When she passed the house and saw the long rows of yellow blinds in the
grey front she thought of him. He would not come back. He had never come
before, so it wasn't likely he would come again.
His being there was one of the things that only happened once. Perhaps
those were the perfect things, the things that would never pass away;
they would stay for ever, beautiful as you had seen them, fixed in their
moment of perfection, wearing the very air and light of it for ever.
You would see them _sub specie ceternitatis_. Under the form of eternity.
So that Richard Nicholson would always be like that, the same whenever
you thought of him.
Look at the others: the ones that hadn't come back and the ones that had.
Jimmy Ponsonby, Harry Craven, Mr. Sutcliffe. And Maurice Jourdain and
Lindley Vickers. If Maurice Jourdain had never come back she would always
have seen him standing in the cornfield. If Lindley Vickers had never
come back she wouldn't have seen him with Nannie Learoyd in the
schoolhouse lane; the moment when he held her hands in the drawing-room,
standing by the piano, would have been their one eternal moment.
Because Jimmy Ponsonby had gone away she had never known the awful thing
he had done. She would go through the Ilford fields for ever and ever
with her hot hand in his; she happy and he innocent; innocent for ever
and ever. Harry Craven, her playmate of two hours, he would always be
playing, always laughing, always holding her hand, like Roddy, without
knowing that he held it.
Suppose Mr. Sutcliffe had come back. She would have hurt them more and
more. Mrs. Sutcliffe would have hated her. They would have been
miserable, all three. All three damned for ever and ever.
She was not sure she wanted Richard Nicholson to come back.
She was not sure he wasn't spoiling it by writing. She hadn't thought he
would do that.
A correspondence? Prolonging the beautiful moment, stretching it thin;
thinner and thinner; stretching it so thin that it would snap? You would
come to identify him with his letters, so that in the end you would lose
what had been real, what had been perfect. You would forget. You would
have another and less real kind of memory.
But his letters were not thin; they were as real as his voice. They
_were_ his voice talking to you; you could tell which words would take
the stress of it. "I don't know how _much_ there is of you, whether this
is all of it or only a little bit. You gave me an impression--you made me
feel that there might be any _amount_ gone under that you can't get at,
that you may _never_ get at if you go on staying where you are. I believe
if you got clean away it might come to the top again.
"But I don't _know_. I don't know whether you're at the end or the
beginning. I could tell better if you were here."
She counted the months till April when her poems would come out. She
counted the days till Tuesday when there might be a letter from Richard
Nicholson.
If only he would not keep on telling you you ought to come to London.
That was what made you afraid. He might have seen how impossible it was.
He had seen Mamma.
"Don't try to dig me out of my 'hole.' I _can_ 'go on living in it for
ever' if I'm never taken out. But if I got out once it would be awful
coming back. It isn't awful now. Don't make it awful."
He only wrote: "I'll make it awfuller and _aw_fuller, until out you
come."