The Heart of the Family

  “They’ve been accumulating through the years on my account,” she said. “As I’ve got older and older I’ve kept wanting to sit down in yet another place, and we’ve put another seat. Now we’ve got our breath again perhaps we had better join the others. It sounds as though they’ve gone to the drawing-room.”

  “I have been excused from this party, Lady Eliot,” said Sebastian formally. “I understand it is a family gathering.”

  “I would like you to come in for a while,” said Lucilla. “I want you to meet my grandson Ben.”

  Like Cordelia’s, her voice was always “soft, gentle and low,” and it was markedly so when she intended to get her own way. Sebastian was powerless in the grip of her adamant gentleness, and before he knew what had happened found himself sitting by her in the drawing-room.

  — 2 —

  Sally had vacated the big arm-chair tonight, and Lucilla sat there enthroned by the fire, the glow of it rose and gold in the folds of the silk skirt that was spread about her, the lights on the mantelpiece turning her hair to shining silver. Perhaps enthroned was not quite the right word, for in spite of his own recent subservience, Sebastian was aware of abdication. Yet authority that has not been dethroned but willingly set aside retains power, and he was aware of the whole Eliot clan circling about her like planets about the sun. There appeared to be a great many of them, and the room seemed to him so vibrant with alien life that he felt for a moment or two confused and troubled. Then Mouse deposited herself upon his feet, steadying him, and beside him, smoking a pipe, he found an old gentleman with a bulging clerical waistcoat and a bald head who was just as unfortunate to look at as he was himself, and he felt better in consequence. Beyond the old parson an elderly spinster of the rugged gardening variety, of which he believed no country in Europe except England could produce the perfect type, sat knitting a jumper of a blinding shade of violet. Upon the other side of the hearth was another elderly gentleman, smoking a cigar, good-looking in the English military manner that Sebastian considered a contradiction in terms, with its combination of weary kindliness and clear-cut hard efficiency.

  “My eldest son Hilary, who has been Vicar here for thirty years,” Lucilla was murmuring. “My daughter Margaret. My second son, General Eliot.”

  “Typical English August,” General Eliot informed them, smiling kindly at Sebastian through a blue haze of smoke. “Chilly once the evenings draw in.”

  “One’s glad of the fire,” Hilary told them all, beaming at Sebastian through thick double-lensed glasses.

  Margaret’s plain face was irradiated with sudden sweetness as she paused in her knitting, smiled at Sebastian and told him that Mouse was on his feet. The art of conversation, Sebastian decided, was, with a few exceptions such as David Eliot, unknown to the English. Making a mighty effort they told you what you knew already and then relapsed into silence, comfortable or uncomfortable, according to temperament. This one was comfortable, and Sebastian felt suddenly at rest in this circle of tired elderly people. The life that had so confused him had withdrawn now to the outer spaces of the large room, young and restless, and here there was a harbour of placidity with the bulk of Hilary Eliot interposed between him and the disturbance of his peace.

  And between him and so much that was disturbing, and more than disturbing, between him and spiritual danger, the powers of darkness, the demons and the ghouls. He had been half turned towards Lucilla, but now he turned towards Hilary, a little startled in spite of his peacefulness. His deep experience of evil in the last decade had given him a correspondingly deep awareness of the bulwarks. He now recognized spiritual power when he met it, but he had not expected to find quite this degree of fighting strength in a man who had been for thirty years vicar of an English country village. Power does not develop without challenge. He had himself been challenged; with poor results, he thought. He was aware of no strength in himself. He had never of his own will surrendered to evil, but he had come to find hatred easier than love, and he had for short periods lost his reason. This man, if he had had his experience, would have done neither. Yet how, in this sanctuary of peace, this Fairhaven, had he met his challenge? Hilary’s voice broke in upon him.

  “My mother had at one time five sons and six grandsons,” he said. “And even now, after two wars, she still has two sons and four grandsons. She is therefore as inured to smoke as a pre-war haddock.”

  “I don’t smoke,” said Sebastian.

