Читать книгу A Prayer for my Son - Hugh Walpole - Страница 3

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This moment of anticipation was the worst of her life—never before had she been so utterly alone.

Her loneliness now was emphasized by the strange dead-white glow that seemed to bathe her room. She had just switched off the electric light, and the curtains were not drawn upon the long gaunt windows. Although it was after five on that winter afternoon, the light of the snow still illuminated the scene. Beyond the windows a broad field ran slowly up to a thin bare hedge; above the hedge, the fell, thick in snow, mounted to a grey sky which lay like one shadow upon another against the lower flanks of Blencathra.

Rose had learnt the name of this mountain from the first instant of her arrival at the Keswick station. She had not known whether she would be met or not, and she had asked a porter whether he knew of Scarfe Hall. He knew of it well enough. It lay near the Sanatorium right under Saddleback. And then, because she was obviously a stranger, and he unlike many of his countrymen was loquacious, he explained to her that Saddleback was the common name for Blencathra. ‘What a pity,’ she murmured. ‘Blencathra is much finer.’ But he was not interested in that. He found the motor-car from the Hall and soon she was moving downhill from the station, turning sharply to the left by the river, and so to her destination.

She had had tea alone with Janet Fawcus in the drawing-room downstairs; such a strange, old-fashioned, overcrowded room, with photographs in silver frames and a large oil painting over the marble fireplace of Humphrey’s father. So odd, Rose thought, to have so large a painting of yourself so prominently displayed. She had seen before, of course, photographs of Humphrey’s father and had always liked the kindliness, the good-humour in his round chubby face, the beautiful purity of his white hair, his broad manly shoulders, but this oil painting, made obviously a number of years ago, gave him a kind of dignified splendour. She had always thought him like Mr. Pickwick, but now he was a Mr. Pickwick raised to a degree of authority that yet had not robbed him of his geniality.

So she and Janet Fawcus had shared an embarrassed tea. It was no surprise to her to discover in Janet the perfect spinster—that is, a woman of middle age whose certainty that virginity is a triumph is mingled with an everlasting disappointment. Janet was dressed in the hard and serviceable tweeds of the English dweller in the country. She talked to Rose with all the kindliness of a hostess and the patronage of a successful headmistress. Rose saw at once that Janet had always hated her and that meeting her had not weakened that emotion.

However, she had expected this, counted on it, in fact, and she sat now in this old curiosity shop of a drawing-room, the heavy, dark, ancient curtains drawn against the snow, brightly and falsely amiable about Geneva and the League of Nations and the selfishness of France, and what a pity it was that despotism was beginning to rule the world. It was explained to her that young John was out with his tutor skating on some pond towards St. John’s in the Vale and that Colonel Fawcus himself was at a meeting in Keswick about pylons, and that was why Janet must do the honours alone. ‘But, of course,’ Janet said, ‘you will see John when he comes in. He is so excited about your coming.’ In that last sentence Rose knew there was something sinister; that immaculate tweed-clad virgin would not give an inch. ‘But then,’ Rose thought, ‘I have no intention of asking her. I have not come here to fight. There is no battle in the air. John’s grandfather has invited me out of kindness and generosity. There was nothing in the signed agreement which compelled him to do this. It has been simply warm-hearted kindness on his part. I am not here to fight. I am not here to get my son back. I am not here to win his affection away from anyone else. He is not mine. I surrendered him deliberately, fully knowing what I was about. I am not here for any contest of any kind with this unagreeable, tiresome, self-satisfied prig of an Englishwoman.’ But as she smiled and said that, yes, she would have another cup of tea, and how good it was after a long cold journey—she was forced to repeat to herself: ‘I am not a mother. I surrendered John not only because it would be for his good, and because he would be given so many many things I could never give him, but also because I was not meant to be a mother. There were other things that I could do better. I am not maternal. I am a modern woman of my time. I do not wish to be hampered with a child. I have things I want to do for my generation and civilization and, although it is true that I am now thirty years of age and have done as yet very little for anybody, there is still plenty of time. I have surrendered John, and no amount of disliking his aunt from the bottom of my heart must make me want to take John away from her.’ She thought further: ‘She is looking at my clothes. She is envious of them and that makes her dislike me the more. I am very pleased. My clothes are certainly not remarkable and at least they do not look like a sheet of mail armour.’

