“Mother, I’ll do what you and Father want,” he whispered. “I mean, I’ll try the F.O. for a bit.”
She did not speak, but sighed out her relief and turned her face with her lips against his cheek. They had never loved each other so much, and with this compromise (and compromise was always as the breath of life to the gentleness in him that tried so hard to please everyone all round) he was extremely happy for a short while. Until the nagging demon of indecision woke up in him again.
And now here was Heloise underlining what John Adair had said, and what Hilary had said. But he had promised his mother. How could he go back on that?
“You’ve not spoken a word for ten minutes,” said Heloise. “Not a word about the brockis. I don’t believe there’s any brockis. That’s just a rabbit-’ole, and the brockis is an imaginary person, like Pan.”
He found he was still holding her hands and she was laughing at him as she talked, helping him to come back again to the island and the summer afternoon in the faery wood. Men were like this when much of their life was lived creatively among the images of memory or imagination. They would be suddenly away, re-living what they had done, building castles in Spain of what they might do, following byways of thought that led them to the queerest places of speculation or fantasy or fear, and then forming out of it all the stuff of their pictures or their poems, the shadows and the lights that made their playing of great music always different from that of another man. Her father had been like that, and many of his friends whom she had known in after-years. And a young Jewish writer who had loved her, and now Ben. How could anyone imagine Ben would be of the slightest use in the Foreign Office? Promotion comes only to a man who can keep his mind forever on the job, and if Ben ever learnt to do that he would paint no more pictures.
“Pan’s not imaginary,” said Ben. “At least, not in this wood. The twins used to see him when they were little. They called him the Person with the Hoofs. And once or twice, I could have sworn I’d heard the sound of his pipes here. Shrill and sweet and terrifying, far away and very near at the same time.”
“Like you these last ten minutes,” said Zelle. “Where were you, Ben?”
“Nowhere interesting,” said Ben drearily. “Only going round and round again.”
“We’re not ’appy now, like we were when we first came ’ere,” said Zelle. “That’s wrong, and an insult to the wood. Come on, Ben, we’ll walk and be ’appy again. Woods like this one are so old that the tops of the trees ’old up the sun and moon and stars like candles, and the roots go down to where the freshness is. ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.’ I read that in an English poem once. Come on. There’s a bird that pipes like Pan, and another that laughs, but they flute and laugh so quietly.”
“A nuthatch and a yaffingale,” said Ben. “The birds are not very noisy now, but in the spring they sing so loudly that you can’t hear yourself think in the wood for the row they make.”
They had left the island by another little bridge and were walking quickly through the bit of the wood that lay beyond. There was no regular path here, only the suggestion of one made by the feet of the Eliots as they walked from Ben’s place to David’s place, the clearing where the stream was, and where the bog-myrtle grew robed in silver light. If one saw a kingfisher in Knyghtwood one most often saw it here, yet, though he would have liked Zelle to see a kingfisher, Ben swung away from the clearing, with a vague feeling that it was not his place and that he might disturb another pair of lovers there. He struck deep into the wood, to the right, with Zelle merry beside him. She had so resolutely brought back their joy that it had banished time and place, and they were the immortal lovers who had lived and loved under the trees in Eden’s garden in the beginning of the world, and would live and love in all lovers until its end. They possessed the end in the sun and moon and stars above them and the beginning in the freshness of the green shade. Zelle’s laughter and talk fell like a chime of bells, making faint echoes that rang farther and farther away, until they were absorbed into the deep places of the woods. The nuthatch blew once on his pipe and the yaffingale laughed, and the silence flowed in again where the lovers had been.
CHAPTER
12
— 1 —
That’s a pretty one,” said Meg, and picked it out of the stream and handed it to Sebastian where he sat comfortably beside her upon a moss-grown stone. He had heard Zelle’s laughter, but he had not looked round, because he realized that in this wood each pair of lovers lived in their own fool’s paradise and were careful not to trespass in that of another pair. Fool’s paradise? Was that the correct description? Correct in the sense of being transitory, for they would all have to come out of this wood at the call of that disrupting thing the English tea-hour, the most idiotic institution that even the English had invented yet. But incorrect in the sense that their happiness here was self-deception. This happiness that he was experiencing with Meg was no self-deception. It was more completely real than anything that had happened to him for a long time.
