THE WIDENING CIRCLE
Maggie’s people, the Schofields, lived in the large gardener’s cottage,
that was half a farm, behind Belcote Hall. The hall was too damp to
live in, so the Schofields were caretakers, gamekeepers, farmers, all
in one. The father was gamekeeper and stock-breeder, the eldest son was
market-gardener, using the big hall gardens, the second son was farmer
and gardener. There was a large family, as at Cossethay.
Ursula loved to stay at Belcote, to be treated as a grand lady by
Maggie’s brothers. They were good-looking men. The eldest was
twenty-six years old. He was the gardener, a man not very tall, but
strong and well made, with brown, sunny, easy eyes and a face
handsomely hewn, brown, with a long fair moustache which he pulled as
he talked to Ursula.
The girl was excited because these men attended to her when she came
near. She could make their eyes light up and quiver, she could make
Anthony, the eldest, twist and twist his moustache. She knew she could
move them almost at will with her light laughter and chatter. They
loved her ideas, watched her as she talked vehemently about politics or
economics. And she, while she talked, saw the golden-brown eyes of
Anthony gleam like the eyes of a satyr as they watched her. He did not
listen to her words, he listened to her. It excited her.
He was like a faun pleased when she would go with him over his
hothouses, to look at the green and pretty plants, at the pink primulas
nodding among their leaves, and cinarrias flaunting purple and crimson
and white. She asked about everything, and he told her very exactly and
minutely, in a queer pedantic way that made her want to laugh. Yet she
was really interested in what he did. And he had the curious light in
his face, like the light in the eyes of the goat that was tethered by
the farmyard gate.
She went down with him into the warmish cellar, where already in the
darkness the little yellow knobs of rhubarb were coming. He held the
lantern down to the dark earth. She saw the tiny knob-end of the
rhubarb thrusting upwards upon the thick red stem, thrusting itself
like a knob of flame through the soft soil. His face was turned up to
her, the light glittered on his eyes and his teeth as he laughed, with
a faint, musical neigh. He looked handsome. And she heard a new sound
in her ears, the faintly-musical, neighing laugh of Anthony, whose
moustache twisted up, and whose eyes were luminous with a cold, steady,
arrogant-laughing glare. There seemed a little prance of triumph in his
movement, she could not rid herself of a movement of acquiescence, a
touch of acceptance. Yet he was so humble, his voice was so caressing.
He held his hand for her to step on when she must climb a wall. And she
stepped on the living firmness of him, that quivered firmly under her
weight.
She was aware of him as if in a mesmeric state. In her ordinary sense,
she had nothing to do with him. But the peculiar ease and
unnoticeableness of his entering the house, the power of his cold,
gleaming light on her when he looked at her, was like a bewitchment. In
his eyes, as in the pale grey eyes of a goat, there seemed some of that
steady, hard fire of moonlight which has nothing to do with the day. It
made her alert, and yet her mind went out like an extinguished thing.
She was all senses, all her senses were alive.
Then she saw him on Sunday, dressed up in Sunday clothes, trying to
impress her. And he looked ridiculous. She clung to the ridiculous
effect of his stiff, Sunday clothes.
She was always conscious of some unfaithfulness to Maggie, on Anthony’s
score. Poor Maggie stood apart as if betrayed. Maggie and Anthony were
enemies by instinct. Ursula had to go back to her friend brimming with
affection and a poignancy of pity. Which Maggie received with a little
stiffness. Then poetry and books and learning took the place of
Anthony, with his goats’ movements and his cold, gleaming humour.
While Ursula was at Belcote, the snow fell. In the morning, a covering
of snow weighed on the rhododendron bushes.
“Shall we go out?” said Maggie.
She had lost some of her leader’s sureness, and was now tentative, a
little in reserve from her friend.
They took the key of the gate and wandered into the park. It was a
white world on which dark trees and tree masses stood under a sky keen
with frost. The two girls went past the hall, that was shuttered and
silent, their footprints marking the snow on the drive. Down the park,
a long way off, a man was carrying armfuls of hay across the snow. He
was a small, dark figure, like an animal moving in its unawareness.
Ursula and Maggie went on exploring, down to a tinkling, chilly brook,
that had worn the snow away in little scoops, and ran dark between.
They saw a robin glance its bright eyes and burst scarlet and grey into
the hedge, then some pertly-marked blue-tits scuffled. Meanwhile the
brook slid on coldly, chuckling to itself.
