“Yes,” said Michael.
“For her it is indeed grievous,” said the Abbot. “But she is a great lady, no doubt trained as these great ladies are to a selfless sense of social duty. Wherever she is, as long as she is able to do it, she will find much to do. We will not forget her in this place. And we will not forget you. I, especially, will remember you, my son.”
He bent upon Michael a look of such extraordinary kindness that honesty blazed up in him.
“You wouldn’t call me your son if you knew the sort of man I am,” he said roughly and almost rudely. “More or less of a heathen too.”
The Abbot laughed. “More or less, you say. Does that include a willingness that I should pray for you?”
“I would like you to,” mumbled Michael.
“It won’t do you any harm, you know,” said the Abbot with twinkling eyes.
“You could do no one anything but good, Sir,” said Michael.
“My good man, it has nothing to do with me!” ejaculated the Abbot in sudden exasperation. “It’s not in my power to do anyone good. Prayer is the Word. He made the heavens and the earth without our aid. Spring comes again whether we live or die. Bringing men to rebirth He works differently, through the souls that are offered up to Him to be the channels of His will. Good-night.”
Brother Martin had started the car, and the old man limped away towards it without looking back.
6
A few days later Daphne and John sat in the drawing room after supper. Daphne, sitting on the sofa with her feet up, had turned on a shaded lamp beside her but they had not drawn the curtains and could see the rising moon. She was wearing her Chinese coat and Baba her sleeve dog lay beside her. Baba had shed years of his age, was sleek and healthy and entirely happy. John sat in the big armchair, his long legs stretched out in front of him. A small log fire was burning in the grate and the murmur of the flames was the only sound in the silence. They were doing nothing.
“I ought to be doing the darning,” said Daphne.
“There are piles of unanswered letters on my table,” said John, “but I’m not saying I ought to be answering them because I know I ought not. There are times in life when sitting down and doing nothing can be a duty.”
“Such a mercy when a husband and wife can think it a duty on the same evening,” said Daphne. “It’s so trying when one does and the other doesn’t.”
“You don’t often think it a duty, Daphne,” said John.
“My dear, you married a restless creature,” she said. “One of those inwardly discontented creatures who wherever they are would like to be somewhere else, and whatever they do think they might have got what they wanted if they’d done the other thing. It’s just sheer pride. They don’t even know what they want, but such is their opinion of their own desserts that when they are given a life as near perfection as one can have in this world they are not satisfied even with that.”
“Are you describing yourself, Daphne?” asked her astonished husband.
“Yes, John. I’ve been converted to the idea that I’m a lucky woman. It’s not a sudden conversion so there’s hope it may last. It started on the day you forgot the daffodils.”
“How can I know which day that was?” asked John. “You know I forget everything every day. I’ve now forgotten I forgot the daffodils. What daffodils?”
“For the church vases. You forgot to pick them and I had to. In the end we both picked them. It doesn’t matter if you remember or not. All that matters is that I sat in the church by myself and meditated. Don’t look so astonished. I meditated. At least I think so.”
“What method did you use?” asked John with twinkling eyes.
“I know nothing about methods,” said Daphne. “I’ve never listened when you’ve told me about them. I’ve always thought Belmaray church was like a rock and I merely thought suddenly that the vicarage pew was my particular hole in that rock, and then somehow or other I arrived at knowing that I’m lodged like a seed in a cranny of some much greater rock; immovably great. . . What I’m saying has been said before of course.”
“Something like it,” said John smiling. “ ‘A man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest . . . as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.’ ”
“Who said that?” asked Daphne. “Saint Paul?”
“Isaiah. You don’t listen when I read the lessons.”
“Not always,” confessed Daphne. “But I will in future, for it’s disgraceful for a parson’s wife not to know who said what. There’s fire in the rock and it’s quite inexorable. It means to burn me into some sort of shape, and I can only grow to what I will be from what I am, and where I am, so discontent is quite useless. Much more sensible to accept the one and love the other. Don’t laugh, John. I know I’m being crude.”
“I wasn’t laughing,” said John. “Everyone’s meditations are crude. Human nature is crude and all our aspirations are as crude as our nature; but they’re the stuff of growth so what does it matter if they are? Nothing could have been cruder than my meditation that morning.”
“Tell me about it,” said Daphne.
“It began with the apple tree outside the kitchen window,” said John. “The sun came out while I was washing up the breakfast things and it was covered all over with drops of light. The light seemed to wash into the kitchen, making it clean. I went on thinking about it at intervals all day. I thought of each drop of light as an individual enclosed in his own experience as an anchorite in his cell, united by it to the tree of life, as your seed was united by its cranny to the rock, united by that experience and no other. I thought of all the obvious things; that the sun transforming each drop of moisture to a diamond was like the birth of God in the soul, transforming it, and that the tree of life is the tree of the cross, union with God’s will, Christ Himself. Our apple tree looks like a madman praying but they thought the cross mad. ‘To the Greeks foolishness, to the Jews a stumbling-block.’ The light of transformed lives, held up on the cross, cleanses the world, and above the tree the Seraph sings. As you say, our pictures of things are very crude but most of us are never anything but children in this world and we must learn from our pictures, just as children do.”
