“Like an old man wrapping us round in the folds of his cloak,” said Ben.
“H’m?” asked George sleepily.
“When we first came, and it was summer and we didn’t so much need his shelter, he just stood there with his arms held wide, welcoming us. He didn’t come very near. Tonight he’s closer.”
“H’m?” asked George again, and this time he sounded a little weary.
“He’s talking about the look of the house from the front door, darling,” explained Nadine soothingly. “It does look like that, you know. The way the stairs branch is like arms held wide.”
George shot up his left cuff and glanced at his watch. “Time for the news?”
“Not quite yet,” said Sally with relief. She hated the news, though she always heard it right through once a day from a painful sense of duty. It was right that one should know. It was wrong to hide one’s head in the sand like an ostrich. Though not wrong, she thought, for the ten minutes that remained before Big Ben struck, to cuddle oneself up in the folds of this old man’s cloak and enjoy the sense of warmth and safety that it gave. For this was no false safety. This old man’s cloak was something real, a symbol of spiritual safety that one sought with one’s eyes wide open to the probability, the certainty even, of material disaster. She had not forgotten Lucilla’s quotation about the reality of symbols.
“When you’ve finished Brockis Island, Ben, you might paint his portrait,” suggested John Adair. “You’ve not tried your hand at a portrait yet, have you? At least, not a man’s portrait. The white deer in the drawing room, of course, is an excellent likeness.”
“What of?” demanded George; and now he looked definitely worried, and the explanatory jerk of John Adair’s pipe stem towards the little stone deer in the alcove, glimmering up above them in the shadows, did not seem to help him at all.
“I can’t paint him yet,” said Ben, sitting cross-legged on the hearth, with the firelight gleaming on his absorbed face. “I don’t see him quite clearly yet. At least not his face. It’s still hidden under his hood. You see, I’ve no clue to what he looks like.”
“You’ve the house,” said John Adair.
“That’s his body. I can see that all right, the build of him, the attitude. But not the face.”
“You’ll see it soon, Ben,” said Sally comfortingly. “Summer—the build of the body; autumn—the feel of his cloak; winter—his face.” She looked round upon them all suddenly with wondering eye. “Winter. Christmas at the Herb of Grace! Where shall we all have got to by the time Christmas comes?”
“George, turn on the news,” said Nadine, taking pity on her poor husband. “It’s time, I think.”
The tolling of Big Ben filled the silence. George smiled at the comfortable familiarity of the sound, but Ben’s involuntary shiver expressed the feelings of the others very accurately. Night by night now the tolling ushered in the announcement of so many ruined hopes. George, though he worried about the state of the world as much as, and more than, anyone, was nevertheless one of those who get a lot of comfort out of hearing another fellow stating the facts of the case out loud. He then felt that his anxiety was justified, and the consequent self-inflation strengthened him to bear it. The news was followed by a talk upon atomic energy, and after that, unable to look each other in the eye, they seemed also unable to think of anything to say.
“Go to bed, Sally,” said John Adair abruptly to his daughter. “You look fagged out.”
“So she does,” agreed George, eying her anxiously. He liked Sally. No nonsense about her, and an excellent seat on a horse. She had been out riding with David this afternoon and it was his opinion that David took her too far. “Takes it out of her,” he muttered.
“Yes,” said John Adair, low and savage. He completely detested David just at present. He was draining Sally of everything she had to give and giving nothing whatsoever in return. It was unconscious, probably. He was a sick man, and the sick batten upon the strong without knowing that they do it. Nevertheless he hated David.
Startled but obedient, Sally rolled up her knitting and bade them good night. They watched her tall figure go slowly up the stairs. When she came home she had changed her riding things for a housecoat of peacock blue. The fine soft wool fell in long folds to her feet, and she had a gold belt round her waist. The light gleamed softly on her bright head. When she reached the white deer in the alcove she turned round and smiled at them, reluctant to leave them, then she turned to the right and the shadows folded themselves around her blue and gold. The room seemed darker. There was a short pause.
“Looks like one of those fellow’s angels,” said George. “That fellow—what’s his name—something to do with a bottle—know it as well as my own name.” He looked appealingly at his wife, whose postwar loss of memory was not as severe as his own.
“Botticelli?” suggested Nadine.
“That’s right,” said George.
“I don’t always like the Botticelli faces,” complained Ben. “When she turned round just then she looked more like Juliet on the balcony.”
John Adair hooted derisively, but he was pleased. “Too much muscular development for Juliet.”
“It was her face, saying good-by,” persisted Ben. “You know—‘Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow.’ I wish David had seen her like that on the stairs. You know, he’s played Romeo about a million times.”
He spoke out of his ignorance, and leaning back against his mother’s knees wondered at the sudden tremor that went through her body, and wondered too at the look John Adair gave her, sorry yet somehow merciless.
“Yes, she looked fagged out,” reiterated George worriedly. “Does she need a tonic, do you think?”
