Towers in the Mist

  He learned, for instance, that quaking grass, gathered and brought into the house, keeps away mice; an interesting fact and of value to those to whom a cat in the house is anathema.

  Put a Tumbling Jockey in

  June in your house

  And he’ll rid you forever of

  Every mouse.

  Grace repeated the rime to him and showed him the spire of quaking grass she had put in every room, so as to take no chances even though they had got Tinker, and he promised that next year he would go out into the June fields and pick them for her.

  He learned, too, how to make pomander balls, with cloves stuck into dried oranges, so as to keep the plague away, and how to make pot pourri, and how to pick the lavender and herbs and dry them, and put them into little bags to lay between the sheets, or herb pillows to put under your head at night to make you sleep.

  Faithful thought he had never been so happy as he was on the days when they bent together over the lavender bushes, snipping off the sweet flower spikes and putting them to dry on the stone paths, with the sun warm on their backs and the bees lurching about from bush to hush. Grace, very bustling and important, with her pink skirts bunched up to be out of the way and her wide-brimmed garden hat tied with pink ribbons under her round chin, was an engaging sight as she picked lavender. The sun of that hot summer had tanned her usually white skin a warm brown and she had four freckles on the tip of her nose. Her eyes seemed to get bluer every day, he thought, as blue as periwinkles, and when she was hot her black hair clung all round her face in kiss-me-quick curls.

  Yet on such days her beauty seemed to Faithful a barrier that kept him away from her, a barrier that he could not pass because of the shut-away feeling that his physical deformity gave him. Beautiful people, he felt, are one with the starlit nights and the June fields and the poetry of the world, but ugly people belong with the toads and the spiders and the east wind rain. Even in the past, when there had been no Grace, he had had this feeling of isolation but he had always tried hard to conquer it. When another boy jeered at him because of his ears he immediately established personal contact by two good blows on the ears of his tormentors, and when he met in another the beauty that he had not got he immediately, figuratively speaking, took off his hat to it, for he knew that worship breeds love and not jealousy. He did not know how he knew these things. He supposed that the harder one’s life is the more desperate must be the struggle to find out how to be happy, and the more likely to be successful.

  But on the same eventful day when Diccon went to the Fair he had the courage to break through this barrier between himself and Grace. They were going round the Christ Church Meadows together, picking meadowsweet to strew the floors. . . . Meadowsweet was Queen Elizabeth’s favorite strewing herb and therefore much in fashion just at present. . . . As they walked, or rather trotted, for walking was too staid a word to describe the motion given to their bodies by the lightness of their hearts and the fewness of their years, Faithful pointed out to Grace all the pretty things that strewed the floor of the world about them. It grieved him that Grace’s practical mind was apt to pass beauty by, seeing in ripe yellow plums hanging among sun-silvered leaves potential pots of jam rather than those apples of gold in pictures of silver that Solomon in his wisdom spoke of, and he was always trying to make her just stand and look without thinking immediately what she looked at could be made into.

  “You are as bad as Philip Sidney,” he said to her, “who must always make everything he looks at into poetry.”

  “Cooks also are artists,” Grace told him solemnly.

  But she tried very hard to do what he wanted her to do, just stand and wonder and worship even though the activity seemed unlikely to lead anywhere, and she was gradually beginning to enjoy things just for themselves. . . . And there were lots of things to enjoy today. . . . The kisses of the sun upon the water, each kiss being held as a speck of shining light within the curve of each ripple; the fine veinings on the underside of grass blades, that are intricate as a spider’s web and delicate as gossamer; the amazing beauty of a wasp, once one can persuade oneself to look at it with an unprejudiced eye, with its delicate wings like silver and its striped golden body quivering below a waist whose slenderness the Queen’s Grace herself, thin in the middle though she was, might have envied. His companionship was like a pointing finger. Look here, look there, he said, and Grace looked and found that the world was beautiful.