“Experience” the wood, Hilary had said, not just “enjoy” it. He’d been right. Enjoy was too shallow a word for the experience of renewal that was his at this moment. “A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning in Eden garden.” He had now read many more of the poems in the book in his room, and lines from them kept recurring to him like phrases of music. Hilary had been speaking of the place of contact where the freshness springs up, a fountain of living water, but he had not said that this wood was the symbol of it. But it was so to Sebastian. He would never, as long as he lived, think of the place of contact without thinking of this wood. A wood for lovers. A place for the contact of one soul with another. A wood for lovers in the deepest of all senses because a place for the deepest contact of all, for the soul with her eternal lover. He imagined that Hilary would say that that could be in greater or lesser degree an unceasing contact, if the search of the soul was unceasing, but the realization of it came most readily in places where the symbols were. What was this state of rest and peace in which he was held? Was it prayer, the kind of prayer that is called consolation?
“It’s a very pretty stone,” he said to Meg. “It’s veined like a wood-violet, and colored like one, too.”
He had spread his handkerchief on his bony knees, and it was slowly filling with the treasures Meg fished out of the stream.
“But now it isn’t,” said Meg, looking at it. “It’s gone grey. When they’re in the water they are all bright, like Mummy’s necklaces, but when I take them out they aren’t the same.”
“They need the freshness of the water to bring out the color,” explained Sebastian. “But they are the same. The wood-violet color is still in the stone, though you don’t see it now. When we go home we’ll put all the pebbles in a bowl of cold water, and they’ll be alive and beautiful again.”
“That’s all right, then,” said Meg. “Here’s another one. It’s pink. We did come a long way, didn’t we? I’ve only come here twice before, with Daddy, and both times we had the push-cart that shuts up for bits of the way.”
They had certainly come what was for them a long way, and Sebastian marveled that his insubordinate heart and her short legs had stood the strain as well as they had. They still had to get back, of course, but sufficient unto the day. It amazed him that Meg had come so unerringly to a place where she had been only twice before. He imagined that the place of the fresh stream and the gleaming pebbles, and the bog-myrtles dressed in silver light, had some particular significance in the lives of her father and mother. Children inherited their parents’ memories, both good and fearful. He remembered how his small daughter had once described to him a dream she had had. She had been walking in moonlight and shadow up a moss-grown path with nut-trees arching over it, and at the end of the path the trees had framed a patch of sky blazing with stars, like a door opening into space. It had been the path where he and Christiana ha
d had their greatest moment together.
Or what had seemed to them their greatest moment. For how could one tell, as the moments flowed in and one held them and then relinquished them, which were great and which were not? That moment of good honest downright human passion, both of them at the peak of triumph, strength and beauty, had seemed a great moment, yet perhaps that other moment, when he had looked down at the smoking rubble that hid her burnt-out body, had been greater. For all he knew, she had been nearer to him then; even though he had felt nothing—not even grief or rage, but only that absence of all feeling which in its emptiness can be more horrible than either. Her love for him might have been filling that apparent emptiness, for all he knew, and have been driven out when the rage came later; such unreasoning rage that he would have imperilled what felt to him like the last remnants of his sanity if only he could have got his hands on the throat of the man who had caused her death. Reason would have told him that no one man, but many, had caused it, but in his murderous rage he had not listened to reason. One man alone had become real to him: her murderer, whom his hatred could not reach.
“Here’s another,” said Meg.
Out of the smoking pit her little face rose up and smiled at him. With a sense of shock and desecration he put out a hand to grab hold of her, lest she tumble back into it. Unaware of her peril, she put the pebble into his hand.
“A green one,” she said.
