Rosalind Murray

“ Mollie cared really far more about George and about Guy than she did for all her science, and about me and Hugo too, and she did not pretend not to.
‘I do the biology too,’ she said, ‘because it interests me and I have plenty of time. If I had not plenty of time I should not do it.’
‘The perfect dilettante,’ Walter called her, when I told him that. ‘How much value will her biology be, treated like that?’
And I said:
‘I don’t know about the biology, but she is of value. She is one of the most perfectly balanced people I know.’
And Walter did not deny it, for he liked Mollie. ”

“ Guy, and Hugo, and Cousin Delia, and Sophia Lane-Watson, and Diana, and Walter, and George Addington, and Mollie; and Yearsly, and Hampstead, and here; but Hugo goes through it all; when I try to think of my life without Hugo, it is impossible; it is as though there were nothing there at all.
And really, so little has happened to me; my life has been a very ordinary one; no adventures, nothing dramatic, just the same sort of life as most of the women I meet in the street, and think so dull. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The train was there this time. Hugo found a place and put his luggage in. Then we walked up and down on the platform till it was time to start. The morning was raw and chilly. The cold fog got into our throats and eyes. It seemed to enclose us in a deadened solitude; to shut out the world beyond; to muffle even the footsteps of the other waiting people. ”

“ Only Hugo does not change. He grows, of course, and changes to that extent, from a child into a man, but from the earliest time that I remember him, and I cannot remember any time before that, it is the same indescribable personality. He is different and more lovable than other people. Not cleverer, nor better, exactly. Guy could do most things better than he could, and many other people are as good; but no one I have ever met was like Hugo in the special quality he had. Guy felt it too, and Cousin Delia, and the Addingtons did, and, I think, Sophia Lane Watson. ”

“ Mollie said:
‘Yes. I am sorry for you, Helen. It must be terrible for you to be outside, and not able to help. Of course you can’t,’ she added quickly, ‘your work is just as important really, more perhaps,’ and she smiled her delightful smile that was like George’s.
‘I feel,’ she went on earnestly, ‘that I can never do enough, if I worked myself to the bone, when I think what the men out there are going through already; what is waiting for George, and Guy, and Hugo, when they go out. ”

“ Again we could hear the whizzing of the engines, louder and louder, and then less loud, and again the barrage and the wailing of the shells and again the pattering like hailstones in the street.
Ada and the cook shuddered and shut their eyes.
Eleanor asked:
‘Why is there such a noise?’
Maud said:
‘Gun practice, my dear child. They are practising with guns.’
And she seemed satisfied, she was still half asleep.
And I thought:
‘Those bombs have fallen somewhere; they have fallen on something; people must have been killed.’
But it did not mean much to me even so. ”

“ I said:
‘I don’t think Hugo does.’
‘He does . . . . I know he does. Give him time, Helen. He will never care for anyone as he does for you.’
I said:
‘He leaves it to you, to say!’
‘Can’t you wait a little while? Six months, or three months even . . . ? That is not very long to wait . . .’
I said:
‘I am sick of waiting. I don’t know even, that I want Hugo, now.’
George was silent; I knew how hard it must be for him to say these things, and I wanted to hurt him. There were sea gulls walking in the mud, at the edge of the river. ”

“ He has dark eyes, that is true, but not the least like Hugo’s. He is just like Diana, and his eyes are like her eyes. He is a splendid child, big and strong and merry. He laughs and fights his brother and sisters, and he is always running. He breaks things and does not mind, he hurts people and isn’t sorry. It sounds strange to me to hear them call him Hugo.
They are all fine children, all strong and well and cheerful. The house is full of noise, laughing and screaming and scuffling. I am glad there are children at Yearsly. ”

