“A weak stomach,” continued Mrs. Wilkes with kindly tolerance. “And Meg the same. I’ll unpack your bag, Sir, while you eat your lunch. Yes, Sir, I’d like to do it. I’m in a better state of ’ealth than what you are.”
Sebastian smiled. “How do you know that, Mrs. Wilkes?”
“I’ve been laying out the dead in this village for close on forty years,” said Mrs. Wilkes placidly.
Sebastian laughed outright, and the sound of his genuine mirth startled him more than it did Mrs. Wilkes, used as she was to the peculiar sense of humour of those whom she still called the gentry. There was never no knowing what they’d laugh at and what they wouldn’t, she would say to Wilkes, any more than there was any telling what crazy thing they’d do next. Like children, they were. A body who looked after them through all their vagaries had to be prepared for anything.
Mrs. Wilkes unpacked quietly and efficiently, and Sebastian did not mind in the least that she should see how meagre and shabby his possessions were. Her mind, he felt, was too weary for comment, and her loyalty to those she cared for too deep for gossip. Eliot paid him a good salary, but in the bitter world of today he had something better to do with it than the buying of comforts and luxuries for himself.
“There now,” said Mrs. Wilkes when she had finished. “Coming on to rain again. Bad for the ’arvest, and I’ll never get me washing dry. But there it is. There’s One Above and there’s the weather, and it ain’t no good fighting either on ’em. If you’ve finished I’ll take your tray. Like a cupper tea?”
“I’m not English,” said Sebastian. “I’ve no great passion for tea.”
“Well, there, it mightn’t mix with the sherry,” said Mrs. Wilkes. “Seeing it’s raining, you might ’ave a nice lay down.”
It was a command. Obediently Sebastian removed his shoes while Mrs. Wilkes folded up the quilt. Then, to his astonishment, he found himself flat on the bed with the eiderdown over him, yet without any clear idea as to how he had got there. Had the excellent sherry gone to his head? His face twisted with a spasm of amusement, for evidently Mrs. Wilkes had thought so. She had applied that swift steerage movement, that abrupt lift below the elbow, whereby the intoxicated are landed in a place of safety.
“There now,” said Mrs. Wilkes, departing with the tray. “Out of ’arm’s way.”
CHAPTER
2
— 1 —
Lucilla Eliot was ninety-one years old.
“Most extraordinary!” she said aloud. She talked to herself a good deal nowadays, but so softly that those who heard her murmuring voice did not hear what she said. It was like overhearing a small child in its cot telling itself stories, a soft bee-hum of reminiscence that had little to do with the stark reality of day-to-day life as they themselves lived it. The small children and the very old, with the stuff of life hardly yet grasped or perforce nearly relinquished, were protected and secure and could enjoy their dreams and illusions immune from the daily wear and tear. And how lucky they were! . . . Lucilla knew that was the thought in the minds of those who came in and out of her room, attending most kindly to her wants and reading to her only those extracts from the daily papers which they considered suitable. They did not say so, of course, but Lucilla had the clairvoyance of the very old and she knew what was in their minds.
There were times when she wished very much that she did not. It could be most uncomfortable; and disillusioning, too, when she discovered the thoughts in the minds of those she loved to be not so invariably excellent as she had hitherto imagined. But, on the other hand, she was aware now of honest thinking and humble charity in inarticulate nonentities that turned all her previous judgements of them upside down; and that was excellent, like picking what you thought was a scentless flower and finding it smelt good after all. At first this growing clairvoyance of hers had frightened her. Did all old people have it? She could not remember in her younger days that any old people had told her about it; but, then, she was not telling her children about it: it would have made them too uncomfortable. Probably her experience was the normal one and nothing to be surprised at. At her age one was already beginning to live a little in the life to come and to know as they know who are set free from all the deceptions and disguises of existence in the body.
“Most extraordinary!” she said again, and then laughed, remembering that that had been one of the favorite exclamations of Queen Victoria in her old age. Doubtless it was the favorite exclamation of many old people, for the state was full of surprises, not the least of them being that one’s body could be so incredibly antique while deep inside one felt so young. Well, of course, one was young. The Old Masters had known that. She could remember a painting of Fra Angelico’s that she had seen once. In the foreground a corpse lay on its bier, and behind the bier stood God holding a child in His arms. She had puzzled over the picture for a long time before she had realized that the child was the soul. She had been young then, just grown up, and had felt extremely mature. Now, being so old and feeling so young, she would have felt no puzzlement. She could remember as though it were yesterday the blue sunny day when she had seen that picture. She had worn a white spotted muslin dress and a leghorn hat with a pink rose in it. She moved her hands a little, feeling not the rug over knees but the crisp feel of the muslin. A sudden gust of rain was pattering against the window, but just for the moment she felt only the warmth of that sunny day. The joy of memory was one of her chief joys now; only the memories were so vivid that they could scarcely be called memories. It was more as though her life had come round full circle and the beginning was with her at the end as actual experience that would pass her on, like all experience, to an enriched existence beyond. And so anticipation was merged in memory and it was hard to know at times which was which.
