Читать книгу A Prayer for my Son - Hugh Walpole - Страница 4

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Michael Brighouse was twenty-three years of age. He was two years old and a little bit on August 4th, 1914, six years of age and a little more on November 11th, 1918: the War, therefore, meant nothing to him at all and this inexperience was shared by all his contemporaries. He was not moved in the slightest by Armistice Day, or by any appeal to remember war veterans, or by Mr. Lloyd George’s aspersions on Earl Haig’s war conduct, or by the few remaining sentimental poets who still wailed about the unhappy time that they had had in the trenches. The War meant nothing to him also because he had all his life lived in a state of war. From the time when he had been at all conscious of any happening outside the excitement of his own rectory garden, there had been war going on somewhere, or if not actually war, at least conflict.

He had seen the kings fall and the despots rise; he had seen the American boom and the American slump; he had seen the quiet absorption of Manchukuo by the Japanese; he had seen the rise of Hitler, the flight of the Jews, the murder of Dollfuss, and only a week or two ago the plebiscite in the Saar. His generation, therefore, did not despair of the world as had the generation before them. Poets of Michael’s day, Auden, Stephen Spender, Day Lewis, were the only figures at this moment in the world of art who were at all representing him. But there were thousands upon thousands of young men like Michael, who out of an extraordinary welter of machinery, speed, half-baked science, complete sexual frankness, poverty, cynicism and unemployment were achieving a new calm, not of indifference, but of a kind of philosophical humorous fortitude. The world was indeed a ludicrous mess, but it was a new world, as new as the early Elizabethan one had been. It offered, no doubt, every kind of parallel to that other splendid epoch—the speed, the machinery and the unemployment were all necessary parts of it. What a time to be alive in!

On the other hand, he had no illusions; above all, no sentimentality, no unbalanced idealism: ‘Keep calm whatever may be offered you, be it death, supreme beauty, or a job at three pounds a week.’ Michael was like his generation in all these things. He was like his generation, too, in that underneath the superficial colouring of his period he was like every other young man who had ever been—idealistic, sentimental, patriotic, sometimes very childish.

His father was rector of a small Dorset parish, and lived in perfect contentment there in a charming old rectory, with a high-walled garden, and a view from the upper windows over rolling down to the sea. Michael’s father and mother were very philosophical people, that is, practically nothing disturbed them. Michael was their only son and they loved him, but they were quite happy when he was away, and always believed that all was for the best in God’s world, even though Michael’s mother had severe rheumatism in one leg and his father a heart that might kill him at any moment.

Michael went to school at Uppingham, had a history scholarship at Cambridge, got a double first and must, therefore, be considered a brilliant young man. He was not, however, really brilliant, but had a ready capacity for putting things on paper and a good memory. He knew very well that he was not brilliant. He knew that he might be a don—he didn’t wish to be that. He thought that he would make a good journalist, but he didn’t wish to be that either. He did not know until he had come to Cumberland what it was he wanted to be.

He knew his character pretty well. There was something weak in the middle of it, a soft, oozing spot somewhere. He was consistently to his own chagrin coming upon this mossy, boggy centre. It was not that he was sentimental so much as that he gave way before he knew it to unreasonable emotions, desires, impulses. He did not realize that no young man is a nice young man if he is hard right through. What exasperated him was that his consistent weakness was the result of no logic. He was quite ready to excuse weakness on definite philosophic grounds, but he hated to be ashamed of himself without a reason. The friends that he had made at Cambridge—Horlock, Redmayne, Burnam—were all perfectly aware of why they were weak when they wanted to be weak and what the results of their weakness would be. ‘You see,’ Redmayne would say, ‘my doing that the other night proves what Jung says in his book’; or Horlock would simply cry, ‘One must get one’s fun where one can. It’s poor fun. Isn’t it astonishing that for thousands of years people have made such a fuss about love when this is all it comes to?’ But Michael, alas! was far more unreasonable than his friends. One day when he was walking from Wastwater over to Eskdale he faced it quite frankly.

‘I’m soft. I get bowled over by anything, but perhaps I am right. Perhaps there is more in this business than Horlock or Redmayne imagines.’

What he meant by ‘this business’ was the lookback from the spur of the fell to Wastwater, which lay black as jet in the Screes. The silence everywhere was so beautiful and comforting that it offered a true reassurance against these black waters. A sheep-trod running in front of him was also comforting. When he slept in Eskdale that night he determined to write to Horlock about it.

