第 76 页

by one the horses crashed by, intent, working themselves up.

They had gone by, brandishing themselves thunderously about

her, enclosing her. They slackened their burst transport, they

slowed down, and cantered together into a knot once more, in the

corner by the gate and the trees ahead of her. They stirred,

they moved uneasily, they settled their uneasy flanks into one

group, one purpose. They were up against her.

Her heart was gone, she had no more heart. She knew she dare

not draw near. That concentrated, knitted flank of the

horse-group had conquered. It stirred uneasily, awaiting her,

knowing its triumph. It stirred uneasily, with the uneasiness of

awaited triumph. Her heart was gone, her limbs were dissolved,

she was dissolved like water. All the hardness and looming power

was in the massive body of the horse-group.

Her feet faltered, she came to a standstill. It was the

crisis. The horses stirred their flanks uneasily. She looked

away, failing. On her left, two hundred yards down the slope,

the thick hedge ran parallel. At one point there was an oak

tree. She might climb into the boughs of that oak tree, and so

round and drop on the other side of the hedge.

Shuddering, with limbs like water, dreading every moment to

fall, she began to work her way as if making a wide detour round

the horse-mass. The horses stirred their flanks in a knot

against her. She trembled forward as if in a trance.

Then suddenly, in a flame of agony, she darted, seized the

rugged knots of the oak tree and began to climb. Her body was

weak but her hands were as hard as steel. She knew she was

strong. She struggled in a great effort till she hung on the

bough. She knew the horses were aware. She gained her foot-hold

on the bough. The horses were loosening their knot, stirring,

trying to realize. She was working her way round to the other

side of the tree. As they started to canter towards her, she

fell in a heap on the other side of the hedge.

For some moments she could not move. Then she saw through the

rabbit-cleared bottom of the hedge the great, working hoofs of

the horses as they cantered near. She could not bear it. She

rose and walked swiftly, diagonally across the field. The horses

galloped along the other side of the hedge to the corner, where

they were held up. She could feel them there in their huddled

group all the while she hastened across the bare field. They

were almost pathetic, now. Her will alone carried her, till,

trembling, she climbed the fence under a leaning thorn tree that

overhung the grass by the high-road. The use went from her, she

sat on the fence leaning back against the trunk of the thorn

tree, motionless.

As she sat there, spent, time and the flux of change passed

away from her, she lay as if unconscious upon the bed of the

stream, like a stone, unconscious, unchanging, unchangeable,

whilst everything rolled by in transience, leaving her there, a

stone at rest on the bed of the stream, inalterable and passive,

sunk to the bottom of all change.

She lay still a long time, with her back against the thorn

tree trunk, in her final isolation. Some colliers passed,

tramping heavily up the wet road, their voices sounding out,

their shoulders up to their ears, their figures blotched and

spectral in the rain. Some did not see her. She opened her eyes

languidly as they passed by. Then one man going alone saw her.

The whites of his eyes showed in his black face as he looked in

wonderment at her. He hesitated in his walk, as if to speak to

her, out of frightened concern for her. How she dreaded his

speaking to her, dreaded his questioning her.

She slipped from her seat and went vaguely along the

path--vaguely. It was a long way home. She had an idea that

she must walk for the rest of her life, wearily, wearily. Step

after step, step after step, and always along the wet, rainy

road between the hedges. Step after step, step after step, the

monotony produced a deep, cold sense of nausea in her. How

profound was her cold nausea, how profound! That too plumbed the

bottom. She seemed destined to find the bottom of all things

to-day: the bottom of all things. Well, at any rate she was

walking along the bottom-most bed--she was quite safe:

quite safe, if she had to go on and on for ever, seeing this was

the very bottom, and there was nothing deeper. There was nothing

deeper, you see, so one could not but feel certain, passive.

She arrived home at last. The climb up the hill to Beldover

had been very trying. Why must one climb the hill? Why must one

climb? Why not stay below? Why force one's way up the slope? Why

force one's way up and up, when one is at the bottom? Oh, it was

very trying, very wearying, very burdensome. Always burdens,

always, always burdens. Still, she must get to the top and go

home to bed. She must go to bed.

She got in and went upstairs in the dusk without its being

noticed she was in such a sodden condition. She was too tired to

go downstairs again. She got into bed and lay shuddering with

cold, yet too apathetic to get up or call for relief. Then

gradually she became more ill.

She was very ill for a fortnight, delirious, shaken and

racked. But always, amid the ache of delirium, she had a dull

firmness of being, a sense of permanency. She was in some way

like the stone at the bottom of the river, inviolable and

unalterable, no matter what storm raged in her body. Her soul

lay still and permanent, full of pain, but itself for ever.

Under all her illness, persisted a deep, inalterable

knowledge.

She knew, and she cared no more. Throughout her illness,

distorted into vague forms, persisted the question of herself

and Skrebensky, like a gnawing ache that was still superficial,

and did not touch her isolated, impregnable core of reality. But

the corrosion of him burned in her till it burned itself

out.

Must she belong to him, must she adhere to him? Something

compelled her, and yet it was not real. Always the ache, the

ache of unreality, of her belonging to Skrebensky. What bound

her to him when she was not bound to him? Why did the falsity

persist? Why did the falsity gnaw, gnaw, gnaw at her, why could

she not wake up to clarity, to reality. If she could but wake

up, if she could but wake up, the falsity of the dream, of her

connection with Skrebensky, would be gone. But the sleep, the

delirium pinned her down. Even when she was calm and sober she

was in its spell.

Yet she was never in its spell. What extraneous thing bound

her to him? There was some bond put upon her. Why could she not

break it through? What was it? What was it?

In her delirium she beat and beat at the question. And at

last her weariness gave her the answer--it was the child.