‘I expect,’ Janet said, with her considerate, indulgent smile, ‘you would like to come to your room now?’

To her room Rose was taken. What a strange, old, confused place it was! It must be, she realized with a thrill of excitement, the actual room of which Humphrey had often told her. The room where he had slept as a boy. Also it must be very little changed from those long-ago days, for there hanging near a window and opposite the four-poster bed was the oil painting of Abraham offering up Isaac for sacrifice. All the details that Humphrey had given her—the dark, angry hill painted a sinister red, the white body of the boy, the Patriarch with knife raised, and a black cloud breaking into spears of lightning, through which God’s voice spoke. Humphrey had told her how, as a child, he had lain in bed and seen the mounting field beyond the window, the sky above it, the serried edge of Blencathra, almost walk into the room and mingle with the old oil painting, so that he used to fancy that Abraham and his knife were waiting there on Blencathra for himself as the appointed victim.

This, then, was the very room that Humphrey had had. All the furniture in it was old and black. There were dark-green hangings with a red pattern on the four-poster, and the only concessions to modern life in the room were the electric light, an electric fire in the old stone fireplace and a small collection of recent books in gay colours near the bed. Then Rose made her first really serious mistake. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘this must be the very room that Humphrey had.’ Her impetuosity that she thought by now she had learnt to control had once again betrayed her. She felt Janet’s whole body stiffen, and she knew with her quickness of apprehension that Janet had loved her brother with an intense passion. Why, Rose wondered, had she been put in Humphrey’s room? They could not have forgotten. Perhaps it was the only spare room in the house. No, she knew that the place was of a rambling, undisciplined size. There must be many spare rooms. Janet had not answered. She had gone to the door and switched on the light. They had been for a moment standing together in the dusky white-stained twilight. Janet said, ‘As soon as John comes I will bring him up to see you,’ and went.

As soon as she was alone Rose switched off the light again and stood without moving, looking on to the fields that grew with every moment darker, seeming to smell that sharp, friendly, aromatic scent of freshly fallen snow. At last she went to the door and switched on the light again, then stood in front of the long old looking-glass bordered with dim gold that hung between the bed and the door. She looked at herself with a new interest. She was a woman devoid almost entirely of personal vanity. She liked to be clean, to be healthy, to be equipped for whatever she might have to do. Since Humphrey’s death she had thought very little about men except as, indirectly, companions. She had had no sexual life at all. She had been living, she fancied, in a world entirely of ideas, and now, looking into the mirror, she suddenly wondered for the first time whether the ideas had been worth while. In this old room, with the intense stillness of the snowy world beyond it, things altered their values. She saw herself one of an eager group of men and women at a table in a Geneva café, or in somebody’s room, or in the bureau where she worked, sharp, opinionative voices saying, ‘But then, of course, Barthou means something quite different,’ or ‘But, I ask you, Simon and Mussolini, how could they ever understand one another?’ or again, ‘Americans go only skin-deep: that is why the world is in the mess it is.’ Yes, these voices, so sure, so clever, so brittle, echoed with a kind of ludicrous inefficiency which came down in front of that old mirror. Five minutes’ talk with Janet Fawcus seemed to have changed, in spite of herself, the whole world. She did not want it to change. She was paying this visit because she was sure that she was impregnable, but now, was she sure? What unexpected influences were beginning to work upon her?

She looked back at herself in the mirror—slim, slight, dark-haired, much too youthful-looking for her thirty years, she impatiently reflected. She wished to impress them all with her stability, her firm security. She was on a visit to her little son whom she had definitely surrendered, coming from outside, remaining outside, a safe modern woman who was at work for the world’s good, rather than for personal maternity. ‘How detestably priggish that is,’ she thought. ‘But perhaps the whole of Geneva is priggish? What have I done coming here? I did not expect to feel so defenceless.’