‘You see, Horlock,’ he meant to say, ‘everything that we talked about at Cambridge is nonsense.’ But of course in the morning he thought better of it. Every day in Cumberland put Horlock more out of touch. He began to grow a new spiritual skin.

He had always supposed that the tutoring of a small boy was as unpleasant a job as could ever be imagined. He did not care about small boys. He disliked the idea of teaching them anything. The word tutor was an offence. Some old schoolmaster friend wrote to his father to ask whether he knew of a likely young man who would give six months in a very lovely part of England to looking after a nice small boy. The point was that the pay was excellent and the work easy; the young man would have leisure to study for his own purposes. The point in Michael’s case was that, lying in bed, he saw the white road which ran like the spine of a fish into a cluster of stars scattered about a moonlit sky. In this sky, and on either side of the road, rolled smaller hills, whitened with moonlit powder. This surprising scene had for him miraculous power. ‘That,’ he thought, ‘is because I am nearly asleep,’ but in the morning the power remained, and to his own astonishment he said to his father at breakfast:

‘I think I’ll go to these people—Fawcus, or whatever they are called.’

‘It’s time,’ his father said gently,’ that you should make up your mind what you are going to do.’

‘I know quite well what I am going to do,’ Michael said. ‘I am going into the City to sell ivory collar-studs and make a lot of money. Then I am going to devote the money to——’ He stopped.

‘To what?’ asked his mother. ‘I hope you are enjoying the kedgeree because Cook made a great fuss when I said we were going to have it.’

‘To what, I don’t know,’ Michael went on. ‘The trouble is all the things you really care about seem to do better when you don’t help them than when you do.’

‘Why collar-studs?’ asked his father.

‘Because I know the man who has asked me to go in with him. He has inherited his father’s business—it isn’t only collar-studs of course.’

So in this indeterminate manner he went up to Cumberland. Before he went the schoolmaster friend of his father wrote to him:

‘Old Fawcus is all right,’ he said, ‘if you remember the things that he has done in the past. He has been M.P. for the Penrith Division of Cumberland, but years ago. He served in the Boer War, which is why he is a colonel; but he isn’t as real a colonel as he would like people to think he is. He has written monographs about monuments—bad ones. He is very easy to manage if you think him important. The boy is his grandson, illegitimate, but being brought up as heir to a great deal more than a non-existent estate. Fawcus has a spinster daughter. The house is ancient, and dark and cold, but the country is lovely, and the rain is not so bad as it sounds. I consider the pay more than adequate for what you will do, because the little boy is not tiresome and old Fawcus easily placated. There are, however, ghosts in the house—a certain madness—and I advise you, if anyone starts throwing spells, to watch out.’

This friend of his father was called Mr. Harris, and Michael thought he sounded so nice in his letter that he wanted to meet him in London, but Mr. Harris did not wish to be met. He was quite frank:

‘I am sure you are a very nice young man,’ he wrote. ‘I had a great affection once for your father, but I care now only for chess, Bach and Handel. I live in Eastbourne and hate coming to London. Good-bye. Let me know how you get on in Cumberland.’

When later on Michael asked Colonel Fawcus about Mr. Harris, Fawcus said:

‘Poor old Harris, as mad as a hatter! Went into King’s Chapel once without his trousers.’

Be that as it might, Michael found everything that Mr. Harris had said very strangely true. The house was dark and ancient and cold; Miss Fawcus was a spinster all right; the Colonel liked flattery; the little boy was a nice little boy. These were the things that he discovered at first. It was only when he had been there some little while that the business of witchcraft and spells began to be apparent. It lay, of course, partly in the country. Michael read certain books about Cumberland and Westmorland. A man called Collingwood, he decided, was the only one who knew anything about the matter. Popular novels, with a great deal of highly coloured scenery, revolted him. The guide-books were for the most part concerned only with the tracks, stiles, stone walls, and seeing as many named places as possible from one particular point. Only two men since Wordsworth and Coleridge had written any poetry about the Lake District worthy of the name; nothing that anyone had written except Wordsworth and Collingwood, nothing that anybody said accounted for the curious spell that the country laid upon him. He could not put it into words, except that its main appeal at first was to his personal vanity. The little stone walls, the fell, the fields and the streams whispered to him, ‘Nobody has ever understood us before you. We cannot tell you how relieved we are that you have come.’ While they did this he knew that they were mocking. He determined at first that he would not allow himself to be cheap about the colour simply because popular novelists were so easily cheap about it, but he could not deny that one mulberry-tinted cloud resting its chin upon the white powdered line of Saddleback (the rest of the sky grey with impending snow) held an intangible delicacy beyond anything he had ever seen. He stared at it from the windows of the Hall waiting for it to go, because clouds are so lovely the shade must be impermanent. But the dark mulberry only lightened as he watched it to a sharper purple.

