How long a day can be! An hour or less—so much less than an hour—how it
can lie in one’s memory like an interminable road, when pleasant years
are more forgotten than towns passed in the train. How long a little
time can be! Once I saw a woman—not Laura—grow old between a question
and an answer—between the opening and the shutting of a door.
Laura, at ten or twelve, would usher in a reminiscence with “When I was
a little girl,” and look bewildered if you laughed. “When I was young,”
said Laura, as innocently, at seventeen. And each time Laura would be
thinking of that Age of Gold and Crystal Palaces, with Mother at the
beginning, and at the end of it—Justin. And yet, less of it than of the
four-hour Odyssey that closes her childhood, that cuts her memories in
two and provides you with the spectacle, comical, pathetic, or merely
curious, as it happens to strike you, of a proved soul waiting wearily,
amid school books and pig-tails and lengthening skirts, amid vanities
and ignorances and experiments, for body and brain to grow up to it.
Those four hours—joyfully down dale and up hill to another glimpse of a
receding heaven, and then down dale again, not quite so springily—those
four hours Laura never forgot. Each incident of the road—the
stumble-stone that cut her knee: a bolting rabbit startling itself and
her, and the fat thrush cracking a snail on her first milestone: a
stony-faced house seen through laurels that encircled it stiffly like an
Elizabethan ruff: meteoric motor-cars that frightened her into ditches,
and once a nettle-bed: that black wood where, through dead leaves, her
own shadow had stalked ghoulishly behind her, upon feet that were the
echoes of her own: the sun-pool of a chalk-pit, trailing and tropical,
like pictures in the _Swiss Family Robinson_, with mighty garlands of
old-man’s beard: a village pond with ducks and slime and dragon-flies:
babies on door-steps, and shrill women: sharp-horned staring cows: dust
and sunshine and the terrible tramps—each and all had been etched
indelibly upon a mind that excitement had made more than ever sensitive
to impressions.
She picked a bunch of flowers as she trotted along, for a mother who
would appreciate them. They were fruit trees in heaven, of course, with
leaves for the healing of the nations, like the eucalyptus tree, she
supposed, on the vicarage front lawn; but _Rev. xxii_ said nothing about
flowers. “Too much pavement,” thought Laura, the gardener. She supposed
that even if grass tried to seed itself in the dust of the cracks the
dust would be gold.... There couldn’t be much nourishment in
gold-dust.... Anyhow, here was one of Mother’s own autumn bunches for
her, pulled from the dear chalk soil—an exquisite disorder of oat-grass
and hips-and-haws, late sprigs of yellow-wort between the scabious
cushions, like stars on a lilac sky, with oak-apples and bleached
heather and fans of scarlet bracken—all put together by the skilful,
flower-loving hands she had inherited from her mother.
A bigger part than she realized of her first light-footed hour had gone
in the picking of them. The end of the second saw her passing a village
bakery, with a wistful eye on the stack of loaves and bars of mouldy
chocolate behind the blurred, thick panes. She hesitated as, through the
open door, the round, red-rimmed baker’s clock told her, between
hiccoughs, that it was half-past two and that she was hungry. So hungry,
indeed, that for a moment her fingers closed on the purse at the bottom
of her pocket. A penny, three half-pennies, two farthings and a
threepenny bit.... Sixpence ... Gran’papa’s Euclid himself couldn’t make
it more than sixpence.... No, she mustn’t.... Yet there was such virtue
in a ha’penny bun—a round, shiny, sticky, steamy, curranty ha’penny bun!
She supposed it wouldn’t do if she offered St. Peter fivepence
halfpenny—and explained? If only St. John had the keys.... St. John
would let her in at once, she felt sure. But St. Peter? He might, of
course ... but perhaps it was wiser not to risk it.... When she got to
Mother there would be tea, tea without bread-and-butter first, the kind
of tea Aunt Adela never knew.... Mother would see to that.... She could
wait.... She wasn’t so awfully hungry....
She turned resolutely from temptation and hurried on.
But she was no longer dancing effortlessly along like a kitten or a
whirled leaf: her haste had become deliberate and would soon be painful.
She was growing—infallible sign of exhaustion—conscious of her body:
conscious that her back was aching; that she was thirsty as well as
hungry; that, through her sand shoes, the surface of the road knubbed
her wincing feet. She carried her bunch of flowers, drooping, too, by
this time, across her shoulder to ease her tired arm, but they were very
heavy. Such a great big bunch—but then Laura, her life long, will always
undertake a little more than she can manage.
Above her the unconquered hill-road stretched as steep and long and high
as Jack’s Beanstalk. She climbed it wearily, bargaining herself upward—
“I will go to the second bend, up to the white birch. If I do it in a
hundred steps I will stop a minute. If I do it in ninety steps I will
stop two minutes.”
But it was always more than a hundred steps for sand shoes, and so,
honourably, though her breathless little body were rocking, she would
not stop.
She reached the top at last, too hot from walking to flinch at the shock
of the wind, or to notice that the sun had gone in: and found her goal
again—twin towers and arched body—yet so strangely altered in an
afternoon, that, as she looked, she gave a cry of dismay. It had been so
near, so clear, a parrot’s flight from Beech Hill, but now, withdrawn to
an immense distance, it rose without a glitter from the iron rim of the
world, a grey, frozen blur upon the sullen sky.
She stared fearfully.
She couldn’t ... she hadn’t ... she couldn’t have made a mistake?... Yet
what had happened?... What in the name of enchantment had happened to
the Crystal Palace, the _Cœlestial City_, the bright and shining
heaven?...
Enchantment! In a flash her scared wits seized at the only endurable
explanation. Enchantment! Of course! Of course! Oh, blessedly of course!
What was she thinking of so soon to forget _Christian_, and her
_Shepherds_?...
_Beware that ye steppe._... How they had rubbed it in too! And she
hadn’t come to a single danger yet except motor-cars and the cow with
the leering eye; did she suppose she was to win through without a qualm?
Foolish Laura, to forget that between _Delectable Mountains_ and the
_Gates of the City_ lies, with all its bewilderments, _the Enchanted
Ground_.
_The Enchanted Ground!_ Her eyes sought the far hills, and once more
credulity was fortified into conviction, for even as she watched, the
white autumn dusk uprose noiselessly, and before it city and hills alike
shrank and were gone. It was as convincing a piece of magic as could be
wanted.
Laura only wished Aunt Adela could have been there to see it—Aunt Adela,
who did not believe in witches—Aunt Adela, always sniffing at _Grimm’s
Fairy Tales_! Besides, even Aunt Adela would be—only for a moment—some
sort of a companion, flesh and blood at least, at a small girl’s elbow,
as she stands lonesomely on a strange hill-top, buttoning the reefer
that had seemed so hot and thick down in the valley, pulling down cuffs
of sleeves through which the wind is tunnelling, making shivering
preparation for the plunge down—down—down—into _Enchanted Ground_.
Impossible to turn back now—wasn’t it?... What a notion?... Mother would
be waiting.... Mother would know by now that she was coming.... One of
the _Shining Ones_ would be sure to have told her.... How excited Mother
would be growing.... _The Enchanted Ground_ stretched from sky to
sky.... It was beginning to rain, and the wind cut through one’s reefer
as if it were gauze.... But there was Mother.... She could get through
somehow.... Only she must hurry, for it must be nearly tea-time.... She
simply had to get to heaven by tea-time....
She shifted her autumn bunch, tucked her free hand between frock and
skin to keep it as warm as might be, and, screwing up eyes and mouth
against the drizzle that whipped her face, set off at a stumbling trot
down her second hill-side in an afternoon.
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