Her flash of vision was gone in a moment. She dabbed angrily at her starting tears with her handkerchief and was scarcely aware of either of them as she went down the garden path and got in the car. Yet as Ben pressed the self-starter she leaned forward and without in the least knowing what she did gave Heloise the same kiss as she had just given Caroline, the kiss of a completely distracted but most affectionate mother.
CHAPTER
18
Some hours later Sebastian sat in one of the cushioned window-seats in the drawing-room at Damerosehay, looking out at the moonlit garden and marveling at its amazing beauty. He had put out the lights in the room and was aware of it behind him as a shadowed place with which he seemed to have no more concern. It was the garden that held him fascinated. The moonlight was so bright that he could see each tree, each clump of flowers, more distinctly than he had seen them in the day, when the misty autumn heat had merged color and form into a blur of loveliness that he had found confusing. But there was no confusion here. Mystery, far deeper than by day, but no confusion. That moonlit country out there had meaning. Each tree, each gleaming white chrysanthemum, had its own meaning and was yielding it to him. He did not know what the meaning was, any more than he understood the meaning of himself, but he possessed it as an integral part of his own being. A sentence of farewell that he had read somewhere occurred to him. “Until we meet in the meaning of the world.” Only he dropped the preposition because the words did not carry him forward to some distant future, but described the joy of his present state. He did not understand yet because he looked into the meaning only from the threshold. Though he had no further concern with the shadowed world, yet he was not quite free of it. But the meaning was there, and he was a part of it and possessed it.
The ilex tree just outside the windows was a towering presence, and the stars seemed alight in its highest branches. Though he did not know it, he was sitting on the same window-seat where Lucilla had sat more than thirty years ago, when she first came to Damerosehay, and where she had fallen asleep and dreamed of paradise. He did not know it, but he began to think of her and to hope that she was not lying awake in too great anxiety. He feared that she was. The more he thought of her, the more certain he became that she suffered. He wished he could send her some of his peace. He wished it intensely, and went on wishing it. No, not some of his peace, for that was a niggardly way of giving, but the whole of it. Yes, the whole of it. He owed her so much and he had nothing else to give. He longed with all the power of his being to give this one and only thing that he possessed just now, and abandoned himself and his longing to the will of God.
He felt a momentary joy in the abandonment, yet as the peace began to drain away from him the joy went, too. The garden darkened and the shadowed room took hold of him. A great fatigue was eating away his peace. He had been prepared for the loss of it, but not for the fact that something else must take its place, not for the substitution of this ghastly fatigue. He knew to what it was leading him, and he felt great fear as the moment drew nearer when the meaning would have gone from the garden and the last of the peace from his soul. He knew it was still within his power to halt the moment and bring back the peace, but he did not do it. For Lucilla’s sake he did not do it. Instead he strengthened his wish until it became not only longing but a willed intention, and of his own choice the utter exhaustion of all his powers and the bitterness of death took hold of him together.
It was the meaninglessness that made the bitterness. Behind him in the shadows his past life lay like a heap of dust and rubble, mistakes and sins and failures all piled together there, all achievement turned to nothingness, the misery of irreparable loss lying over it all like a pall of smoke. Such an eternity of pain, and all to no purpose. All of it leading to nothing but this exhaustion, this dread of death and fear of extinction. In his ignorance he had thought he would welcome death, he who had never tasted the fear of it until now. He did not know how long he endured the fear, for time as he had hitherto understood it had also lost all meaning. Each moment of it seemed a century, and yet when the centuries had gone by the striking of the clock in the hall told him that only an hour had passed since David after supper had gone up to Sally’s room, and he had come in here and switched out the lights to watch the rising moon.
The old clock was like a friendly voice calling him out of a nightmare. He was still here, in the world of Damerosehay. The bitterness of death had washed over him, but it had not taken him away. He sat for a long time in a state of nothingness, exhausted but nothing else. Perhaps it had been merely illusion, a phantom of his confused mind, and the lost peace, too, only illusion. Nothing was real now except the exhaustion of his body, a cold sickness of exhaustion that brought upon him a new sort of fear—the ridiculous childish fear that he would not be able to get himself off this window-seat, across the room and up the stairs to bed. And he could not be ill now—on this particular evening, of all evenings—with General Eliot seriously ill, Sally’s baby already on the way, Mrs. Wilkes preoccupied and David distracted. Death no longer mattered. The meaning, if any, of the world no longer mattered. Nothing mattered but that he should refrain from making a nuisance of himself.
He heard light footsteps running down the stairs and David came into the room. He supposed he must have spoken, for he heard David’s voice answering from a great distance, “She’s asleep now. Everything all right so far. It won’t be for a long time yet. Barnes has gone back to the hospital to see how they’re getting on there. What a turmoil all at once! I’m sorry. Aren’t you cold, Weber? Let’s light the fire and have a drink. Do you mind the lights? The moonlight is glorious, but so damn cold. Come over here and get warm.”
