She summoned a smile, even flushed faintly with pleasure.
Then panic descended suddenly upon Judith. Her head was like a floating bubble; there was nothing in it at all. She caught at threads of knowledge and they broke, withered and dissolved like cobwebs in the hand. She struggled to throw off a crowding confusion of half-remembered words.
Unarm Eros, the long day’s task is done. And we must sleep.... Peace! Peace! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep?... Who said that? Who could have said such a thing? I am Duchess of Malfi still.... Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young. Beatrice died young too. Here Mother ... bind up this hair in any simple knot ... ay that does well.... Prithee undo this button.... Thank you, Sir.... Cordelia! Cordelia! So many of them died young. There were those two, you had forgotten their names now, and Cordelia, and Desdemona too. O, thou weed!... It might be useful to remember them.... But they had already slipped away. This was the parting that they had Beside the haystack in the floods. William Morris. Speak but one word to me over the corn. Over the tender bowed locks of the corn. Gold cornfield like Jennifer. A bracelet of bright hair about the bone. That had always been Jennifer’s bright hair. Only a woman’s hair.... Calm hair, meandering in pellucid gold. But Jennifer’s hair had never been calm.... Speak but one word to me. Roddy, one whisper from you!
It was Tennyson who said: The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.... And Browning who said: The old June weather Blue above lane and wall. Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley.... What had they said? and Blake:
Bring me my bow of burning gold; Bring me my arrows of desire.... Once you had composed a tune for that. Bring me my bow of burning gold.... Oh, stop saying that now. Think about the origins of drama, the rise of the universities, the development of the guilds, the order of Shakespeare’s plays.... O God! A headful of useless scraps rattling about in emptiness—
The clock struck nine.
‘You can begin now,’ said a thin voice from the däis.
There was an enormous sigh, a rustling of paper, then silence.
The questions had, nearly all, at first glance a familiar reassuring look. It was all right. Panic vanished, the mind assembled its energies, cooly, precisely, the pen flew.
After an hour the first pause to cool her forehead with a stick of frozen Eau de Cologne and to sip some water. Behind, poor Mabel’s dry little cough and sniff went on. The head bowed low over her writing looked as if it could never raise itself again.