Part Two of my review continued from here:
The Little Girls by Elizabeth Bowen
All my reviews of Bowen novels are linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/27/elizabeth-bowens-novels/
All my links of Bowen stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
My gestalt real-time review will be conducted in the comment stream below:
Part 2 (2)
“Delicate metal stitchery underran dishes and saucers and held lids together; tiny alloy claws enabled handles to keep their grip on cups; cemented cracks formed networks cradling fine bowls, and where hatted and curled heads of shepherdesses or braceleted forearms of court ladies had been fitted back again on to throats or elbows, healed wounds were to be pointed out.” (My italics.)
China-teeming Feverell Cottage where Mrs Piggott (Dicey’s Mum) is lost in reading novels, perhaps like this one, a cottage that is a sort of Way Station near the day-boarding school for what she sometimes sees as our ‘tiresome’ threesome, like a gang of Jane Turpins, and there is some talk of ‘gelignite’ in a box that they let off recently! Don’t go there! Simply that this one of the greatest chapters in Bowen, without a doubt. Aickman-like in certain respects but essentially the source of some of that strange story-telling. “Oh, to be as destructive as a story!” as it says.
One of their fathers is coming to collect his daughter. Dicey is off with Sheikie, I think; Clare is there with Mrs P and the china and with Clare’s clickety puzzle, a puzzle that Portia might have liked, I guess, and Clare drops it noisily, thus disturbing Mrs P out of her novel!
“Also, some of the china had a secret lien with at least one of them: scenery motifs spoke in particular to Clare. Their miniature vastness was of a size for her; their look of eternity could be taken in in less than a minute. She had lived within them. That she knew each landscape, to her a planet, to be linked in destructibility with the cup, bowl or plate upon which it was, added peril to love. One saw, here, how china could break. One foresaw also how, one day or another, it must do so beyond repair.”
“Mrs Piggott and Dicey had, by contrast, spun round themselves a tangible web, through whose transparency, layers deep, one glimpsed some fixed, perhaps haunted, other dimension.”
As well as the china, there is wondrous description of the cottage’s “muslin window-cave”, as premonition of a later cave in the scheme of their future we already know about.
Mrs P reads her scarlet novel like a waxwork, till puzzle-dropped out of it…
“She must make a break with the novel – a ruthless, clean one: she did nothing by halves. […] While on the move, she also looked over her shoulder at the clock: her French one, busy with its minute pendulum on the chimneypiece, amid idling china.”
“To be overcome is, to be got the better of.”
Talk of some sugarmouse shop Dicey might have gone to…
Then the father comes through the gate in the wall, as Mr P prepares herself for this outsider…
“She and Feverel Cottage were to be taken as they were. Not so much as a glance in a looking-glass or cushion shaken or curtain straightened or petal picked from the carpet. She did, however, do as she always did the minute before an outside person came in: cast a meditative, half-solicitous look round at these multitudinous things of hers, not least china, wondering how the stranger might affect them. Clare’s father would not be coming here for the first, second, or even third time. But a visitor alters, as each visit becomes one more.”
Maybe the garden knows something about it, a garden that did things by Zenoist halves?….
“The moment could, at least, never be again. Or, could it – who knew? Happy this garden would be to have such a revenant, were he ever dead.”
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him—a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured—captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
— Elizabeth Bowen on Writing
And so it is with one of our three girls…
Part 2 (3)
“She did so with the school bathing party, which comprised all St Agatha’s girls other than those afflicted by summer colds and, more strangely, some of the bigger ones, who were for some reason debarred. The mystic smugness with which they bore their exclusion made such girls as ludicrous to their juniors as did, already, their bulging forms. The rest oozed through the gap in the parapet, and poured, zigzag, down the cement steps to the orange beach and glassily waiting sea. That the beach was private made the sea seem so. Over bathing suits, wriggled into up at the school, flapped wraps to be worn for crossing the road. Rub-down towels awaited them in the school cloakroom. They wore, to the sea’s brink, sandshoes, against the hurtful shingle. Some wore frilly bathing-caps, others not. Those first in shrieked and beat at the sea, bobbing.”
The teachers with ‘deterrent whistles’ as the girls swam towards France! Miss Kinmate herself is ‘unwell’, and not likely to want to do any life-saving… later she seems to half-blow her whistle! No ‘horrible little boys’ in sight, though.
