The Green Mirror

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Hugh Walpole

The Green Mirror

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He gazed up into the Mirror, saw in it the reflection of the room, the green walls, the green carpet, the old faded green place like moss covering dead ground. Soft, damp, dark,–and beyond outside the Mirror, the world of the Forests–“the great expanse of Forests” and “beyond, the Ocean–smooth and polished... rising up to the sky in a wall of steel.”

His people, his family, his many, many relations, his world, he thought, were all inside the Mirror–all embedded in that green, soft, silent enclosure. He saw, stretching from one end of England to the other, in all Provincial towns, in neat little houses with neat little gardens, in Cathedral Cities with their sequestered Closes, in villages with the deep green lanes leading up to the rectory gardens, in old Country houses hemmed in by wide stretching fields, in little lost places by the sea, all these persons happily, peacefully sunk up to their very necks in the green moss. Within the Mirror this... Outside the Mirror the rolling forests guarded by the shining wall of sea. His own family passed before him. His grandfather, his great-aunt Sarah, his mother and his father, Aunt Aggie and Aunt Betty, Uncle Tim, Millicent, Katherine... He paused then. The book slipped away and fell on to the floor.

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