“Just for purposes of verification,” he said.
“In other words, just to satisfy your curiosity,” said Sebastian. “No, thank you. All I require of you, doctor, is that now we have made each other’s acquaintance you should keep your eye on me and tell me when I should remove myself from Damerosehay. I imagine I have some while yet, but I do not wish to incommode my friends here.”
He spoke with a dignity, almost with a royalty, that made Dr. Barnes smile beneath his bristling white moustache and yet very nearly riled him at the same time, for the fellow was young enough to be his son. And who was he, anyway? But one could not be seriously riled by a man so ill, nor fail to pay homage to his courage. It was odd how much and yet how little the dying seemed to know about themselves. This chap knew his number was up, but seemed to have no idea it might be next week.
“Where would you go?” he asked.
“To London,” said Sebastian dreamily. “I have something saved; enough to keep me for a short while. I used to be very fond of London.” Dr. Barnes saw that he was back in a London of the past. His mind was sometimes as clear as it could be and sometimes confused. He smiled and said nothing, for he would never tell Sebastian to leave Damerosehay. About that he had a private agreement with Eliot, who, though intensely irritating in many ways, was a good-hearted chap on the whole.
Sebastian had enjoyed his days in bed, but he was enjoying even more his days in the long chair under the ilex tree in the golden October warmth. The struggle to lead a normal life had just lately nearly defeated him, and the mere cessation of effort was in itself a sort of heaven. While he had been ill Mrs. Wilkes had entirely owned him, and the rest of the family had been let into his room only on sufferance, but now Mrs. Wilkes was busy in the house and he lived much in the society of Sally and Meg. With the baby imminent, Mrs. Wilkes had taken the unprecedented step of importing Wilkes’s sister Emma to look after Wilkes and her sons and was living in, to her vast enjoyment. What effect this first parting of their married life would have upon Wilkes she had no idea, but Emma had a grumbling temper and a heavy hand with pastry, and Wilkes might quite possibly miss her. That he should seek comfort with the red-haired hussy over to Radford was only to be expected, but the hussy had a sharp tongue from all accounts, and a further acquaintance with it might do Wilkes no harm either. So Mrs. Wilkes took a cheerful view, and was giving the house a good clean before starting on the baby. Sally, at liberty, sat beside Sebastian and knitted, if she thought he looked lonely, while Meg read to them the adventures of Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter, the Tailor of Gloucester and Mrs. Tiggy Winkle. Meg could not read very well yet, so she mostly held the book upside down and relied upon her excellent memory. Robin was kept out of the way by Zelle because of the noise he made.
David, when Sebastian was alone, would sometimes appear and ask him, almost shyly, how he was, and talk gently for five minutes about the international situation, and then immediately go away again with a humble sadness that grieved Sebastian. He would have liked to ask him to stay so that he could take hold of the new relationship that had come into being between them, since that silent drive back from the Hard, and wrest it into some sort of shape, but he had not got the strength. Later he must and would. He realized now, from the manner of David’s withdrawals, that he must always have been aware of his hatred and suffered it with patience. How could he ever have thought him arrogant? The arrogance was chiefly a defensive system of earthworks. He had erected the same in his time. Stuck up in the public eye, to be stared at by the public and excoriated by the critics, one did. No truly arrogant man could have continued quietly and steadily to like a man who hated him; liking would have turned to resentment sooner or later. But that David had done that he was also now aware. At their first meeting he had been struck by the warm kindness in David’s eyes and, looking back, he realized that that look had never chilled. “There’s not much about us all that you don’t know,” Sally had said to him on the evening of the family party, but with David either his intuition had entirely failed or else his hatred had had its roots in something he did not understand yet, and perhaps would never understand. That did not matter. What did matter was that he should make it clear to his friend that the hatred had passed. That he must do as and when he could.