The child bound her to him. The child was like a bond round her

brain, tightened on her brain. It bound her to Skrebensky.

But why, why did it bind her to Skrebensky? Could she not

have a child of herself? Was not the child her own affair? all

her own affair? What had it to do with him? Why must she be

bound, aching and cramped with the bondage, to Skrebensky and

Skrebensky's world? Anton's world: it became in her feverish

brain a compression which enclosed her. If she could not get out

of the compression she would go mad. The compression was Anton

and Anton's world, not the Anton she possessed, but the Anton

she did not possess, that which was owned by some other

influence, by the world.

She fought and fought and fought all through her illness to

be free of him and his world, to put it aside, to put it aside,

into its place. Yet ever anew it gained ascendency over her, it

laid new hold on her. Oh, the unutterable weariness of her

flesh, which she could not cast off, nor yet extricate. If she

could but extricate herself, if she could but disengage herself

from feeling, from her body, from all the vast encumbrances of

the world that was in contact with her, from her father, and her

mother, and her lover, and all her acquaintance.

Repeatedly, in an ache of utter weariness she repeated: "I

have no father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place

in the world of things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to

Nottingham nor to England nor to this world, they none of them

exist, I am trammelled and entangled in them, but they are all

unreal. I must break out of it, like a nut from its shell which

is an unreality."

And again, to her feverish brain, came the vivid reality of

acorns in February lying on the floor of a wood with their

shells burst and discarded and the kernel issued naked to put

itself forth. She was the naked, clear kernel thrusting forth

the clear, powerful shoot, and the world was a bygone winter,

discarded, her mother and father and Anton, and college and all

her friends, all cast off like a year that has gone by, whilst

the kernel was free and naked and striving to take new root, to

create a new knowledge of Eternity in the flux of Time. And the

kernel was the only reality; the rest was cast off into

oblivion.

This grew and grew upon her. When she opened her eyes in the

afternoon and saw the window of her room and the faint, smoky

landscape beyond, this was all husk and shell lying by, all husk

and shell, she could see nothing else, she was enclosed still,

but loosely enclosed. There was a space between her and the

shell. It was burst, there was a rift in it. Soon she would have

her root fixed in a new Day, her nakedness would take itself the

bed of a new sky and a new air, this old, decaying, fibrous husk

would be gone.

Gradually she began really to sleep. She slept in the

confidence of her new reality. She slept breathing with her soul

the new air of a new world. The peace was very deep and

enrichening. She had her root in new ground, she was gradually

absorbed into growth.

When she woke at last it seemed as if a new day had come on

the earth. How long, how long had she fought through the dust

and obscurity, for this new dawn? How frail and fine and clear

she felt, like the most fragile flower that opens in the end of

winter. But the pole of night was turned and the dawn was coming

in.

Very far off was her old experience--Skrebensky, her

parting with him--very far off. Some things were real;

those first glamorous weeks. Before, these had seemed like

hallucination. Now they seemed like common reality. The rest was

unreal. She knew that Skrebensky had never become finally real.

In the weeks of passionate ecstasy he had been with her in her

desire, she had created him for the time being. But in the end

he had failed and broken down.

Strange, what a void separated him and her. She liked him

now, as she liked a memory, some bygone self. He was something

of the past, finite. He was that which is known. She felt a

poignant affection for him, as for that which is past. But, when

she looked with her face forward, he was not. Nay, when she

looked ahead, into the undiscovered land before her, what was

there she could recognize but a fresh glow of light and

inscrutable trees going up from the earth like smoke. It was the

unknown, the unexplored, the undiscovered upon whose shore she

had landed, alone, after crossing the void, the darkness which

washed the New World and the Old.

There would be no child: she was glad. If there had been a

child, it would have made little difference, however. She would

have kept the child and herself, she would not have gone to

Skrebensky. Anton belonged to the past.

There came the cablegram from Skrebensky: "I am married." An

old pain and anger and contempt stirred in her. Did he belong so

utterly to the cast-off past? She repudiated him. He was as he

was. It was good that he was as he was. Who was she to have a

man according to her own desire? It was not for her to create,

but to recognize a man created by God. The man should come from

the Infinite and she should hail him. She was glad she could not

create her man. She was glad she had nothing to do with his

creation. She was glad that this lay within the scope of that

vaster power in which she rested at last. The man would come out

of Eternity to which she herself belonged.

As she grew better, she sat to watch a new creation. As she

sat at her window, she saw the people go by in the street below,

colliers, women, children, walking each in the husk of an old

fruition, but visible through the husk, the swelling and the

heaving contour of the new germination. In the still, silenced

forms of the colliers she saw a sort of suspense, a waiting in

pain for the new liberation; she saw the same in the false hard

confidence of the women. The confidence of the women was

brittle. It would break quickly to reveal the strength and

patient effort of the new germination.

In everything she saw she grasped and groped to find the

creation of the living God, instead of the old, hard barren form

of bygone living. Sometimes great terror possessed her.

Sometimes she lost touch, she lost her feeling, she could only

know the old horror of the husk which bound in her and all

mankind. They were all in prison, they were all going mad.

She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed

already enclosed in a coffin, she saw their unchanging eyes, the

eyes of those who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting

edges of the new houses, which seemed to spread over the

hillside in their insentient triumph, the triumph of horrible,

amorphous angles and straight lines, the expression of

corruption triumphant and unopposed, corruption so pure that it

is hard and brittle: she saw the dun atmosphere over the

blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches of houses, slate

roofed and amorphous, the old church-tower standing up in

hideous obsoleteness above raw new houses on the crest of the

hill, the amorphous, brittle, hard edged new houses advancing

from Beldover to meet the corrupt new houses from Lethley, the

houses of Lethley advancing to mix with the houses of Hainor, a

dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the