We were forced to wait in the town of March for two days for a stage coach that would take us to Cambridge and so on to London.
On the first of these days, a Tuesday, a market began setting up at dawn outside our windows and so I took Katharine out and we walked among the stalls selling honey and fruit and candles and skeins of wool and beeswax and we found a man who, for threepence, would imitate the cry or growl or squawk of any animal or bird. And this person mystified and delighted Katharine so much that I was forced to keep paying him money for one imitation after another and soon felt very foolish standing in a gawping crowd and listening to a man pretending to be a chicken and a hog and a capercaillie and a new-born lamb. After almost a quarter of an hour, I said to Katharine:
"We have heard enough now. Let us move on before he begins on all the beasts of Africa," but she begged me to let her hear one more thing and said: "You have not chosen any animal or bird yet, Robert, so now it is your turn." And so I took out another three pennies from my purse, and the man held out his leathery palm for them and said: "What is it to be, Sir? A screaming peacock? A howling wolf? Or – two for the price of one – an old sow and her suckling piglets?"
"The pigs," said Katharine, "tell him to be the pigs."
"No," I said, "not the pigs. A blackbird."
"A blackbird, Sir?"
"Yes."
"Well then we must have silence round about, we must have quiet among you good people. For the sound of the blackbird is a little thing and I cannot make it loud."
He persuaded the cluster of people round him to cease their chatter. He then cupped both his hands to his lips and through his fingers I could see his mouth making some ugly contortions. I closed my eyes and waited. And then the sound came, perfect and pure, and I knew at once that tears were coming into my eyes, so I quickly took out my handkerchief and blew my nose loudly, thus interrupting the blackbird imitation so rudely as to cause an outbreak of laughter in the little crowd. I then nodded to the man, who was scowling at me, and, taking Katharine firmly by the wrist, I led her away.
There being nothing whatever to do in March, I hired a rowing boat in the afternoon. The day was warm, like a day from summer suddenly come again, and I rowed downstream on the River Nene towards a place called Benwick. "It is too insignificant a village to attract to it any bird imitators," I said with a smile. But Katharine was not listening to me. She had put her hand into the water and seemed hypnotised by the sight of it and by the flotsam of leaves and waterweed that swam into her fingers. Her mouth hung open and she did not notice that her long hair had begun to trail in the river. Then suddenly she came out of her trance and laughed, and her laughter, which I had seldom heard at Whittlesea, sounded exactly like that of a child. But instead of feeling kindness or pity for her childishness, I felt only a great weariness with time which, with Katharine as my only companion, seemed to pass so slowly that it was difficult to believe that the day's sun would ever go down or the night's darkness ever break into morning. I tried to comfort myself by imagining that, if time had slowed down, I would not get to old age until long after I had passed it. But this little conceit brought me a mere moment of solace, for I knew that I no longer minded about growing old or indeed cared much about whether I lived or died.
That night in the apple room, when I lay down on the bed, my shoulders and my back aching from my afternoon of rowing, Katharine came and stood by me and lifted up her skirt and told me to put my hand on her belly and complained peevishly that I had never done this nor wanted to do it and that therefore I did not love the child inside her.
I turned my head and looked at her belly and I said that I found it most difficult to love anything in advance of its being. But she did not understand what I meant by this and I had no will to explain it, so I soothed her by stroking her belly and she began to tell me everything she would do for the child when he was born and how she would let no one but me ever take him from her, for what she feared now was the jealousy of barren women who would come when she was asleep and steal her baby "and leave me with the nothing that I had." And so, to comfort her, I said – as if telling one of my Tales of the Land of Mar to Meg Storey – we would build a fortress round the child, we would put him in a high tower and let no one near him except ourselves, "so that not only will he be safe, he will neither see nor feel any of the unkindnesses of the world, nor its scheming, nor its ugliness, for everything he will see from the window of the tower will be beautiful…" And Katharine was so entranced by all this nonsense that she fell asleep standing up and so I got off the bed and lifted her up and laid her on it. And then I did not know where to put myself, not wanting to lie down beside her, so I sat down on the hard chair that had been placed near the window and thought I would look out at the stars and see whether I could find Jupiter and its little girdle of moons, but the window was grimy and all I could see was my own reflection in it and I saw, suddenly, how I had aged a great deal in a short time and how my face, which I still thought of as wide and smiling, had become gaunt and worried.
And my thoughts turned to Celia. I do not know if it was my search for Jupiter that brought her to mind or the changes I observed in an appearance that had always been so distasteful to her. I thought of my famous Letter of Apology to her which I had spent so many hours trying to compose, but which had never been written, a pathetic short note being sent in its place. So now, I wrote it in my mind. I told her I had understood that love puts reason to sleep. I told her that it was my misfortune now to be the object of a love I could not return and that the furies of guilt and the furies of loathing hounded me day and night and that the pain of these was as cruel as the pain of love itself. "And so I can measure now," I concluded in my imaginary letter, "how much I made you suffer, Celia, and for this suffering caused by me, I ask you to forgive me."
For reasons which I do not completely understand, this Apology to Celia took away from me sufficient of my anxiety for me to be able to fall asleep in the chair. But it was not a contented sleep, for during the night I had a sad dream of my mother, in which I went to speak to her in Amos Treefeller's old room but found that she could neither see me nor hear me and so, believing that I was not there, put on her bonnet and went out, leaving me alone.
The warm weather that had returned the previous day accompanied us on our journey to London and I noticed, as we came near to the city, that the grass beside the road was brown and parched and all the fallen leaves dry and brittle, as if no rain had come for a great while. I could see a little cloud of flies and insects outside the window of the coach, moving with us, so I enquired of our fellow passengers, "What has the weather been in London since the summer?" And they told me that you could not say what it had been "since the summer" for the summer had never truly gone, but stayed on "most sultry and horrid" and that no cooling breeze nor fresh shower had come to the capital for months, "so that the smell of the place is getting very foul and all who are wise are journeying out of it and not into it."