  But suddenly Faithful fell silent and hung his head, for Grace in her rosy beauty was like a jewel that fitted sweetly into its setting of veined grass and running water, making the green and the silver sparkle more brightly, but he in his ugliness did violence to them both. His sudden sense of his own disharmony hurt him like a blow.

  “What is it, Faithful?” asked Grace softly.

  “I wish I was not so ugly,” said Faithful in a choked voice.

  Grace folded her hands upon her stomacher in the matronly way that sat so comically upon her and flounced round upon him in real anger. The pink ribbons under her chin quivered with indignation and her eyes shot sparks. “How dare you say you are ugly!” she stormed.

  Faithful glanced up, astonished. He had not yet experienced the possessiveness of a woman, and her fury when a thing of her own is scorned. Grace, too, was surprised by her own rage. Her maternal instinct had erupted all in a moment like a volcano inside her and Grace the little girl had become Grace Catherine Leigh the woman. “You’re not ugly,” she said, and stamped her foot. “No! You look so clever, Faithful, and different from other people. Men like Giles and Nicolas de Worde, with mouths and ears all alike, are so dull. . . . I tell you what it is, Faithful,” she summed up. “You’re distinguished looking.”

  Every woman in love with an ugly man lays this phrase like balm to his smart, but Grace did not know that; she had thought of it all by herself and she was very proud when she saw his painful flush fade away and his mouth tilt up at the corners. But she was nothing if not practical and she hastened to act as well as to speak for his comfort.

  “At Binsey,” she said, “there is a holy well that cures boils and pock marks.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Faithful.

  “Perfectly certain,” said Grace strong-mindedly. “Dorothy Goatley had a boil on her chin and Diggory fetched her some of the holy water in a bottle and the minute she put it on her boil it burst.”

  “Do you think,” asked Faithful in a low voice, “that it would take away my pock marks?”

  “Yes,” said Grace judicially, “I do. It’s not that I don’t like them, Faithful, and I’m sure that other people never notice them at all, but I think you yourself would be happier without them.”

  “I should,” said Faithful fervently. “It would be nice,” he added wistfully, “to look like Philip Sidney.”

  “Philip Sidney!” snorted Grace contemptuously. “I should hate it if you looked like him. Why, he’s just like a girl.”

  “Could we go to Binsey?” asked Faithful. “I know the way.”

  “We’ll go now,” breathed Grace. Her eyes were sparkling with delight and each of her cheeks had a large dimple where the finger of delight had prodded her to make her laugh. She had never been to Binsey, for young females never went outside the city gates except with the very strongest male escort, and she was wildly excited. Faithful, who had tramped from London to Oxford and thought little of it, did not realize that perhaps he ought not to take Grace so far. They ran home, giggling with happiness. Faithful’s ugliness, that a few moments ago had seemed to him a barrier that separated him from Grace, seemed now a link between them; a sort of secret that they shared together.

  They dumped their armfuls of meadowsweet in the hall and shouted up the stairs to Joyeuce. “We’re going for a walk, Joyeuce.”

  “Very well,” said Joyeuce. “Don’t go near the Fair, because of the smallpox, and don’t go far.”

 
They made no reply to this last injunction but scurried hastily away again lest any awkward questions should be asked. Under the Fair Gate they found Heather­thwayte asleep and Satan awake, but looking very depressed.

  “What’s the matter, Satan?” they asked, stopping to rub him behind the ears.

  Satan thumped his tail deprecatingly, and licked their hands in humble apology. With tail and tongue and pleading glances of his sad dark eyes he tried to tell them that their evil small brother had run away only a short while since, and they had better go after him; but they were stupid and did not understand.