It was then, standing in the middle of the room, that she knew her moment of wild, terrified anticipation. What would John be like? How would he greet her? How had he been taught to think of her? It was ten years since she had surrendered him, and she saw again that last dreadful minute in the cold room of the London hotel when she had delivered him up to the nurse and to the family man of affairs, and, seeing that minute again, she thought to herself: ‘It was not because I did not want him that I gave him up, but because I knew that it would be so much better for him; and it shall be. I must have no personal relationship with him. I must let them keep him from me as much as they wish.’

It was at that moment that she heard, even through the closed door, the sharp, clear call of a boy. The door opened, and John, his aunt just behind him, stood there looking at her.

There were two things she at once realized when she saw him; one was that he was strangely like the baby she had surrendered, the other that he had an astonishing and most moving resemblance to his father. It was the second of these two things that instantly warned her, like an inner voice: ‘Take care, take care. You must not be affected by this’—for indeed it was most desperately moving.

John, now twelve years of age, was small and slight and very fair in colouring. His hair, which was rather stiff (a little tuft of it stood up sharply on the back of his head), was pale honey-colour. His face was sharp and thin. His most remarkable feature, which you saw at once as you had done in his father before him, was the eyes, grey-blue in colour, strong, fearless, masculine, full of character. His nose and mouth were thin and pointed. The shape of his upper lip might have been, as his father’s had been inclined to be, cynical and sarcastic. But John’s mouth had suddenly a rather babyish softness which was probably transitory but, at the moment, very appealing. His slim child’s body was as straight as a dart. He was dressed in a light blue pullover and short grey flannel trousers, but you felt the nervous activity of his body beneath his clothes. He stood urgently on his feet as though he were about to start a race, but this may have been because he was feeling the excitement and strangeness of this meeting. His pale hair, his sharp-boned, delicate colouring, the athletic urgency of his poise gave him at once an air of life and spirit that scarcely seemed to belong to that old, dark room, nor had it anything to do with the spare, thin figure of the woman who stood beside him, her hand lightly touching his arm. But he was like the baby Rose had left and like the man she had lost, and it was no sentimental weakness for her to feel a catch in her throat, or to see the room suddenly sway behind a misty cloud of uncertainty.

‘Here’s John,’ Janet said.

‘Hullo,’ John said, and then he held out his hand. ‘How are you?’

She felt and shared his own sense of intolerable shyness. He did not in all probability realize all the implications of this meeting, but he knew enough of them to feel a deep awkwardness and possibly strong, urgent resentment.

She went forward and took his hand. ‘How are you, John?’ she said. She bent down and kissed his forehead.

He received her kiss as though he had known that this ghastly thing must occur. She realized that that had been one of the moments he had been dreading and that now everything would be a little easier. She realized, too, that to the virgin mind of Janet Fawcus all this was of a dreadful indecency—the unmarried mother greeting her bastard child—and suddenly she thought: ‘How inconceivably stupid of me! Janet must have fought her father’s decision to invite me here with all the force she possessed. I had never realized how abandoned she must have thought me.’ She felt it exasperating that Janet should be present at her first meeting with her own son. She longed to have the courage to say, ‘Leave us for a moment, won’t you?’ but she could not and the woman did not move. Something had to be done, the pause had already lasted too long.

‘You have been skating, John, haven’t you?’

His eyes were eating into her face. He was studying her with an absorbed attention, having forgotten completely all the rules of conduct, that you must not stare at strangers, and so on. His eyes never wavered from her face as he answered:

‘Yes. The pond’s been frozen for a week. I’m getting quite good.’

‘John, dear,’ Janet said softly, but he gave a little impatient wriggle of his shoulders.

‘Oh! I’m not swanking, but Mr. Brighouse said so and he can skate like anything.’

‘I live in Switzerland most of the time,’ said Rose, ‘so I get plenty of skating, or could have if I wanted it.’

‘Why, don’t you want it?’ he asked, his eyes wider than ever, staring at her.

