Miss La Trobe (Near ending)

   At last, Miss La Trobe could raise herself from her stooping position. It had been prolonged 
to avoid attention. The bells had stopped; the audience had gone; also the actors. She could 
straighten her back. She could open her arms. She could say to the world, You have taken 
my gift! Glory possessed her - for one moment. But what had she given? A cloud that melted 
into the other clouds on the horizon. It was in the giving that the triumph was. And the triumph 
faded. Her gift meant nothing. If they had understood her meaning; if they had known their 
parts; if the pearls had been real and the funds illimitable - it would have been a better gift. 
Now it had gone to join the others.
   "A failure," she groaned, and stooped to put away the records. 
   Then suddenly In one flock they pelted it like so many winged stones. The whole tree hummed 
with the whizz they made, as if each bird plucked a wire. A whizz, a buzz rose from the bird 
buzzing, bird vibrant, bird blackened tree. The tree became a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony, 
a whizz and vibrant rapture, branches, leaves, birds syllabling discordantly life, life, life, 
without measure, without stop devouring the tree. Then up! Then off! 
   What interrupted? It was old Mrs. Chalmers, creeping through the grass with a bunch of 
flowers - pinks apparently - to fill the vase that stood on her husband's grave. In winter it was 
holly, or ivy. In summer, a flower. It was she who had scared the starlings. Now she passed.
   Miss La Trobe nicked the lock and hoisted the heavy case of gramophone records to her 
shoulder. She crossed the terrace and stopped by the tree where the starlings had gathered. 
It was here that she had suffered triumph, humiliation, ecstasy, despair - for nothing. Her heels 
had ground a hole in the grass.
   It was growing dark. Since there were no clouds to trouble the sky, the blue was bluer, the 
green greener. There was no longer a view - no Folly, no spire of Bolney Minster. It was land 
merely, no land in particular. She put down her case and stood looking at the land. Then something 
rose to the surface.
   "I should group them," she murmured, "here." It would be midnight; there would be two 
figures, half concealed by a rock. The curtain would rise. what would the first words be? 
The words escaped her.
   Again she lifted the heavy suit case to her shoulder. She strode off across the lawn. The house 
was dormant; one thread of smoke thickened against the trees. It was strange that the earth, with 
all those flowers incandescent - the lilies, the roses, and clumps of white flowers and bushes of 
burning green - should still be hard. from the earth green waters seemed to rise over her. she 
took her voyage away from the shore, and, raising her hand, fumbled for the latch of the iron 
entrance gate. 
   She would drop her suit case in at the kitchen window, and then go on up to the Inn. Since the 
row with the actress who had shared her bed and her purse the need of drink had grown on her. 
and the horror and the terror of being alone. One of these days she would break - which of the 
village laws? Sobriety? Chastity? Or take something that did not properly belong to her?
   At the corner she ran into old Mrs. Chalmers returning from the grave. The old woman looked 
down at the dead flowers she was carrying and cut her. The women in the cottages with the red 
geraniums always did that. She was an outcast. Nature had somehow set her apart from her kind. 
Yet she had scribbled in the margin of her manuscript: "I am the slave of my audience."
   She thrust her suit case in at the scullery window and walked on, till at the corner she saw the 
red curtain at the bar window. There would be shelter; voices; oblivion. She turned the handle of 
the public house door. The acrid smell of stale beer saluted her; and voices talking. They stopped. 
They had been talking about Bossy as they called her - it didn't matter. She took her chair and 
looked through the smoke at a crude glass painting of a cow in a stable; alto at a cock and a hen. 
She raised her glass to her lips. And drank. And listened. Words of one syllable sank down into 
the mud. She drowsed; she nodded. The mud became fertile. words rose above the intolerably 
laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. words without meaning - wonderful words.
   The cheap clock ticked; smoke obscured the pictures. Smoke obscured the earth-coloured jackets. 
She no longer saw them, yet they upheld her, sitting arms akimbo with her glass before her. 
There was the high ground at midnight; there the rock; and two scarcely perceptible figures. 
Suddenly the tree was pelted with starlings. She set down her glass. She heard the first words.