A comforting warmth suddenly deposited itself upon his feet and there was a soft drum-like sound as of a tail thudding up and down on the carpet. A small peal of laughter rang out and was checked, so that against the darkness of his closed eyes David saw a little fountain of light leap up and fall in a shower of bright drops all shaped like bells. He leaned back in his chair. “Bells and drums,” he said aloud. “Who can possibly be under the table?”
There was a giggle, instantly suppressed, and the drum notes increased their tempo while a minor earthquake heaved upon his feet.
“I’ve got my eyes shut,” he said. “If someone were to come out and climb on top of me I shouldn’t have an idea who it was. I should have to guess.”
She was there in a moment, lighter to hold than Robin. She was not demonstrative and made no attempt to strangle him with her arms round his neck, as Robin had done. She sat most lightly on his knee, but the glowing warmth of her body, that he could feel through the stuff of her smock, seemed as much the warmth of love as of life. Though he knew it by heart, he touched with his hand the curve of her head beneath the soft silky hair, and the outline of her cheek. How little one needed sight to be aware of one’s child with the sort of awareness that is like light flooding all the dark places of one’s being. Mouse, sensing the change in his mood, removed herself from his feet and came out from beneath the table to pounce upon a sunbeam on the floor. She was not yet of an age to be quite sure if sunbeams could be picked up and shaken or whether they could not. Disappointed, she sat down upon the sunbeam and scratched herself, the little medal she wore on her collar tinkling softly. Dogs of Damerosehay who were now dead, Pooh Bah and the Bastard, had worn those medals too, and with that little familiar sound in his ears David knew he was home again.
“You haven’t guessed,” whispered Meg.
“Mrs. Wilkes?”
“No.”
“Mummy?”
“No.”
“Robin?”
“No.”
“Could it be Meg?”
“Yes! Open your eyes!”
“Who’d have thought it,” said David, his face a mask of profound astonishment.
Meg seized the lapels of his coat and swung on them, laughing in delight, her head tipped back as she looked at him and her fair hair falling back from her face. Her usually pale cheeks were rosy with joy and her eyes were slits of mirth. No one could pretend like Daddy. Not even Mummy, though she did her best. Only Daddy of all the people in the world could play the games that Meg wanted to play with complete understanding of his part. There was not a sign on her happy face of the hurt that Sally had feared for her.
“Why did you run away, Meg?”
“Too many people,” said Meg.
He remembered that when as a boy he had come home from school he would not go into the drawing-room to greet Grandmother until he could be sure she was alone there. How relationships repeated themselves in life, like a recurring chord in music, and when they were good ones, each striking of the chord seemed to increase its beauty.
“You all right, Meg?” he asked.
“I’m all wight,” said Meg. “Are you all wight?”
“Yes, I’m all right.” And so he was, with Meg there. “I suppose you couldn’t kiss me, could you?”
She gave him a kiss that felt like the touch of a butterfly’s wing upon his face and then settled herself comfortably in the crook of his arm, her head on his shoulder and her feet upon the arm of his chair. She had removed her wellingtons and contemplated the red leather slippers she had had on inside them with satisfaction.
“They’re new,” she said. “For you,” she added drowsily. The room was warm and golden with the westering sun, she was utterly happy and it seemed that she was going to sleep.
David, more or less sleepless for weeks past, roused himself with a jerk and remembered that he must go and tell Sally that Meg was safe, but a snore from Mouse, now asleep on the sunbeam that had refused to be shaken, changed the current of his thoughts. Sally, coming in five minutes later to tell David it was Meg’s bedtime and still she could not be found, contemplated the three of them with amusement.
“And yet he says he doesn’t want more children,” she thought. “There’ll have to be another girl after Christopher, or whatever will he do when Meg is at boarding-school?”