Snow began very faintly to fall across the shadow of the fell, and the dark trees of the Hall garden. But even this did not diminish the mulberry cloud. Shadows of pale gold, a final suggestion of a sun that had not appeared all day, broke into the grey expanse of sky, and then, steadily supporting the cloud, this was the only fragment of light and colour in all the world. As the falling snow thickened, the garden grew ever darker, and over the fell a whiteness gleamed. At last, when all was dark, he fancied that he could still see the mulberry cloud. He was never quite to lose sight of it again. Now coloured clouds and falling snow are not the property of the North of England alone, but he discovered that in this country, because the hills are so near and the stretches of water so personal, many things happen that seem personally significant. He decided that the whole country was bad for one’s egotism.

He was forced, however, very abruptly to think of people rather than places. He had never before lived intimately with a family not in any way of his own kind. He had been brought up, as are most young men, to congratulate himself on circumstances and surroundings that were in fact exactly right for him. Now he was an intruder, almost, he felt at times, a spy upon the lives of people who were as alien to him as West African natives. He had been brought there for a purpose which was, he very quickly perceived, not at all the education and development of one small boy. The boy himself he found easy. In the first place he had from the very beginning a kind of tenderness towards him because of his illegitimacy. He would not have pitied himself had he been illegitimate, but he had not been in the house two days before Miss Fawcus very sternly, very briefly, and as though she were reciting to him one of the more indecent passages of the Old Testament, gave him the bare bones of the facts.

‘My brother,’ she said, ‘my only brother, was one of the finest men I have ever known. He was everything in the world to me. He had one weakness—women—only because of his kindness of heart, not because he had a horrid nature. He was married—well, some people said unhappily, I believe not. I think that Gertrude and he might have had a most successful marriage had not others interfered. However, that’s as may be.

‘Gertrude was in some ways an odd woman. She needed understanding. I frankly disliked her very much. In any case, after he had been married some five years a dreadful thing occurred. He lost his head, ran away with a girl of eighteen. Gertrude very rightly refused to divorce him. He had a child in Switzerland. John is that child.’ She paused.

Michael perceived that she was labouring under stress of terrible emotion. There were tears in her eyes. She could scarcely speak. With a tremendous effort, which he could not but admire, she recaptured her self-command.

‘My brother was killed climbing the Alps. It became evident later that the girl who had ruined his life had no means, and my father, very nobly as I thought, made her an offer that if she would surrender her boy entirely, never see him again, or have any kind of claim on him, the child should be brought up with every advantage of my father’s special care. Not to my surprise, the woman consented, so little had she of any real feeling. But quite calmly she gave up her baby. John was brought here when he was two years old—ten years ago. She kept her part of the bargain. We had no word from her of any kind.

‘I think, Mr. Brighouse, you ought to know these facts if you are going to be John’s constant companion. You will find him a good little boy, I think—at times strangely like his father, he seems to me. It would be better, I think, to make no allusion whatever to his mother.’

It was not long, however, before Michael realized that Miss Fawcus meant little in the house in comparison with her father. After his first week Michael knew that there was no one in the place, from Miss Fawcus herself down to the small spotty boy who helped under compulsion in the garden, not aware of the Colonel during every minute of the day and even more aware of him when his bodily presence was felt rather than seen. There was something curious in this, Michael thought, because the Colonel’s robust geniality was anything rather than frightening—a kinder and more agreeable man surely did not exist anywhere. He was generous and open, more than fatherly with Michael from the very first moment. He had a way of putting his hand on Michael’s shoulder, of gripping his arm, that was extremely pleasant, so cordial, so spontaneous. As a rule, Michael fastidiously disliked any kind of physical contact with his friends and acquaintances. He inherited this possibly from his father, who had never kissed him although they were such excellent friends. The Colonel pressed his hand into Michael’s shoulder, drew him a little towards him, looked him laughingly in the face, and then said with such spontaneous, cordial honesty:

‘We’re in luck, Brighouse. You’re just the man I’ve been wanting.’

And Michael replied: ‘I’m the lucky one, sir.’

