The Heart of the Family

  “You can and you will be,” said Sebastian lightly. “Anxiety for your children is your Thing.”

  “Now whatever do you mean by that?” asked Lucilla, curiosity getting the better of her sudden spasm of shrinking.

  “Ask your son Hilary,” said Sebastian.

  Their friendship, that had come so suddenly, and which they deepened now with a sense of urgency whenever they could, as though there was so much to say quickly before this particular mode of intimacy was taken from them, kept them where they were together, as though enclosed in the same sort of circle of light as held Jerry and José. But now tea was over and the two small circles dissolved and the larger one of the family enclosed them all.

  “I’m going to show the Chapel to Mr. Weber,” said Ben.

  “No, you aren’t; José and I are,” shouted Jerry. “It’s our Chapel. We found it.”

  “You’ll show no one anything, Jerry, till you’ve had what’s coming to you,” said Tommy darkly.

  “You won’t show the Chapel to Mr. Weber,” said David. “The noise you make would destroy his powers of appreciation.”

  José’s beautiful eyes met Sebastian’s and were full of pleading. If Tommy’s dark purpose were postponed he might forget about it. That had been known to happen.

  “If Ben will forgive me,” said Sebastian unexpectedly, “I should like to be shown the Chapel by Jerry and José.”

  — 3 —

  They were instantly beside him, standing sword-straight as their mother did. They were tall children, and their heads nearly reached to his shoulder.

  “It’s this way, sir,” said Jerry. “Through the other kitchen.” His wickedness had suddenly fallen from him and his modernity receded. His grave courtesy was charming, and in his scarlet sun-suit he looked like a boy from another age than this. He might have set on the grass among the scarlet anemones, in an Athenian spring, and heard Socrates talk, or run over the Sicilian hills when the sun was drawing up the hot scent of the mignonette. José’s eyes were soft with gratitude as she smiled at Sebastian. Her face had an unexpected maturity when she smiled. In protecting Jerry from the consequences of his actions, motherhood had begun for her already.

  “Your blazers are hanging on the back of the kitchen door, Jerry and José,” said Jill. “Put them on before you go into the Chapel.”

  “Why?” demanded Jerry.

  “It’s not right to go into the Chapel with only sun-suits on,” said Jill firmly. “Not nice at all. Your mother doesn’t think it’s right.” She eyed Nadine with respectful firmness, and Nadine said meekly, “Jill’s quite right.” Nadine was not a meek woman, but Jill, who was, had, like all good nannies, considered the training of the mother as important as that of the children. Without a well-trained mother it is not possible to train the children. From her first day with Nadine and the twins Jill had begun as she meant to go on, but she had been more successful with Nadine than the twins.

  “Rats!” said Jerry contemptuously, and opened the door into the further kitchen.

  His tone had made Sebastian fear that the tide of modernity was coming in again, but with the door shut, and the three of them alone together in the further kitchen, he was conscious once more of the warm wind of the golden age blowing over the flowers in the grass. It is always so with normal children of eleven or so, he remembered. At one moment they are loudly self-assertive, proclaiming their rights and staking their claim in this new age in which they must fulfill themselves, and at another time there breathes from them the fresh sweet air of all the innocent and timeless beginnings. It is the timelessness of beginnings that makes their freshness, he thought. To begin again is to be born again and also to have some foretaste of the end. Down in the depths where the eternal freshness eternally springs there is no time and creation and fulfillment are one thing.

  Bringing his thoughts back to the kitchen, he realized that though they were just as much a tumbling kaleidoscope as ever, the fragments fell into pleasing patterns more often now.

  “It is a beautiful kitchen,” he said, looking round at the shining pots and pans, the huge scrubbed kitchen table, the gay china on the dresser, and the view of the orchard seen between the scarlet curtains at the window. The back door, set wide today, opened into a porch almost as large as a little room, with seats in it, and outside doves strutted on the cobbles of the yard.