“St Agatha’s stared denudedly out to sea: alien became its dead-still tamarisks, cream-cheese gables and garden patterning up behind. Sheikie, nosing that way in a long, swift, sleek streak, like a surfaced shark, with scorn sighted two of the left-behinds teenily framed in a french window. She wore a scarlet bathing-cap.”
Her bathing cap the same colour as Mrs Piggott’s latest obsessive novel, I notice..
Some beauteous passages about floating ….the writing buoys our Batheing Bowen accordingly
Much about ball games, too…
“A girl purporting to look for a lost ball could fade from view for the rest of the afternoon.”
The visit to the school of a suffragette Aunt who demands to see her niece Elfreda… but Diicey/ Diana/ Dinah is somehow saddled with entertaining and being fazed by this Aunt and her amazing hat…
“…a largish black straw hat which, by the sticky look and still more the smell of it, had been lately touched up with hat-dye, known to be poison, and had upon it what could only be magpie’s wings.”
Something about “robbing a charnel hedge” and about a a magpie’s omen, even when dead on a hat….
Dicey’s chat with the Aunt, prefigures what we already know about her later burying and unburying obsessions, when talking about local history hereabouts and the Romans…
“‘I like looking for things,’ she added, ‘or hiding things, wondering who’ll find them. Or doing anything I can do, like getting on people’s nerves or swimming.’”
But what can we prophesy from the conceit of being “chained to railings”, I wonder. Whether to sink or swim surely depends on what extra weight you carry. But the buoyant sea of literature, even at the best of times, does not allow the confidence in being naturally floated forever, I suggest.
“She was still wondering whether to look for tennis balls when Elfreda put her aunt on a close-by seat, muttered something, and hurriedly went away. Dicey perceived why. To the aunt’s look of avidity and intentness was added the aimful glitter of pince-nez. Worse, the woman, though clad as far as the neck in a way which seemed neither here nor there, had topped herself off with a largish black straw hat which, by the sticky look and still more the smell of it, had been lately touched up with hat-dye, known to be poison, and had upon it what could only be magpie’s wings. The effect was not of poverty or bravura but, far more, that of both hat’s and wearer’s having been chemically reconstituted, and of that’s having so acted on her as to send her out robbing a charnel hedge. For the wings were not sporty hat-ornament, but sheer dead bird — of which the child on the roller was subject to an overmastering horror. And living, even, a magpie is of ill omen.”
Part 2 (4)
Can one actually believe this chapter exists? Why is it not more well known? It is somehow absurdly believable, as our Gang of Three search for a box or coffer for their time capsule collection, amid curio shops, goldfish and fleas. This chapter is miraculous, so miraculous, it probably does not exist at all. I shall just try and convey some of its contents before its attenuates to something seen on the Southstone harbour parapet by Trevor through his opera glasses.….including Sheikie, amid thrown pennies, still In gluey reflected dance pose…amid this swirling Jungian stream of collective consciousness, as a would-be collective, and these 11 years old girls themselves, collectors, too…
Dicey bossing, bones to be collected butbnot human ones, Cousin Roland coming to visit, but why did they need a huge dog chain from Fagg’s, a chain they later wind round Sheikie in Fagg’s earth closet for disguised keeping as they pass through the wonderfully described Southstone — Southstone being a genius loci second to none in literature, I claim!… You really MUST read this chapter, especially before you allow it to vanish before your very eyes!
Inventing ‘Unknown language’, rich jewels, pistol and other objects for ‘box’?
Squabbles of girls, in secret bathroom meeting place away from Mrs P.
Geisha Cafe Or Blue Bird, they are sent off to Southstone with 5 shillings to keep it peaceful at home for Cousin Roland’s visit.
“Halfway down that was Fagg’s goldfish shop: this not only dealt in but provided for dogs and all but all kinds of pet. More than sunless, Fagg’s inside was dark as a cellar: clicks, fumblings and rustlings, from cages stacked to the grubby ceiling and barricading the small-paned window, animated the awesomely smelly gloom, in which how many hundreds of pairs of captive eyes watched? The only form of life missing, when the girls walked in, was Mr Fagg: in a minute, however, he put that right, coming through the arch from the rabbit-vaults to behind his counter like an old he-owl. ‘Well, ladies, what can I do for you?’”
