II
They woke to a clean superb day. The high trees broke the sun, and Scylla admired the form of them, standing straight to the east in the natural shape of trees, their tops curled to the west, tightened and distorted against the ocean wind.
Below them the copse was a knit bundle, almost as firm as stone. Still there were long shadows as she dressed, still dance and flash of birds. The wood was innocent, the house fresh and serene. At breakfast, in a quicksilver mirror, she saw the men come in. The eagle over it had a sock-suspender in its beak, but between the straps and the distortion she did not like the look of them.
They meant not to help her with the American, whom they had ordered like a new record from town. Who would have to be met.
They were like that. She was like that herself, but did not manage to give in to it. Which made her despise herself, think herself too female.
All three had work to do. She got hers done, and at the same time believed herself the sole stay of her men. Separated and bound to them because of her service they seemed unable to do without.
Ross was saying, cautiously: “That man’s coming today.” She wondered what he was thinking about in the train. Staring about and trying to remember the name of the station. A name as familiar as their own. Nothing to him. Fun to make it part of his consciousness? Fun for them. The men were saying: “We really ought to go over to Tollerdown and see if the others have turned up.”
Ross’s hair curled like black gorse, Felix’s spread like burnt turf. “And not to Starn with me?” she said. A long day off they would have on the turf together; Ross poking about for rare plants, Felix making up a tolerable poem. Ten miles she would walk, also alone in the hills. At the end there would be a point of human life, a station shed a stone’s throw from a crazy square, old houses tilted together; the gaping tourists, the market-day beasts; the train poking its head suddenly round an angle in the hills. There she would be eventually accompanied by a stranger, neat, interested, polite.
Then back in a car, flight after the steady walk—which would end where she was now, in a place like a sea-pool, on the lawn grass, in the cool rooms, under the trees, in the wood.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll go—if you order six lettuces and four lobsters, a basket of currants; and Felix does the flowers.” There would be six lobsters and four lettuces. She needed to be alone as much as they.
She took her hat, and ashplant, and left them.
For a while she climbed the green road, worn down in places to its flints, black glass set in white porcelain rings. Below her the field-chequered sea-valley collected a haze. The sea was a hardly visible brilliance. On the top of the down, she looked inland, across another valley to another range, and far inland to Starn on its hill, the hub of the down-wheel, set in its cup of smoke and stone. A very long way over the grass, a very long way down a chalk-road. A longer way through a valley track, called Seven Fields into Starn. Seven Fields, because Felix said there were seven different kinds of enclosures, all unpleasant. A yellow field, a dirty field, a too-wet field, a field where you stubbed your feet. A field with a savage cow, a field with a wicked horse. Always something wrong, whichever way you walked it, except the fourth, which was not a field but an open copse, treed and banked and prettified. Midsummer Night’s Dream, true greenwood. And hope, one way, of Starn in a mile and a half. She needed it by the time she reached the copse, in spite of her light stride and airy dress. The boys were off by now, somewhere on Gault cliffs, which was not a nice place, but a wonder and a horror, overhanging a gulf over a wood full of foxes the surf lapped, where even she had never been. The boys would be sitting there, dangling their legs, the gulls fanning them, an unsailable bay under them, transparent, peacock-coloured, where under the water the reefs wound like snakes.
It was all very well. She had told Felix to collect mushrooms and not allow Ross to experiment. He could get them in Ogham meads—What was she worried about? Money, of course, and love affairs; the important, unimportant things. Hitherto God had fed his sparrows, and as good fish had come out of the sea. But everywhere there was a sense of broken continuity, a dis‑ease. The end of an age, the beginning of another. Revaluation of values. Phrases that meant something if you could mean them. The meaning of meaning? Discovery of a new value, a different way of apprehending everything. She wished the earth would not suddenly look fragile, as if it was going to start shifting about. Every single piece of appearance. She knew it was only the sun, polishing what it had dried. Including her face, her makeup had made pasty with sweat. There was something wrong with all of them, or with their world. A moment missed, a moment to come. Or not coming. Or either or both. Shove it off on the war; but that did not help.
Only Ross was all right—He never wanted anything that he did not get. Life had given it up and paid over Ross’s stakes, because once his strong appetites were satisfied, he did not want anything in human life at all. It was something to eat and drink, to embrace and paint. Apart from that, he knew something that she was only growing conscious of. And wouldn’t tell. Not he—laughed at her for not knowing, and for wanting to know.
Felix was quite different. Felix was scared. Fear made him brittle and angry and unjust. Without faith.
Faith was necessary for the knowledge of God. Only, there were fifty good reasons for supporting the nonexistence of God. Besides, no one wanted to believe that any more. That was the point. And it was a shame for those two men to make her go all that way through a valley, while they were grubbing about in the wind. The next stile was a beast. She crossed it heavily. A long corner to turn, and there would be Starn to look at. There was that horse again, knotted and stiff and staring at her. It was too far to come. Miles behind her, a white road stood on its head over the hill that led to the green road that led to their house. She had come down that road, a long time ago, turning her back on the sea, to get to Starn, to meet an American, who would like her, not for long, and no one else—Someone had barbed-wired the gap, damn him! She flung herself on her back and wriggled under, jumping up with too great an effort. What was she really doing, out in this burning valley at midday? They force me with more virtue than is convenient to me. Not innocently—How can we be innocent? I am going to let things go. A witch and a bitch they call me. They shall see. She flung into the inn at Starn, ashamed of her appearance, red and dusty, and ordered a long drink.