The girls wandered across the snowy grass to where the artificial
fish-ponds lay under thin ice. There was a big tree with a thick trunk
twisted with ivy, that hung almost horizontal over the ponds. Ursula
climbed joyfully into this and sat amid bosses of bright ivy and dull
berries. Some ivy leaves were like green spears held out, and tipped
with snow. The ice was seen beneath them.
Maggie took out a book, and sitting lower down the trunk began to read
Coleridge’s “Christabel”. Ursula half listened. She was wildly
thrilled. Then she saw Anthony coming across the snow, with his
confident, slightly strutting stride. His face looked brown and hard
against the snow, smiling with a sort of tense confidence.
“Hello!” she called to him.
A response went over his face, his head was lifted in an answering,
jerking gesture.
“Hello!” he said. “You’re like a bird in there.”
And Ursula’s laugh rang out. She answered to the peculiar, reedy twang
in his penetrating voice.
She did not think of Anthony, yet she lived in a sort of connection
with him, in his world. One evening she met him as she was coming down
the lane, and they walked side by side.
“I think it’s so _lovely_ here,” she cried.
“Do you?” he said. “I’m glad you like it.”
There was a curious confidence in his voice.
“Oh, I love it. What more does one want than to live in this beautiful
place, and make things grow in your garden. It is like the Garden of
Eden.”
“Is it?” he said, with a little laugh. “Yes—well, it’s not so bad——” he
was hesitating. The pale gleam was strong in his eyes, he was looking
at her steadily, watching her, as an animal might. Something leaped in
her soul. She knew he was going to suggest to her that she should be as
he was.
“Would you like to stay here with me?” he asked, tentatively.
She blenched with fear and with the intense sensation of proffered
licence suggested to her.
They had come to the gate.
“How?” she asked. “You aren’t alone here.”
“We could marry,” he answered, in the strange, coldly-gleaming
insinuating tone that chilled the sunshine into moonlight. All
substantial things seemed transformed. Shadows and dancing moonlight
were real, and all cold, inhuman, gleaming sensations. She realized
with something like terror that she was going to accept this. She was
going inevitably to accept him. His hand was reaching out to the gate
before them. She stood still. His flesh was hard and brown and final.
She seemed to be in the grip of some insult.
“I couldn’t,” she answered, involuntarily.
He gave the same brief, neighing little laugh, very sad and bitter now,
and slotted back the bar of the gate. Yet he did not open. For a moment
they both stood looking at the fire of sunset that quivered among the
purple twigs of the trees. She saw his brown, hard, well-hewn face
gleaming with anger and humiliation and submission. He was an animal
that knows that it is subdued. Her heart flamed with sensation of him,
of the fascinating thing he offered her, and with sorrow, and with an
inconsolable sense of loneliness. Her soul was an infant crying in the
night. He had no soul. Oh, and why had she? He was the cleaner.
She turned away, she turned round from him, and saw the east flushed
strangely rose, the moon coming yellow and lovely upon a rosy sky,
above the darkening, bluish snow. All this so beautiful, all this so
lovely! He did not see it. He was one with it. But she saw it, and was
one with it. Her seeing separated them infinitely.
They went on in silence down the path, following their different fates.
The trees grew darker and darker, the snow made only a dimness in an
unreal world. And like a shadow, the day had gone into a faintly
luminous, snowy evening, while she was talking aimlessly to him, to
keep him at a distance, yet to keep him near her, and he walked
heavily. He opened the garden gate for her quietly, and she was
entering into her own pleasances, leaving him outside the gate.
Then even whilst she was escaping, or trying to escape, this feeling of
pain, came Maggie the next day, saying:
“I wouldn’t make Anthony love you, Ursula, if you don’t want him. It is
not nice.”
“But, Maggie, I never made him love me,” cried Ursula, dismayed and
suffering, and feeling as if she had done something base.
She liked Anthony, though. All her life, at intervals, she returned to
the thought of him and of that which he offered. But she was a
traveller, she was a traveller on the face of the earth, and he was an
isolated creature living in the fulfilment of his own senses.
She could not help it, that she was a traveller. She knew Anthony, that
he was not one. But oh, ultimately and finally, she must go on and on,
seeking the goal that she knew she did draw nearer to.
