After he had gone she had told Mamma that Richard Nicholson had said she
was beautiful; and Mamma had pretended that it didn't matter what he
said; but she had smiled all the same.
He carried himself like Mr. Sutcliffe when he walked, straight and tall
in his clean cut grey suit. Only he was lighter and leaner. His eyes
looked gentle and peaceable now under the shadow of the Panama hat.
The front door stood open. She asked him to come in for tea.
"May I? ... What are you doing afterwards?"
"Going for a walk somewhere."
"Will you let me come too?..."
He was standing by the window looking at the garden. She saw him smile
when he heard Catty say that Mamma had gone over to Mrs. Waugh's and
wouldn't be back for tea. He smiled to himself, a secret, happy smile,
looking out into the garden.... She took him out through the orchard. He
went stooping under the low apple boughs and laughing. Down the Back Lane
and through the gap in the lower fields, along the flagged path to the
Bottom Lane and through the Rathdale fields to the river. Over the
stepping stones.
She took the stones at a striding run. He followed, running and laughing.
Up the Rathdale fields to Renton Moor. Not up the schoolhouse lane, or on
the Garthdale Road, or along the fields by the beck. Not up Greffington
Edge or Karva. Because of Lindley Vickers and Maurice Jourdain; and Roddy
and Mark.
No. She was humbugging herself. Not up Karva because of her secret
happiness. She didn't want to mix him up with _that_ or with the self
that had felt it. She wanted to keep him in the clear spaces of her mind,
away from her memories, away from her emotions.
They sat down on the side of the moor in the heather.
Indoors when he was working he was irritable and restless. You would hear
a gentle sighing sound: "D-amn"; and he would start up and walk about the
room. There would be shakings of his head, twistings of his eyebrows,
shruggings of his shoulders, and tormented gestures of his hands. But not
out here. He sat in the heather as quiet, as motionless as you were,
every muscle at rest. His mind was at rest.
The strong sunlight beat on him; it showed up small surface signs.
Perhaps you could see now that he might really be forty, or even
forty-five.
No, you couldn't. You couldn't see or feel anything but the burning,
inextinguishable youth inside him. The little grey streaks and patches
might have been powder put on for fun.
"I want to finish with all my Greek stuff," he said suddenly. "I want to
go on to something else--studies in modern French literature. Then
English. I want to get everything clean and straight in five pages where
other people would take fifty.... I want to go smash through some of the
traditions. The tradition of the long, grey paragraph.... We might learn
things from France. But we're a proud island people. We won't learn....
We're a proud island people, held in too tight, held in till we burst.
That's why we've no aesthetic restraint. No restraint of any sort. Take
our economics. Take our politics. We've had to colonise, to burst out
over continents. When our minds begin moving it's the same thing. They
burst out. All over the place.... When we've learned restraint we shall
take our place inside Europe, not outside it."
"We do restrain our emotions quite a lot."
"We do. We do. That's precisely why we don't restrain our expression of
them. Really unrestrained emotion that forces its way through and breaks
down your intellectual defences and saturates you with itself--it hasn't
any words.... It hasn't any words; or very few."
* * * * *
The mown fields over there, below Greffington Edge, were bleached with
the sun: the grey cliffs quivered in the hot yellow light.
"It might be somewhere in the South of France."
"_Not_ Agaye."
"No. Not Agaye. The limestone country.... I can't think why I never came
here. My uncle used to ask me dozens of times. I suppose I funked it....
What the poor old chap must have felt like shut up in that house all
those years with my aunt--"
"Please don't. I--I liked her."
"You mean you liked him and put up with her because of him. We all did
that."
"She was kind to me."
"Who wouldn't be?"
"Oh, but you don't know how kind."
"Kind? Good Lord, yes. There are millions of kind people in the world.
It's possible to be kind and at the same time not entirely brainless."
"He wouldn't mind that. He wouldn't think she was brainless--"
"He wasn't in love with her--there was another woman--a girl. It was so
like the dear old duffer to put it off till he was forty-five and then
come a cropper over a little girl of seventeen."
"That isn't true. I knew him much better than you do. He never cared for
anybody but her.... Besides, if it was true you shouldn't have told me.
I've no business to know it...."
"Everybody knew it. The poor dear managed so badly that everybody in the
place knew it. She knew, that's why she dragged him away and made him
live abroad. She hated living abroad, but she liked it better than seeing
him going to pieces over the girl."
"I don't believe it. If there was anything in it I'd have been sure to
have heard of it.... Why, there wasn't anybody here but me--"
"It must have been years before your time," he said. "You could hardly
even have come in for the sad end of it."
* * * * *
Dorsy Heron said it was true.
"It was you he was in love with. Everybody saw it but you."
She remembered. His face when she came to him. In the library. And what
he had said.
"A man might be in love with you for ten years and you wouldn't know
about it if he held his tongue."
And _her_ face. Her poor face, so worried when people saw them together.
And that last night when she stroked your arm and when she saw him
looking at it and stopped. And her eyes. Frightened. Frightened.
"How I must have hurt him. How I must have hurt them both."
* * * * *
Mr. Nicholson had come back on Friday as he had said.