  “That’s the disadvantage of a faulty ticker,” said Hilary in a husky whisper. “May the merciful heavens preserve me from falling ill of any ailment that separates me from my pipe.”

  His remark was heard only by Sebastian, and meant only for him. Sebastian laughed. It was impossible to look at Hilary’s round and cheerful countenance and not laugh, even though at the same time one did reverence to the discernment of his selflessness. Sebastian wondered to what extent the violence of a man’s wrestling with self implied a correspondingly violent attack upon him by the forces of evil. If the war was always upon two fronts, his previous questioning was answered. A man like Hilary Eliot would not have to go to a concentration camp to discover the power of hell. Turning to Hilary, he began to talk lightly and naturally on the subject of tobacco, the unaccustomed ease with which the words came from the surface of his mind telling him how deeply stirred were the depths that reached wordlessly after friendship with him.

  “Though you need not pity me,” he finished. “I was never much of a smoker.”

  “Not even a pipe?”

  “No, not even a pipe.”

  “Without a pipe, what do you think about?” asked Hilary. “Some man said once that women knit to give themselves something to think about while they talk. It was meant for a backhander, but he doubtless smoked himself for the same reason. We must employ our minds in some way while we throw dust in the other fellow’s eyes.”

  “I like to speculate as to what is behind the dust,” said Sebastian.

  “I used to,” said Hilary, “but I never got it right. So now I just think about my pipe.”

  Sebastian took that as a reassurance that he was safe from probing. He did not wish to be safe from Hilary’s understanding, for he coveted that. Men could understand each other without asking a single question. And Lady Eliot had asked no questions. He glanced at her, and met her smiling eyes. It was almost impossible to realize that the beautiful old lady upon his right was the mother of the comically plain old man upon his left. Yet how alike they were in their power of sympathy, that he had described as the gift of feeling from a lesser pain to a greater and bearing something of that, too. It was because they took a little of the weight that they could establish intimacy so quickly. Even with Meg he had achieved a quick intimacy. These three—the old lady and the old parson and the little girl—must stand very near the frontier of another world so to transcend the body’s power to separate. Though even Meg’s father, at that first meeting when David had asked no questions . . .

  “Ben, come here a minute,” said Lucilla, “I want you to meet Mr. Weber. He will like you.”

  A lanky, dark-haired young man obeyed Lucilla’s gesture and pulled a low chair forward between her and Sebastian.

  “What Grandmother means, Sir,” said Ben, his pale face flushing a little, “is that I shall like you.”

  “Allow me to mean what I say, dear,” said Lucilla tartly. “And put another log on the fire.”

  Ben reached a long arm towards the log-basket behind her chair, and Sebastian was aware that his sallowness and lankiness, that had seemed to put him with Margaret among the plain Eliots, combined themselves with David’s grace of movement. His voice and hands were David’s, and so was the slight look of strain on his sensitive gaunt young face. But his deep-set dark eyes were not Eliot eyes. They were not even English eyes. The English, Sebastian thought, seldom combine gentleness with an almost fanatical ardor; the climate is all against it. Engli
sh enthusiasts, overcoming the somnolence of the weather, generally do so with a certain violence of eccentricity. Yet, whatever the turbulence of Ben’s feelings, his manners would never suffer. He was a thoroughbred. And this well-dressed young man, the finished product of a very expensive education, had flushed at their introduction and called him “Sir” with a humility that he found unexplainable. Lucilla was right. He liked Ben.

  Yet they found little to say to each other, and only the kindly interpolations of Lucilla upon one side and Hilary upon the other kept their conversation going. With their help Sebastian was able to discover that Ben had finished with Cambridge and had been lucky enough to pass the difficult examination for entry to the Foreign Office. He was thus exempted from military service, but would not start work for another month. Just now he was at a loose end. “Just ‘messing about in boats,’ ” he said.

  Sebastian knew and finished the quotation. “ ‘Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ ” They both laughed: Ben with delighted surprise.

