I
LEAVES are falling down from the laburnum tree at the gate; yellow
leaves, white gate, and red brick of the houses opposite; it
is very ugly. In the spring the flowers are yellow instead of
the leaves, and the hawthorn bush, to the side, is bright pink,
and across the road is lilac. The red-brick houses have facings
of yellow stone, squares of yellowish stone round the doors and
the windows. All the colours are wrong, all the shapes are ugly,
even the trees are not real trees.
Once I would have minded it so much, to live here, looking out
at that laburnum tree, and that house opposite, that bow window,
and the yellowish stone facings of the windows, and the lilac
bush that has grown all crooked, and the pink hawthorn, and the
laurels with patterned leaves; but now I do not mind. Now I do
not see these things or think about them at all; only to-night
I am seeing them, because somehow I have come awake to-night,
for a bit.
To-night I realize that for nine years I have lived here, looking
at that house, every time I go out, and have never really noticed
it before. But even now that I see it, I do not mind. I do not
mind about anything very much now, except, I suppose, John.
To-morrow I shall be forty; my youth is gone; irretrievably,
irrevocably, gone; and even that I do not mind. It used to seem
to me so difficult not to feel too much, and now I cannot feel
at all. Is this simply growing old? Is this what always happens
when one grows old? But if Hugo were alive still, would it be
like this? I do not think that it would.
To-night things come back to me very clearly, in an odd, detached
way, things that have happened to me, as though they had happened
to somebody else, while I looked on. Yearsly comes back to me
much more than usual, and Guy and Hugo, and our childhood there.
Some things I have been almost afraid of thinking about too much.
Now I can think of everything and am not afraid.
It is like what I have heard happens when people are going to
die, or be executed. Is being forty like that? Does it mean that
I do mind being forty, though I think I don’t?
Hugo said that we must hold out till the end; I have had to hold
out longer than he did, and it has seemed, often, that if I let
myself think, or feel much, I couldn’t do it. That was before
this deadening came, that makes it easier; but now I am not afraid.
Something is past, some danger is past, and now I know that I
shall be able to hold out till the end. I do not believe in immortality,
and yet I feel, somehow, that Hugo will know if I keep my promise.
Walter is in bed, asleep; and I am by the window, alone. There
is a bright moon coming up now behind the houses opposite, and
in the moonlight the colours are changing; the yellow and red
grow paler, and less violent. Even on this road there comes a
quiet and beauty of the night.
And my life up to now comes before me very clearly; the people
and the places, and the choices and mistakes, and I seem to see
it all in better proportion than before; less clouded and blurred
across by the violent emotion of youth.
Guy, and Hugo, and Cousin Delia, and Sophia Lane-Watson, and
Diana, and Walter, and George Addington, and Mollie; and Yearsly,
and Hampstead, and here; but Hugo goes through it all; when I
try to think of my life without Hugo, it is impossible; it is
as though there were nothing there at all.
And really, so little has happened to me; my life has been a
very ordinary one; no adventures, nothing dramatic, just the
same sort of life as most of the women I meet in the street,
and think so dull. The lady who lives opposite, in the house
with the bow window, has three grown-up sons, and two daughters.
She is much older than I am, her life must have had more in it
than mine. Does it seem to her, I wonder, as intricate, and poignant
as mine does to me?
I suppose that it does, when she thinks about it; and I suppose
that is only seldom, just as it is with me.
Perhaps before her fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays she thought
about it, and perhaps she thought it very interesting.