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By Root 1114 0

a character in a book who was said to have taken to drink through love; she remembered that lovers’ existences were said to be punctuated with heavy sighs. Once she went to the little cottage piano that was in the corner of the hall and began to play. It was a tinkly, reedy instrument, for none of that household had any turn for music. Nancy herself could play a few simple songs, and she found herself playing. She had been sitting on the window seat, looking out on the fading day. Leonora had gone to pay some calls; Edward was looking after some planting up in the new spinney. Thus she found herself playing on the old piano. She did not know how she came to be doing it. A silly lilting wavering tune came from before her in the dusk – a tune in which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and melted into minor sounds, as, beneath a bridge, the high-lights on dark waters melt and waver and disappear into black depths. Well, it was a silly old tune…

It goes with the words – they are about a willow tree, I think:

Thou art to all lost loves the best

The only true plant found.

– That sort of thing. It is Herrick,155 I believe, and the music with the reedy, irregular, lilting sound that goes with Herrick. And it was dusk; the heavy, hewn, dark pillars that supported the gallery were like mourning presences; the fire had sunk to nothing – a mere glow amongst white ashes… It was a sentimental sort of place and light and hour…

And suddenly Nancy found that she was crying. She was crying quietly; she went on to cry with long convulsive sobs. It seemed to her that everything gay, everything charming, all light, all sweetness, had gone out of life. Unhappiness; unhappiness; unhappiness was all around her. She seemed to know no happy being and she herself was agonizing….

She remembered that Edward’s eyes were hopeless; she was certain that he was drinking too much; at times he sighed deeply. He appeared as a man who was burning with inward flame; drying up in the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals. Then, the torturing conviction came to her – the conviction that had visited her again and again – that Edward must love some one other than Leonora. With her little, pedagogic sectarianism she remembered that Catholics do not do this thing. But Edward was a Protestant. Then Edward loved somebody…

And, after that thought, her eyes grew hopeless; she sighed as the old St Bernard beside her did. At meals she would feel an intolerable desire to drink a glass of wine, and then another and then a third. Then she would find herself grow gay… But in half an hour the gaiety went; she felt like a person who is burning up with an inward flame; desiccating at the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals. One evening she went into Edward’s gunroom – he had gone to a meeting of the National Reserve Committee.156 On the table beside his chair was a decanter of whisky. She poured out a wine-glassful and drank it off.

Flame then really seemed to fill her body; her legs swelled; her face grew feverish. She dragged her tall height up to her room and lay in the dark. The bed reeled beneath her; she gave way to the thought that she was in Edward’s arms; that he was kissing her on her face that burned; on her shoulders that burned, and on her neck that was on fire.

She never touched alcohol again. Not once after that did she have such thoughts. They died out of her mind; they left only a feeling of shame so insupportable that her brain could not take it in and they vanished. She imagined that her anguish at the thought of Edward’s love for another person was solely sympathy for Leonora; she determined that the rest of her life must be spent in acting as Leonora’s handmaiden – sweeping, tending, embroidering, like some Deborah, some medieval saint – I am not, unfortunately, up in the Catholic hagiology.157 But I know that she pictured herself as some personage with a depressed, earnest face and tightly dosed lips, in a clear white room, watering flowers or tending an embroidery frame. Or, she desired to go with Edward to