‘Yes, but you know what it is,’ she said, smiling, ‘when you have so much of anything all round you, you don’t value it in the same way.’

‘No, I suppose you don’t,’ he said. ‘It’s like being an assistant in a sweet-shop. They get as bored as anything with chocolates and cakes.’ He drew a quick little breath. ‘I don’t think I’d ever be bored with marzipan,’ he said.

Janet pressed her hand in a little on his shoulder. ‘Come, John,’ she said.

And it was at that moment that Rose knew her first instant of sharp, intense rebellion. What right had this woman to tell her son to go at this moment? This was her moment. If the woman had had any kind of decency she would have left them alone together. Then Rose remembered. She smiled, looked him full in the eyes, nodded and lightly said:

‘Good night, John. See you to-morrow.’

He said, his eyes still on her face: ‘Yes. I hope the frost holds, don’t you?’ Then turned and went out with his aunt.

The room was very quiet. There was a gentle tap on the door. Rose said, ‘Come in,’ and a small, rather pinched-faced little maid stood in the doorway. She asked whether she might pull the curtains. Then, standing near the window, she asked whether everything was all right, please, miss?

‘I didn’t know,’ she said, ‘whether that would be the dress you’d be wanting to wear.’

Rose looked and saw—what she had not noticed before—that her evening frock was laid out on the bed, and that it was the smart one of grey and silver. She smiled. ‘Oh, thank you. How nice everything is! But I think that I’ll have the black one to-night.’

‘Oh yes, miss. I didn’t know.’ And she moved very quickly to the drawer, brought out the black taffeta dress and put the other one away, then drew the heavy thick mulberry-coloured curtains across the windows and moved to the door. Again she said: ‘Will that be everything, miss? Dinner’s at quarter to eight.’

‘Yes, thank you,’ Rose said. ‘What is your name?’

‘Sally, miss.’ The girl gave her a sharp, inquisitive look.

‘I suppose,’ Rose thought, ‘they already know all about everything.’ But there was more in the look than mere personal curiosity. It said not only ‘I wonder whether all they say about you is true,’ but also ‘I wonder how much you know about us.’

There was something pleasant about the girl’s face, something unagreeable too. But Rose felt, without having any real reason for her instinct, that this young girl was important in the house. While she dressed she had to struggle against the cold. The electric fire gave out heat, but the room seemed to contain cold as a well contains ancient water. The walls gave off cold so concretely that she could almost see it, and the cold from the world outside seemed to press in from the windows. ‘I suppose,’ she thought, ‘it is the central heating I have been used to in Geneva that makes me feel this. I have never been so cold in my life before. It is as though there were something personal about it.’

When, however, she went down to the drawing-room, there was a great fire leaping wildly in the old dark fireplace, and all the many many things in the room leaped and sparkled with it. The room seemed filled with a kind of aimless chatter. Two clocks were ticking away. Two canaries in a gilt cage near the window were twittering. There was the noise of the fire. And behind all these things a kind of undertone, as though people out of sight were whispering together.

‘The fact is,’ Rose reflected, ‘this house is so old that you feel the past in it more than the present.’ She stood, one shoe up on the fender, her skirts a little raised, warming her ankles, looking into the fire.

The door opened and a young man came in. He was slim and dark, with a bright intelligent face—that was all she noticed about him. He seemed to her a perfectly ordinary boy with that odd gesture of surprise that belongs to so many of his generation as though he were discovering that things were very different from what he had been told they would be. She noticed all this—his dark good looks, his friendliness and his rather surprised eagerness as he shook hands with her and said:

‘My name is Michael Brighouse. I’m John’s tutor. I know who you are.’

And she showed that at once they were friends when she said to him: ‘And I know who you are. You are the first person John mentioned to me.’

‘He is a jolly good kid,’ Michael Brighouse said. ‘I’d have known anywhere you were his mother,’ he added, staring at her, she knew, with admiration and liking.

‘He is very young for his age,’ she thought, ‘but we are going to be friends, and that is a good thing. I shall need a friend here.’

