“She has good hair,” said her brother shortly. “She has put it up now.... When we get leave you must come home and see my people. I think you would find it interesting. My mother was a Stardyke before she married, so we have dozens of political and literary people about the place. That is in your line, isn’t it?”
John said it was; but he was chiefly interested in Margaret, whose hair had made so strong an impression on his boy’s mind. He loved hair—the colour, the line, the scent, the touch of it. He saw the wind blowing through Margaret’s, though he had forgotten her features. And, from searching in the past, his mind went out suddenly towards the future. His sense of beauty, so acute, so creative, must not be allowed to develop. It had power to arrest and overwhelm him, to transform some swift manifestation of loveliness into an essential of tremendous importance, capable of dwarfing all the other realities of the world. And then, when the world insistently broke in upon him, he would be haunted by that flash of appreciation as by the ghost of one beloved. A moment would light the years, laying them bare, exposing aspects of existence that he had been happier not to recognize. The movement of a beautiful hand, for instance, once seen and realized by him, would become a light in which to consider the movements of all hands. A phrase of poetry that had once captured his mind would dwell in it and gather significance from his experience. Margaret’s hair—though he had forgotten Margaret—had become for him a symbol; and yet, not her hair as a whole, but her hair as he had seen it at a certain instant. In his memory the association of colour and light and movement never varied. He had no recollection of the appearance of her hair at any time but at this moment which his imagination had endowed with permanency.... John realized that it was necessary for him to blunt this sense, which was for ever creating within his imagination a background to the immediate circumstance. He put it to himself in this way:
“Seeing that I am to be a naval officer, the sooner I shape myself to Service conditions the better.” Then he added aloud: “It’s better not to think too much about those other things.”
Fane-Herbert looked up in surprise. “What other things?”
“The things outside your job that you can’t ever reach. If I were to have a painter’s training and could ever paint that hair, or a writer’s and could ever describe it, then——”
“Are you still thinking about Margaret?”
This renewed association of personality with his symbol startled John. “No,” he said, “I wasn’t thinking about your sister. It might have been anyone’s hair for that matter.”
As they turned into a shop to have tea, John said suddenly: “You remember that I told you how the Padre offered to lend me poetry and then said I should be happier if I didn’t read it?... I’ve just understood what he was driving at.”