1
That year there was a marvellous harvest, and by the end of July the sun had burned the wheat into the very quintessence of gold, and every evening for a few moments the reflection of its dying rays transfigured it into a vision, so glorious, so radiant, that Dick, looking up from his fish, would exclaim to the dinner-table, “Good God! Look at the wheat!”
Thus must the memory of the corn of Cana, sown with symbols, heavy with memories and legends, radiant with gleams caught from the Golden City in the skies, have appeared to St. John dying in the desert.
Teresa, having, during her walks in the view, noticed a field of wheat from which a segment had already been cut, so that, with the foil of the flat earth beside it, she was able to see the whole depth of the crop, carried away an impression of the greater thickness of wheat-fields as compared to those containing the other crops; and this impression—strengthened by the stronger colouring of the wheat, for to the memory quality is often indistinguishable from quantity—lingering with her after she had got back to Plasencia, whence the view always appeared pintado, a picture, gave her the delusion of appreciating the actual paint, not merely as a medium of representation, but as a beautiful substance in itself; as one appreciates it in a Monet or a Monticelli.
And all the time, silently, imperceptibly, like the processes of nature, the work of harvest was transforming the picture, till by the end of the first week in August many of the planes of unbroken colour had been dotted into shocks or garnered into ricks. The only visible agent of this transformation was an occasional desultory wain with a green tarpaulin tilt, meandering through the silent fields. Its progress through, and its relation to, or, rather, its lack of relation to, the motionless view gave Teresa an almost eerie sense of incongruity, and made her think of a vase of crimson roses she had sat gazing at one night in the drawing-room. The light of the lamp behind it had changed the substance of the roses into something so translucent that they seemed to be made of a fluid or of light. A tiny insect was creeping in and out among their petals, and as she watched it she had a sense of being mentally out of gear in that she could see simultaneously phenomena belonging to such different planes of consciousness as these static phantom flames and that restless creature of the earth—they themselves, at any rate, could neither feel or see each other.
Then they all went away—the Doña and Dick to join Hugh Mallam at Harlech, Jollypot to a sister in Devonshire, and Teresa to Cambridge to stay with Harry Sinclair.
The year began to pay the penalty of its magnificence; for “violent fires soon burn out themselves”; and Teresa, walking down the Backs, or punting up to Byron’s pool, or bicycling among the lovely Cambridgeshire villages, saw everywhere signs of the approach of autumn in reddening leaves and reddening fruits, and there kept running in her head lines from a poem of Herrick’s on Lovers How They Come and Part.
They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall,
They fall like dew, and make no noise at all.
So silently they one to th’other come
As colours steale into the Pear or Plum.
While she was there she met Haines (the man who ran the pastoral players). He had heard of her play from Guy, and was so importunate in his requests to be allowed to read it that she finally gave it to him.
Guy had been right—the need to publish or produce was biological: useless to fight against.
Haines liked it, and wanted to set his company working at it at once.
As one hypnotised, she agreed to all of his suggestions: “Cust says you have a lawn with a view which would make an excellent natural background ... I believe it would be the very thing. It’s a piece that needs very few properties—some cardboard trees for the orchard, a few bottles and phials for Trotaconventos’s house, and an altar to give the effect of a chapel in the last scene ... yes, it should be very nice on your lawn, I think folk will like it.”
Did he say folk? But, of course, it would obviously be a favourite word of his.
So, Folk were to take a hand—Folk were to spring up like mushrooms on the lawn of Plasencia, and embody her dreams!
A little shiver went down her spine.
“I am a fool, I am a fool, I am a fool,” she muttered.