“I like to see the water dimpling in the sunlight, and I like the old Willow Pattern basins. What are you going to do?”
Joan had letters to write. Lizzie was reading a book on “Sex and Heredity.”
Eve left them under the may tree, washed her face and hands in the blue basin, tidied her hair, put on her hat with unusual discrimination, and went out to play the truant.
She simply could not help it. The impulse would brook no argument. She walked through Basingford in the direction of Fernhill. She wanted to see the familiar outlines of the hills, to walk along under the cypress hedges, to feel herself present in the place that she loved so well. For the moment she was conscious of no purpose that might bring her into human contact with Fernhill. She wanted memories. The woman in her desired to feel!
Her first glimpse of the pine woods made her heart go faster. Here were all the familiar lanes and paths. Some of the trees were her intimates, especially a queer dwarf who had gone all to tam-o’-shanter. Even the ditches ran in familiar shadow lines, carrying her memories along. From the lodge gate she could see the top of the great sequoia that grew on the lawn before the Fernhill house. It was absurd how it all affected her. She could have laughed, and she could have wept.
Then a voice, a subtle yet imperious voice, said, “Go down to the Wilderness!” She bridled at the suggestion, only to remind herself that she knew a path that would take her round over the hill and down into the valley where the larches grew. The impulse was stronger than anything that she could oppose to it. She went.
The green secrecy of the wood received her. She passed along the winding path between the straight, stiff poles of the larches, the gloom of the dead lower boughs making the living green above more vivid. It was like plunging from realism into romance, or opening some quaint old book after reading an article on the workings of the London County Council. Eve was back in the world of beauty, of mystery and strangeness. The eyes could not see too far, yet vision was stopped by crowded and miraculous life and not by bricks and mortar.
The trees thinned. She was on the edge of the fairy dell, and she paused instinctively with a feeling that was akin to awe. How the sunlight poured down between the green tree tops. Three weeks ago the bluebells must have been one spreading mist of lapis-lazuli under the gloom of the criss-cross branches. And the silence of it all. She knew herself to be in the midst of mystery, of a vital something that mattered more than all the gold in the world.
Supposing Lynette should be down yonder?
Eve went forward slowly, and looked over the lip of the dell.