“All right—all right! When one has got himself into a mess he is prosecuted, arrested, condemned. No good to embrace every one like a brother when one has good land to look after. One has bother enough with the land—there are plenty of folk to prowl about it. Just look at him! He doesn’t even see us—it’s all the same to him—everything’s all the same to him.”
As a general thing Tem had no desire to be observed. Now he was making a great racket to attract attention and not succeeding. This failure completed his disgust—his failure combined, I think, with the prospect of finishing the afternoon without a drink. He deliberately laid down the straw of which he made his ligatures, and deserting his post he abandoned me into the bargain.
“I won’t see it! I won’t see it!” he exclaimed as he went, irritated and discouraged.
See what? The invasion of the mole-crickets? Neither did I want to see it.
I followed the deserter as far as the gate, where I read the bill three or four times over the better to understand the extent of our disaster, and then came slowly back. What could I do now? My horses—the poles—my wooden sword, my plays, were no longer anything to me. For the first time in my life, perhaps, I let my arms hang useless by my sides. By this feeling of the vanity of all things I was being born into grief. I was learning to separate myself from things. Since that moment I have always felt the pang of separation as soon as I see it coming and long before it actually reaches me.
I went back to the garden and threw myself down in the long grass which Tem had neglected to mow, and there I lay, face downward, I know not how long. All the garden enveloped me in perfume, and I breathed the garden. The house, from its open windows, looked at me across the grass, and I wept for the house. The strength of my love for the house had been as unknown to me as my own heart.
It was a warm, still summer afternoon, full of the hum of insects in the sunshine. Little by little I felt myself drowned in a soft sweetness, as a fly is drowned in honey. And little by little I became happy in spite of my pain. Later I came to know that debasing consolation that comes to us from the beauty of the day, when death has passed that way.
I fell asleep at last, like a baby in its tears. When I awoke evening had come into the garden, noiselessly, and was hiding under the trees. I got up and ran to seek it in the chestnut grove. The dinner bell rang and I turned back. A quantity of things that I had never noticed before impressed themselves upon my mind: the tone of the bell, the rosy tint of the sky between the branches, the long sprays of clematis drooping from the balcony, the lack of symmetry in the windows, and even the creaking of the door as I pushed it open, though it must always have creaked just so. With fierce ardour I was discovering all that I was about to lose.
We could never get used to seeing without indignation, on returning from school, the ill-omened bill that dishonoured the entrance. Tem Bossette had not returned; we learned that he was drinking himself drunk in all the wine-shops. Mimi Pachoux was working elsewhere; the ship was leaking at every joint and the crew was escaping. Only the long, woe-begone face of The Hanged occasionally showed itself here and there like a sign of distress, or an abhorrent symbol of the evil fate which was pursuing us.
“He is faithful,” Aunt Deen would say, overshadowing him with her protection and aiding him in his work.