But the awakening now was not to darkness, but to the silvery peace of his special place in Knyghtwood, and to the sound not of the clock striking, but of a voice saying gently, “Meg.” The dream memory of the nightmare had not gripped him as the nightmare itself used to do. Though he was trembling when he woke, he shook himself free of it quickly and could even think what a ridiculous childish nightmare it was. Yet in the moment of waking the figure of Weber seemed curiously near to him, as though the man standing by him. He almost spoke to him, and then he saw that Weber was still sitting on the flat rock, and that it was he who had said “Meg.” He saw Meg drop her pebble and go to him, and though he was horribly jealous, he nevertheless fixed his eyes balefully upon a lady-bird crawling up a stalk of grass beside him, so as not to pry upon the two lovers down below. He had a feeling that Weber had called Meg to him that the fact of her might keep at bay the thoughts he did not want, just as the fact of her had banished the last of the nightmares from her father’s mind, almost as though the new-born baby had lifted the Thing right off him and taken it upon herself. Staring at the lady-bird, he heard Mouse barking, and then the two of them murmuring softly to each other as lovers do, though the subject-matter of their talk seemed only the relative merits of honey and strawberry jam, and then they went away.
Sitting on the rock, looking with distaste at Maria Flinders, David was suddenly reminded of Anne. It was the fair hair and the smirk. Anne had not smirked exactly, for he could never have loved a smirking woman, but she had smiled as a woman smiles who knows her own power. And no wonder, for her snow-queen blonde loveliness, combined with her sparkling vitality, had been the most bewitching enchantment he had ever met. And she had had the wit to use both to get what she wanted, and she had wanted David desperately, but not the strength of character to want the same thing long . . . Any more than he had . . . It was the first time David had owned that to himself, for, while it lasted, their passion had seemed to have the quality of eternity in it, like bad illness, and, as with illness, now it was over it astonished him that he could ever have thought it would not cease.
Passion, like illness, was of the body only. He and Anne had had a motor smash together in America and had been lucky to escape with their lives. He tried to imagine what it would have been like to have been suddenly flung together into the grey dimness of the life beyond. For a grey dimness it would have seemed to them, utterly rooted in the life of the body as both of them had been. For there was so little that such as he and she could have taken with them when they died. Stripped of everything that belongs to this world, practically nothing. On his side, only a single-minded devotion to his art and, growing out of it, a hard and aching hunger for a beauty that would have blinded him and burned him to nothing had he seen it only distantly and far away. For at that time this shame of self-loathing had not fully come to him. Now he had that. Perhaps that was something. On her side, he did not know. He had known next to nothing about her, he realized now. They would have been like the dead lovers in Flecker’s terrible poem, two desolate wraiths blown away by the wind.
He got up from his stone and picked up Maria Flinders from hers. It was a temptation to put the creature face downwards in the stream and leave her there, but Meg was attached to her and it was incumbent upon him to carry her home. To spend the next five years looking at Maria Flinders (for Meg was faithful in love) and being reminded of Anne was just a small penance that he must pay for his own unfaithfulness. He sat down again with Maria in the crook of his arm, for he was afraid to be separated from her lest he should forget her.
Looking down the lovely length of his special place, to where the river was a sheet of light at the bottom of the clearing, he could not see her, but her angularities stuck into him, and for a moment or two the three women seemed present with him here, Nadine, Anne and Sally. Nadine. That was all right now. How ridiculous that they could have loved as they had and now be so serene in affection! Anne. Soon for her it would be over, and for him no more than an abiding shame. But Sally. That was different. That might be forever, if one chose it so. Already his quiet love for her had stood firm beneath the turmoil of his love for Anne. It had been extraordinary to come home and find his marriage just what it had always been. He had not expected that. But, then, though he was not single-minded in love, she was, and upon her constancy their life together was grounded. But he could be if he chose. He had worked at his art, sweated at it, disciplined himself for it, denied himself for it. He could do the same with his marriage. That something beyond life that he ached for was present in life. One could worship it, and in some minute sense possess it, in a three-fold discipline of love and work and shame; for that particular discipline was one of the trinities that must not be divided. A kingfisher flashed across the clearing, cutting the light like a sword. That had happened on the day when he and Sally had met each other here. He could see Sally’s face now, amazed and almost stunned as she looked at him. And she had told him afterwards that he had looked the same. He had not understood their amazement then, but he did now. They had seen each in the other not only a mortal lover but, under God and if they chose it so, the instruments of each other’s immortality. She had chosen already. He, who until now had sought in her chiefly his own comfort, chose now. “I will,” he said, and took out his handkerchief and tied a knot in it; why, he had no idea. “Sally,” he said, “Sally,” and heard her voice replying, “What were you seeing?” She had asked him that before, here in this place, and he had said then, “A kingfisher. A heavenly bird.” Now he said, “A sword,” and knew that he had cut himself off forever from every woman except Sally.
