knowing I can go and join them in the warmth, yet staying here in the cold.
Oh, dear, there has just been a slight scene!
Rose asked Topaz to go to London and earn some money. Topaz replied
that she didn't think it was worth while, because it costs so much to live there. It is true that she can never save more than will buy us a few presents-she is very generous.
"And two of the men I sit for are abroad," she went on, "and I don't like working for Macmorris."
"Why not?" asked Rose.
"He pays better than the others, doesn't he?"
"So he ought, considering how rich he is," said Topaz.
"But I dislike sitting for him because he only paints my head. Your Father says that the men who paint me nude paint my body and think of their job, but that Macmorris paints my head and thinks of my body. And it's perfectly true. I've had more trouble with him than I should
care to let your Father know."
Rose said: "I should have thought it was worth while to have a little trouble in order to earn some real money."
"Then you have the trouble, dear," said Topaz.
This must have been very annoying to Rose, considering that she never has the slightest chance of that sort of trouble.
She suddenly flung back her head dramatically and said:
"I'm perfectly willing to. It may interest you both to know that for some time now, I've been considering selling myself. If necessary, I
shall go on the streets."
I told her she couldn't go on the streets in the depths of Suffolk.
"But if Topaz will kindly lend me the fare to London and give me a few hints."
Topaz said she had never been on the streets and rather regretted it,
"because one must sink to the depths in order to rise to the heights,"
which is the kind of Topazism it requires much affection to tolerate.
"And anyway," she told Rose, "you're the last girl to lead a hard working, immoral life. If you're really taken with the idea of selling yourself, you'd better choose a wealthy man and marry him
respectably."
This idea has, of course, occurred to Rose, but she has always hoped
that the man would be handsome, romantic and lovable into the bargain.
I suppose it was her sheer despair of ever meeting any marriageable men at all, even hideous, poverty-stricken ones, that made her suddenly
burst into tears. As she only cries about once a year I really ought
to have gone over and comforted her, but I wanted to set it all down
here. I begin to see that writers are liable to become callous.
Anyway, Topaz did the comforting far better than I could have done, as I am never disposed to clasp people to my bosom. She was most
maternal, letting Rose weep all over the orange velvet tea-gown, which has suffered many things in its time.
Rose will be furious with herself later on, because she has an unkind tendency to despise Topaz; but for the moment they are most amicable.
Rose is now putting away her ironing, gulping a little, and Topaz is
laying the table for tea while outlining impracticable plans for making money --such as giving a lute concert in the village or buying a pig in installments.
I joined in while resting my hand, but said nothing of supreme
importance.
It is raining again. Stephen is coming across the courtyard. He has
lived with us ever since he was a little boy; his Mother used to be our maid, in the days when we could still afford one, and when she died he had nowhere to go. He grows vegetables for us and looks after the hens and does a thousand odd jobs--I can't think how we should get on
without him. He is eighteen now, very fair and noble-looking but his
expression is just a fraction daft. He has always been rather devoted to me; Father calls him my swam.
He is rather how I imagine Silvius in As You Like It but I am nothing like Phoebe.
Stephen has come in now. The first thing he did was to light a candle and stick it on the window-ledge beside me, saying: "You're spoiling your eyes, Miss Cassandra."
Then he dropped a tightly folded bit of paper on this journal. My
heart sank, because I knew it would contain a poem; I suppose he has
been working on it in the barn. It is written in his careful, rather
beautiful script. The heading is, ""To Miss Cassandra" by Stephen Colly."
It is a charming poem--by Robert Herrick.
What am I to do about Stephen? Father says the desire for
self-expression is pathetic, but I really think Stephen's main desire is just to please me; he knows I set store by poetry.
I ought to tell him that I know he merely copies the poems out--he has been doing it all winter, every week or so--but I can't find the heart to hurt him.
Perhaps when the spring comes I can take him for a walk and break it to him in some encouraging way. This time I have got out of saying my
usual hypocritical words of praise by smiling approval at him across
the kitchen. Now he is pumping water up into the cistern, looking very happy.