St Agatha’s bigger girl, Hermione Bollet, later “Wobbledy-wobbledy-wobble”, comes into the shop with her small brother She is 15 with new ladylike appearance, here to find if her goldfish are ill from ants’ eggs she was given here in Fagg’s. She is devoted to what she claims are unIdentical fish that she can love separately. Ah well, I don’t expect you to follow all this as it vanishes as you read it… as you see the words fading just ad they pass by your eyes. So on to something more substantial — that dog chain…
“‘All I ask,’ requested the dedicated one, ‘is, dust it properly, first!’ The chain was wound around Sheikie, rather a business in the cramped half-dark of the Fagg earth-closet, out at the bottom of the yard beyond the rabbits. He’d been anything but keen on their going there. ‘What you’ll find won’t be much to your fancy, probably. However, if whichever it is of you can’t wait, go on.’ The chain went easily more than .once, not completely twice, round the dancer’s average-slender middle: they reefed it out with blue baby-ribbon unthreaded from Sheikie’s Saturday frilly knickers. When she had shaken down again into place her nicely starched frock and embroidered petticoat, true enough nothing was to be seen. In the front shop, happily, Mr Fagg now was interesting somebody in his litter. Putting down two shillings, they told him the rest would have to tick, and, saying ‘Thank you so very much, Mr Fagg,’ left. By the time he roared they were out of hearing, all but.
While still in funds, now for the coffer … the more battered the better. From a wreck, or a crack in a rock? Try at the rag-and-bone shop, down near the harbour. Ahead they would have been forging, but for Dicey. ‘Now what’s up?’ she had to be asked.
‘I am not too fat. That wou1d have gone round me.’
To brighten her up, they had to buy six ounces (two each) of lemon sherbet powder: this not only fizzed deliciously on the tongue but enabled one to froth at the mouth ad lib., bright yellow. Sheikie, seized by doubt as to whether, as Miss Beaker, she ought to froth at the mouth in the open street, remained on to do so inside the sweetshop: the unrestricted others went on ahead, frothing away in particular at an unknown clergyman whom they hoped might think them possessed by devils.”
Dicey and Mumbo get separated from Sheikie as she froths with sherbet. The two of them explore the curio shops as well as the concept of the word ‘curio’, including a painting important in Aickman fiction….
“…among them ‘Hope’, still clutching her harp,…”
And ‘domed or naked clocks’….
“All this was to be wondered at through two layers of glass – the picture-shop’s windows and the glass in the gilt or ebony frames.”
Amazing concept, this, of a shadowy threeway palimpsest of window reflections and the curios themselves and the very High Street depicted in reality outside the shop!
The High Street itself as its own shadowy third?!
“Warned by a third reflection, they jumped round from the window in time to stop Sheikie from lobster-nipping them –“
Then an epiphany signalled by some ‘elbowing’!…
“Mumbo came elbowing back for a second peer: longer, this time, and closer. Her spine stiffened, her knuckles whacked at her skirt. She used a shout-sized breath for a held-in whisper: ‘They’ve got a coffer in there.’”
Sheikie has two coffers at home, it is discovered!
Her Dance Pose of a curio, that wondrous literary moment that stays lodged in the mind as Sheikie imitates a dance pose of a curio statuette, and attracts a crowd with pennies, till it eventually attenuates, too, as you pass your eyes over the words describing such a pose.
Rag and bone as a countervailing of such attenuation, bones they need for the box or coffer, even a sheep’s skull should they wait long enough for the words to substantiate…
Yes, Sheikie collects a crowd as well as pennies…
“She suffered the increase of starers round her with the indifference of the artist — till one or two of them started chucking pennies. News of a pretty little living waxwork’s being on exhibition somewhere at. the bottom of the High Street was, from all signs, spreading like wildfire. Outside where ‘Curios’ was, the Old High Street started not only to flatten down but to widen, being about to debouch on the Old Harbour. This was where good-humoured Saturday people, doing nothing particular, made it their custom to stand and be. By now the sun was off them, but had not left them: from where it was, in hiding behind the High Street’s roofy hill, the sun went on heating the toast-brown shadow, in which the colours, darker than earlier, seemed brighter, brightest being the pink peppermint rock being licked by infants.”