“ We went back to Guy’s rooms in Clifford’s Inn and had coffee and biscuits, and George began to chaff Hugo about his enthusiasm for Miranda, but Hugo was serious.
‘I want to see her,’ he said. ‘I must get to know her.
How beauteous Mankind is! Oh brave new world
That has such people in’t!
Didn’t she do that divinely?’
‘I shouldn’t get to know her if I were you, Hugo,’ said George. ‘She will probably be a disillusionment. Let her remain the “stuff that dreams are made of.” ’
Mollie was laughing and I laughed too, but I didn’t like it. ”

“ In the holidays, when Guy and Hugo came home, I went to Yearsly, and that was like coming alive again. The holidays were much shorter than the term time, but they stand out in my remembrance as the only real parts of those years.
I believe many children have this power of detachment, almost like a sort of suspended animation—a living quite apart in an untouchable world of one’s own, when the outside world is too uncongenial. Certainly Hugo and I did it. Guy did not need to. ”

“ Of most people, even people I love very much, I feel that they might in certain circumstances act wrongly or from some bad motive; but with George and Mollie one felt from the beginning absolutely sure that they never would. There was a sort of solid nobility in them both that nothing could shake or alter. They were unlike each other in a great many ways. George was much cleverer than Mollie, much more amusing and more whimsical, but in this essential quality they were the same, and it was this, I think, that attracted Hugo so strongly to them first, and then Guy, and then me. ”

“ It is hard for me now when I think of those years at Yearsly to see them clearly and critically at all. It seems to me now that the life we led was a perfect life, as happy and complete as any children could possibly have. I know that it is unlikely to have been quite perfect, for nothing is; perhaps we were too idle; perhaps we should have been made to work harder and take lessons more seriously. I know Walter thinks we were all spoiled, that the realities of life were not brought before us, and that Guy and Hugo suffered afterwards for this. ”

“ It was Anthony Cowper who reported the conversation. Hugo blushed a little and laughed.
‘So hard on dear Paulina,’ Mrs. Connell had said to Anthony, ‘to have to go on the stage—not that it was a penance at all to her, for if ever a girl had a passion for her art it was Paulina; but of course you understand, Mr. Cowper, it is not the sort of profession her father’s family would approve at all. My family is different, you see. We are all artists—artists to the finger-tips—and you understand, Mr. Cowper, to an artist social distinctions do not exist. But I do feel it hard for Paulina. ”

“ To Hugo too it seemed odd, but not so much to Guy. I believe that with a different environment Guy might have been a politician. It had always been a joke against Guy that he liked to read the newspaper; not just reviews or headlines, but the solid political articles. But even he had no particular party, and it was the party that seemed so curious to Hugo and to me. To suppose that one could agree, always, on all points, with one group of people, and that one must support one party.
‘How can you agree always with one group of people?’ Hugo asked George one day, in a punt. ”

“ Often we went to Yearsly for the week-end, and Yearsly was always the same, and Cousin Delia always the same.
I think of that summer often when I am in London in June; the scent of limes and chestnut trees, and dust, and the fresh green of the trees, and the watering carts in the streets, and people coming out of houses in new clothes, pretty summer clothes, light-hearted people as we were then. Hugo had a lavender-coloured tie that summer, and George used to chaff him about it; and Guy had a light grey suit; George said it was too light a grey. ”

“ Hugo had talked about George Addington at Christmas, and I longed to see him.
‘He is such a splendid fellow,’ he had said, ‘and such a wonderful mind.’
‘And such jolly good company,’ said Guy.
I was rather disappointed when I first saw him. He and Mollie were waiting for us in Hugo’s room when we came in. There was a big fire burning, and hot cakes standing down in covered dishes on the hob, and tea all waiting on the round polished table. Outside the sun was shining, a thin, cold sun, and it slanted in through the window and mixed with the firelight. ”