He found himself after a while eagerly sharing in the Colonel’s past triumphs: the present ones were, he was bound to admit, very small and he wondered that a man of the Colonel’s character and broad-minded good-nature should value so seriously the little encounters in Keswick, trifling compliments paid him in a letter, foolish little nothings that the wife of Mr. Broster, the clergyman, or old Mrs. Page-Hunter had paid him. ‘But that,’ he thought, ‘is what happens when you live for a long time in the country; little things become so important and the old boy’s getting on. It is natural for him to wish to live in the past. The fact that he is a bit of an egotist is nothing against him: we are all egotists together and as we grow old we are afraid of being left alone.’

After a month or two, it might be said that Michael almost loved the Colonel. He was excited at his approach. He had never before thought very much of the physical appearance of any man, but the Colonel’s cleanliness and physique and freshness of colour, a faint aroma of an extraordinarily healthy soap, a very fine virile tobacco, a tang of open-air health that the Colonel carried with him, gave Michael an intimate satisfaction, and when the Colonel drew him a little towards him and he could see those clear bright-blue eyes and the rough cleanly strength of the stiff white hair, and measure the broadness of the chest and appreciate the fine set-back of the shoulders, then Michael felt a warmth of almost filial affection.

One morning going to his bath, the door being open, he went in and found the Colonel singing in a funny high treble that was almost falsetto and rubbing himself fiercely with an enormous towel.

‘Come in, my boy, come in,’ the Colonel cried. ‘Room for us both.’

And it was then that Michael was compelled to admire the splendid physical strength of that body, its freshness and symmetry and energetic happiness.

‘Wouldn’t think I was nearly seventy, would you, my boy?’ said the Colonel, punching his chest. ‘Like to see me touch my toes? How’s this for an old man’s exercise?’ And obviously extremely proud of his strength he bent and twisted and turned, his beautiful white hair standing up on end, the muscles of his shoulders and thighs rippling under the fair skin.

‘My word!’ said Michael. ‘I wish I could be like that when I am nearly seventy. How have you managed it, sir?’

‘Luck,’ said the Colonel, his whole face smiling like that of a happy child. ‘Luck and obeying a few sensible rules, watching the teeth and the colon, exercises every day. Here, let me see you do an exercise or two.’

Michael was ashamed of his thin, meagre body. The Colonel felt his muscles, slapped him on the back, and then looking at him with real fatherly affection said:

‘I can tell you, my boy, it’s a happy thing that you’ve come here. It makes a difference to all of us.’

‘Do I indeed?’ said Michael, blushing with pleasure. ‘I want to do my best; you are all so very good to me.’

One individual with whom intimate relations were not at once established was little John. He was from the beginning polite and obedient, but at first he kept absolutely aloof.

‘How much does he know of his history? wondered Michael. ‘Does he suffer because of it? Is he aware of his own loneliness and isolation?’—because lonely it seemed the boy was. It was clear that he admired his grandfather intensely and that he obeyed in every instance his aunt. But it was not so clear that he loved either of them. His affections were elsewhere. First and above all other, the Parkin boy, who was three years older than himself. After that the mongrel kitchen dog named Romp by the cook and more vulgarly Rump by everybody else. Rump was of the engaging kind of mongrel as common in life as in fiction. He was a sort of terrier, but with a round, amiable, friendly face that belonged more to the sheep-dog kind. He was a dog who had been brought up from the beginning in the worst kind of social snobbery. He was gay and merry in the kitchen quarters, but if ever he ventured higher he became painfully subservient, crawling across the floor, wagging his tail, looking up into Miss Fawcus’ face with a beseeching manner—and well he might, for if she found him in any part of the house other than the servants’ rooms he was swished and shooed and driven away. He would run for his very life. This creature John loved. The third item in his affections was the gardener, old Lewcomb, an absolutely silent, saturnine man, who so far as anyone could see hated mankind. Nevertheless John worshipped him. He would sit by him for hours in the very depressed garden under the fell, would ask him endless questions which Lewcomb did not answer. He had an irresistible fascination for John, who thought him infinite, wise and omniscient.

Into this select company of three Michael was not admitted. On the other hand, John after a while did more than tolerate him. He liked being with him. He liked being taught by him. He was obedient and very seldom sulky, but he did not surrender himself, and after four months Michael knew the boy very little better than he had at first.

Then came Miss Fawcus’ extraordinary announcement.

Miss Clennell, John’s abominable mother, had been asked by the Colonel to pay a visit. Miss Fawcus’ horror was almost pathetic in its ineffectiveness.

