“You’re not vexed, David, are you?” asked Sally. “Why I should cry over such a small thing as you touching my hand I can’t imagine.”
He tightened his hold on her arm. “Because it wasn’t a small thing,” he said. “I mean, it was one of those still, small things that matter. Passions and emotions and successes, what a noise they all make! What’s war but the noise of broken promises? And then just death and misery and a foul stink.” He pulled himself up. “I’m sorry, Sally. What’s my talk most of the time but the same sort of noisy selfishness? I could cut my tongue out sometimes after some of the things I’ve said. I wish I could cut out of my life some of the things I’ve done. Come on, darling, let’s go in. I am wandering from the point. I have forgotten now what it was.”
“That you touched my hand,” said Sally, as they went slowly through the garden, breathing in the freshness of the dusk. “David,” she said breathlessly as he shut the gate by the guelder-rose bush, “would you mind very much if I had this baby at Damerosehay?”
“I think it would be a very suitable place,” said David unexpectedly. “Have him in Grandmother’s four-poster. And when the horrid business is over you can lie there in state, dressed in lace and whatnot, like a medieval queen, and the infant can be bathed in the big silver rose-bowl from downstairs.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Sally.
“I’m not being ridiculous,” said David. “This is going to be a very important baby.”
“More dear than Meg and Robin?” wondered Sally.
“Not more dear,” said David. “Not such a candle lit for the family as Meg is and will be, but more important.”
“Do you mean Christopher is going to be a great man?” asked Sally, holding like a child to his arm in her wonder.
“Something tells me he will startle the world,” David teased her. “You are calling him after Christopher Martin, aren’t you? He was a great man, though he lacked opportunity to startle the world. Our Christopher will do that for him.”
“David, I believe you are looking forward to this baby,” said Sally.
“Of course I am,” David lied glibly. “Though, mind you, Sally, this must be the last.”
“One more little girl,” pleaded Sally. “For you when Meg goes to school.”
“Oh, Lord!” groaned David. “Don’t let’s think of that until you have quite forgotten having Christopher.”
Sally smiled and said nothing. Men always thought that women forgot about the pain of childbirth. Even Christ had thought that they did. And no woman ever undeceived them.
Mrs. Wilkes, in a state of self-control, appeared at the garden door and rang the bell again.
“Did you ring before, Mrs. Wilkes?” asked Sally anxiously.
“I did, Madam,” said Mrs. Wilkes. “And you ’eard it, too, or you’d still be where you was.”
CHAPTER
15
It was already October, and the leaves were turning. The nut-trees that bordered one side of Lavender Cottage garden were pale gold and the Virginia creeper was on fire all over the little house. It was mellow and warm, much warmer that it had been in August, and Lucilla one Saturday morning was sitting on the lawn, swathed in rugs and shawls against an autumn chill that existed only in Margaret’s imagination. She was much too hot, but, for fear of hurting Margaret’s feelings, would be able to remove nothing until Margaret went down the village to the Shop to buy the mouse-trap and the slug-death. There was only one shop in Big Village, and it sold nearly everything.
“There’s nothing else you want, Mother?” asked Margaret from an open window behind her.
“I don’t think I actually want either a mouse-trap or slug-death, dear,” said Lucilla, striving for accuracy. “But you said they were needed. A house and garden always seem to need so much to which one is not personally attracted.” Then she racked her brains, for the longer Margaret was away the more freedom she would have from hotting-up like a compost heap in this blazing sun. “I think I do want some sweets for the children, and some little gold safety-pins and a five-shilling book of stamps.”
“Stamps?” said Margaret. “That means the post office, and I’ll have to go right down to Little Village.”
“Would you mind, dear?” asked Lucilla. “It’s a lovely morning for a walk. And you could look in at Damerosehay and see how Sally and Mr. Weber and all of them are.”
“You’ll be alone so long,” said Margaret anxiously.
Alone. It was a state for which Lucilla sometimes panted even as the hart for the water-brooks, for she found Margaret’s anxious love almost as suffocating as too many shawls, but she had not been so well lately, and Margaret did not permit her to achieve it if she could help it. Lucilla chose her words with the utmost care, for it is not easy to combine getting your own way with perfect charity and absolute rectitude. To say she wanted to be alone would hurt Margaret. To say she was sure Hilary would be looking in this morning was not the strict truth.
“I like it when you come back and tell me things,” she said.
“There’s plenty to tell after just going to the Shop,” said Margaret. And she spoke the truth, for Mrs. Enticknapp at the Shop had many most enjoyable ailments and wonderful descriptive powers.
“But not about Damerosehay,” said Lucilla.
“I could ring up,” said Margaret.
“So unsatisfactory,” said Lucilla. “You don’t see how they are, only hear how they want you to think they are.”
“It’s not right for you to be alone so long,” said Margaret.
“It’s bad for me to worry,” said Lucilla.
“I’ll go to Damerosehay this afternoon, when Mrs. Digley is here,” said Margaret. “She can sit with you while she cleans the silver. Now I come to think of it, I can get the mouse-trap and slug-death then too, and I need not go out at all this morning. I’ll put the pudding in the oven and then come out with you. I won’t be five minutes.”