Trevor arrives, the one who eventually marries one of these little girls, and who apparently provided the gelignite, which did not go off.
Sheikie, clanking, desperate to get the chain off, is financed by Trevor to take a horse carriage home, a carriage with a dreaming horse, while Dicey grapples with a flea on her body, quite different from that chain on Sheikie, a flea that no doubt hopped upon her skin in Fagg’s…
“And mortified Dicey confessed to a baser crisis: a great flea had caught her — in Fagg’s, probably? As fleas do, it had taken a short rest after its change to its new surroundings, but it now was active in many parts of her. ‘Everything,’ they told her, ‘bites you, Dicey.’
‘Mother says I must be succulent,’ said the poor child miserably. Barely could she wait to get to the Beakers’ to tear all her clothes off, truly to search. ‘I’m not going home with this flea on me,’ she droned on. ‘Supposing it hopped on to Cousin Roland?’”
The carriage indeed had a dreaming horse pulling it along…
A bit like the carriage on an author’s typewriter???
Part 2 (5)
“…fifteen houses facing a railed-in glade. This not being a wood, there were no ravens. There was an orderly twitter of smaller birds, some of which when maddened by spring sang.”
… being Ravenswood Gardens, and here Sheikie Beaker is arriving home in the horse carriage to its Number Nine, with Dicey and Mumbo ….
And these two hear and then see her father…
“An enormous gerrumph sound, belly-deep, issued from what could only be Mr Beaker.”
Another amazingly miraculous chapter. These coffers or chapters are full of places, psychological furniture / objects and people that keep on coming. I can only convey this chapter by quoting some of its own words, along with my hopefully rare interpolations….
“The others looked through the hinge crack. There Mr Beaker sat, looking pachydermatous. The armchair from which he protruded was of leather. The cigar from here being out of view, he appeared himself to be fuming, like a slow incense-cone, though of different odour. Comatose, reconciled to the absence of his spouse, he duly sickened with love at the sight of his little daughter: he would as soon not have. Dote, however, he always had, so he did.”
“One of the Beaker coffers was wedged in under the hall hat-stand, tented by dejectedly hanging overcoats and having as neighbour the vast brass evenly-dinted gong. It contained two discolouring billiard balls and a whistle.”
“Sheikie’s room was surely the prettiest in Southstone? — probably England, possibly the world? Round the frieze darted swallows, sprays of pink blossom in their beaks; the little dressing-table on which the little mirror supported a trophy boxing-glove, was draped in lovingly laundered flounces. Enamelled furniture shed an ivory gleam. From within the cupboard, tissue-wrapped dancing dresses (accordion pleated), block-toed dancing sandals (satin of every colour) and rainbow dancing scarves made their existences felt. Vestments. That these should cohabit with her St Agatha’s winter reefer, serge kilts, games boots, hockey pads — such as any girl has — made the room not less of a little temple; though, it might be, a more curious one. Her castanets, on a ribbon, hung over a knob of the little bed; on the pillow, the teddy bear wore a bow to match. Her tambourine had the rather more restless air of an object constantly shifted from place to place. On the chimneypiece was a signed — how obtained? — photo of Pauline Chase flying in at the window as Peter Pan, and an unsigned, more frantic photo of child tennis prodigy Suzanne Lenglen. There were three of Sheikie — one with wings, one as a bacchante, one in a mantilla.”
“…unguents or dentifrices or anything else squeezable out of baby tubes,…”
Dicey…
“Having ascertained that the flea was no longer with her — it had got off, somewhere — she was back again into the picture; indeed its forefront. The flea was probably driving, now, back again across Southstone in the victoria. She bore it wonderfully little malice, in view of the gluttonous bites it had left behind. Abstractedly scratching at them.”
Her flea having taken itself off her body, the contrastively heavier chain needs taking off Sheikie…
“The scissors sawed at the obdurate ribbon knot. The chain fell from Sheikie, noisily, on to the carpet. It – they (fetters) – was taken down the flight-and-a-half of stairs and consigned to what by this very act came to be recognized as the coffer. Clare, even, said nothing. The house, with the dead man down at the bottom, was conspiratorially silent.”
Sheikie’s idea below encapsulates the gestalt of Bowen and her readers and her characters…
“Each girl was to place in the coffer, before its burial, one undeclared object, of which the nature was to remain known to herself only.”