Meanwhile there was Sally, and he remembered the longing he had had that she should be less vulnerable, that she should learn how to arm herself against possible disaster. Yet he felt now that as his hatred was passing, so was her defencelessness. There was a new maturity in her. Her friendliness had been like that of a shy child, glowing yet hesitant, now it was outgoing, as though some barrier had been pushed away.
“How much longer, if Christopher is punctual?” he asked her. The freedom with which he spoke to her in these days would have startled his punctiliousness a short while ago. Now he was as unaware of it as she was. They said what came into their minds as two people do who have lived together all their lives.
“Only a fortnight if he is punctual, but of course he won’t be. Boys generally keep you waiting. It’s girls who are in such a hurry to be born. At least, that’s what Mrs. Wilkes says.”
“Is there more eagerness for life in women?” wondered Sebastian. “I think perhaps there is. They generally live longer, as though they felt life to be more desirable than men do. Perhaps that is as it should be, since they are the bearers of life.”
“I want children more than David does,” said Sally. “Once he had one daughter and one son, that was all he wanted. It was I who wanted Christopher, in spite of being afraid.”
“Afraid?” asked Sebastian sharply.
Sally dropped her knitting into her lap. “How odd!” she said. “I have never told anyone except Mrs. Wilkes about being afraid, and now I have told you.”
“Why should it be odd to tell me?” asked Sebastian.
“Because to own up to you, of all people, that I am a coward about a little pain should make me squirm with shame.” She stopped and laughed. “No wonder you are smiling. To be laughed at for my fears is what I deserve.”
He had smiled because she had spoken like a little girl of twelve. The new maturity had vanished; or rather it had parted like the petals of a flower to show the child she would always be at its heart.
“It was not at your fear that I smiled,” he said, “but at that queer English word squirm. Meg uses it frequently. Does it derive from worm?”
“Not that I know of,” she said, with a high seriousness worthy of Meg. “It is spelt differently. David could tell you.”
“It’s not a matter in which I thirst for correct information,” said Sebastian. “But I should like to know, I should like to know very much, why you should feel shame in telling me that you carry the burden of fear.”
“If you were carrying half a pound of apples in a bag on your back, and you met Atlas, wouldn’t you be ashamed to tell him that your back ached?” asked Sally. “But yet, you know, I don’t feel ashamed now. A month ago I would, but not now.”
“Well, that’s good,” said Sebastian. “You are less proud, perhaps.”
“Am I a proud woman?” she asked.
“No, on the whole you are a humble woman, but only the perfected are without a taint of pride.”
“Yes, I was proud,” owned Sally. “I felt humiliated, after I was married, to find I was terrified of what most women take as a matter of course. It destroyed quite a lot of my good opinion of myself. I wasn’t what I thought I was, you see.”
“Yes, I see,” said Sebastian gravely, but his eyes twinkled.
“Please forgive me,” said Sally. “I ought not to talk about myself so much.”
“Yes, you ought,” said Sebastian. “Because I want to know about you, and you like to please me. And now you have accepted yourself, you no longer mind revealing yourself. Is that it?”
“Not to you and Mrs. Wilkes,” said Sally. “I’m glad
to. Of course I couldn’t to anyone else. It would never do to tell David, and you can never show fear before children, can you?”
“Certainly not,” said Sebastian. “Fear is always a thing that must be secretly carried. What, besides pain, are you afraid of?”
“Of losing David.”
“Why should you lose him?”
“Because I can’t share his experience. I never shall. He will live always a little farther on. I shall never catch up.”
“That doesn’t matter in marriage,” said Sebastian gently. “Watching you together, I should say that what he wants of you just now is not understanding, but peace. And you will catch up with him one day; if not here, then in that world where we shall not need to look for peace because it will be as the very air we breathe.”
“I know that sometimes,” said Sally. “I mean about the peace. It is always when we are quiet together that we are happiest.”
“Do you fear other things?”
“I fear pain for the children, but nothing else in life as it is now. I am so fortunate.”
