“Come too, Weber,” said David suddenly, as he lifted Meg and Mouse and Maria Flinders on to the seat beside him.
“Thank you, no,” said Sebastian with alarm, thinking of the twins. “I have a great deal of work to do,” he added in one of those careful after-thoughts with which the human race justifies its immediate instinctive reaction to danger. “I am making very little headway with those translations. I am afraid I lack application. I am afraid . . .”
But Mrs. Wilkes had fetched his hat from the hall, and her gently propelling hand was beneath his elbow. “What you lack, Sir, is fresh air,” she said firmly. “It’s a nice drive to The ’Erb of Grace.”
“You must see The Herb of Grace,” said Sally. “It is beautiful. It is an old Pilgrim Inn, and there is a wood there by the river. David, don’t let him miss the wood.”
“No,” said David.
Robin, clasping Yabbit, was wriggling close to Zelle on the back seat, so that there should be plenty of room for Mr. Weber. He turned his round red face towards Sebastian and smiled. When Robin smiled, his bulging apple-cheeks bulged yet more, so that his eyes were pushed shut by a roll of fat. His mouth, on the other hand, opened wide, and two bottom teeth came prominently yet attractively into view. Meg turned round on the seat beside David and also smiled at Sebastian. Her small pale face was dim to his view within the blue shade of the bonnet, but he knew she was smiling because of the comfortable warmth within him that was always engendered by a smiling Meg. Mouse, standing up beside Meg, rested her nose between her forepaws on the back of the seat and looked at him pleadingly, while her whiskers vibrated in rhythmical sympathy with the swing of an unseen tail. Mrs. Wilkes applied that adroit lift below the elbow which he had already experienced, and he found himself sitting on the back seat with Robin’s small fat red hand laid possessively upon his knee. Good-byes were called and the car purred down the drive. Meg and Mouse still had their backs to the view and their chins on the back of the seat so that the light of their eyes might beam upon him, and Zelle was smiling at him shyly over the top of Robin’s flaming head. David turned his profile towards him and said gently that Nadine had the twins under control more often than not and that the wood was called Knyghtwood.
As the car passed under the oak-trees Sebastian realized with astonishment that he had added to the pleasure of all five of them by coming with them to a place that meant a great deal to them. Or at least meant a great deal to David and his wife, and so by inheritance, though they might not know it yet, to Meg and Robin. The Herb of Grace. Knyghtwood. The names attracted him. They seemed to promise just such another small country of enchantment as Damerosehay itself, and even David wished to give him the freedom of it. What did these Eliots see in him that they had so quietly let him into the heart of their life? For that, after a bare fortnight at Damerosehay, was where he felt he was. He had ceased to feel an outsider. There were moments when he felt that the two weeks were two years, and others when they might have been two centuries, so vast was the tract of time that seemed to separate him from the darkness of the time before he came. So vast and so peaceful. Even David’s profile no longer had power to irritate. Its perfection was not a thing the man could help. It was turned away from him now, but in his mind’s eye he still saw it, and with pleasure. It had the precision of a profile incised upon a silver coin, and the same look of lastingness, as though it were symbolic of that something eternal within the perishing man that was struggling for its freedom.
As the car came from under the oak-trees out into the sunshine of Little Village he was wondering about physical beauty. Was there always some particular thing in the changing, dying human aspect of every man or woman—a smile, a lift of the head or look in the eyes—that was symbolic in that way? If so, to those who loved that man or woman it should be a memory that would outlast death and lead to recognition in “the world of light.” That was a descriptive phrase that Lucilla had taught him, and he liked it. It was the light of the small world of Damerosehay, he realized suddenly, the sanctuary light, that was the symbolic element in its multifarious beauty.
