Windyridge

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

THE CALL OF THE HEATHER

I am beginning to-day a new volume in the book of my life. I wrote the Prologue to it yesterday when I chanced upon this hamlet, and my Inner Self peremptorily bade me take up my abode here. My Inner Self often insists upon a course which has neither rhyme nor reason to recommend it, but as I am a woman I can plead instinct as the explanation—or shall I say the excuse?—of my eccentric conduct. Yet I don't think I have ever been quite so mad before as I fully realise that I am now, and the delight of it all is that I don't care and I don't repent, although twenty-four hours have passed since I impulsively asked the price of my cottage, and found that I could have it, studio and all, for a yearly rental of ten pounds. I have never been a tenant "on my own" before, and the knowledge that I am not going back to the attic bedroom and the hard "easy" chairs of the Chelsea lodging-house which has been my home for the last three years fills me with a great joy. I feel as if I should suffocate if I were to go back, but it is my soul which would be smothered. Subconsciously I have been panting for Windyridge for months, and my soul recognised the place and leaped to the discovery instantaneously.

Yet how strange it all seems: how ridiculously fantastic! I cannot get away from that thought, and I am constantly asking myself whether Providence or Fate, or any other power with a capital letter at the beginning, is directing the move for my good, or whether it is just whimsicalness on my part, self-originated and self-explanatory—the explanation being that I am mad, as I said before.

When I look back on the events of the last three days and realise that I have crossed my Rubicon and burned my boats behind me, and that I had no conscious intention of doing anything of the kind when I set out, I just gasp. If I had stayed to reason with myself I should never have had the courage to pack a few things into a bag and take a third-class ticket for Airlee at King's Cross, with the avowed intention of hearing a Yorkshire choir sing in a summer festival. Yet it seems almost prophetic as I recall the incident that I declined to take a return ticket, though, to be sure, there was no advantage in doing so: no reduction, I mean. Whether there was an advantage remains to be seen; I verily believe I should have returned rather than have wasted that return half. I dislike waste.

That was on Tuesday; on Wednesday I went to the Town Hall and entered a new world. It cost me a good deal in coin of the realm—much more than I had dreamed of—but I got it all back in the currency of heaven before I came away. It may have been my excitable temperament—for my mother, I remember, used to condone my faults by explaining that I was "highly-strung," whatever that may mean—or it may have been the Yorkshire blood in my veins which turned to fever heat as the vast volume of sweet sound rose and fell; one thing is certain, I lost myself completely, and did not find myself again until I discovered that the room was almost bare of people, and realised by the good-humoured glances of the few who remained that I appeared to be more vacant than the room, and was making myself foolishly conspicuous by remaining seated with my head in my hands and that far-away look in my eyes which tells of "yonderliness."

To be quite candid, I am not quite sure that I did find myself; I suspect some tenant moved out and another moved in that afternoon, and I am disposed to think that Airlee explains Windyridge....