“You may not always be so fortunate, and as life goes on I expect you will be very afraid indeed. Don’t mind if you are. How ridiculous that sounds!”
“I know what you mean,” said Sally. “I won’t mind. I don’t now. I expect one’s particular thing is always the thing that is right for oneself, and one can be glad about it even if one does not see why. But with mine I do not see why. I asked for it.”
“Asked for it?”
“I have a shame that is a good shame,” said Sally. “I was born with it, and so it’s not to my credit, and I can say that it is good. I am ashamed of good fortune. The shame goes so deep it is like prayer, and it’s been answered. Something that less fortunate women make little of is allowed with me to cut deep so that I can be nearer to them. Perhaps later on other things will cut deep in the same way. I can be glad of that, can’t I?”
“You will always have that gladness,” said Sebastian. “Gladness is a strong armor as well as a bright one. You will be safe with it. And so will I.”
“Do you mean you feel glad, too?” asked Sally in amazement, for she remembered how she had been sure he could not again be happy. “You don’t mean you feel happy, do you?”
“Not in the way that most people use the word, perhaps,” said Sebastian. “The kind of gladness you will feel when in future things cut deep is not what they mean by happiness. My gladness is a sort of deepening of the respite we talked about once. The moments of light are lasting longer, so that the dark times are getting squeezed out between them. Nowadays it is nearly all respite.”
She remembered how she had seen his compassion for her, which she had not understood because she had seen no reason for it, as a light in profound darkness, and how she had wished she could banish his darkness. She acknowledged humbly to herself that whoever had done that, it was not she.
“Which I owe to you,” said Sebastian. “Why shouldn’t I tell you? It can’t hurt you. I love you very much; so much that I have come to love all whom you love. The respite I needed was from hatred, and that way I have nearly achieved it.”
Sally’s astonishment was so vast that it completely swallowed her for a few moments. When she had climbed out of it sufficiently to get her breath she found herself saying quietly, “That is a wonderful way to love me. Generally when a man loves a married woman there is jealousy, and then in the end that means not more of love, but less.”
“You can love as I do when you are coming to the end of your life, and have nothing you want to possess through love except an increase of the power of love,” said Sebastian. “You have given me that. Did you mind me telling you?”
“Not in the least,” said Sally matter-of-factly. “I am glad you did. I love you, too.”
It was Sebastian’s turn to be swallowed by amazement. “That is so astonishing that it is almost unbelievable,” he said at last. “How did you manage it?”
Sally’s knitting was now on the grass, and she had turned in her chair to face him, her elbows on its arm and her chin in her hands. Her face was that of a child trying seriously but happily to do a difficult sum. His heart had been beating wildly, but now her matter-of-factness took hold of him, too, and he felt quieted.
“I didn’t manage it,” she said. “It just happened in the way right things do happen. It was just that there was an empty place at Damerosehay, and in my life and in all our lives, and you just walked into it. Now we are completed. Is it any wonder that we all love you?”
“I still don’t understand,” said Sebastian. “What sort of empty place?”
“I know what I mean, but I don’t know how to put it into words,” said Sally.
“You must try, please,” said Sebastian.
“It is so dreadfully difficult,” said Sally.
“Try,” insisted Sebastian.
“There isn’t a single one of us who has been broken in any way,” said Sally. “Grandmother is old, and David hasn’t got a happy nature, and I am afraid, and Ben never knows what to do for the best, and I expect all the others think themselves hardly used in one way or the other. But there is not one of us who has been crucified.”
“What are you daring to say?” asked Sebastian in a tone of sharp horror.
“That’s what I don’t quite know,” said Sally. “I don’t quite understand myself what I am saying. I think it is that we all needed to have you and to say, this is what it costs. You can’t ever really begin faintly to love God until you have said that.”