She was wearing away her second and last cycle at St. Philip’s. As the
months went she ticked them off, first October, then November,
December, January. She was careful always to subtract a month from the
remainder, for the summer holidays. She saw herself travelling round a
circle, only an arc of which remained to complete. Then, she was in the
open, like a bird tossed into mid-air, a bird that had learned in some
measure to fly.
There was college ahead; that was her mid-air, unknown, spacious. Come
college, and she would have broken from the confines of all the life
she had known. For her father was also going to move. They were all
going to leave Cossethay.
Brangwen had kept his carelessness about his circumstances. He knew his
work in the lace designing meant little to him personally, he just
earned his wage by it. He did not know what meant much to him. Living
close to Anna Brangwen, his mind was always suffused through with
physical heat, he moved from instinct to instinct, groping, always
groping on.
When it was suggested to him that he might apply for one of the posts
as hand-work instructor, posts about to be created by the Nottingham
Education Committee, it was as if a space had been given to him, into
which he could remove from his hot, dusky enclosure. He sent in his
application, confidently, expectantly. He had a sort of belief in his
supernatural fate. The inevitable weariness of his daily work had
stiffened some of his muscles, and made a slight deadness in his ruddy,
alert face. Now he might escape.
He was full of the new possibilities, and his wife was acquiescent. She
was willing now to have a change. She too was tired of Cossethay. The
house was too small for the growing children. And since she was nearly
forty years old, she began to come awake from her sleep of motherhood,
her energy moved more outwards. The din of growing lives roused her
from her apathy. She too must have her hand in making life. She was
quite ready to move, taking all her brood. It would be better now if
she transplanted them. For she had borne her last child, it would be
growing up.
So that in her easy, unused fashion she talked plans and arrangements
with her husband, indifferent really as to the method of the change,
since a change was coming; even if it did not come in this way it would
come in another.
The house was full of ferment. Ursula was wild with excitement. At last
her father was going to be something, socially. So long, he had been a
social cypher, without form or standing. Now he was going to be Art and
Handwork Instructor for the County of Nottingham. That was really a
status. It was a position. He would be a specialist in his way. And he
was an uncommon man. Ursula felt they were all getting a foothold at
last. He was coming to his own. Who else that she knew could turn out
from his own fingers the beautiful things her father could produce? She
felt he was certain of this new job.
They would move. They would leave this cottage at Cossethay which had
grown too small for them; they would leave Cossethay, where the
children had all been born, and where they were always kept to the same
measure. For the people who had known them as children along with the
other village boys and girls would never, could never understand that
they should grow up different. They had held “Urtler Brangwen” one of
themselves, and had given her her place in her native village, as in a
family. And the bond was strong. But now, when she was growing to
something beyond what Cossethay would allow or understand, the bond
between her and her old associates was becoming a bondage.
“’Ello, Urs’ler, ’ow are yer goin’ on?” they said when they met her.
And it demanded of her in the old voice the old response. And something
in her must respond and belong to people who knew her. But something
else denied bitterly. What was true of her ten years ago was not true
now. And something else which she was, and must be, they could neither
see nor allow. They felt it there nevertheless, something beyond them,
and they were injured. They said she was proud and conceited, that she
was too big for her shoes nowadays. They said, she needn’t pretend,
because they knew what she was. They had known her since she was born.
They quoted this and that about her. And she was ashamed because she
did feel different from the people she had lived amongst. It hurt her
that she could not be at her ease with them any more. And yet—and
yet—one’s kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to
let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it
goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it. So Cossethay hampered
her, and she wanted to go away, to be free to fly her kite as high as
she liked. She wanted to go away, to be free to stand straight up to
her own height.
So that when she knew that her father had the new post, and that the
family would move, she felt like skipping on the face of the earth, and
making psalms of joy. The old, bound shell of Cossethay was to be cast
off, and she was to dance away into the blue air. She wanted to dance
and sing.
She made dreams of the new place she would live in, where stately
cultured people of high feeling would be friends with her, and she
would live with the noble in the land, moving to a large freedom of
feeling. She dreamed of a rich, proud, simple girl-friend, who had
never known Mr. Harby and his like, nor ever had a note in her voice of
bondaged contempt and fear, as Maggie had.
And she gave herself to all that she loved in Cossethay, passionately,
because she was going away now. She wandered about to her favourite
spots. There was a place where she went trespassing to find the
snowdrops that grew wild. It was evening and the winter-darkened
meadows were full of mystery. When she came to the woods an oak tree
had been newly chopped down in the dell. Pale drops of flowers
glimmered many under the hazels, and by the sharp, golden splinters of
wood that were splashed about, the grey-green blades of snowdrop leaves
pricked unheeding, the drooping still little flowers were without heed.
