In the autumn of that year, Eugene lived about a mile out from town in a house set back from the Ventnor Road. The house was called a “farm”— Hill-top Farm, or Far-end Farm, or some such name as that — but it was really no farm at all. It was a magnificent house of the weathered grey stone they have in that country, as if in the very quality of the wet heavy air there is the soft thick grey of time itself, sternly yet beautifully soaking down for ever on you — and enriching everything it touches — grass, foliage, brick, ivy, the fresh moist colour of the people’s faces, and old grey stone, with the incomparable weathering of time.
The house was set back off the road at a distance of several hundred yards, possibly a quarter of a mile, and one reached it by means of a road bordered by rows of tall trees which arched above the road, and which made Eugene think of home, at night when the stormy wind howled in their tossed branches. On each side of the road were the Rugby fields of two of the colleges and in the afternoon he could look out and down and see the fresh moist green of the playing fields and watch young college fellows, dressed in their shorts and jerseys, and with their bare knees scurfed with grass and turf as they twisted, struggled, swayed, and scrambled for a moment in the scrimmage-circle, and then broke free, running, dodging, passing the ball as they were tackled, filling the moist air with their sharp cries of sport. They did not have the desperate, the grimly determined, the almost professional earnestness that the college teams at home have; their scurfed and muddy knees, their swaying scrambling scrimmages, the swift breaking away and running, their panting breath and crisp clear voices gave them the appearance of grown-up boys.
Once when Eugene had come up the road in the afternoon while they were playing, the ball got away from them and came bounding out into the road before him, and he ran after it to retrieve it, as he used to do when passing a field where boys were playing baseball. One of the players came over to the edge of the field and stood there waiting with his hands upon his hips while Eugene got the ball: he was panting hard, his face was flushed, and his blond hair tousled, but when Eugene threw the ball to him, he said “Thanks very much!” crisply and courteously — getting the same sound into the word “VERY” that they got in “AMERican,” a sound that always repelled Eugene a little because it seemed to have some scornful aloofness and patronage in it.
For a moment Eugene watched him as he trotted briskly away on to the field again: the players stood there waiting, panting, casual, their hands upon their hips; he passed the ball into the scrimmage, the pattern swayed, rocked, scrambled, and broke sharply out in open play again, and everything looked incredibly strange, near, and familiar.
Eugene felt that he had always known it, that it had always been his, and that it was as familiar to him as everything he had seen or known in his childhood. Even the texture of the earth looked familiar, and felt moist and firm and springy when he stepped on it, and the stormy howling of the wind in that avenue of great trees at night was wild and desolate and demented as it had been when he was eight years old and would lie in his bed at night and hear the great oaks howling on the hill above his father’s house.
The name of the people in the house was Coulson: he made arrangements with the woman at once to come and live there: she was a tall, weathered-looking woman of middle age, they talked together in the hall. The hall was made of marble flags and went directly out on to a gravelled walk.
The woman was crisp, cheerful, and worldly-looking. She was still quite handsome. She wore a well-cut skirt of woollen plaid and a silk blouse: when she talked she kept her arms folded because the air in the hall was chilly, and she held a cigarette in the fingers of one hand. A shaggy brown dog came out and nosed upward toward her hand as she was talking and she put her hand upon its head and scratched it gently. When Eugene told her he wanted to move in the next day, she said briskly and cheerfully:
“Right you are! You’ll find everything ready when you get here!” Then she asked if he was at the university. He said no, and added, with a feeling of difficulty and naked desolation, that he was a “writer,” and was coming there to work. He was twenty-four years old.
“Then I am sure that what you do will be VERY, VERY good!” she said cheerfully and decisively. “We have had several Americans in the house before and all of them were very clever! All the Americans we have had here were very clever people,” said the woman. “I’m sure that you will like it.” Then she walked to the door with him to say good-bye. As they stood there, there was the sound of a small motorcar coming to a halt and in a moment a girl came swiftly across the gravel space outside and entered the hall. She was tall, slender, very lovely, but she had the same bright hard look in her eye that the woman had, the same faint, hard smile round the edges of her mouth.
“Edith,” the woman said in her crisp curiously incisive tone, “this young man is an American — he is coming here tomorrow.” The girl looked at Eugene for a moment with her hard bright glance, thrust out a small gloved hand, and shook hands briefly, a swift firm greeting.
“Oh! How d’ye do?” she said. “I hope you will like it here.” Then she went on down the hall, entered a room on the left, and closed the door behind her.
Her voice had been crisp and certain like her mother’s, but it was also cool, young, and sweet, with music in it, and later as Eugene went down the road, he could still hear it.
That was a wonderful house, and the people there were wonderful people. Later, he could not forget them. He seemed to have known them all his life, and to know all about their lives. They seemed as familiar to him as his own blood and he knew them with a knowledge that went deep below the roots of thought or memory. They did not talk together often, or tell any of their lives to one another. It is very hard to tell about it — the way they felt and lived together in that house — because it was one of those simple and profound experiences of life which people seem always to have known when it happens to them, but for which there is no language.
And yet, like a child’s half-captured vision of some magic country he has known, and which haunts his days with strangeness and the sense of imminent, glorious rediscovery, the word that would unlock it all seemed constantly to be almost on their lips, waiting, just outside the gateway of their memory, just a shape, a phrase, a sound away, the moment that they chose to utter it — but when they tried to say the thing, something faded within their minds like fading light, and something melted within their grasp like painted smoke, and something went for ever when they tried to touch it.
The nearest Eugene could come to it was this: In that house he sometimes felt the greatest peace and solitude that he had ever known. But he always knew the other people in the house were there. He could sit in his sitting-room at night and hear nothing but the stormy moaning of the wind outside in the great trees, the small gaseous flare and jet from time to time of the coal fire burning in the grate — and silence, strong living lonely silence that moved and waited in the house at night — and he would always know that they were there.
He did not have to hear them enter or go past his door, nor did he have to hear doors close or open in the house, or listen to their voices: if he had never seen them, heard them, spoken to them, it would have been the same — he would have known they were there.
It was something he had always known, and he had known it would happen to him, and now it was there with all the strangeness and dark mystery of an awaited thing. He knew them, felt them, lived among them with a familiarity that had no need of sight or word or speech. And the memory of that house and of his silent fellowship with all the people there was somehow mixed with an image of dark time. It was one of those sorrowful and unchanging images which, among all the blazing stream of images that passed constantly their stream of fire across his mind, was somehow fixed, detached, and everlasting, full of a sorrow, certitude, and mystery that he could not fathom, but that wore for ever on it the old sad light of waning day — a light from which all the heat, the violence, and the substance of furious dusty day had vanished and which was itself like time, unearthly-of-the-earth, remote, detached, and everlasting.
And that fixed and changeless image of dark time was this: In an old house of time Eugene lived alone, and yet had other people all around him, and they never spoke to him or he to them. They came and went, like silence in the house, but he always knew that they were there. He would be sitting by a window in a room, and he would know then that they were moving in the house, and darkness, sorrow, and strong silence dwelt within them, and their eyes were quiet, full of sorrow, peace, and knowledge, and their faces dark, their tongues silent, and they never spoke. Eugene could not remember how their faces looked, but they were all familiar to him as his father’s face, and they had known one another for ever, and they lived together in the ancient house of time, dark time; and silence, sorrow, certitude, and peace were in them. Such was the image of dark time that was to haunt his life thereafter, and into which, somehow, his life among the people in that house had passed.
In the ............