Bildungsromans; Domestic fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction
He said, "The spirit blows where it wills. You hear the sound of it, but
you can't tell where it comes from or where it goes to. Everybody that is
born from the spirit is like that." The spirit blows where it wants to.
He said it was a good thing for them that he was going away. If he didn't
the Holy Ghost wouldn't come to them; they would never have any real
selves; they would never be free. They would set him up as a god outside
themselves and worship Him, and forget that the Kingdom of God was within
them, that God was their real self.
Their hidden self was God. It was their Saviour. Its existence was the
hushed secret of the world.
Christ knew--he must have known--it was greater than he was.
It was a good thing for them that Christ died. That was how he saved
them. By going away. By a proud, brave, ironic death. Not at all the sort
of death you had been taught to believe in.
And because they couldn't understand a death like that, they went and
made a god of him just the same.
But the Atonement was that--Christ's going away.
II.
February: grey, black-bellied clouds crawling over Greffington Edge, over
Karva, swelling out: swollen bodies crawling and climbing, coming
together, joining. Monstrous bodies ballooning up behind them, mounting
on top of them, flattening them out, pressing them down on to the hills;
going on, up and up the sky, swelling out overhead, coming together.
One cloud, grey as sink water, over all the sky, shredded here and there,
stirred by slight stretchings, and spoutings of thin steam.
Then the whole mass coming down, streaming grey sink water.
She came down the twelve fields on the south slope of Karva: she could
say them by heart: the field with the big gap, the field above the four
firs farm, the field below the farm of the ash-tree, the bare field, the
field with the thorn tree, the field with the sheep's well, the field
with the wild rose bush, the steep field of long grass, the hillocky
field, the haunted field with the ash grove, the field with the big barn,
the last field with the gap to the road.
She thought of her thirty-four years; of the verses she had sent to the
magazines and how they had come back again; of the four farms on the
hill, of the four tales not written.
The wet field grasses swept, cold, round her ankles.
Mamma sat waiting in her chair, in the drawing-room, in the clear, grey,
glassy dusk of the cross-lights. She waited for the fine weather to come
when she would work again in the garden. She waited for you to come to
her. Her forehead unknitted itself; her dove's eyes brightened; she
smiled, and the rough feathers of her eyebrows lay down, appeased.
At the opening of the door she stirred in her chair. She was glad when
you came.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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