  “It’s nice and bright,” agreed José.

  But it was the stout strength of the kitchen that had impressed Sebastian. This room had known for generations the meaning of hard work. Backs had ached here, carrying pails of water from the well, loads of wood, heavy baskets of apples and pumpkins. Women had worked early and late, washing and ironing, baking their bread and brewing their wines, worked until they had hardly had a leg to stand on. Men had dropped asleep on the settle by the fire, worn out after a long day driving the plough or cutting the corn. He was aware of past labour much as Caroline was, only in her daydream there were no backaches, no sense of the driving obstinate force that seemed to make this room a physical power house. How surprised those men and women would have been if they had known how the stored-up energy of their bodies revitalized his own now that theirs were dust.

  In the corner of the room an opened small door showed a turret staircase winding away into dimness. “It’s this way and it isn’t far,” said José. “Not the whole way upstairs.”

  Two school blazers hung on the other open door, and Sebastian wordlessly indicated them with a gesture of the head and a movement of the hands which, though courteous, had authority.

  “Rot,” said Jerry, but without conviction.

  “Would you like us to wear them?” asked José politely.

  “I think that I should like you to,” said Sebastian.

  “O.K.,” said Jerry cheerfully, and fetched them. He liked this bloke. José did, too, he knew, because she was being polite, and she was only polite to people whom she liked. She was not polite very often. She had been sent away from her first school because she had not liked the headmistress or the staff, or any of the girls. She did not like women at all, except her mother and grandmother and Jill. She now went to a co-education school with Jerry, where she liked Jerry and the headmaster, so things were better. And now she liked Sebastian, and put on her blazer with such a beautiful meekness that he had seldom felt more complimented. It was with compunction that he remembered how he had tried to avoid Jerry and José, and with horror that he remembered how a short while ago he had wanted to strike the mouth of a smiling child. Hilary had talked cheerfully about the last of the chaff. What would he have thought of such hatred of the innocent? Hatred of the haters was bad enough, a wind blowing upon flame, but hatred of the innocent was murder most foul. He had never felt so ashamed of himself.

  The narrow turret stairs only allowed of ascent in single file. José went first, and Jerry brought up the rear. José went up with deliberation. “Because,” she said, “though it’s only twelve steps, I always take old people up very slowly. Jerry, don’t hustle behind Mr. Weber.”

  “I wasn’t hustling,” said Jerry. “I was only jigging.”

  “Then don’t jig,” said José. “Put one foot on the step and bring the other slowly to it, the way Robin comes downstairs.”

  She did not need to do that herself. She ascended slowly and gracefully, like a tall young angel going up Jacob’s ladder. Her blazer was cerulean blue. Sebastian would have been content to watch her for quite a long time, even at the cost of a stone for a pillow. Well, he had that. Shame is a hard pillow, and he would lay his head upon it every night now until he died.

  José stopped at a small arched doorway and looked round at him. “It used to be a store cupboard,” she said. “But one day Jerry and I pulled a bit of the wallpaper off and there were paintings underneath. And then Ben and David and old Beaver (that’s Sally’s father) pulled it all off, and cleaned the walls, and it wa
s a Chapel with what they call frescoes all round.”

  “Sixteenth century, and painted by the old monk who was Mine Host here then,” said Jerry, pleased to air his knowledge. “So Ben says,” he added. “But the way he works things out never makes sense to me.”

  “It wouldn’t,” said José, opening the door. “You can’t make sense unless you have it, Tommy says. Don’t fall over the step, Mr. Weber. And don’t let it take you too much by surprise.”

  “The chairs were put there for people to be struck crackers on,” said Jerry.

  Sebastian sat on the nearest chair.

