第33章

Mrs Bolton also kept a cherishing eye on Connie,feeling she must extend to her her female and professional protection.She was always urging her ladyship to walk out,to drive to Uthwaite,to be in the air.For Connie had got into the habit of sitting still by the fire,pretending to read;or to sew feebly,and hardly going out at all.

It was a blowy day soon after Hilda had gone,that Mrs Bolton said:

'Now why don't you go for a walk through the wood,and look at the daffs behind the keeper's cottage?They're the prettiest sight you'd see in a day's march.And you could put some in your room;wild daffs are always so cheerful-looking,aren't they?'

Connie took it in good part,even daffs for daffodils.Wild daffodils!

After all,one could not stew in one's own juice.The spring came back...'Seasons return,but not to me returns Day,or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn.'

And the keeper,his thin,white body,like a lonely pistil of an invisible flower!She had forgotten him in her unspeakable depression.But now something roused...'Pale beyond porch and portal'...the thing to do was to pass the porches and the portals.

She was stronger,she could walk better,and iii the wood the wind would not be so tiring as it was across the bark,flatten against her.She wanted to forget,to forget the world,and all the dreadful,carrion-bodied people.

'Ye must be born again!I believe in the resurrection of the body!Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die,it shall by no means bring forth.When the crocus cometh forth I too will emerge and see the sun!'

In the wind of March endless phrases swept through her consciousness.

Little gusts of sunshine blew,strangely bright,and lit up the celandines at the wood's edge,under the hazel-rods,they spangled out bright and yellow.And the wood was still,stiller,but yet gusty with crossing sun.

The first windflowers were out,and all the wood seemed pale with the pallor of endless little anemones,sprinkling the shaken floor.'The world has grown pale with thy breath.'But it was the breath of Persephone,this time;she was out of hell on a cold morning.Cold breaths of wind came,and overhead there was an anger of entangled wind caught among the twigs.

It,too,was caught and trying to tear itself free,the wind,like Absalom.

How cold the anemones looked,bobbing their naked white shoulders over crinoline skirts of green.But they stood it.A few first bleached little primroses too,by the path,and yellow buds unfolding themselves.

The roaring and swaying was overhead,only cold currents came down below.

Connie was strangely excited in the wood,and the colour flew in her cheeks,and burned blue in her eyes.She walked ploddingly,picking a few primroses and the first violets,that smelled sweet and cold,sweet and cold.And she drifted on without knowing where she was.

Till she came to the clearing,at the end of the wood,and saw the green-stained stone cottage,looking almost rosy,like the flesh underneath a mushroom,its stone warmed in a burst of sun.And there was a sparkle of yellow jasmine by the door;the closed door.But no sound;no smoke from the chimney;no dog barking.

She went quietly round to the back,where the bank rose up;she had an excuse,to see the daffodils.

And they were there,the short-stemmed flowers,rustling and fluttering and shivering,so bright and alive,but with nowhere to hide their faces,as they turned them away from the wind.

They shook their bright,sunny little rags in bouts of distress.But perhaps they liked it really;perhaps they really liked the tossing.

Constance sat down with her back to a young pine-tree,that wayed against her with curious life,elastic,and powerful,rising up.The erect,alive thing,with its top in the sun!And she watched the daffodils turn golden,in a burst of sun that was warm on her hands and lap.Even she caught the faint,tarry scent of the flowers.And then,being so still and alone,she seemed to bet into the current of her own proper destiny.She had been fastened by a rope,and jagging and snarring like a boat at its moorings;now she was loose and adrift.

The sunshine gave way to chill;the daffodils were in shadow,dipping silently.So they would dip through the day and the long cold night.So strong in their frailty!

She rose,a little stiff,took a few daffodils,and went down.She hated breaking the flowers,but she wanted just one or two to go with her.She would have to go back to Wragby and its walls,and now she hated it,especially its thick walls.Walls!Always walls!Yet one needed them in this wind.

When she got home Clifford asked her:

'Where did you go?'

'Right across the wood!Look,aren't the little daffodils adorable?

To think they should come out of the earth!'

'Just as much out of air and sunshine,'he said.

'But modelled in the earth,'she retorted,with a prompt contradiction,that surprised her a little.

The next afternoon she went to the wood again.She followed the broad riding that swerved round and up through the larches to a spring called John's Well.It was cold on this hillside,and not a flower in the darkness of larches.But the icy little spring softly pressed upwards from its tiny well-bed of pure,reddish-white pebbles.How icy and clear it was!Brilliant!

The new keeper had no doubt put in fresh pebbles.She heard the faint tinkle of water,as the tiny overflow trickled over and downhill.Even above the hissing boom of the larchwood,that spread its bristling,leafless,wolfish darkness on the down-slope,she heard the tinkle as of tiny water-bells.

This place was a little sinister,cold,damp.Yet the well must have been a drinking-place for hundreds of years.Now no more.Its tiny cleared space was lush and cold and dismal.

She rose and went slowly towards home.As she went she heard a faint tapping away on the right,and stood still to listen.Was it hammering,or a woodpecker?It was surely hammering.