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Subjects
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #74787.
The opening · free to read
LEAVES are falling down from the laburnum tree at the gate; yellow leaves, white gate, and red brick of the houses opposite; it is very ugly. In the spring the flowers are yellow instead of the leaves, and the hawthorn bush, to the side, is bright pink, and across the road is lilac. The red-brick houses have facings of yellow stone, squares of yellowish stone round the doors and the windows. All the colours are wrong, all the shapes are ugly, even the trees are not real trees.
Once I would have minded it so much, to live here, looking out at that laburnum tree, and that house opposite, that bow window, and the yellowish stone facings of the windows, and the lilac bush that has grown all crooked, and the pink hawthorn, and the laurels with patterned leaves; but now I do not mind. Now I do not see these things or think about them at all; only to-night I am seeing them, because somehow I have come awake to-night, for a bit.
To-night I realize that for nine years I have lived here, looking at that house, every time I go out, and have never really noticed it before. But even now that I see it, I do not mind. I do not mind about anything very much now, except, I suppose, John.
To-morrow I shall be forty; my youth is gone; irretrievably, irrevocably, gone; and even that I do not mind. It used to seem to me so difficult not to feel too much, and now I cannot feel at all. Is this simply growing old? Is this what always happens when one grows old? But if Hugo were alive still, would it be like this? I do not think that it would.
To-night things come back to me very clearly, in an odd, detached way, things that have happened to me, as though they had happened to somebody else, while I looked on. Yearsly comes back to me much more than usual, and Guy and Hugo, and our childhood there. Some things I have been almost afraid of thinking about too much. Now I can think of everything and am not afraid.
It is like what I have heard happens when people are going to die, or be executed. Is being forty like that? Does it mean that I do mind being forty, though I think I don’t?
Hugo said that we must hold out till the end; I have had to hold out longer than he did, and it has seemed, often, that if I let myself think, or feel much, I couldn’t do it. That was before this deadening came, that makes it easier; but now I am not afraid. Something is past, some danger is past, and now I know that I shall be able to hold out till the end. I do not believe in immortality, and yet I feel, somehow, that Hugo will know if I keep my promise.
Walter is in bed, asleep; and I am by the window, alone. There is a bright moon coming up now behind the houses opposite, and in the moonlight the colours are changing; the yellow and red grow paler, and less violent. Even on this road there comes a quiet and beauty of the night.
And my life up to now comes before me very clearly; the people and the places, and the choices and mistakes, and I seem to see it all in better proportion than before; less clouded and blurred across by the violent emotion of youth.
Guy, and Hugo, and Cousin Delia, and Sophia Lane-Watson, and Diana, and Walter, and George Addington, and Mollie; and Yearsly, and Hampstead, and here; but Hugo goes through it all; when I try to think of my life without Hugo, it is impossible; it is as though there were nothing there at all.
And really, so little has happened to me; my life has been a very ordinary one; no adventures, nothing dramatic, just the same sort of life as most of the women I meet in the street, and think so dull. The lady who lives opposite, in the house with the bow window, has three grown-up sons, and two daughters. She is much older than I am, her life must have had more in it than mine. Does it seem to her, I wonder, as intricate, and poignant as mine does to me?
I suppose that it does, when she thinks about it; and I suppose that is only seldom, just as it is with me.
Perhaps before her fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays she thought about it, and perhaps she thought it very interesting.
I wonder if I should think so too, if she told it to me.
The beginning is Yearsly. People say that places ought not to matter—still less houses, but I think they do. Yearsly has mattered to me, and it did to Guy and Hugo. It stood for something very stable, very enduring, and very sympathetic. Yearsly without Cousin Delia might have been something quite different; it is quite different now; but I think of them together, complementary to each other. Cousin Delia’s personality pervaded everything at Yearsly, and everything there seemed somehow an enhancement and expression of her; and yet each was distinct. Yearsly had something that it had had long before she came there, and Cousin Delia had something, and a great deal, that she must have had before she came, and would have had wherever she was: she has it now.
The house at Yearsly was of grey stone; it was a long plain house built at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with a door in the middle and a row of high sash windows on either side of the door. Above this was a second row of windows, and a kind of Classical stone cornice overhung the upper windows. The roof was steeper than is usual in such houses, and was also grey; grey slates or chips of stone, with patches of green moss on them.
Once it had been a much bigger house, with a long bedroom wing stretching back, northwards, at the east end of the house, but that had been burnt down in 1830, and never rebuilt, and when I first remember it, this centre block was the entire house.
In the middle of the house was a hall, stretching from back to front, and the two main doors, the ‘Front’ door to the north, and the ‘Garden’ door to the south, faced each other across it. Standing on the south side of the house, you could look right through to the clouds at the north. The garden door stood open almost always, except in winter.
The hall reached up to the top of the house, and the big staircase wound up and round it, ending in a square wooden gallery from which the bedrooms opened.
In front of the house, the Garden Front, stretched a long lawn, with a wide gravel path down the middle; at the end of the path six stone steps led down to a lower lawn where we played tennis, and, at the top of the steps, one on each side, stood two lead statues; one of Diana with a bow, and the other, a hero leaning forward with a shield. The lead of the statues was perishing away, and there was a great crack across Diana’s head, but they stood out clear, and almost black, from all the south windows of the house.
Below the tennis court was a piece of meadow sloping down to the Mellock river, with its two lines of willows, flowing at this point due east, and almost parallel with the front of the house. A little further on, it turned sharply southward, wandering away through the low-lying meadows beyond the hill.
At the east end of the house were beach trees: the nearest grew within a few feet of the wall, and their branches threw green lights and shadows into the end windows, and filled the rooms on windy nights with a swishing sound like the sea.
Further from the house the trees thickened up into the ‘High wood’ which stretched along the side of the hill, southward, above the course of the river, for a little way.
This wood was a particular home for us: we played in the trees like birds or squirrels, and built great nests of sticks in which we sat.
We had special trees too—good trees and bad trees, which seemed to us like people. There was one in particular, a very big one, which we called the Happy Tree, and that we loved the best.
Hugo had given it the name: lying on his back one summer’s day, his bare feet kicking on the moss:
‘On a drear nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne’er remember Their green felicity . . . Green felicity, Green felicity, Green felicity . . .’
he kept chanting the words, beating softly on the moss with his feet.
The pale green sunlight flickered through the world of beech leaves on to his face; his hands were clasped behind his head, and his dark blue jersey was open at the neck:
‘It is green felicity . . .’
Guy, half way up among the branches, said:
‘What are you saying?’
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