“What we ought to be seeing,” she had said after that, “are the twins and Mary. I brought them for a walk, and now I’ve lost them.”
— 3 —
He blinked in utter bewilderment, and found that it was Tommy standing beside him, with Robin on his back. “Did you say you’d lost the twins?” he asked vaguely.
“I’ve been saying so for the last five minutes,” complained Tommy bitterly, “and all you did was tie a knot in your handkerchief. I always did suspect you of being more or less crackers. That’s proved it. Those blasted twins! I’ve shouted myself hoarse. Take this kid of yours and cart him home. I’d better go a bit farther. Mother will make a stink of a row if I turn up without the twins. Here’s the kid.”
He shed Robin and Yabbit at David’s feet and was gone, trampling away through the undergrowth like a young heifer. And what, wondered David, had he been doing with Robin? Even to his inexperienced eye his son’s small shirt seemed buttoned wrong. And where was Zelle? He believed he paid her a handsome sum to keep her eye on his children, but her eye appeared to be upon neither this afternoon. He felt extremely irritable. He had been so shaken by shame and resolve that he was tired out, and exhaustion always made him feel like a cat with its fur stroked the wrong way. And the sight of Yabbit did nothing to improve his temper; for the fact that Maria Flinders had reminded him of Anne made him now see a likeness to himself in Yabbit. The creature, rehabilitated by Sebastian, had a pleasing enough exterior, elegantly masculine in shape and tailoring, but there was a suggestion of effeminacy in the genteel pink-lined ears, and the pleading look in the eyes was bogus. Yabbit had nothing to plead about. No stuffed rabbit ever had a more comfortable home. Stuffed rabbit. There lay the rub. For that elegance of outline, that gentility and pathos, enclosed nothing but sawdust. Burst Yabbit and there would be nothing there at all but dusty stuff drifting on the wind and a deflated outer garment of grubby flannel. Façades. That was what he and Yabbit were. And behind the façades only wraiths like the dead lovers in Flecker’s play. Nothing.
He got up quickly, suddenly ashamed of his shame. He had been more or less absorbed in it the entire afternoon. As things now were with him, he must carry his shame until the end of life, but such absorption was merely another form of the self-engrossment of which he was so ashamed. He had no business to be nothing.
He was something. He was Sally’s lover and husband and the father of her children. He could start from there. “Come on, Robin,” he said. “There’s honey for tea.” Robin had sat down backwards in the stream and was extremely wet. Whatever Tommy had been doing with him, he had at least kept his clothes dry, David thought with compunction.
“Cawwy me,” said Robin.
“You must walk a bit to dry off,” said David. “Come on.” Holding Maria Flinders and Yabbit in one arm, he held out his other hand to Robin. “Come on, Robin.”
Robin removed himself instantly from the stream, for he vaguely remembered that that irritable note in his father’s voice preceded a slapping if not attended to. He took his father’s hand and smiled at him, his cheeks bulging up and pushing his eyes shut, his two bottom teeth extremely prominent. His cheeks were scarlet with his exertions in the stream, and his hand, though wet, felt in David’s warm and fat as a minute muffin just out of the oven. They walked slowly through the wood, for though Robin could run fast until he fell, his walking pace was that of a tortoise. Running to the end of the world, he forgot himself, but walking he felt as top-heavy as a peony on an inadequate stalk. After a bit he didn’t like it. He sagged at the knees and his tummy ached.
“Cawwy me,” he insisted.
David sighed and heaved him up on his arm, for he had never learned the trick of bouncing him on his back and remaining upright, as Tommy did. Robin smiled across at the occupants of his father’s other arm.
“Mwya Finders and Yabbit,” he said.
“Three of you,” groaned David. “Where on earth is Zelle?”
“Wiv Ben,” said Robin. He had early acquired the habit of knowing where people were. Like all Personages, he liked to know the whereabouts of the royal entourage.
“Is she, indeed?” said David, and fell into thought that was unconnected with himself for the first time that afternoon. Ben and Zelle. What would Nadine say to that? She was not exactly a humble woman, and for her children, extensions of herself, her ambitions soared. She had accepted obscurity for herself with a good grace, but she would not for her children, if she could help it. David did not doubt that in her present imaginings (for he supposed that even in Nadine’s well-ordered existence the usual ridiculous daydream masquerade was somewhere firmly battened down) Ben guided the destinies of nations as Foreign Secretary, with the assistance of a wealthy wellborn wife. Zelle was neither. She would fight Zelle, as she had already fought Ben’s painting. David sighed and frowned worriedly. It had distressed him to come back from America and find Ben pledged to the F.O. A worse Civil Servant he couldn’t imagine, or a finer artist. But everything had seemed settled, and he had been afraid to interfere between Ben and his parents. Father and mother and child. That was another of the trinities with which one must not interfere. He looked at Robin, whose top-heavy sleepy head was now lolling against his shoulder, and it seemed to him that Sally walked beside them. The puppets on his other arm, Anne and the David Eliot who had imagined that he loved her, were merely puppets.
