Meanwhile, there was enough to do to help in keeping the nursery in order, in seeing that the weaker babies were not trodden upon, in making sure that no one cried himself to sleep.
Anger and condemnation would never be possible again; no, nor would he expect the Millennium.
[VI]
LUCY MOON
Lucy Moon was the daughter of the Reverend Stephen Moon, Rector of Little Hawkesworth in North Yorkshire. She was twenty-one years of age, and pretty. She was so pretty indeed that she reminded one young man in Hawkesworth of "a cornfield under a red moon," and the Reverend Simon Laud, to whom she was engaged, thought of her privately as his "golden goddess," from which it will be seen that she had yellow hair and a peach-like complexion.
She had lived always a very quiet and retired life, the nearest to adventure being two or three expeditions to Scarborough. She did not know, however, that her life was retired. She was never dull. She had two younger brothers, and was devoted to her father and mother. She never questioned their authority. She read the books that they advised, and wished to read no others. The life that ebbed and flowed around the rectory seemed to her a very exciting one, and it was not until the Reverend Simon Laud, rector of a neighbouring parish, proposed to her, and she found that she accepted him, although she did not love him, that she began to wonder, a little uncertainly, with a little bewilderment, about herself. She had accepted him because everyone had agreed that it was so obviously the right thing for her to do. She had known him ever since she could remember. He was older than she, and kindly, although he had asthma and his knees cracked. He had been rector of his parish for twenty years, and everyone said that he was a very good man indeed. He had a sense of humour too, and his Penny Readings were the best in all North Yorkshire. It was not until Simon had kissed her that Lucy wondered whether she were doing right. She did not like him to kiss her. His nose seemed so large when near to her, and his lips tried to catch hers and hold them with a kind of sucking motion that was quite distressing to her. She looked ridiculously young when Mr. Laud proposed to her, with her fair gold hair piled up in coils on the top of her head, her cheeks crimsoned with her natural agitation, and her young, childish body, like a boy's, slender and strong under her pink cotton gown.
"My little girl!" Mr. Laud said, and kissed her again. She went up to her room and cried for quite a long time. Then, when she saw how happy her mother was, she was happy too. Perhaps he would not want to kiss her after they were married.
Then came the marvellous event. Her Aunt Harriet, Mrs. Comstock, her mother's sister, and a rich widow, asked her to come and stay with her for a month in London. Mrs. Comstock was a good-natured, chattering widow, fond of food and bright attire; Mrs. Moon hesitated about committing Lucy to her care, but she felt perhaps it would do the child no harm to give her a peep at worldly ways, before the long black arms of Simon Laud closed her in for ever. Lucy was terrified and delighted both at once. It meant that she would see London, where she had never in all her life been. Even the war had not altered her. She had worked in the village institute, knitted and sewed, helped in the village concerts. The war had seemed very remote to her. She had lost no one whom she loved. She was vaguely distressed by it, as she might have been by the news of an earthquake at Naples. The Moon household believed in tranquillity. Mr. Moon was engaged in a series of village addresses on "The Nativity." The war, after all, he felt, "is probably a blessing in disguise!"
So Lucy saw it. I think, as the day of her departure drew near, that she had some slight premonition of future events. The village, the fields, the lanes, the church, were touched suddenly by some new and pathetic splendour. The spring came late to Yorkshire that year, and the lanes were coloured with a faint shadow of purple behind the green, so light and shining that it seemed to be glass in its texture. The bright spaces of the moon were uncertain in their dim shadows, and there were soft spongy marshes where the frost had released the underground streams, and long stretches of upland grass, grey-white beneath the pale spring skies. Space was infinite. The village, tucked under the rim of the moor with its grey church, its wild, shaggy, tiny graveyard, its spreading village street, was like a rough Yorkshire child huddling for protection beneath its father's shoulder. This had pathos and an appeal for love, and a cry of motherhood. The clouds, carried by the fresh spring wind, raced above the church steeple, swinging the young birds in their flight, throwing joyfully, contemptuously, shadows across the long street, shadows coloured and trembling like banners.
Lucy had known these beauties all her life; now they appealed to her with a new urgency. "When you come back," they seemed to say to her, "we shall not be the same. Now you are free as we. When you come back you will be a prisoner."