regiment;
pity--great pity!' He is a fighter, of course. I don't like fighting,
but if I'm not ready to, he'll stop loving me, perhaps. I've got to
learn. O Darkness out there, help me! And Stars, help me! O God, make
me brave, and I will believe in you forever! If you are the spirit that
grows in things in spite of everything, until they're like the flowers,
so perfect that we laugh and sing at their beauty, grow in me, too; make
me beautiful and brave; then I shall be fit for him, alive or dead; and
that's all I want. Every evening I shall stand in spirit with him at
the end of that orchard in the darkness, under the trees above the
white flowers and the sleepy cows, and perhaps I shall feel him kiss
me again.... I'm glad I saw that old man Gaunt; it makes what they feel
more real to me. He showed me that poor laborer Tryst, too, the one
who mustn't marry his wife's sister, or have her staying in the house
without marrying her. Why should people interfere with others like that?
It does make your blood boil! Derek and Sheila have been brought up to
be in sympathy with the poor and oppressed. If they had lived in London
they would have been even more furious, I expect. And it's no use my
saying to myself 'I don't know the laborer, I don't know his hardships,'
because he is really just the country half of what I do know and see,
here in London, when I don't hide my eyes. One talk showed me how
desperately they feel; at night, in Sheila's room, when we had gone up,
just we four. Alan began it; they didn't want to, I could see; but he
was criticising what some of those Bigwigs had said--the 'Varsity makes
boys awfully conceited. It was such a lovely night; we were all in
the big, long window. A little bat kept flying past; and behind
the copper-beech the moon was shining on the lake. Derek sat in the
windowsill, and when he moved he touched me. To be touched by him gives
me a warm shiver all through. I could hear him gritting his teeth at
what Alan said--frightfully sententious, just like a newspaper: 'We
can't go into land reform from feeling, we must go into it from reason.'
Then Derek broke out: 'Walk through this country as we've walked; see
the pigsties the people live in; see the water they drink; see the tiny
patches of ground they have; see the way their roofs let in the rain;
see their peeky children; see their patience and their hopelessness; see
them working day in and day out, and coming on the parish at the end!