ON THE MARSHES
THE marshes stretched mellow in the autumn sun, sheep wandered about, nibbling contentedly, or lay down to rest in groups, the sky reflecting itself in the narrow dykes gave a blue colour to the water, a scent of the sea was in the air as one breathed it, flocks of plover rose, now and then, crying softly.Betty, walking with her dog, had passed a heron standing at the edge of a pool.
From her first discovery of them, she had been attracted by the marshes with their English suggestion of the Roman Campagna, their broad expanse of level land spread out to the sun and wind, the thousands of white sheep dotted or clustered as far as eye could reach, the hues of the marsh grass and the plants growing thick at the borders of the strips of water.Its beauty was all its own and curiously aloof from the softly-wooded, undulating world about it.Driving or walking along the high road--the road the Romans had built to London town long centuries ago--on either side of one were meadows, farms, scattered cottages, and hop gardens, but beyond and below stretched the marsh land, golden and grey, and always alluring one by its silence.
"I never pass it without wanting to go to it--to take solitary walks over it, to be one of the spots on it as the sheep are.It seems as if, lying there under the blue sky or the low grey clouds with all the world held at bay by mere space and stillness, they must feel something we know nothing of.I want to go and find out what it is."This she had once said to Mount Dunstan.
So she had fallen into the habit of walking there with her dog at her side as her sole companion, for having need for time and space for thought, she had found them in the silence and aloofness.
Life had been a vivid and pleasurable thing to her, as far as she could look back upon it.She began to realise that she must have been very happy, because she had never found herself desiring existence other than such as had come to her day by day.Except for her passionate childish regret at Rosy's marriage, she had experienced no painful feeling.In fact, she had faced no hurt in her life, and certainly had been confronted by no limitations.Arguing that girls in their teens usually fall in love, her father had occasionally wondered that she passed through no little episodes of sentiment, but the fact was that her interests had been larger and more numerous than the interests of girls generally are, and her affectionate intimacy with himself had left no such small vacant spaces as are frequently filled by unimportant young emotions.Because she was a logical creature, and had watched life and those living it with clear and interested eyes, she had not been blind to the path which had marked itself before her during the summer's growth and waning.She had not, at first, perhaps, known exactly when things began to change for her--when the clarity of her mind began to be disturbed.She had thought in the beginning--as people have a habit of doing--that an instance --a problem--a situation had attracted her attention because it was absorbing enough to think over.Her view of the matter had been that as the same thing would have interested her father, it had interested herself.But from the morning when she had been conscious of the sudden fury roused in her by Nigel Anstruthers' ugly sneer at Mount Dunstan, she had better understood the thing which had come upon her.Day by day it had increased and gathered power, and she realised with a certain sense of impatience that she had not in any degree understood it when she had seen and wondered at its effect on other women.Each day had been like a wave encroaching farther upon the shore she stood upon.At the outset a certain ignoble pride--she knew it ignoble--filled her with rebellion.She had seen so much of this kind of situation, and had heard so much of the general comment.People had learned how to sneer because experience had taught them.If she gave them cause, why should they not sneer at her as at things? She recalled what she had herself thought of such things--the folly of them, the obviousness--the almost deserved disaster.She had arrogated to herself judgment of women--and men--who might, yes, who might have stood upon their strip of sand, as she stood, with the waves creeping in, each one higher, stronger, and more engulfing than the last.There might have been those among them who also had knowledge of that sudden deadly joy at the sight of one face, at the drop of one voice.When that wave submerged one's pulsing being, what had the world to do with one--how could one hear and think of what its speech might be? Its voice clamoured too far off.
As she walked across the marsh she was thinking this first phase over.She had reached a new one, and at first she looked back with a faint, even rather hard, smile.She walked straight ahead, her mastiff, Roland, padding along heavily close at her side.How still and wide and golden it was; how the cry of plover and lifting trill of skylark assured one that one was wholly encircled by solitude and space which were more enclosing than any walls! She was going to the mounds to which Mr.Penzance had trundled G.Selden in the pony chaise, when he had given him the marvellous hour which had brought Roman camp and Roman legions to life again.Up on the largest hillock one could sit enthroned, resting chin in hand and looking out under level lids at the unstirring, softly-living loveliness of the marsh-land world.So she was presently seated, with her heavy-limbed Roland at her feet.She had come here to try to put things clearly to herself, to plan with such reason as she could control.She had begun to be unhappy, she had begun --with some unfairness--to look back upon the Betty Vanderpoel of the past as an unwittingly self-sufficient young woman, to find herself suddenly entangled by things, even to know a touch of desperateness.