I

PART ONEILEAVES are falling down from the laburnum tree at the gate; yellow leaves, white gate, and red brick of the houses opposite; it is very ugly. In the spring the flowers are yellow instead of the leaves, and the hawthorn bush, to the side, is bright pink, and across the road is lilac. The red-brick houses have facings of yellow stone, squares of yellowish stone round the doors and the windows. All the colours are wrong, all the shapes are ugly, even the trees are not real trees.Once I would have minded it so much, to live here, looking out at that laburnum tree, and that house opposite, that bow window, and the yellowish stone facings of the windows, and the lilac bush that has grown all crooked, and the pink hawthorn, and the laurels with patterned leaves; but now I do not mind. Now I do not see these things or think about them at all; only to-night I am seeing them, because somehow I have come awake to-night, for a bit.To-night I realize that for nine years I have lived here, looking at that house, every time I go out, and have never really noticed it before. But even now that I see it, I do not mind. I do not mind about anything very much now, except, I suppose, John.To-morrow I shall be forty; my youth is gone; irretrievably, irrevocably, gone; and even that I do not mind. It used to seem to me so difficult not to feel too much, and now I cannot feel at all. Is this simply growing old? Is this what always happens when one grows old? But if Hugo were alive still, would it be like this? I do not think that it would.To-night things come back to me very clearly, in an odd, detached way, things that have happened to me, as though they had happened to somebody else, while I looked on. Yearsly comes back to me much more than usual, and Guy and Hugo, and our childhood there. Some things I have been almost afraid of thinking about too much. Now I can think of everything and am not afraid.It is like what I have heard happens when people are going to die, or be executed. Is being forty like that? Does it mean that I do mind being forty, though I think I don’t?Hugo said that we must hold out till the end; I have had to hold out longer than he did, and it has seemed, often, that if I let myself think, or feel much, I couldn’t do it. That was before this deadening came, that makes it easier; but now I am not afraid. Something is past, some danger is past, and now I know that I shall be able to hold out till the end. I do not believe in immortality, and yet I feel, somehow, that Hugo will know if I keep my promise.Walter is in bed, asleep; and I am by the window, alone. There is a bright moon coming up now behind the houses opposite, and in the moonlight the colours are changing; the yellow and red grow paler, and less violent. Even on this road there comes a quiet and beauty of the night.And my life up to now comes before me very clearly; the people and the places, and the choices and mistakes, and I seem to see it all in better proportion than before; less clouded and blurred across by the violent emotion of youth.Guy, and Hugo, and Cousin Delia, and Sophia Lane-Watson, and Diana, and Walter, and George Addington, and Mollie; and Yearsly, and Hampstead, and here; but Hugo goes through it all; when I try to think of my life without Hugo, it is impossible; it is as though there were nothing there at all.And really, so little has happened to me; my life has been a very ordinary one; no adventures, nothing dramatic, just the same sort of life as most of the women I meet in the street, and think so dull. The lady who lives opposite, in the house with the bow window, has three grown-up sons, and two daughters. She is much older than I am, her life must have had more in it than mine. Does it seem to her, I wonder, as intricate, and poignant as mine does to me?I suppose that it does, when she thinks about it; and I suppose that is only seldom, just as it is with me.Perhaps before her fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays she thought about it, and perhaps she thought it very interesting.I wonder if I should think so too, if she told it to me.IIThe beginning is Yearsly. People say that places ought not to matter—still less houses, but I think they do. Yearsly has mattered to me, and it did to Guy and Hugo. It stood for something very stable, very enduring, and very sympathetic. Yearsly without Cousin Delia might have been something quite different; it is quite different now; but I think of them together, complementary to each other. Cousin Delia’s personality pervaded everything at Yearsly, and everything there seemed somehow an enhancement and expression of her; and yet each was distinct. Yearsly had something that it had had long before she came there, and Cousin Delia had something, and a great deal, that she must have had before she came, and would have had wherever she was: she has it now.The house at Yearsly was of grey stone; it was a long plain house built at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with a door in the middle and a row of high sash windows on either side of the door. Above this was a second row of windows, and a kind of Classical stone cornice overhung the upper windows. The roof was steeper than is usual in such houses, and was also grey; grey slates or chips of stone, with patches of green moss on them.Once it had been a much bigger house, with a long bedroom wing stretching back, northwards, at the east end of the house, but that had been burnt down in 1830, and never rebuilt, and when I first remember it, this centre block was the entire house.In the middle of the house was a hall, stretching from back to front, and the two main doors, the ‘Front’ door to the north, and the ‘Garden’ door to the south, faced each other across it. Standing on the south side of the house, you could look right through to the clouds at the north. The garden door stood open almost always, except in winter.The hall reached up to the top of the house, and the big staircase wound up and round it, ending in a square wooden gallery from which the bedrooms opened.In front of the house, the Garden Front, stretched a long lawn, with a wide gravel path down the middle; at the end of the path six stone steps led down to a lower lawn where we played tennis, and, at the top of the steps, one on each side, stood two lead statues; one of Diana with a bow, and the other, a hero leaning forward with a shield. The lead of the statues was perishing away, and there was a great crack across Diana’s head, but they stood out clear, and almost black, from all the south windows of the house.Below the tennis court was a piece of meadow sloping down to the Mellock river, with its two lines of willows, flowing at this point due east, and almost parallel with the front of the house. A little further on, it turned sharply southward, wandering away through the low-lying meadows beyond the hill.At the east end of the house were beach trees: the nearest grew within a few feet of the wall, and their branches threw green lights and shadows into the end windows, and filled the rooms on windy nights with a swishing sound like the sea.Further from the house the trees thickened up into the ‘High wood’ which stretched along the side of the hill, southward, above the course of the river, for a little way.This wood was a particular home for us: we played in the trees like birds or squirrels, and built great nests of sticks in which we sat.We had special trees too—good trees and bad trees, which seemed to us like people. There was one in particular, a very big one, which we called the Happy Tree, and that we loved the best.Hugo had given it the name: lying on his back one summer’s day, his bare feet kicking on the moss:‘On a drear nighted December,Too happy, happy tree,Thy branches ne’er rememberTheir greenfelicity . . .Green felicity, Green felicity, Greenfelicity . . .’he kept chanting the words, beating softly on the moss with his feet.The pale green sunlight flickered through the world of beech leaves on to his face; his hands were clasped behind his head, and his dark blue jersey was open at the neck:‘It is green felicity. . .’Guy, half way up among the branches, said:‘What are you saying?’And Hugo answered:‘Green felicity. . .’and then:‘On a drear nighted December,Too happy, happy tree. . .‘Oh,’ Guy said, ‘well, I suppose so. . .but I don’t see why too happy?’And I said:‘But it just is. . .’And Hugo said:‘It just is. . .’‘All right,’ Guy answered, ‘too happy, if you like. . .’And afterwards we always called it the ‘Happy Tree.’Below the trees the hillside was smooth and green. A grass path had been cut in it, many years ago when the house was newly built. In those days all the hillside had been kept closely mown, but in our time the grass grew long and was made into hay. Only the path was kept still a little shorter than the rest; we used to race along it. . .there was room for two abreast, but it was not wide enough for three.The path ended in a little stone pavilion which we called the ‘Temple’—why we called it so, no one could remember. . .it had four glass doors and steps all round; inside there was a mosaic table and four statues in the niches between the doors. The doors were always locked, for the roof was unsafe, and nobody ever went inside; only Guy could remember going inside once, with Cousin John, when an architect or expert of some sort came to look at it.At the other end of the house, to the west, was the walled garden, and in the sunny corner between the end wall of the house and the garden wall was the rose garden that Cousin Delia had made.In that there was a sundial and some little stone ‘putti,’ and there most often we would find her. When I think of Yearsly in those long ago days, I think very often of her in the rose garden, with her long gardening gloves, and shady hat, and the half smile with which she would look up when one of us called to her, and her quiet grey eyes in the shadow of her hat.She was never in a hurry, and never too busy to answer questions; if we wanted her she was always there. I used to wonder, even then, how it was that she had so much time, for my own mother was always busy. . .I wonder even more now.Cousin Delia was very quiet, but she never repressed us nor made it seem wrong to make a noise, as so many quiet people do. I think it was partly that she was not quiet on purpose, or with an effort, but simply from a kind of serenity. She was happy, I am sure, and people round her were happy.My mother once said that it surprised her that a woman of Delia’s intelligence should be contented with such an ‘idle stagnant life.’ I felt very angry, even then, and tried to defend her, though I don’t think I managed to explain what I meant.The truth was, I think, that she was never idle, only the things she did were not the kind of things that my mother would count.She was interested in so many things; in flowers and animals, and little precious things in the house; little pieces of china, or even old chairs; they seemed to have a value for her which they had not for other people, not as objects, but almost as friends; they lived and felt and were real for her; you could see it from the way she touched them; and then, of course, she had Guy and Hugo. . .and they meant so much more to her than I ever meant to my mother.Beyond the rose garden was the old wall; high and baked and a little bulging in places. Big espalier apple trees were trained across it, and pear trees too. There were two wrought-iron doors that led into the walled garden; one led out of the rose garden, and the other, in the centre of the wall, was called the ‘Jasmine Gate,’ because of a great bush of white jasmine which hung round it and over the wall.Inside the wall there were more fruit trees; apples and pears again and plums and cherries; there were also currant bushes covered up in nets, and vegetables of all sorts.And then there were flowers; a wide herbaceous border ran the length of the north wall, and it seems to me, even now, that the flowers in that border were brighter and bigger than any other flowers.One year, too, there was a big clump of sunflowers, giant sunflowers, in a corner, away from the main border, and we made a house under the broad leaves, at least Hugo and I did, but Guy laughed at us. . .for he was older, and thought it silly; it was not a real house, like our house in the wood, he said; but Guy never laughed in a way that we could mind.In the middle of the walled garden was a small round pond with a fountain in the middle. The fountain hardly ever played, but there were frogs in the pond, surprising quantities of frogs, and we used to call it the ‘Frog Pond.’ Twice we saw a mouse there too, on the little island of stones and weeds in the middle, where the spout of the fountain was. The mouse was running about among the stones, picking up something from under the weeds, and then it met a frog sitting stolidly on a stone, and it jumped back suddenly. We lay on our stomachs at the edge of the pond for a long time, watching for the mouse to come back, and then it was dinner time, and we had to go in. We only saw it once again, though we watched for it often, but the question of how it got there, and how it got away, occupied us a great deal, and its existence imparted a new interest to the pond.Inside the house there was a special smell that I have never met anywhere else. It was a sweet, clean smell, and faint; what it came from exactly, it would be hard to say; lavender and pot-pourri, and old polished floors, and old brocade; sweet and faint and slightly pungent.Sometimes I have caught whiffs of smells in other places that were just a little like it, and they have brought Yearsly back to me more vividly and suddenly than anything else, as though I had just come in by the garden door, and were standing in the hall.The drawing-room was on the left of the door, as you went in from the garden. It was a very long room, with four tall windows along the side and one at the end, and there were two fireplaces with high chimney-pieces, white marble, with carved figures in faint relief, and over the chimney-pieces were high mirrors that reflected back the green of the garden from the windows facing them. There were yellow brocade curtains, very old and faded, and white shield back chairs upholstered in the same yellow brocade.The room had been redecorated for our great-great-grandmother, Mary Geraldine, when she came as a bride to Yearsly, in 1802, and it had hardly been altered since her death, eight years later.A portrait of her by Jackson hung between the two fireplaces, and there was a miniature of her on a little gilt nail by the further fireplace as well; a dark-eyed, laughing face, very charming, very romantic. There was an atmosphere of romance all about her, since her death in Spain when she was twenty-six. She had followed her husband to the Peninsular War and died of fever there. Her body had been embalmed and sent home to be buried at Yearsly, and the story was told of how, when the coffin was opened, it was seen that her hair had gone on growing after her death, long black hair flowing down below her knees, wrapping her round like a great black shawl.Our great-grandfather had been a little boy, barely seven years old, but this sight he remembered, naturally enough, and he had told it to his children, Guy and Hugo’s grandfather and my grandmother. My grandmother had told it to us. This impressed us very much and increased the indefinable glamour surrounding our young great-great-grandmother. Her husband had preserved everything after her death exactly as she had left it, and so it had remained down to our time. There were her handkerchiefs and pieces of lace, her little volumes of Italian poetry, even chairs and tables remained where she had put them; yet it was a happy sentimentality; there was no sense of a dead hand in the cult of Mary Geraldine. If Cousin Delia’s own personality was gradually, quite imperceptibly, superseding the fainter older one, it was not deliberately nor of set purpose at all. The two personalities, quite distinct and different in themselves, seemed to blend and merge harmoniously, and Yearsly was the richer for both.IIICousin Delia never scolded, and never disapproved. It seems to me, when I think of that time now, that there were no rules at Yearsly, no forbidden places, nothing we might not do. It seems now, as though we had done just what we liked all the day long, only somehow we did not want to do naughty things. To begin with we did not quarrel. I cannot remember any quarrel between Guy and Hugo except once, over a dead robin—when Guy called the cat who killed it cruel, and Hugo insisted that it was not cruel, because it did not understand.Even then they had not fought, but their voices had been angry, and that was very rare.We did not want to annoy each other or other people, as my children so often do; we did not want to disobey, but then there were no rules to disobey. Sometimes I have thought that it was easy for Cousin Delia, because Guy and Hugo were so little trouble and so easy to manage, and that I could manage my own children that way, if they had been like them; but this explanation is not enough. Guy and Hugo would not have been so good with another mother. They were not very good at school, and I know that I was often naughty when I was not at Yearsly. I know that it was something in Cousin Delia herself that made the atmosphere; a kind of active peace and contentment that affected us, as it affected the animals and the flowers she had.She did not play with us often, she seldom took us for walks; she left us much more alone, to ourselves, than I was ever left at my grandmother’s in London, but she was always there when we wanted her, always in the background, doing her own ploys, and because she took pleasure in so many different things in the day, we took pleasure in them also; pigeons and tame birds, that came to her when she went out, and her big dogs and her flowers, and her beautiful embroidery of bright butterflies and flowers. Everything she touched or came in contact with became alive, even the chairs and the curtains, and the little china bowls. There was one chair in the drawing-room that was called the ‘Little Chair.’ It was a little old chair of white-painted wood with a high back and very low seat, and she had covered it herself with an old piece of Mary Geraldine’s gold brocade. This chair was not one of Mary Geraldine’s; it had lain forgotten in a box room till Cousin Delia found it, but now it was a friend. So many things at Yearsly were like that.Another thing about Cousin Delia was the way she took us as we were, and did not seem to want us different and better all the time, as I do with my children, except perhaps John. We were never afraid to say anything to her, for she was never shocked or disappointed with us. I wonder sometimes if she did disapprove of anything, or merely never thought of what she disliked.I did not realize this so much until I married Walter, and found that he and his mother disapproved of so many things; and of course my mother did also, though differently.She would read to us in the evenings, when it was too dark to be outside; sitting by the fire in the long drawing-room, with the lamp beside her. I can see her now, distinctly, if I shut my eyes. In the high-backed arm-chair, her chin resting on her hand, and her elbow on the arm of the chair. The lamplight would fall across her hair and shine redly through her fingers on to the book; and the ends of the room would be dark. Guy and Hugo would be lying on the floor, Hugo almost always on the hearthrug, with his chin in his hands, Guy more sideways, nearer the lamp, and I would be on a footstool beside the fender.The crackling of a wood fire, wet sap spurting in the logs, the slight warm smell of an oil lamp brings those evening ‘reads’ back to me so vividly, even now, that I could cry to know how long ago they are, and how hopelessly past.The books she read to us were very varied—Burnt Njal, theMorte d’Arthur,Treasure Island,Ivanhoe, are some I remember particularly, and sometimes poetry; but Guy did not care for poetry so much.My mother used to say that Cousin Delia was a stupid woman. ‘I have no patience with these beautiful cows,’ she said once. But I do not believe that at all. She could not have read to us as she did, and made us understand and enjoy the books so much, if she had been stupid. I am not clever, I know, and it might not have mattered to me, but it would to Hugo, and I know he never felt her so. He loved her as much as I did, and admired her as much; and Hugo understood people almost always, I think.After the reading we would go up to bed—running and chasing each other across the high, shadowy hall and up the wide stairs. We had candles with glass shades, so the grease did not drip when we ran. Sometimes I was frightened, when I was the first to run, and Guy and Hugo came after me round the great bends of the staircase; and Hugo was sometimes frightened, but never Guy.We would separate at the top of the stairs and call ‘Good night’ to each other across the echoing space of the hall. Guy and Hugo slept together at the south side of the house. My room was at the opposite corner, looking out eastward to the beech trees, and at night I could hear the owls in the High Wood calling to the owls in the ivy—till the world seemed full of owls.On the north side of the house was a small stretch of park, with a drive meandering through it. Once there had been deer in the park, and it was still surrounded by a high iron deer fence, but there were only cows grazing in it now, among the trees. They were Jersey cows, for Cousin John had a prize herd and took great interest in them. They would stand about the house, close up under the dining-room windows, and the soft munching sound they made could be heard distinctly during the pauses in the talk at meals. The dining-room was a panelled room, painted a pale green, with two windows to the north. Our schoolroom led out of it, with one window on to the rose garden and one to the north.The nursery had been upstairs, where Guy and Hugo now slept, when they were very little, but I can hardly remember the earliest time, when I first came to stay at Yearsly, and afterwards, in the time I think of mostly, we were downstairs in that schoolroom, when we were not out of doors. We made things there; cardboard theatres, and plays and clay statues, and illustrated stories; and we would look out of the window into the garden and show Cousin Delia what we had done.We used to have tea there too with our governess, Miss Bateson. She was kind to us and we were fond of her, but she was not very important—not nearly so important as Nunky, who had been Guy and Hugo’s nurse, and mine too when I first went to Yearsly, and who looked after us always, in a way, and said good night to us and unpacked for us and saw that our feet were dry. She stayed there always, long after Miss Bateson went away.There was a round white teapot with bright flowers, raised up a little, on it, and a bright blue bird on each side. It never got broken till Hugo was at Oxford and his scout dropped it—but Hugo had it riveted, and I have got it now. We thought it lovely, and I still do, but Eleanor thinks it absurd, and ‘funny,’ so we don’t use it now. I keep it in a cupboard, and I think I shall give it to John when he marries, if his wife likes it; but perhaps she won’t.We had very nice brown bread for tea, rather a light brown, and spongy—Mrs. Jeyes made it, the Yearsly cook, who had been there always and stayed always—the servants never changed at Yearsly—and milk and butter from Cousin John’s Jersey cows, specially nice butter. Sometimes one of the cows would look in at the window, the north window, on to the park. Once Guy got out of the window on to a cow’s back, and rode off on it—but the cow kicked him off very soon, and we watched him chasing it and laughing, but he could not get on again.We had ponies, too, that grazed in the park with the cows. We used to catch them ourselves and ride about bareback on them. When we were older we rode out properly with the coachman, Mathew, and Guy became a great rider. I loved it too, but Hugo did not ride so much when he grew older. I was sorry he didn’t, for I always did the same as he did, when I could.The dogs were deerhounds. There were always two of them and sometimes three, and Cousin John had black spaniels as well. The dogs lived outside in kennels, or at the stables, but they played with us and were very much part of our life.It is hard for me now when I think of those years at Yearsly to see them clearly and critically at all. It seems to me now that the life we led was a perfect life, as happy and complete as any children could possibly have. I know that it is unlikely to have been quite perfect, for nothing is; perhaps we were too idle; perhaps we should have been made to work harder and take lessons more seriously. I know Walter thinks we were all spoiled, that the realities of life were not brought before us, and that Guy and Hugo suffered afterwards for this. There may be something in what he says. I don’t know. I only know that it was the happiest part of my life and I believe of theirs too, and that it has helped me afterwards, when things were bad and difficult, to look back to those times and live them over again; and as for Guy and Hugo, they were and are to me all I could wish for anyone to be, and I cannot wish anything at all different about them.IVThe first big change came when Hugo went to school.Guy had gone two years before, when he was ten years old. That made a break in our lives, of course; we missed Guy badly, but it seemed somehow in the order of things and natural. It had always been settled for Guy to go away to school when he was ten. He had accepted the idea, and Hugo and I accepted it for him. He was ready to go, and there was nothing tragic in the separation.He went and came back, and went again and came back again. The term time while he was away passed not interminably, and he slipped back into our life each holiday time without a serious break.With Hugo it was quite different. We had known that it was intended for him to go some time, but vaguely. Cousin Delia had said so at the time Guy went, and Guy spoke of it from time to time. But it had not seemed real or imminent, and had not worried us. Just as we grown-up people live always with the knowledge of death in front of us, yet do not think of it much, until it comes certainly near.So two years went by after Guy’s going, and we had grown accustomed to life with him only sometimes there, and were as happy as before, and as free from care. Then, a month after Hugo’s tenth birthday, Cousin Delia told him that he was going to school with Guy the next autumn.It was June. I found him lying in the hayfield, quite still, on his face with the long flowering grasses and the buttercups above his head.I had known something was the matter, but I did not know what it was. I was up in our house in the Happy Tree, and I knew suddenly that something had happened bad, that Hugo was in trouble. I came down from the tree and looked for him, and for a long time I could not find him. I looked for him in the Walled Garden, by the Frog Pond, in the Ruin; I knew he was not in the wood; then I went down to the stream and walked along it; and then I began to wonder if Hugo was dead. Then as I came back from the stream I found him, lying like that, in the long grass.I sat down beside him in the long grass and asked him what had happened, and at first he did not answer.Two white butterflies were chasing each other backwards and forwards over his head. The buttercups nodded and swayed in the faint wind, and the soft, feathery heads of the grass.They touched against my cheek, too, as I sat there, squatting on my knees. They were almost as tall as I was.I bent down and touched him and spoke to him again.“I am going to school in the autumn,” Hugo said at last, and his voice sounded muffled as though it came from a long way off, and was not his.It was like being shot—like the world stopping. I sat straight up again; even so the grass came level with my head.I could not realize it at first; it seemed too dreadful to believe; and then a blind resistance came over me, an unreasoning impulse to protect him from this unbearable thing. I felt much older and stronger than Hugo and very fierce.I snuggled down beside him and put my arm round his neck. He seemed suddenly very little and helpless, with no one in the world to protect him except me.‘You shan’t go, Hugo,’ I was saying. ‘I won’t let them.. . .They mustn’t do it.’Hugo shook his head.‘It is no good, Helen,’ he said. ‘I shall have to go. I don’t want to. I am afraid of it—and nothing will ever be the same any more.’I thought he was crying, but he wasn’t, for he sat up then and looked at me.His face was quite white and his eyes that were always big and dark looked bigger and darker. His whole face looked pinched and tragic as though he saw and understood so much beyond this one thing.And I realized suddenly, for the first time, the relentlessness of time and the inevitability of change. I understood that I could not resist, and what that meant.Something was passing, a door was closing, and nothing in the world could hold it open. Hugo was helpless, and I was helpless; and every one. We could not stand still and we could not go back; and what we had had, we could never have again.I shut my eyes very tight and tried to understand, and a queer feeling came over me that in one moment more I would understand everything—the secret of life and the universe—something unutterably splendid and complete, but the moment passed, the secret receded. It had gone, and I could not grasp it; only the sense of helplessness remained, and of inevitability.‘Is this growing up?’ I asked Hugo.And he nodded.‘I think it is the beginning of growing up,’ he said.We sat very still for a long time, holding hands and not speaking. The butterflies had fluttered away, but the sun shone just as brightly; birds were singing in the willows by the stream, and somewhere up by the house the dogs were barking.‘Can you bear it, Hugo?’ I asked at last.And he answered:‘I don’t know. They will try and take away my inside world, and perhaps they will take it away, and then what can I do?’I said:‘Our inside worlds are too private for that. They wouldn’t know about them at a place like school.’He said:‘I have thought of that. One might keep it quite hidden away and pretend.’I said:‘People don’t know anything about what one thinks except here, you know, Hugo, and if they don’t know they can’t do any harm.’‘That’s what Mother says,’ he answered. ‘She says no one can take one’s inside world away ever; and nothing can matter too badly while one has that—but she says one must learn to live outside as well, and school does that—and Guy does that, of course.’‘Oh, Hugo, what shall I do when you are gone?’‘I suppose dying is like this,’ Hugo said seriously. ‘One going away—the other being left behind. It happens to every one and yet it is just as bad.’When we went indoors I found Cousin Delia in the drawing-room. She was standing by the end window, looking out into the rose garden, and her back was to me.I called her and she looked round. She held out her hand to me and I ran up to her.‘Must Hugo go to school?’ I asked her, and she nodded her head. I looked up and saw she had been crying.‘Dear heart, he must—isn’t it cruel?’ she said, and I felt as though I had said already all that I was going to say, and she had answered all. I threw my arms round her and burst into tears.‘Oh, Cousin Delia, I can’t bear it!’ I cried.She called me her pet and kissed me, and said again to me what she said to Hugo; it was kinder to him really to send him now, she said.‘Life will be hard for Hugo,’ she said. ‘I know that. I have always known it; but it will be worse if we put it off. We can’t run away,’ she said. ‘We can’t shut ourselves up for always. He has to go out into the world and fight some time, you know, Helen. Oh, my little Hugo—I would save him if I could!’ She turned suddenly away and sobbed.I had never seen her cry; she was so quiet and calm as a rule; my mother called her cold—and it frightened me, I felt more than ever that something momentous had happened.That afternoon we sat in our Happy Tree and told stories and talked very solemnly, about school and life and growing up. After tea Cousin John took us riding on our ponies. He was kind and cheerful as he always was, and did not seem to feel that anything tragic was happening at all. He never understood things as Cousin Delia did, but we enjoyed our ride and were happier after it; and the next morning when we woke up, the grief was less.This sounds, I expect, a great fuss about nothing. What is it, you will say one little say—boy going to school? But even now, when I think of that day, it seems just as heart-breaking, just as momentous, as it did then. It is not, after all, the event itself that makes the tragedy, or significance, but the effect of that event on the people concerned. Guy’s going to school was not tragic; Hugo’s was. It was like going to the war; like being killed—at least in one way—something terrible to be faced and gone through with; and he did face it and go through with it; and it was not less painful because we were children.VWe were happy again that summer, as the days and weeks passed by, but the shadow of the coming autumn was over us. We would remember suddenly in the middle of playing, and stop. One said without thinking, ‘We will do that in the winter—or when the nuts are ripe’—or something of that sort, and then remembered that Hugo would not be there.Guy was very kind to Hugo.He said to me:‘I am sorry for Hugo. You see, I like school. It is different for me—but Hugo minds things more.’Once, many years later, he said almost the same again. When he was in hospital and very ill, he said:‘I am worried about Hugo—it is different for a tough fellow like me⸺but Hugo minds things more.’ And I remembered. It was like Guy, dear old Guy; he minded things quite enough in his different way.The day came at last; the 22nd of September. The last week was a misery, but it passed too; and Guy and Hugo went off together.Soon after that I left Yearsly and went to London to my grandmother, in Campden Hill Square. My mother was there too, mostly, but she travelled about so much that she did not really live in any place at all. She organized Women’s Trade Unions and societies for Citizenship and things of that kind.My mother had been at Newnham and got a First Class in Economics. She was very clever and competent. She lectured in Economics too.I was a disappointment to her, I know, for I was not clever, and not interested in those things at all. I don’t think she would ever have bothered about me much. I don’t think she would ever have cared about children or wanted to be with them. She had not time. And I am glad of that, for if she had cared more, she would not have let me go to Cousin Delia as she did, when my father died, for she did not like Yearsly nor the Lauriers. If she had kept me with her I don’t know what would have happened. I don’t know how I could have grown up at all.But now when I went back for a bit, it did not matter. It was really my grandmother who counted, and I loved her. She used to be at Yearsly sometimes before, when I was there, and I had gone back to her always from time to time. She was my father’s mother, Mary Geraldine’s granddaughter. She was not different and hostile, as my mother was.I think that my grandmother must have been a rather wonderful person. My father had loved her very much. I have seen letters he wrote to her from Afghanistan just before he died, and letters when he was a boy, before he was married. She had grown up at Yearsly in the strange time after Mary Geraldine’s death, when our great-great-grandfather was still alive and kept everything like a museum of his wife. His son and daughter-in-law lived with him and their two children. Yet they had not been oppressed by him. They had grown up unwarped and contented, loving their home and their strange old grandfather, and when my grandmother married the chain had not been broken. My father and Cousin John had been more like brothers than cousins, although they must have been very unlike in themselves.I think now that my father’s marriage must have been a sorrow to her. I don’t think she can have liked my mother really, but in the time I remember she never showed it. She made it easy for my mother to come and go as she wished, with no constraint upon her. She never appeared to disapprove of her—not even of her neglect of me. Of course I did not understand these things at the time. It is only now, looking back, that I see what a difficult situation it must have been, and how well she dealt with it.I don’t think it would be true to say that I disliked my mother. I admired her in a way, and I think her poor opinion of me had a very strong effect upon me. It was her own doing that I felt her so definitely in opposition to Cousin Delia, and that inevitably raised hostility in me. I think now that it was curious in so clever a woman that she did not conceal her feelings more.It was only years afterwards that Grandmother told me of my father’s wish for me to go to Delia when he died. He had sent for Cousin Delia and asked her to take care of me, to have me with her at Yearsly as much as she could. My mother did not want me herself, but she could not forget this.VIFor about two years I was mainly with my grandmother. I had a governess and went to classes with six other little girls.After that I went away to school. I was not unhappy, but that time did not seem to count. In the holidays, when Guy and Hugo came home, I went to Yearsly, and that was like coming alive again. The holidays were much shorter than the term time, but they stand out in my remembrance as the only real parts of those years.I believe many children have this power of detachment, almost like a sort of suspended animation—a living quite apart in an untouchable world of one’s own, when the outside world is too uncongenial. Certainly Hugo and I did it. Guy did not need to. It was not that he cared less for home, but he had room for more different enjoyments, more different people and forms of life.These holidays at Yearsly stretch out, in one way, as an unbroken continuity, so that the time before school and this are not separated really by the big break which we felt at the time.I have felt like that often with big and important events in life, or what seem to one so at the time. In one sense they are irreparable and complete, and nothing is ever the same again, and in another they seem after a certain time to have made no difference at all.What is different ‘and what the same’? I suppose there is no test—no way of knowing—just as with a person—they change and yet are the same. When I think of myself as a child, through all these years I am writing about, in one way I see myself as quite a different person⸺a child whom I watch and wonder at, sometimes, and from whom I am quite detached; and yet in another way I feel all the time, that that child and I myself, now, are one. And both are true.Only Hugo does not change. He grows, of course, and changes to that extent, from a child into a man, but from the earliest time that I remember him, and I cannot remember any time before that, it is the same indescribable personality. He is different and more lovable than other people. Not cleverer, nor better, exactly. Guy could do most things better than he could, and many other people are as good; but no one I have ever met was like Hugo in the special quality he had. Guy felt it too, and Cousin Delia, and the Addingtons did, and, I think, Sophia Lane Watson. Some people did not understand Hugo at all.Walter didn’t, and some of the people at Oxford. I have heard people say he posed, and gave himself airs, and it used to bewilder me at first that anyone could be so wildly mistaken.Hugo never posed. I don’t think he could have, if he had tried. He cared so little what other people thought of him. He lived so entirely in a world of his own.He was kind, and very careful about hurting people’s feelings, when he thought of it, but often he used to forget altogether that anyone was there. He said odd things sometimes, unexpected sort of things, because what he saw struck him in some unexpected light. It would never have occurred to him to say what he said for any other reason.It used to worry me at one time that Walter did not appreciate Hugo, but that was a long time ago. I see now, and have seen for many years, that they never could have understood each other. They spoke different languages—or rather they used the same words for quite different meanings.Walter once said:‘Hugo has