The Heart of the Family

  “David, wake up,” she said gently. “It’s nearly tea-time and I’m the hostess.”

  He woke up, blinking and stupefied at first, then instantly alert. “You go back,” he said. “I’m going a little farther.”

  She nodded, and he strode off through the trees, and she quickly lost sight of him. They all had their special places in Knyghtwood. David’s, she knew, was where he had once met Sally. She did not know where it was, or what he and Sally had said to each other there, but she guessed he was going there now. That was all right, then. “If thou hast broken a vow, tie a knot on it to make it hold together again.” He’d keep tryst with Sally there and tie a fresh knot on his marriage vow. “It is spiritual thrift, and no misbecoming baseness, to piece and join thy neglected promises with fresh ones. So shall thy vow in effect be not broken when new mended.” Hilary had quoted that from Thomas Fuller in a sermon lately. Hilary in his old age was getting rather irritatingly full of quotations from queer old writers one had never heard of, yet they came in handy sometimes, for there was no doubt about it that the longer ago people lived the better sense they seemed to talk.

  Like Knyghtwood itself, with its old secrets that it guarded so carefully until the right moment came and then yielded with so rich a grace. How she had disliked the country, and above all this wood, when she had first come to live here, and now how she loved the country quiet and the wisdom of the wood! She strolled slowly home, loving the feel of the floor of the wood beneath the thin soles of her shoes: moss here, a few crackly twigs now, the akermast, crunchy and delightful, then, best of all, the trodden bare earth. Walking slowly and lightly, one’s feet caressed the solid hard ground where all delights are rooted. The trees seemed strolling by her, rather than she by the trees, and she greeted politely those whom she knew. For so many years they had been walking around in this wood, talking to so many, yet each spring they renewed themselves again for fresh meetings and greetings. Although she loved winter in the wood, with the bone-beauty of the bare branches against the sky and the delicate dove’s-breast color of the twigs, yet already she was looking forward to next spring, when the scent of hidden violets would blow through the aisles of the wood and there would be primroses growing beside the path and anemones under the thorns. And the ringing of bird-song and the dapple of sun through new leaves would make one forget all sorrow and dismay.

  She came to the gate of the wood and stood looking across at her home, strongly built and stoutly rooted in its old garden that glowed under the hot sun with all the fiery colors that in winter glowed indoors, on the wide hearths and on the candle-brackets round the hall. And at George asleep with his hat over his nose and Hilary asleep with his hands folded over his stomach, neither of them looking their best but both a picture of placidity, and happy now in this quiet pause that old age sometimes gives men and women between the stresses and conflicts of their working days and the fear and the weariness of their dying and their death. Men had a right to such a pause, she thought, and the harder their sufferings through life the deeper their right, so that they could get their breath to face their end. For always, she supposed, even for the greatest and the best, there must be some terror in death, either at the time of it or in a secret anticipation of it that could be shared with no one else. “Death is a fearful thing.” One of the sinners in Measure for Measure had said that, not Angelo but the other one, the one she had always sympathized with because he did not want “To be imprisoned in the viewless winds. And blown with restless violence round about the pendent world.”

  She had her own secret dread of death, born of her own innate frivolity, a dread of finding that when her beauty, her love of pleasure, her gifts of vitality and charm, all fell away from her at last, that it would appear that it had been only for those she had been in life so deeply loved, and that there was nothing else there, nothing at all; not even the child that in her moments of faith she believed God would take in His arms at death to nurse into new life. Nothing at all. Not even the weakest wraith of a child. Of her, nothing left but a handful of dust. It was the sort of fear that one could not speak of to anyone, and it was only very occasionally that it came upon her, as now, in the midst of present joy. She thought abruptly of Sebastian Weber. He looked a dying man. Did he ever feel afraid of death? But perhaps those who had suffered as he had, passed beyond such fears. Perhaps they were the prerogative of the comfortable and the happy, just crumples in the rose-leaves. The fortunate always felt their crumples very acutely, like the Princess and the pea. And a good thing, too, thought Nadine. It gave them some minute share in the pain of the unfortunate.