The door opened again and Colonel Fawcus came in. Her impression of him at once was of height and breadth rather than the stout Pickwick rotundity that she had expected. He must have been well over six feet in height, his shoulders seemed tremendous, and only his round, bespectacled red face and snow-white hair carried on the Pickwick illusion. But she was bathed at once in the full tide of his kindly congeniality.

He came forward with both hands outstretched and caught hers, and, all his face smiling even to his large, rather protruding ears, he said: ‘Welcome, my dear Rose, welcome. How kind of you to come.’

She noticed that in some trick of light his round glasses caught the glare so that she could not see his eyes. What she did see were his mouth, his nose, his cheeks, his high red forehead and, above all, his ears. All these were smiling in a kind of ecstasy of welcome, but it was at that moment as though a blind man were greeting her.

‘You know Brighouse?’ he said, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘I expect he has introduced himself.’

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘and I had heard of him from John before that.’

‘Ah! you have seen John,’ Colonel Fawcus said quickly.

‘Yes. He came to my room for a moment.’

‘And what did you think of him? It must have been extraordinary after so long.’

She realized that he intended to deny and hide nothing. He was welcoming her with all the facts on the table. She had not expected to find him so large, so strong, so breezy. She had known that he was kind.

Then Janet came in wearing a black dress that fitted her badly and emphasized her bony neck and her thin arms. She did not use any kind of make-up. Her nose was a little red, pinched with the cold, and there were faint streaks of purple veins on her sallow cheeks. But the great thing about her was that however plain she might be she did not care.

‘She is full of pride,’ Rose thought, ‘of selfsatisfaction. She knows just what she wants and always gets it. She is by far the strongest person in this room.’

The echoes of the gong rolled in the distance.

‘Dinner, dinner,’ Colonel Fawcus cried, as though he were announcing a wonderful new event that was about to change the world’s history. ‘Come, my dear Rose, you must, I am sure, be ravenous,’ and the two clocks, the canaries and the undertone of whispering chatter repeated ‘ravenous.’

Seated at the old mahogany table, the impression that Colonel Fawcus made was overwhelming. Sitting, he looked more massive than ever, more massive, more benevolent, more completely head of the family, more entirely commander of all he surveyed; and he surveyed, she noticed, a very great deal. His eyes were everywhere. While he talked—and he talked voluminously, words pouring from his lips—his eyes darted like fish in a pool up and down the room. You could feel that the maid, Sally, was immensely conscious of his supervision. Rose was interested to notice that here at the table Janet Fawcus counted for nothing. It was the big, hearty, benevolent man who dominated everyone. He talked to Rose exclusively, once and again saying genially:

‘Well, Michael, what do you think of it?’ or ‘I am sure Michael would tell you the same,’ or ‘Michael knows what I feel about it.’

He spoke to her as though he were almost bursting with happiness at her arrival. She could not but wonder. She was of a generation brought up to regard simple kindness as extremely suspect. Let anyone be accused of the worst crimes in the human calendar and she would offer them the friendly protection of Freudian analysis. Just as the works of John Galsworthy, Sir James Barrie, Mr. Milne and other kindly creatures were to her pernicious, so if she were told that anyone was kind or good she assumed instantly that they must also be false and hypocritical. And yet here she was surrendering at once to kindness, goodness, benevolent hospitality, eager friendship, because that was what he was. It was long since anyone had shown her so plainly that he meant well by her. People did not show you that in Geneva unless they wanted something either sexual or financial.

‘I do hope you will enjoy your time with us, Rose. Of course there will be John, who will be a host in himself, and we have neighbours who should interest you—the Parkins, for instance, eh, Michael?’

‘Oh! the Parkins certainly,’ said Michael, laughing.

‘Who are the Parkins?’ Rose asked.

‘The Verdurins,’ Michael said, smiling at her.

‘The Verdurins?’ she repeated.

‘Yes, Proust.’