charm, certainly, but he is an unsatisfactory fellow. What is there behind all that?’And another time he said:‘If Hugo had ever done a good day’s work one would know where one was with him.’And I could not explain. Hugo did work in his own way constantly, practically all day long, but it was not the kind of work that Walter could recognize or admit. Hugo was living and taking in and trying to understand all the time. If Hugo went for a ride on a bus—afterwards, when we were older—he found drama and beauty and queer exciting romance. He would tell one when he came back sometimes about it. The other people in the bus, people he had looked down on walking in the street, lights and shadows in a fog, sunsets in smoke, everything and anything was exciting and inspiring to Hugo; and some one else might have been the same bus ride and seen nothing at all.It was not that he was exactly observant, for he wasn’t. Often he noticed nothing when other people did. But he had a world of his own in which he lived a great deal, and sometimes—you never knew when—outside sights and sounds responded to something in it, and there was an illumination, a sudden quickening into life, of all around.We who knew Hugo and loved him understood this. I don’t think Walter could have been expected to understand; he was too different.VIIScenes stand out to me from those school-time years.Chiefly in summer. The summer holidays were longer—and the summer days at Yearsly were lovelier than anywhere else.The sound of the mowing machine in the clear mornings; haymaking along the grass hill below the wood;—tossingthe hay and playing in it; romping in the little ‘pikes’ of hay with the dogs. One hot afternoon in particular—it must have been late in August, for they were cutting the corn in the field beyond the willows—paddling in the stream while Guy fished.Then there were agricultural shows; one in particular I remember, when Guy rode his pony in a jumping competition and won the second prize.That must have been September, for the corn was cut in nearly all the fields. We drove, Hugo and I, with Cousin Delia in the dog-cart. Guy had ridden over earlier with Cousin John. It was at Shelbury, nearly nine miles away, and we had tea in a tent at the show, and wandered round the field and looked at the horses and the cows—Cousin John was showing his Jersey cows—and flowers in a big marquee and cheeses and butter and eggs. There was the noise of the farmers talking, and the soft stamping noise of the horses, and lowing of cows, and the hot strong sunlight over everything; and then the excitement when Guy’s competition came on. He had a grey pony called Griselda, and he rode very well. Hugo and I were breathless with anxiety when it touched the bar once and knocked it down. But there were two chances, and the second time he cleared it. When he rode up to us afterwards with his blue badge we were desperately proud of him, and some of the farmers came and congratulated him, for the boy who won the first prize was much older than Guy, and they were very close.Afterwards we drove back in the cool of the evening, and all along the road there were people coming away from the show, and cattle and horses, and carts, and some called out good night to us as we passed, and we felt how nice they all were; and when we had turned off the main road on our way to Yearsly, the horses’ hooves sounded on the road in the stillness, and we heard the rooks cawing over the trees in the High Wood, and saw them wheeling in great circles, getting ready for bed; and we saw the smoke going up very straight into the sky before we could see the house; and we were very happy.Walter laughed at me when I first told him that I liked agricultural shows. He thought I was joking. It seemed to him, he said, an impossible thing to like. But I do and always have. We went to them often at Yearsly.Guy was in the first eleven at Winchester. He sang and he danced, and he rode, and he shot, and he fished, and he played tennis—all well. Hugo and I did most of these things too, but not as Guy did. It seemed at that time that there was nothing Guy could not do. He was handsome too, not taller than Hugo, but much stronger and browner, and he held himself better, and walked as though the earth belonged to him. His eyes were grey—very merry eyes—and his hair bright brown. Every one loved Guy. Hugo worshipped him.He said:“There is no one in the world like Guy. He can do everything.”One had the feeling about Guy that the world must be his to do what he liked with; that he could do or have whatever he set his heart on. He threw his head right back when he laughed, and opened his mouth very wide. Anyone who heard Guy laugh was bound to laugh too. You could not help it; it made the world full of laughter.He used to sing with Cousin Delia a great deal. His voice was a pleasure to her, and his love for the songs she loved.I remember them singing the ‘Agnus Dei’ from Mozart’s Third Mass one winter evening in the long drawing-room. Guy looked so tall and big in the lamplight, and Cousin Delia so happy; and he let himself go and sang with all his might. It was exciting and wonderful.Sometimes people came to stay—various cousins and second cousins—and sometimes Guy and Hugo brought friends back from Winchester; but most of them did not count very much.Guy used to hunt too, and made friends with people he met out hunting. They would come to meals and sometimes spend the night. We liked them when they came, but did not miss them when they went away. We were I think too contented by ourselves. Later when they were at Oxford they made friends who counted in a different way, and became a part of all our lives.Hugo was very happy at this time. When I think of him in those years, it is generally happy. He did not laugh as Guy did, loud, with his head thrown back; his was a lower, more gurgling kind of laughter; but his eyes danced and his whole face twinkled.I remember his laughing at me one day in the hay. They were making hay on the grass hill below the wood, and we had been helping, and he threw himself down on one of the new-made ‘pikes,’ and Guy and I had buried him; and he burrowed out, and his head came through all tangled and stuck over with hay, and his dark laughing eyes shone out of the nest of hay like some wild, but not frightened animal.One summer we had a passion for Conrad, and read aloud to each other up in our Happy Tree. Another time it was Shakespeare that we discovered for ourselves. Hugo knew a great deal of poetry by heart, more than anyone I have met, but he was not a mooning, moping sort of boy as poetical people are supposed to be. He loved games and swimming and fishing and dancing too—when we were older and used to dance.I think one of the special qualities about both Guy and Hugo was the way they enjoyed so many different things.We used to fish in the stream very often—long afternoons with the sun flickering through the willows on to the clear bright water. There was a big pool to the east of the house, below the temple, with a willow slanting out across it, almost horizontally, from the bank, and the bank was rather high. There were perch there, and ling. Sometimes Cousin John would come with us and teach us the art of ‘casting,’ or tell us about places he had fished in in Norway, and in Persia. He had been in the diplomatic service when he was a young man, before he married. He knew endless curious unrelated things, about places and people and armour and folklore, and the history of weapons of all sortsGuy would fish for hours at a time, sitting almost motionless on the slanting willow, but Hugo and I would bring books with us as a rule. We would fish for a bit and then read for a bit and then fish again. Guy thought that rather childish, but he never interfered with us or tried to stop us. That was, I think, part of the special charm of Yearsly. No one ever interfered with anyone else. There was no pressure on anyone or anything to be different from what it was.One thing we missed during these years was the autumn at Yearsly, when the trees in the High Wood turned red and gold, and the leaves floated down about you as you walked, through the still air, and rustled round your feet. There was a blue haze among the tree trunks and a nip in the air, and often the smell of bonfires, burning up leaves and sticks, and the dew on the grass would lie thick till midday, though the sun was shining. And in the walled garden, the dahlias would be out, and dark red chrysanthemums and michaelmas daisies, and old Joseph, the gardener, would be pottering slowly about the summer borders, clearing up, and rooting out and burning up piles of finished flowers, on the rubbish heap behind the potting shed.We had to go back to school now, at the very beginning of autumn, leaving with the trees still green and coming back again when they were quite bare.In the Christmas holidays there were carol singings. Cousin Delia trained the people in the village to sing carols, and they would come in and sing in the hall by candle-light, sometimes with lanterns in their hands, on Christmas Eve; and Guy would sing with them, and Cousin Delia would teach them special things, besides carols. Once it was Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. And Guy sang the solo parts. I think that is the most beautiful music I know. They stood there in the shadow of the hall, about twenty people altogether, with their lanterns on the ground. The light flickered upward on the dark wood of the staircase and on faces here and there, but it was mostly shadow, and the sound of the voices rose up and died away in the high darkness of the roof. Sometimes they would go round being waits and sing at other houses, and at farms, and we would go with them, walking back with our lantern after midnight over dark frosty fields, with stars very clear in the frost. Of course it was not always like that—sometimes it was wet and we had colds, and it was all a disappointment—but not often, and somehow I don’t remember those times.We had Christmas Trees too, generally on New Year’s Day, and the children from the village came, and some old people, and then there would be games.My grandmother came to stay very often at Christmas. We all liked it when she came.VIIIMy own life at school was uneventful. I was not unhappy, nor unkindly treated. I think it was rather a good school, but I did not learn much, and it never mattered to me one way or another. It was time to be lived through, and that was all; and I lived through it without much trouble or distress.I was not naughty, so far as I can remember. I did not get into scrapes or mischief. But I was not clever at all. Arithmetic I have never been able to do, or the things connected with Arithmetic, and subjects like Literature and Poetry were badly taught. I had learned much more of them from Cousin Delia and from Hugo.The only friend I made at school was Sophia Lane Watson. She was two years younger than me, and came to school when she was thirteen, so I had been there nearly three years when she came. But I was struck by her as soon as I saw her, and we made friends in a kind of way, almost at once.She was standing in the ‘girls’ hall when I saw her first. It was the first day of the summer term, and everything was in a bustle: the noise and uncomfortableness of arrivals; girls rushing about everywhere and shouting to each other, and slapping each other on the back or kissing, according to the ‘set’ they belonged to. How I did hate those ‘first days’ at school!I had come by a different train from most of the others—I don’t remember why—and drove up from the station alone. They had taken my luggage in, and I walked in by myself; and there I saw Sophia Lane Watson, standing quite still by the fireplace in the ‘girls’ hall.’ She was quite alone, not talking to anyone, nor reading; just standing still and watching all the hurrying about, quite impassively, with a perfectly expressionless face. She did not look shy or frightened or unhappy—just quite detached—and that interested me. She was a striking-looking child too, with her very big eyes and her straight black hair, and her very white face. Her eyes always looked so dark, much darker than mine or even Hugo’s; but they were not black or brown when you saw them close, only grey, sometimes almost green. She was medium height and very thin, and her hands and feet were too big; but rather beautifully made. Her clothes always looked as though they were falling off her; her skirt was always crooked, sagging down in a tail, either behind or at one side. She was certainly not pretty, though I still think she was prettier at that time than afterwards. Perhaps it was only that her queerness was more attractive in a child.She certainly did attract me. I know I stopped then, on my way through the hall, and looked at her, and she looked at me perfectly stonily, without any change of expression. Then I went upstairs to my room and found the three other girls in it, all talking and sitting on their beds, and I had to stay and talk to them a few minutes while I took off my things; but when I came downstairs again, I went straight up to Sophia and asked her her name. She was still standing exactly as I had left her.She answered rather slowly:‘Sophia Lane Watson.’ Her voice was rather deep; a curious voice.Then I asked her age, and she told me she was thirteen. She was not very easy to talk to, for she merely answered my questions and volunteered nothing. But I persevered, and offered to take her round the school, and show her the classrooms, and afterwards we went into the garden and walked round the playing field, and we sat together at tea.She told me that she lived at Salchester, that her father was a Canon of the Cathedral, that she had two brothers and one sister, and that she had never been at school before.I don’t know why, but I felt curiously consoled by her having come. The utter blankness of that first day, the blocks of bread at tea, the noise and hurry and ugliness, seemed less unbearable than usual, and I had a feeling when I went to bed that evening that something important, pleasantly important, had happened.IXSophia Lane Watson and I made friends. It was a rather odd friendship, never very intimate. I used to doubt sometimes if she could be intimate with anybody. She seemed to live her own life inside a sort of fortress, and although she would open the door a little way, she never opened it wide and let one really in. And for me, any friendship at school was a subsidiary thing, not comparable really to my friendship for Guy and Hugo.But life at school was very different for me after she had come.She used to surprise me often; sometimes she shocked me; she seemed to have thought and decided upon so many subjects which had never crossed my mind at all.She told me about the second week of our acquaintance that she was an atheist and an anarchist. She looked at me with a sort of quiet defiance as she said it, and added:‘It is best to be quite plain about it—now you know.’I don’t think I was very sure at the time what either meant. We had never discussed religion or politics at Yearsly. That may seem odd, but it had never come our way, and I only associated anarchists with bombs; but I was not disturbed, for I was sure that I liked Sophia.She leant me Shelley’sEssays, and expounded Atheism and Anarchy of a very theoretic kind to me, and I was a good deal impressed. The very fact of not having defined my own beliefs made the shaking of them less severe. Afterwards of course I told Hugo what she had said, and he too read theNecessity of Atheismand was interested in it; but Hugo never cared very much for Shelley, not as he cared for Keats, and Shakespeare, and Campion, andParadise Lost.Sophia was at this time a Shelley devotee. She knew hundreds of lines by heart, not only the lyrics, but a great deal of the political verse as well. I remember her walking down the passage from her bath, in a blue dressing gown, saying over and over with intense feeling: ‘I met Murder by the way; He had a Mask like Castlereagh,’ and she told me about this time that she thought if Castlereagh were alive now she would kill him.‘Or at least I would like to try,’ she added with the sudden drop into reasonableness which often surprised one.She would talk endlessly on subjects of this sort—freedom and tyranny, and what truth was, and whether there was such a thing as goodness. I expect most of what she said was nonsense, but even so, she must have been precocious for a child of thirteen. But of her personal feelings she hardly ever spoke, nor of her home.I thought at first she was homesick, but she was not. I don’t think she liked her home any more than school. She gave me the feeling sometimes of a creature at bay, on the defensive somehow against life. She said once—I forget how the subject came up:‘I hate pretty people—my sister is pretty.’And another time when I had been speaking about Yearsly, she looked at me seriously with her big green eyes and said:‘It is curious how you love Guy and Hugo. I should have thought you would dislike them, being brought up with them like that.’These were the sort of things that shocked me at first, but not when I knew her better. I realized then that she did not mean them in a shocking way.I thought how differently I should feel if I had not lived at Yearsly, if, for instance, my own mother had brought me up, and I felt very sorry for Sophia, and that made me like her more.She was in a higher form than me, although she was younger, and I did not see much of her during the day, but in our second term we were put to sleep together, just us two in the room, and we used to talk in the mornings and evenings, and on Sundays, when we went for walks. Sophia had been ill and she was not allowed to play games. She always went for walks, and I did so too when I could, and walked with her.It was the end of that second term that she made her sensation.There were always recitations at the end of that term, and a prize for the best recitation. That time there was a choice of three pieces, all Shakespeare, and one was Lady Macbeth’s speech.I was considered good at this, and there were two or three others who were good. Nobody expected anything of Sophia—she was so unemotional and stiff as a rule.And then suddenly she took us all by storm.She stood up on the platform, looking like a ghost, and the moment she began to speak a thrill ran through us all. There were visitors there, parents and people, and they too were completely taken by surprise.It was not like a child reciting at all. Her great deep voice rose and fell, with an odd little break in it at times. She held her hands in front of her and rubbed at the spot like some one in a dream. It was, I still believe, a marvellous bit of acting, quite on a different level from anything we were used to. When it was over there was a thunder of applause, and Miss Ellis, the head mistress, went across to Sophia and shook hands with her. The recitals were her special subject, and the visitors were all asking who Sophia was.Sophia slipped off at the back of the platform and came back to her seat in the hall, but afterwards when the prize-giving was over people crowded up to her, girls and their parents and mistresses. There was a buzzing and a fuss, and I could see that Sophia was not liking it. Then she disappeared, and when Miss Ellis wanted to introduce her to a distinguished old man who had written about Shakespeare she couldn’t be found, and Miss Ellis was annoyed. Afterwards I found her under her bed, crying bitterly on the floor. She was quite wild and wouldn’t come out, and told me to go away. At last I got her to come out, and tried to find out what had upset her, but for a long time I couldn’t make out. She kept saying that she could never come back to school now, she could never face the girls again.‘Why did I do it?’ she wailed. ‘What possessed me to do it? Now I have let them inside and I have given myself away. Oh, it is awful! And perhaps they will say something about it at home!’I thought vaguely that she must have some plan of going on the stage, but it was not that.‘Don’t you understand?’ she said at last. ‘It is as though you had got up and told all that crowd just what you feel about Guy and Hugo and Cousin Delia. You couldn’t live if you had done that, could you? Can’t you imagine it?