  “At one time I travelled a good deal, and I tried to read all the best-loved children’s classics in all the countries I visited,” explained Sebastian. “I had an idea that if you read the books they write for their children, you will know something about the soul of a people that you could not know otherwise. Folk-music teaches you a great deal, too, and the little pictures a peasant paints on the walls of his house to beautify it are of more value as evidence than the pictures in the art galleries. I wanted, you see, to understand the soul of the people to whom I—for whom I worked.” Suddenly Sebastian remembered that picture in the hall. “You will know what I mean about the paintings. You paint yourself.”

  “Not a great deal, now,” said Ben, with a sharp hardening of the voice that made Sebastian wince and Mouse transfer herself from his feet to Ben’s. It also most unexpectedly brought the General to his feet.

  “You’ve not met my wife,” he said to Sebastian.

  Sebastian could see no reason why he should be detached from the comfortable circle of the elderly and towed out among the ebullient young to be introduced to the General’s wife; unless of course he provided a way of escape for the General, who must be Ben’s father, for behind the haze of his cigar-smoke his anxious eyes had never left the boy’s face. Yet Ben had never once looked at his father.

  “My wife,” said the General, and Sebastian suddenly liked him immensely for the pride in his voice. “Nadine, this is Mr. Weber.”

  She was certainly a beautiful woman, and he paid immediate homage to her beauty, bowing over her hand after the fashion of his country, a fashion he thought he had forgotten. She could not be entirely English, surely, or he would not so have saluted her. It was from her that Ben had inherited his arresting dark eyes.

  “Sit down here,” she said. “David is playing card games with my children, but there are moments of quiet when Sally and I can hear each other speak.”

  He sat beside her on a sofa, with Sally next to them on the window-seat. The General had been absorbed into the vortex of noise a little farther off, and he looked more closely at Ben’s mother. He guessed her to be past forty, for her dark hair was streaked with white at the temples and her fine pale skin was delicately lined about the eyes. The oval of her face was flawless and she carried her small head proudly. She had the figure of a slender and elegant boy, and her plain black dress, as simple and expensive as it well could be, had been chosen by a woman who knew how to make her clothes the foil of a beauty that had been to her all her life her weapon and her wealth. He could feel the steel in her, and guessed with what skill she had fought for what she wanted, and how rich had been her giving when she had won her will. She had the classic beauty, and the mastery of it, that can drive men mad, but there was upon it now a sheath of quietness that reminded him comically of Mrs. Wilkes. Like Mrs. Wilkes, she must have learnt acceptance, and how to be content with what she had. She obviously had much, but that did not lessen the respect he felt for her, for she had the true serenity that stems only from self-denial.

  He gazed in astonishment at the crew at the card-table. “My children,” she had said, but he found it hard to believe her the mother of so much blatant noise. Of the dark-eyed Ben, yes, but not of all those hooligans.

  “It is the twins who seem to be five children each,” Sally explained.

  A moment of quiet cleared his sight. There were actually only two children: a twin of eleven or so, boy and girl. Though they had a delicate beauty, the thought of gangsters rather than sprites or angels presented itself to his mind on this his first introduction to them. They had peculiarly penetrating voices.

  “Jerry and José,” said their mother. “Avoid them. Caroline has all the virtues. Ben is the eldest. Tommy comes next.”

  She spoke with a certain detachment, and he guessed her to be not naturally a maternal woman. Yet her voice warmed at the mention of Tommy. Her best-beloved, thought Sebastian, and had a good look at Tommy. “He’ll go far,” he said aloud.

  Not that he liked Tommy. A more magnificent specimen of young manhood he had never seen; six splendid feet of vigorous bone and brawn, healthy dark good looks, a head with plenty of brains in it, merry eyes, a fine deep voice and a good rollicking laugh. But what an impervious-looking boy! It was difficult to think of any sort of battering that would hurt enough to awaken the sleeping soul in him. It amazed Sebastian that he should be his mother’s favorite; unless he was the sublimation of herself. She had had to deny herself what she wanted, but Tommy would not.

