Domestic fiction; Family -- England -- Midlands -- Fiction; Midlands (England) -- Fiction
There was green and silver and blue in the air about her now. And there
was a strange insistence of light from the sea, to which she must
attend. Primroses glimmered around, many of them, and she stooped to
the disturbing influence near her feet, she even picked one or two
flowers, faintly remembering in the new colour of life, what had been.
All the day long, as she sat at the upper window, the light came off
the sea, constantly, constantly, without refusal, till it seemed to
bear her away, and the noise of the sea created a drowsiness in her, a
relaxation like sleep. Her automatic consciousness gave way a little,
she stumbled sometimes, she had a poignant, momentary vision of her
living child, that hurt her unspeakably. Her soul roused to attention.
Very strange was the constant glitter of the sea unsheathed in heaven,
very warm and sweet the graveyard, in a nook of the hill catching the
sunshine and holding it as one holds a bee between the palms of the
hands, when it is benumbed. Grey grass and lichens and a little church,
and snowdrops among coarse grass, and a cupful of incredibly warm
sunshine.
She was troubled in spirit. Hearing the rushing of the beck away down
under the trees, she was startled, and wondered what it was. Walking
down, she found the bluebells around her glowing like a presence, among
the trees.
Summer came, the moors were tangled with harebells like water in the
ruts of the roads, the heather came rosy under the skies, setting the
whole world awake. And she was uneasy. She went past the gorse bushes
shrinking from their presence, she stepped into the heather as into a
quickening bath that almost hurt. Her fingers moved over the clasped
fingers of the child, she heard the anxious voice of the baby, as it
tried to make her talk, distraught.
And she shrank away again, back into her darkness, and for a long while
remained blotted safely away from living. But autumn came with the
faint red glimmer of robins singing, winter darkened the moors, and
almost savagely she turned again to life, demanding her life back
again, demanding that it should be as it had been when she was a girl,
on the land at home, under the sky. Snow lay in great expanses, the
telegraph posts strode over the white earth, away under the gloom of
the sky. And savagely her desire rose in her again, demanding that this
was Poland, her youth, that all was her own again.
But there were no sledges nor bells, she did not see the peasants
coming out like new people, in their sheepskins and their fresh, ruddy,
bright faces, that seemed to become new and vivid when the snow lit up
the ground. It did not come to her, the life of her youth, it did not
come back. There was a little agony of struggle, then a relapse into
the darkness of the convent, where Satan and the devils raged round the
walls, and Christ was white on the cross of victory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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