—EllaPrice and Rosa Baylis and all of them.’She was beside herself. I think now it was probably a reaction from excitement, and that she hardly knew what she said, but I was frightened then. I did what I could with her, and got her into bed. I think she agreed to go to bed as a means of avoiding the girls downstairs. Then I told a Miss Singleton, whom we both liked, that she was not well, and Miss Singleton came up to see her. I don’t know how much she told Miss Singleton.The next morning the school broke up, and we all went away. I wondered if Sophia would come back after all the next term. She did; but she would not speak about that evening, and she would not recite again all the time she was at school.I told Hugo about it in the holidays, and he did not seem at all surprised.‘I quite understand her feeling like that,’ he said. ‘That is if it was really good, you know, not just good, but really first-rate, and it must have been from what you say. Like saying your prayers aloud, real prayers, and then finding suddenly you had done it.. . .I should like to see that Sophia.’I asked Sophia to come to Yearsly at Easter, but she couldn’t. One of her brothers had whooping cough, and she was in quarantine; and I asked her again in the summer, but for some other reason she couldn’t come.When she did come for a few days the next year, Hugo was disappointed in her. She didn’t talk and seemed out of it, and Guy thought her too ‘intellectual.’ He was in a phase of disliking ‘intellectual women.’XSophia wrote a great deal of poetry. She did not show it to me till I had known her over a year. I don’t know now if it was good; I thought so then. It was odd, passionate stuff, very correct in form. She wrote a good many sonnets, some obscure, rather mystical things about the universe, and some love poems, which surprised me very much. I wanted to show them to Hugo, but she would not let me.‘I don’t want anyone to see them ever,’ she said. ‘I have only shown them to you—and I shall be sorry about that!’At the end of her second year at school Sophia got pneumonia. She was very ill indeed, and there were special prayers for her in the school service.Several girls cried. Ella Price came up to me afterwards, wiping her eyes.‘I shall never forgive myself,’ she sobbed, ‘never, if anything happens to Sophia.’‘You were always unkind to her,’ I said.Then I was sorry for Ella, for I thought how terrible it would be if Sophia did die, and she knew she had been unkind.‘I don’t think you mattered very much to her,’ I said.It did not console Ella, but it was the most I could say. I was unhappy about Sophia, and it made me angry with the people who had been unkind.Sophia got better, and when she was better I was allowed to sit with her, and I asked her one day if she had been frightened when she was so ill.She looked at me a long time without speaking, and her eyes looked enormous.‘Not frightened of dying,’ she said. ‘I heard them talking once, and they said, “Not much hope now—just a chance,” and I was glad.’I thought:‘ “Not much more to face.” I can’t face life when I am tired.’It gave me a shiver to hear her.‘Are you really so unhappy, Sophia?’ I asked.And she said:‘Not unhappy, exactly—but I do hate life. I feel it trying to down me all the time, and sometimes I am afraid that it will in the end.’I wondered what Cousin Delia would have made of Sophia. She would not have felt like that, I thought, if she had been with Cousin Delia.Sophia and I remained friends, but as the time went on it was not equal. She needed me more than I needed her. I think she wanted some one to admire and love very much, and she had no one else—and of course I had.She said to me once:‘I wonder sometimes what it would be like to be lovely like you.’And I laughed at her and said:‘But you don’t like pretty people.’ But I was pleased.She said quite seriously:‘I feel differently about it since I have known you, and besides, you’re more than pretty. You’relovely. It’s like the sun coming out of clouds when you come into a room!’I laughed at her, but I liked her saying that, all the same. Nobody had said things like that to me before.When I went home the next holidays I wondered if Guy and Hugo thought me pretty, and Cousin Delia. I wanted to ask them, but I couldn’t.What I enjoyed perhaps most at school was the dancing.We had dancing lessons twice a week and practice dances on Saturday evenings.It was like discovering a new world to me, learning to dance. We only danced with each other, of course, and with whichever partner was allotted to us, except on Saturdays, when we chose as we liked. There was one girl called Flora Hilman, whom I always danced with when I could. She was very tall, with red hair, and she danced beautifully. We hardly ever spoke to each other in between, but we danced together whenever we could, and I forgot everything else when we were dancing. I expect she did too, but she never said so and I never asked her.I met her once after leaving school. She was walking in Kensington Gardens with a man in a top hat, and I was with Guy. We stopped when we saw each other and looked pleased. I think we both thought at first that we had lots to say to each other, and then found there was nothing at all. We said:‘How funny to meet here.’But it wasn’t funny really, as we both lived in London.Then we said:‘How nice to see you again,’ or something like that.And she said:‘Do you ever go down to Ellsfield now?’ (The School was called Ellsfield.)And I said:‘No, do you?’And she said:‘Yes, I do sometimes.’Then we waited a minute or two, and Guy and the man in the top hat said something to each other, and then we said ‘Good-bye.’I have never seen her again. Somebody told me she had married a German just before the war, but I didn’t believe it somehow, I don’t know why.Sophia couldn’t dance at all. It was funny how she couldn’t learn, and I think she was sorry about it. And she couldn’t play the piano. She started to learn Russian about this time. She got a dictionary and grammar, and some Russian books, and she used to try and learn it in odd moments, in bed at night, and at times when she ought to be preparing lessons. She had a passion for Tolstoy at this time, and said she must read him in the original. She did not get time to do much at school, but she learned quite a lot by herself in the holidays.It seems odd in a way, considering how much we were friends at that time, that we did not keep up with each other more afterwards. It was my fault, I think. I left school two years before she did, and my life was so full of other things and people that she slipped out. We wrote to each other for a time, and she kept on writing for a bit after I had stopped. It was on my mind, I know, that I had not answered her letters. I kept meaning to, and putting it off, and then I wrote and she did not answer, and we let it drop. When we met again, later, it was quite a different thing, just as one meets a stranger.XIWhen I was sixteen my mother married again and went away for good. She married a Canadian judge, with some special scheme for prison reform. He had reorganized the penal system in Manitoba, my mother said, and that interested her. They went to live in Winnipeg, and only came back at long intervals to visit England. I believe she was happy in Winnipeg. She ran evening classes and formed Women’s Societies of different kinds. When I saw her next, about five years later, she seemed to me kinder than before, and more tolerant, and I think that may have been because she was happier.Once, long after this, Cousin Delia said that she had been sorry for my mother, and that had surprised me very much. She had never seemed the sort of person one could be sorry for, but when Cousin Delia said that it made me think about it, and I wondered if she understood that nobody cared for her, none of my father’s people, I mean, and I wondered if perhaps that had made her harder and more aggressive. After all, she could not help being what she was, always wanting to alter things and put people right, and of course if she was like that, it must have been disappointing for her that my father was not and that I was not. I can see too that to her, Cousin Delia might be irritating just because she was so peaceful and didn’t want to upset things at all.They never said they did not like her; they were very careful about that, except Guy and Hugo, of course; but I knew, and I knew that Cousin Delia had asked her to come to Yearsly and that she never came.Her marriage made very little difference to me, but it was a certain relief. I felt as though a quite vague fear had been removed—a fear that some time she might assert herself and claim me, and take me away from Cousin Delia and my grandmother. Now I knew she would not.XIIThe next thing that happened was Guy’s twenty-first birthday. He had been at Oxford two years by then, and Hugo was just leaving Winchester.It was on the 15th of July, and there was a party at Yearsly.On the day before there was a dinner to the tenants and a school treat, but on the day itself there were no official festivities, just a party of people Guy wanted, mostly staying in the house, and a dance in the evening in the hall.Hugo and I had come back from school for it, for the school terms were not quite over. It was my first real dance, and I was very excited.A good many people were staying in the house. There were three Oxford friends of Guy’s—Ralph Freeman, John Ellis and Anthony Cowper. Ellis and Cowper had been at Winchester with him too, and stayed with us before. Ralph Freeman was new. Then there were Mary and Margaret Lacey, second cousins of Guy and Hugo on the other side, they too had stayed at Yearsly before, and Faith Vincent, the Vicar’s daughter, and Claude Pincent, who was also some sort of cousin of Cousin Delia’s. There were no other Laurier cousins, for my grandmother and Hugo’s grandfather had no other children but our fathers.Claude Pincent too had come before, but not often. He was older than Guy and had been at Cambridge. He was supposed to be a very brilliant young man, and we were a little bit in awe of him. He was distinguished looking, with bright, big eyes and a crest of hair. He seemed much more mature and experienced than we were, and that impressed us too.In the afternoon we bathed in the fishing pool by the willow, and then we had tea down there by the stream. Cousin Delia and Cousin John were at the picnic, and we liked them to be there. They never spoiled the fun of what we did—even rather silly young parties like this one.It was a perfect day, hot and almost cloudless, and the hay was not yet cut. Buttercups danced in the long grass, just as they had on that day nine years before when we heard that Hugo was going to school.The pool was hardly big enough to swim in, but it was clear and deep and very lovely, and the dogs came too. Maurice, the deerhound, stood on the bank and watched us, but Libbet and Oscar, the spaniels, jumped in after us and swam all about. Then we lay in the long grass—we were allowed to spoil the hay for this occasion—and had tea, and laughed a great deal at silly jokes, and then we lay still and were lazy, and before we knew where we were it was time to pack up the tea things and get ready for the dance.The Hall had been decorated since the morning. Cousin Delia and old Joseph had done it together, and I had helped them for a bit. There were big clusters of roses in silver vases—light coloured roses against the dark wood of the stairs and the panelled wall—and four white lilies in pots at the four corners, and there were sconces with pale green candles fixed up along the walls to light later on, when it got dark.Mary and Margaret were sharing a room, and Faith Vincent, who was a special friend of theirs, had brought her dress to change in their room. I was alone in mine and I was glad. It was always the same room, looking out into the beech trees on one side, and the big light window to the north, and the shiny chintz curtains were the same that I had always had, and the little comfortable arm-chairs. There was a special jug and basin too—rather too small for general use, but pretty—very fine clear china and hand-painted flowers. Cousin Delia had put it there for me when I was little and I would not have it changed. Now there was a shining brass can of hot water waiting for me and a thick soft towel over it, and Nunky came in to help me dress.I had a pale yellow dress, very pale yellow and very soft and plain. It was the first time I had worn a low-cut evening gown. The first time too that my hair was to be done up.Nunky was as pleased dressing me as though she had been dressing a doll. I had yellow stockings and satin shoes too, and Cousin Delia had given me a coloured Spanish shawl, which belonged to Mary Geraldine. It was a beautiful shawl. The colours were a little faded, but still brilliant. It had a creamy background and a quaint intricate pattern of bright flowers upon it; red and pink flowers and bright green leaves.I sat in front of the looking-glass while Nunky did my hair, and laughed at myself and her, reflected smiling at me in the glass.My hair was not difficult to do, for it was always curly—a little bit curly, so that it stayed where it was put—and very bright golden brown. I know that it was pretty hair. It is so long ago now, that it is not silly to say so, for it isn’t like that any more.I was pleased with my hair done up. It looked much nicer, I thought, than just tied behind with a ribbon. And with the stockings and the satin slippers and the dress. I was pleased with my bare neck and arms. I had a dark blue enamel bracelet that was almost black, and a little necklace of yellow topaz, that my father had brought back from India for me when I was a baby.Then Cousin Delia came in to see me, and she turned me round and round, and then she kissed me, smiling as though she were pleased.‘Dear heart,’ she said.I put the Spanish shawl round my shoulders: I loved its many colours and its softness and we went downstairs.They were mostly there already, standing about in the hall. Hugo was in the furthest corner talking to Anthony Cowper and Faith Vincent. Guy was standing at the foot of the stairs with Claude. They looked up at us as we came down. Cousin Delia came first, and I followed her. The candles were not lit yet, for it was still broad daylight, but the hall seemed filled with light, as though it were illuminated—coming down into it, with its flowers, from the shadow of the stairs. They both looked up at me and smiled.Guy said:‘That’s splendid, Helen. You do look nice’—and he too looked pleased.I laughed and went past them into the hall, and as I passed I heard Claude say to Guy:‘I say, Guy, that little cousin of yours is a beauty!’And I felt all warm and glowing, and as though I was stepping on air. I ran across to Hugo, and he turned to look at me.‘Jolly,’ he said, ‘and that shawl is just right. I love that shawl.’There was supper first, two long tables in the dining-room; and after supper more people arrived, various neighbours, and the dancing began.The music was in the drawing-room with the doors open, and we danced in the hall. The floor was polished oak, very smooth and perfect for dancing, and there were chairs at the end for the older people who were there.Claude came up and asked me to dance, and I said, ‘Oh, the first is for Hugo’—butI danced with him afterwards, three times, and then with Guy.Guy was the best dancer I know. It was like his riding and his singing and everything he did—a complete mastery and ease, as though it all came naturally to him with no trouble or effort at all.Hugo was not so perfect, but I loved dancing with him, and we danced together a great deal.Later the candles were lit, the pale green candles on the wall, but it was not dark outside, hardly twilight, and the big doors were open at each end of the hall, and people went out between the dances and walked about or sat in chairs on the lawn.Hugo and I went out into the garden. We were hot with dancing and it was cooler outside.There was a crescent moon, low down still over the walled garden, and a long line of pink sky where the sun had just gone down. There were stars beginning to show, pale stars in the light sky, and the air was very warm and still.We turned towards the walled garden. Cousin Delia’s roses smelt sweet as we passed them, and we stopped and wandered about on the little flagged paths among the cupids. The tune of the last waltz kept echoing through my head, and my feet seemed to be dancing while we walked.‘It is too hot to go in for a bit,’ said Hugo, ‘and awfully nice out here.’And I said:‘Yes, it is nice out here too.’The jasmine on the Jasmine Gate smelled strong in the warm air. We stopped to smell it. There was something strange and exciting in the strong scent—all the garden round seemed excited that night, still and expectant and waiting for something, and I was excited, and Hugo. He pushed open the Jasmine Gate and we walked through into the walled garden. A spray of jasmine was hanging down. It caught in my hair as we stepped under it. I put up my hand to pull it away, but I couldn’t at first. Hugo undid it for me. He broke off the spray and gave it to me, and I stuck it into the front of my dress. The Spanish shawl slipped down from my shoulder and Hugo lifted it up. The music had begun in the house again. We could hear it, dimmed by the distance and the high garden wall. Up in the High Wood the owls had begun to call.I looked up at Hugo and found him looking at me. There was something strange in his eyes that I had never seen before. I felt elated and a little frightened, and still very excited and happy. We stood and looked at each other, without speaking, and then Hugo touched my arm.‘Oh, Helen, how lovely you are!’ he said suddenly. ‘I never knew you were like this!’There was an odd excitement in his voice, and his face was very white. He was breathing fast.A thrill ran through me, and then I was afraid. I looked at Hugo and he looked at me, and I felt his fingers, warm and strange, on my bare arm.And it seemed to me suddenly that he had become strange himself—that he was not the Hugo I knew at all. I found that I was trembling all over, and could not stop. I could not bear his fingers on my arm. I wanted to pull it away, but I did not dare.Then Hugo stepped back and took his hand away, and it seemed as though something had snapped. It seemed as though a barrier had come down between us, and we were suddenly very far apart. Something had happened to us that I could not understand. We had become strangers to each other and to ourselves, and for the first time in our lives we were afraid of each other, and shy.Again I had the sense of a door closing, of time passing and not to be called back. It will never be the same again, never in all our lives, I said to myself, and a sense of complete desolation came over me. It seemed to me then that the best thing in my life had gone irretrievably. We had broken something that could never be mended.I shivered, and Hugo asked if I was cold.I said:‘Yes, a little,’ and we turned back towards the house.Hugo felt the same as I did, or something like it.I knew that, and he knew that I knew, but we could not speak of what we felt. For the first time in our lives we had something to hide.We turned back towards the house, through the Jasmine Gate, and past the rose garden. Francis, the cat, ran silently across the lawn in front of us. Two people were walking about by the statues at the end of the path. I think they were Anthony Cowper and Mary Lacey, but they did not matter. The light streamed out from the windows of the drawing-room, and in a great shaft from the open garden door. The music was stopping again as we reached it, and more couples came out, laughing, and some wiping their faces, for the night was still very warm. Hugo and I went in. We did not dance together again that evening, and the light had gone out for me.I did not know what I had done, but I felt miserable, and somehow oddly ashamed.The next day both Hugo and I went back to school.We did not meet again till the end of the summer, for that August Guy and Hugo went abroad, to France and Italy.My grandmother came to Yearsly with me, and part of the time the Lacey girls were there, but the place seemed empty and all wrong without Guy and Hugo.They came back in September only a week before I went back to school, and two other friends of Guy’s came too.In October Hugo went up to Oxford with Guy, but I did not see them there till the next spring.