‘Oh! Proust,’ she said, laughing. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t read him for ages. In smart circles in Geneva he is more old-fashioned than Anatole France, and that is more old-fashioned than’—she laughed and looked about her—‘I can’t think of anything more old-fashioned,’ she said.

‘Well,’ Michael said, ‘when you have met the Parkins once or twice you have read certain parts of Chez Swann again.’

Rose fancied that Colonel Fawcus did not altogether enjoy this little literary interruption; although he had not moved, he yet seemed restless. He looked at them benevolently as a kind guardian watches children hunting for sea-shells on the shore. Then he said to her that he did not get half the time he would have liked to keep up with modern literature.

He was, of course, although she did not know it, an author himself. He told her very modestly of the two little books that he had published, one on Ancient Monuments in the Cockermouth district and the second on Old Cumberland Churches. He had been for many years, he remarked, president of the Cumberland-Westmorland Antiquarian Society. He had been forced to give it up because of the accumulation of business. If he ever had time again he planned a work on Anglo-Saxon life in Cumberland, which would, he hoped, be of some general interest. He had accumulated much material, but alas! try as he would, each day seemed busier than the last.

‘And my age,’ he cried to her joyfully. ‘How old do you think I am?’

Although she knew that he was more, she suggested, ‘Sixty.’

‘Sixty,’ he cried. ‘Sixty-eight—sixty-nine in a month or two.’ He was so plainly delighted with his health and vigour that she was delighted too.

He was more of a scholar than she had imagined. She had not known that he had all this antiquarian knowledge. Why had Humphrey never told her? She could now faintly remember Humphrey once saying something like, ‘Oh! Dad’s all right if you flatter him on his hobbies.’ This, perhaps, was one of them. She saw that he took a child’s delight in his own little affairs; so many men did and that was why so many women felt maternal. She looked up at him. Their eyes met. They both smiled. She felt for a moment as though she were his mother.

During the meal, which was plain and good—a rich thick soup, fried sole, roast beef and apple tart—Janet Fawcus spoke very little.

Once she said to Michael Brighouse: ‘How did John behave to-day?’

‘Very well,’ said Michael. ‘He is getting on with his skating like anything.’

‘You mustn’t flatter him too much.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Michael, ‘I’m sometimes afraid I don’t encourage him enough. He is very easily discouraged, you know.’

She said nothing to that, but there was an implication in the grave authority with which she considered the food on her plate, that she did not wish instructions from Michael about John, that she knew quite enough without his telling. Later in the meal she said:

‘Father, Mr. Cautley rang up.’

‘Oh! did he?’ said Colonel Fawcus, suddenly changed from gay to grave. ‘What did he want?’

‘Oh! the usual thing,’ said Janet. ‘He wanted to come and have a talk with you about the pylons.’

‘Oh! did he?’ said Colonel Fawcus. ‘Well, he can wait. He can take his stuffy self-importance somewhere else. You’d imagine that I’d nothing to do but fuss about little men who do not know their proper place. Cautley, indeed! I should have thought I’d snubbed that man enough to last him a lifetime.’

‘How like Geneva!’ Rose thought. ‘How like everywhere in the world! How like every portrayal of daily life in every novel! Always there is somebody in the way of somebody else. Always everywhere there is someone who just prevents life from being perfect.’ Her sympathies were all alive for poor Colonel Fawcus. She could just figure to herself the kind of self-important, interfering little man who would drive a great, generous, impulsive creature like Humphrey’s father to frenzies of irritation. There were so many of them in Geneva.

After dinner she had a little conversation with Michael Brighouse. This contained one or two odd things which she was to remember afterwards. Janet disappeared about some household business. Colonel Fawcus said:

‘Will you excuse me for half an hour? I have a little business to finish and then I am at your service.’

So Michael and Rose were left alone in the lively, whispering drawing-room, and sat by the side of the fire and had a little talk.

She looked at him and decided that she not only liked him, but trusted him too.

‘Tell me about John,’ she said.

‘No,’ he answered quickly, ‘not yet. I’ve thought it all out before you came. I want you to see him for two or three days yourself first and make your own conclusions. I don’t want to say anything about him until you see for yourself.’

