Indoors when he was working he was irritable and restless. You would hear a gentle sighing sound: "D-amn"; and he would start up and walk about the room. There would be shakings of his head, twistings of his eyebrows, shruggings of his shoulders, and tormented gestures of his hands. But not out here. He sat in the heather as quiet, as motionless as you were, every muscle at rest. His mind was at rest.
The strong sunlight beat on him; it showed up small surface signs. Perhaps you could see now that he might really be forty, or even forty-five.
No, you couldn't. You couldn't see or feel anything but the burning, inextinguishable youth inside him. The little grey streaks and patches might have been powder put on for fun.
"I want to finish with all my Greek stuff," he said suddenly. "I want to go on to something else—studies in modern French literature. Then English. I want to get everything clean and straight in five pages where other people would take fifty…. I want to go smash through some of the traditions. The tradition of the long, grey paragraph…. We might learn things from France. But we're a proud island people. We won't learn…. We're a proud island people, held in too tight, held in till we burst. That's why we've no aesthetic restraint. No restraint of any sort. Take our economics. Take our politics. We've had to colonise, to burst out over continents. When our minds begin moving it's the same thing. They burst out. All over the place…. When we've learned restraint we shall take our place inside Europe, not outside it."
"We do restrain our emotions quite a lot."
"We do. We do. That's precisely why we don't restrain our expression of them. Really unrestrained emotion that forces its way through and breaks down your intellectual defences and saturates you with itself—it hasn't any words…. It hasn't any words; or very few."
* * * * *
The mown fields over there, below Greffington Edge, were bleached with the sun: the grey cliffs quivered in the hot yellow light.
"It might be somewhere in the South of France."
"Not Agaye."