ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ᾽ ἀπολήγει.[∗]
PART ONE
‘Green Felicity.’
PART ONE
I
LEAVES are falling down from the laburnum tree at the gate; yellow leaves, white gate, and red brick of the houses opposite; it is very ugly. In the spring the flowers are yellow instead of the leaves, and the hawthorn bush, to the side, is bright pink, and across the road is lilac. The red-brick houses have facings of yellow stone, squares of yellowish stone round the doors and the windows. All the colours are wrong, all the shapes are ugly, even the trees are not real trees.
Once I would have minded it so much, to live here, looking out at that laburnum tree, and that house opposite, that bow window, and the yellowish stone facings of the windows, and the lilac bush that has grown all crooked, and the pink hawthorn, and the laurels with patterned leaves; but now I do not mind. Now I do not see these things or think about them at all; only to-night I am seeing them, because somehow I have come awake to-night, for a bit.
To-night I realize that for nine years I have lived here, looking at that house, every time I go out, and have never really noticed it before. But even now that I see it, I do not mind. I do not mind about anything very much now, except, I suppose, John.
To-morrow I shall be forty; my youth is gone; irretrievably, irrevocably, gone; and even that I do not mind. It used to seem to me so difficult not to feel too much, and now I cannot feel at all. Is this simply growing old? Is this what always happens when one grows old? But if Hugo were alive still, would it be like this? I do not think that it would.
To-night things come back to me very clearly, in an odd, detached way, things that have happened to me, as though they had happened to somebody else, while I looked on. Yearsly comes back to me much more than usual, and Guy and Hugo, and our childhood there. Some things I have been almost afraid of thinking about too much. Now I can think of everything and am not afraid.