  As she walked across the lane and up the steps to the garden, George woke up. He always did when she came towards him, though her step was so light, as though sleep were a waste of time if she were there. He restored his hat to its proper position and smiled at her, and her fear vanished. In a marriage such as theirs had become these last years there was a tie deeper than the physical one, deeper than that of the shared children, of habit or even affection, a tie most mysterious and unexplainable. She thought suddenly, and for the first time, that it was stronger than death. Each had come to share, now, the something in both of them that would live beyond death, and if in her there was scarcely anything, that which was in him would, wherever he was, in this world or the other, lend strength to her trembling dust at the hour of her death.

  Hilary slept on. No woman’s step had ever troubled his dreams in the slightest degree.

  CHAPTER

  10

  — 1 —

  Tommy, whistling cheerfully, Robin bouncing on his back, had come far through the wood, past Brockis Island and the stream in the clearing and farther on still, following the twins and Mary. He walked fast, but the twins, flashes of scarlet among the trees, ran faster, and Mary rolled faster still. She had put on weight with increasing years and was now somewhat spherical in shape, so that when she ran it was like a large white puffball rolling over and over. The twins’ bare legs and backs and arms had been tanned by the sun to the color of brown boiled eggs. They were tall and slender, and running now through dappled shade and now through pools of sun, they had today an astonishing unearthly beauty that Tommy could not define. It was not a fairy beauty, for there was nothing diaphanous about it. Tommy had no fears that the twins would vanish into thin air; indeed, the scarlet of their sun-suits seemed almost to shout down the glow of the summer woods. Not heavenly—good Lord, no! thought Tommy, remembering the noisiness of the twins and the devilment of their general behavior at times. Pagan? Yes, that was the word he wanted. Crowns of poppies and leopard skins and that sort of thing. He could picture them scampering on the outskirts of some bacchanalian feast, painted on a Greek vase, perhaps. How did it go? “What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?” There was a wild ecstasy in the way they ran in the woods. They liked it here. Jolly little beggars! They were growing like Mother, which was why he liked them and bothered with them.

  And yet you wouldn’t call Mother’s beauty pagan. He couldn’t picture Mother in a leopard skin. But he could see her in the sort of austere draperies those old Greeks wore. Classic, that was the word for Mother. He could picture her now, moving on ahead in the wood with that wonderful grace that he adored in her, the thin draperies clinging to her long limbs so that one could see the lines of them through the gauze. She had a wonderful line from the hip-bone to the knee. Her femur was unusually long. Jerry’s was, too. And how those kids’ muscles did ripple under the skin! Gosh! he was getting quite poetical. Most unsuitable in a surgeon. Poetry and surgery didn’t go together at all. It was the wood. Though he was never so barmy about it as the others were, it always affected him oddly, all the same. He always thought of Mother here. He did not suppose he would ever be able to fall in love, because he would never meet a girl who would hold a candle to Mother. But he’d marry, all the same. He’d pick her with an eye for child-bearing, healthy and good-tempered with good wide hips. Pret
ty and a good cook, too, because though brilliant surgeons had little time to spend at home, they did occasionally have a meal there; and a decorative hostess was necessary to a man who wanted fame. Which he did want. And he’d have it, too. There was nothing to stop him. He’d got the brains and he’d got the guts, and the health and strength. He’d got what it takes, too. And there wasn’t a nerve in his body. None of this highly-strung business for him, like those poor fools Ben and David. He was tough, like Robin. He bounced the baby on his back, and a thrill of delight went through him at the feel of the warm compact little body between his shoulders. Funny how the kid adored him. He believed that Robin would go to Land’s End and home again on his back and never even whimper or ask to be put down. Stout fellow. He whistled a stave of “Robin Adair,” and Robin chuckled like the last of the bath-water gurgling out of the bath. Tommy had taught him how, and he did not chuckle that way for anyone else.