PART ONE

LEAVES are falling down from the laburnum tree at the gate; yellow leaves, white gate, and red brick of the houses opposite; it is very ugly. In the spring the flowers are yellow instead of the leaves, and the hawthorn bush, to the side, is bright pink, and across the road is lilac. The red-brick houses have facings of yellow stone, squares of yellowish stone round the doors and the windows. All the colours are wrong, all the shapes are ugly, even the trees are not real trees.

Once I would have minded it so much, to live here, looking out at that laburnum tree, and that house opposite, that bow window, and the yellowish stone facings of the windows, and the lilac bush that has grown all crooked, and the pink hawthorn, and the laurels with patterned leaves; but now I do not mind. Now I do not see these things or think about them at all; only to-night I am seeing them, because somehow I have come awake to-night, for a bit.

To-night I realize that for nine years I have lived here, looking at that house, every time I go out, and have never really noticed it before. But even now that I see it, I do not mind. I do not mind about anything very much now, except, I suppose, John.

To-morrow I shall be forty; my youth is gone; irretrievably, irrevocably, gone; and even that I do not mind. It used to seem to me so difficult not to feel too much, and now I cannot feel at all. Is this simply growing old? Is this what always happens when one grows old? But if Hugo were alive still, would it be like this? I do not think that it would.

To-night things come back to me very clearly, in an odd, detached way, things that have happened to me, as though they had happened to somebody else, while I looked on. Yearsly comes back to me much more than usual, and Guy and Hugo, and our childhood there. Some things I have been almost afraid of thinking about too much. Now I can think of everything and am not afraid.

It is like what I have heard happens when people are going to die, or be executed. Is being forty like that? Does it mean that I do mind being forty, though I think I don’t?

Hugo said that we must hold out till the end; I have had to hold out longer than he did, and it has seemed, often, that if I let myself think, or feel much, I couldn’t do it. That was before this deadening came, that makes it easier; but now I am not afraid. Something is past, some danger is past, and now I know that I shall be able to hold out till the end. I do not believe in immortality, and yet I feel, somehow, that Hugo will know if I keep my promise.

Walter is in bed, asleep; and I am by the window, alone. There is a bright moon coming up now behind the houses opposite, and in the moonlight the colours are changing; the yellow and red grow paler, and less violent. Even on this road there comes a quiet and beauty of the night.

And my life up to now comes before me very clearly; the people and the places, and the choices and mistakes, and I seem to see it all in better proportion than before; less clouded and blurred across by the violent emotion of youth.

Guy, and Hugo, and Cousin Delia, and Sophia Lane-Watson, and Diana, and Walter, and George Addington, and Mollie; and Yearsly, and Hampstead, and here; but Hugo goes through it all; when I try to think of my life without Hugo, it is impossible; it is as though there were nothing there at all.

And really, so little has happened to me; my life has been a very ordinary one; no adventures, nothing dramatic, just the same sort of life as most of the women I meet in the street, and think so dull. The lady who lives opposite, in the house with the bow window, has three grown-up sons, and two daughters. She is much older than I am, her life must have had more in it than mine. Does it seem to her, I wonder, as intricate, and poignant as mine does to me?

I suppose that it does, when she thinks about it; and I suppose that is only seldom, just as it is with me.

Perhaps before her fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays she thought about it, and perhaps she thought it very interesting.

I wonder if I should think so too, if she told it to me.

The beginning is Yearsly. People say that places ought not to matter—still less houses, but I think they do. Yearsly has mattered to me, and it did to Guy and Hugo. It stood for something very stable, very enduring, and very sympathetic. Yearsly without Cousin Delia might have been something quite different; it is quite different now; but I think of them together, complementary to each other. Cousin Delia’s personality pervaded everything at Yearsly, and everything there seemed somehow an enhancement and expression of her; and yet each was distinct. Yearsly had something that it had had long before she came there, and Cousin Delia had something, and a great deal, that she must have had before she came, and would have had wherever she was: she has it now.

The house at Yearsly was of grey stone; it was a long plain house built at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with a door in the middle and a row of high sash windows on either side of the door. Above this was a second row of windows, and a kind of Classical stone cornice overhung the upper windows. The roof was steeper than is usual in such houses, and was also grey; grey slates or chips of stone, with patches of green moss on them.

Once it had been a much bigger house, with a long bedroom wing stretching back, northwards, at the east end of the house, but that had been burnt down in 1830, and never rebuilt, and when I first remember it, this centre block was the entire house.

In the middle of the house was a hall, stretching from back to front, and the two main doors, the ‘Front’ door to the north, and the ‘Garden’ door to the south, faced each other across it. Standing on the south side of the house, you could look right through to the clouds at the north. The garden door stood open almost always, except in winter.

The hall reached up to the top of the house, and the big staircase wound up and round it, ending in a square wooden gallery from which the bedrooms opened.

In front of the house, the Garden Front, stretched a long lawn, with a wide gravel path down the middle; at the end of the path six stone steps led down to a lower lawn where we played tennis, and, at the top of the steps, one on each side, stood two lead statues; one of Diana with a bow, and the other, a hero leaning forward with a shield. The lead of the statues was perishing away, and there was a great crack across Diana’s head, but they stood out clear, and almost black, from all the south windows of the house.

Below the tennis court was a piece of meadow sloping down to the Mellock river, with its two lines of willows, flowing at this point due east, and almost parallel with the front of the house. A little further on, it turned sharply southward, wandering away through the low-lying meadows beyond the hill.

At the east end of the house were beach trees: the nearest grew within a few feet of the wall, and their branches threw green lights and shadows into the end windows, and filled the rooms on windy nights with a swishing sound like the sea.

Further from the house the trees thickened up into the ‘High wood’ which stretched along the side of the hill, southward, above the course of the river, for a little way.

This wood was a particular home for us: we played in the trees like birds or squirrels, and built great nests of sticks in which we sat.

We had special trees too—good trees and bad trees, which seemed to us like people. There was one in particular, a very big one, which we called the Happy Tree, and that we loved the best.

Hugo had given it the name: lying on his back one summer’s day, his bare feet kicking on the moss:

‘On a drear nighted December,Too happy, happy tree,Thy branches ne’er rememberTheir greenfelicity . . .Green felicity, Green felicity, Greenfelicity . . .’

‘On a drear nighted December,Too happy, happy tree,Thy branches ne’er rememberTheir greenfelicity . . .Green felicity, Green felicity, Greenfelicity . . .’

‘On a drear nighted December,

Too happy, happy tree,

Thy branches ne’er remember

Their greenfelicity . . .

Green felicity, Green felicity, Greenfelicity . . .’

he kept chanting the words, beating softly on the moss with his feet.

The pale green sunlight flickered through the world of beech leaves on to his face; his hands were clasped behind his head, and his dark blue jersey was open at the neck:

‘It is green felicity. . .’

Guy, half way up among the branches, said:

‘What are you saying?’

And Hugo answered:

‘Green felicity. . .’and then:

‘On a drear nighted December,Too happy, happy tree. . .

‘On a drear nighted December,Too happy, happy tree. . .

‘On a drear nighted December,

Too happy, happy tree. . .

‘Oh,’ Guy said, ‘well, I suppose so. . .but I don’t see why too happy?’

And I said:

‘But it just is. . .’

And Hugo said:

‘It just is. . .’

‘All right,’ Guy answered, ‘too happy, if you like. . .’

And afterwards we always called it the ‘Happy Tree.’

Below the trees the hillside was smooth and green. A grass path had been cut in it, many years ago when the house was newly built. In those days all the hillside had been kept closely mown, but in our time the grass grew long and was made into hay. Only the path was kept still a little shorter than the rest; we used to race along it. . .there was room for two abreast, but it was not wide enough for three.

The path ended in a little stone pavilion which we called the ‘Temple’—why we called it so, no one could remember. . .it had four glass doors and steps all round; inside there was a mosaic table and four statues in the niches between the doors. The doors were always locked, for the roof was unsafe, and nobody ever went inside; only Guy could remember going inside once, with Cousin John, when an architect or expert of some sort came to look at it.

At the other end of the house, to the west, was the walled garden, and in the sunny corner between the end wall of the house and the garden wall was the rose garden that Cousin Delia had made.

In that there was a sundial and some little stone ‘putti,’ and there most often we would find her. When I think of Yearsly in those long ago days, I think very often of her in the rose garden, with her long gardening gloves, and shady hat, and the half smile with which she would look up when one of us called to her, and her quiet grey eyes in the shadow of her hat.

She was never in a hurry, and never too busy to answer questions; if we wanted her she was always there. I used to wonder, even then, how it was that she had so much time, for my own mother was always busy. . .I wonder even more now.

Cousin Delia was very quiet, but she never repressed us nor made it seem wrong to make a noise, as so many quiet people do. I think it was partly that she was not quiet on purpose, or with an effort, but simply from a kind of serenity. She was happy, I am sure, and people round her were happy.

My mother once said that it surprised her that a woman of Delia’s intelligence should be contented with such an ‘idle stagnant life.’ I felt very angry, even then, and tried to defend her, though I don’t think I managed to explain what I meant.

The truth was, I think, that she was never idle, only the things she did were not the kind of things that my mother would count.

She was interested in so many things; in flowers and animals, and little precious things in the house; little pieces of china, or even old chairs; they seemed to have a value for her which they had not for other people, not as objects, but almost as friends; they lived and felt and were real for her; you could see it from the way she touched them; and then, of course, she had Guy and Hugo. . .and they meant so much more to her than I ever meant to my mother.

Beyond the rose garden was the old wall; high and baked and a little bulging in places. Big espalier apple trees were trained across it, and pear trees too. There were two wrought-iron doors that led into the walled garden; one led out of the rose garden, and the other, in the centre of the wall, was called the ‘Jasmine Gate,’ because of a great bush of white jasmine which hung round it and over the wall.

Inside the wall there were more fruit trees; apples and pears again and plums and cherries; there were also currant bushes covered up in nets, and vegetables of all sorts.

And then there were flowers; a wide herbaceous border ran the length of the north wall, and it seems to me, even now, that the flowers in that border were brighter and bigger than any other flowers.

One year, too, there was a big clump of sunflowers, giant sunflowers, in a corner, away from the main border, and we made a house under the broad leaves, at least Hugo and I did, but Guy laughed at us. . .for he was older, and thought it silly; it was not a real house, like our house in the wood, he said; but Guy never laughed in a way that we could mind.

In the middle of the walled garden was a small round pond with a fountain in the middle. The fountain hardly ever played, but there were frogs in the pond, surprising quantities of frogs, and we used to call it the ‘Frog Pond.’ Twice we saw a mouse there too, on the little island of stones and weeds in the middle, where the spout of the fountain was. The mouse was running about among the stones, picking up something from under the weeds, and then it met a frog sitting stolidly on a stone, and it jumped back suddenly. We lay on our stomachs at the edge of the pond for a long time, watching for the mouse to come back, and then it was dinner time, and we had to go in. We only saw it once again, though we watched for it often, but the question of how it got there, and how it got away, occupied us a great deal, and its existence imparted a new interest to the pond.

Inside the house there was a special smell that I have never met anywhere else. It was a sweet, clean smell, and faint; what it came from exactly, it would be hard to say; lavender and pot-pourri, and old polished floors, and old brocade; sweet and faint and slightly pungent.

Sometimes I have caught whiffs of smells in other places that were just a little like it, and they have brought Yearsly back to me more vividly and suddenly than anything else, as though I had just come in by the garden door, and were standing in the hall.

The drawing-room was on the left of the door, as you went in from the garden. It was a very long room, with four tall windows along the side and one at the end, and there were two fireplaces with high chimney-pieces, white marble, with carved figures in faint relief, and over the chimney-pieces were high mirrors that reflected back the green of the garden from the windows facing them. There were yellow brocade curtains, very old and faded, and white shield back chairs upholstered in the same yellow brocade.

The room had been redecorated for our great-great-grandmother, Mary Geraldine, when she came as a bride to Yearsly, in 1802, and it had hardly been altered since her death, eight years later.

A portrait of her by Jackson hung between the two fireplaces, and there was a miniature of her on a little gilt nail by the further fireplace as well; a dark-eyed, laughing face, very charming, very romantic. There was an atmosphere of romance all about her, since her death in Spain when she was twenty-six. She had followed her husband to the Peninsular War and died of fever there. Her body had been embalmed and sent home to be buried at Yearsly, and the story was told of how, when the coffin was opened, it was seen that her hair had gone on growing after her death, long black hair flowing down below her knees, wrapping her round like a great black shawl.

Our great-grandfather had been a little boy, barely seven years old, but this sight he remembered, naturally enough, and he had told it to his children, Guy and Hugo’s grandfather and my grandmother. My grandmother had told it to us. This impressed us very much and increased the indefinable glamour surrounding our young great-great-grandmother. Her husband had preserved everything after her death exactly as she had left it, and so it had remained down to our time. There were her handkerchiefs and pieces of lace, her little volumes of Italian poetry, even chairs and tables remained where she had put them; yet it was a happy sentimentality; there was no sense of a dead hand in the cult of Mary Geraldine. If Cousin Delia’s own personality was gradually, quite imperceptibly, superseding the fainter older one, it was not deliberately nor of set purpose at all. The two personalities, quite distinct and different in themselves, seemed to blend and merge harmoniously, and Yearsly was the richer for both.

Cousin Delia never scolded, and never disapproved. It seems to me, when I think of that time now, that there were no rules at Yearsly, no forbidden places, nothing we might not do. It seems now, as though we had done just what we liked all the day long, only somehow we did not want to do naughty things. To begin with we did not quarrel. I cannot remember any quarrel between Guy and Hugo except once, over a dead robin—when Guy called the cat who killed it cruel, and Hugo insisted that it was not cruel, because it did not understand.

Even then they had not fought, but their voices had been angry, and that was very rare.

We did not want to annoy each other or other people, as my children so often do; we did not want to disobey, but then there were no rules to disobey. Sometimes I have thought that it was easy for Cousin Delia, because Guy and Hugo were so little trouble and so easy to manage, and that I could manage my own children that way, if they had been like them; but this explanation is not enough. Guy and Hugo would not have been so good with another mother. They were not very good at school, and I know that I was often naughty when I was not at Yearsly. I know that it was something in Cousin Delia herself that made the atmosphere; a kind of active peace and contentment that affected us, as it affected the animals and the flowers she had.

She did not play with us often, she seldom took us for walks; she left us much more alone, to ourselves, than I was ever left at my grandmother’s in London, but she was always there when we wanted her, always in the background, doing her own ploys, and because she took pleasure in so many different things in the day, we took pleasure in them also; pigeons and tame birds, that came to her when she went out, and her big dogs and her flowers, and her beautiful embroidery of bright butterflies and flowers. Everything she touched or came in contact with became alive, even the chairs and the curtains, and the little china bowls. There was one chair in the drawing-room that was called the ‘Little Chair.’ It was a little old chair of white-painted wood with a high back and very low seat, and she had covered it herself with an old piece of Mary Geraldine’s gold brocade. This chair was not one of Mary Geraldine’s; it had lain forgotten in a box room till Cousin Delia found it, but now it was a friend. So many things at Yearsly were like that.

Another thing about Cousin Delia was the way she took us as we were, and did not seem to want us different and better all the time, as I do with my children, except perhaps John. We were never afraid to say anything to her, for she was never shocked or disappointed with us. I wonder sometimes if she did disapprove of anything, or merely never thought of what she disliked.

I did not realize this so much until I married Walter, and found that he and his mother disapproved of so many things; and of course my mother did also, though differently.

She would read to us in the evenings, when it was too dark to be outside; sitting by the fire in the long drawing-room, with the lamp beside her. I can see her now, distinctly, if I shut my eyes. In the high-backed arm-chair, her chin resting on her hand, and her elbow on the arm of the chair. The lamplight would fall across her hair and shine redly through her fingers on to the book; and the ends of the room would be dark. Guy and Hugo would be lying on the floor, Hugo almost always on the hearthrug, with his chin in his hands, Guy more sideways, nearer the lamp, and I would be on a footstool beside the fender.

The crackling of a wood fire, wet sap spurting in the logs, the slight warm smell of an oil lamp brings those evening ‘reads’ back to me so vividly, even now, that I could cry to know how long ago they are, and how hopelessly past.

The books she read to us were very varied—Burnt Njal, theMorte d’Arthur,Treasure Island,Ivanhoe, are some I remember particularly, and sometimes poetry; but Guy did not care for poetry so much.

My mother used to say that Cousin Delia was a stupid woman. ‘I have no patience with these beautiful cows,’ she said once. But I do not believe that at all. She could not have read to us as she did, and made us understand and enjoy the books so much, if she had been stupid. I am not clever, I know, and it might not have mattered to me, but it would to Hugo, and I know he never felt her so. He loved her as much as I did, and admired her as much; and Hugo understood people almost always, I think.

