CHAPTER III
The thing goes now at a most frightful pace for Rosalie. One hates the slow, laborious written word that tries to show it. There needs a pen with wings or that by leaping violence of script, by characters blotched, huge and run together, would symbolise the pace at which the thing now goes. There’s no procession of the days. Immersed in work or lost in pleasure, there never is procession of the days, so hurtling fast goes life. They crowd. They’re driven past like snow across a window pane. The calendar astounds. It is the first of the month, and lo, it is the tenth. It’s the sixteenth—half gone!—while yet it scarcely had begun; a day after the twentieth is the date; it’s next the twenty-fifth; it’s next—the month has gone.... The month! It is a season that has flown. Here’s Summer where only yesterday the buds of Spring; here’s Winter, coming—gone!—while yet the leaves seem falling.
It was like that the thing now went with Rosalie.
They call it a race. It isn’t a race, living like that. It’s a pursuit. Engaged in it, you’re not in rivalry, you are in flight. You’re fleeing all the time the reckoning; and he’s a sulky savage, forced to halt to gather up what you have shed, ordered to pause to note the things that you have missed, and at each duty cutting notches in a stick.
That is his tally which, come up, he will present to you.
Well, best perhaps to take that tally stick to try by it to show the pace at which the thing now went. Rosalie, when all was done, could run the tally over (you have to) in thought, that lightning vehicle that makes to crawl the swiftest agency of man’s invention: runs through a lifetime while the electric telegraph is stammering a line; reads memory in twenty volumes between the whiff and passing of some remembered scent that’s opened them; travels a life again, cradle to grave, between the vision’s lighting on and lifting from some token of the past.
All’s done; some years rush on; she sits in retrospection, that tally stick in hand; and thought, first hovering, would always start for her from when, returned to her career, the thing at frightful pace began to go; and then, from there, away! from scene to scene (the notches cut by reckoning in his stick) rending the womb of memory in dread delivery, as it were flash on flash of lightning bursting the vault of night from east to west across the world.
Her thoughts first hovering: There’s Huggo and there’s Doda and there’s Benji! Her children! Her darling ones! Her lovely ones! Love’s crown; and, what was more, worn in the persons of those darling joys of hers in signal, almost arrogant in her disdain of precedent to the contrary, that woman might be mother and yet live freely and unfettered by her home, precisely as man is father but follows a career. Ah....
Away! The womb of memory is rent, and rent, delivers.
Look, there they are! She’s down with one or other at some gala at their schools. It’s Founders’ Day at Tidborough, or it’s at Doda’s school on Prize Day. Aren’t they just proud to be with her and show her off, their lovely, brilliant mother so different from the other rather fussy mothers that come crowding down! All the masters and all the mistresses know the uncommon woman that she is. The children, growing older, know it. “You must be very proud of your mother.” It has been said (the self-same words) to each of them by their respective principals. Nice! Nice to have your children proud of you!