“I leave it in Mrs. Eliot’s hands,” said John Adair gently and inexorably.
Nadine could stand no more. She too rolled up her knitting. “Ben, it’s past your bedtime. I’ll come too.”
They went up the stairs, Nadine graceful as a willow wand, Ben, nearly as tall as she was, with his arm round his adored mother. George watched them.
“Yours,” said John Adair. “Lucky man.”
George leaned forward and flung a log on the fire; his face in the sudden leap of light looked old and haggard. “I don’t make her happy,” he muttered. “Can’t get the hang of it somehow.”
“Believe me, you will,” said John Adair quietly. “You’ll ask—how do I know that? Intuition, chiefly, but also a sense I have of a strong pulse of creative joy that beats in this house. That perpetual weary turning back to the past for refuge that we are all more or less guilty of these days is not the natural reaction to the challenge of this house. Maison-dieu. In this place we are urged creatively forward to an ending that is for each of us altogether good.”
George smiled. The fellow talked like book, and not the sort of book George cared about either, but he was a comforting fellow, none the less. . . . Gave you the feeling that he had the universe well in hand.
“Botticelli—that reminds me,” said his guest. “What about that bottle of whisky David brought down?”
George fetched it, and the rest of the evening passed pleasantly.
— 2 —
In the night a wild southwester from the sea sprang upon them. It sprang so suddenly that everyone except the twins woke up.
“Annie-Laurie!” ejaculated Nadine, hearing a faint chiming of fairy bells borne through the open window on the wind, and knowing that the houseboat must be swinging. “We ought to have moved them in before this.”
“They’re all right,” murmured George sleepily. “Stout little craft. How you do worry about that girl! More than you do over your own children,” he added jealously.
“Ben and the twins are safe inside the Herb of Grace,” said Nadine. “Shut the window, George. The rain’s blowing straight in.”
“Horizontal weather,” muttered
George, shutting the window. “There must be a racket out at Damerosehay.”
He went back to bed and fell asleep again, but Nadine lay awake thinking of Damerosehay. There they would be getting the full force of the wind, and the old house would be shuddering and creaking, and the trees in the oak wood would be stretching their old arms to shield it as well as they might. . . . David would be awake. . . . On just such a night as this, before the war, they had both of them lain awake and steeled their wills to give each other up. She could remember as vividly as though it were yesterday the hours of misery she had lived through that night, and in the morning she had thought the conflict won. And so it had been up to a point; she had gone back to George. But she had not ceased to love David. The love for her husband that Lucilla had assured her would eventually be born of a way of life that assumed it had not been born because she loved David too utterly to let go of him, to endure the thought of him married to another woman. Without him there in the background of her life, still loving her, still faithful to her, she could not live. To the thought of him still there she clung when life got too much for her, as other people clung to religion. It meant as much as that. . . . David waiting . . . If George should die . . . David waiting . . . But what if he waited now against his will?
The question burned into her brain. She lay in the noisy darkness facing it, and hating John Adair, who had brought her to this pass. For he had made her face it. Subtly, with no clear word spoken, yet he had made her face it. He demanded of her the ultimate denial, without reservation, and correlated with that the ultimate giving, without reservation. He asked of her the single mind, the herb of grace.
What right had he to ask it? she demanded passionately. What did he know of the kind of love that had been for years between herself and David? What he called love was just emotional enjoyment, equivalent to the feasting of a body already well nourished, not the feeding of starvation upon the bread of life. The bread of life to him was his art. What response would he make to a demand that he tear that out of his life? He did not understand the hugeness of the thing that he was asking out of his own selfishness. For what he wanted was that she set David free for his Sally.
She had faced that, too, now. In the last few weeks there had been much coming and going between Damerosehay and the Herb of Grace, and it had gradually dawned upon all the adult members of both households, as it had shone upon Lucilla in a flash of insight in the first moment, that Sally and David walking together, riding together, sailing his boat together, was a sight that somehow satisfied them with a sense of fitness. This satisfaction had not yet reached the point of being openly expressed; they were perhaps scarcely aware of it themselves, but Nadine was aware of it through every nerve of her body, and aware too of the depth and maturity of Sally’s love for David. It was a love she could not even hope to weaken. A crude possessive love, or even the romanticism that one would have expected to find in a young girl’s first passion, she would have fought. But this she could not fight. There were no tender glances, no naïve flatteries, nothing that gave any excuse for ridicule.
She was aware of Sally’s love as she was aware of the presence of spring in the world when as yet there were no green shoots or bird song, aware of it as a hidden power, sealed in with patient pain until the hour should strike. Against this she could do nothing; even if it had been possible she could not hurt so fine a thing. Nor could she any longer dislike the girl who had proved herself capable of it, and who so quietly, though perhaps unaware of what she did, put her happiness in the hands of the older woman to make or mar as she would. For that was how it was. David, self-absorbed in his own wretchedness and clinging to the past like the rest of them, was not likely to leave the familiarity of an old allegiance, even though it had become for him now a prison, unless she herself did violence to it and set him free.