  The small room was octagonal in shape, with narrow lancet windows. There was a plain oak table for an altar, with branched candlesticks upon it and pots full of summer flowers, and all round the walls the artist had painted the story of St. Eustace. Only it was not that wood outside Rome where the great noble went hunting that was painted on the walls, but one of the deep old woods of England. The flowers and trees, the birds and beasts upon the wall, were those of Knyghtwood, the lovers’ wood. Each had been painted with a passionate delight in the unity of its creation, and yet not one of the creatures—and Sebastian’s mind used the word creature in the sense of a created thing—but was subordinated to the whole creation. Each, though a world in itself, lay as humbly in its place as Jacob had when he lay with his head on his stone looking up to heaven. Only these had no stone, for they had reached their perfection. Bright and gay, they made each its patch of beauty in its place, and yet, though stillness held them, their colors seemed all fused together in the white light of the figure of the great stag over the altar, its branching antlers twisting themselves into the form of a crucifix held in a thorn tree. Eustace, with his dogs and his hunting-horn, rode through the wood, royally dressed, like the twins, in scarlet and sky-blue. But he was not perfected. He had only just reined in his galloping horse, and the whole group, man and horse and dogs, was tense and quivering with checked speed. Eustace, one arm raised to shield his eyes from the blinding light, leaned from his saddle as though he were about to fling himself out of it. In another moment he would be kneeling before the white stag, waiting for the words that all men find they know by heart the moment they are spoken. “Why dost thou attempt to injure me? I am Jesus Christ.”

  How Europe loved the story! Sebastian wondered how many representations of it he had seen, sublimely pictured in great churches at Canterbury, Abbéville and Paris, humbly pictured in the carvings and paintings of peasant craftsmen in Bavaria and Austria. He had had a wooden box on his study table in the house in the mountains, with a crude picture of the stag and the kneeling man painted upon it by a man in the village. Reading music, correcting a score, he had often picked it up and held it in his hands, amused by the crudity and yet touched by the devotion of the kneeling figure. The children had loved to play with the box, and he had told them the story a hundred times. Yet he had never seen it portrayed as movingly as here.

  Or else he had not until now reached the point in his own journey through the wood when he heard the words spoken to himself. He did now. He saw every thought of hatred that had ever formed in his mind as an arrow in the body of that stag, and saw the body quivering. Yet the worse the pain the more brilliantly the light shone. Though it was day in the wood, it was night behind the stag, and as with the flight of each arrow the darkness deepened, so the light increased. No wonder Saul of Tarsus had been blinded by it. Eustace the hunter had galloped all day in the wood, and when at last the chase was over and the creature turned at bay, it was seen to be one with the Creator and Redeemer of all creatures. Men defaced in the creatures the beauty and love they longed for and did not know what they were doing. It was the most dreadful fact in the world, and to know it at last not with the mind only, but with this piercing personal knowledge, was neither pleasant nor easy. Why was the knowledge so long in coming and yet so familiar when it came? That was another of the mysteries. There were so many mysteries, and yet they were all one mystery. He put his head in his hands and abandoned himself to it. That was all he could do. He might be entirely cleansed of hatred while he yet lived in this world, or he might not. He could not know. Cleansed of it at last he must be, now that he knew what he knew. Meanwhile the silence comforted him, and time so old “it hath forgot itself” washed with oblivion over his head.

  The twins, sitting behind Sebastian at the back of the Chapel, were in no way disturbed by the time he was taking coming round from being struck. They were used to showing visitors the Chapel, and used to the oddness of their behavior when shown it. There were, of course, degrees of struckness. Some were only mildly struck, some so mildly that they had got over it before they knew they had been. Others were bad cases. Mr. Weber was the worst case they had seen yet, but that was only to be expected because he was a foreigner, and foreigners always seemed to take what they took a great deal worse than the English took it. There were several foreigners at their school, and they were observant children. The smooth marble hardness which they shared with Tommy was due not to lack of observation, but to not worrying about what they observed. It slid off them. So now Mr. Weber slid off them, and they were pleased to find that there were bull’s-eyes in José’s blazer pocket. They had thought they had finished the ration, and it was a pleasure to find themselves mistaken. José wrenched the bull’s-eyes off the lining of the pocket, removed from them the traces of fishing-bait that had been in her pocket before the bull’s-eyes, and they sucked happily.