Ursula picked some lovingly, in an ecstasy. The golden chips of wood
shone yellow like sunlight, the snowdrops in the twilight were like the
first stars of night. And she, alone amongst them, was wildly happy to
have found her way into such a glimmering dusk, to the intimate little
flowers, and the splash of wood chips like sunshine over the twilight
of the ground. She sat down on the felled tree and remained awhile
remote.
Going home, she left the purplish dark of the trees for the open lane,
where the puddles shone long and jewel-like in the ruts, the land about
her was darkened, and the sky a jewel overhead. Oh, how amazing it was
to her! It was almost too much. She wanted to run, and sing, and cry
out for very wildness and poignancy, but she could not run and sing and
cry out in such a way as to cry out the deep things in her heart, so
she was still, and almost sad with loneliness.
At Easter she went again to Maggie’s home, for a few days. She was,
however shy and fugitive. She saw Anthony, how suggestive he was to
look on, and how his eyes had a sort of supplicating light, that was
rather beautiful. She looked at him, and she looked again, for him to
become real to her. But it was her own self that was occupied
elsewhere. She seemed to have some other being.
And she turned to spring and the opening buds. There was a large pear
tree by a wall, and it was full, thronged with tiny, grey-green buds,
myriads. She stood before it arrested with delight, and a realization
went deep into her heart. There was so great a host in array behind the
cloud of pale, dim green, so much to come forth—so much sunshine to
pour down.
So the weeks passed on, trance-like and pregnant. The pear tree at
Cossethay burst into bloom against the cottage-end, like a wave burst
into foam. Then gradually the bluebells came, blue as water standing
thin in the level places under the trees and bushes, flowing in more
and more, till there was a flood of azure, and pale-green leaves
burning, and tiny birds with fiery little song and flight. Then swiftly
the flood sank and was gone, and it was summer.
There was to be no going to the seaside for a holiday. The holiday was
the removal from Cossethay.
They were going to live near Willey Green, which place was most central
for Brangwen. It was an old, quiet village on the edge of the thronged
colliery-district. So that it served, in its quaintness of odd old
cottages lingering in their sunny gardens, as a sort of bower or
pleasaunce to the sprawling colliery-townlet of Beldover, a pleasant
walk-round for the colliers on Sunday morning, before the public-houses
opened.
In Willey Green stood the Grammar School where Brangwen was occupied
for two days during the week, and where experiments in education were
being carried on.
Ursula wanted to live in Willey Green on the remoter side, towards
Southwell, and Sherwood Forest. There it was so lovely and romantic.
But out into the world meant out into the world. Will Brangwen must
become modern.
He bought, with his wife’s money, a fairly large house in the new,
red-brick part of Beldover. It was a villa built by the widow of the
late colliery manager, and stood in a quiet, new little side-street
near the large church.
Ursula was rather sad. Instead of having arrived at distinction they
had come to new red-brick suburbia in a grimy, small town.
Mrs. Brangwen was happy. The rooms were splendidly large—a splendid
dining-room, drawing-room and kitchen, besides a very pleasant study
downstairs. Everything was admirably appointed. The widow had settled
herself in lavishly. She was a native of Beldover, and had intended to
reign almost queen. Her bathroom was white and silver, her stairs were
of oak, her chimney-pieces were massive and oaken, with bulging,
columnar supports.
“Good and substantial,” was the keynote. But Ursula resented the stout,
inflated prosperity implied everywhere. She made her father promise to
chisel down the bulging oaken chimney-pieces, chisel them flat. That
sort of important paunch was very distasteful to her. Her father was
himself long and loosely built. What had he to do with so much “good
and substantial” importance?
They bought a fair amount also of the widow’s furniture. It was in
common good taste—the great Wilton carpet, the large round table, the
Chesterfield covered with glossy chintz in roses and birds. It was all
really very sunny and nice, with large windows, and a view right across
the shallow valley.
After all, they would be, as one of their acquaintances said, among the
elite of Beldover. They would represent culture. And as there was no
one of higher social importance than the doctors, the
colliery-managers, and the chemists, they would shine, with their Della
Robbia beautiful Madonna, their lovely reliefs from Donatello, their
reproductions from Botticelli. Nay, the large photographs of the
Primavera and the Aphrodite and the Nativity in the dining-room, the
ordinary reception-room, would make dumb the mouth of Beldover.
