The Heart of the Family

  A bell tolled softly, sounding so deep and far away that it might have been ringing at the bottom of that same sea, and Sally seized the rabbit and jumped up.

  “It’s supper!” she cried in dismay. “And I’ve not washed my hands, and I don’t expect my husband is even awake yet. When our Mrs. Wilkes is annoyed with us she does not show it much, but one feels it just the same.”

  As much as her natural serenity was capable of hurrying anyone, Sally hurried Sebastian, the bell tolling once more in patient resignation as they entered the house. A door in the passage opened and a man stumbled out, shabby and untidy, his shoulders hunched and his rumpled hair standing on end. Meg, deeply asleep, was in his arms and a drowsy little dog trotted at his heels. For a moment he stood quite still. His blue eyes were utterly bewildered and his lined and ageing face looked blind and smudged with fatigue. The golden sunset light, streaming through the glass of the garden door full upon him, was merciless, and yet gave him of its magic at the same time, so that in his red-brown tweed coat, with his face reflecting the light and the child in her red frock in his arms, he looked like a glowing oil-painting, a Rembrandt or a Paul Rubens, a splendid bit of warm color against the dark velvety shadows of the old house. Sebastian, who in these days of returning sanity lived in a world where fantasy, dream and nightmare were so intermingled with actual fact that he felt himself to be perpetually disintegrating like a kaleidoscope, toppling from one level of consciousness to another, looked at the picture with an artist’s delight. It was so utterly in its place in this old house, so a part of it. Then the little dog yawned, showing quantities of pink tongue, and the man caught the infection and yawned, too, blinking like an owl. Sebastian realized with a shock that he was alive. An elder brother of Mrs. Eliot’s? He had her warmth, and judging by the way he held the child her tenderness too, to a degree that drew Sebastian’s thought to him with liking.

  “For heaven’s sake, David!” implored Sally. “The bell has rung twice. Take Meg to Zelle, and get tidy while you are upstairs. You have no idea what you look like.”

  The bell rang for the third time, with a deep mournfulness, and Sally ran to the dining-room to comfort Mrs. Wilkes. There was a seat in the passage, and Sebastian sat down upon it. Damerosehay was prolific in seats, and he realized the fact gratefully, for from combined reasons of physical weakness and mental astonishment they were perpetually necessary to him here. If he had been unable to visualize David Eliot at Damerosehay or with his wife, he was even less able to identify him with the man he had just seen. The beginnings of panic invaded him, and he felt all the more panicky because he did not quite know why he was panicky. Did he want to hate? Had his hatred of Eliot become a source of spiritual strength to him, the only one he had now that change of circumstances had taken other hatreds away? Was it a fact that when a man has deliberately stifled the emotion of love in himself he must hate or dry up altogether? Was he now incapable of love? With panic he pushed his panic away. This was no time for self-questioning, for Mrs. Wilkes was waiting.

  — 2 —

  At supper his host appeared once more as the man he knew, and his dislike flowed back again with the ease of acquired habit; but the ease shocked him now.

  Years of hard practice had enabled David to erect the required façade with the speed of a conjurer bringing rabbits out of a hat. He was immaculate as ever as he played the host at his own dinner-table, and his conversational patter flowed with ease; though a little brittle tonight, as though a spray of water had turned to tinkling ice. The situation might have been difficult, comprising as it did a stranger sharing a meal with a husband and wife who only wanted to be left alone together, a hostess who was never very ready with small talk and was by now much too tired to think of anything intelligent to say, and the occasional presence of Mrs. Wilkes, moving in and out like a martyred mountain and impregnating the whole atmosphere with the knowledge that owing to her being kept late Wilkes was already at the local. But situations were never difficult when David handled them. Though he was aware of Sebastian’s dislike fanning his face like a blast of hot air from a desert, Mrs. Wilkes’s patience running down his back like a runner of cold water, and Sally’s weariness of body sapping the strength of his own in the peculiar way that is one of the drawbacks of a happy marriage, his awareness only showed itself in a sharpening of his faculty for entertainment. Sally helped as well as she could, though she hated it when David talked like this. He had talked this way when she had first met him, when he had just come back to the stage after the war and was talking himself into a nervous breakdown. She hoped he was not going to have another. But Sebastian, sustained by good food, found himself entertained. He liked that icy tinkle in a man’s talk. It was like rapier play. Behind it the man moved masked, and there was fascination in trying to glimpse the face behind the mask. Yet this was the first time he had been aware of the rapier and the mask with Eliot. Were they there, or did he only fancy it, because he had seen in the passage a man he did not know?

  They went into the drawing-room for coffee. The wood-fire was glowing warmly and there were a few shaded lights and he gave an exclamation of delight at the beauty of the room. He sat down and drank his coffee and watched the light of the flames leaping up over the strange carved overmantel above the fireplace. It affected him oddly, and he knew that it must have some history. This room seemed the heart of the house, as the children’s sanctuary had been of the garden. He was aware once again, as he had been in his room, of the strong tough spirit of the house created by the fortitude of the men and women who had lived here. He looked across the hearth at the two who lived here now, David sitting on the arm of his wife’s chair, and was so sharply aware of their love that it was as though a pit opened between the two of them in their proud possession and himself in his stripped loneliness. Battered between such contrasts, he always fell between them into darkness, and he did so now. He got up abruptly and said he was tired and would go to his room.

