ld have  brought a trowel,"
she  reflected.  The earth  was so  shallow  over  the  roots that it seemed
doubtful if she could do  as she meant and bury the book  here. Besides, the
dogs would dig  it up. No luck  ever  attends these symbolical celebrations,
she thought. Perhaps it would be as  well then to do without them. She had a
little  speech on  the tip of her tongue which  she meant  to speak over the
book as she buried it. (It was a copy of the first edition, signed by author
and artist.) "I bury  this  as a  tribute," she  was going to have  said, "a
return to  the land of what the land has given me," but Lord! once one began
mouthing words aloud, how silly they sounded! She was reminded of old Greene
getting upon a  platform  the other day comparing her  with Milton (save for
his blindness)  and handing her a cheque for two  hundred guineas.  She  had
thought then, of the oak tree here on its hill,  and what has that got to do
with this, she had wondered?  What has praise  and  fame to do  with poetry?
What has seven  editions (the book had already gone into no less)  got to do
with the value of  it? Was not  writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice
answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting
people who admired one and meeting people who did  not admire one was as ill
suited as  could be to the thing  itself - a voice  answering a voice.  What
could  have  been  more  secret,  she  thought,  more  slow,  and  like  the
intercourse  of lovers,  than the stammering answer she had made  all  these
years  to the old crooning  song  of  the woods, and the farms and the brown
horses  standing at the  gate, neck to neck, and  the smithy and the kitchen
and the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the garden
blowing irises and fritillaries?
     So she let her book  lie unburied and  dishevelled  on the  ground, and
watched the vast view, varied like an ocean floor  this evening with the sun
lightening it  and the  shadows darkening  it.  There  was a  village with a
church tower among elm trees; a grey domed manor house in a park; a spark of
light burning on some  glass-house; a farmyard with  yellow corn stacks. The
fields  were marked with black tree clumps, and beyond the  fields stretched
long woodlands, and there was the gleam of a river, and then hills again. In
the far distance Snowdon's crags broke white among the  clouds; she saw  the
far Scottish hills  and the  wild tides that swirl  about  the Hebrides. She
listened for the sound of gun-firing out  at sea.  No - only  the wind blew.
There  was  no war to-day. Drake had gone; Nelson had gone. "And there," she
thought, letting  her eyes,  which had been looking at these far  distances,
drop  once more to the land  beneath  her, "was  my  land  once: that Castle
between the downs was mine; and all that moor running  almost to the sea was
mine." Here the landscape (it must have been some trick of the fading light)
shook itself, heaped  itself,  let  all this encumbrance of houses, castles,
and woods slide off its tent-shaped sides. The bare mountains of Turkey were
before her. It was blazing noon. She looked straight at the baked hill-side.
Goats  cropped  the sandy  tufts at her feet.  An  eagle  soared above.  The
raucous voice of old Rustum,  the gipsy, croaked  in her ears, "What is your
antiquity and your race,  and  your possessions  compared with this? What do
you need  with four hundred bedrooms and silver lids on all your dishes, and
housemaids dusting?"
     At this  moment some  church clock  chimed in the valley. The tent-like
landscape  collapsed and fell. The present showered  down upon her head once
more, but now that  the light was fading, gentlier than before, calling into
view nothing  detailed, nothing small, but only misty fields, cottages  with
lamps in them, the slumbering bulk of a wood, and a fan-shaped light pushing
the darkness before it along some lane.  Whether it had struck nine, ten, or
eleven, she  could not say.  Night  had come - night  that  she loved of all
times, night  in which the  reflections in  the dark pool of the mind  shine
more clearly than by day. It was not necessary to faint now in order to look
deep into the darkness where  things shape themselves and to see in the pool
of the mind now Shakespeare, now a girl in Russian trousers, now  a toy boat
on the  Serpentine, and then the  Atlantic itself, where  it storms in great
waves past Cape Horn.  She looked into the darkness. There was her husband's
brig, rising to the top of the wave! Up, it went,  and  up and up. The white
arch of a thousand deaths rose before it. Oh rash, oh ridiculous man, always
sailing, so uselessly, round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale!  But the brig
was through the arch and out on the other side; it was safe at last!
     "Ecstasy!" she cried,  "ecstasy!"  And  then the wind  sank, the waters
grew calm; and she saw the waves rippling peacefully in the moonlight.
     "Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!" she cried, standing by the oak tree.
     The beautiful, glittering name fell out  of the  sky like  a steel-blue
feather. She watched it fall, turning and twisting like a slow-falling arrow
that cleaves the deep air beautifully. He was  coming, as he always came, in
moments of dead  calm; when the  wave  rippled and the  spotted leaves  fell
slowly  over her foot in the  autumn woods; when the leopard  was still; the
moon was on the waters,  and nothing moved  in between sky and sea. Then  he
came.
     All was still now. It was near midnight. The  moon rose slowly over the
weald. Its light raised a  phantom castle upon earth. There stood  the great
house with all its windows robed  in silver. Of  wall or substance there was
none. All was phantom. All was still.  All  was lit as for the  coming  of a
dead Queen.  Gazing below  her,  Orlando saw  dark  plumes  tossing  in  the
courtyard,  and torches flickering and shadows kneeling.  A  Queen once more
stepped from her chariot.
     "The house is at your  service, Ma'am,"  she  cried, curtseying deeply.
"Nothing has been changed. The dead Lord, my father, shall lead you in".
     As she  spoke, the first stroke of midnight sounded. The cold breeze of
the  present brushed her  face with  its  little breath of fear.  She looked
anxiously into the sky. It was dark with clouds now. The wind roared in  her
ears. But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar  of an aeroplane coming
nearer and nearer.
     "Here! Shel, here! she cried, baring her breast to the moon  (which now
showed bright) so that her  pearls glowed  like the eggs of  some vast  moon
spider.  The aeroplane  rushed out of the clouds and stood over her head. It
hovered  above  her. Her  pearls burnt like a  phosphorescent  flare  in the
darkness.
     And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea captain, hale, fresh-coloured,
and  alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head a single wild
bird.
     "It is the goose!" Orlando cried. "The wild goose..."
     And the  twelfth  stroke of  midnight sounded; the  twelfth  stroke  of
midnight, Thursday, the  eleventh of  October, Nineteen hundred  and  Twenty
Eight.
        THE END