III.
When your mind stopped and stood still it could feel time. Time going fast, going faster and faster. Every year its rhythm swung on a longer curve.
Your mind stretched to the span of time. There was something exciting about this stretch, like a new sense growing. But in your dreams your mind shrank again; you were a child, a child remembering and returning; haunting old stairs and passages, knocking at shut doors. This child tried to drag you back, it teased you to make rhymes about it. You were not happy till you had made the rhymes.
There was something in you that went on, that refused to turn back, to look for happiness in memory. Your happiness was now, in the moment that you lived, while you made rhymes; while you looked at the white thorn-trees; while the black-purple cloud passed over Karva.
Yesterday she had said to Dorsy Heron, "What I can't stand is seeing the same faces every day."
But the hill world had never the same face for five minutes. Its very form changed as the roads turned. The swing of your stride put in play a vast, mysterious scene-shifting that disturbed the sky. Moving through it you stood still in the heart of an immense being that moved. Standing still you were moved, you were drawn nearer and nearer to its enclosing heart.
She swung off the road beyond the sickle to the last moor-track that led to the other side of Karva. She came back by the southern slope, down the twelve fields, past the four farms.
The farm of the thorn-tree, the farm of the ash, the farm of the three firs and the farm all alone.
Four houses. Four tales to be written.
There was something in you that would go on, whatever happened. Whatever happened it would still be happy. Its happiness was not like the queer, sudden, uncertain ecstasy. She had never known what that was. It came and went; it had gone so long ago that she was sure that whatever it had been it would never come again. She could only remember its happening as you remember the faint ecstasies of dreams. She thought of it as something strange and exciting. Sometimes she wondered whether it had really happened, whether there wasn't a sort of untruthfulness in supposing it had.
But that ecstasy and this happiness had one quality in common; they belonged to some part of you that was free. A you that had no hereditary destiny; that had got out of the net, or had never been caught in it.
You could stand aside and look on at its happiness with horror, it didn't care. It was utterly indifferent to your praise or blame, and the praise or blame of other people; or to your happiness and theirs. It was open to you to own it as your self or to detach yourself from it in your horror. It was stronger and saner than you. If you chose to set up that awful conflict in your soul that was your own affair.
Perhaps not your own. Supposing the conflict in you was the tug of the generations before you, trying to drag you back to them? Supposing the horror was their horror, their fear of defeat?
She had left off being afraid of what might happen to her. It might never happen. And supposing it did, supposing it had to happen when you were forty-five, you had still thirteen years to write in.
"It shan't happen. I won't let it. I won't let them beat me."