“You are so thoughtful, dear,” said Lucilla gently.
Five minutes. She had five minutes. But it would have been fifteen if Margaret had gone to the Shop. Well, it was her own fault. Striving, in her greed, for a little more, she had lost the little she might have had. She tried to make an act of acceptance; of this hotting-up like a compost heap under too many shawls, of not being allowed to be alone, of being too much loved, of being ninety-one, of not getting her own way. She made it and loosened the shawls a little, so that some air could blow in. Then she tightened them again, for to admit air was not perfectly to accept the compost heap. In the few minutes that remained to her she would try to make of her discomfort what Jacob must have made of his when he laid his head on a stone for a pillow. It should be her resting-place while she made a Jacob’s ladder of the beauty about her. The attempt to do this was one of her favorite recreations now, as it must have been of Saint Augustine. “Our soul riseth out of its mortal weariness unto Thee, helped upward by the things Thou hast made.” She could take them one by one, each a rung in the ladder, and mount. At least she could, and Saint Augustine doubtless did, but unfortunately human interruption or the deflection of her own wandering thoughts invariably prevented her from doing much more than meaning to mount. Resolutely she decided to regard the asters and michaelmas daisies in the border with that profound astonishment and deep thankfulness that would lift her soul upon the first rung.
She remembered that she had always liked all the different kinds of daisies the best of all the flowers. The lilies and roses of martyrdom were all very well for those great ones who were willing to pay the price of the crown. Personally, she was not quite sure that she was, and had always retired before them with a modest grace. They were glorious flowers, but their scent was a bit heady and strong for the groundlings. But the scents of camomile daisies and field marguerites, michaelmas daisies, asters and hardy garden chrysanthemums, and, best of all, of the small
daisies in the grass when the sun was hot upon them, were all refreshing pungent homely scents that reminded her of the good and honest daily living of the country life about her. She could not see the flowers in the borders very well but memory supplied what her failing sight denied her, reminding her how sturdily the michaelmas daisies grew, nothing limp about them, and how small were the individual stars that massed their perfect small worlds together to make the glory of each firmament.
Meg had always called the stars “daisies in the sky,” rather than candles, as her father had done. David as a child had always been intensely concerned with light, sunlight and moonlight and candlelight, and had dreaded darkness; he still liked bright lights and hated sitting in the dark. Meg did not seem to have this adoration of light. For her as yet it was not the light in itself that she loved but what it showed her. The love of the light would come later, and meanwhile she loved what it showed her as David had never been able to do. Perhaps if he had he would have been less centred upon himself and the way would not now stretch before him quite so stonily.
Now where had she got to? Not upon the first rung at all, only to David and Meg and worrying about the family, as usual. The gate clicked and Hilary came in, his pipe in his mouth and crumpled sheets of paper sticking untidily out of his pocket. He did sometimes come and sit with her while he prepared his Sunday sermons, and she sighed with relief at the sight of him, for Margaret would now go out and she could be alone or not just as she wished. For Hilary, preparing his sermons, did not speak unless he had to, and she could take off all her shawls (she had forgotten now that she had made an act of acceptance of being too hot) without him noticing and plunge herself in meditation up to the neck without his being in the least affronted. He would not even be aware of what she was doing. Or so she thought.
“Tell Margaret,” she said to him.
“I’ve seen him,” came Margaret’s voice. “Since he’s here, I’ll go to the Shop.”
“And on to Damerosehay,” said Lucilla firmly.
“Are you worried about them there?” asked Hilary, lowering his bulk carefully into the chair beside Lucilla.
“Sally and Mr. Weber are for some reason in my mind,” said Lucilla. “And it would be nice,” she added, raising her voice, “if Meg and Robin could come and have tea with me this afternoon.”
“I’ll suggest it,” said Margaret, coming out of the house.
“Command it,” said Hilary.
“Very well,” said Margaret meekly, and departed carrying a basket and wearing a very battered felt hat.
“Such a dreadful hat of dear Margaret’s!” mourned Lucilla.
“Very good women always wear hats like that,” said Hilary cheerfully. “It’s almost a uniform hat.”
“I’m surprised at your noticing, dear,” said Lucilla.
“I always notice uniforms,” said Hilary. “They interest me.”
“Should you say I was a very good woman?” asked Lucilla.
“I don’t know, Mother,” said Hilary. “The evidence of your hats is all against it, but no one can judge of the spiritual state of another.”
“I’m very worried about David’s spiritual state,” said Lucilla.
“Are you?” asked Hilary. “I’m not. Would you mind, Mother, if I got these sermons by heart? It’s Saturday and I’m a bit late with them.”
“I don’t want to say anything, dear,” said Lucilla. “I was so glad when I saw you coming to talk to me, because then I knew I was sure of a silent morning. I like to meditate.”
Hilary polished his glasses and absorbed himself in his crumpled papers.
“I do think it’s disgraceful that after all these years as a priest you still have to learn your sermons by heart,” said Lucilla. “Other clergy whom one knows rely upon notes and the inspiration of the moment.”
