Месяц в деревне

Well, we all see things with different eyes, and it gets you nowhere hoping that even one in a thousand will see things your way.

What befell you Over There to give you that God-awful twitch? Are you here to try to crawl back into the skin you had before they pushed you through the mincer?

This is what I need, I thought – a new start and, afterwards, maybe I won’t be a casualty anymore.

And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart—knowing a precious moment gone and we not there.

We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

You can only have this piece of cake once; you can't keep on munching away at it. Sad, but there it is! You'll find that, once you've dragged yourself off round the corner, there'll be another view; it may even be a better one."

All right Alice Keach, I thought, you're going to be pushed. You can lie awake in the dark too.

If I'd stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.

“I’ve never done anything in that line,” I protested. “Preaching! Or praying! Praying aloud, that is.” (Conscience compelled “aloud” because I’d prayed eloquently enough in my signal-pit during big strafes. And had I felt disposed to reproduce one of those very particular prayers, it would have been the most remarkable utterance heard in any chapel, let alone Barton Ferry.)

And I wondered about Keach and his wife and how the oddest people meet and then live together year after year, look at each other across hundreds of meals, watch each other dress and undress, whisper in the darkness, cry aloud in the marvelous agony of sexual release.

And then, God help me, on my first morning, in the first few minutes of my first morning, I felt that this alien northern countryside was friendly, that I’d turned a corner and that this summer of 1920, which was to smolder on until the first leaves fell, was to be a propitious season of living, a blessed time.