After the reading we would go up to bed—running and chasing each other across the high, shadowy hall and up the wide stairs. We had candles with glass shades, so the grease did not drip when we ran. Sometimes I was frightened, when I was the first to run, and Guy and Hugo came after me round the great bends of the staircase; and Hugo was sometimes frightened, but never Guy.

We would separate at the top of the stairs and call ‘Good night’ to each other across the echoing space of the hall. Guy and Hugo slept together at the south side of the house. My room was at the opposite corner, looking out eastward to the beech trees, and at night I could hear the owls in the High Wood calling to the owls in the ivy—till the world seemed full of owls.

On the north side of the house was a small stretch of park, with a drive meandering through it. Once there had been deer in the park, and it was still surrounded by a high iron deer fence, but there were only cows grazing in it now, among the trees. They were Jersey cows, for Cousin John had a prize herd and took great interest in them. They would stand about the house, close up under the dining-room windows, and the soft munching sound they made could be heard distinctly during the pauses in the talk at meals. The dining-room was a panelled room, painted a pale green, with two windows to the north. Our schoolroom led out of it, with one window on to the rose garden and one to the north.

The nursery had been upstairs, where Guy and Hugo now slept, when they were very little, but I can hardly remember the earliest time, when I first came to stay at Yearsly, and afterwards, in the time I think of mostly, we were downstairs in that schoolroom, when we were not out of doors. We made things there; cardboard theatres, and plays and clay statues, and illustrated stories; and we would look out of the window into the garden and show Cousin Delia what we had done.

We used to have tea there too with our governess, Miss Bateson. She was kind to us and we were fond of her, but she was not very important—not nearly so important as Nunky, who had been Guy and Hugo’s nurse, and mine too when I first went to Yearsly, and who looked after us always, in a way, and said good night to us and unpacked for us and saw that our feet were dry. She stayed there always, long after Miss Bateson went away.

There was a round white teapot with bright flowers, raised up a little, on it, and a bright blue bird on each side. It never got broken till Hugo was at Oxford and his scout dropped it—but Hugo had it riveted, and I have got it now. We thought it lovely, and I still do, but Eleanor thinks it absurd, and ‘funny,’ so we don’t use it now. I keep it in a cupboard, and I think I shall give it to John when he marries, if his wife likes it; but perhaps she won’t.

We had very nice brown bread for tea, rather a light brown, and spongy—Mrs. Jeyes made it, the Yearsly cook, who had been there always and stayed always—the servants never changed at Yearsly—and milk and butter from Cousin John’s Jersey cows, specially nice butter. Sometimes one of the cows would look in at the window, the north window, on to the park. Once Guy got out of the window on to a cow’s back, and rode off on it—but the cow kicked him off very soon, and we watched him chasing it and laughing, but he could not get on again.

We had ponies, too, that grazed in the park with the cows. We used to catch them ourselves and ride about bareback on them. When we were older we rode out properly with the coachman, Mathew, and Guy became a great rider. I loved it too, but Hugo did not ride so much when he grew older. I was sorry he didn’t, for I always did the same as he did, when I could.

The dogs were deerhounds. There were always two of them and sometimes three, and Cousin John had black spaniels as well. The dogs lived outside in kennels, or at the stables, but they played with us and were very much part of our life.

It is hard for me now when I think of those years at Yearsly to see them clearly and critically at all. It seems to me now that the life we led was a perfect life, as happy and complete as any children could possibly have. I know that it is unlikely to have been quite perfect, for nothing is; perhaps we were too idle; perhaps we should have been made to work harder and take lessons more seriously. I know Walter thinks we were all spoiled, that the realities of life were not brought before us, and that Guy and Hugo suffered afterwards for this. There may be something in what he says. I don’t know. I only know that it was the happiest part of my life and I believe of theirs too, and that it has helped me afterwards, when things were bad and difficult, to look back to those times and live them over again; and as for Guy and Hugo, they were and are to me all I could wish for anyone to be, and I cannot wish anything at all different about them.

The first big change came when Hugo went to school.

Guy had gone two years before, when he was ten years old. That made a break in our lives, of course; we missed Guy badly, but it seemed somehow in the order of things and natural. It had always been settled for Guy to go away to school when he was ten. He had accepted the idea, and Hugo and I accepted it for him. He was ready to go, and there was nothing tragic in the separation.

He went and came back, and went again and came back again. The term time while he was away passed not interminably, and he slipped back into our life each holiday time without a serious break.

With Hugo it was quite different. We had known that it was intended for him to go some time, but vaguely. Cousin Delia had said so at the time Guy went, and Guy spoke of it from time to time. But it had not seemed real or imminent, and had not worried us. Just as we grown-up people live always with the knowledge of death in front of us, yet do not think of it much, until it comes certainly near.

So two years went by after Guy’s going, and we had grown accustomed to life with him only sometimes there, and were as happy as before, and as free from care. Then, a month after Hugo’s tenth birthday, Cousin Delia told him that he was going to school with Guy the next autumn.

It was June. I found him lying in the hayfield, quite still, on his face with the long flowering grasses and the buttercups above his head.

I had known something was the matter, but I did not know what it was. I was up in our house in the Happy Tree, and I knew suddenly that something had happened bad, that Hugo was in trouble. I came down from the tree and looked for him, and for a long time I could not find him. I looked for him in the Walled Garden, by the Frog Pond, in the Ruin; I knew he was not in the wood; then I went down to the stream and walked along it; and then I began to wonder if Hugo was dead. Then as I came back from the stream I found him, lying like that, in the long grass.

I sat down beside him in the long grass and asked him what had happened, and at first he did not answer.

Two white butterflies were chasing each other backwards and forwards over his head. The buttercups nodded and swayed in the faint wind, and the soft, feathery heads of the grass.

They touched against my cheek, too, as I sat there, squatting on my knees. They were almost as tall as I was.

I bent down and touched him and spoke to him again.

“I am going to school in the autumn,” Hugo said at last, and his voice sounded muffled as though it came from a long way off, and was not his.

It was like being shot—like the world stopping. I sat straight up again; even so the grass came level with my head.

I could not realize it at first; it seemed too dreadful to believe; and then a blind resistance came over me, an unreasoning impulse to protect him from this unbearable thing. I felt much older and stronger than Hugo and very fierce.

I snuggled down beside him and put my arm round his neck. He seemed suddenly very little and helpless, with no one in the world to protect him except me.

‘You shan’t go, Hugo,’ I was saying. ‘I won’t let them.. . .They mustn’t do it.’

Hugo shook his head.

‘It is no good, Helen,’ he said. ‘I shall have to go. I don’t want to. I am afraid of it—and nothing will ever be the same any more.’

I thought he was crying, but he wasn’t, for he sat up then and looked at me.

His face was quite white and his eyes that were always big and dark looked bigger and darker. His whole face looked pinched and tragic as though he saw and understood so much beyond this one thing.

And I realized suddenly, for the first time, the relentlessness of time and the inevitability of change. I understood that I could not resist, and what that meant.

Something was passing, a door was closing, and nothing in the world could hold it open. Hugo was helpless, and I was helpless; and every one. We could not stand still and we could not go back; and what we had had, we could never have again.

I shut my eyes very tight and tried to understand, and a queer feeling came over me that in one moment more I would understand everything—the secret of life and the universe—something unutterably splendid and complete, but the moment passed, the secret receded. It had gone, and I could not grasp it; only the sense of helplessness remained, and of inevitability.

‘Is this growing up?’ I asked Hugo.

And he nodded.

‘I think it is the beginning of growing up,’ he said.

We sat very still for a long time, holding hands and not speaking. The butterflies had fluttered away, but the sun shone just as brightly; birds were singing in the willows by the stream, and somewhere up by the house the dogs were barking.

‘Can you bear it, Hugo?’ I asked at last.

And he answered:

‘I don’t know. They will try and take away my inside world, and perhaps they will take it away, and then what can I do?’

I said:

‘Our inside worlds are too private for that. They wouldn’t know about them at a place like school.’

He said:

‘I have thought of that. One might keep it quite hidden away and pretend.’

I said:

‘People don’t know anything about what one thinks except here, you know, Hugo, and if they don’t know they can’t do any harm.’

‘That’s what Mother says,’ he answered. ‘She says no one can take one’s inside world away ever; and nothing can matter too badly while one has that—but she says one must learn to live outside as well, and school does that—and Guy does that, of course.’

‘Oh, Hugo, what shall I do when you are gone?’

‘I suppose dying is like this,’ Hugo said seriously. ‘One going away—the other being left behind. It happens to every one and yet it is just as bad.’

When we went indoors I found Cousin Delia in the drawing-room. She was standing by the end window, looking out into the rose garden, and her back was to me.

I called her and she looked round. She held out her hand to me and I ran up to her.

‘Must Hugo go to school?’ I asked her, and she nodded her head. I looked up and saw she had been crying.

‘Dear heart, he must—isn’t it cruel?’ she said, and I felt as though I had said already all that I was going to say, and she had answered all. I threw my arms round her and burst into tears.

‘Oh, Cousin Delia, I can’t bear it!’ I cried.

She called me her pet and kissed me, and said again to me what she said to Hugo; it was kinder to him really to send him now, she said.

‘Life will be hard for Hugo,’ she said. ‘I know that. I have always known it; but it will be worse if we put it off. We can’t run away,’ she said. ‘We can’t shut ourselves up for always. He has to go out into the world and fight some time, you know, Helen. Oh, my little Hugo—I would save him if I could!’ She turned suddenly away and sobbed.

I had never seen her cry; she was so quiet and calm as a rule; my mother called her cold—and it frightened me, I felt more than ever that something momentous had happened.

That afternoon we sat in our Happy Tree and told stories and talked very solemnly, about school and life and growing up. After tea Cousin John took us riding on our ponies. He was kind and cheerful as he always was, and did not seem to feel that anything tragic was happening at all. He never understood things as Cousin Delia did, but we enjoyed our ride and were happier after it; and the next morning when we woke up, the grief was less.

This sounds, I expect, a great fuss about nothing. What is it, you will say one little say—boy going to school? But even now, when I think of that day, it seems just as heart-breaking, just as momentous, as it did then. It is not, after all, the event itself that makes the tragedy, or significance, but the effect of that event on the people concerned. Guy’s going to school was not tragic; Hugo’s was. It was like going to the war; like being killed—at least in one way—something terrible to be faced and gone through with; and he did face it and go through with it; and it was not less painful because we were children.

We were happy again that summer, as the days and weeks passed by, but the shadow of the coming autumn was over us. We would remember suddenly in the middle of playing, and stop. One said without thinking, ‘We will do that in the winter—or when the nuts are ripe’—or something of that sort, and then remembered that Hugo would not be there.

Guy was very kind to Hugo.

He said to me:

‘I am sorry for Hugo. You see, I like school. It is different for me—but Hugo minds things more.’

Once, many years later, he said almost the same again. When he was in hospital and very ill, he said:

‘I am worried about Hugo—it is different for a tough fellow like me⸺but Hugo minds things more.’ And I remembered. It was like Guy, dear old Guy; he minded things quite enough in his different way.

The day came at last; the 22nd of September. The last week was a misery, but it passed too; and Guy and Hugo went off together.

Soon after that I left Yearsly and went to London to my grandmother, in Campden Hill Square. My mother was there too, mostly, but she travelled about so much that she did not really live in any place at all. She organized Women’s Trade Unions and societies for Citizenship and things of that kind.

My mother had been at Newnham and got a First Class in Economics. She was very clever and competent. She lectured in Economics too.

I was a disappointment to her, I know, for I was not clever, and not interested in those things at all. I don’t think she would ever have bothered about me much. I don’t think she would ever have cared about children or wanted to be with them. She had not time. And I am glad of that, for if she had cared more, she would not have let me go to Cousin Delia as she did, when my father died, for she did not like Yearsly nor the Lauriers. If she had kept me with her I don’t know what would have happened. I don’t know how I could have grown up at all.

But now when I went back for a bit, it did not matter. It was really my grandmother who counted, and I loved her. She used to be at Yearsly sometimes before, when I was there, and I had gone back to her always from time to time. She was my father’s mother, Mary Geraldine’s granddaughter. She was not different and hostile, as my mother was.

I think that my grandmother must have been a rather wonderful person. My father had loved her very much. I have seen letters he wrote to her from Afghanistan just before he died, and letters when he was a boy, before he was married. She had grown up at Yearsly in the strange time after Mary Geraldine’s death, when our great-great-grandfather was still alive and kept everything like a museum of his wife. His son and daughter-in-law lived with him and their two children. Yet they had not been oppressed by him. They had grown up unwarped and contented, loving their home and their strange old grandfather, and when my grandmother married the chain had not been broken. My father and Cousin John had been more like brothers than cousins, although they must have been very unlike in themselves.

I think now that my father’s marriage must have been a sorrow to her. I don’t think she can have liked my mother really, but in the time I remember she never showed it. She made it easy for my mother to come and go as she wished, with no constraint upon her. She never appeared to disapprove of her—not even of her neglect of me. Of course I did not understand these things at the time. It is only now, looking back, that I see what a difficult situation it must have been, and how well she dealt with it.

I don’t think it would be true to say that I disliked my mother. I admired her in a way, and I think her poor opinion of me had a very strong effect upon me. It was her own doing that I felt her so definitely in opposition to Cousin Delia, and that inevitably raised hostility in me. I think now that it was curious in so clever a woman that she did not conceal her feelings more.

It was only years afterwards that Grandmother told me of my father’s wish for me to go to Delia when he died. He had sent for Cousin Delia and asked her to take care of me, to have me with her at Yearsly as much as she could. My mother did not want me herself, but she could not forget this.

For about two years I was mainly with my grandmother. I had a governess and went to classes with six other little girls.

After that I went away to school. I was not unhappy, but that time did not seem to count. In the holidays, when Guy and Hugo came home, I went to Yearsly, and that was like coming alive again. The holidays were much shorter than the term time, but they stand out in my remembrance as the only real parts of those years.

I believe many children have this power of detachment, almost like a sort of suspended animation—a living quite apart in an untouchable world of one’s own, when the outside world is too uncongenial. Certainly Hugo and I did it. Guy did not need to. It was not that he cared less for home, but he had room for more different enjoyments, more different people and forms of life.

These holidays at Yearsly stretch out, in one way, as an unbroken continuity, so that the time before school and this are not separated really by the big break which we felt at the time.

I have felt like that often with big and important events in life, or what seem to one so at the time. In one sense they are irreparable and complete, and nothing is ever the same again, and in another they seem after a certain time to have made no difference at all.

What is different ‘and what the same’? I suppose there is no test—no way of knowing—just as with a person—they change and yet are the same. When I think of myself as a child, through all these years I am writing about, in one way I see myself as quite a different person⸺a child whom I watch and wonder at, sometimes, and from whom I am quite detached; and yet in another way I feel all the time, that that child and I myself, now, are one. And both are true.

Only Hugo does not change. He grows, of course, and changes to that extent, from a child into a man, but from the earliest time that I remember him, and I cannot remember any time before that, it is the same indescribable personality. He is different and more lovable than other people. Not cleverer, nor better, exactly. Guy could do most things better than he could, and many other people are as good; but no one I have ever met was like Hugo in the special quality he had. Guy felt it too, and Cousin Delia, and the Addingtons did, and, I think, Sophia Lane Watson. Some people did not understand Hugo at all.

Walter didn’t, and some of the people at Oxford. I have heard people say he posed, and gave himself airs, and it used to bewilder me at first that anyone could be so wildly mistaken.

Hugo never posed. I don’t think he could have, if he had tried. He cared so little what other people thought of him. He lived so entirely in a world of his own.

He was kind, and very careful about hurting people’s feelings, when he thought of it, but often he used to forget altogether that anyone was there. He said odd things sometimes, unexpected sort of things, because what he saw struck him in some unexpected light. It would never have occurred to him to say what he said for any other reason.

It used to worry me at one time that Walter did not appreciate Hugo, but that was a long time ago. I see now, and have seen for many years, that they never could have understood each other. They spoke different languages—or rather they used the same words for quite different meanings.

Walter once said:

‘Hugo has charm, certainly, but he is an unsatisfactory fellow. What is there behind all that?’

And another time he said:

‘If Hugo had ever done a good day’s work one would know where one was with him.’

