So I followed the script: the trite phrases of a letter from a French-speaking girl to an English soldier. ‘I think of you always, always. Do you think sometimes of me?’ And then I vaguely realized that I was reading a man’s private correspondence. And yet, how could one consider these trivial, facile French phrases private! Nothing more trite and vulgar in the world, than such a love-letter — no newspaper more obvious.
‘I remember, too,’ she said, ‘a little black-and-white kitten that followed me. Mater would not have it in—she would not. And I remember finding it, a few days after, dead in the road. I don’t think I ever quite forgave my mater that.’
‘More sorrow over one kitten brought to destruction than over all the sufferings of men,’ he said. She glanced at him and laughed. He was smiling ironically. ‘For the latter, you see,’ she replied, ‘I am not responsible.’
Catching sight of her reflection in a mirror, she glanced at herself with a slight smile of recognition, as if she were an old friend to herself.
And she had a vision, a vision of evil. She became aware of evil, evil, evil rolling in great waves over the earth. And she thought in horror of those other people, so glib, so glibly evil. … What did they want to do? Undermine, undermine, undermine.
…
Believe in nothing, care about nothing: but keep the surface easy, and have a good time. Let us undermine one another. There is nothing to believe in, so let us undermine everything.
…
Never draw blood. Keep the hemorrhage internal, invisible.
…
Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror. But go on saving life, the ghastly salvation army of ideal mankind. At the same time secretly, viciously, potently undermine the natural creation, betray it with kiss after kiss, destroy it from the inside, till you have the swollen rottenness of our teeming existences.
People, all the people she knew seemed so entirely contained within their cardboard let’s-be-happy world. Their wills fixed like machines on happiness…
“I know you too are pining,” his voice shimmered again, “but your pining, compared to mine, my tempestuous, turbulent pining, is but the even breathing of one who is asleep.”
She was stimulated all the day. She did not think about her husband. He was the permanent basis from which she took these giddy little flights into nowhere. At night, like chickens and curses, she would come home to him, to roost.
Her look was even more sullen. She remembered the state of trade—Trade, the invidious enemy; Trade, which thrust out its hand and shut the factory doors, and pulled the stockingers off their seats, and left the web half-finished on the frame; Trade, which mysteriously choked up the sources of the rivulets of wealth, and blacker and more secret than a pestilence, starved the town. Through this morose atmosphere of bad trade, in the afternoon of the first day of the fair, the girl strode down to the Poultry with eleven sound geese and one lame one to sell.
The lovers stood for some time watching the people of the farm in the down below dip their sheep on this sunny morning. There was a ragged noise of bleating from the flock penned in a corner of the yard. Two red-armed men seized a sheep, hauled it to a large bath that stood in the middle of the yard, and there held it, more or less in the bath, whilst a third man baled a dirty yellow liquid over its body. The white legs of the sheep twinkled as it butted this way and that to escape the yellow douche, the blue-shirted men ducked and struggled. There was a faint splashing and shouting to be heard even from a distance. The farmer’s wife and children stood by ready to rush in with assistance if necessary. Helena laughed with pleasure. ‘That is really a very quaint and primitive proceeding,’ she said. ‘It is cruder than Theocritus.’ ‘In an instant it makes me wish I were a farmer,’ he laughed. ‘I think every man has a passion for farming at the bottom of his blood. It would be fine to be plain-minded, to see no farther than the end of one’s nose, and to own cattle and land.’ ‘Would it?’ asked Helena sceptically. ‘If I had a red face, and went to sleep as soon as I sat comfortable, I should love it,’he said. ‘It amuses me to hear you long to be stupid,’ she replied. ‘To have a simple, slow-moving mind and an active life is the desideratum.’ ‘Is it?’ she asked ironically. ‘I would give anything to be like that,’ he said. ‘That is, not to be yourself,’ she said pointedly. He laughed without much heartiness.
One ruby drop of blood hung on the small snout, ready to fall. Anne shook it off on to some harebells. Frances suddenly became calm; in that moment, grown-up. “I suppose they have to be killed,” she said, and a certain rather dreary indifference succeeded to her grief. The twinkling crab-apples, the glitter of brilliant willows now seemed to her trifling, scarcely worth the notice. Something had died in her, so that things lost their poignancy. She was calm, indifference overlying her quiet sadness. Rising, she walked down to the brook course.