  “Hi, you kids!” yelled Tommy, but the twins and Mary took no notice, and ran on down the narrow path that led into the deepest and most secret part of the wood. It led to the Buckpen, where the old ruined Chapel was, and where Mine Host of The Herb of Grace had once tended the sick animals, and it was their special place. Tommy let them go, merely shouting after them that if they made him late for tea he’d wallop Jerry’s backside good and hard. They vouchsafed no answer, and he stood between the two giant beeches, that leaned together to form an archway over the entrance to the path, and watched them. The two scarlet figures gleamed brightly against the darkness of the great holly-trees, that grew in the deep and secret part of the wood, and then they were gone. The white ball that was Mary shone out for a moment, and then that, too, had vanished.

  Funny, he thought, how all the family except himself and Father and Caroline had a bit of the wood that was their special place. Mother had the oak-tree, Ben Brockis Island, the twins the Buckpen and David the place where the stream was. Crackers, they were. Even Mother. Good thing for the family that he and Father and Caroline had more sense. They gave a little ballast to the general Eliot sloppiness. Perfectly barmy to go sloppy about a wood. Now that he was here he’d just take the kid down to the place where the golden willows grew. He liked that place.

  He left the path and strode away to the left, where the great oaks and beeches grew so close together that even on a day of summer sunshine there was shadow and mystery, and a breath of pungent coolness from the wet mosses and multi-colored lichens that patched the bared roots of the trees. This bit of the wood was so old that it felt almost primeval. The trees were so tall that the sighing of them was lifted to an immeasurable height above one’s head, and down here at their roots one might have been at the bottom of the green gloom of the sea.

  He swung Robin off his back and took him in his arms, ostensibly to keep the briars from scratching his legs, but really because he thought the kid might be a bit scared by the shadows and the silence. Robin’s red curls tickled his chin, and his heart knocked hard against the cage of his ribs because of the feel of the little boy’s warm body held there. Who was to know? No one, Tommy thanked his stars. A strong man must keep his weakness hidden, and he’d take jolly good care that no one ever knew about this queer passion that he had for small kids. There was no danger, for he was always very offhand with them in public. Perhaps that was why he repelled Meg. He was sorry that Meg did not like him. She was the only kid he knew who didn’t. But, she wasn’t like a kid. She’d been born a woman, and though women admired his good looks they didn’t like his toughness and the way he didn’t care a damn about them.

  Except Mother. But, then, she was his mother. She’d made his body, with its strength and beauty, out of her own strength and beauty, and for that he worshipped her. “With my body I thee worship.” A man said that to his mate, but a son could just as well say it to his mother, who had given him the glory of physical life. Why had people always got to be going on about the soul? Personally he didn’t care a damn about the soul. He didn’t know if he had one or if he hadn’t, and he didn’t care. He’d no wish to go drifting around after death with no body, just dressed up in a lot of gas. It was the body that mattered, this splendid bit of form and substance with its symmetry, its intricate mechanism, its beauty, its tough strength. Odd that he should want to be a surgeon and carve it up. But it was not the fact of the carving in itself that appealed to him, it was the caring for the body, the mending of it, the cutting away of detestable evil growths that dared sap its strength and hinder its efficiency. And then surgery made such demands upon one’s own body, upon the perfect co-ordination of eye and hand and brain, upon concentration, strength, the control of nerves and muscle. In surgery the body was an instrument in full power and full play, used for the restoration of other instruments to their birthright of enjoyment of this glorious world.

  Like a child coming from the primeval darkness of the womb out to the light of day, he had come through the darkness of the trees to the brightness of the river’s brink, where the willows grew. The sun was brilliant on the water and the willows were wands of gold and orange, growing in a semicircle about a little beach of smooth silvery pebbles. The shallow water lapped in here like a faery ocean on a faery shore. Not that the word “faery” would ever occur to Tommy; he just thought this was a good safe place for the kid to paddle, and sitting down on the flat boulder that had been so conveniently placed here at some time by some obliging prehistoric monster, he peeled off Robin’s entire outfit, vest and all. Sally and Zelle would have had fits, had they seen, for both disapproved of the entire immersion in cold river-water of the very young, but luckily they had no idea of what Tommy did with Robin when he had him to himself.