Daphne swung her feet off the sofa, went to her Chinese cabinet and opened it. Behind her head Queen Henrietta Maria’s mirror reflected the moon and a great wave of thankfulness went over John that he had not had to ask her to sell it. Now that the manor and most of its contents were to be sold, it would be possible to make up the sum needed for Farthing Cottage without selling anything from the vicarage except his stamps and Margary’s brooch. That decision was not to be altered. To him and to Margary the stamps and the brooch were the two foundation stones of Farthing Cottage. In the mingled sorrow and relief with which Aunt Maria’s decision to sell the manor had plunged him the thankfulness that nothing Daphne loved need be sold was uppermost.
“What on earth?” he asked, as she came to him carrying some broken china in her hands.
“I broke Winkle’s mug the other day,” said Daphne. “And when I took it out to the dustbin there was the sugar bowl you’d smashed.”
“How do you know Mrs. Wilmot didn’t smash it?” asked John.
“If she had she’d have hidden it at the bottom. You put it at the top. That’s the kind of man you are. I rescued them both for some reason. I didn’t know why.”
John got up and put his hands on her shoulders. “And now you do know why?”
She looked up at him. “It was that night I first began to realize my need of you.”
“Did you?” he said. “Cracked vessels, both of us, but not to be parted. Was that it?”
“Something like that,” she said. “But since that night I’ve realized much more, John; that our marriage has been my salvation. If it’s not been as happy as it ought to have been the fault has been mine.”
He took the ridiculous bits of smashed china out of her hands and put them on the table and put his arms round her. For almost the first time in their long companionship he was neither awkward nor deprecating but entirely confident and happy in his handling of her. She gave herself to his arms with a sigh of relief, wanting from him now neither passion nor strength but only this blessed easy sense of equality that her humbling of herself had given to their relationship. In her heart she knew that there was not equality, that in all ways he surpassed her, but she knew too that to humble herself too much before him would be to distress him. When he said, “My fault, Daphne, not yours,” and kissed her with an equal humility, she smiled and let it pass. She would have liked to ask him to forgive her but she knew that to bring himself to acknowledge her need of it was something he could not do. She must do without the relief of hearing the words spoken. After all, forgiveness was implicit in this fresh beginning. Without it, a fresh beginning would not have been possible.
“Winkle says she likes living,” said Daphne. “With you, John, I do too. You’ll be surprised to hear it, but I’m a happy woman.” They laughed and clung together, and upstairs Margary, who had not been able to get to sleep, was suddenly happy, turned over and slept instantly.
Chapter 18
1
Michael was perched on a stepladder, painting the walls of Mary’s bedroom at Farthing Cottage honeysuckle color. Miss Giles and Mary had gone to Otway to choose curtain material, and he was having a day of solitude in the cottage to get on with the painting. Unlike most people he liked the smell of paint. It was to him an invigorating smell, the smell of cleanliness and of a fresh start, and it went well with the scent of apple blossom that came in through the open window. Now and then he looked out and marvelled at the beauty of the earth and the row the birds were making. A month had gone by since he and Daphne had heard the linnet singing in the vicarage garden. The weather had broken in torrents of cold rain but now it had mended again and this was the second day of its mending. Everything had rushed into bloom. The apple blossom had passed its perfection but the gardens were full of hyacinths and wallflowers. Beyond the sparkling river he could see the brilliant green fields, the buttercups and lady’s-smocks, and the hedges white with hawthorn blossom. The trees were in full fresh vivid leaf and high white clouds were sailing fast before a northwest wind. The birds could scarcely contain themselves in this world where sunshine and warmth had returned.
It had been an eventful month. In lives where there had been no change for so long there had suddenly been cataclysmic change, as startling as this change from cold grey rain to brilliant sunshine. Belmaray manor house had been bought by a religious order. Oaklands had been bought by a retired, wealthy, jolly brewer with a family of rollicking sons and daughters, the volume and power of whose high spirits it seemed that not even Oaklands could depress. Farthing Cottage, so far as the knowledge of everyone except John, Daphne, Margary and Miss Wentworth went, had been bought by the parents of the former Oaklands children and leased to Miss Giles. Miss Wentworth had bought a little house in Silverbridge. Michael had been up to London, reopened his flat, stayed in it, met and faced the careful smiles or the equally careful cuts of the men and women he had known in the days before his imprisonment, met one friend whose smile was what it had always been, the brother of his friend Simon Matthews who had been killed beside him in Crete, and through him got a job as an assistant at a bookshop, he had also, during the lonely and rather desperate evenings in his flat, tried to rough out the plot of a new kind of thriller, the type Miss Wentworth liked. But he had found it as difficult as the writing of the poem he had destroyed, and realized with depression how hard it would be to acquire new habits of thought and work. Well, there would be the bookshop while he struggled. Setting his plotting aside he had written a long letter to Mary, which he had not posted until two days ago. He had not seen her since and there had been no answer by this morning’s post.
