THE WAVES (1931) - World eBook Library

school. But when darkness comes I put off this unenviable body--my
large nose, my thin lips, my colonial accent--and inhabit space. I
am then Virgil's companion, and Plato's. I am then the last scion
of one of the great houses of France. But I am also one who will
force himself to desert these windy and moonlit territories, these
midnight wanderings, and confront grained oak doors. I will
achieve in my life--Heaven grant that it be not long--some gigantic
amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to
me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will
enter.'
'I have torn off the whole of May and June,' said Susan, 'and
twenty days of July. I have torn them off and screwed them up so
that they no longer exist, save as a weight in my side. They have
been crippled days, like moths with shrivelled wings unable to fly.
There are only eight days left. In eight days' time I shall get
out of the train and stand on the platform at six twenty five.
Then my freedom will unfurl, and all these restrictions that
wrinkle and shrivel--hours and order and discipline, and being here
and there exactly at the right moment--will crack asunder. Out the
day will spring, as I open the carriage-door and see my father in
his old hat and gaiters. I shall tremble. I shall burst into
tears. Then next morning I shall get up at dawn. I shall let
myself out by the kitchen door. I shall walk on the moor. The
great horses of the phantom riders will thunder behind me and stop
suddenly. I shall see the swallow skim the grass. I shall throw
myself on a bank by the river and watch the fish slip in and out
among the reeds. The palms of my hands will be printed with pine-
needles. I shall there unfold and take out whatever it is I have
made here; something hard. For something has grown in me here,
through the winters and summers, on staircases, in bedrooms. I do
not want, as Jinny wants, to be admired. I do not want people,
when I come in, to look up with admiration. I want to give, to be
given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.
'Then I shall come back through the trembling lanes under the
arches of the nut leaves. I shall pass an old woman wheeling a
perambulator full of sticks; and the shepherd. But we shall not
speak. I shall come back through the kitchen garden, and see the
curved leaves of the cabbages pebbled with dew, and the house in
the garden, blind with curtained windows. I shall go upstairs to
my room, and turn over my own things, locked carefully in the
wardrobe: my shells; my eggs; my curious grasses. I shall feed my
doves and my squirrel. I shall go to the kennel and comb my