  They ran up Fish Street to Carfax, turned to the left and went down Great Bailey towards West Gate and the grim old castle that in itself formed part of the city wall. The oldest part of it was a mound that had been reared as a fortification against the Danes. . . . For those terrible Danes who crossed the North Sea every summer in their magnificent carved galleys had penetrated even as far as Oxford. “Good Lord, deliver us from the Danes,” was once a frequent prayer in Oxford churches, and the ringing of the tocsin that called them to arms against the Dane was one of the most terrible sounds a citizen could hear. . . . Next in age was the tower of Saint George, built in the eleventh century, and then came the twelfth-century castle itself with its five splendid towers.

  Under the castle tower was the castle mill, with the millpond below it. The mill had begun to work in the eleventh century and it went on doing its work, year in and year out, for eight hundred years. Kings and queens might come and go, civil war, riots, fire and pestilence might ravage the city, but the living must be fed though the dead lay in heaps in the streets and through it all the old water-wheel went round and the old mill went on turning corn into bread.

  Once outside West Gate Grace and Faithful had green grass under their feet, trees and singing birds around them, and in front of them the ruins of Oseney Abbey. It was still lovely, though the roofs were gone and the walls were falling and only the birds sang in the great church as big as a cathedral where the monks used to chant mass.

  Faithful, standing with Grace knee-deep in the sea of flowers and grass that rolled right up to the walls of the Abbey, stared in a sort of sorrowful anger at the wrecked loveliness. From what was left he could reconstruct what had been; the splendid cloister and the quadrangle as large as that at Christ Church, the magnificent church, the schools and libraries, the Abbot’s lodgings and the water-side buildings with their high pitched roofs and oriel windows. “Someone ought to paint these ruins,” he said sadly, “before they fall to pieces altogether and we forget what they were like.”

  A few years later someone did. In the south aisle of the cathedral there was put up a window designed by the Dutchman, Van Ling, and among the trees in the background was a picture of Oseney Abbey. So precious was this window to Christ Church, with its picture of the first home of the Christ Church bells, that during the Civil War they buried it, and triumphantly dug it up again at the Restoration.

  2.

  Faithful and Grace went on their way. It was a perfect summer’s day and between banks of meadowsweet and willow herb and green rushes the river ran through fields of shimmering grass.

  There is something about a river that draws one on and on. It slips along so gently that one feels one can outstrip it, and the song of the ripples in the rushes is the best marching song in the world.

  Over their heads was the blue sky of late summer, mirrored in the rippling water, and across the river to their right the glorious stretch of Port Meadow, the “town” meadow that had been given to the city of Oxford to graze its cattle on for all time. It was so wide and so flat that it was like a green sea, and reflected the high white clouds that sailed above it in drifting pools of deeper green. Black-winged swallows dipped and rose and dipped again beside the river, and it seemed to Faithful that plumb upon the center of every reflected white cloud in the blue water there sat a fat white swan. “There is no place in the world so beautiful as this,” he said to Grace, “no place in all the world.”

  Leaving the river behind them they turned to their left and went across the meadow that led to Binsey. When they got to the tiny village they turned to their right and followed the rough stony path that led to the church and the Holy Well. Hips and haws shone scarlet on either side of the path and the trees arched over their heads as though candles were lit and a roof provided to help their pilgrimage. They met no one and Grace had a feeling that home was hundreds of miles away. She and Faithful were going a long journey together and she was enjoying it so much that she hoped she would never get to the end.

  Faithful, too, felt superbly happy. A few months before, when he first began to live the life of an Oxford scholar, he had thought he was as happy as anyone could be, but now he was happier even than that. He had known joy, both the joy that comes from delight in beauty and the joy of a fine mind in achievement, and he had known the exquisite relief and sense of well-being when hardship and suffering are over and one has a bed to lie on and a well-filled stomach, but he had never before known this depth of content that he felt as he ran down the lane with Grace beside him in her pink frock and the candles of the hips and haws burning on either side. . . . He could find no words for what he felt.

  “I am happy too,” said Grace, just as though he had spoken. “It is like when Mother was alive.”

  “Was it nice when your mother was alive?” asked Faithful.

  “It was nice,” said Grace. “One could tell things to Mother.”

