Then Anna trotted off into the garden and Teresa sat on, thinking.
How was she going to cope with Pepa’s children?
These counter-influences—Plasencia and Cambridge—one continually undoing the work of the other, were so very bad for them. Childhood was a difficult enough time without that.
She remembered the agony of her own struggle to free herself from the robe of Nessus, woven by suggestion, heredity, and imperfectly functioning faculties; was she yet free from the robe? Anyhow, it was better now than in that awful world of childhood—a world, as it were, at the bottom of the sea: airless, muted, pervaded by a dim blue light through which her eyes strained in vain to see the seaweeds and shells and skulls in their true shape and colour; a world to which noises from the bright windy land above would from time to time come floating down, muffled and indistinct—voices of newspaper boys shouting “Death of Mr. Gladstone! Death of Mr. Gladstone!” Snatches of tunes from San Toy; bells ringing for the relief of Mafeking.
2
September turned into October; the apples grew redder and the fields—the corn and barley gradually being carted away to be stacked in barns—grew plainer, severe expanses of a uniform buff colour, suggesting to Teresa the background of a portrait by Velasquez.
The children were going back to Cambridge; and their excitement at the prospect might have convinced the Doña, had she been open to conviction, that their life there was not an unhappy one.
They were sorry to leave the Doña and Teresa and ’Snice and the garden—that went without saying; but the prospect of a railway journey was sufficient to put Jasper, who never looked very far ahead, into a state of the wildest excitement, and the occasional nip in the air during the past week had given Anna an appetite for the almost forgotten joys of lessons, Girl-Guides, the “committee” organised by a very grand friend of twelve for collecting money for the Save the Children Fund (one was dubbed a member of the committee with the President’s tennis-racket and then took terrible oaths of secrecy), and soon Christmas drawing near, when Nanny would take them down to brilliantly lighted Boots, with its pleasant smell of leather and violet powder, to choose their Christmas cards.
Teresa knew what she was feeling; it was a pleasant thought, all the small creatures hurrying eagerly back from sea or hills or valleys all over the kingdom—tiny Esquimaux swarming back from their isolated summer fisheries to the civic life of winter with its endless small activities, so ridiculous to the outside world, so solemn, and so terribly important, to themselves.