‘My father has invited the woman to stay here. His reasons I cannot imagine. I have argued with him, protested, done all that I could. You are a young man, Mr. Brighouse, but you will understand the scandals to which this visit must inevitably give rise in a small community like this. My father, as you know, has been a Member of Parliament for this district and has lived here for many years. Even small day-by-day occurrences give rise to much comment. The appearance here of Miss Clennell will be the talk of the place. But in addition to that, I consider it an insult that she should be brought into this house. What her influence on the boy may be I shudder to think.’

Miss Fawcus’ announcement left him in a state of curious excitement and he realized very quickly that it was not the anticipation of Miss Clennell’s arrival that excited him so much as his sharpened consciousness of some kind of mysterious conflict that was going on in the house. Where did the conflict lie? Was it between Miss Fawcus and her father? Was it between the Colonel and some person or persons whom he, Michael, had not yet realized? Was it between the servants in the house and their superiors? Was John the centre of it? Was it simply the house itself and the country that surrounded it?

Why was it that he, who until this visit had never been afraid of anything, was conscious so often of little moments of apprehension? Yet he was happy here. He was happy partly because of the very excitement that the place produced in him. Was his love of this country making him more sharply perceptive than the facts warranted? In any case, putting these vague sensations aside, what an extraordinary thing for the Colonel to do—Miss Fawcus was right there—to ask his son’s mistress to the house where her child was, when he had made the sharpest condition that she should never see the child again. He had imagined that in spite of his vigour and full body the Colonel was a strict moralist, in fact he told Michael on more than one occasion that he disliked this modern broad-mindedness and that if he had his way young people should be taught to obey the old rules again; especially he emphasized his opinion that women to-day were surrendering almost everything that made them valuable and attractive.

‘I may be old-fashioned,’ he said, ‘most men are at sixty-eight, but the world will find out one day that I am right.’

But Michael was by this time more than suspicious that there was a great deal in the Colonel that he had not yet perceived. One family of friends, the Parkins, confirmed him in this.

Mrs. Parkin was a little, thin, very tidy woman, with short well-cared-for grey hair and a rather pinched white face. She was immensely energetic and vivacious. Her husband, who had made money in buttons or something of the kind and had now retired from business, was a thin, tall man, completely under the domination of his wife. Mrs. Parkin lived for her circle of friends. This circle was by far the most important thing in her life and meant much more to her than either her husband or her child. Every member of the circle had to be distinguished for something or other. It was not so very easy in a little neighbourhood like this to find a number of distinguished people, but Mrs. Parkin had achieved marvels.

There was, for instance, Mr. Latter who played the piano: Mrs. Lincoln who had sung solos in oratorio. Then there were Mr. Morphew, his wife and daughter, who all wrote. They were naturalists, and in one of the Northern papers once a week there were delightful things by Mr. Morphew about what the blackbird was doing, why owls made the noises they did at night, and so on. Amy Morphew knew all about dogs, and quite often little articles would appear hither and thither about the skins of dogs and the right biscuits to give them. But Mrs. Parkin had failed, alas! to capture the greatest prize of all, Mr. Bauman, who lived on the other side of the Lake, a quite famous novelist. He was in appearance a stout cheery-faced man who could be seen walking furiously on the fell or along the road, swinging a stick, and as he went he would often sing aloud. He seemed so cheerful a person that he should have been easy for Mrs. Parkin to capture, but he refused absolutely. He was, in fact, extremely rude to her, and if you wanted to please Mrs. Parkin, even if it were very easy, all you had to do was to abuse Mr. Bauman.

Mrs. Parkin was extremely tenacious of her friends. Once you were a member of the circle it cost you your very social life to forsake it. It might be that all her geese were swans, but there was something very charming about her enthusiasm. To listen to her you would think that Mr. Latter played the piano like Cortot, that the Morphews were naturalists like Monsieur Fabre, and that Mrs. Lincoln was the recognized equal of Clara Butt. Unfortunately this enthusiasm instantly died did you refuse one of Mrs. Parkin’s invitations, or, still worse, pretend you were ill and then be discovered at some other person’s house.

Mrs. Parkin was a lady of immense character and determination.

‘We may live in the depths of the country,’ she would say, ‘but we can find our culture wherever we are.’

Now the one person of whom Mrs. Parkin was afraid was the Colonel. It was difficult to see why, for the Colonel was always charming to her, laughed and joked with her, complimented her, went to her parties. But if he did not, if he said to her quite sharply: ‘Nonsense, Emmeline, I have no time to waste on that foolishness,’ Emmeline Parkin would smile and say: ‘The dear Colonel, he is sometimes out of sorts. I understand him so very well.’