  “Please don’t,” he said sharply, when David got up to go with him, but his host smiled and insisted. It was getting dark and the switches were not easy to find.

  “Sometimes I think that the putting in of electric light was an act of vandalism on my part,” said David. “In old days we all went to bed carrying candles.” He smiled at the recollection. “Such a procession as it always was, with the candles and the dogs.”

  “You’ve lived here long?” Sebastian asked for politeness’ sake.

  “Nearly all my life,” said David. “This was my grandmother’s home. My parents died in the First World War, and I came to live with her.” He paused, as he always did when he accompanied his secretary up a flight of stairs, so that the poor devil could get his breath, and as always his excuse for the pause entirely deceived Sebastian. “That’s the cottage in the village where she lives now,” he said, looking down over the bannisters at the painting of a house and garden that hung below them in the hall. “You can’t see it properly from here, but I think it is rather remarkable. It’s sunset. The color brims the flowers but it does not run over. It’s all held charmed and still. Ben painted it. Ben is another grandson who lived here with his brother and sister. There have always been children in this house since the Eliots came, and now we more or less infest the neighborhood. All descending on us tomorrow for a family party.”

  Sebastian looked at him in breathless anxiety, and David smiled.

  “I shan’t ask you to come,” he said. “I wish I need not be present either. Not that I don’t delight in the family, especially Grandmother, but not in the aggregate.”

  What nonsense he was talking! he thought, as they went slowly on. But he had to keep on saying something, for Sebastian’s dislike of him was harder to bear when they were silent. Yet he did not resent it, for it was to him the rationalization of his hatred of himself. He even found a sort of relief in it. Here at last was a man who had seen through both the masks to what he really was.
br />   They reached Sebastian’s room and he switched the light on. He was silent for a moment, looking round with a half-smile at this room where he had slept as a boy and a young man. He did not often come here now, but it seemed that the boy he had been was still in the room, over there by the window, smiling at himself and Sebastian; the eternal child in a man who had not yet needed to put on a mask, and who did not know that when the pleasure and pride he felt in himself and all that he did had parted company with his innocence he himself would become a mask to hide the egoist gone rank and foul within.

  David saw that the room still held some of the treasures of his boyhood: Van Gogh’s lark, the sea-horse and a good many of his books—books which had meant a good deal to him at one time but which now he had forgotten. He moved towards a bookcase. Humbert Wolfe’s “Uncelestial City.” He remembered lying in bed in this room and reading that on a night of storm that had been a night of crisis in his life, and it had helped to turn him in the direction that he had taken, a direction that had led away from Nadine, whom he might have married, to Sally and Meg and Robin . . . Meg . . . But for that decision there would have been no Meg. He turned cold at the thought. And yet he had almost forgotten that poem now.

  And next to it was Gerard Manley Hopkins. After the war, during those sleepless nights when he had worked himself into such ridiculous states of fear, afraid he would kill himself, afraid he would go mad, afraid of this, that and the other which had never happened at all, he had found the sonnets of darkness and had the sense to know that his torments were nothing at all to the mental suffering that other men endured and survived. That had been a bad time, in its different way as bad as this. He had forgotten the sonnets now. Would they help in this? He took the book out and then put it quickly down on the table by the bookcase and swung round in apology, for he had entirely forgotten Sebastian.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and laughed. “I had forgotten you, Weber. This was my room when I was a boy.”

  Sebastian, standing by the window, smiled faintly, and David moved towards him. It was that moment of dusk when the world outside a lighted window wraps itself in a cloak of such deep and heavenly blue that the mere gift of sight with which to see it seems in the moment of seeing all one can need. David opened the window, which Mrs. Wilkes’s disapproval of night air for the indisposed had firmly closed, and they could see the lights twinkling on the Island and the lights of a ship sailing up the estuary. There was no sound but the faint rustle of the reeds, and the air was fresh. David remembered that night when they had stood together in Sebastian’s room high above the noise of a big city, so high that the sound of the night traffic had been hardly louder than the rustle of the reeds. The lights had twinkled then as now and the air had been fresh. Did Sebastian remember? He turned towards him, but the man’s face was expressionless. “Good night,” he said quickly, and went away. As he closed the door he had the ridiculous thought that he hoped the smiling boy who was still in the room would be kind to the poor devil.

  CHAPTER

  5

  — 1 —

  Sebastian sat down in the chair by the window, and he was conscious of the boy standing close to him, the same boy who had come so near in the dream in the garden and whose identity he had known when Eliot on the stairs had spoken of the children who had lived in this house. It was of a boyish innocence and sensitiveness that he had imagined himself aware in Eliot that night in America; it was that, he supposed, that must have got beneath his defences. He had not been aware of that boy again, and he had hated Eliot not only because of the contrasts but also because he had said so much to a man who was no different from any of the others. Just a little more fortunate, that was all, slightly more arrogant and therefore more cynical . . . Yet here was the boy.

