but the background was like the Midlands atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And
the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he stared at Connie in his
peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise information, she felt all the
background of his mind filling up with mist, with nothingness. And it
frightened her. It made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.
And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that
when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the
body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only
appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the re-assumed habit. Slowly,
slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise,
which Only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche.
And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the
terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.
So it was with Clifford. Once he was `well', once he was back at
Wragby, and writing his stories, and feeling sure of life, in spite of all,
he seemed to forget, and to have recovered all his equanimity. But now, as
the years went by, slowly, slowly, Connie felt the bruise of fear and horror
coming up, and spreading in him. For a time it had been so deep as to be
numb, as it were non-existent. Now slowly it began to assert itself in a
spread of fear, almost paralysis. Mentally he still was alert. But the
paralysis, the bruise of the too-great shock, was gradually spreading in his
affective self.
And as it spread in him, Connie felt it spread in her. An inward dread,
an emptiness, an indifference to everything gradually spread in her soul.
When Clifford was roused, he could still talk brilliantly and, as it were,
command the future: as when, in the wood, he talked about her having a
child, and giving an heir to Wragby. But the day after, all the brilliant
words seemed like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning
really nothing, blown away on any gust of wind. They were not the leafy
words of an effective life, young with energy and belonging to the tree.
They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life that is ineffectual.
So it seemed to her everywhere. The colliers at Tevershall were talking
again of a strike, and it seemed to Connie there again it was not a
manifestation of energy, it was the bruise of the war that had been in
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