She reached her room, still filled with the noise of the storm and George’s peaceful snoring, got into bed, awaited her black hour. . . . But it did not come. . . . Very faintly in a lull in the storm something interposed itself between her spirit and its coming. She heard again the faraway chiming of bells. . . . Annie-Laurie. . . . What was the burden that Annie-Laurie carried, rocking through the storm in her houseboat? Whatever it was, much greater than her own. Remembering Annie-Laurie Nadine was once more ashamed of herself. What a ridiculous fuss she was making about doing what everyone was always doing every day, every hour, every moment of his life almost: gathering in the divided allegiance, denying it to the one thing, giving it to the other, the choice never really in doubt when to the inner beseeching of the spirit the motive is revealed. It was a process that could not end while the eventual salvation of one’s soul was still a possibility, the pain of the unceasing effort merely a question of degree but not differing moment by moment in essence. One lived, and it was so. Accept it and have done. . . . She went to sleep.
CHAPTER
11
— 1 —
In the morning the rain was descending in a solid sheet. Upon awaking the twins looked at the weather, looked at each other, and decided simultaneously, with no word said, what they were going to do this morning. It was a wicked thing. They looked at each other and laughed delightedly. They were going to be bad today. They were going to start right off by being bad. That was always the way with the twins. One evil action planned, say, for midday, worked both retroactively and progressively; their strong histrionic sense compelled them to see to it that their behavior throughout the day was in keeping with the culminating point.
So when Jill came to call them she found them not in their beds. But she did not let this phenomenon disturb her. She was used to it. “Now where are José and Jerry, I wonder?” she said aloud, rummaging in the little flower-painted chest of drawers for warm garments in keeping with the sad change in the weather. Then she listened, expecting to hear the grunting of a bear under the bed, or the roar of a lion shut up in the wardrobe. But there was no sound at all. A search all round the nursery showed it to be completely empty, though two little pairs of pajamas were neatly folded and placed in the fireplace. She went out into the passage, noted that the General had already gone downstairs, leaving his wife’s bedroom door ajar, and raised her voice.
“Madam!” she called.
Nadine, weary and heavy-eyed, but impeccably groomed as usual, came to her bedroom clipping on her earrings. “Yes, Jill?”
“The twins have disappeared, madam,” said Jill in a clear carrying voice. “Such a pity! It’s their favorite breakfast. Boiled bantam’s eggs and bread and honey.”
Nadine knew Jill’s methods with the twins and co-operated. Whatever Jill did or suggested she always, now, co-operated. When she had first seen Jill at Damerosehay she had felt herself caught, fearing that she would be for the rest of her life the prisoner of Jill’s high standards. And her fear had been justified, for this gentle but extraordinarily tough-willed young woman now had her as firmly in hand as the twins themselves. But she was not dismayed at her bonds because she was unaware of them. Jill, also, was unaware of them. Hers was the unconscious tyranny of inexorable great expectations.
“Well, Jill,” said Nadine, also in a clear carrying voice, “they won’t be able to have any breakfast, that’s all. What a pity! Send the eggs into grown-up breakfast. Mr. Adair will enjoy them.”
The twins disliked John Adair. Upon finding them in his studio one day, squeezing oil paints onto the floor, he had smacked them good and hard.
“Very well, madam,” said Jill, and went quietly along the passage towards the turret staircase leading to the kitchen. As she passed the linen cupboard the door flew open and Jerry and José, stark naked, fell out upon her from the top shelf.
“Old Beaver’s not to have our eggs!” they shouted as one child. “Jill! Jill! Old Beaver’s not to have our eggs!”
Gently but firmly Jill seized a bare arm of each. “Now, Jerry and José, I’ve told you before and I tell you again, you are not to run about the house with no clothes on. It’s not respectable.”
“We had to be with no clothes on,” said Jerry loudly. “We were hatching out.”
“In the incubator,” explained José. “Chickens are all bare when they’re borned.”
“They are not,” said Jill, leading them firmly towards the nursery. “It’s just that their feathers don’t fluff out just at first.”
“Did Mummy lay us in an egg?” shouted Jerry.
“She did not,” said Jill. “An angel brought you both and laid you one on each side of her when she was asleep. Straight from heaven you came, though no one would think it, seeing the way you behave now. And you must not shout like that about being born. It is one of those subjects which ladies and gentlemen discuss quietly.” They were now in the nursery and she led them sorrowfully to the fireplace. “And look where you’ve put your pajamas. That’s no place for pajamas.”
“It’s a nest. We put our ’jamas there to make it all soft to lay eggs in.”
Jill foresaw that it was going to be a difficult day. Without a word she put them into their woolly combinations. She had never before had to deal with children quite like these. She supposed it was the artistic temperament. Mrs. Eliot was artistic. And, on the other side of the family, Mr. David. And dear Ben, of course.
Ben had been a difficult child, too, with his fancies and his asthma, but he had been loving. The first child generally was loving, Jill had noticed, the father and mother probably being a bit taken up with each other at the time, the honeymoon not worn off yet, as you might say, and the child wanted. These two were not loving. Bitter at heart their mother must have been when she bore them, and not wanting them at all; though one could hardly blame her for that, poor soul, for she’d not had the strength for it, and she’d not been the same since and likely never would be.
