Louise shut the window. She shivered a little as she gathered up her books.
Her happiest day was over.
CHAPTER VIII
A week before Christmas Alwynne began to wonder how the day itself should be spent, or rather, if her plans for the spending would ever pass Elsbeth's censorship. She was doubtful. For the last two or three years Christmas had been to them a rock of collision.
"The pity of it!" thought Alwynne. Once it had been the event, the crowning glory, the very reason of the ending year. A year, indeed, had always presented itself to her in advance as a wide country through which she must make her way, to reach the hostel, Christmas, hidden in the mists of time, on its further border. She had the whole map of the land in her mind, curiously vivid and distinct. She had never consciously devised the picture; it had, from the first, presented itself complete and unalterable. She stood, on New Year's Day, at the entrance of a country lane which ran between uneven hedges through a varying countryside of fields and woods and heatherland. Each change in the surroundings represented a month, the smaller differences the weeks and days. She went down this winding lane as the days went by, in slow content. January was a silent expanse of high tableland, snow-bound to the horizon. Winding down hill through the sodden grassland of the bare February country, where she lighted on nothing but early parsnip fronds and sleepy celandine buds in the dripping wickery hedges, she passed at last into the wood of March, a wood of pollard hazels and greening oaks and bramble-guarded dingles, where the anemones grew, and the first primroses. She slipped and slithered in and out of mossy leaf-pits, and the briars clawed her hair and pinafore, as she robbed the primrose clumps with wet, reddened fingers. The wind shrieked overhead and wrestled wildly with the bare branches, but beyond there was blue sky and a drift of cloud. But, unawares, she would always head through the wood to where the trees grew thinner and dash out at last, through a mist of pale cuckoo-pint, into the cowslip field that was April.
The path ran on through May and June between fields of ox-eye daisies and garden roses, always down hill, till she tumbled into August, the deep hot valley. There she found the sea.
With September the road lifted steadily, growing stony and ever steeper. It wound on ahead of her like a silver thread through a brocade of red and gold and purple, that was heather and bracken and beech. But the beech blossoms could never be gathered; they fell apart into a shower of dull leaves, and left her with a branch of bare twigs in her hand. The briony berries that she twisted into wreaths stained her straw hat with their black, evil juice; even the manna-like old-man's-beard smelled sour and rotten. The decaying, witchlike beauty of the season tricked and frightened her; autumn was a hard hill to climb.
But far away, on the summit of that difficult hill, stood a house. An old house, gaily bricked, dressed in ivy, with a belfry from which carols rang out unceasingly. It was always night-time where it stood and cheerful lights were set in every window. Alwynne never saw the house till she had turned the bend of the road into November; then it faced her suddenly and she would wave to the distant windows with a thrill of excitement, and quicken her steps, with the goal of the journey in sight at last. There was yet a weary climb before it was reached; every day of December was a boulder, painfully beclambered. But she would come to the gates at last, and tear up the frosty drive, from the shadow of whose shrubberies Jacob Marley peered and clanked at her and ghosts of Christmas turkeys gobbled horribly, to the open holly-hung doorway where Santa Claus, authentic in beard and dressing-gown, welcomed her with Elsbeth's voice. Followed stay-at-home days of delirious merry-making, from which she awoke a week later, to find herself, her back to a closed door, a spent cracker in her hand, looking out again, eager and a little wistful, across the white untrodden plain of yet another January.