“The name of this house,” repeated the other in a dull voice.
“You’ve seen it at the top of your note-paper a thousand times and taken it for granted; and you have never seen that that is the falsehood. It doesn’t matter whether your father’s position is false or not: it doesn’t matter whether it’s old or new. This place doesn’t belong to the old families any more than the new families. It belongs to God.”
Rosamund seemed to stiffen suddenly like a literal statue and yet one could swear the statue had ears to hear.
Olive burst out again with her broken soliloquy; “Why have all our toppling fancies about kings and knights come with a crash; why is all our Round Table ruined? Because we never began at the beginning. Because we never went back to the Thing itself. The Thing that produced everything else; the love of the Thing where it really lives. On this spot long ago two hundred men lived and loved It.”
She stopped and seemed to realise that her words were tumbling out in a tail foremost fashion; and that she was herself, hardly setting a good example of beginning at the beginning. She made a desperate effort at clarity.
“Don’t you see–the modern people may be right to be modern; there may be people who ask for nothing better than banks and brokers; there may be people who think Milldyke a nice place. Your father and his friends may have been right in their way; I’m sure they weren’t so wrong as they looked when he was abusing them . . . it was hateful, and anyhow he had no business to spring it on you like that, without telling you beforehand.”
The statue spoke again; it seemed as if it never spoke except to utter one sort of stony defence.
“He did tell me beforehand. And I think that was more terrible.”
“Let me say what I am trying to say,” said 0live pathetically. “I feel as if it didn’t belong to me, and I must give it away. There may be people to whom it’s senseless to talk about a flower of chivalry; it sounds like a blossom of butchery. But if we want the flower of chivalry, we must go right away back to the root of chivalry. We must go back if we find it in a thorny place people call theology. We must think differently about death and free will and loneliness and the last appeal. It’s just the same with the popular things we can turn into fashionable things; folk-dances and pageants and calling everything a Guild. Our fathers did these things by the thousand; quite common people; not cranks. We are always asking how they did it. What we’ve got to ask is why they did it. . . . Rosamund, this is why they did it. Something lived here. Something they loved. Some of them loved it so much. . . . Oh don’t you and I know what is the only test? They wanted to be alone with it.”
The statue moved ever so faintly as if turning away; and Olive clutched the arm again in a sort of remorse.