Michael had, of course, been drawn into the Parkins’ circle. He found it indeed one of the trials of his young life, for he had not the mature courage to refuse an invitation. Once he had said he must go back home and work, and instead of that had visited some extremely sophisticated friends of his, the Lascelles, whom Mrs. Parkin detested even as she detested Mr. Bauman and for the same reason that they would have nothing at all to do with her. Mrs. Parkin discovered his falseness as she always discovered everything, and he found that, within a week, the most dreadful suspicions about him were being circulated in Keswick and the district: that no girl was safe from his amorous advances, that he had been sent down from College in disgrace, that his father was ashamed of him, and that he was the worst possible young man to be tutor to a small boy. He did not know that Mrs. Parkin had said any of these things, but in sheer cowardice he went and made his peace with her and his character seemed suddenly to recover its pristine innocence. May and Kate Lascelles chaffed him brilliantly for his cowardice. He frankly admitted it. He wanted to live at peace with all the world. It was the Parkins whom he had specially in mind when he heard of the visit of John’s mother. What excitement there would be, what chatter, what gossip!

At the first sight of Rose Clennell in that warm, old, crowded, whispering drawing-room, he forgot all about gossip, all about local curiosity and chatter, all about the Colonel, all about Miss Fawcus, even all about John. He fell at once, completely, entirely, for the first time in his young life, in love. He did not know why. He had never had any experience of this before, so that he could offer to himself no comparisons. It was as though his heart and soul were bared to himself for the first time. He was, from that instant of experience, no longer a rather aimless, rather clever, rather characterless young man. He was sublimated there on that drawing-room floor into a knight-errant, a worshipping servant, a humble friend. It was not that his breath was taken away by her beauty; he knew at once that she was not in the general sense a beautiful woman. It was not that he could discern any special ability of character or wisdom. There was no divine air, no heavenly music. He kept his head. He did not stare at her in any kind of breathless fashion. He had no wish at all to catch her in his arms and embrace her. He scarcely even wished to be near her. He only felt within himself such a surrender of his personality to another, such a fire of a desire for service, for unselfish action, that it was really a dedication of all that he was and ever had been.

After his first little talk before the Colonel interrupted them he decided for himself that she was very young for her age—exactly the opposite impression from that which Rose thought she gave him. Her talk about Geneva and the League, foreign politics in general, seemed to him to be very simple and inexperienced. He decided that what she wanted to be was very different from what she was. In his room alone afterwards, as he was undressing, his principal thought was: ‘She needs protecting: she needs looking after. I shall be able to help her.’ And he lay awake for hours, feeling as though his invisible room were lit with every kind of beauty.

This sudden and so unexpected experience coincided with the revelation that the country had been to him. The two things came together. In the confused and busy hours that follow a sudden falling in love one cannot remember anything of the beloved in actual fact—very often scarcely the name. One can see nothing of the features. One hears the voice as a very distant echo of something much more beautiful. One is sunk, lapped round by a fire as bright and fierce as ever lapped protectingly about Brünnhilde. There are two fires: one, the flames of glory that come from one’s own ecstasy; the other, a mysterious, smoky flame that veils the loved one. Both fires die down, and when, afterwards, there is only the cold hillside and all iridescence has faded from the sky, then the first real meeting takes place.

Michael may have conjured up for himself these immature rhapsodies, but at least he knew for a certainty that his life would never be the same again and that the country and Rose Clennell had come to him together.

As he lay in bed, staring into the darkness, he saw as though from a great distance line upon line of little hills, mouse-grey, and then, as though he himself ran towards them, the background expanded into long, rough expanses of fell. He climbed the rocky, twisting path and now he was on the top, the wind whistling about his feet. He could move now all day over turf that sprang with the running touch of his step, and he turned the corner, as he had done only a week before, starting from Cat Bells, and saw the valley of Newlands lying with its farms, stone walls, and marvellous, shapeless symmetry, stained with colour between the hills, an intense green, and then grey, like smoke, where threads of mist drifted in between the hollows.

He passed from vision to vision, from recapture to recapture of little places that he knew, of journeys that he had taken, and whether he stood on Esk Hause and looked down the rolling slopes to Eskdale, or climbed the hill above Hawkshead and saw Coniston in a blue mist, or watched small blue waves curl about the reeds on Rydal, or from the downs above Uldale stared at the Scottish border and the silver line of the Firth, it was always the same—Rose Clennell was the country and the country was Rose, and he himself was happier than he had ever been in his life before.