“ Mollie said that I should be thankful for John, and I am, I have been always.
Eleanor likes books that give her information. She likes facts and statistics, and she does very well at school, much better than John or Rachel. They say she is very clever, that she will get a scholarship. That will please Walter. He is proud of Eleanor, but I think he loves Rachel best. She is more alive; she is not so good as Eleanor, nor so naughty as John, not so fair as Eleanor, nor so dark as John. She does her lessons well, but she likes to play at games. I don’t think life will be hard for Rachel. ”

“ Guy and Anthony Cowper were talking to her—but I felt convinced somehow that she didn’t really know what she meant herself that she was repeating things she had learnt from somebody else, and that annoyed me, for I had never liked that sort of person.
She always talked about Art. Once she said:
‘I live for my Art. A true artist must’; and it sounded silly. A ‘true artist’ would never have said it, I felt sure.
She was talking to Guy when she said that, and Guy was very funny with her. ”

“ These things don’t happen really . . . not with people like us.’
‘No, not with you and Hugo. . . . I should have known,’ she said.
We sat and talked together till very late that night. The lamps were lit outside, those cheerless, darkened lamps, and the noise in the streets went on.
We bathed John by the fire, in George’s big blue basin and we put him to sleep on the sofa, and then we made our supper.
And Mollie talked of Salonika and what she had done there, and we talked of little things, little everyday things, and I stayed there that night, and in the morning, it was better. ”

“ Walter said that I would find that I had lots of things in common with some of them, if only I would try, and I expect that is quite true, but somehow I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t make the effort. I felt then, and I still do, as though there were no room for new people in my life any more. I should never care for new friends as I did for the old ones. When one has had the best of all, second best seems not worth having.
Mollie came to see us. ”

“ Cousin Delia sent me Hugo’s statue of the Delphic charioteer, and I put it in the corner, on a shelf all to itself just as Hugo used to have it in his room at Clifford’s Inn; our room was not like his even when that was there, but I liked to have it there.
People came to call on me, a great many people. They meant to be kind to me, I knew that. They wanted me to join all sorts of societies and to do all sorts of things. They asked me if I was musical; if I took an interest in politics, or infant welfare. ”

“ There was a blue haze among the tree trunks and a nip in the air, and often the smell of bonfires, burning up leaves and sticks, and the dew on the grass would lie thick till midday, though the sun was shining. And in the walled garden, the dahlias would be out, and dark red chrysanthemums and michaelmas daisies, and old Joseph, the gardener, would be pottering slowly about the summer borders, clearing up, and rooting out and burning up piles of finished flowers, on the rubbish heap behind the potting shed. ”

“ The summer holidays were longer—and the summer days at Yearsly were lovelier than anywhere else.
The sound of the mowing machine in the clear mornings; haymaking along the grass hill below the wood;—tossing the hay and playing in it; romping in the little ‘pikes’ of hay with the dogs. One hot afternoon in particular—it must have been late in August, for they were cutting the corn in the field beyond the willows—paddling in the stream while Guy fished. ”

“ Sebright said.’
‘Sebright?’ said George. ‘When did he talk about it?’
‘I went to the British Museum with him the other day.’ I tried to say it nonchalantly, but I felt self-conscious, and that vexed me, for why shouldn’t I go with him? ‘He says Greek vases are like faces without souls.’
‘So they are,’ said George.
Hugo said:
‘No, they are not at all like that. They are more like souls without faces—impersonal and rather cold. ”

“ I had never lived with a bathroom like that, for at Yearsly the bath was a big old-fashioned one in a wooden casing, and at Campden Hill Square it was the same. I don’t know why this got into my head, or why it stayed there, but it became an obsession. I kept planning how it would be, and where the glass shelf would be, and how many white tiles would be needed, though I knew, of course, that it could not be done; even if we had the money to spend, our bathroom was not big enough to be like the one I planned; but it kept me from thinking of the War, and about Hugo, and Guy, and George ”

“ One thing we missed during these years was the autumn at Yearsly, when the trees in the High Wood turned red and gold, and the leaves floated down about you as you walked, through the still air, and rustled round your feet. ”