And after all, it is better to be princess in Beldover than a vulgar
nobody in the country.
There was great preparation made for the removal of the whole Brangwen
family, ten in all. The house in Beldover was prepared, the house in
Cossethay was dismantled. Come the end of the school-term the removal
would begin.
Ursula left school at the end of July, when the summer holiday
commenced. The morning outside was bright and sunny, and the freedom
got inside the schoolroom this last day. It was as if the walls of the
school were going to melt away. Already they seemed shadowy and unreal.
It was breaking-up morning. Soon scholars and teachers would be
outside, each going his own way. The irons were struck off, the
sentence was expired, the prison was a momentary shadow halting about
them. The children were carrying away books and inkwell, and rolling up
maps. All their faces were bright with gladness and goodwill. There was
a bustle of cleaning and clearing away all marks of this last term of
imprisonment. They were all breaking free. Busily, eagerly, Ursula made
up her totals of attendances in the register. With pride she wrote down
the thousands: to so many thousands of children had she given another
sessions’s lessons. It looked tremendous. The excited hours passed
slowly in suspense. Then at last it was over. For the last time, she
stood before her children whilst they said their prayers and sang a
hymn. Then it was over.
“Good-bye, children,” she said. “I shall not forget you, and you must
not forget me.”
“No, miss,” cried the children in chorus, with shining faces.
She stood smiling on them, moved, as they filed out. Then she gave her
monitors their term sixpences, and they too departed. Cupboards were
locked, blackboards washed, inkwells and dusters removed. The place
stood bare and vacated. She had triumphed over it. It was a shell now.
She had fought a good fight here, and it had not been altogether
unenjoyable. She owed some gratitude even to this hard, vacant place,
that stood like a memorial or a trophy. So much of her life had been
fought for and won and lost here. Something of this school would always
belong to her, something of her to it. She acknowledged it. And now
came the leave-taking.
In the teachers’ room the teachers were chatting and loitering, talking
excitedly of where they were going: to the Isle of Man, to Llandudno,
to Yarmouth. They were eager, and attached to each other, like comrades
leaving a ship.
Then it was Mr. Harby’s turn to make a speech to Ursula. He looked
handsome, with his silver-grey temples and black brows, and his
imperturbable male solidity.
“Well,” he said, “we must say good-bye to Miss Brangwen and wish her
all good fortune for the future. I suppose we shall see her again some
time, and hear how she is getting on.”
“Oh, yes,” said Ursula, stammering, blushing, laughing. “Oh, yes, I
shall come and see you.”
Then she realized that this sounded too personal, and she felt foolish.
“Miss Schofield suggested these two books,” he said, putting a couple
of volumes on the table: “I hope you will like them.”
Ursula feeling very shy picked up the books. There was a volume of
Swinburne’s poetry, and a volume of Meredith’s.
“Oh, I shall love them,” she said. “Thank you very much—thank you all
so much—it is so——”
She stuttered to an end, and very red, turned the leaves of the books
eagerly, pretending to be taking the first pleasure, but really seeing
nothing.
Mr. Harby’s eyes were twinkling. He alone was at his ease, master of
the situation. It was pleasing to him to make Ursula the gift, and for
once extend good feeling to his teachers. As a rule, it was so
difficult, each one was so strained in resentment under his rule.
“Yes,” he said, “we hoped you would like the choice——”
He looked with his peculiar, challenging smile for a moment, then
returned to his cupboards.
Ursula felt very confused. She hugged her books, loving them. And she
felt that she loved all the teachers, and Mr. Harby. It was very
confusing.
At last she was out. She cast one hasty glance over the school
buildings squatting on the asphalt yard in the hot, glistening sun, one
look down the well-known road, and turned her back on it all. Something
strained in her heart. She was going away.
“Well, good luck,” said the last of the teachers, as she shook hands at
the end of the road. “We’ll expect you back some day.”
He spoke in irony. She laughed, and broke away. She was free. As she
sat on the top of the tram in the sunlight, she looked round her with
tremendous delight. She had left something which had meant much to her.
She would not go to school any more, and do the familiar things. Queer!
There was a little pang amid her exultation, of fear, not of regret.
Yet how she exulted this morning!
