5
The mile of gently rising roadway leading to the Heath was overarched by huge trees. Shadowy orchards, and the silent sunlit outlying meadows and park land of a large estate streamed gently by them beyond the trees as they strode along through the cool leaf-scented air. They strode speechlessly ahead as if on a pilgrimage, keeping step. Harriett’s stylish costume had a strange unreal look in the great lane, under the towering trees. Miriam wondered if she found it dull and was taking it so boldly because they were walking along it together. Obviously she did not want to talk. She walked along swiftly and erect, looking eagerly ahead as if, when they reached the top and the Heath and the windmill, they would find something they were both looking for. Miriam felt she could glance about unnoticed and looked freely, as she had done so many hundreds of times before, at the light on the distant meadows and lying along the patches of undergrowth between the trunks of the trees. They challenged and questioned her silently as they had always done and she them, in a sort of passionate sulkiness. They gave no answer, but the scents in the cool tree-filled air went on all the time offering steady assurance, and presently as walking became an unconscious rhythm and the question of talk or no talk had definitely decided itself, the challenge of the light was silenced and the shaded roadway led on to paradise. Was there anyone anywhere who saw it as she did? Anyone who looking along the alley of white road would want to sit down in the roadway or kneel amongst the undergrowth and shout and shout? In the north of London there were all those harsh street voices infesting the trees and the parks. No! they did not exist. There was no North London. Let them die. They did not know the meaning of far-reaching meadows, park-land, deer, the great silent Heath, the silent shoulders of the windmill against the far-off softness of the sky. Harsh streetiness ... cunning, knowing ... do you blame me? ... or charwomanishness, smarmy; churchy or chapelish sentimentality. Sentimentality. No need to think about them.
“Never the time and the place and the loved one all together.” Who said that? Was it true? Dreadful. It couldn’t be. So many people had seen moonlit gardens, together. All the happy people who were sure of each other. “I say, Harriett,” she said at the top of her voice, bringing Harriett curvetting in the road just in front of her. “I say, listen.” Harriett ran up the remaining strips of road and out on to the Heath. It was ablaze with sunlight—as the river and the trees had been yesterday—a whole day of light and Eve on her way home, almost home. Harriett must not know how she was rushing to Eve; with what tingling fingers. “Oh, what I was going to ask you was whether you can see the moonlight like it is when you are alone, when Gerald is there.”
“... It isn’t the same as when you are alone,” said Harriett quietly, arranging the cuff of her glove.
“Do explain what you mean.”
“Well, it’s different.”
“I see. You don’t know how.”
“Does Gerald like the moonlight?”
“I dunno. I never asked him.”
“Fancy the Roehampton people living up here all the time.”
“There’s their old washing going flip-flap over there.”
Harriett was finding out that she was back in the house with Eve.
“Let’s rush to the windmill. Let’s sing.”
“Come on; only we can’t rush and sing too.”
“Yes we can, come on.” Running up over hillocks and stumbling through sandy gorse-grown hollows they sang a hunting song, Miriam leading with the short galloping phrases, Harriett’s thinner voice dropping in, broken and uncertain, with a strange brave sadness in it that went to Miriam’s heart.