She went out, closing the door softly. Outside in the passage that led to the garden she stood with her hands pressed to her aching temples and tried to think what she had to do next. Robin was bathed and in bed and Zelle comforted, the chicken was in the oven and the vegetables ready, and Mrs. Wilkes was laying the table and had promised to stay and wash up, providing they were punctual in coming to supper. Mr. Weber! He was the next thing. She didn’t look forward to him very much, but she must try and take him without fear, with no before or after. When one was well the next thing flowed in so easily and naturally, but when one was tired to death it sent before it a wave of nervous apprehension. Would one be able to manage? Would one make a mess of it? Was it going to be just the last straw which would break one down completely? Engulfed in this fear, Sally had taught herself to think of the next thing as though it were the last thing. Just this one more thing and then no more. If it were the last thing, then it did not seem too hard to rally one’s forces just once more. Obliteration of the future seemed to lead to obliteration of the past too, and there could be a sense, she knew, in which this living for the moment only could be evil. It could be licence, and then the destruction of past and future was a betrayal of both. But when you took the moment in your hands as selflessly as you were able, past and future were not so much destroyed as gathered into it in one perfect whole, and living for it was not destructive but creative. The moment was no longer the last thing but the one thing, and so nothing else mattered and one would not fail.
She opened the garden door and went out into a world which the wind and the rain had swept and cleansed and then left to a happy loneliness. Each flower, each leaf, burning with color in the streaming light from the west, was held in such a stillness that it seemed alone, and yet by its very loneliness a more integral part of the immensity of light. Sally stood bathed in light and felt herself made new. The loneliness of each leaf and flower was like the loneliness of each next thing. It was all there was, and yet it was a part of a whole whose before and after was the circle of eternity.
CHAPTER
4
— 1 —
Restored by Mrs. Wilkes’s ministrations, Sebastian had explored the garden with growing delight. Like all old gardens, it had many trees and bushes: lilacs, laburnums, guelder roses and strawberry trees, cherry trees, rose trees that must have been there for a hundred years, a magnolia growing against the house, and on the lawn outside the drawing-room window a grand old ilex-tree lifting its islands of darkness against the bright blue sky. There were rosemary bushes and lavender hedges, and the scent of lemon verbena was coming from somewhere. There were still late roses in bloom and a grand show of asters and dahlias in the borders. There was no kitchen garden that he could see but a wall bordered the flower garden to the west. This wall was almost hidden by a riotous growth of winter honeysuckle, and the jasmine that country folk call mind-your-own-business, but behind a guelder-rose bush he saw a wrought-iron gate in the wall and unlatched it and went inside, leaving it open.
It was not a kitchen garden, but just such a wild enchanted place as in his childhood he had pictured that garden where the sleeping beauty dreamed away a hundred years. One could dream away a hundred years in this place, he thought, untouched by time. It was a continuation of the oak-wood beyond the drive, though the trees must have been thinned out to make this place more of a garden than a wood. Rough grass grew beneath the trees, and the moss-grown path wandered in and out between them. Honeysuckle and traveller’s joy, brambles and mind-your-own-business grew everywhere, and there were lavender and rosemary bushes
growing in the grass. Yet he could see that the heavenly wildness of the place was a planned wildness, and carefully restrained. Here and there a small flower-bed had been cleared and planted with hardy plants, michaelmas daisies, hollyhocks and Japanese anemones, with plenty of primrose roots about the old trees. There were birds everywhere: tits and chaffinches, whose wings made almost a mist of color about the silvery branches of the trees, nut-hatches, wrens and robins. A thrush was singing somewhere, though it was not the season of song, and he followed the path towards the heart of the garden, from which the singing came.
Here there was a very large oak-tree, gnarled and old, with lichened branches, and the thrush was singing high up on the topmost branch. There was a seat beneath the tree, and the grass all about it was carpeted with the delicate mauve of autumn crocuses. A child’s swing hung from one of the branches and lying among the crocuses was a bedraggled toy rabbit, wearing a pink bow, but minus one ear.
