Free Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner Page A

not drink of its brilliant peace.
    During the journey she stared sometimes at the landscape through the mesh of her veil, sometimes at the mesh itself, eyeing this needle-run entanglement as though it were something alien and inexplicable, a puzzle set before her in a dream. At Exeter a young woman got into the carriage who carried a baby and was in tears. As soon as the train started she broke into conversation. Her talk was perfectly insipid, alternately self-pity and brag, and Sophia found herself listening with pleasure, glad of any distraction from her own thoughts. For any forward thinking travelled only to boredom, and she would not let her thoughts turn backward, lest they should recall the events of yesterday, the iron sense of doom which had so oppressed her, that terrifying evening at the Half Moon Inn.
    Mrs. Henry Woolby, daughter of the late Canon Pawsey, lasted till Dorchester, where Sophia got out, hearing as she did so that life was so cruelly full of partings, and that Mrs. Woolby’s address was 7 Marine Terrace, Dawlish.
    Her groom was beside her, holding the dressing-case. She turned to give him her ticket.
    “Good-evening, Roger. Is all well?”
    She heard him catch his breath, and now looked at him. His face was flushed, she thought he had been drinking.
    “Master Damian, madam, and Miss Augusta. They’re queer.”
    “What?”
    “Miss Augusta, madam, she was took queer late last night. And this morning Master Damian was queer, too.”
    “Has the doctor been sent for?”
    “Yes, madam. Grew fetched him this morning.”
    “What did he say?”
    “I’m sure I don’t know, madam. But I understand he said it might be the smallpox.”
    She saw again the blank face of the Trebennick Academy, the staring sunset, the empty porch whence Caspar had already been whisked. But it was not he whom she would never see again. It was her own children, the fruit of her forsaken womb.
    Once I am at the house, she thought, driving between the ripened cornfields, I can get to work. I am only a little late, four hours’ delay cannot count for so much. Already she felt the need to exculpate herself; and since destiny cannot be wheedled, and since in any crisis her nature turned, not to God but to destiny, she would brazen it out. Yet in turning rather to destiny she was like one who seeks shelter. God, an enormous darkness, hung looped over half her sky, an ever-present menace, a cloud waiting to break. In the antipodes of God was destiny, was reason — a small classical temple in a clear far-off light, just such a temple as shone opposed to a stormcloud in the landscape by Claude Lorraine that all her life long had hung in the dining-room. Small and ghostly were the serene figures that ministered there, a different breed to the anxious pilgrims who in the foreground rested under the gnarled tree, turning, some to the far-off temple, some to the cloud where lightnings already flashed. God was a cloud, lightnings were round about his seat; and though the children must pray to Jesus, and Mrs. Willoughby support the Church of England, Sophia, even in her childhood, had disliked God exactly as she disliked adders, earthquakes, revolution — anything that lurked and was deadly, any adversary that walked in darkness. For God, her being knew, meant her no good. He had something against her, she was not one of those in whom he delighted. Now in his cloud he had come suddenly close, had reared up close behind her — at her back, as usual, for God was not an honest British pugilist. But once at the house, she thought — and already the carriage was turning in at the lodge gate — she could get to work.
    Seeing the children, all her sense of competence fell off her. They were not her children who lay there, her children biddable and comprehensible. They were the fever’s children, they were possessed; devils had entered into them, and looked with burning sullen glare from their heavy eyes. A devil strengthened Augusta’s