There was green and silver and blue in the air about her now.
And there was a strange insistence of light from the sea, to
which she must attend. Primroses glimmered around, many of them,
and she stooped to the disturbing influence near her feet, she
even picked one or two flowers, faintly remembering in the new
colour of life, what had been. All the day long, as she sat at
the upper window, the light came off the sea, constantly,
constantly, without refusal, till it seemed to bear her away,
and the noise of the sea created a drowsiness in her, a
relaxation like sleep. Her automatic consciousness gave way a
little, she stumbled sometimes, she had a poignant, momentary
vision of her living child, that hurt her unspeakably. Her soul
roused to attention.
Very strange was the constant glitter of the sea unsheathed
in heaven, very warm and sweet the graveyard, in a nook of the
hill catching the sunshine and holding it as one holds a bee
between the palms of the hands, when it is benumbed. Grey grass
and lichens and a little church, and snowdrops among coarse
grass, and a cupful of incredibly warm sunshine.
She was troubled in spirit. Hearing the rushing of the beck
away down under the trees, she was startled, and wondered what
it was. Walking down, she found the bluebells around her glowing
like a presence, among the trees.
Summer came, the moors were tangled with harebells like water
in the ruts of the roads, the heather came rosy under the skies,
setting the whole world awake. And she was uneasy. She went past
the gorse bushes shrinking from their presence, she stepped into
the heather as into a quickening bath that almost hurt. Her
fingers moved over the clasped fingers of the child, she heard
the anxious voice of the baby, as it tried to make her talk,
distraught.
And she shrank away again, back into her darkness, and for a
long while remained blotted safely away from living. But autumn
came with the faint red glimmer of robins singing, winter
darkened the moors, and almost savagely she turned again to
life, demanding her life back again, demanding that it should be
as it had been when she was a girl, on the land at home, under
the sky. Snow lay in great expanses, the telegraph posts strode
over the white earth, away under the gloom of the sky. And
savagely her desire rose in her again, demanding that this was
Poland, her youth, that all was her own again.
But there were no sledges nor bells, she did not see the
peasants coming out like new people, in their sheepskins and
their fresh, ruddy, bright faces, that seemed to become new and
vivid when the snow lit up the ground. It did not come to her,
the life of her youth, it did not come back. There was a little
agony of struggle, then a relapse into the darkness of the
convent, where Satan and the devils raged round the walls, and
Christ was white on the cross of victory.