Well, she was not self-deceived now. John Adair had seen to it that she should not have the excuse of ignorance. “I leave it in Mrs. Eliot’s hands,” he had said quietly, as though he trusted her. The trees of Knyghtwood, tossing and complaining in the wind, cried out with many voices. How she hated the sound of a gale in the trees. There was a nightmare quality in the rush of the great wings, the queer sudden silences broken by whisper and lament, and then again the loud cry and the clamor, with every nerve in one’s body stretched in sympathy with the mysterious anguish that wrung this crying from the heart of the world. Again! Again! It was just such a night as that other night at Damerosehay. The denial then had not been complete. Now it must be.
As though flying from the fact she suddenly slipped from her bed and reached for dressing gown and slippers. She’d start screaming if she stayed here listening to the wind any longer with George snoring beside her.
She went to the door and slipped out into the dark passage. It was quieter here; the roar of the wind seemed to come from a long way away, and the great gusts had no effect at all upon the immense strength of the house. When they smote upon this fortress there was no tremor. It was warm and safe. “Like an old man wrapping us round in the folds of his cloak.” She groped her way down the passage to the foot of the attic stairs. Hardly knowing what she did she went up them and found herself at the door of John Adair’s studio. She turned the handle and went in, felt for the matches and lit the lamp. She took a cigarette from his box, lit it, and sat down in a chair, one of the pieces of drapery tucked over her knees. In prewar days she had been too fastidious to smoke, but now her overstrained nerves often drove her to it.
It was quieter here in this north room than in her south bedroom, and she felt less tormented. Though even here the stricken trees seemed still present with her. John Adair had a passion for trees, and they looked out at her from several of his canvases, and from Ben’s painting of Brockis Island. She had not seen Brockis Island yet, for she still had not explored further than the fringe of Knyghtwood. She did not really care about woods much, even though it had been in a wood that David had first told her that he loved her. . . . David. . . . She pulled herself sharply away from the brink of that pain and found herself looking at her own portrait, at that extraordinarily lovely woman to whose perfected beauty she had not yet attained, set against the background of a wood with small blue flowers growing at her feet.
A sudden bitter little exclamation broke from her and she jumped up and went to the picture. He had altered the background without telling her, and instead of the green drapery it was the background of just such another wood as that in which David had first loved her. And the flowers about her feet, echoing the blue of her dress, were the same flowers as those on the inn signboard, the flowers of the narrow-leaved rue. How dared he! How dared he paint her so unsparingly, beautiful even with the gray in her hair and the lines upon her face, against the background of the warm love he was forcing her to deny, and with that bitter herb at her feet. She went back to her chair and smoked her cigarette furiously to the bitter end. Then she stubbed it out and forced herself to be more reasonable. How could he possibly know about the wood and David? He didn’t know. He was merely obsessed, like everyone else in this house except herself and George, with that detestable Knyghtwood. And it was natural that at the feet of the hostess of the Herb of Grace he should paint the flowers from the inn signboard. “I’m sorry, John,” she said, and helped herself to another of his cigarettes and smoked it more quietly, looking about her, reaching for the comfort of his strong presence by looking at his things. . . . It was odd how his steady, passionless love was supporting her these days. Angry though she was with him, yet she was leaning on him. . . . What a wildly untidy man he was! His books were all over the place. There was one on the floor by her chair and she bent and picked it up. Meredith. Old-fashioned. She’d never read him. The book opened of itself at the marker of a jay’s feather thrust between the pages. It marked a lyric. Startled, she read it through, hearing every word as though spoken in John Adair’s voice.
Should thy love die;
&
nbsp; O bury it not under ice-blue eyes!
And lips that deny,
With a scornful surprise,
The life it once lived in thy breast when it wore no disguise.
Should thy love die;
O bury it where the sweet wild-flowers blow!
And breezes go by,
With no whisper of woe;
And strange feet cannot guess of the anguish that slumbers below.
Should thy love die;
O wander once more to the haunt of the bee!
Where the foliaged sky
Is most sacred to see,
And thy being first felt its wild birth like a wind-wakened tree.
Should thy love die;
O dissemble it! smile! let the rose hide the thorn!
While the lark sings on high,
And no thing looks forlorn,
Bury it, bury it, bury it where it was born.
So that was it, she thought bitterly, that was why he had painted her against a background of trees. So this was what she had to do: go out into the depth of Knyghtwood, bury her past there, and come back laughing. . . . How very easy it sounded.
Suddenly everything seemed unreal. The things in the room about her were traveling away at a great speed to a great distance. She got up hastily, turned down the lamp, groped her way to the door, and down the stairs. She knew this nightmare sensation of old. It presaged moments of despair, those moments when she felt she could not longer bear to live and yet knew herself unfit to die. She’d better be in bed before the full wretchedness surged over her. It came, she knew, chiefly from deadly fatigue, but that did not make it any easier to bear.