Jill suddenly knelt down and flung an arm round each little warm body. Not loving yet, perhaps, but they would be by the time she’d finished with them. You could waken response in children just by giving them love, she’d found, like putting baking powder into a cake. And she had never loved children as she did these. Coming to her as they had, with her husband dead and her hope of children of her own gone forever (for she’d never look at another fellow after Alf, not she), they had healed her heartache and filled the void in her life and brought her a delight she had not expected to feel again. And though they were rather heartless little creatures as yet, they had a something that she had not come across in other children of their age. The word that occurred to her was intuition, though she was not very sure what the word meant. There were things that they seemed to know without benefit of experience or learning. They could not express what they knew, but a chance word dropped here and there, like a few petals of cherry blossom drifting down from branches far out of sight above the ceiling of a wood, made her aware of hidden wealth.
“Jill’s loving little children,” she said to them with faith. “Jill’s good little twins,” she added hopefully, and her arms went out like the wings of charity and hugged them close. The twins responded, for the moment, to the power of suggestion. They kissed her ears with enthusiasm and co-operated wholeheartedly in the subsequent arraying of their persons in the poppy-colored jerseys that she considered suitable to the gloom of the day.
“We’re not going to do any lessons this morning,” said José.
“Indeed you are,” said Jill.
“No,” said José.
“Stow your gaff, José,” said Jerry.
“That’s no way to talk to your sister,” said Jill severely.
“O.K.,” said Jerry genially.
Then they went down the turret staircase, past the low arched doorway to the store cupboard, to breakfast in the warm firelit second kitchen, no
w the family living room, and feasted upon bantam’s eggs and bread and honey and milk until the poppy jerseys took on a pronounced aldermanic bulge in the front and a corresponding concave curve in the back. When they had finished Jill cleared the table, gave them some jigsaw puzzles to play with until it should be time for their morning lessons, and went into the other kitchen to grill the herrings for the grownups’ breakfast. The twins exchanged a glance, then bent their sleek dark heads demurely over their puzzles. Jill looked in on them before she carried the herrings and coffee through to the hall and decided from the look of them that they were tethered for another half hour. She’d be able to slip up and help Annie-Laurie with the beds.
As soon as she had gone the twins looked at each other again, slid from their chairs, and ran through into the inner kitchen. They knew where Mother kept the key of the storeroom: in the right-hand drawer of the big pitch-pine dresser. They took it out, together with a kitchen spoon, and scurried up the stairs to the little low-arched doorway. They unlocked the door, went inside, locked themselves in and were safe . . . safe . . . safe . . . and laughed aloud out of the splendor of their joy.
It was not only because of the jam that they had come here, nor because they wanted to escape morning lessons, but because of a special feeling they had about this little room. They knew that it was the heart of the house, right deep in, just as the Place Beyond was the heart of Knyghtwood. This little room held something that the other rooms did not hold. The other rooms were each of them just one of many rooms, differing from each other only in shape and size, like the petals of a daisy, but this one room was all by itself, like the gold heart of the daisy that is a thing all by itself. You can pull away the daisy petals and the heart is still there, unhurt, glowing like a little sun, but if you tear away the heart from among the petals then there isn’t any flower any more. This they knew without knowing that they knew it. They had wanted to be here in the storeroom all by themselves for a while, just as they had wanted to be alone in the Place Beyond, and had run away from Sally so that they should be.
Well, here they were, and here also was the jam. They looked about them, the tips of their tongues just showing between their parted lips. The strange little octagonal-shaped room with the three small lancet windows had changed since Auntie Rose’s day, but not, the twins thought, for the better. Nadine had not admired the shining mustard-colored paper with the chocolate lozenges like Easter eggs that they had thought so handsome, and she had made Malony put a wash of cream distemper over the top of it. . . . Though they were happy to see that owing to an insufficiency of distemper the chocolate eggs still showed through a bit. . . . And she had not admired the slatted sagging shelves with their stains of bygone feasts; she had made George and Malony take them down, and make and put up clean, white deal shelves with neat little metal brackets supporting them underneath. And upon the shelves there was not quite such a glorious welter of things to eat, all higgledy-piggledy in great brown crocks; there were just neat rows of glass jars all the same size and all neatly labeled, containing the jams and jellies and chutneys Nadine and Jill had been making throughout the summer, an army of Kilner jars in perfect formation filled with bottled fruit, and there were tall shining golden pots of honey.
“Honey?” queried José.
“We had it for breakfast,” said Jerry. “Strawberry jam.”
He bent down, hands on knees, and José climbed on his back and reached down a jar of strawberry jam. They were not messy children; the beautiful fastidious Nadine could never have given birth to a messy child. They had remembered to bring a spoon, so that they should not have to put their fingers in, and sitting side by side on the floor they ate daintily, turn and turn about, until there wasn’t any more. Nor were they greedy children. They did just consider going on to a pot of blackberry and apple, but after holding wordless communion upon the subject they turned the idea down. Enough is as good as a feast, and though they felt quite well after the strawberry they thought that perhaps after the blackberry and apple they might not.