“Heavens, Robin, you weigh a ton,” he groaned, but Robin, too, had a tendency to self-absorption, and his concern with his weight was only lest it should be put down.
“Cawwy!” he commanded sleepily.
There was a short cut from the clearing to the green gate, and David had taken it. It was with profound relief that he saw the strong walls of The Herb of Grace shining through the trees, and with greater relief that a few moments later he saw Zelle running down the path to meet him at the blue gate.
“Do you ever carry this child any distance?” he asked, as he transferred Robin, Maria Flinders and Yabbit from his arms to hers. “If so, don’t. You’ll get a rupture.”
“ ’E can perfectly well walk a little distance,” said Zelle.
“Not if he doesn’t want to,” said David.
“You must be fir-r-r-m,” said Zelle with a touch of severity.
Stretching his cramped limbs, David looked down at her. There was gentleness in his eyes, but something, too, of judgement, or of summing up, and she flushed. She braced herself, the child held on her hip with strong and lovely ease, and looked him bravely in the eyes. “It is I who should ’ave been looking after Meg and Robin this afternoon,” she said. “I am sorry. I went for a walk with Ben.”
“That was nice for Ben,” said David with a touch of sarcasm. He had seen little of Zelle, and when they had been together he had just endeavoured to be kind without noticing her very much. The great man patronising his children’s nursery governess. This being kind to those who in the bad old days had been called one’s dependants, how detestable it was; no more than a flung coin, costing nothing, and undeserving of the name of kindness. “Charity suffereth long and is kind.” If charity and kindness did not hold on, one on each side, to suffering and patience, they both turned at once into patronage. What a frightful thing! For the first time he looked attentively at Zelle, and liked the way in which, though her flush deepened, she did not shrink from his scrutiny. Her curly hair had been pushed back from her broad wise forehead (probably by Ben, he thought) and he saw how deeply scored it was by lines of anxiety and concentration, lines that had no business to be there at her age, and behind their sparkling vitality her eyes were somehow sombre. She’d obviously been through something. Most of the vivid lipstick she usually wore had been removed from her mouth (probably also by Ben), and for the first time he noticed its strength, and the determination of her pointed chin. She’s not pretty, he thought, but she’s got what it takes. He knew her already to be sensible and tender, for he had a keen eye for anything that concerned Meg, and that much he had been careful to verify in Meg’s governess, but the strength and courage in her took him by surprise.
“That’s all right, Zelle,” he said. “And I repeat—it was nice for Ben.” There was no sarcasm in his tone now, but real sincerity, and an undercurrent of meaning which for a moment or two she did not understand. Her lips parted in surprise and she looked at him as keenly as he had been looking at her. Then she turned and fell into step beside him as they walked together up the flagged path. Her heart leaped with joy, but David’s sank. Good Lord! now I’ve let myself in for something, he groaned within him. He would say for patronage that it did not involve one in any bother.
CHAPTER
13
— 1 —
Roused to fresh devotion to duty by David’s unexpected alliance, Zelle was at the blue gate to relieve Sebastian of Meg when they arrived by the longer way round ten minutes later. And this time Ben came with her.
“We are late?” asked Sebastian anxiously. “This English tea hour. I know its importance.”
“No,” comforted Zelle, who knew how he felt about the English tea. “It’s not till five at The ’Erb of Grace. And at Damerosehay we ’ad lunch early, you remember, so that there should be no danger ’ere. Come, Meg, mignon. You must wash your ’ands.”
“I had a nice time,” said Meg.
She was not as self-absorbed as Robin, but she did think it was important that she should enjoy herself. It seemed to her that the beautiful world about her demanded enjoyment. She could feel the grass enjoying her when she ran over it, and she liked to feel its pleasure, so it was only fair that she should enjoy the grass.
“And Mouse has had a nice time,” said Meg, as Zelle led her up the path. “And Maria Flinders is still having it. I left her behind fishing. We must fetch her after tea. I did not want to stop her nice time.”
“She did not catch anything and she got tired of it,” said Zelle. “So Daddy brought ’er ’ome.”
“I hope you had a nice time, Sir,” said Ben shyly.