It had been here, sitting on this flat stone, with the golden willows behind him and the sun sparkling on the river, that he had first worshipped eternity.
— 2 —
He’d been out on Boanerges and got himself mixed up in an accident. Nothing to do with him. He just came to a cross-roads and found two cars had had a collision. The police were there, and an ambulance, so he was not really needed, but all the same he stopped and did what he could to help. Two people had been killed, one of them a little boy of about four or five. Even then, though he had not been more than sixteen at the time, he’d loved children. He helped the driver of the ambulance to lift the dead child on to the stretcher. It was the first time he had seen death, and he drove home in a mad rage. He didn’t go in to lunch. He just flung Boanerges into the garage and tramped off into Knyghtwood. He did not see the wood or know where he was going. He did not see anything but the scarlet fire of his rage. That kid not to grow up. Jolly little kid he’d been, with red curly hair. That kid not to grow up and have a motor-bike and play rugger, and stand knee-deep to watch the waves come in. That kid not to know, as the glorious years came toppling one upon another, the leaping of fire in one’s blood and the strength of one’s body when one rode it like a horse over the hills, and the rain beat in one’s face, and the sun and the wind. That kid to be defrauded of it all, just be dust in the earth, with the life drained away. It was damnable! How could one live in a world where kids got killed like that? Where some damn fool, who’d been too lazy to get his brakes attended to, could crush a perfect little body to pulp, under the summer sun, with the bees humming in the heather and everything happy and nice one minute and utterly damnable the next? A world like that did not make sense. Nothing made sense. Nothing at all.
He was sitting on the flat stone among the golden willows, and he had no idea how he had got there. He remembered that the wood had been dark and cool as he came among the dense old trees and that the coolness had somehow eased his hot hurt fury. Yet he supposed that he had subconsciously swung away from the deep places of the wood, for he never liked darkness, and always made instinctively for the open places and warmth and light. It was light enough here. The sun was dazzling on the water and the willows were rods of light. His body soaked up the warmth and his rage quieted as the strength of the sun took hold of him. Literally took hold. He could have sworn that warm hands held him. It was the queerest feeling. Yet they could not be the hands of the sun, because they held the sun, too. And the butterfly that had perched on his foot. And each minute creeping thing down there in the grass. Hands of such power that they held the whole universe, of such delicacy that the butterfly was not crushed by their hold. And what they held lived, and what they laid down was no more held in life. Yet it did not matter, because there was no diminution of life. There was not less of life because a sparrow or child fell to the ground. Loss of life was something that could not happen, because life was something entirely whole. Nothing could be taken from it or added to it. It was eternal perfection to be worshipped and adored for as long as one retained consciousness of its beat and glow in one’s body. While the hands held him he vowed he would enjoy that beat and glow to the utmost, and cherish the bodies of others, so that they could enjoy it, too; especially the bodies of the children that were so lightly held, so easily laid down.
It did not occur to Tommy that day, or any day, to notice his own concern and wonder where it came from. He did not give to it the name of love, or wonder if his own warm anguish of pity was a faint echo of some tremendous compassion identifiable with the life that held the universe in being, and of which the symbol of the hands had been given to him because it was with his own hands that he would serve his fellow men, and through them his God. He did not think of God at all, but only of life, and though he would always now recognize life as being transcendent as well as immanent, it was in its immanence that he chose to worship it. The artist’s gift of wonder had not been vouchsafed to Tommy. As a general rule he wondered about nothing. Only, when he came to this particular place, he would wonder at the way in which his childhood’s love of numbers had led him to his manhood’s love of life. And in this place he would remember the hands that had held him as men remember their first love, and know they will remember when they have forgotten everything else. For with Tommy, though he did not know it, the experience had been a falling in love. The love of a woman, if it ever came, would in comparison be as the light and warmth of a candle to the light and warmth of the sun.
— 3 —
He got up and stretched himself, for time was getting on, and the kids must be carted back to tea. But he was reluctant to leave this place that he liked. To sit here and remember that day, even though he sat broiling in the sun, refreshed him as though he had drunk at a spring of cold water. He felt that way sometimes when he was doing his work and remembering, as he often did, old Æsculapius and surgeons and physicians down the ages who had handed on their wisdom one to the other for the renewing of life in the bodies of men. He grinned, thinking what a study Aunt Margaret’s face would be if he were to tell her that dissecting a corpse or watching someone have their insides cut out refreshed him. Only he would not tell her, fun though it would be, because his love of his work was something that he did not seem able to talk about. And to say that he liked work better than anything else would sound quite crackers. Yet it was true. In spite of this place, and Mother and Robin, it was a bit boring being at home, and he was always panting to get back to work. “Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks.” That was a line of some soppy poem. No, it wasn’t, it was a psalm, and Uncle Hilary would have a fit if he heard him quoting it in this connection. Good Lord! how crazy one’s thoughts were, tumbling out of one’s mind like sausages out of a machine. He grabbed Robin and began to dress him, and the little boy was happy in his hands, and did not mind leaving the water when it meant being handled by Tommy.