“Stop, Sally, I beg of you,” said Sebastian, out of the midst of a whirling of shame and confusion that had set him down finally in the hall of Damerosehay on the day of his arrival, wondering why God demanded the continued existence in time and space of such disconnected items of rubbish as himself. His thoughts then had had a bitterness that had been almost sacrilege, and now most deeply he repented of it. “Stop, Sally,” he said.
“I had stopped,” said Sally. “And don’t ask me any more questions, for I don’t think my answers are at all good for you. For your body, I mean . . . And, Sebastian, the way I love you doesn’t make any difference to the way I love David.”
The sudden sweet childishness of her change of tone added laughter to Sebastian’s whirling emotions, but steadied him at the same time. “Of course not,” he said. “Nor does my love for you affect my love for Christiana, my wife.”
“Christiana,” said Sally slowly. “I like that name.”
“I don’t want to tell you about my life before I came here,” said Sebastian. “Do you mind?”
“You wouldn’t want to tell any of us,” said Sally, “for there isn’t one of us who could possibly even begin to understand; except perhaps David.”
“Why David?” asked Sebastian sharply.
“He does sometimes understand things you wouldn’t expect him to,” said Sally. “I think it may be something to do with being an actor. On the stage actors have sometimes to become people much bigger than themselves . . . Sebastian, here’s Aunt Margaret!”
It was as well, thought Sebastian, getting up and bowing to Margaret, for it brought it easily to its ending.
“Aunt Margaret, come and sit down,” said Sally. “Have you been here long?”
“Not long, dear. David has been showing me the herbaceous border,” said Margaret, subsiding into the chair that David put for her. “We did not want to disturb you and Mr. Weber while you were talking. You seemed so absorbed. How are you, Mr. Weber? And you, Sally? Mother wanted me to find out. She said she had you both in her mind together.”
— 2 —
As well Grandmother might, thought David, and found himself, to his great surprise, back at the herbaceous border, squatting on his heels and pulling up weeds. After a few moments of savage onslaught he looked over his shoulder and saw Sebastian going slowly and perhaps a little u
nsteadily towards the secret garden, leaving Sally and Margaret together. It was his duty, he knew, to go after him and make sure that what he had said to Sally, and she to him, had done him no harm, but he did not do his duty. He could not even go on with the weeding, for it did not exhaust him sufficiently. He fetched a spade from the tool-house and went round to the kitchen garden at the back of the house to dig potatoes. He dug till he had deflected his rage from Sally and Sebastian to himself. What right had he to be so suddenly and madly jealous? Couldn’t Sally and Sebastian be friends, even intimate friends, without his flying off the handle? What about himself and Nadine? Even if they were something more, lovers of a sort, he still had no right to his rage; for what about himself and Anne? Well, why not own it, they were lovers of a sort; he had the evidence of his own eyes for that. But what sort? Not his and Anne’s sort. Digging more slowly, and using all the power of his imagination, he endeavoured to put Sebastian in his place and Sally in Anne’s. But he couldn’t do it. The niches in which he tried to fit them were far too small for them. Then he tried the other way round, and the little puppet figures of himself and Anne, Yabbit and Maria Flinders, dwindled and cowered down in the large and airy spaces that were filled by Sebastian’s integrity and Sally’s loyalty. The past held Sebastian, and her marriage held Sally. They had merely leaned from their strongholds to love each other as men and women may whose destiny, in perfection of beatitude, is just such an interchange as he had seen.
What had she given him? A respect for himself that he had lost? Too much disaster could do that to a man, could at the moment of his greatest value make him see himself as so much trash when it was merely the unessentials of body and fortune that were broken. What had he given her? Perhaps a greater sense of proportion to steady her among the many dumb fears of a woman’s life. Women moved mysteriously among their fears, that were perhaps known to each other, but not comforted by each other. It was with men that women found comfort for their fear, though seldom to a man that they would tell it. He was always wishing that Sally would tell him more. Well, he could not tell her much. The load of the things that he could not tell was heavy to carry. And serve him right. He flung down his spade, lifted his coat from the lilac bush where he had hung it and put it on.