The well is below the kitchen floor and has been there since the
earliest days of the castle; it has been supplying water for six
hundred years and is said never to have run dry. Of course, there must have been many pumps. The present one arrived when the Victorian
hot-water system (alleged) was put in.
Interruptions keep occurring. Topaz has just filled the kettle,
splashing my legs, and my brother Thomas has returned from school in
our nearest town, King's Crypt. He is a cumbersome lad of fifteen with hair that grows in tufts, so that parting it is difficult. It is the
same mousy color as mine; but mine is meek.
When Thomas came in, I suddenly remembered myself coming back from
school, day after day, up to a few months ago. In one flash I re-lived the ten-mile crawl in the jerky little train and then the five miles on a bicycle from Scoatney station --how I used to hate that in the
winter! Yet in some ways I should like to be back at school; for one
thing, the daughter of the manager at the cinema went there, and she
got me in to the pictures free now and then. I miss that greatly. And I rather miss school itself--it was a surprisingly good one for such a quiet little country town. I had a scholarship, just as Thomas has at his school; we are tolerably bright.
The rain is driving hard against the window now. My candle makes it
seem quite dark outside. And the far side of the kitchen is dimmer now that the kettle is on the round hole in the top of the range. The
girls are sitting on the floor making toast through the bars.
There is a bright edge to each head, where the firelight shines through their hair.
Stephen has finished pumping and is stoking the copper --it is a great, old-fashioned brick one which helps to keep the kitchen warm and gives us extra hot-water. With the copper lit as well as the range, the
kitchen is much the warmest place in the house; that is why we sit in it so much. But even in summer we have our meals here, because the
dining-room furniture was sold over a year ago.
Goodness, Topaz is actually putting on eggs to boil. No one told me
the hens had yielded to prayer. Oh, excellent hens! I was only
expecting bread and margarine for tea, and I don't get as used to
margarine as I could wish. I thank heaven there is no cheaper form of bread than bread.
How odd it is to remember that "tea" once meant afternoon tea to us with little cakes and thin bread-and-butter in the drawing-room. Now
it is as solid a meal as we can scrape together, as it has to last us until breakfast. We have it after Thomas gets back from school.
Stephen is lighting the lamp. In a second now, the rosy glow will have gone from the kitchen. But lamplight is beautiful, too.
The lamp is lit. And as Stephen carried it to the table, my Father
came out on the staircase. His old plaid traveling-rug was wrapped
round his shoulders --he had come from the gatehouse along the top of the castle walls. He murmured: "Tea, tea- has Miss Marcy come with the library books yet?" (she hasn't.) Then he said his hands were quite numb; not complainingly, more in a tone of faint surprise--though I find it hard to believe that anyone living at the castle in winter
can be surprised at any part of themselves being numb. And as he came downstairs shaking the rain off his hair, I suddenly felt so fond of
him. I fear I don't feel that very often.
He is still a splendid-looking man, though his fine features are
getting a bit lost in fat and his coloring is fading. It used to be as bright as Rose's.
Now he is chatting to Topaz. I regret to note that he is in his
falsely cheerful mood--though I think poor Topaz is grateful for even false cheerfulness from him these days. She adores him, and he seems
to take so little interest in her.
I shall have to get off the draining-board--Topaz wants the tea-cozy
and our dog, Heloise, has come in and discovered I have borrowed her
blanket.
She is a bull-terrier, snowy white except where her fondant-pink skin shows through her short hair.
All right, Heloise darling, you shall have your blanket. She gazes at me with love, reproach, confidence and humor- how can she express so
much just with two rather small slanting eyes his I finish this entry sitting on the stairs. I think it worthy of note that I never felt
happier in my life- despite sorrow for Father, pity for Rose,
embarrassment about Stephen's poetry and no justification for hope as regards our family's general outlook. Perhaps it is because I have