As Mrs. Wilkes had said, it was a nice drive to The Herb of Grace through the narrow lane that threaded the woods and green fields of the valley, and then widened and lifted over the high moorland where the wind sang and the tang of the sea made each breath of it strong in the body, like a draught of wine. The fading heather was wine-colored on the moors, and the children sang when with the lifting of the hill they felt the wind, but when they dropped down to the valleys again their voices fell to a soft bee-hum of gentle talk. Zelle talked, too, in the valleys, telling Sebastian about the famous places to which they would soon be coming; the Hard, the shipbuilding town by the river where the sailing-ships of England had once been built, and the Cistercian Abbey beyond whose pilgrims had been housed at The Herb of Grace.
“And it is still an inn?” asked Sebastian.
“And a guest-’ouse,” said Zelle, “General and Mrs. Eliot take ver-r-y special guests, but it feels more like just their ’ome. It is lovely. Pr-r-etty, and so quiet.”
Sebastian listened with only half an ear, but he liked her talk, with the dropped h’s and rolling r’s. He thought he had never heard a more musical woman’s voice. It lacked the depth and warmth of Sally’s, but the words fell like a chime of bells, and every note was true. Though she was not pretty, she had great charm, a sparkling vitality and an airy, sprightly motherliness such as Titania must have shown when Bottom’s great ears lay flapping on her breast. But it hurt him to see that tautness on her face and the sadness of her eyes when she was not laughing.
David said little, but attended to his driving, and Sebastian realized that he drove his high-powered car at great speed but with skill and care. When he did speak it was in answer to the soft little flow of song and conversation that came from within the blue bonnet. Always his head was turned very slightly towards Meg, even when his eyes were on the road. There was never a teasing note in his voice when he answered her, only a charming and serious courtesy. Sebastian realized that Meg was not a child to her father. She was Meg, and insofar as his life was not centred upon himself it was centred upon her, who was a part of himself. Sebastian was suddenly alarmed, and could have shouted to the man to disorientate himself before it was too late. “He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven and fire us hence like foxes.” It was already too late. He had not known, when he had heard David as Lear speak those words, why they had moved him so unbearably. He knew now. It had been fire from heaven that had destroyed his own small daughter. The fires of Hamburg. The walls of flame. And afterwards the dust, the smoke and stench. “Let me not be mad, sweet heavens.” He saved himself on the brink of the pit. He could occasionally do that now, though the effort to control his thought seemed to wrench his whole being. Yet he could now, sometimes, control it.
“Yes,” he said to Zelle as the car slowed to a standstill, “it is a lovely street.”
It was the place they called the Hard, and there was only the one street left now of the once-famous little town. White cottages with casement windows and rose-red steep old roofs. A grass-bordered street, and golden-rod growing against the walls. A view of the river at the bottom and the woods beyond. A few boats rocking at anchor and a white gull flying overhead. For a moment the smoke of Hamburg drifted across, but he pushed it away and saw again the blue and green and gold.
“It is a pity the rest was destroyed,” he said, forcing the words politely, and found that David, his arm stretched along the back of the seat behind Meg, was looking at him intently and oddly, almost with fear.
“Only by time,” he said quickly. “Not by violence. We had better get on, I think. Someone has had the sense to open the gate. That will have been Ben.”
— 2 —
The gate led into a narrow lane, and a storm-twisted oak-tree grew beside it. It might have been one of the trees from the oak-wood at Damerosehay, and Seb
astian knew they had entered the second Eliot kingdom even before the lane itself made it abundantly clear. For the narrow lane, winding downhill between its grassy banks crowned with gorse, gave the same sense of home-coming as the drive at Damerosehay. It led to a home deeply and deservedly loved, and so many hearts had sung with joy all the length of the lane that there seemed almost a singing in the air, an unheard melody woven into the music that was heard; a robin fluting, Meg singing inside her bonnet; the wind in the gorse, and Zelle laughing. Zelle was gloriously happy, Sebastian realized. Each fresh turn and twist of the lane brought her more deeply into her joy.