There was for her no longer any bitterness in remembered experience. It was a curious fact that as she looked back over her life she thanked God for its happiness, while at the time she had thought it to be largely made up of grief and pain. A loveless marriage and the bearing of children whom at the time she had not wanted. At the beginning of it all how bitter it had been! Yet now the fact that in the end she had made a success of her marriage, in the end had loved her children, somehow acted retrospectively to sweeten the whole experience. Then that parting from the man for whom she had almost left her husband and children. For duty’s sake she had denied herself what she had described at the time, with Edwardian magnificence, as the one great love of her life, and the immensity of the sacrifice had, she had thought at the time, nearly killed her. And yet now that memory, out of all her memories, was the only one that had grown not vivid to the point of present reality but dim as a dream. She could scarcely remember now what the man had looked like, and yet at the time he who was now a dream had seemed her very life. Yet she was grateful to that dream-figure of a lover because he had been all that is most lovable, and her love of his lovableness, and sacrifice of it, had both gone to the making of the child she had borne to her husband after she had returned to her wifely duties. Maurice, that child, had a charm and beauty that none of her other children had possessed; and a spark of that heavenly genius that springs only somewhere, somehow, from a true denial, and she had loved him with what she thought now was in truth the great love of her life. When he had died in the First World War it had seemed like the death of her own soul; and yet now he was with her more constantly than the sons and daughter who still lived with her in this world.
That silence of the world of light, that can seem so heavenly when for a moment or two it hushes with its peace the tumult of material things and yet so terrible when it takes to itself the souls of the freed, had lasted from the day of his death until now. He had seemed to vanish so utterly that she had been tempted to doubt the truth of the immortality of the soul. She had felt at times that he lived only in the qualities he had handed on to his son, her grandson David, and that David had handed on to his daughter Meg; and for
that reason David and his Meg were loved by her with an intensity considered by the rest of the family to be extremely bad for the characters of both.
And yet now, after a lifetime of absence, here was Maurice back again, returned from the great distance and the deep silence with an ease that suggested that they were neither so deep nor so great as she had thought. He had made himself known to her as an enfolding of warm joy, as though her small soul was held within his, that was so much greater. It was almost, she thought shyly, as though his adult soul was carrying her childish one to a new birth, as once through nine long months her body had carried his. She never mentioned his presence to anyone except very occasionally to Meg, or to her eldest son Hilary. How could she? How explain to men and women fixed extremely firmly in their mortal bodies the existence of someone who could be neither heard nor seen, and yet was there? You had to be slightly loose in your body before you could understand. Extreme old age had loosened Lucilla, and his lifetime of austerity would have caused the sword that was Hilary to rattle in the scabbard of his body, had he not been so fat. As to Meg, her flower-like body had scarcely had time to close its petals over and about her and she was very loose indeed.
“And so, with you so constantly here, Maurice,” said Lucilla aloud, “my lifelong grief for you seems slightly foolish. If I had my time over again I would weep for nothing but sin.”
“Did you speak, Mother?” asked Margaret Eliot, Lucilla’s daughter, from the door.
“Not to you, dear,” said Lucilla with a touch of asperity. “But if you are there you can come in and light this fire. It’s laid.”
“But it’s only August,” objected Margaret, coming in.
“An English August,” said Lucilla. “Cold as January. And David comes home today. He’ll be in to see me, perhaps.”
“Tomorrow, I expect,” said Margaret. She was aware that Lucilla was waiting for David with an intensity of expectation that was likely to wear her out if it went on too long. “There will scarcely be time for him to come today. Don’t start expecting him before tomorrow, Mother.”
“The matches,” said Lucilla, “are behind the clock.”
“Shall we have the electric stove?” suggested Margaret with a forced brightness.
“I dislike it intensely,” said Lucilla. “It makes my head hot and leaves my feet exactly what they were before the thing was lit. Don’t argue, dear Margaret. Do as you are told.”
“It’s the coal,” explained Margaret. “They say it will be very short next winter.”
“Why bother with next winter?” asked Lucilla. “What I am bothering about is cold feet now.”
Margaret laughed and knelt down to light the fire. She gloried, as did all the family, in Lucilla’s moods of asperity, for they were as sparks flying up from the vivid and glowing vitality that had warmed them all their lives long and was still their life and their delight. For even at ninety-one there was no dying down of Lucilla’s vital fire. Her body was weakened with age and rheumatism, so that she moved very slowly, and she could no longer read small print even with her spectacles on, but her deafness only troubled her when she chose that it should, and her mind was as keen and alert as ever. And she was still a delight to look at, her white hair growing vitally from her low forehead and her blue eyes seeming only more lovely because they were so deeply sunken in their shadowed sockets. The fine bones of her face showed more clearly than they used to beneath the delicately wrinkled skin, and her hands had lost some of their shapeliness, but she had kept her grace and air of distinction.
“I am extremely fortunate, Margaret,” she said.
“What about, Mother?” asked Margaret, pushing her untidy short grey hair back from her face with one of those quick nervous gestures that betray the overworked. There had been some coal-dust on her fingers and it left little streaks of black on her temples.
