Then I turned round, and let her go, and confronted her, all at the same time. And there she stood, "with her head hung down and all her little face grown red."
Love has never been described properly: all that about roses and altars is nonsense. Love is like being in a beautiful and mysterious room, and you push a curtain aside and you find a more mysterious and more beautiful room, and you see another curtain. How that comparison would shock the people who write poetry. Imagine comparing love to a suite of rooms.
I shall never forget that drive; the horses were those Russian horses that go as if they were mad; the air was all filled with the smell of autumn, and the earth seemed as silent as the leaden-coloured sky. The park lay all dull-coloured and damp, the great trees were standing with their leaves hanging down.
Miles and miles of park we passed through; there were sober and sad-coloured hills in the distance that seemed to watch us with a mournful air. The country had for me the aspect of fate as it lay around us, silent as a dream, the trees dropped their withered leaves, the clouds passed by, the wind blew, and clouds and wind and trees all said to me in their own language, the past, the past, the past. Once Geraldine said, "When I saw you before, so long ago, you were not dressed as you are now."
No, Geraldine, I said to myself, when you saw me before, so long ago, I was dressed as a man. But I did not answer her in words.
CHAPTER XIV
THE BALLADE OF THE FALCON
To the deep window of the library, where I am sitting now wrapped in shawls and scribbling this, I came that day after our drive to sit and think, and stare out of the double windows at the dusky garden, and wait for tea. I had taken an old book from one of the library shelves. It was "The whole art of Falconry," dedicated to his Majesty, King Charles the First, by his liege servant—I forget whom.
When I was tired with looking out of the window I turned over the leaves of the book; they smelt of age. Between the cover and the last leaf was a manuscript, the ink faded, the paper mildewed. I spelt it out in the dusk.