The distant voice seemed to come nearer and clearer, staccato and edgy with worry, catching Sebastian’s attention away from his own distress. David switched on the two reading lamps by the arm-chairs and bent to light the fire. Sebastian’s problem contracted a little. It was not upstairs that he had to get himself, but to the armchair by the fire. He got there while David’s back was turned, and then in another moment his host’s old brandy was a reviving fire in his body, and his panic receded.
“It was good of you to wait up, and I’m ready,” said David gently.
Sebastian’s mind groped in confusion. Was he waiting up? He had not intended to. He had only meant to watch the moonlight for a moment, and then had come those phantasms of life and death and held him where he was. For what was David ready?
“That is, if you’re not too tired,” said David, “and would still like to tell me.”
With horror Sebastian remembered. He had asked David if he might tonight talk about himself. He had thought by doing so to make reparation. What madness! How, by torturing himself and embarrassing David, could he atone for his injustice? Well, he was delivered from his madness, for this night of anxiety was no time for such a thing.
“Not tonight,” he said.
“Why not tonight?” asked David, smiling.
“You’ve enough on your mind.”
“Actually, so little,” said David humbly. “Only the usual things, death and birth, and those made as easy as the comforts of the fortunate can make them. And George may not die, and according to Barnes Sally most certainly will not. And if there is another trouble I shall see that, too, in better proportion when I have heard what you have to tell me.”
There was appeal in his voice. He now wanted that which earlier in the day he had not wanted. Perhaps he was right, thought Sebastian. Perhaps he himself had been right when he had felt that he must surrender to David the only thing he had to surrender. “Prithee, go in, seek thine own ease.” He would have liked to say that to David now, pushing him back into his own comfortable world, but impossible though it was to share one’s experience with another, perhaps there were times when it was right to try. He was not capable of intuition now, but he had been this morning. It might be that only by such a surrender would h
e be able to convince David that his hatred had passed. And that, he remembered, he had decided he must do, where and when he could. For all he knew, this was his last chance. But the words he wanted would not come to his confused mind, and if they had come he knew he had not the strength to utter them. At least, that was what he thought he knew, but what did he know? Nothing. And he himself, in this abysmal hour, was nothing. If the nothingness that he was must still do this thing, then something other than himself must form his nothingness to thought and speech. To it he surrendered himself, and presently began speaking slowly and quietly, with many pauses but no real break in his narrative.
“There’s so little to tell, really,” he said. “So little that I wonder that I have, until now, been unable to speak of it. After so many years, too. Time is supposed to heal. I do not know why it has not done so in my case. The fault must have been in myself. Perhaps in the rigidity of my grief and hatred I would not humble myself to be healed.
“You have remembered that recital in Paris, and so you know what my life was like before the war. Much like your own now. I had a measure of success. I worked hard, but the rewards were great. I married. My wife was a singer, a German whom I met at her home in Hamburg between the wars. The marriage of two artists is not always happy, but ours was as perfect as marriage can be. We had three children, two boys and a girl. We would have called ourselves entirely fortunate had it not been that I hated the regime in Germany, and she resented my hatred. But, as artists, politics pressed less heavily upon us than upon many others. We travelled a great deal, and our country home in my native Austria was very remote.
“Just before the war I became ill and was threatened with tuberculosis. We went to our mountain home, and were there when the war broke out. Mercifully bad health put active service out of the question for me, and I was glad, for even had I not been a pacifist, which I was and am, I could not have fought for a way of life I hated. I continued my work in Austria, in Sweden and Finland, but I would not give any more recitals in Germany, and when Christiana went each year with the children to visit her parents in Hamburg I did not go with her. I did not wish her to go, and in spite of our love a bitterness came between us because she would not discontinue her visits. She had a great devotion to her parents, whose youngest child she was, and a great devotion to her country, unchanging in its verity. You know what I mean by the verity of one’s country, that country of our birth whose ground beneath our feet, whose airs and verdure, keep faith with the strength and wisdom of what is past and are unpolluted by the passing corruption of the present. I should have understood her better, but I was more cosmopolitan than she. I was at home in many countries as she never was. If I had let her go in the early years with a better grace, she would not have withstood me so violently when in that year of the great fire-bomb raid I refused to let her go to her parents’ golden wedding. It was chiefly because of the danger of the times that I refused, but partly also because there was no sympathy between her parents and myself. They were whole-hearted supporters of the regime and disliked my pacifism. Because of it they had opposed our marriage. I disliked them and was jealous of her devotion to them. I have always had intensely strong likes and dislikes; until adversity left me for a while with the power of love dried up in me.”
Sebastian had continued speaking fairly easily, though sometimes breathlessly. David had smoked at first, moving a little occasionally, but now he stubbed out his cigarette and sat perfectly still. Sebastian was vaguely conscious of something unnatural in his stillness, but his whole being was so focused upon this thing that must be given, so gathered into this form of thought and speech to which he had been shaped that he might give it, that his mind could make no comment upon it. But he could not go on. Some vague horror seemed to be between them, like the pit of contrast into which he had so often fallen.