  He gave an impatient exclamation. His mind was once more at its tumbling kaleidoscope tricks, falling from memory to fantasy and back again. Looking across at the lights on the Island, he was back in the room high above the lights of the city, the roar of it far down below, as though in the depths of a canyon. It was a bare room, with very little in it except himself and his poverty and the thesis he was trying to write on the rickety table by the window, by the light of one failing electric bulb that he feared might go out at any moment; and he had not got another to replace it. The thesis was not going at all well, and even while he continued to struggle with it he knew that he would never finish it. How could he expect to, with a crippled mind and crippled hands? There were pits in his once brilliant mind. The dialectic would fall into place easily for a while, and then would come a gap in which he fell and floundered, and when he got out upon the other side, the necessary link between one thought and another would be missing. Concentration gave him an almost constant headache. His hands were slow—not yet recovered from the rheumatism that at one time had made them helpless—and he could not afford a typewriter. Yet if he finished the thesis and acquired the academic post he wanted, what then? He would not be able to hold it. He had had several posts during the last few years and lost them, sooner or later, through illness of mind or body. Yet he went on laboriously writing because only working at something, however futile, kept his hopelessness at bay. Then came one of those pits, worse than usual. He stopped working and it became one with the canyon beneath his window. He looked at it drearily, stretching his cramped fingers, and the miasma of his hopelessness came swirling up out of it, just as it always did out of all the pits. For there were many of them. They lay between every contrast. What he had once been and what he was now. What he had once possessed and the present nothingness. The joys of other men and his own sorrows.

  “Come in,” he said, for there was a knock on the door.

  Afterwards he had wondered what he might have done later that night if that knock had not come just then. At his worst moments up till now he had not contemplated suicide, for he had great fortitude, but it had been an unusually bad moment just before the knock came.

  But he said “Come in,” and the door opened and shut and a man came across the room to him. At first he had thought he was a very young man, for he was boyishly slender and moved lightly. And then looking up at him in the dim light he saw that he was not young, and the strained exhaustion of the face touched a chord of sympathy in him. And he liked the warm kindness of the eyes. At that point the bulb went out.

  “I haven’t another,” he said apologetically.

  His visitor laughed. “It doesn’t matter. There’s moonlight and starlight. It’s a wonderful evening. Quite enough light to talk by. We have a friend in common, Roger Hamilton. He told me you are usually working late and would not mind if I came along one evening. He comes along often at this time himself, he says.”

  Sebastian listened attentively to the trivial remarks, spoken by a voice he had heard before, though he could not remember where. It was a wonderful voice. He became conscious of his duties as a host and struggled to get up from his chair, but he had sat so long that his limbs had grown stiff. He was full of rheumatism.

  “Don’t move,” said the man quickly. “I’ll find another.”

  “There isn’t another,” said Sebastian. “Only a packing-case that I use as an extra table. I’ll have that.”

  But his visitor had found it and pulled it forward. It was not very high, and sitting on it with his hands linked round his knees he looked, in the half-dark, the boy he had seemed when he came in.

  “There’s nothing to drink, I’m afraid,” said Sebastian. “And no cigarettes.”

  His guest produced his own case, and they sat smoking quietly for a moment or two. Sebastian felt oddly at home with this man, as though he had known him a long time. It seemed that he knew him for the type that is uncorruptible. Not necessarily better than another man, but uncorruptible because unresting as running water and not to be satisfied by any end that can be attained in this life. Whatever his disasters, spiritual or material, they would never either deaden or
detain him. Always he would slough them off and go farther, afraid because aware in every part of his being of the unsleeping and unwearied evil, and hounded by his fear to outstrip that too if it were possible. “We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go always a little farther.” However bitter present experience might be, there had never been a time when Sebastian himself had not been convinced, though in late years with only a sort of heavy dullness, that it was possible. Aware of his kinship with his guest, he waited quietly, reluctant to have this moment of understanding iced in and perhaps forgotten under the banality of trivial talk. But it had to come, and the moment passed.

  “My name is Eliot. I am an actor in need of a secretary. Mine has deserted me and gone to Hollywood. Hamilton told me about you. He thought you might take pity on me. Temporarily, at any rate, for he tells me you hope to get some teaching post here.”

  Sebastian understood. Hamilton knew that he would never write that thesis, and was now shifting the responsibility of him on to another man. Hamilton was an old friend who had got him out of the concentration camp in Europe and brought him to America. He had sponsored him here, but was tired of him now. The twinge of bitterness he felt was not very severe, for he knew Hamilton. He had always been of the company of those who believe you can end a thing just as satisfactorily by giving up as by going on. But he was not going to deceive this other man, whom he knew instinctively always went on. He must know what it was that he would have to go on with. He must explain himself once again. He was always explaining himself.

  “I think I should be an extraordinarily bad secretary. I have been at times a victim of what nowadays they politely call psychosis. It has passed, but I still find concentration difficult. I can type, of course, but I write and therefore take notes very slowly. Did Hamilton tell you that?”