  Caroline at eighteen, sandy-haired, freckled and small, her head bent anxiously over her cards, was, in spite of her mother’s careful dressing, not very noticeable until her father came and stood beside her and touched her cheek with his finger. She looked up then and smiled at him, suddenly so vividly alive that she was beautiful. He withdrew his hand at once and moved on round the table, and she looked down again at her cards. They had thought that no one saw them. A father and his young daughter can have great fun, Sebastian knew, in keeping the depth of their love for each other a delicious secret between themselves.

  The little dark Zelle was also there, sparkling with vivacity. She sat between Tommy and David, and they were both seeing to it that she enjoyed herself; Tommy with the effortless good nature of all healthy young animals, and David spilling his more mature charm with equal ease. Yet was he? The man was a fine actor, and he looked mortally tired.

  The General had made the round of the table, and there was that in his eye that suggested to Sebastian that he would like to finish his cigar sitting on the sofa beside his wife, gloating with her over their offspring in a state of mutual self-congratulation. Only Sebastian doubted if Nadine Eliot was a gloating woman. She was too serenely detached. But her husband would not notice that. Sebastian was sure he had been all his life too competent a soldier to be now a domestically noticing man. But he was a domestically devoted man and he wanted to sit by his wife. With a murmured apology Sebastian got up and sat beside Sally. He had been aware that she had been watching him while he studied Nadine’s children.

  “There’s not much about us all that you don’t know now,” she said, smiling at him.

  “Indeed I know nothing,” he said hastily, his quick hands deprecating the nothing that he knew. “How could I know anything in so short a time?”

  “It is not a question of time,” said Sally, and her smile seemed to accuse him of a want of truth which he acknowledged with another quick gesture.

  “It might,” he said, “be a question of shortness of time.”

  He had spoken without knowing what he was going to say, and he wondered if he was right. Old Lady Eliot’s time was short, and she had told him that the nearness of death had given her a knowledge of the dead that had not been hers before. Had it, in his case, brought a deeper knowledge of the living? But perhaps she
had that, too. Perhaps the one had preceded the other. Certainly he felt very near to these people, whom he had not even heard of a short while ago, and oddly at home in their home. And for all of them except David Eliot he felt genuine liking—a thing he had never expected to feel again; and for David Eliot’s wife something that was already deeper than liking.

  Was that what it was? Was that what had brought them so close to each other in the children’s garden? It did not seem within the bounds of possibility that he could be capable of love again, but if it was so, there would be no passion in it, and so no harm. He had not thought such a thing was possible, after the bereavements he had suffered, and finding as he did such strength in hatred. But he was glad to discover it might be possible. It showed that he was not entirely arid; in him, too, there was a hidden freshness.

  He turned to look at her, liking the green silk dress she wore, with its full long skirt and full sleeves gathered at the wrists. She wore no jewels, except a big square-cut emerald above her wedding ring, but he noticed there were little festive touches about her. She had washed her hair, so that it made an angelic brightness about her head, and she wore gold shoes. A lace handkerchief was tucked in her belt and she had put on her make-up with care. Tired though she was, she had done her very best to make it clear that the anniversary of her wedding day was a great day for her. Her hands were folded upon some treasure that lay in her lap. Sebastian looked at her as he would have looked at some picture that he wished never to forget, as though memorizing every light and shadow, every curve and plane of color, intently and yet not with hunger, for though he desired to love and remember, he did not want to possess, with pity because he knew on what short tenure she might hold her earthly joy.

  Feeling his eyes upon her, she turned towards him, and for a queer long moment of sheer courage they looked at each other. The compassion in his eyes, a light in profound darkness, filled her with foreboding, but she would not drop her eyes. The childlike trust, the vulnerability that he saw in hers equally appalled him, but he would not look away. She had a feeling that she must reach beyond his compassion to his darkness and dispel it. He thought that he must teach her some way of protecting herself. Though she would have courage in the face of calamity, she might be so deeply wounded that her warmth would drain away. To think of this woman without her warmth was as bad as remembering children’s faces when the eyes have lost their light. Yet how could he teach her any art of self-protection when he himself, he imagined, had never learnt any except that of indifference and hatred, and the aridity of hatred was in its turn only another form of suffering?