But, of course, for her there was no peril. She was not his child, and his memories had no power to hurt her. He thanked heaven his own children had been conceived in the days of his happiness, and whatever nightmares had haunted them before they died had had no origin in any experience of his. But David Eliot could not say that. Sebastian looked a little anxiously at Meg’s small upturned face and wondered if any shape of fear ever lay in wait for her in the dark places of her dreams, or in the shadowy corners of the old house when she went upstairs to bed. Some Thing? Bat-winged, perhaps, like the planes that had brought death and destruction to women and children in the war. God help me, he thought, to what thoughts am I giving free passage in this place of refreshment? In the presence of this child? He had fallen from prayer. The unwilled thinking of idle moments, Lucilla had said, could help to keep humanity upon the rack. Yes, it was evil. The perpetual remembrance of past misery was sin in him, after all these years, and now that he possessed the power to push it away. He called upon all the strength he had, and the pit closed, and in its place was a scene like an illustration in a nursery picture-book, all clear line and pure bright color and simplicity and mirth.
The doll Maria Flinders was sitting on a stone beside the stream. She was an amiable jointed creature who could hold a desired position with ease. She was fishing, apparently, for a long stick with a piece of grass attached projected from beneath her person. Not being able to hold it in hands that were permanently star-fish shape, she sat on it. Her frock was bright magenta and there was a magenta bow in her flaxen hair. The expression of her podgy pink face was peacefully and statically seraphic, like that of so many fishermen, and like them she gave one a delightful sensation of permanence in a changing world, as though rooted where she was until the day of judgement. Only the rear elevation of Mouse, violently agitated, was visible. The front elevation was snorting and snuffling beneath a bog-myrtle bush. There was Something There; only Mouse knew that. Meg was bending absorbed over the stream. Her blue sun-bonnet had fallen backwards, and the sunlight gleamed on her silvery fair head. Her crisp white frock stuck out horizontally in the most absurd way when she bent down, and her back view, when she turned round in this position, was enchanting. Her new blue shoes were not what they had been, but they were still blue, and her usually pale face was rosy with exertion. The little stream was a ribbon of pure light. Pads of bright moss on the stones, a company of toadstools in liveries of dove-color, orange and pale buff, a brilliant scarlet moss-cup on a lichened stick, the doll’s dress, were all sharp notes of color in the general gaiety, but not challenging enough to take one’s attention from the glowing life of the child. One could have warmed oneself at it.
“Meg,” said Sebastian.
She came to him at once, and this time she did not bring him the stone she was holding, but dropped it. He had spoken her name as a lover might, and she had responded with the instant warm giving of herself that she had inherited from Sally. She stood in front of him and beamed up at him while he held her lightly between his hands. The bodies of small children were almost incredibly warm and alive. He did not quite know why he had called her or what he wanted of her. Perhaps it was simply this warmth and assurance of life in the long-drawn-out cold ending of it all. But, whatever it was, she had given it to him and he was satisfied.
“Is it tea-time?” asked Meg.
He looked at his watch and saw that it was. He sighed. How early in life these English became the slaves of their tea hour! He tied up Meg’s pebbles in his pocket handkerchief and stood up stiffly, stretching his cramped limbs. Mouse, English to the backbone in spite of Scottish ancestry, backed out from beneath the bog-myrtle bush and cavorted round them, barking impatiently. She always had a piece of bread-and-butter for tea, and tea in the slop-bowl. Meg took Sebastian’s hand, and they left the clearing talking softly to each other, as lovers do. Maria Flinders remained sitting on her fishing-rod, gazing beatifically into space.
— 2 —
David also stretched his cramped limbs and came out from behind the largest bog-myrtle bush, farther up-stream. He strolled down the clearing and sat where Sebastian had sat, on the large flat rock. He gazed with distaste at Maria Flinders. He had always disliked the woman. All that pink. And that seraphic expression was entirely bogus. If you looked fixedly at it, it turned into a most unpleasant smirk. The creature knew he had been eavesdropping. But he had not meant to. He had been farther into the wood and, coming back again, had found them here in his special place, where he had wanted to be. Meg, of course, had a right to be here, but not Weber. What had it got to do with Weber? Why should Weber take possession both of his child and of his special place? He was damned if he was going to be turned out of here by Weber, he had said to himself. He would simply sit down here and wait till they’d gone. So he had sat down behind the bog-myrtle, his back against a boulder, and fumed.