That scarlet thread continues…
“Here, too, was a scarlet pillar-box. Dicey leaned up against it, to ask: ‘Why shan’t we?’
“Because that is the idea. We shall never know.’”
***
“In the next days, not much was outwardly done. Dicey devoted her evenings to Cousin Roland; Mumbo, at work on the Unknown Language, was seeing no one; Sheikie simply went off to the rink and tore round and round. Anyone might have thought they had broken up. Summer evening concerts began in the Pier Pavilion, which like a lit-up musical box admired .itself in the glass of the darkening mauve sea; above, the chains of lamps along the Promenade etherealized strollers in evening dress, from the big hotels, bright-ghostly baskets of pink geraniums and the fretwork balconies they were slung from…”
Dicey attends a ball at the wondrously depicted Southstone Grand Hotel, along with Mrs P and Cousin R.
She speculates on burying the coffer box at the school and at the moment its seeming darkness creates what would have been the perfect circumstances as she views down upon it from the Grand… but that was a ‘fluke’, as everyone was at the ball?…
“…searching round and into the gulf where the school must be. There was nothing but gulf …”
When they do bury it, they are helped by a very suspicious person called Cuth, who thinks the coffer is a “ferret cage – true, a heavy one. Secret ferret-keeping and still more girls’ schools were ideas which excited Cuth Barnes deeply and strangely:” — but is that scenario as real as the fiction it is within? Or simply imaginary?
***
Clare’s house depicted, another miraculous scene crowding in on the reader; almost too much richness of prose to deal with!
Her mother’s watering can…
Concern over Clare’s brainwork and eyesight.
Scolded for how she talks about her friends!
Sudden ending to her mother’s preoccupation as if such thoughts pass in the night.
And there are earwigs.
“‘Your father back yet, I wonder?’
‘I suppose so. I saw him.’
‘Just now? Where?’
‘Drawing-room window.’
‘Coming out, going in?’
‘Standing.’
Major Burkin-Jones’s tendency to do simply that mystified his wife often, his daughter never. It arose not from infirmity of purpose but out of his happening, from time to time, to find himself where he was.”
“Glossy-covered, the red and the yellow books slithered against each other under her elbow: she gave them a hitch up. He gave them a glance. ‘Prep?’”
‘Unknown Language’, Clare replies to her father’s Prep question . Which begs my question: what are “trails of smilax”? Party streamers? Or just more of my own Prep in reading Bowen, if for no other purpose than simply the word-heady hedonism in reading her?
Part 2 (6)
“Words had a night sound.”
This very short chapter in the thickest thickets of St Agatha’s school, the shortest chapter no doubt in the Bowen canon, deploys the Ritual of the Box’s Buriers at the Pit’s Edge and is probably the most incredibly created ceremony in all literature, comprising the fetters (the dog chain), the bones (Bowens, and inferred elbows?), the blood, and meaningful objects that otherwise populate our world amid its psychological furniture, and the heady words ever halfway between the Unknown Language and the Known, the unBowen and The Bowen, apotheosised, almost a Black Mass conducted by children, half childish, half seriously aged, a blend that shines out and darkens, too, from a gang of Jane Turpins to some implied sacrificial rite beyond age or gender. Fiction truth at last. Signed with an invisible thumbprint.
And one of those earlier lost balls rolling….as each of the shadowy Trinity place her personal secret object within the box, too. Secret, by being secret from the other two. The Mysterious Kôr of the Shadowy Third syndrome that has pervaded my Bowen fiction reviews as they now near their end…
Part 2 (7)
‘Three-legged races, next?’
“‘The Pococks’ picnic.’ ‘The Pococks’ picnic.’ The sound had the spell of alliteration. Or incantation,…”
Now for a contrastive ritual to the one in the previous chapter, but one with perhaps kindred trappings…
The seaside picnic for a girl called Olive, prized like a holy Queen, and the girls from St Agatha’s arriving in a hired charabanc, amid the summer holidays from school, plus a few adult helpers, too, and Trevor, it seems, who is perhaps the sacrifice to some huge sewer pipe… whatever the typhoid threatened…
“…a palmful of loose sand and absorbedly watched it run from between her fingers in slow skeins, as sand runs through an hour-glass.”