She nodded her head. ‘That’s right. I think that’s wise.’

‘I only want to say one thing,’ he went on promptly. ‘There is so much more going on here than you know, and if at any time later you want a friend, I offer myself.’

‘It’s very nice of you,’ she said, and also rapidly, ‘You may detest me. We may fight over John. You cannot promise friendship so quickly as that.’

‘Oh yes, I can,’ he answered eagerly, ‘in this case, at least. However much I might dislike you, I would be with you in this affair for John’s sake.’

‘You speak,’ she said, ‘as though there were going to be an inevitable taking of sides.’

‘There will be much more than that,’ he answered.

‘You want to frighten me.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘of course not. I hope you will have a lovely time. I know it will be an interesting one.’

She looked at him. Her eyes dwelt on his face. ‘I am sure I can trust you,’ she said. ‘That is one thing I know about people at once. Tell me yourself. Do you like it here?’

She was aware that they were both speaking urgently, almost furtively, as though they knew there would be an interruption, almost as though they were sure that someone was listening. She looked about the room.

‘This is a funny place. You can almost believe there are people in the room you cannot see. But tell me. I want to know. Do you like it here?’

‘Like it?’ He laughed. ‘That’s a mild word. There’s more than liking or disliking here, as you will soon find. But I am glad to be here for two reasons: one John, the other the country.’

‘The country?’ She gave a little shiver. ‘Isn’t it terribly cold and bleak and rough? Doesn’t it rain all the time? But perhaps you are North-country by birth. That would make a difference.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact, I’m not. I was born in Dorset, near Corfe Castle. I have never been north before I came here, and it isn’t the North that I thought I loved so much, but this immediate piece of country.’

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Of course I know the lakes are beautiful, but aren’t they desolate in the winter, and tripper-haunted in the summer, and isn’t the Wordsworth-Coleridge inheritance dreadfully dreary?’

‘That has nothing to do with it,’ he said. ‘I can’t explain to you now. Besides, you may not feel it, and if you don’t, nothing that I say will be of the slightest use. If you do, you won’t need me to explain it to you. It’s lovely. It’s perfect. Every inch of ground is exciting. For instance, there is snow everywhere to-night; well, it never lies for long except on the mountain-tops and in a day or two, perhaps to-morrow, the fields will slowly reveal themselves again, and then every detail of them will be important. You will go, for instance, beyond the pond where we were skating to-day, to the road that leads up to St. John’s in the Vale, and every tree and every field, every hedgerow, will have some shape, or some colour, or some effect under the changing sky that will make it exciting. I had a friend at Oxford who was great at Anglo-Saxon. He would have some piece of manuscript that he would study, a square of parchment, and every letter and every scrap of colour would mean beauty and history and human interest. So I feel about every inch of country here.’

‘I suppose,’ Rose said, ‘that whenever anyone loves the country they feel that?’

‘Perhaps so,’ he answered. ‘I don’t know. I have never felt it about anywhere before. Listen, here’s a little poem.

“Close-fitting house of velvet, foxglove bell,

My heart within your walls might live at ease

And never heed Time’s knell;

And you, like rose, upturned by infinite seas,

To bleach here on the foam-remembering fell,

Could teach my spirit by obscure degrees

Of gossamer tension between heaven and hell;

But heart and spirit are roving, hiveless bees.” ’

‘How beautiful!’ she said. ‘Who’s that by?’

‘A friend of mine copied it out and sent it to me from Oxford. He said it was by somebody called Bowes-Lyon, a new poet. But it has exactly the quality that this place has for me. “Close-fitting house of velvet”—that is what this is, as you will find, and “foam-remembering fell”—that is what the country is.’ And he added, his voice almost sinking to a whisper: ‘There is a battle here. Our own battle, of which the poet of course knows nothing, scarcely anybody knows.’

‘Battle? What battle?’ she asked.

But before he could answer her there was the strong, friendly voice at the door:

‘Finished sooner than I expected. Now, Rose, let us have a cosy talk.’