Lucilla flushed a delicate pink, for she had not known that she had spoken aloud. She had been thinking that she was fortunate still to retain her beauty at ninety-one, while Margaret at only sixty-nine looked more deplorable than words could say. But she was not going to lie about what was in her mind. This new knowledge of the thoughts of others that had come to her in old age had given her an almost fantastic horror of the life of half-unconscious deception which almost everybody seemed to lead. Of course to a certain extent one had to build from the outside in, one had to act with a willed charity, however unloving the thoughts in one’s mind, on and on till feeling came to heel and followed action, but that was a creative thing, utterly different from the hypocrisy of the easy flattery and the easier platitude that were just a floating with the tide. The word integrity was one which she had come to love almost the best of the words in the dictionary; though she recognized that the union of charity with honesty was dreadfully difficult; one was sure to be lopsided one way or the other.
“That I was born beautiful and that my beauty has not left me,” she said to Margaret. “It will not be counted unto me for righteousness, but it has eased my way. Even as a little girl, Margaret, you were never pretty, and that has made a hard life harder. Could you sit down for a moment?”
Margaret drew up a low chair to the fire and held out her work-roughened hands to its warmth. “I should be ironing your handkerchiefs,” she said guiltily.
“I wish your love for me did not take the form of disliking the laundry,” said Lucilla. “If I could see you rested I’d joyfully blow my nose on torn handkerchiefs.”
“If it was our own torn handkerchiefs that came back, I should not mind so much,” said Margaret, “but it’s other people’s.”
“To see you sitting down and doing nothing I should not care whose handkerchief I used,” said Lucilla. “That was one of the reasons why I wanted to leave Damerosehay, but I believe this is the first time in five years that I have seen you do it.”
“Have we really been in Lavender Cottage five years?” marveled Margaret.
“Five years,” said Lucilla. “Which reminds me that it is the anniversary of David’s and Sally’s wedding on Wednesday, and there is to be the usual party. I mustn’t forget.”
“You’re not likely to forget, Mother,” said Margaret. “You love family parties.”
Lucilla flushed again. Here she was, now, expressing her thoughts with a certain measure of deception. For weeks she had been counting the days to the party, and yet she must needs imply that she was so above such things that she was likely to forget them.
“I own I have been counting the days,” she said with steady truthfulness. “I own I have thought a good deal about that new black silk dress, for it suits me, and I like to be admired.”
“Mother, you’re adorable!” laughed Margaret.
“They say that humility is so important,” sighed Lucilla, “but I’ll never learn it, not in this world, if all my children and grandchildren persist to the very end in adoring even my faults. Now then, Margaret, sit down!”
“Even if I don’t iron the handkerchiefs there are still the beans for supper,” said Margaret, half in and half out of her chair. “Shall I do them here with you?”
“Don’t do them at all,” said Lucilla. “Why be a slave to beans? There are moments when I wish we had no garden. It’s such a worry trying not to waste the things in it. Put some logs on and then lean back and sit quite still for half an hour. We said to each other, when we left Damerosehay for Lavender Cottage, that now we would make our souls, but so far as I know neither of us has made the slightest attempt to do it.”
“Yes, we did say that,” thought Margaret, leaning back with her hands tightly folded in her lap and her rough grey head unwillingly propped against a patchwork cushion. “Though I’m sure I don’t know what we meant by it.”
She and Lucilla had lived at the family home of Damerosehay for nearly thirty years. It was Lucilla, house hunting after the First World War, who had found it, and had seen in it no
t just an old house for sale but a sanctuary for battered Eliots forever. She had lost another son as well as Maurice in that war, and, clear-sighted in her grief, had had no faith in the era of perfection that its vileness was supposed to usher in. Instead she had seen in it but the beginning of sorrows for her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, each in their turn and in their generation. But she had vowed that they should have something of beauty and security in their lives, a home where they could come and be refreshed physically and mentally when the world had been too much for them. She had thought of Damerosehay much as a man thinks of that quietness within the soul to which it is possible to escape if he can but learn the way to get there. She had even hoped that the physical withdrawal might help them to the spiritual one. Perhaps it had and did. She did not know. In any case she and Margaret, with little leisure for spiritual withdrawals of their own, had given all their strength for thirty years to Damerosehay, Lucilla the strength of her spirit and Margaret the strength of her toiling body, and had not left it until David had married Sally and gone to live there in their place.
David was the most vital and successful of the Eliots, the natural head of the family after Lucilla, and Sally had in her character that union of warmth and selflessness that in the mistress of it can make a house always welcoming. Lucilla and Margaret had felt their life’s work safe in the keeping of those two when they left Little Village, wind-blown and washed with light in the marshes by the sea, for Big Village, cupped in the sheltered lanes and fields a mile inland, to live in peace and quiet and make their souls.
“Which we have not done,” repeated Lucilla. “We go on behaving here exactly as we used to behave at Damerosehay. I go on worrying about the family and trying not to tell them what they ought to do, and you go on cooking meals we don’t need, and washing clothes we can quite afford to send to the laundry, because overworking the body is the only way of life of which you have experience. We still have no time to make our souls.”