  So then Faithful knew the true definition of a really comfortable love: a cozy state of telling things. Their love would have none of the ups and downs, the ecstasies and torments that lay in wait for Joyeuce and Nicolas. Faithful’s life burned far more strongly in his mind than in his body. Even when he became a man the desires of his body would never loom large in his life, and he would never ask more of Grace than the quiet affection and understanding that cannot burn out because they are lit eternally one from the other and grow with the giving. This placidity would never have contented Joyeuce, who beneath the apparent coldness of her nervously braced demureness was a passionate person who found her happiness in a reaching out to the things beyond practical living; but to Grace who found her pleasure in the things that lie near at hand it would bring content.

  A feeling of awe crept over them as they came into the churchyard and stood together on the path that led to the old gray church. The days of pilgrimage to the Holy Well were now over and thick green moss had grown over the path that once had been kept bare and hard with the passing of feet. The grass had grown high, hiding the tombs of the dead, and the trees had grown thickly and darkly about the weather-stained walls and lichened roof of the church. Nature was taking back again the holy place that once had belonged to man. Bit by bit her sea was lapping up, covering man’s brown paths and gray stones with a slowly encroaching tide of green. Faithful marveled at the inexorable patience of nature. Let man attack her, cutting down her trees to make room for the smoke-grimed walls of his houses, rooting up her flowers to make space for his teeming streets, putting her birds to flight and sending her furry creatures scurrying away into exile, and she patiently withdraws herself to the horizon, gathering her creatures to her, brooding and biding her time. But let man loosen his grip for a moment, let him leave his house or neglect the paving of his street, and she is back again with seeds blown in the wind and the germ of growth alive in the sun and the rain. Her touch is that of Midas and the mark of her possessive finger is seen in a yellow wall-flower upon the wall, and the print of her returning feet in dandelions among the cobbles. They are forerunners of the returning tide, those specks of gold, and if man does not fight her in a few centuries green waves of meadow and forest will have swept over his houses and streets and only a few hummocks in the grass will show where his city has been.

  But in Binsey churchyard nature was not yet conquered or conqueror and the enchantment of all moments of t
ransition added its magic to the enchantment that haunts a place of pilgrimage. On the path pilgrim feet had traced a pattern of penitence and the moss that had grown over it was the brighter for its cleansing. Prayers had been said by the graves and the tall grasses whispered them over again when the wind blew. Nuns had sung hymns of praise in the church and the blackbird who caroled every sunset upon the roof-tree would sing a stave and then stop, his head on one side as though listening to echoes from the past, then sing again, triumphant, as though he had heard aright. And year in, year out, the water of the Holy Well bubbled up cool and limpid from the dark places of the earth that never change.

  It was in the churchyard at the west end of the church. Four stone walls had been built round it to protect it from those who might profane it and its steep wooden roof was turfed. Little trees had seeded themselves on the roof; elders and briars and even an oak tree; elves of trees because they had so little foothold but perfect in their degree.

  “It is the holy water that makes them so perfect,” said Grace, and then she told Faithful how long ago Saint Frideswide and her nuns had come to live at Binsey for a little while, taking refuge from their enemies. They had had the little church built for them, dedicating it to Saint Margaret of Antioch, and some dwelling houses whose ruins were still to be seen. The country people who loved them had tilled the fields for them to give them bread; blackberries and elderberries grew on the bushes for their dessert and at the prayer of the saint the water of the well had sprung from the earth that they might drink. After her death the water of the well worked miraculous cures upon the faithful, like the well at Cowley Ford, so that for Frideswide as well as Edmund death made no ending of their service to their fortunate people of Oxford.

  Fortunate the people of Oxford still might be, but not so believing, and Frideswide who had been a living presence in the churchyard was now but a ghost in the trees. Few came to her for help now; only the simple-minded like Diggory Coir or children like Grace and Faithful. So rusty was the key in the door of the well-house that it took the two of them, hands twining together, to turn it and force the door.