“Westmacott had come home, and I knew that he had found his children grown, and his wife, perhaps, temporarily happy to see him. At least he could turn to watch her beauty as she slept.... I cursed my instinct for following people into their private lives, a damnable trick, and nothing more than a trick, but one which made me lower my eyes in shame when next I met them. Peeping through keyholes. I had done it all my life. Well, if anybody peeped through my keyhole, there wouldn’t be much to see.
“How queerly things work out sometimes, for no sooner had I emerged from the fields on to the cross-roads, where the finger-post says ‘Edenbridge, Leigh, Cowden,’ still wrapped in my loneliness as in a cloak, I came upon Mrs. Pennistan walking slowly up and down, waiting, I presumed, for Amos. At the sight of me she stopped and stared, till we simultaneously cried one another’s names. I was filled with real warm gladness on seeing her there unchanged, unchangeable, and I went forward with my hands outstretched to clasp her fat, soft hands—do you remember her hands? they spoke of innumerable kneadings of dough, and she had no knuckles, only dimples where the knuckles should have been. And then, before I knew what had happened, that good woman’s arms were round my neck and her soft, jolly face was against mine, and she kissed me and I kissed her, and I swear there were tears in her eyes, which, for that matter, she didn’t trouble to conceal.
“Presently Amos came along. I had intended returning to London that night, but they would hear nothing of it, and I found myself supping as of old in their happy kitchen, and going upstairs later to that bare little room which had once been mine and had since been yours. It is a real satisfaction to me that you should be as familiar with these surroundings as I am myself, for you have, as you read, the same picture as I have as I write, and this harmony we could never achieve were I telling you of places and faces you had never seen.
“We talked, naturally, of you, for after the manner of old friends we travelled from one to the other of persons we had known. The sons, who were there solemnly munching, lent a certain constraint to the evening. And I missed so poignantly, so unexpectedly, the figure of the old woman by the fire. I had not realised until then what a prominent figure it had been, although so tiny and so silent, bent over the eternal chestnuts, the great-great grandmother of the little Westmacotts. Will you smile if I tell you that I took the diary up to bed with me, and read myself again into the underworld of Spain?
“Was it you, by the way, that drew a charcoal portrait of me over the wash-stand in my room?
“I got up and dressed the next morning still uncertain as to whether I should or should not go over to Westmacotts’. I do not exactly know why I was uncertain, but perhaps my loneliness on the previous day had more to do with it than my self-offered pretext, that my acquaintance with Ruth had better be left where it was at our last meeting. Remember, I had not seen her since she stood distraught but resolute in the cowshed with the Hunter’s moon as a halo behind her head. What could one say to people in greeting when one’s last words had been full of dark mystery and of things which don’t come very often to the surface of life? In a word, I was afraid. Afraid of embarrassment, afraid of the comfort of her home, afraid of her. Afraid of my own self as a companion through lonely years afterwards. I dressed very slowly because I wanted to put off the inevitable moment of making up my mind. And after all it was Mrs. Pennistan who made it up for me, for such was her surprise when I mentioned catching a train which would certainly leave me no time for the visit, that I said I would go.
“I realised then that I was glad. When I was a boy and couldn’t make up my mind whether I wanted to do a thing or not, I used to toss a coin, not necessarily abiding by the coin’s decision, but my own predominant feeling of relief or disappointment. I found the system invaluable. In this case Mrs. Pennistan had spun herself as a coin for me.
“Westmacott, I knew, would be out. Would Ruth be out, too? and my problem thus resolved by, as it were, another spin of the coin? She was not out; she was in her kitchen rolling a white paste with a rolling-pin, the sleeves of her blue linen dress turned back, and as she rolled she sang to the baby which lay in a low cradle in the corner. The baby lay on its back waving a piece of red coral which it occasionally chewed. I stood for quite a long time in the doorway watching them, and then Ruth looked up and saw me.
“I suppose I had remembered her blush as the most vivid thing about her, for I had waited there fully expecting her to look up and colour as she always did when surprised in any way, but instead of this she stood there gazing at me with the colour faded entirely from her face. She stood holding the rolling-pin, as white as the flour upon her hands and arms. The strong light of the window was upon her. Red geraniums were in the window. The strident voice of a canary broke our stillness.