She went down to Devonshire, to a farmhouse not far from Chagford, on
the edge of Dartmoor. Tanqueray had rooms there which were his and
nobody else's, and he had lent them to her for three months, or for as
long as she cared to stay. She would be safe there, he said. Nobody
would find her.
Certainly it would be hard to find her, so remote and hidden was the
place. The farm, which was small and humble, stood in a deep lane cut
off from Chagford by a hill. The lane dipped abruptly from the hillside;
it plunged; it went down, at noon, as into a pit of darkness. The
white-washed house, lodged on a flat break in the descent, sucked light
through its high ring of ash-trees. Below it the lane went headlong to
the hill-bottom. It was perched on a hill, hugged in a valley, according
as you approached it from the north-east or the south-west.
The doorway was guarded by a deep, white-walled porch. You came straight
into an ancient low-roofed, white-washed kitchen, now the living-room
for the eccentric stranger who had made his lodging there. A stairway
led up from it into the bedroom overhead. This living-room had a door
that opened into a passage joining it to further and dimmer parts of the
house; but the bedroom was inaccessible save by its own stair.
By the deep-set window of each room there stood a firm, solid oak table,
at which, the woman of the farm had told her, Mr. Tanqueray wrote. Both
windows looked on to the lane. That was the beauty of it, Tanqueray had
said. There would be nothing to distract her. You couldn't trust Jinny
on the open moor.
For the first week Jinny, cut off from her husband and children, was
assailed by a poignant and perpetual misery. As one who has undergone a
surgical operation, she suffered an inveterate nerve-aching after the
severed flesh. She was haunted by Brodrick's face as she had seen it
from her corner of the rail-way carriage, looking in at her through the
window, silent and overcast, and by his look, his unforgettable look as
the train carried her away. And the children, their faces and their soft
forms and their voices haunted her. She did no work that week.
Then the country claimed her. Dartmoor laid on her its magic of wild
earth and wild skies. She tried to write and could not. Something older
and more powerful than her genius had her. She suffered a resurgence of
her youth, her young youth that sprang from the moors, and had had its
joy in them and knew its joy again. It was on the moors that earth had
most kinship and communion with the sky. It took the storms of heaven.
Its hills were fused with heaven in fires of sunset; they wore the
likeness of the clouds, of vapour and fine air. On the moors it was an
endless passing of substance into shadow and of shadow into substance.
And she had her own kinship and communion with them. She remembered
these hillsides grey as time, where the grass was a perishing bloom on
the face of the immemorial granite. A million memories and instincts met
in these smells of furze and heather and moss, of green rushes and the
sweet earth of the south-west.
Tanqueray was right. She was not to be trusted on the open moors. She
was out of doors all day. And out of doors the Idea that had driven her
forth withdrew itself. Its very skirts, only half-discerned, were beyond
her grasp. She was oppressed at times by a sense of utter frustration
and futility. If this was all; if she was simply there enjoying herself,
tramping the hills all day, a glorious animal set free; if she was not
going to accomplish anything, then she had no business to be there at
all. It would be better to give it up, to give in, to go back again.
There was a day in her third week when she nearly did go back, when it
seemed to her that she would be obeying a wise instinct if she went. She
got as far as looking up the trains to Waterloo.
Then, on the brink of it, something that announced itself as a wiser
and profounder instinct, an instinct of self-preservation, told her not
to go. It told her to wait, to trust to Nature's way, and to Nature's
wisdom in bringing back her youth. Nature's way was to weave over again
the web of life so strained and worn, so tangled and broken by the
impact of other lives. Nature's wisdom was to make her simple and
strong, a new creature, with a clean vision and an imagination once more
virgin to the world. In short, Nature's beneficent intention was to
restore her whole to the genius which also had been a part of Nature's
plan.
And all the time good news of Brodrick and the children reached her
every other day. Punctually, every other day Gertrude Collett wrote,
assuring her that all was going well at home and urging her to stay.
Brodrick wrote (at rather longer intervals) saying how happy the
children were, and how entirely comfortable he was with Gertrude. His
letters contained little besides praise of Gertrude. There was no
reason, he reiterated, why she should not stay.
She stayed, and in her fifth week she received the reward of her
staying. Walking back to the farm late one evening, the moors veiled
from her passion by the half-darkness, her Idea came back to her. It
came, not yet with the vividness of flesh and blood, but like a ghost.
It had ghostly hands and feet, and like a ghost it walked the road with
her. But through its presence she felt in herself again that nascent
ecstasy which foretold, infallibly, the onset of the incredible act and
labour of creation.
When she reached the farm she found George Tanqueray sitting in the
porch. The lamp-light through the open door revealed him.
"Whatever brought you here?" she said.
"What always brings me."
She understood him to mean that he also had been driven forth, and was
in subjection to the Idea.
"Have you come to turn me out?" she said.
"No, Jinny."
He explained that he was staying in the village, at the Three Crowns. He
had arrived that evening and had walked over.
He followed her into the deep kitchen. At the supper-table his place had
been laid for him already. He had ordered it so.
He looked at her, smiling an apology.
"Is it all right?" he said.
"Perfectly all right, George."
They talked all evening and far into the night. She parted from him at
the gate of the lane under the ash-trees. Under the ash-trees her Idea
showed in its immense and luminous perfection. It trembled into life. It
drew her, palpitating, into the lamp-light of the room.
She had found what she had come for.
That was the effect he always had on her.