Mrs. P is invited because she looked sad… and there are touching scenes at the chapter’s end, of obliquely an unknown and unrequited love between her and Mumbo’s father whose unexpected presence to collect Mumbo sort of creeps up on us, and and perhaps an unrequited love, too, between otherwise surly Dicey and Mumbo, a sort of unadmitted farewell between them into nothingness, although of course we do know what frontstory of a cave emerged beyond this real-time backstory. Dicey wants to know whether there will be caves in Cumberland, I think. Although I may have certain aspects of this chapter wrong. Sometimes to be wrong is to be creative…
“Mrs Piggott, wearing the tussore dust-coat and with her hat bound on with a chiffon motor-veil, scrambled up the land side of the sea wall among the children, on the heels of her daughter. When she reached the top, wind caught the transparent mauve ends of the veil, sending them flying against the sky – which was so lightly grey as to itself seem a veil over wide light. There she stood a minute, looking down at the sands, smiling at the beginnings of so much pleasure; a weather-signal. She was the first indication that there was a wind, playful so far.”
Cake!
Candies in the wind, jam dollops, Dicey with another flea!
Mandolin, singing Swanee River (“some few notes twanged, lunatic, on the air”); Dicey asking who killed the Austrian Archduke, but she think he was Australian! Today’s war in my own real-time echoes the start of that war, I guess.
“August stood for dispersal.”
They were soon off, on separate holidays, like Cumberland.
Then…
Running races galore on the beaches amidst a strange humming silence as if this was a new Picnic at Hanging Rock….
“Everything from now onward was a matter of distance – distance from what? The organized running or staggering or hopping or crawling of the children… […]… over the contests reigned a demonic silence, punctuated only by whistle-blowing or words of command. No part of the picture was for an instant still: each athletic event took place in a nimbus of scuffle in which few onlookers failed to be taking part. Exactly what was going on was hard to discern.”
Dicey chasing Trevor…
‘The great, long, redlegg’d scissor man’,
…into the drain-pipe!
“Also, considerably to the west of the encampment (for no one cared to picnic in its vicinity) a vast iron drain-pipe, flaking with rust, issued out of the base of the sea wall. Though not carrying, probably, anything more noxious than overflow from the dykes draining the Marsh, the thing had the look of being a sewer; its mouth was slimed on the lower lip by a constant trickle which, on its way seaward, grooved for itself a miniature river valley before exhaustedly losing itself in the sand. This had to be crossed; for the sports ground, demarcated by the fathers and uncle, lay beyond.”
“Mrs Piggott went to the mouth of the drain-pipe and, bending down, said pleasantly: ‘Trevor?’
His voice, coming whonging along from some way up, answered, with a frigidity one could understand: ‘Yes, Mrs Piggott?’
‘Won’t you come out?’
‘I like it in here, thank you.’”
Meanwhile, Sheikie does her ritual gluey dance pose again, with the erstwhile sharp dissection of her skull… with four bows on her ears…
“To and fro, backward then forward along the wood-bone, bone-dry, dry-slippery edge of the topmost board jaunted the airily-balanced dancer – going away, returning, turning each turn into a nonchalant pirouette. She danced her music. […] The clean fine pink line dividing her skull in two was to be seen when she turned her back,…”
And so, duly, ineluctably, with a double-mentioned elbow’s clinching, we reach this chapter’s pair of unrequited loves, unexplained but believable….a sort of last farewell by this author, although we know there is more to come as a sprawling coda…
“Mrs Piggott looked away to the west, along the ink-clear line of the wide bay, from one to another of the martello towers, some whole, some broken. Her daughter came and hooked herself to her elbow, while the long, few steps they had heard coming towards them were to be heard going away.”
“She jerked the elbow. ‘Mother, he’s not gone, yet!’”
Mumbo and Dicey, gone from each other’s Sapphic self, too? Till they come back to us when middle-aged, having already been taken elsewhere. Through time’s cruelly slow drain-pipe.
“They watched. The withdrawing sea washed over less of the sand each time. Its retreat made land seem itself to be an advancing tide, hard sleek wet sand-ripples dulled only by clottings of dead foam. From across the shrinking watery miles came an expiring sigh – not like the sound of wind, a sigh in itself.”
This review continues here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/03/21/the-little-girls-by-elizabeth-bowen/