“And look how they go on,” said Hilary, laying down his sermon. “My parishioners know they can rely on me for fifteen minutes in the morning and twenty in the evening, and not a moment longer. Then they know exactly at what time they will be home to put the Sunday tart in the oven, or the macaroni cheese, if it’s Evensong. That’s why they come to church. What are you meditating on, Mother?”
“The beauty of nature,” said Lucilla. “Trying to let it lift me up out of my mortal weariness to where refreshment is and strength unfailing, like Saint Augustine said.”
“Did he?” said Hilary. “I didn’t know you read Saint Augustine.”
“You told me to,” said Lucilla. “After Maurice died.”
“I’d forgotten,” said Hilary. “It is so very long ago,” he added slowly.
“That shows you are not really old yet, Hilary. If you were it would seem like yesterday.”
“Why did I want you to read Saint Augustine?” wondered Hilary. “Because of the window at Ostia, I expect. Did it help you at all?”
“Not in the least,” said Lucilla. “Nothing that people give you to help you ever does help you. At least, not at the time. It’s generally the unexpected that helps. With me, then, it was the shadow of a bird’s wing on a blind. Such a little thing, but perhaps God thought it more suited to my intelligence at the moment than Saint Augustine. You’ve always over-rated my intelligence. God never has.”
“Should you be taking all those shawls off?” asked Hilary unexpectedly.
“Yes, I should,” said Lucilla with asperity. “And if you had been attending to your sermon, instead of talking to me when I want to meditate, you wouldn’t have seen what I was doing.”
Hilary re-lit his pipe and returned to his sermon. Lucilla decided it was no good thinking any more about the michaelmas daisies, because somehow they brought her round to worrying about David, and she lifted her eyes a little higher, to the glory of the nut trees. The poets compared spring to childhood, but the colors of spring had not the simplicity of those of autumn, and the noisy and complicated exuberance of spring was more that of a young man in his prime than of a child. But the sunny quietness of this day was very like Meg, and the pale gold of those leaves against the blue of the sky made her think of David’s hair and eyes when he had been little.
“Why are you not worried about his spiritual state?” she asked Hilary.
“Whose?” asked Hilary, detaching his mind with difficulty.
“Don’t be so vague, dear,” said Lucilla. “You ought to concentrate more. Surely you remember who we were talking about?”
“Saint Augustine,” said Hilary. “And if ever there was a man about whose spiritual state I do not feel called upon to worry, it’s Saint Augustine.”
“Saint Augustine was simply by the way,” said Lucilla. “It’s David we are really talking about. He’s not himself, Hilary, and if you’re not worried you ought to be.”
“He’s a new self since he came back from the States,” agreed Hilary. “Or at least there seems a new self emerging. A vast improvement on the old one, too—not nearly such an ass. What an ass he must have been out there!”
“I don’t follow your reasoning, Hilary,” said Lucilla coldly.
“There’s nothing like being really disastrously silly to draw your attention to how silly you are,” explained Hilary. “Without a disaster in that way one doesn’t always notice it. There is a paradox, Mother, that ought to be grasped by all female progenitors of the worrying sort. When your descendants appear to be in a state of complete well-being, all glorious and glossy with it, that’s the time to worry.”
“Then I’m not to worry about David?” asked Lucilla.
“Certainly not. Leave him to Weber.”
“If that’s what you are doing, then it’s very lazy of you,” said Lucilla. “The souls of the family should be your special charge.”
“It’s all I can do to get a couple of sermons by heart per week,” said Hilary.
“Even as a little boy you couldn’t concentrate,”
said Lucilla, and bringing her lovely hands softly together she looked up, with a studied superiority of concentration, at the high white clouds that were passing quickly along some current of the upper air that down here was no more than a cool breath. When she was momentarily at peace her hands folded of themselves into a shape that was somehow the very pattern of serenity, but the moment she was agitated they fell apart and the pattern was broken. Hilary, spending as he did so many hours each week sitting beside her, had learned to watch her hands. When he was working he was never so oblivious of her as she thought he was. After only a few moments her hands fell apart again.
“Yes, Mother?” asked Hilary, laying down his sermon.
“There’s a cloud there just like the flying white deer that leads the herd in Ben’s picture,” she said.
“Is there?” said Hilary. “Which one?”
“That one,” said Lucilla.
“I can’t say that I see the resemblance,” said Hilary. “And nor would you if you were not worrying about Ben. Now why in the world are you worried about Ben?”
“All this trouble at The Herb of Grace,” mourned Lucilla. “All these wearing arguments between Ben and his parents. Just like it was before.”
“It’s not in the least like it was before,” said Hilary. “Last time it was Ben who was worn down. This time it is he who is doing the wearing. I didn’t know he had it in him. An excellent state of affairs.”
“He’ll have to do his military service if he isn’t going to the Foreign Office,” said Lucilla. “And he isn’t strong enough.”
“Quite strong enough,” said Hilary. “Be the making of him and keep Zelle with Meg and Robin a few years longer.”
“That love affair exists only in your imagination, dear,” said Lucilla. “I always seem to be aware of what is in the minds of the children, and I have not been made aware of Ben’s love for Zelle.”