“Come on, youngster. Honey for tea.”
He picked up Robin and strode back through the wood, whistling like a blackbird. The wood was very old, and that whistling had echoed in its aisles through many centuries. The young men changed, and the tunes whistled were not the same in one generation as another, but the life and the song that the wood held within its own were eternal.
CHAPTER
11
— 1 —
If the love of a woman would never mean a great deal to Tommy, to Ben just now it meant more than anything had ever meant; except his painting, with which it was so inextricably confused that he could not put paint upon canvas without thinking of Zelle, or see Zelle without wanting to paint her just exactly as he was seeing her at the moment. The gallery of his mind was hung all round with portraits of Zelle in every attitude, mood and frock that she possessed. He understood now why so many paintings labelled “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife” are inflicted upon the world. He had deplored them in times past. From now on he would be obliged to regard them with a tolerant eye.
He had only lately discovered the joys of portrait painting, for until now it had been the beauty of earth and of legend that had absorbed him. They had seemed one, even as now the thought of Zelle and the thought of painting were one. The figures of legend had clothed themselves in natural beauty. The familiar spirits of Knyghtwood and The Herb of Grace, the Cistercian lay brother who had been the pilgrims’ host at the inn and had fed the wild animals in the Buckpen, and the great white deer who had been with him in the woods and whom the twins called the Person with the Horns, had to his imagination taken form from the natural beauty they haunted. In his picture of the white deer, that hung now in the drawing-room of The Herb of Grace, the body of the deer seemed formed of moonlight and his antlers of the branches of the winter trees, growing in such a manner that they formed a cross in the centre. The shadowy figures of the red deer who fled after him, as men pursue the vision that always eludes them, were clouds that chased the moon, and the picture was full of the wind of
their frantic chase. And when he had painted the Brother, the dark wood and the shadows of The Herb of Grace had gone to the forming of the great cruciform figure with arms held out in welcome.
Lucilla had said once that a wood is a foreshadowing of the fact of paradise, and when it lived in spring he agreed with her. The smallest petal of a flower, held in life, took the curve of the hand that held it, as did the earth itself, and the sun and moon. When the petal fell, the curve of life would go out of it. The unseen thrust through into the seen, like a hand into a glove, holding and moulding, revealing the shape of things to come. Always in nature the curve and the cross, life and death; the summer trees with the rich curve of foliage and the winter trees like the antlers of the deer.
And now he was beginning to see the bodies and faces of men and women as he had hitherto seen the natural world. In portrait painting, too, there was the curve and the cross. The Italian masters with their flowing lines had seemed to have their minds and imaginations fulfilled with life. El Greco had seen the rigid lines of death in every face and form. And in this twentieth century the pictures of some of the modems were as angular and disjointed as the times. Zelle’s cheek, when he turned to look at her walking so lightly beside him, had the curve of a flower-petal, and her whole body the flowing lines of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin with St. Anne. Sebastian Weber, as day by day life loosened its hold upon him, looked more and more of an El Greco.
And just as the figures of legend had to his imagination clothed themselves in natural beauty, so now he saw the spirits of men wearing material form, as the white deer had worn the moonlight and the Brother the strength of wood and the darkness of shadow, moulding it from within. One felt an eavesdropper sometimes, painting a face. You knew things you were not supposed to know. But Sally’s father, John Adair the portrait painter, who had taught him all he knew about painting, had said that did not matter provided you held your tongue. You need not feel guilty. Did you feel guilty when after an hour spent in painting a tree you found yourself a little nearer to the animating, sustaining spirit of immortal life? You felt humbled, perhaps slightly scared, but not ashamed, for you knew yourself possessed of a knowledge that was intended for you. And as with trees, so with men when you painted them. You felt your way into union with, and some infinitesimal knowledge of, a microcosm of the same spirit. Polluted, as a pool of water can be polluted, but possessing within itself the possibility of a clarity beyond belief. It was upon that you fixed your mind when you painted a portrait, so much so that sometimes you painted a face not as it was now, but as it would be in five years’ time, when the soul of the man or woman you painted had moved a little nearer to her possible perfection. “Have you ever had it happen the other way on?” Ben had once asked John Adair, and the painter had replied grimly, “Only once, thank God. And then it wasn’t evil that I painted into that face so much as fear. I believe the knowledge of the possibility of damnation, even the unconscious knowledge, to be the source of all fear.”