The final turn brought to Sebastian, too, what was almost a sense of joy. Upon his right was the wood of which Sally had told him, Knyghtwood, thick and deep and many centuries old. He knew these ancient woods, hung with dark curtains of shadow about pools of light, each tree as much its own world of mystery as a star in the sky, each leaf and flower as transient as a flake of fire, and yet seeming as fast held in the mystery as jewels in a king’s cloak. He knew the richness of these woods and the breath of them, pungent and warm. He knew the ancient homeliness, and the safety of them. All his life they had brought him ease.
The orchard on the left looked almost as old, and the lichened apple-trees had grown so much according to their own wild will that their condition would have shocked a trained horticulturist. Yet they bore apples—yellow and red and russet—so many of them that though some had fallen, and made pools of color in the rough grass below the trees, many were still left glowing above in the sunlight.
At the bottom of the lane was a sheet of light that resolved itself into the same sunlight dancing on the river. The lane seemed to run straight into the light and lose itself there, so that its joy was not ended, but transmuted. He thought that this was more of a world of light even than Damerosehay. There the silver sanctuary light was more diffuse. Here it was golden wine brimming a golden cup held out to the parched by the jovial spirit of the place.
“Comfortable-looking, isn’t it?” said David, stopping the car at the bottom of the flight of steps that led up to the garden gate upon their left.
The garden was full of autumn flowers, yellow and red and russet like the apples, and beyond their warmth The Herb of Grace was comfortable indeed. Its stout whitewashed walls shone almost golden in the sun, and above them the steep uneven roof was tiled with amber-colored tiles. The walls were buttressed, so that, though it was a two-storeyed house, it seemed to squat down into its garden with a suggestion of immovable strength, facing Knyghtwood across the way on terms of equal age and lastingness. As he got out of the car, Sebastian saw that at the point where the river and the lane met there was a small fan-shaped beach of jewel-like stones. Over the inn door there was a sign-board with blue flowers painted upon it. Then he noticed nothing else because the door opened and, to his surprise and delight, Hilary limped out and came down the flagged path towards them, his pipe in his mouth, leaning on his stick and beaming at them through his thick glasses. Sebastian had not seen him since that night of their first meeting at Damerosehay. He had not realized that he was lame. He walked as though he had an artificial leg. The First World War, thought Sebastian.
“I’m a shock to you all, I’m afraid,” said Hilary, “I’m spending the day. I brought Grandmother over.”
There was such an outcry of delight from the children and Mouse, as they hurled themselves out of the car upon Hilary, and from Zelle, too, as she stepped out lightly with gay skirts swinging, that David and Sebastian were silent. Yet they were attentive only to Hilary, the beauty all about them for the moment nonexistent for them. It was only when he saw the old boy unexpectedly, David thought, that he realized his own immense reliance on him; unstable as he knew himself to be, it was as though he felt sudden firm ground under his feet. Sebastian thought that if the spirit of this place had ever existed as a man, he had been in essentials just such another as Hilary Eliot.
A surge of color and noise came out of the front door, its spear-point the high shrill voices and blinding scarlet sun-suits of the twins. Sebastian’s head spun until Hilary’s hand gripped his arm above the elbow and he felt himself being steered away from it.
“Round this corner there is another bit of garden and a seat in the sun,” said Hilary. “I know nothing worse than the sudden eruption of a large family en masse; unless it happens to be your own, and even then after a certain age one can prefer it in its component parts. Sit down. You look better than when I saw you last. I wish you smoked.”
“It is a pleasure to me that you do,” said Sebastian courteously. “It seems a part of your—your—” His hands moved expressively as he sought for the right word. “How did Mr. Eliot describe this house just now? Comfortable-looking. Your comfortableness.”
“I think the word you really want is corpulence,” said Hilary, his eyes twinkling.
“No. Comfortableness,” insisted Sebastian. “And in the strong sense.”
“You mean, not just bed-socks?” asked Hilary.
“Certainly not,” said Sebastian. “Comfort in the sense of a house built on rock. Was mine host of this inn at one time a priest of your quality?”