  They were always happy in the Chapel. When they had first come to live at The Herb of Grace, and the Chapel had been only the storeroom, they had known it was the most important part of the house. It was right deep in, just as the Buckpen in Knyghtwood was right deep in. José thought sometimes that if the kitchen below made one feel like a car that’s just been filled up with petrol, the Chapel made one feel like the same car coming out of the garage into air and light. Coming from one to the other, first you felt you could go, and then you felt there was somewhere to go to. She had peculiar ideas sometimes, but did not mention them to anybody. She was sure no one else in the family had peculiar ideas. She was unique, she feared, but she did not worry about it.

  Sebastian was recalled to consciousness of his whereabouts by a penetrating smell of peppermint. For how long had he been absent, he wondered? An hour or five minutes? He turned round in his chair and looked anxiously at the twins, but with cheeks pleasantly distended and legs swinging happily, it seemed that for them, too, time had forgotten itself. With their round bright eyes narrowed to sleepy slits, and that distension across the cheekbones caused by a peppermint in each cheek, they had now a distinctly Mongolian appearance. They might have been lamas in the making. Undoubtedly young celestials of some sort.

  “Shall we go now?” he asked them humbly. “I am in your hands, of course, but I think that it may be getting late.”

  Their eyes returned to the normal shape and they crunched loudly, the Mongolian appearance slipping from their faces as they did so.

  “If you like,” said José when she could speak. “I did hear people calling, but Jerry and I don’t usually bother when people call. It wastes our time.”

  Sebastian got up quickly. “Then we must go,” he said. “Not to go when people call wastes their time, surely.”

  “We don’t let that worry us,” said Jerry. “They should mind their own business.”

  Sebastian led the way out hastily. The crunching, and the turn the conversation had taken, seemed to him equally unsuitable to the Chapel. He did not even look back as he shut the door behind him, for had he done so the glory on the walls might have seemed to him no more than rather crudely painted medieval frescoes. He wanted now to leave the wood quickly with the treasure he believed he had found in it, for if the wood ceased to be a wood, the treasure might seem to cease to be a treasure. Only seem, for he had it.

  — 4 —

  They went downstairs, and found it was long
past Meg’s bed-time, and the hour when Lucilla had promised Margaret she would be home.

  “What does it matter?” said Lucilla placidly. “Margaret will fuss; but, then, she likes to fuss. Sally won’t, for I understand that Mrs. Wilkes is with her. I am so glad, Mr. Weber, that you have met Mrs. Wilkes.”

  Sebastian smiled, accepted her rebuke and tried to calm the agitation he was now feeling. The surge of color and noise that was a family departure rose like a wave, but this time he was not breasting it, but being lifted by it, and was deposited in the car before he knew where he was. Speeding up the lane, he discovered that both children were behind with Zelle and he was sitting beside David. He settled back in his seat with a movement of relaxation that so surprised David that he looked round at him in astonishment, and met the smile of an equal. He looked straight in front of him again with an absurdly pounding heart. That sense of equality between two men was one of the treasures of life. Bitterness could not live with it, nor envy nor patronage. He, too, settled back in his seat, and Sebastian realized, to his relief, that David was not going to let loose upon him the brilliance of his conversation. They were going to drive back in pure silence, enjoying the view.

  — 5 —

  “Hilary,” said Lucilla to her eldest son as they followed in the vicarage car, “this has been an eventful day.”

  “Has it?” said Hilary. “I hadn’t noticed anything particular about it.”

  “You don’t notice much, dear,” said Lucilla.

  “Don’t I?” asked Hilary. “I notice when you are looking particularly beautiful. It’s what I’ve noticed particularly about today.”