England -- Fiction; Experimental fiction; Psychological fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- England -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
Mrs. Jarvis walked on the moor when she was unhappy, going as far as a
certain saucer-shaped hollow, though she always meant to go to a more
distant ridge; and there she sat down, and took out the little book
hidden beneath her cloak and read a few lines of poetry, and looked
about her. She was not very unhappy, and, seeing that she was
forty-five, never perhaps would be very unhappy, desperately unhappy
that is, and leave her husband, and ruin a good man's career, as she
sometimes threatened.
Still there is no need to say what risks a clergyman's wife runs when
she walks on the moor. Short, dark, with kindling eyes, a pheasant's
feather in her hat, Mrs. Jarvis was just the sort of woman to lose her
faith upon the moors--to confound her God with the universal that
is--but she did not lose her faith, did not leave her husband, never
read her poem through, and went on walking the moors, looking at the
moon behind the elm trees, and feeling as she sat on the grass high
above Scarborough... Yes, yes, when the lark soars; when the sheep,
moving a step or two onwards, crop the turf, and at the same time set
their bells tinkling; when the breeze first blows, then dies down,
leaving the cheek kissed; when the ships on the sea below seem to cross
each other and pass on as if drawn by an invisible hand; when there are
distant concussions in the air and phantom horsemen galloping, ceasing;
when the horizon swims blue, green, emotional--then Mrs. Jarvis, heaving
a sigh, thinks to herself, "If only some one could give me... if I could
give some one...." But she does not know what she wants to give, nor who
could give it her.
"Mrs. Flanders stepped out only five minutes ago, Captain," said
Rebecca. Captain Barfoot sat him down in the arm-chair to wait. Resting
his elbows on the arms, putting one hand over the other, sticking his
lame leg straight out, and placing the stick with the rubber ferrule
beside it, he sat perfectly still. There was something rigid about him.
Did he think? Probably the same thoughts again and again. But were they
"nice" thoughts, interesting thoughts? He was a man with a temper;
tenacious, faithful. Women would have felt, "Here is law. Here is order.
Therefore we must cherish this man. He is on the Bridge at night," and,
handing him his cup, or whatever it might be, would run on to visions of
shipwreck and disaster, in which all the passengers come tumbling from
their cabins, and there is the captain, buttoned in his pea-jacket,
matched with the storm, vanquished by it but by none other. "Yet I have
a soul," Mrs. Jarvis would bethink her, as Captain Barfoot suddenly blew
his nose in a great red bandanna handkerchief, "and it's the man's
stupidity that's the cause of this, and the storm's my storm as well as
his"... so Mrs. Jarvis would bethink her when the Captain dropped in to
see them and found Herbert out, and spent two or three hours, almost
silent, sitting in the arm-chair. But Betty Flanders thought nothing of
the kind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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