Sebastian sat down abruptly upon the seat. Crocuses of just that color grew in the mountains in his country, and in the garden of his house at the foot of the mountains he had hung a swing for his children from the branches of a tree. The path to the heart of the garden had carried him straight to the heart of his own past, where he did not allow himself to go. “Fool!” he said to himself, fighting the impulse to get up and walk from this garden and from Damerosehay, to get away somewhere else. Somewhere. Anywhere. Yet where? “Fool!” he said again. “Sentimental fool.”
His heart was pounding, yet his mind was groping through darkness to a thread of light swinging there to which he could hold, he thought, if he could reach it. It swung towards him and he caught it and knew what it was. Merely a memory of light, that sanctuary light that had come to him without distress up in his room. If he could have remembered that, and been glad, the time might come when he would welcome the memory of the swing in the garden. His mind presented this to him as an impossible hypothesis, and yet in these days was anything impossible? He had seen the unendurable endured and had himself endured it. He had seen men match themselves against impossible horror and surmount it; but not slumped on a seat in this attitude of defeatism.
He sat up and found himself regarding the rabbit. It was an engaging creature in spite of its condition, with pleading green glass eyes and a pink lining to its one ear. It must belong to Meg, or to the other child who had been yelling blue murder upstairs. He must take it indoors, or further rain in the night would bring it to a soppy end. He had not handled a child’s toy since the days that belonged now to another life, and it took all his resolution to bend down and pick the creature up, and yet once he was holding it he found himself in no nightmare of recollection, but merely thinking that he must find a bit of felt and make another ear. Sawdust was oozing from a split seam, too, and that also must be seen to. Altogether the creature was in a bad way, though obviously much beloved, for repairs had taken place before: there was a patch on the nose, and a new scut made out of a woman’s powder puff had been rather clumsily attached in the place of one lost. He leaned back against the tree, in the warm sun that was now shining full upon him through the branches, and turned it over in his nervous oddly-shaped long hands that had once had such skill in making and mending. Other children besides his own had brought him their broken toys, and stood round him in a tense silence while he examined the broken engine or the headless doll and pondered weightily alternative methods of rehabilitation.
He was almost asleep in the warm sun. How well he remembered those children! They were about him now in this children’s sanctuary. In the warm silence he was aware of them, breathing hard with anxiety and yet knowing that he would not fail them. He would restore this rabbit to its pristine glory. He held the creature on his knee and his hands were still, for the sun was like a sedative, it was so warm now. Yes, they were here, but not now the children he had known, and not Meg or the yeller upstairs, but other children who had played in this garden. Wraiths, not necessarily of the dead but of vanished childhood. There were two dark-haired boys, one with a thin keen dark face, the other fat and rosy. A plain little girl with freckles on her face. A beautiful boy to whom the fatherhood in him reached out with such strength that he knew he was fatherless. The boy turned and looked at him, and his eyes were Meg’s. And another boy quaintly dressed in green who had lived here so long ago that perhaps he had been the first to play in this garden. But of them all it was the fatherless boy who came closest. Sebastian fancied that he could feel him leaning against his knee.
And there was a woman, the mother of them all, wearing an old-fashioned dress with a full and sweeping skirt the color of the autumn crocuses. Her dark eyes made him welcome, trespassing though he was in the children’s special place. Yet when he opened his eyes and looked at her she was wearing a loose lavender-colored tweed coat and her smiling eyes were tawny.
“I’m afraid I’m trespassing in the children’s sanctuary,” he said.
“Not only theirs,” she answered. “Yours too I hope.”
She looked young, he thought, to be the mother of them all. “You have so many children,” he said.
She looked puzzled. “Only two,” she said. “Though Robin makes enough noise for five. Oh, you’ve found his rabbit!”
“Is he missing it?”
“He’s been yelling all day, and Zelle did not know why.”
