Sometimes the door stood open. She would go in. She would go up the stairs and down the passages, trying to find the schoolroom. She would know that Mark was in the schoolroom. But she could never find it. She never saw Mark. The passages led through empty, grey-lit rooms to the bottom of the kitchen stairs, and she would find a dead baby lying among the boots and shoes in the cat's cupboard.
Autumn and winter passed. She was thirty-two.
III.
When your mind stopped and stood still it could feel time. Time going fast, going faster and faster. Every year its rhythm swung on a longer curve.
Your mind stretched to the span of time. There was something exciting about this stretch, like a new sense growing. But in your dreams your mind shrank again; you were a child, a child remembering and returning; haunting old stairs and passages, knocking at shut doors. This child tried to drag you back, it teased you to make rhymes about it. You were not happy till you had made the rhymes.
There was something in you that went on, that refused to turn back, to look for happiness in memory. Your happiness was now, in the moment that you lived, while you made rhymes; while you looked at the white thorn-trees; while the black-purple cloud passed over Karva.
Yesterday she had said to Dorsy Heron, "What I can't stand is seeing the same faces every day."
But the hill world had never the same face for five minutes. Its very form changed as the roads turned. The swing of your stride put in play a vast, mysterious scene-shifting that disturbed the sky. Moving through it you stood still in the heart of an immense being that moved. Standing still you were moved, you were drawn nearer and nearer to its enclosing heart.
She swung off the road beyond the sickle to the last moor-track that led to the other side of Karva. She came back by the southern slope, down the twelve fields, past the four farms.
The farm of the thorn-tree, the farm of the ash, the farm of the three firs and the farm all alone.