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“Islands of light are swimming on the grass,” said Rhoda. “They have fallen through the trees.”
Off they fly like a fling of seed. But one sings by the bedroom window alone.”
I saw her kiss him. I saw them, Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there.”
But she is blind after the light and trips and flings herself down on the roots under the trees,
I shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the brown water where dead leaves have rotted.”
We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.”
I have seen signposts at the crossroads with one arm pointing ‘To Elvedon.’ No one has been there.
We are the first to come here. We are the discoverers of an unknown land.
“I see the lady writing. I see the gardeners sweeping,” said Susan. “If we died here, nobody would bury us.”
I shall lie, too, in the fields among the tickling grasses. I shall lie with my friends under the towering elm trees.
He sways slightly, mouthing out his tremendous and sonorous words. I love tremendous and sonorous words. But his words are too hearty to be true.
His blue, and oddly inexpressive eyes, are fixed with pagan indifference upon the pillar opposite.
But look—he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.
It is an action that all the other masters will try to imitate; but, being flimsy, being floppy, wearing grey trousers, they will only succeed in making themselves ridiculous.
other masters will try to imitate; but, being flimsy, being floppy, wearing grey trousers, they will only succeed in making themselves ridiculous.
Look at us trooping after him, his faithful servants, to be shot like sheep, for he will certainly attempt some forlorn enterprise and die in battle.
But I am also one who will force himself to desert these windy and moonlit territories, these midnight wanderings, and confront grained oak doors. I will achieve in my life—Heaven grant that it be not long—some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.”
When I wake early—and the birds wake me—I lie and watch the brass handles on the cupboard grow clear; then the basin; then the towel-horse. As each thing in the bedroom grows clear, my heart beats quicker. I feel my body harden, and become pink, yellow, brown. My hands pass over my legs and body. I feel its slopes, its thinness. I love to hear the gong roar through the house and the stir begin—here a thud, there a patter.
I am often scolded. I am often in disgrace for idleness, for laughing; but even as Miss Matthews grumbles at my feather-headed carelessness, I catch sight of something moving—a speck of sun perhaps on a picture, or the donkey drawing the mowing-machine across the lawn; or a sail that passes between the laurel leaves, so that I am never cast down. I cannot be prevented from pirouetting behind Miss Matthews into prayers.
I shall propose meeting—under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait, and he will not come. It is for that that I love him.
But by some inscrutable law of my being sovereignty and the possession of power will not be enough; I shall always push through curtains to privacy, and want some whispered words alone.
I undo a paper packet tied with a piece of white cotton. The egg shells slide in to the cleft between my knees.
“So I detach the summer term. With intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea. It is to this we are attached; it is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses. And yet we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures. Here is the ticket collector. Here are two men; three women; there is a cat in a basket; myself with my elbow on the window-sill—this is here and now.
A good phrase, however, seems to me to have an independent existence. Yet I think it is likely that the best are made in solitude. They require some final refrigeration which I cannot give them dabbling always in warm soluble words.
It would be better to breed horses and live in one of those red villas than to run in and out of the skulls of Sophocles and Euripides like a maggot, with a high-minded wife, one of those University women. That, however, will be my fate. I shall suffer. I am already at eighteen capable of such contempt that horse-breeders hate me.
He reads a detective novel, yet understands everything.
“The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exultation. I am about to meet—what? What extraordinary adventure waits me, among these mail vans, these porters, these swarms of people calling taxis? I feel insignificant, lost, but exultant. With a soft shock we stop. I will let the others get out before me. I will sit still one moment before I emerge into that chaos, that tumult. I will not anticipate what is to come. The huge uproar is in my ears. It sounds and resounds under this glass roof like the surge of a sea. We are cast down
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You thought, as you drew your pencil there, ‘I too throw off my cloak like that. I too snap my fingers in the face of destiny.’
I feel, as I look from the window, parting the curtains, ‘That would give him no pleasure; but it rejoices me.’ (We use our friends to measure our own stature.) My scope embraces what Neville never reaches.
The old woman pauses against the lit window. A contrast. That I see and Neville does not see; that I feel and Neville does not feel. Hence he will reach perfection, and I shall fail and shall leave nothing behind me but imperfect phrases littered with sand.
‘My father, a banker at Brisbane’—being ashamed of him he always talks of him—failed.
I prop my book against a bottle of Worcester sauce and try to look like the rest.
“Yet I cannot. (They go on passing, they go on passing in disorderly procession.) I cannot read my book, or order my beef, with conviction. I repeat, ‘I am an average Englishman; I am an average clerk,’ yet I look at the little men at the next table to be sure that I do what they do.
Supple-faced, with rippling skins, that are always twitching with the multiplicity of their sensations, prehensile like monkeys, greased to this particular moment, they are discussin...
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All excesses beyond that norm are vanity. That is the mean; that is the average. Meanwhile the hats bob up and down; the door perpetually shuts and opens. I am conscious of flux, of disorder; of annihilation and despair. If this is all, this is worthless.
“I will read in the book that is propped against the bottle of Worcester sauce. It contains some forged rings, some perfect statements, a few words, but poetry. You, all of you, ignore it. What the dead poet said, you have forgotten. And I cannot translate it to you so that its binding power ropes you in, and makes it clear to you that you are aimless; and the rhythm is cheap and worthless; and so remove that degradation which, if you are unaware of your aimlessness, pervades you, making you senile, even while you are young.
(Susan, whom I respect, would wear a plain straw hat on a summer’s day.)
It is a stigma burnt on my quivering flesh by a cowled man with a red-hot iron.
I turn my face with hatred and bitterness upon Bernard and Neville, who saunter under yew trees; who inherit arm-chairs; and draw their curtains close, so that lamplight falls on their books.
The earth hangs heavy beneath me.
This is the momentary pause; the dark moment. The fiddlers have lifted their bows.
Just behind my shoulderblades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep.
There are girls of my own age, for whom I feel the drawn swords of an honourable antagonism.
I who long for marble columns and pools on the other side of the world where the swallow dips her wings.
I see out of the window over his shoulder some unembarrassed cat, not drowned in light, not trapped in silk, free to pause, to stretch, and to move again. I hate all details of the individual life.
What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. The wave breaks. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”
The hills curved and controlled, seemed bound back by thongs, as a limb is laced by muscles; and the woods which bristled proudly on their flanks were like the curt, clipped mane on the neck of a horse.
They sang as if the edge of being were sharpened and must cut, must split the softness of the blue-green light,
A jar was so green that the eye seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a limpet.
My dear sir, I could say, why do you fidget, taking down your suitcase and pressing into it the cap that you have worn all night? Nothing we can do will avail.
