When your mind stopped and stood still it could feel time. Time going
fast, going faster and faster. Every year its rhythm swung on a longer
curve.
Your mind stretched to the span of time. There was something exciting
about this stretch, like a new sense growing. But in your dreams your
mind shrank again; you were a child, a child remembering and returning;
haunting old stairs and passages, knocking at shut doors. This child
tried to drag you back, it teased you to make rhymes about it. You were
not happy till you had made the rhymes.
There was something in you that went on, that refused to turn back, to
look for happiness in memory. Your happiness was _now_, in the moment
that you lived, while you made rhymes; while you looked at the white
thorn-trees; while the black-purple cloud passed over Karva.
Yesterday she had said to Dorsy Heron, "What I can't stand is seeing the
same faces every day."
But the hill world had never the same face for five minutes. Its very
form changed as the roads turned. The swing of your stride put in play a
vast, mysterious scene-shifting that disturbed the sky. Moving through it
you stood still in the heart of an immense being that moved. Standing
still you were moved, you were drawn nearer and nearer to its enclosing
heart.
She swung off the road beyond the sickle to the last moor-track that led
to the other side of Karva. She came back by the southern slope, down the
twelve fields, past the four farms.
The farm of the thorn-tree, the farm of the ash, the farm of the three
firs and the farm all alone.
Four houses. Four tales to be written.
There was something in you that would go on, whatever happened. Whatever
happened it would still be happy. Its happiness was not like the queer,
sudden, uncertain ecstasy. She had never known _what_ that was. It came
and went; it had gone so long ago that she was sure that whatever it had
been it would never come again. She could only remember its happening as
you remember the faint ecstasies of dreams. She thought of it as
something strange and exciting. Sometimes she wondered whether it had
really happened, whether there wasn't a sort of untruthfulness in
supposing it had.
But that ecstasy and this happiness had one quality in common; they
belonged to some part of you that was free. A you that had no hereditary
destiny; that had got out of the net, or had never been caught in it.
You could stand aside and look on at its happiness with horror, it didn't
care. It was utterly indifferent to your praise or blame, and the praise
or blame of other people; or to your happiness and theirs. It was open to
you to own it as your self or to detach yourself from it in your horror.
It was stronger and saner than you. If you chose to set up that awful
conflict in your soul that was your own affair.
Perhaps not your own. Supposing the conflict in you was the tug of the
generations before you, trying to drag you back to them? Supposing the
horror was _their_ horror, their fear of defeat?
She had left off being afraid of what might happen to her. It might never
happen. And supposing it did, supposing it had to happen when you were
forty-five, you had still thirteen years to write in.
"It shan't happen. I won't let it. I won't let them beat me."