Hilary looked startled. “In the days when the Abbey over there beyond the river was a house of the Cistercian order, and The Herb of Grace a hostelry for its pilgrims, one of the brothers was always guest-master here,” he said. “One of them set his mark very firmly on the place. Ben imagines that he has found out a good deal about him, and has even gone so far as to paint an imaginary portrait of the fellow, showing him as very stout. But I should not presume to say that I was at all like him, apart from the corpulency, which you so kindly describe as comfortable. You are a remarkable man. I know who you are, you know. My mother told me. She thought that you would not mind, and I’ll not give you away. I wish that I had the artist’s awareness. Myself, I know so little.”
Hilary’s remarks came quietly between puffs at his pipe, and Sebastian minded none of them.
“The artist’s awareness of atmosphere and quality, both in people and places, even when, as in my case, it is perhaps a little intensified by the nearness of death, is not knowledge,” he said. “Knowledge is something deeper than that. I think that you have it, though you may not know you have. I suspect that you have fought the last deadly battle with self and know what one knows when that is over.”
“It never is in this life,” said Hilary; but Sebastian noticed that he did not deny that there had been a fight or that it had been deadly. “While evil still attacks, not even a saint can dare to say, ‘I’ve won.’ ”
“Perhaps that is true,” said Sebastian. “But he can say, ‘By the grace of God I know what I know.’ ”
“Yes, he can say that,” said Hilary. “Even a sinner can say that.”
“Is it incommunicable?” asked Sebastian.
“Why ask? You know it is,” said Hilary. “Yet if I should attempt to put what I think I know into words and you were to do it, too, I suspect that the formula would be quite different but the incommunicable knowledge much the same.”
“I am not where you think I am. I am not where you are,” said Sebastian.
Hilary puffed at his pipe, and his eyes twinkled, but for a moment or two he said nothing. Then he said, “The other day we talked about throwing dust in the other fellow’s eyes, and most of the time that is what we all do. Shall we do that now, or shall we try to get behind it?”
“For I should think the first time in my life I should like to try to get behind it,” said Sebastian. “That, for me, is a volte-face, but I know that I have not long to live, and there are things I should like to speak about.”
“You look better,” repeated Hilary.
“I am. But all the same, one knows.”
“Some do,” said Hilary. “I hope I do when my time comes. I should dislike taking a header, so to speak, into eternity. I would rather be
like Dante’s good mariner, who, ‘when he draws near to the harbour lets down his sails, and enters it gently with slight headway on; so we ought to let down the sails of our worldly pursuits, and turn to God with all our understanding and heart, so that we may come to that harbour with all composure and with all peace.’ ”
It was easy to see what had brought the quotation to Hilary’s mind. From where they sat on their seat in the sun they looked across the flowers in the garden to the broad shining reaches of the tidal river. Quite close to them a boat rocked at anchor with sails down. It had reached a perfect haven.
“One cannot turn to God unless one finds Him,” said Sebastian.
“At your worst hour you found something,” said Hilary. “You must have found something, or you could not have come through.”
“Nothing,” said Sebastian. “Except, at brief moments, just a consciousness of world-suffering.”
“Held within it. Supported by it and cleansed by it. And yet at the same time you were taking your infinitesimal share in the bearing up and the redemption,” said Hilary. He asked no questions, but stated facts.
“I did not analyze it,” said Sebastian.
“You do not analyze Christ,” said Hilary quietly. “You find Him. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that He finds you; sometimes without your conscious knowledge. For the Christian, searching hour by hour through the days and nights, the months and years, if the time ever comes when he can say, ‘By the grace of God I know what I know,’ what he experiences can seem more or less like a conscious finding; but for those who have not chosen to search, but whom yet He has chosen to find, when for a brief moment He speaks to them they call Him by another name: ‘Christ, or whatever name is given to the secret kingdom of heaven in which we are and have this shadow of life, that shadow of the grave.’ I seem full of quotations today. The fact is that you other fellows, you poets and musicians, say these things so much better than the rest of us.”