And I could not explain. Hugo did work in his own way constantly, practically all day long, but it was not the kind of work that Walter could recognize or admit. Hugo was living and taking in and trying to understand all the time. If Hugo went for a ride on a bus—afterwards, when we were older—he found drama and beauty and queer exciting romance. He would tell one when he came back sometimes about it. The other people in the bus, people he had looked down on walking in the street, lights and shadows in a fog, sunsets in smoke, everything and anything was exciting and inspiring to Hugo; and some one else might have been the same bus ride and seen nothing at all.

It was not that he was exactly observant, for he wasn’t. Often he noticed nothing when other people did. But he had a world of his own in which he lived a great deal, and sometimes—you never knew when—outside sights and sounds responded to something in it, and there was an illumination, a sudden quickening into life, of all around.

We who knew Hugo and loved him understood this. I don’t think Walter could have been expected to understand; he was too different.

Scenes stand out to me from those school-time years.

Chiefly in summer. The summer holidays were longer—and the summer days at Yearsly were lovelier than anywhere else.

The sound of the mowing machine in the clear mornings; haymaking along the grass hill below the wood;—tossingthe hay and playing in it; romping in the little ‘pikes’ of hay with the dogs. One hot afternoon in particular—it must have been late in August, for they were cutting the corn in the field beyond the willows—paddling in the stream while Guy fished.

Then there were agricultural shows; one in particular I remember, when Guy rode his pony in a jumping competition and won the second prize.

That must have been September, for the corn was cut in nearly all the fields. We drove, Hugo and I, with Cousin Delia in the dog-cart. Guy had ridden over earlier with Cousin John. It was at Shelbury, nearly nine miles away, and we had tea in a tent at the show, and wandered round the field and looked at the horses and the cows—Cousin John was showing his Jersey cows—and flowers in a big marquee and cheeses and butter and eggs. There was the noise of the farmers talking, and the soft stamping noise of the horses, and lowing of cows, and the hot strong sunlight over everything; and then the excitement when Guy’s competition came on. He had a grey pony called Griselda, and he rode very well. Hugo and I were breathless with anxiety when it touched the bar once and knocked it down. But there were two chances, and the second time he cleared it. When he rode up to us afterwards with his blue badge we were desperately proud of him, and some of the farmers came and congratulated him, for the boy who won the first prize was much older than Guy, and they were very close.

Afterwards we drove back in the cool of the evening, and all along the road there were people coming away from the show, and cattle and horses, and carts, and some called out good night to us as we passed, and we felt how nice they all were; and when we had turned off the main road on our way to Yearsly, the horses’ hooves sounded on the road in the stillness, and we heard the rooks cawing over the trees in the High Wood, and saw them wheeling in great circles, getting ready for bed; and we saw the smoke going up very straight into the sky before we could see the house; and we were very happy.

Walter laughed at me when I first told him that I liked agricultural shows. He thought I was joking. It seemed to him, he said, an impossible thing to like. But I do and always have. We went to them often at Yearsly.

Guy was in the first eleven at Winchester. He sang and he danced, and he rode, and he shot, and he fished, and he played tennis—all well. Hugo and I did most of these things too, but not as Guy did. It seemed at that time that there was nothing Guy could not do. He was handsome too, not taller than Hugo, but much stronger and browner, and he held himself better, and walked as though the earth belonged to him. His eyes were grey—very merry eyes—and his hair bright brown. Every one loved Guy. Hugo worshipped him.

He said:

“There is no one in the world like Guy. He can do everything.”

One had the feeling about Guy that the world must be his to do what he liked with; that he could do or have whatever he set his heart on. He threw his head right back when he laughed, and opened his mouth very wide. Anyone who heard Guy laugh was bound to laugh too. You could not help it; it made the world full of laughter.

He used to sing with Cousin Delia a great deal. His voice was a pleasure to her, and his love for the songs she loved.

I remember them singing the ‘Agnus Dei’ from Mozart’s Third Mass one winter evening in the long drawing-room. Guy looked so tall and big in the lamplight, and Cousin Delia so happy; and he let himself go and sang with all his might. It was exciting and wonderful.

Sometimes people came to stay—various cousins and second cousins—and sometimes Guy and Hugo brought friends back from Winchester; but most of them did not count very much.

Guy used to hunt too, and made friends with people he met out hunting. They would come to meals and sometimes spend the night. We liked them when they came, but did not miss them when they went away. We were I think too contented by ourselves. Later when they were at Oxford they made friends who counted in a different way, and became a part of all our lives.

Hugo was very happy at this time. When I think of him in those years, it is generally happy. He did not laugh as Guy did, loud, with his head thrown back; his was a lower, more gurgling kind of laughter; but his eyes danced and his whole face twinkled.

I remember his laughing at me one day in the hay. They were making hay on the grass hill below the wood, and we had been helping, and he threw himself down on one of the new-made ‘pikes,’ and Guy and I had buried him; and he burrowed out, and his head came through all tangled and stuck over with hay, and his dark laughing eyes shone out of the nest of hay like some wild, but not frightened animal.

One summer we had a passion for Conrad, and read aloud to each other up in our Happy Tree. Another time it was Shakespeare that we discovered for ourselves. Hugo knew a great deal of poetry by heart, more than anyone I have met, but he was not a mooning, moping sort of boy as poetical people are supposed to be. He loved games and swimming and fishing and dancing too—when we were older and used to dance.

I think one of the special qualities about both Guy and Hugo was the way they enjoyed so many different things.

We used to fish in the stream very often—long afternoons with the sun flickering through the willows on to the clear bright water. There was a big pool to the east of the house, below the temple, with a willow slanting out across it, almost horizontally, from the bank, and the bank was rather high. There were perch there, and ling. Sometimes Cousin John would come with us and teach us the art of ‘casting,’ or tell us about places he had fished in in Norway, and in Persia. He had been in the diplomatic service when he was a young man, before he married. He knew endless curious unrelated things, about places and people and armour and folklore, and the history of weapons of all sorts

Guy would fish for hours at a time, sitting almost motionless on the slanting willow, but Hugo and I would bring books with us as a rule. We would fish for a bit and then read for a bit and then fish again. Guy thought that rather childish, but he never interfered with us or tried to stop us. That was, I think, part of the special charm of Yearsly. No one ever interfered with anyone else. There was no pressure on anyone or anything to be different from what it was.

One thing we missed during these years was the autumn at Yearsly, when the trees in the High Wood turned red and gold, and the leaves floated down about you as you walked, through the still air, and rustled round your feet. There was a blue haze among the tree trunks and a nip in the air, and often the smell of bonfires, burning up leaves and sticks, and the dew on the grass would lie thick till midday, though the sun was shining. And in the walled garden, the dahlias would be out, and dark red chrysanthemums and michaelmas daisies, and old Joseph, the gardener, would be pottering slowly about the summer borders, clearing up, and rooting out and burning up piles of finished flowers, on the rubbish heap behind the potting shed.

We had to go back to school now, at the very beginning of autumn, leaving with the trees still green and coming back again when they were quite bare.

In the Christmas holidays there were carol singings. Cousin Delia trained the people in the village to sing carols, and they would come in and sing in the hall by candle-light, sometimes with lanterns in their hands, on Christmas Eve; and Guy would sing with them, and Cousin Delia would teach them special things, besides carols. Once it was Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. And Guy sang the solo parts. I think that is the most beautiful music I know. They stood there in the shadow of the hall, about twenty people altogether, with their lanterns on the ground. The light flickered upward on the dark wood of the staircase and on faces here and there, but it was mostly shadow, and the sound of the voices rose up and died away in the high darkness of the roof. Sometimes they would go round being waits and sing at other houses, and at farms, and we would go with them, walking back with our lantern after midnight over dark frosty fields, with stars very clear in the frost. Of course it was not always like that—sometimes it was wet and we had colds, and it was all a disappointment—but not often, and somehow I don’t remember those times.

We had Christmas Trees too, generally on New Year’s Day, and the children from the village came, and some old people, and then there would be games.

My grandmother came to stay very often at Christmas. We all liked it when she came.

My own life at school was uneventful. I was not unhappy, nor unkindly treated. I think it was rather a good school, but I did not learn much, and it never mattered to me one way or another. It was time to be lived through, and that was all; and I lived through it without much trouble or distress.

I was not naughty, so far as I can remember. I did not get into scrapes or mischief. But I was not clever at all. Arithmetic I have never been able to do, or the things connected with Arithmetic, and subjects like Literature and Poetry were badly taught. I had learned much more of them from Cousin Delia and from Hugo.

The only friend I made at school was Sophia Lane Watson. She was two years younger than me, and came to school when she was thirteen, so I had been there nearly three years when she came. But I was struck by her as soon as I saw her, and we made friends in a kind of way, almost at once.

She was standing in the ‘girls’ hall when I saw her first. It was the first day of the summer term, and everything was in a bustle: the noise and uncomfortableness of arrivals; girls rushing about everywhere and shouting to each other, and slapping each other on the back or kissing, according to the ‘set’ they belonged to. How I did hate those ‘first days’ at school!

I had come by a different train from most of the others—I don’t remember why—and drove up from the station alone. They had taken my luggage in, and I walked in by myself; and there I saw Sophia Lane Watson, standing quite still by the fireplace in the ‘girls’ hall.’ She was quite alone, not talking to anyone, nor reading; just standing still and watching all the hurrying about, quite impassively, with a perfectly expressionless face. She did not look shy or frightened or unhappy—just quite detached—and that interested me. She was a striking-looking child too, with her very big eyes and her straight black hair, and her very white face. Her eyes always looked so dark, much darker than mine or even Hugo’s; but they were not black or brown when you saw them close, only grey, sometimes almost green. She was medium height and very thin, and her hands and feet were too big; but rather beautifully made. Her clothes always looked as though they were falling off her; her skirt was always crooked, sagging down in a tail, either behind or at one side. She was certainly not pretty, though I still think she was prettier at that time than afterwards. Perhaps it was only that her queerness was more attractive in a child.

She certainly did attract me. I know I stopped then, on my way through the hall, and looked at her, and she looked at me perfectly stonily, without any change of expression. Then I went upstairs to my room and found the three other girls in it, all talking and sitting on their beds, and I had to stay and talk to them a few minutes while I took off my things; but when I came downstairs again, I went straight up to Sophia and asked her her name. She was still standing exactly as I had left her.

She answered rather slowly:

‘Sophia Lane Watson.’ Her voice was rather deep; a curious voice.

Then I asked her age, and she told me she was thirteen. She was not very easy to talk to, for she merely answered my questions and volunteered nothing. But I persevered, and offered to take her round the school, and show her the classrooms, and afterwards we went into the garden and walked round the playing field, and we sat together at tea.

She told me that she lived at Salchester, that her father was a Canon of the Cathedral, that she had two brothers and one sister, and that she had never been at school before.

I don’t know why, but I felt curiously consoled by her having come. The utter blankness of that first day, the blocks of bread at tea, the noise and hurry and ugliness, seemed less unbearable than usual, and I had a feeling when I went to bed that evening that something important, pleasantly important, had happened.

Sophia Lane Watson and I made friends. It was a rather odd friendship, never very intimate. I used to doubt sometimes if she could be intimate with anybody. She seemed to live her own life inside a sort of fortress, and although she would open the door a little way, she never opened it wide and let one really in. And for me, any friendship at school was a subsidiary thing, not comparable really to my friendship for Guy and Hugo.

But life at school was very different for me after she had come.

She used to surprise me often; sometimes she shocked me; she seemed to have thought and decided upon so many subjects which had never crossed my mind at all.

She told me about the second week of our acquaintance that she was an atheist and an anarchist. She looked at me with a sort of quiet defiance as she said it, and added:

‘It is best to be quite plain about it—now you know.’

I don’t think I was very sure at the time what either meant. We had never discussed religion or politics at Yearsly. That may seem odd, but it had never come our way, and I only associated anarchists with bombs; but I was not disturbed, for I was sure that I liked Sophia.

She leant me Shelley’sEssays, and expounded Atheism and Anarchy of a very theoretic kind to me, and I was a good deal impressed. The very fact of not having defined my own beliefs made the shaking of them less severe. Afterwards of course I told Hugo what she had said, and he too read theNecessity of Atheismand was interested in it; but Hugo never cared very much for Shelley, not as he cared for Keats, and Shakespeare, and Campion, andParadise Lost.

Sophia was at this time a Shelley devotee. She knew hundreds of lines by heart, not only the lyrics, but a great deal of the political verse as well. I remember her walking down the passage from her bath, in a blue dressing gown, saying over and over with intense feeling: ‘I met Murder by the way; He had a Mask like Castlereagh,’ and she told me about this time that she thought if Castlereagh were alive now she would kill him.

‘Or at least I would like to try,’ she added with the sudden drop into reasonableness which often surprised one.

She would talk endlessly on subjects of this sort—freedom and tyranny, and what truth was, and whether there was such a thing as goodness. I expect most of what she said was nonsense, but even so, she must have been precocious for a child of thirteen. But of her personal feelings she hardly ever spoke, nor of her home.

I thought at first she was homesick, but she was not. I don’t think she liked her home any more than school. She gave me the feeling sometimes of a creature at bay, on the defensive somehow against life. She said once—I forget how the subject came up:

‘I hate pretty people—my sister is pretty.’

And another time when I had been speaking about Yearsly, she looked at me seriously with her big green eyes and said:

‘It is curious how you love Guy and Hugo. I should have thought you would dislike them, being brought up with them like that.’

These were the sort of things that shocked me at first, but not when I knew her better. I realized then that she did not mean them in a shocking way.

I thought how differently I should feel if I had not lived at Yearsly, if, for instance, my own mother had brought me up, and I felt very sorry for Sophia, and that made me like her more.

She was in a higher form than me, although she was younger, and I did not see much of her during the day, but in our second term we were put to sleep together, just us two in the room, and we used to talk in the mornings and evenings, and on Sundays, when we went for walks. Sophia had been ill and she was not allowed to play games. She always went for walks, and I did so too when I could, and walked with her.

It was the end of that second term that she made her sensation.

There were always recitations at the end of that term, and a prize for the best recitation. That time there was a choice of three pieces, all Shakespeare, and one was Lady Macbeth’s speech.

I was considered good at this, and there were two or three others who were good. Nobody expected anything of Sophia—she was so unemotional and stiff as a rule.

And then suddenly she took us all by storm.

She stood up on the platform, looking like a ghost, and the moment she began to speak a thrill ran through us all. There were visitors there, parents and people, and they too were completely taken by surprise.

It was not like a child reciting at all. Her great deep voice rose and fell, with an odd little break in it at times. She held her hands in front of her and rubbed at the spot like some one in a dream. It was, I still believe, a marvellous bit of acting, quite on a different level from anything we were used to. When it was over there was a thunder of applause, and Miss Ellis, the head mistress, went across to Sophia and shook hands with her. The recitals were her special subject, and the visitors were all asking who Sophia was.

Sophia slipped off at the back of the platform and came back to her seat in the hall, but afterwards when the prize-giving was over people crowded up to her, girls and their parents and mistresses. There was a buzzing and a fuss, and I could see that Sophia was not liking it. Then she disappeared, and when Miss Ellis wanted to introduce her to a distinguished old man who had written about Shakespeare she couldn’t be found, and Miss Ellis was annoyed. Afterwards I found her under her bed, crying bitterly on the floor. She was quite wild and wouldn’t come out, and told me to go away. At last I got her to come out, and tried to find out what had upset her, but for a long time I couldn’t make out. She kept saying that she could never come back to school now, she could never face the girls again.

‘Why did I do it?’ she wailed. ‘What possessed me to do it? Now I have let them inside and I have given myself away. Oh, it is awful! And perhaps they will say something about it at home!’

I thought vaguely that she must have some plan of going on the stage, but it was not that.

‘Don’t you understand?’ she said at last. ‘It is as though you had got up and told all that crowd just what you feel about Guy and Hugo and Cousin Delia. You couldn’t live if you had done that, could you? Can’t you imagine it?—EllaPrice and Rosa Baylis and all of them.’

She was beside herself. I think now it was probably a reaction from excitement, and that she hardly knew what she said, but I was frightened then. I did what I could with her, and got her into bed. I think she agreed to go to bed as a means of avoiding the girls downstairs. Then I told a Miss Singleton, whom we both liked, that she was not well, and Miss Singleton came up to see her. I don’t know how much she told Miss Singleton.

The next morning the school broke up, and we all went away. I wondered if Sophia would come back after all the next term. She did; but she would not speak about that evening, and she would not recite again all the time she was at school.

I told Hugo about it in the holidays, and he did not seem at all surprised.

