II
That Summer, Walter was appointed to a Readership at Oxford. It was a better post than the one he had before, at Grey College, and he was glad to get it.
He said:
‘I shall have time at last to write my book.’
And so we left our house in Hampstead, and I was glad to leave it. It looked shabbier and more forlorn when we left it, than when we came. For a time, when we lived there first, it had been better; when the garden was in order, and the bulbs came up in the Spring; but the grass was all ragged again now, and I had planted no bulbs that Autumn. The paint we had put on, inside the house, was chipped and scratched already. Outside, it had never been done as we had meant to do it, and the extra wear and dirt of six years was over everything. The bath was more worn than ever, for we had not had it re-enamelled, and the greasy patch on the wall, behind the cedar mop, was bigger and darker.
I was glad to go, and I did not mind much where we went. There were schools for the children in Oxford, and Walter longed to be there.
He said:
‘It is the only place where people think.’
I did not find that at all, but I suppose that they thought about different things.
We went down to Oxford and looked at houses. We did not enjoy looking at them as we had the first time. We stayed at the hotel, where Mollie and I had stayed with Cousin Delia for our Commemoration dance. It seemed quite different now, and all the town seemed different from what it used to seem when Guy and Hugo were at college and we used to come and see them. We looked at a great many houses and at last we took this one, where we live now. It is strange to me to realize that we have lived here, already, almost twice as long as we lived at Hampstead; so much was happening then and so little now; one year is like another now, only the children grow bigger, and we grow older, and I suppose it will go on, just like this, until we die.
We moved to Oxford in November, just a year after the Armistice. We moved our furniture and our pictures and our books, and put them into new places in the new house. I put the alabaster bowl on the new chimney-piece, and the candlesticks that George and Mollie had given me. They looked all wrong in this room with the ornate chimney-piece and the coloured panes in the window.
And I thought:
‘What does it matter? What does anything matter now?’
Cousin Delia sent me Hugo’s statue of the Delphic charioteer, and I put it in the corner, on a shelf all to itself just as Hugo used to have it in his room at Clifford’s Inn; our room was not like his even when that was there, but I liked to have it there.
People came to call on me, a great many people. They meant to be kind to me, I knew that. They wanted me to join all sorts of societies and to do all sorts of things. They asked me if I was musical; if I took an interest in politics, or infant welfare. And it seemed to me, when they asked me that I was not interested in anything at all.
They thought so too, I think.
Walter was vexed with me. He said that I ought to make friends with some of the ladies that came to see me; he said they would think me stuck up, that I gave myself airs. I didn’t understand how they could think that. I don’t now. Walter said that I would find that I had lots of things in common with some of them, if only I would try, and I expect that is quite true, but somehow I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t make the effort. I felt then, and I still do, as though there were no room for new people in my life any more. I should never care for new friends as I did for the old ones. When one has had the best of all, second best seems not worth having.
Mollie came to see us. She helped me with the house; we arranged the books together, and the pictures, and all the little things. She stayed a little longer, and I thought:
‘There is still Mollie . . . if she can go on, I can.’
But she could not stay long. She was going to work again at her Biological institute, and she had to go back. She said she would come again, she said she would often come, and she does come, and stay with us quite often. Even Walter is glad when she comes; he says it is her intellectual interests that have kept her so sweet and serene; he calls it so intelligent. I should not put it in that way, I think it is something much deeper and more fundamental in Mollie, than her interest in biology, that makes her what she is; but it does not matter much what we call it, we mean, really, the same thing. And often when she is not there, when I am discouraged and downhearted, and wonder if it is worth while going on, I think of Mollie, as I do of Cousin Delia, and I am ashamed of my own poorness of spirit, and I think again, how wonderful they are.