The Unsettled Dust Read Online Free PDF

use the obvious but apt metaphor.
    After that rather terrible first day on the river, freezing cold (and, later, raining as well), muddy everywhere, and spent mainly (as it now seems) in pushing through endless thickets of dead bramble and dogrose, with insufficiently defined authority over Hand’s rough-mannered group, I returned to Clamber Court and a first-class dinner with much relief. The second evening with the Brakespear sisters, a replica of the first, presented the oddest contrast to my day with Hand and his noisy friends, as can easily be imagined. A really bitter wind was getting up, as it often does towards the end of March; but though it made the house creak a little, it did nothing to disturb the dust. At one point, I had proposed to mention the dust to Olive Brakespear, if I could find myself long enough alone with her; having at least made a start with the grey Elizabeth. But no possible moment seemed to arise that evening. Perhaps I was too exhausted with the river, to embark gratuitously upon new uncertainties. Probably I thought that I should wait until I knew the Brakespears better: if one ever could.
    Only when back in my room for the night did it clearly strike me that Agnes might deliberately have prevented my being alone for more than a minute or two with Olive. Thinking back over the evening that had just passed, I could recall more than one moment when Agnes had obviously been about to fetch something or do something, and when, instead, she had remained. The reasons for leaving us had been tiny, and many people might have been dissuaded by mere inertia; but hardly, I felt, Agnes. She had sat on, though she had been fretful and under-occupied from the start; and was then all the more fretful, no doubt, if she felt tied by the task of never taking her eyes from two people she did not trust. Could it relate to her immediate suspicion of me concerning the dust, when first she saw me? Did she imagine that Olive and I were becoming affectionate? Was it merely that she did not believe in allowing Olive any unnecessary peace? Or had I altogether deceived myself?
    One of the moments which I found to be oddest in this generally odd way of life, was the moment when I returned to the house after my day on the river. It was always evening and always I seemed quite alone in the world, or at least in the big park. There was not even a light in the house, because Olive never turned one on unless compelled, and Agnes came back an hour or so later from undertakings which were apparently demanding, apparently unsatisfying, but never quite defined (and one could hardly enquire). Everything was silent. I had to mount the curving stone steps, and disturb the silence by pressing the little bellpush at the centre of the long façade, stretching through the evening from pavilion to pavilion. The illusion of the house being a vast, empty model always returned to me at this time. That there should be any living person in the huge, dark, noiseless interior seemed either absurd or sinister.
    But I never had to ring more than once. The grey Elizabeth always appeared after the same short interval and let me in. She never put on a light for me, and I never did it for myself. I suppose we both held back out of regard for Olive. I myself found Olive’s day-after-day passivity as unfathomable as Agnes’s day-after-day agitation. Three or four of these days passed, and I never saw Olive on a horse, though all the time she wore the same worn riding breeches and boots. It was true that I had always left fairly early and returned fairly late, and that Olive might have tended to these clothes because she looked her best in them, as many women do. All the same, I might by now have been invited to visit the stables, at least in principle. Elsewhere, it had usually happened during my first luncheon; with the time unchallengeably fixed for immediately after it: at houses where the stables still functioned , of course, and had not been let