‘I quite understand her feeling like that,’ he said. ‘That is if it was really good, you know, not just good, but really first-rate, and it must have been from what you say. Like saying your prayers aloud, real prayers, and then finding suddenly you had done it.. . .I should like to see that Sophia.’

I asked Sophia to come to Yearsly at Easter, but she couldn’t. One of her brothers had whooping cough, and she was in quarantine; and I asked her again in the summer, but for some other reason she couldn’t come.

When she did come for a few days the next year, Hugo was disappointed in her. She didn’t talk and seemed out of it, and Guy thought her too ‘intellectual.’ He was in a phase of disliking ‘intellectual women.’

Sophia wrote a great deal of poetry. She did not show it to me till I had known her over a year. I don’t know now if it was good; I thought so then. It was odd, passionate stuff, very correct in form. She wrote a good many sonnets, some obscure, rather mystical things about the universe, and some love poems, which surprised me very much. I wanted to show them to Hugo, but she would not let me.

‘I don’t want anyone to see them ever,’ she said. ‘I have only shown them to you—and I shall be sorry about that!’

At the end of her second year at school Sophia got pneumonia. She was very ill indeed, and there were special prayers for her in the school service.

Several girls cried. Ella Price came up to me afterwards, wiping her eyes.

‘I shall never forgive myself,’ she sobbed, ‘never, if anything happens to Sophia.’

‘You were always unkind to her,’ I said.

Then I was sorry for Ella, for I thought how terrible it would be if Sophia did die, and she knew she had been unkind.

‘I don’t think you mattered very much to her,’ I said.

It did not console Ella, but it was the most I could say. I was unhappy about Sophia, and it made me angry with the people who had been unkind.

Sophia got better, and when she was better I was allowed to sit with her, and I asked her one day if she had been frightened when she was so ill.

She looked at me a long time without speaking, and her eyes looked enormous.

‘Not frightened of dying,’ she said. ‘I heard them talking once, and they said, “Not much hope now—just a chance,” and I was glad.’

I thought:

‘ “Not much more to face.” I can’t face life when I am tired.’

It gave me a shiver to hear her.

‘Are you really so unhappy, Sophia?’ I asked.

And she said:

‘Not unhappy, exactly—but I do hate life. I feel it trying to down me all the time, and sometimes I am afraid that it will in the end.’

I wondered what Cousin Delia would have made of Sophia. She would not have felt like that, I thought, if she had been with Cousin Delia.

Sophia and I remained friends, but as the time went on it was not equal. She needed me more than I needed her. I think she wanted some one to admire and love very much, and she had no one else—and of course I had.

She said to me once:

‘I wonder sometimes what it would be like to be lovely like you.’

And I laughed at her and said:

‘But you don’t like pretty people.’ But I was pleased.

She said quite seriously:

‘I feel differently about it since I have known you, and besides, you’re more than pretty. You’relovely. It’s like the sun coming out of clouds when you come into a room!’

I laughed at her, but I liked her saying that, all the same. Nobody had said things like that to me before.

When I went home the next holidays I wondered if Guy and Hugo thought me pretty, and Cousin Delia. I wanted to ask them, but I couldn’t.

What I enjoyed perhaps most at school was the dancing.

We had dancing lessons twice a week and practice dances on Saturday evenings.

It was like discovering a new world to me, learning to dance. We only danced with each other, of course, and with whichever partner was allotted to us, except on Saturdays, when we chose as we liked. There was one girl called Flora Hilman, whom I always danced with when I could. She was very tall, with red hair, and she danced beautifully. We hardly ever spoke to each other in between, but we danced together whenever we could, and I forgot everything else when we were dancing. I expect she did too, but she never said so and I never asked her.

I met her once after leaving school. She was walking in Kensington Gardens with a man in a top hat, and I was with Guy. We stopped when we saw each other and looked pleased. I think we both thought at first that we had lots to say to each other, and then found there was nothing at all. We said:

‘How funny to meet here.’

But it wasn’t funny really, as we both lived in London.

Then we said:

‘How nice to see you again,’ or something like that.

And she said:

‘Do you ever go down to Ellsfield now?’ (The School was called Ellsfield.)

And I said:

‘No, do you?’

And she said:

‘Yes, I do sometimes.’

Then we waited a minute or two, and Guy and the man in the top hat said something to each other, and then we said ‘Good-bye.’

I have never seen her again. Somebody told me she had married a German just before the war, but I didn’t believe it somehow, I don’t know why.

Sophia couldn’t dance at all. It was funny how she couldn’t learn, and I think she was sorry about it. And she couldn’t play the piano. She started to learn Russian about this time. She got a dictionary and grammar, and some Russian books, and she used to try and learn it in odd moments, in bed at night, and at times when she ought to be preparing lessons. She had a passion for Tolstoy at this time, and said she must read him in the original. She did not get time to do much at school, but she learned quite a lot by herself in the holidays.

It seems odd in a way, considering how much we were friends at that time, that we did not keep up with each other more afterwards. It was my fault, I think. I left school two years before she did, and my life was so full of other things and people that she slipped out. We wrote to each other for a time, and she kept on writing for a bit after I had stopped. It was on my mind, I know, that I had not answered her letters. I kept meaning to, and putting it off, and then I wrote and she did not answer, and we let it drop. When we met again, later, it was quite a different thing, just as one meets a stranger.

When I was sixteen my mother married again and went away for good. She married a Canadian judge, with some special scheme for prison reform. He had reorganized the penal system in Manitoba, my mother said, and that interested her. They went to live in Winnipeg, and only came back at long intervals to visit England. I believe she was happy in Winnipeg. She ran evening classes and formed Women’s Societies of different kinds. When I saw her next, about five years later, she seemed to me kinder than before, and more tolerant, and I think that may have been because she was happier.

Once, long after this, Cousin Delia said that she had been sorry for my mother, and that had surprised me very much. She had never seemed the sort of person one could be sorry for, but when Cousin Delia said that it made me think about it, and I wondered if she understood that nobody cared for her, none of my father’s people, I mean, and I wondered if perhaps that had made her harder and more aggressive. After all, she could not help being what she was, always wanting to alter things and put people right, and of course if she was like that, it must have been disappointing for her that my father was not and that I was not. I can see too that to her, Cousin Delia might be irritating just because she was so peaceful and didn’t want to upset things at all.

They never said they did not like her; they were very careful about that, except Guy and Hugo, of course; but I knew, and I knew that Cousin Delia had asked her to come to Yearsly and that she never came.

Her marriage made very little difference to me, but it was a certain relief. I felt as though a quite vague fear had been removed—a fear that some time she might assert herself and claim me, and take me away from Cousin Delia and my grandmother. Now I knew she would not.

The next thing that happened was Guy’s twenty-first birthday. He had been at Oxford two years by then, and Hugo was just leaving Winchester.

It was on the 15th of July, and there was a party at Yearsly.

On the day before there was a dinner to the tenants and a school treat, but on the day itself there were no official festivities, just a party of people Guy wanted, mostly staying in the house, and a dance in the evening in the hall.

Hugo and I had come back from school for it, for the school terms were not quite over. It was my first real dance, and I was very excited.

A good many people were staying in the house. There were three Oxford friends of Guy’s—Ralph Freeman, John Ellis and Anthony Cowper. Ellis and Cowper had been at Winchester with him too, and stayed with us before. Ralph Freeman was new. Then there were Mary and Margaret Lacey, second cousins of Guy and Hugo on the other side, they too had stayed at Yearsly before, and Faith Vincent, the Vicar’s daughter, and Claude Pincent, who was also some sort of cousin of Cousin Delia’s. There were no other Laurier cousins, for my grandmother and Hugo’s grandfather had no other children but our fathers.

Claude Pincent too had come before, but not often. He was older than Guy and had been at Cambridge. He was supposed to be a very brilliant young man, and we were a little bit in awe of him. He was distinguished looking, with bright, big eyes and a crest of hair. He seemed much more mature and experienced than we were, and that impressed us too.

In the afternoon we bathed in the fishing pool by the willow, and then we had tea down there by the stream. Cousin Delia and Cousin John were at the picnic, and we liked them to be there. They never spoiled the fun of what we did—even rather silly young parties like this one.

It was a perfect day, hot and almost cloudless, and the hay was not yet cut. Buttercups danced in the long grass, just as they had on that day nine years before when we heard that Hugo was going to school.

The pool was hardly big enough to swim in, but it was clear and deep and very lovely, and the dogs came too. Maurice, the deerhound, stood on the bank and watched us, but Libbet and Oscar, the spaniels, jumped in after us and swam all about. Then we lay in the long grass—we were allowed to spoil the hay for this occasion—and had tea, and laughed a great deal at silly jokes, and then we lay still and were lazy, and before we knew where we were it was time to pack up the tea things and get ready for the dance.

The Hall had been decorated since the morning. Cousin Delia and old Joseph had done it together, and I had helped them for a bit. There were big clusters of roses in silver vases—light coloured roses against the dark wood of the stairs and the panelled wall—and four white lilies in pots at the four corners, and there were sconces with pale green candles fixed up along the walls to light later on, when it got dark.

Mary and Margaret were sharing a room, and Faith Vincent, who was a special friend of theirs, had brought her dress to change in their room. I was alone in mine and I was glad. It was always the same room, looking out into the beech trees on one side, and the big light window to the north, and the shiny chintz curtains were the same that I had always had, and the little comfortable arm-chairs. There was a special jug and basin too—rather too small for general use, but pretty—very fine clear china and hand-painted flowers. Cousin Delia had put it there for me when I was little and I would not have it changed. Now there was a shining brass can of hot water waiting for me and a thick soft towel over it, and Nunky came in to help me dress.

I had a pale yellow dress, very pale yellow and very soft and plain. It was the first time I had worn a low-cut evening gown. The first time too that my hair was to be done up.

Nunky was as pleased dressing me as though she had been dressing a doll. I had yellow stockings and satin shoes too, and Cousin Delia had given me a coloured Spanish shawl, which belonged to Mary Geraldine. It was a beautiful shawl. The colours were a little faded, but still brilliant. It had a creamy background and a quaint intricate pattern of bright flowers upon it; red and pink flowers and bright green leaves.

I sat in front of the looking-glass while Nunky did my hair, and laughed at myself and her, reflected smiling at me in the glass.

My hair was not difficult to do, for it was always curly—a little bit curly, so that it stayed where it was put—and very bright golden brown. I know that it was pretty hair. It is so long ago now, that it is not silly to say so, for it isn’t like that any more.

I was pleased with my hair done up. It looked much nicer, I thought, than just tied behind with a ribbon. And with the stockings and the satin slippers and the dress. I was pleased with my bare neck and arms. I had a dark blue enamel bracelet that was almost black, and a little necklace of yellow topaz, that my father had brought back from India for me when I was a baby.

Then Cousin Delia came in to see me, and she turned me round and round, and then she kissed me, smiling as though she were pleased.

‘Dear heart,’ she said.

I put the Spanish shawl round my shoulders: I loved its many colours and its softness and we went downstairs.

They were mostly there already, standing about in the hall. Hugo was in the furthest corner talking to Anthony Cowper and Faith Vincent. Guy was standing at the foot of the stairs with Claude. They looked up at us as we came down. Cousin Delia came first, and I followed her. The candles were not lit yet, for it was still broad daylight, but the hall seemed filled with light, as though it were illuminated—coming down into it, with its flowers, from the shadow of the stairs. They both looked up at me and smiled.

Guy said:

‘That’s splendid, Helen. You do look nice’—and he too looked pleased.

I laughed and went past them into the hall, and as I passed I heard Claude say to Guy:

‘I say, Guy, that little cousin of yours is a beauty!’

And I felt all warm and glowing, and as though I was stepping on air. I ran across to Hugo, and he turned to look at me.

‘Jolly,’ he said, ‘and that shawl is just right. I love that shawl.’

There was supper first, two long tables in the dining-room; and after supper more people arrived, various neighbours, and the dancing began.

The music was in the drawing-room with the doors open, and we danced in the hall. The floor was polished oak, very smooth and perfect for dancing, and there were chairs at the end for the older people who were there.

Claude came up and asked me to dance, and I said, ‘Oh, the first is for Hugo’—butI danced with him afterwards, three times, and then with Guy.

Guy was the best dancer I know. It was like his riding and his singing and everything he did—a complete mastery and ease, as though it all came naturally to him with no trouble or effort at all.

Hugo was not so perfect, but I loved dancing with him, and we danced together a great deal.

Later the candles were lit, the pale green candles on the wall, but it was not dark outside, hardly twilight, and the big doors were open at each end of the hall, and people went out between the dances and walked about or sat in chairs on the lawn.

Hugo and I went out into the garden. We were hot with dancing and it was cooler outside.

There was a crescent moon, low down still over the walled garden, and a long line of pink sky where the sun had just gone down. There were stars beginning to show, pale stars in the light sky, and the air was very warm and still.

We turned towards the walled garden. Cousin Delia’s roses smelt sweet as we passed them, and we stopped and wandered about on the little flagged paths among the cupids. The tune of the last waltz kept echoing through my head, and my feet seemed to be dancing while we walked.

‘It is too hot to go in for a bit,’ said Hugo, ‘and awfully nice out here.’

And I said:

‘Yes, it is nice out here too.’

The jasmine on the Jasmine Gate smelled strong in the warm air. We stopped to smell it. There was something strange and exciting in the strong scent—all the garden round seemed excited that night, still and expectant and waiting for something, and I was excited, and Hugo. He pushed open the Jasmine Gate and we walked through into the walled garden. A spray of jasmine was hanging down. It caught in my hair as we stepped under it. I put up my hand to pull it away, but I couldn’t at first. Hugo undid it for me. He broke off the spray and gave it to me, and I stuck it into the front of my dress. The Spanish shawl slipped down from my shoulder and Hugo lifted it up. The music had begun in the house again. We could hear it, dimmed by the distance and the high garden wall. Up in the High Wood the owls had begun to call.

I looked up at Hugo and found him looking at me. There was something strange in his eyes that I had never seen before. I felt elated and a little frightened, and still very excited and happy. We stood and looked at each other, without speaking, and then Hugo touched my arm.

‘Oh, Helen, how lovely you are!’ he said suddenly. ‘I never knew you were like this!’

There was an odd excitement in his voice, and his face was very white. He was breathing fast.

A thrill ran through me, and then I was afraid. I looked at Hugo and he looked at me, and I felt his fingers, warm and strange, on my bare arm.

And it seemed to me suddenly that he had become strange himself—that he was not the Hugo I knew at all. I found that I was trembling all over, and could not stop. I could not bear his fingers on my arm. I wanted to pull it away, but I did not dare.

Then Hugo stepped back and took his hand away, and it seemed as though something had snapped. It seemed as though a barrier had come down between us, and we were suddenly very far apart. Something had happened to us that I could not understand. We had become strangers to each other and to ourselves, and for the first time in our lives we were afraid of each other, and shy.

Again I had the sense of a door closing, of time passing and not to be called back. It will never be the same again, never in all our lives, I said to myself, and a sense of complete desolation came over me. It seemed to me then that the best thing in my life had gone irretrievably. We had broken something that could never be mended.

I shivered, and Hugo asked if I was cold.

I said:

‘Yes, a little,’ and we turned back towards the house.

Hugo felt the same as I did, or something like it.

I knew that, and he knew that I knew, but we could not speak of what we felt. For the first time in our lives we had something to hide.

We turned back towards the house, through the Jasmine Gate, and past the rose garden. Francis, the cat, ran silently across the lawn in front of us. Two people were walking about by the statues at the end of the path. I think they were Anthony Cowper and Mary Lacey, but they did not matter. The light streamed out from the windows of the drawing-room, and in a great shaft from the open garden door. The music was stopping again as we reached it, and more couples came out, laughing, and some wiping their faces, for the night was still very warm. Hugo and I went in. We did not dance together again that evening, and the light had gone out for me.

I did not know what I had done, but I felt miserable, and somehow oddly ashamed.

The next day both Hugo and I went back to school.

We did not meet again till the end of the summer, for that August Guy and Hugo went abroad, to France and Italy.

My grandmother came to Yearsly with me, and part of the time the Lacey girls were there, but the place seemed empty and all wrong without Guy and Hugo.

They came back in September only a week before I went back to school, and two other friends of Guy’s came too.

In October Hugo went up to Oxford with Guy, but I did not see them there till the next spring.

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