She was tremulous with pride and joy. She loved the two books. They
were tokens to her, representing the fruit and trophies of her two
years which, thank God, were over.
“To Ursula Brangwen, with best wishes for her future, and in warm
memory of the time she spent in St. Philip’s School,” was written in
the headmaster’s neat, scrupulous handwriting. She could see the
careful hand holding the pen, the thick fingers with tufts of black
hair on the back of each one.
He had signed, all the teachers had signed. She liked having all their
signatures. She felt she loved them all. They were her fellow-workers.
She carried away from the school a pride she could never lose. She had
her place as comrade and sharer in the work of the school, her fellow
teachers had signed to her, as one of them. And she was one of all
workers, she had put in her tiny brick to the fabric man was building,
she had qualified herself as co-builder.
Then the day for the home removal came. Ursula rose early, to pack up
the remaining goods. The carts arrived, lent by her uncle at the Marsh,
in the lull between hay and corn harvest. The goods roped in the cart,
Ursula mounted her bicycle and sped away to Beldover.
The house was hers. She entered its clean-scrubbed silence. The
dining-room had been covered with a thick rush matting, hard and of the
beautiful, luminous, clean colour of sun-dried reeds. The walls were
pale grey, the doors were darker grey. Ursula admired it very much, as
the sun came through the large windows, streaming in.
She flung open doors and windows to the sunshine. Flowers were bright
and shining round the small lawn, which stood above the road, looking
over the raw field opposite, which would later be built upon. No one
came. So she wandered down the garden at the back of the wall. The
eight bells of the church rang the hour. She could hear the many sounds
of the town about her.
At last, the cart was seen coming round the corner, familiar furniture
piled undignified on top, Tom, her brother, and Theresa, marching on
foot beside the mass, proud of having walked ten miles or more, from
the tram terminus. Ursula poured out beer, and the men drank thirstily,
by the door. A second cart was coming. Her father appeared on his motor
bicycle. There was the staggering transport of furniture up the steps
to the little lawn, where it was deposited all pell-mell in the
sunshine, very queer and discomforting.
Brangwen was a pleasant man to work with, cheerful and easy. Ursula
loved deciding him where the heavy things should stand. She watched
anxiously the struggle up the steps and through the doorways. Then the
big things were in, the carts set off again. Ursula and her father
worked away carrying in all the light things that remained upon the
lawn, and putting them in place. Dinner time came. They ate bread and
cheese in the kitchen.
“Well, we’re getting on,” said Brangwen, cheerfully.
Two more loads arrived. The afternoon passed away in a struggle with
the furniture, upstairs. Towards five o’clock, appeared the last loads,
consisting also of Mrs. Brangwen and the younger children, driven by
Uncle Fred in the trap. Gudrun had walked with Margaret from the
station. The whole family had come.
“There!” said Brangwen, as his wife got down from the cart: “Now we’re
all here.”
“Ay,” said his wife pleasantly.
And the very brevity, the silence of intimacy between the two made a
home in the hearts of the children, who clustered round feeling strange
in the new place.
Everything was at sixes and sevens. But a fire was made in the kitchen,
the hearth-rug put down, the kettle set on the hob, and Mrs. Brangwen
began towards sunset to prepare the first meal. Ursula and Gudrun were
slaving in the bedrooms, candles were rushing about. Then from the
kitchen came the smell of ham and eggs and coffee, and in the gaslight,
the scrambled meal began. The family seemed to huddle together like a
little camp in a strange place. Ursula felt a load of responsibility
upon her, caring for the half-little ones. The smallest kept near the
mother.
It was dark, and the children went sleepy but excited to bed. It was a
long time before the sound of voices died out. There was a tremendous
sense of adventure.
In the morning everybody was awake soon after dawn, the children
crying:
“When I wakened up I didn’t know where I was.”
There were the strange sounds of the town, and the repeated chiming of
the big church bells, so much harsher and more insistent than the
little bells of Cossethay. They looked through the windows past the
other new red houses to the wooded hill across the valley. They had all
a delightful sense of space and liberation, space and light and air.
But gradually all set to work. They were a careless, untidy family. Yet
when once they set about to get the house in order, the thing went with
felicity and quickness. By evening the place was roughly established.
They would not have a servant to live in the house, only a woman who
could go home at night. And they would not even have the woman yet.
They wanted to do as they liked in their own home, with no stranger in
the midst.