A Note in Music by Rosamond Lehmann

Author:Rosamond Lehmann
Language: ara, eng, fra
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-03-03T21:43:48+00:00

Part Five

Where her holiday was spent she never quite knew. She forgot to ascertain, either by map, or by inquiry, precisely in what direction and locality the village lay; but traveling out by bus from the southern market town where she had spent the night, mile after mile, waiting to detect it, it revealed itself at last, as she had seen it in her mind’s eye, basking in sunlight among corn fields and water meadows; and she had found a thatched cottage, white-washed on the garden side, old pink brick where it faced the lane; and walked up through a small garden packed with flowers and set with a few ancient fruit trees; and there taken lodging.

From her square of window she saw the garden and a row of poplars, pond and village green beyond, and more cottages sitting squat and rosy in their gardens, and sending up threads of smoke from sprawling chimneys; and she heard hens and ducks, sleepy-sounding, and the children coming down the lane to school and back again; carter and cowman calling to their beasts in the fields; and the anvil ringing from the forge at the end of the village.

And she heard, too, warning notes of a new order—the frequent rattle of a motor-bicycle, newly-acquired property of the young man at the public-house, and the roar of the daily bus as it passed to the town and back, picking up, setting down its handful of shoppers and cinema-goers.

But for a little longer there would be peace: no factory stack, no entertainment hall, no railway station, tram-lines, or golf-links. For a little longer time would move kindly here; the changing seasons of all created things would follow one another imperceptibly and bring no change. Men and women, and apple trees, the great cart-horses and the corn, the rose bushes and the swallows, were all gathered up together into one common harmony of the fruitful earth.

She fell into a summer trance.

Beauty is a visitor, coming without warning, transforming for an hour, a day—sometimes for longer; crumbling at a breath, vanished again.

She wove herself into an iridescent web, linking small charm with frail enchantment until the shining fabric hid from her the commonplace noon, the ordinary night.

She was in love with her room, with its cracked pink crockery, its four-poster, whose mattress reversed every property requisite for rest and comfort, the texts, the wedding group, and the photograph of a grave on the wall. She was in love with the acrid smell of the damp old walls, with the square of window that let in the stars by night and the sighing rustle of the poplar trees, and the fragrance of meadowsweet from laden fields.

She heard the young swallows at daybreak, stirring in their mud nests beneath the eaves, greeting the light with a tender chatter.

She found upon her window-sill a moth of palest jade, with a lime-green wavering track across each wing. It lay there in the evening outspread in swooning stillness; but later she saw

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