Bildungsromans; Domestic fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction
Hunderd--blundered. Did Tennyson really call hundred hunderd?
The grey curve of the high road glimmered alongside the moor. From the
point where her track joined it she could see three lights, two moving,
one still. The still light at the turn came from the Aldersons' house.
The moving lights went with the klomp-klomp of hoofs on the road.
Down in the darkness beyond the fields Garthdale lay like a ditch under
the immense wall of Greffington Edge. Roddy hated Greffington Edge. He
hated Morfe. He _wanted_ to get away.
It would be all right.
The klomp-klomping sounded close behind her. Two shafts of light shot out
in front, white on the grey road. Dr. Kendal drove past in his dog-cart.
He leaned out over the side, peering. She heard him say something to
himself.
The wheels slowed down with a grating noise. The lights stood still. He
had pulled up. He was waiting for her.
She turned suddenly and went back up the moor by the way she had come.
She didn't want to see Dr. Kendal. She was afraid he would say something
about Roddy.
XXIII
I.
The books stood piled on the table by her window, the books Miss Wray of
Clevehead had procured for her, had given and lent her. Now Roddy had
gone she had time enough to read them: Hume's _Essays_, the fat maroon
Schwegler, the two volumes of Kant in the hedgesparrow-green paper
covers.
"_Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Kritik der reinen Vernunft_." She said it
over and over to herself. It sounded nicer than "_The Critique of Pure
Reason_." At the sight of the thick black letters on the
hedgesparrow-green ground her heart jumped up and down with excitement.
Lucky it was in German, so that Mamma couldn't find out what Kant was
driving at. The secret was hidden behind the thick black bars of the
letters.
In Schwegler, as you went on you went deeper. You saw thought folding and
unfolding, thought moving on and on, thought drawing the universe to
itself, pushing the universe away from itself to draw it back again,
closer than close.
Space and Time were forms of thought. They were infinite. So thought was
infinite; it went on and on for ever, carrying Space, carrying Time.
If only you knew what the Thing-in-itself was.
II.
"Mamma--"
The letter lay between them on the hall table by the study door. Her
mother put her hand over it, quick. A black, long-tailed M showed between
her forefinger and her thumb.
They looked at each other, and her mother's mouth began to pout and smile
as it used to when Papa said something improper. She took the letter and
went, with soft feet and swinging haunches like a cat carrying a mouse,
into the study. Mary stared at the shut door.
Maurice Jourdain. Maurice Jourdain. What on earth was he writing to Mamma
for?
Five minutes ago she had been quiet and happy, reading Kant's _Critique
of Pure Reason_. Now her heart beat like a hammer, staggering with its
own blows. The blood raced in her brain.
III.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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