“I could make a new ear,” said Sebastian. “And re-attach the tail. I used to be good with my hands and I think I could still manage an ear and a tail.”
“I’m not good at mending things,” said Sally apologetically. “Nor is David. We fail them there.”
Sebastian suddenly stood up, his hands eloquent with distress. “Mrs. Eliot? Please forgive me. I believe I have been asleep.”
“I believe you have,” laughed Sally. “I expect you are like my husband. You have bad nights and fall asleep unexpectedly in the day instead.”
But Sebastian was still distressed. “I should not be here. You came here to be quiet?”
“No, I came to look for you. The gate was open so I thought I’d find you here.”
His distress had communicated itself to her and she flushed, but she straightened her shoulders and said what she had come to say clearly and steadily, like a child saying her piece. “I am so sorry about this morning. David forgot to telephone and so there was no proper welcome for you. I am so glad you have come and I hope you will be happy here.”
She was a tall woman and they were of almost the same height. She thought she had never looked into such lightless eyes. There was no kindling from within, and they were sunk so deeply in his ugly bony head that it seemed they could reflect no light from without. His rough grey hair and his clothes looked dusty and his sallow rigid face had a parched look, as though the dry skin were about to crack. She had thought to herself earlier in the day that she had never suffered and did not know the meaning of the word. Nor did she, but she knew now what men and women looked like who had suffered to the limit of endurance. Scorched like a desert. And she had said that she hoped he would be happy. This was a man who could not again be happy in the sense in which she had used the word. All her adult life she had had a sense of shame because she was so fortunate, but it had never been so deep as now. Her flush ran over her whole face and down her white neck, but her eyes did not drop. She still looked at him steadily, and he at her, both aware that though by experience, race and age they were deeply parted, yet something that neither as yet understood had already given them union with each other. Her tawny eyes were like a lion’s, he thought. She was a brave woman, and calamity if and when it came would find her ready.
Yet what a child she was now, although the mother of Meg and the yeller, and in some mysterious way of the children of his dream. And of a child that was yet unborn. He suddenly forgot everything else in concern, for her flush had faded and she looked deadly tired as she obeyed the movement of his hands and sat down upon t
he seat. He sat beside her. What a pity the English cannot talk with their hands, she thought. The language of movement was better than the language of sound, swifter and more sure.
Sebastian’s hands, as eloquent as his face was expressionless, lifted and then moved gracefully to his knees and rested there. The movement was very individual, and awakened a memory. As a child she had seen the hands of a great pianist do that, seeking respite while the orchestra lifted and carried the theme they had stated. Respite. If happiness was now beyond his reach, he could at least know respite, and respite, with its lifelong rhythm, can in the awareness of it be called by the name of peace.
“But there must be no before or after,” said Sally.
He looked at her with polite astonishment, and she laughed.
“Please forgive me!” she said. “I was thinking of moments of respite. One can’t get the most out of them unless one treats them as one treats the next thing: as though it were the only thing. I mean, if you think about the toothache that has just stopped, it so easily becomes the toothache that is going to begin again, and all your peace is lost.”
“That’s true,” said Sebastian, and he laughed too, his harsh croak of laughter the most surprising sound in the children’s garden. He felt so at ease with this childlike woman that he half turned on the seat to look at her. She was the most surprising wife for David Eliot, and he could not picture them together. He tried to see her beside her husband in his dressing-room at the theatre, at parties in New York or on board the luxury liner that had brought them home, but he could no more see her there than he could see Eliot in this old house and garden that suited her timeless charm to perfection. Eliot was of his century, and the bright lights and ceaseless movement of hot rooms and tall hard streets made the right setting for his restless brilliance. But the sunshiny warmth, the quiet tempo of mind and body of which he was so gratefully aware in this woman, belonged with Damerosehay to another age than this, and it was in another age that he sat here with her, talking of his meeting with Meg, of the flowers and birds about them and of that light that comes when tracts of land are islanded by the sea.