He thought of her with aching compassion. With just a few more meetings love had come quickly and warmly between them, to her cloudless joy and his secret wretchedness. He had made a clean breast of it to Daphne and John, he had now told Miss Wentworth, but he had not been able to tell Mary the whole story to her face. He had had to write it. But he had not been able to write it until he had gone back to London and faced alone what they would have to face together if and when she married him. When he had found that he could do that he had written his letter.
Which she had not answered. Well, how could she so quickly? She was overwhelmed by it all, his treatment of Daphne, his cowardice, the full details of his dishonesty, the hard struggle for reinstatement which as his wife she would have to share. It had been Miss Giles, not Mary, who had rung up last night and asked if he could get on with the painting alone today, because they were taking Annie with them and going to buy curtain material. Would she ask for time, would she refuse him, what would she do? He steeled himself against a rising hopelessness and went on grimly with his work. Whatever happened now he was glad he loved her. The mere fact of loving her had restored to him a certain measure of self-respect. When he was not despairing his manhood rejoiced in her and in rejoicing made him more aware of itself. His hopelessness lessened as he worked. Empty, quiet and clean, the house was as fresh as the spring, as full of delight as the birds in the garden. He could imagine he was splashing sunshine onto Mary’s walls.
Mary herself had painted Miss Giles’s room next door pale pink, after an argument with Miss Giles who had wanted it grey. But Miss Giles was coming round now it was finished and she would surely be happy in the warmth and glow. Annie needed no persuasion where Mary’s color schemes were concerned. To everyone’s astonishment she had in this new beginning showed that she possessed astonishing recuperative powers. Once she had recovered from the shock of her mistress’s death she had transferred to Mary the devotion she had given long ago to the young Mrs. Belling. It was a blind unquestioning devotion that awed even while it amused Mary. It was amazing that any human being should be such a chameleon. Annie, who had become a slut because her mistress had become one, was now rapidly becoming as devoted to bright colors, fresh air and cleanliness as Mary herself. Miss Giles, though she did occasionally put up some resistance to Mary’s despotism, was now equally her devoted slave. Yet she kept somewhere, though in abeyance now while she was still so tired, her own independence and power of authority, her strong sense of discipline. When she was rested, and if and when Mary left her, she would be able to continue successfully alone. But it was Mary who was laying the foundations of the new school. There was not a single person connected with its establishment who did not turn to Mary for orders.
“She has power,” thought Michael. “The kind of power that takes women captive as well as men. ‘My thoughts are going after her.’ And with that power the kernel of her is sound as a nut. Why didn’t she write to me? Something, anything, to keep me going. She knew I would not see her today. Perhaps she’s writing letter after letter and tearing them up, trying her best to express herself with truth without wounding my feelings. That’s hard to do when you’re honest. What’s the time? Five o’clock. The room’s done.”
He got stiffly off the ladder and found that he was uncommonly tired as well as thirsty and hungry. He’d go home and see if there was a letter by the second post. Whatever was in it he would at least be clear of these alternations of hope and hopelessness.
“Are you still there, Michael?” called a voice.
He strode to the window and looked out. Mary, hatless, was down below him in the garden. A full basket was at her feet and she had a new frying pan in one hand and a coal scuttle in the other. “Timothy White’s,” she said. “We’ve had a grand day. How have you got on? Have you finished?”
“I’ve finished,” said Michael.
She looked up at him, laughing. There was no change in her easy happy manner. She might have received no letter. Perhaps she ha
dn’t. Perhaps it had gone astray. His face looked drawn and grey as he looked down at her, and she realized that he was not only a great deal older than she was, but also weaker both in character and body. Also that he loved her far more than she had realized. Also that he had been in doubt as to her answer, and she had kept him waiting two days, not knowing that he doubted her response; clear to her on the day she had first met him, unwavering even after the blow he had dealt her then. Also, and this last with a flash of vision, that she had it in her power through the kindness of love to make of this weakling a very fine man.
For even the weak with surprise
Spread wings, utter song,
They can launch . . . in this blue they can rise,
In this kindness are strong . . .
All the motherhood in her surged up in such a flood of tenderness that she dropped the frying pan and coal scuttle and held out her arms.
“Michael!” she cried, her cry sharp with the distress of her love and compunction. “Michael, come down at once and have some tea!” And dropping her arms she bolted in through the French windows of the sitting room.
He raced downstairs and met her there and they kissed each other passionately, yet more as two passionately loving children would have done than as man and woman. Every vestige of his heavy weariness fell from him and he felt himself light and buoyant within the strength of her arms. And she, feeling the unexpected strength of his, knew strength to be an entirely relative thing. A weak man, struggling with circumstances too hard for him, might put up a stronger fight in failure than the strong man in success. He might even be more worthy of respect and love. Anyway she respected Michael and would show him so by every means in her power until she died.
“I’ll be proud to be your wife,” she told him vehemently. “And if you ever thought I wouldn’t be, that just shows what a fool you are.”