Now that the faces of men and women had become his study it astonished him to find how often he caught a look of fear on a face. He was constantly afraid himself, but he had imagined he was abnormal in that way, and had not realized how deeply fear was woven into the fabric of human personality. He had little fear of physical danger, but he was afraid of decisions, of responsibility, of hurting those he loved, and he could see that John Adair was quite right, for in each case his fear could be traced back to the fear of wrong-doing. And he could see that it might be the same with the physical fears. The shrinking of the nerves from noise, from darkness, from the supernatural, from pain, all had their roots in the fear of physical death, a change which to his mind was not so dreadful in itself as being the image and symbol of the second death.
The ubiquity and depth of fear that he saw shocked him, revealing as they did the depth of that darkness of which men were afraid. It was a relief to look in a face in which he did not see fear. Only once or twice had he seen a shadow of it in Grandmother’s face, never in Hilary’s. Though Hilary’s humility would never think it of him, Ben supposed he had reached a level of being in which there could hardly be the possibility of loss. Yet one never saw fear in Tommy’s face either. But, then, Tommy, at the other end of the scale, had no belief in his own soul, and you cannot fear the loss of what you don’t believe in. And he had no imagination to bring what he had not yet experienced into the realm of possibility, and no nerves to shrink from it if he had. Yet he did not envy Tommy either the self-confidence of his fearlessness or the definiteness of his machines. Deeply aware though Tommy might be of the glory of life, Ben did not think he ever felt the thrilling inwardness of things. It was fear and uncertainty that admitted one to that. It was the fear of loss that made the artist cry out for the invisible beauty of a flower in the sun, that he might capture the rumor of the one in the other before the transient thing fell to the ground. And the possibility of failure kept alive in one that sense of personal nothingness that seemed to call out in otherness such a depth of glory. One could sink one’s nothingness in the otherness and come back refreshed.
“It’s odd how when you’re in love it can all come to a focus in one person,” he said to Zelle. Only he did not call her Zelle, but by her own name of Heloise.
“What all comes to a focus in me?” asked Zelle. They were walking quickly now, for Ben wanted to get to Brockis Island, his special place, and show it to her. His hand no longer held her, but sometimes the rough tweed of his coat touched her bare arm as they swung along under the trees, and she thrilled at the light touch, longing for Brockis Island and the kisses he would give her there. It was strange to be longing for a man’s kisses, because for much of her hard young life she had been warding them off. But, then Ben’s odd, delicate, fastidious love-making was no more like other men’s than he himself was like any other man she had known or imagined. No, that was not quite true, for in the worst of the bad days she had comforted herself with an imagined impossible lover not unlike Ben. The fantasy lover had been wonderful to look at, of course, which Ben was not, but he had been gentle as Ben was and he had loved in her some suffering thing, hidden in some place of deep peace within her, that had nothing to do with her being a woman, and nothing to do with those dark fires that lit up when men wanted her who were not gentle, and that made her so terrified both of herself and them.
“What do you mean, Ben?” she asked again.
“When I try to paint it isn’t only the shape and color that I like,” said Ben, “it’s the something that you don’t see creating the shape and color from within. And possessing it from without, too, like the invisible air that holds us. It’s hard to explain. And why the dickens do I use such a milk-and-white word as ‘like’? Worship would be better. ‘With my body I thee worship,’ the man says in the marriage service. You seem all the beauty of the world that I worship, and the invisibility that makes it visible, focused in just one being whom I can love and serve mortally and immortally with all the powers of my body and my soul.”
Zelle was not sure that she knew quite what he was talking about; and she was not sure that he was as sure as he thought he was. Compared to her he was a child in experience and knew things chiefly by intuition. She was the opposite. Her intuition had consisted in an almost desperate conviction that a woman’s experience should not be like this, and that in the face of all impossibility one day hers would not be. Somehow or other she had gone on believing that it would not be, and had kept that something hidden like a child within her, inviolate against that day.
As she walked with this impossible young lover of hers in this faery wood that could not be true (and yet he was here beside her, and yet the trees of her paradise arched over her head) she felt almost dizzy with thankfulness.
There had been times when the hidden child in her had seemed asleep and the fires had not frightened, but excited her madly, waking up something else that was deeply hidden in her, some primeval woman w
ho lived licentiously for the moment only, so that she had wanted to plunge into them and lose the self that suffered so and be done with it forever. And there had been other times when to refuse men what they wanted had seemed cruelty, like refusing a cup of water to a thirsty child. And other times when the fires had died down to a warm glow that allured with a promise of desperately needed comfort. Yet always the deep instinct of self-preservation, not of the body but of the self that suffered, had conquered against every temptation to oblivion or unlawful comfort. Always fear had returned in time to save her, so that now she could walk lightly under these trees, beside this impossible boy who so deeply satisfied all her passionate maternity, and feel more of laughter than of shame when he said that he worshipped her. And feel glad, too, of her hard experience. He might need it, so unprepared did he seem to her for life in the world as she knew it; he might need it as much as she needed his intuition.