“I know. That’s always supposed to be a joke. But the tuning of an orchestra, if there is enough of it at once, is wonderful. Why not both? It’s the appalling way people have of liking only one thing. Liking ‘good’ music and disapproving of waltzes. The Germans don’t.”
“But when I thought of one of my sisters, I used to want to die. If she had been there we should both have yelled, without moving a muscle of our faces. Harriett is perfect for that. We learnt it in church. But when she used to twist all the fingers of her gloves into points, under the seat, and then show them to me suddenly, in the Litany” ....
“What? What is this? No. Tell me. You were very happy with your sisters.”
“That’s all. She waggled them, suddenly.”
“A happy childhood is perhaps the most-fortunate gift in life.”
“You don’t know you’re happy.”
“That is not the point. This early surrounding lingers and affects all the life.”
“It’s not quite true that you don’t know. Because you know when you are quite young how desperately you love a place. The day we left our first home I remember putting marbles in my pocket in the nursery, not minding, only thinking I should take them out again by the sea, and downstairs in the garden I suddenly realised, the sun was shining on to the porch and bees swinging about amongst the roses, and I ran back and kissed the warm yellow stone of the house, sobbing most bitterly and knowing my life was at an end.”
“But you were six years old. That is what is important. You do not perhaps realise the extent of the remaining of this free life of garden and woods with you.”
“I know it is there. I often dream I am there and wake there, and for a few minutes I could draw the house, the peaked shapes of it, and the porches and french windows and the way the lawns went off into the mysterious parts of the garden; and I feel then as if going away were still to come, an awful thing that had never happened. Of course after the years in the small house by the sea, I don’t remember the house, only the sea and the rocks, the house at Barnes grew in a way to be the same, but I never got over the suddenness of the end of the garden and always expected it to branch out into distances, every time I ran down it. I used to run up and down to make it more.......” He was no longer following with such an intentness of interest. There ought to have been more about those first years. Now, no one would ever know what they had been......