  “Get ’em tough early,” said Tommy to himself, pulling off his own shoes and rolling up his trousers. “Come on youngster.” With Robin in his arms he waded out until he was knee-deep in the sparkling water, and then with his hands beneath the little boy’s armpits lowered him down into it up to the neck.

  Robin squealed in delight. If anyone else had done the things with him that Tommy did he would have been terrified, but he was never afraid with Tommy. For Tommy’s hands gave him the same feeling of complete security as did his father’s arms. The same sort of feeling, but not the same sort of security. In David’s arms he was in the fortress that is at the beginning and the end, with danger a thing unknown or else finished with forever, but Tommy’s hard hands were a strength that held him in the danger and would not let him go. At this moment he was right up to the neck in the danger, and there was no firm ground under his feet, but the grip of Tommy’s hands was like iron and he gloried in it. Either way, in the fortress or in the hard hands, there was no danger of falling into the black pit, and his squeals burned to shouts of triumph.

  “That’ll do, youngster,” said Tommy, and carried him back to the boulder and dried off his top half with his pocket handkerchief. “Now you paddle while I go to sleep.”

  This was a figure of speech, for Tommy never went to sleep in the day. But he liked sitting on the flat boulder in the sun, with Robin splashing in the shallows, and remembering the day when he had first found this place and taken a fancy to it. He’d had an odd experience here, one of the queerest things that had ever happened to him; in fact, now he came to think about it, the only queer thing; for queer things did not happen as a general rule to those like himself whose common sense, and mental and physical health, kept them well above the mire of nonsense that engulfed such poor fools as David and Ben.

  Searching back to the beginning of things in remote childhood—a soppy sort of thing to do, which he did nowhere else but here—he remembered how as a very small boy he had wanted to be a policeman because he had liked taking the numbers of cars. Numbers had fascinated him, and they still did. They were so definite. Number seven was number seven, the number of perfection, people said, and nothing on earth that anyone did or said could make it number six. But later in his boyhood a visit to a Gilbert and Sulliv
an opera had informed him that a policeman’s life is not a happy one, and meditating on the number of hours put in by members of the Force conducting old ladies across busy streets and picking up drunks, he had been inclined to agree, and had transferred his passionate interest from the collecting of the numbers of cars to the cars themselves.

  And then he had discovered the wonder and glory of machinery. If a number is definite, how much more definite is a machine. A number in the abstract is merely an idea; it cannot be grasped, smelt, heard, or set in motion by yourself, like a motor-bike. Oh, ye gods, the joy of Boanerges, his first motor-bike! Oh, the bliss of knowing that if you did this, that or the other, a particular movement, noise or stink would be the result! And no uncertainty about the noise and the stink. That noise and no other. That stink and no other. And the joy of taking the thing to pieces, of having it disintegrated and at your mercy, and then by the power of your own knowledge and skill putting it together again, giving it life, so to speak, bestowing upon it once more the ability to make the noise and stink that so delighted you. To give life to a machine. To give life. He believed it was the idea of life that had switched him over from wanting to be a motor mechanic to wanting to be a surgeon. For though you might talk about restoring life to a disintegrated motor-bike, you didn’t really do it. Stink and noise are not life. It was dead stuff that you handled. But when a surgeon handled a human body the tissues were living, the flesh was warm, the blood spurted hot and red. Life was there—life the eternal, fascinating, baulking mystery. For Tommy, rationalist though he was, was honest with himself. There was a mystery. He might in his boyhood have dismissed number seven—the number of perfection—as merely an idea, but the idea had nevertheless haunted him. Perfection. An idea, but yet real. Life. An idea, and yet real. The perfection of life. The phrase embodied precision, strength, warmth, movement—all that he most worshipped. And eternity.