Free The Only Poet by Rebecca West

looked wildly over the fields, she saw that a road crossed the plains to the little town. It ran with sudden narrowings like a twisted staylace.
    Somehow, this road fascinated her. It seemed the most desirable thing in the world to walk along by the bent alders in the lively winds: to become for a time a part of the joyful traffic of the plains: to reach at last the quiet streets of that little town, flooded with blue shadow and the sleepy sounds of church bells tolling and dogs barking drowsily.… To sit in the coolness of some inn and look out on the hot cobbled stones of the marketplace: to watch the pleasant, kindly folk pass in and out on their sober, leisurely occupations, to hold out a hand and grasp at their kindliness. And in the morning to go forth again to somewhere lovelier and more distant to find pleasanter and kindlier people.
    For the first time in her life she felt fully the desire for the open road, that before she had only faintly experienced on clear days at the sight of distant purple moors from the high places of Saltgreave. Her cheeks flamed. Overcome by a passion quite as sharp and fiery as any lust, she turned swiftly to make her way out of the station on to that road.
    She stopped dead. While she had been musing over the fields a man and woman had entered the station and now stood a few paces away. They were in riding-costume and had evidently just come from a run of the hounds: the joy of physical exercise glittered from the hard surface of their arrogance. The woman was about thirty-five and not beautiful. But if her face was blunt and sallow and heavy, one felt that her high birth and her wealth would cause bluntness and sallowness and heaviness to be proclaimed as essentials of beauty. And if her bosom was solid and square and her hips overlarge, she had retained a pantechnicon-like weight and impressiveness that did not need the aid of beauty to compel respect. And if her expression was self-consciously obtuse, it was because she disdained the vulgar weapon of intelligence. So although she turned ox-like eyes of contempt on Adela, Adela returned her gaze with reverence and admiration. This woman might be stupid, ungainly and uncomely, but she had the supreme gift, the power of being a bully at the right time and in the right way … the power that had kept her class stubbornly sitting on top of all the others in spite of their plaintive agreement that it really shouldn’t if it had any sort of a conscience at all. What it had bought for this woman! The delight she must have experienced already that day, riding some fine-blooded horse in the keen wine of the spring air, from some distant wooded place, drowsy with morning mists, into these clear plains. And this was only one day of the year, and each day had its particular delight. There must be something valuable in a class that has secured unto itself such an existence, thought Adela, driven into the worship of success by the bitterness of her own defeat.
    Then it struck her that she came of the same stock. If Amy Motley was of Saltgreave, Digby Furnival was born at Ferney Manor, Ashby-à-Court, Warwickshire. And by inheritance she possessed that inconquerable sense of her own rightness and value, that arrogance of mind that had sometimes desolated her by its divergence from the slave-morality inculcated in girls’ schools. Now she gloried in it. She determined to face life with insolence. She forgot the open road. She was going on to Peartree Green to live not idly in the luxury of her aunt’s home, becoming in each moment of enjoyment more and more the blackguard.
    The black-and-tan puppy nuzzled about her feet. She picked it up and hugged it, so that its pink tongue licked her cheek. Its supple sides wriggled over its own ribs: it panted with the excitement of being alive.
    As she got into a carriage the man and the woman passed her again.
    This time she looked at the man, a slim boy of twenty-five or so, his youth and