“Put the pot back where it was,” commanded Jerry, who possessed both a tidy mind and the firm conviction that females had been created by God to do all menial tasks, and he bent double again, with hands on knees. In this position, with José on his back, he looked under the lowest shelf and noticed something. “Come down,” he commanded José. She came, and they dropped upon hands and knees and gazed together at the pleasing sight.
Malony hadn’t had quite enough distemper to go right down to the floor all the way round, and beneath the shelf a few inches of the lovely mustard and chocolate paper had been left uncovered; what was more, it had come unstuck at the juncture of the wall and the stone floor of the little room and was curling upwards in irresistible curls like autumn leaves. Jerry seized one and pulled and it ripped upwards, bringing the distemper with it in a shower of chalky dust. There was another paper under the egg one, green with red roses on it, and that also was coming unstuck and curling up. With a squeak of excitement José seized a curl and pulled too; and then they both opened their mouths for their special train-going-into-a-tunnel shriek that was torn from them in moments of extremest joy, but checked it suddenly lest they should be heard and discovered. After that they worked in silence, though now and then, remembering Ben stripping the paper from the paneling in their mother’s sitting room, and Ben and Tommy pulling away the black marble surround in the drawing room, they ejaculated softly, “For the glory of God, my hearties! Heave-ho, my hearties, for the glory of God!”
“Here’s a bunny,” said José, quite quietly, as though the finding of a bunny were quite a common occurrence.
She had cleared quite a large patch, and sure enough there was a dim form on the wall, brown against a green background, shaped just like the hind quarters of a rabbit.
“It’s just one of the Easter eggs,” said Jerry.
“No,” said José. “It was under the Eastern eggs, and under the red roses. It’s an Easter bunny but not an Easter egg.”
“Scrape, scratch, scrabble, and scrooge,” commanded Jerry.
They did so, and found a very odd-shaped robin, and a little scarlet flower on a long green stalk.
“There’s a third paper under the rosy one,” said Jerry.
“No,” said José. “It’s a picture painted on.”
“Scrooge, scrabble, and scratch,” repeated Jerry. “For the glory of God, my hearties. For the glory of God.”
— 2 —
John Adair and Ben were indifferent to the weather. Their studio to them a kingdom was, and they didn’t care what happened outside. Breakfast over, John Adair cocked his right eyebrow at Ben, and Ben, flushing with pleasure, nodded. This cocking of the eyebrow meant that the great man was in the mood for the dealing out of a little instruction. When he was not in the mood they would sometimes work together for a whole morning companionably enough, but in a silence that Ben knew better than to break even with a hasty movement, let alone a remark.
He was aware to the depths of his humble soul of the immense honor done him. Here was he, a raw, inexperienced, futile dabbler in the great art, and one of the most famous painters of the century had seen fit to pick him up out of the mud, so to speak, and set him upon his feet, and teach him and encourage him and make a man of him. For that was exactly what John Adair had done. He never treated Ben as a child, as George and Nadine did, and in teaching him he never talked down to him, indulged or flattered him; he treated him as a man and an equal, storming at him sometimes to such an extent that Ben’s ears flapped out from the sides of his head like two scarlet flags of distress, but keeping always between them the bond of two men working together at a craft that was to both of them the most precious thing in the world.
And sometimes, though the boy was not aware of this, he looked at Ben’s efforts with a queer humble respect, stroked his beard, put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and shook it affectionately, and then
turned back to his own work with a smothered exclamation of fury. Once when Ben, scarlet to the roots of his hair, had dared to mutter, “That’s grand, sir,” as he stood before Nadine’s portrait, John Adair had turned on him savagely. “Grand? You young fool! I know what I am, boy, a cross between a detective, a psychiatrist, and a fashion-plate artist. I’d have done better to set up my plate in Harley Street, or study dressmaking under Norman Hartnell.” Then he had swung round upon Ben’s crude little painting of a summer dawn stealing into the secret green recesses of Brockis Island. “How’d you get it?” he muttered. “The sound of the pipes in the air, the smell of the dew—and the trunks of the trees like licorice sticks, and that damned rabbit jointed as no rabbit was jointed yet since the animals came out of the ark. God knows we eat rabbit often enough in this house. Haven’t you ever noticed the formation of the femur?”
“Tommy would have,” Ben had chuckled. “He’s going to be a surgeon. Funny to think you’ve not met Tommy yet.”
“Hope the Pirate and I get on when the time comes,” John Adair had commented dryly. “A surgeon, did you say? As detective and murderer we’ll doubtless have much in common.”
Today he was in one of his brisk and critical moods. “Come on now,” he admonished Ben. “No good messing about any longer with Brockis Island. I’m sick of the sight of it. More like an advertisement for face powder every time you touch it. Chuck it in the corner and make a fresh start. Get going with that fellow. If you’ve not seen his face yet you’ve seen the attitude—you said so last night. Get going now. Your sense of anatomy being what it is you’d better hang up Horace.”