But in five minutes it was himself he was fuming at. Great heaven, what childishness! And what detestable childishness, too! Knyghtwood was not private property, though to hear the Eliots talk anyone would think they owned the entire place. Weber had as much right in it as anybody. More right, for he was one of the disinherited who inherit the earth. What did it feel like to be stripped of everything? There could be joy in it, they said—that joy of spiritual inheritance that through the grace of God could flow into the emptiness of material loss. In vulgar parlance, what you lost on the swings you could gain on the roundabouts. But the experience of loss, of whatever kind, must be pretty frightful—a sort of darkness through which you would have to struggle with no certainty that you would ever arrive at the roundabouts. He turned away quickly from the thought of it, and watched Meg.
She was enjoying herself, utterly absorbed in taking pebbles from the stream and carrying them along to poor old Weber. And he was not sure that Weber was not as absorbed as she was. He suspected that to both of them each pebble was one of the wonders of the world, in which they saw beauties that he would not see, if Meg were to show them to him. They neither of them owned anything, of course, Meg because she had not yet clutched and Weber because he had let go. He imagined that the absorption of a child and the prayer of a man who was truly great had much in common, and they much in common, and that he was looking at both. Which he had no right to do, being what he was. Ashamed of himself he shut his eyes and wished Weber did not dislike him so much. Not for his sake, for he still saw Weber’s dislike as a rationalization of his own hatred of himself, and found relief in it, but for the fellow’s own sake. It was a smudge
on the character of a man whom he was coming more and more to reverence and almost love. He knew that love was a word that should be used with caution, but his gratitude to this man, whose light, shining so infinitely above him that night, had saved him from disaster, was so profound that he believed it had almost earned the name of love.
He must have slept again, for he was visited by a dream-memory of one of the nightmares that used to torment him after the war; for quite a long time after the war, because it had not left him until Meg had been born. Then, until now, it had entirely vanished. He would be riding through the air at night on the back of a most horrible Thing, a devilish Thing with wings like a bat and a filthy body that stained his hands when he touched it. But he had to touch it, because if he had not held on he would have hurtled through space to destruction. Yet it was difficult to find hand-hold on the Thing, because its body was infested with parasites—worm-like creatures whose touch filled him with shuddering revulsion. Yet, sickened though he was, he had to be one with this Thing that was carrying him through the night because he had become the instrument of its evil will. There was no escape. The stars were like flowers about him in the clear sky, but as he passed them they shriveled up and burned away. The stars could escape, but not he. As his horror grew, the Thing slackened speed and began to circle lower and lower. There was a city below them and a terrible sight was given him whereby he was able to see inside the houses. He saw children in bed, their faces rosy with sleep, and their mothers sitting beside shaded lamps, reading or sewing peacefully. He saw hospitals and the sick lying quietly in the narrow beds. He looked down on them all as a messenger of heaven might have looked, in pity and love, and lifted his hands from the filthy Thing because he wanted now to fall from it and go to them in pity and love. But the minute his hands were empty they were filled, for the worm-like things crawled into them. In horror he shook his hands, to be free of them, and they fell from his hands upon the city below and destroyed it. He heard the scream of the children and the sick, and he saw the flames, and the smoke of the burning city came up and choked him. And then he fell from the back of the Thing into a pit of darkness. He went on falling and falling, and he longed to reach the bottom so that he could have his back broken and be finished with the Thing forever. But when he reached the bottom he merely woke up, shaking and drenched with sweat, and found he was in his room at Damerosehay and the war was over. But the night was not over, for he would hear the cuckoo clock strike one or two, and know that he would have to get through it as best he could, remembering the fires of Hamburg and knowing himself the sole man responsible. He was not, of course, but such is the power of the small hours to distort the judgement, that he would not know he was not until the dawn came and he heard the sea-birds fluting in the marshes.