David knew it was not contrast now, it was likeness. In their past lives one particular thing had represented to both of them the peak of misery, and it was the same thing. David knew what it was, and with every moment that passed the silence grew more terrible to him. He heard footsteps overhead, distant because in this old strongly-built house one did not hear things very easily, and knew that Sally had awakened to pain and that Mrs. Wilkes was looking after her. But he could not move and go to Sally. By this time tomorrow night Christopher would have come and he would have three children, two boys and a girl. But they could not sit here in silence. He must say something. He must get them through it.
“She took the children,” he said, making a statement rather than asking a question, and his voice was ugly, a voice that Sebastian would not have recognized had he been attentive to it. He had not even been told that Sebastian’s wife had won that battle with her husband, but he knew that she had. He seemed to know her, passionate, strong-willed, with no sense of danger, devoted to her husband, but even more resentful of his pacifism and his antagonism to her parents than he realized.
“She took the two youngest,” said Sebastian. “Her father was ill at the time, and she thought he would not see his grandchildren again, or her either, if she did not go and take them. Josef, our eldest child, was not well and he had to stay with me. I still had Josef after the others had died in the flames of Hamburg. I went to Hamburg and saw the smoking rubble of the house, and so I knew how they had died.”
There was another long silence, and this time David could not break it. He knew now the chief reason why Sebastian hated him. To what extent, at some deep level of existence, the experience of one man is subconsciously known to another, he had no idea, but he did not suppose it possible for a man to be in the presence of the murderer of his children and not be emotionally aware of it. For David always thought of himself as being the only man who had dropped bombs on Hamburg on the night of the fire-bomb raid. In his nightmare he had always been alone in that dark sky. Only one man had done it.
“I’ll tell the rest as quickly as I can,” said Sebastian. “You have some rough idea, I expect, of the suffering and confusion in Eastern Europe both before the Allied victory and after it. I need not describe it. At one time Josef and I were in a refugee camp in Eastern Germany; for we had been in Germany, staying with friends of mine, when the Russians overran the country. There were many children in that camp, with not enough to eat and little help or comfort for them when they fell ill. It is wonderful how patient children are when they suffer and how tenacious some of them can be of life. You think the small spectre must die, and yet he lives. After a time that camp was closed, and those of us who were of Austrian birth were put on a train and sent to Vienna, to be sorted out and dealt with there. It was bitter winter weather and there were delays on the journey, owing to the snow and the breaking down of the engine and so on. We were on that train for four days and nights without food or water. We were packed like sardines. The cold was indescribable. A few went mad. Some died. Josef died. When they emptied us out of the train at Vienna, and pulled Josef out of my arms, I imagined that I was sane, but I suppose that I was not, because in the next camp where they put me I attacked and injured one of the Russian guards because I imagined he had murdered Josef. I might have killed him if another guard had not put a bullet through me. After that, when I came out of hospital, the Russians put me in a concentration camp. When I at last came out our friend Hamilton rescued me and got me to America, where in the intervals of jobs of work I put in a good deal of time in hospitals for various forms of mental and physical disaster.
“The rest you know. You have listened very patiently. Why I imagined that I must tell you this, as a gift that I owed you, I do not now feel very sure. My recitation must have been an ordeal that you would have been glad to be spared. But with no foreknowledge that I should benefit myself, telling you has been a release almost equal to the catharsis that you gave me when I watched your Lear.”
It was perfectly true. Relaxed in his chair, Sebastian felt a sense of immense relief. He felt ill, but not so ill as he
had felt earlier. His mind was clear and even receptive. He was able to realize now that David’s ordeal was not over, and was worse than he knew. He was aware of an agony of indecision in him and then of a decision made.
“Would it help you if I were to tell you why you hate me?” asked David. “There are obvious reasons, of course, but for a man of your quality they do not account for the intensity of your dislike. It must puzzle and distress you. You may be less distressed if you know the reason.”
“I do not dislike you now,” said Sebastian gently. “But I should like to know the reason for what is past.”
“I was a bomber pilot in that raid on Hamburg,” said David.
For a few minutes Sebastian felt nothing at all but a sense of calamitous shock. Then his mind slowly awoke to the knowledge of darkness. The mind has pits, and he clung above the abyss and swung there. The one man whom he had for so long and so intensely hated. The man so like himself that he might have been himself. It might have been he who had dropped bombs on Hamburg, murdering his own wife and children. It was he. The darkness was like the darkness of his prison days that had been lit only by that light of oneness. World suffering. Who was suffering most at this moment, himself or David? Had he killed David’s children, or David his? He did not feel very sure, but it was not important since they were together in what they suffered, caught in this lunatic age that was not of their making. Or had they made it? While one of them harboured one thought of hatred, hugged to himself one moment of self-indulgence, they were not guiltless of the misery of these times. Mutual guilt locked them together, as well as mutual sorrow. For one man to hate another in such a situation was sheer madness. Wicked though the times might be, never in the history of the world had one man’s life been so interwoven with that of another. What men felt to be the meaningless writhing of the whole interlocked surface of human affairs was a sort of mockery of what union might be; of what it was down in the depths where the selfless had union with each other and their God. A mockery and a signpost at the same time.