“If you don’t change that shirt, sir, before you puts your coat on,” said Mrs. Wilkes from the kitchen window, “you’ll be sorry for it. All of a lather you must be. And we don’t want them potatoes neither. There’s plenty indoors.”
“I can’t be bothered to change,” said David.
“Lumbago for certain,” said Mrs. Wilkes. “Your death of cold it wouldn’t surprise me. And just with master Christopher expected and all. If there’s trouble in the ’ouse already, trust a man to give more.” Her attention was distracted by Zelle’s entry into the kitchen. “If it’s the children you’re wanting, ducks, I’ve no idea. Vanished since their milk.”
“I want to give them their lunch early so that they can rest after,” said Zelle. “Lady Eliot wants us to take them over for tea.”
“Perhaps they are in the secret garden, Zelle,” said David, as she came out into the kitchen garden with her arms full of small wet garments to hang on the line. “I’ll go and see.”
Zelle smiled at him as she pegged out poppy-colored smocks and sky-blue pyjamas on the line. She knew even better than he the value of what he had done for her lately. Several times he had taken her and the children over to The Herb of Grace and with great skill had somehow landed Meg and Robin with Jill, and seen to it that Nadine and George became aware of her existence. Under his able stage management they had done so, and she had used her wits while they did it. She had sat beside George through lunch one day and captivated him. She had helped Nadine cut out a frock for Caroline, and had made her apple-jelly for her. There had been other things, too. David had been very kind and very clever. And he had taken the trouble to get to know her himself, too; as Heloise the woman, not just Zelle. Her quick eye had not been able to help noticing that he liked himself taking all this trouble and being so kind, tired and preoccupied as he was; but that did not alter the kindness and the trouble.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant very much by what she said.
As he opened the gate by the guelder-rose bush, David remembered that Sebastian had gone into the secret garden. Well, his despicable rage was over. He could meet him now with gratitude for whatever invisible good the fact of him at Damerosehay had given Sally. As he closed the gate behind him, a spray of winter honeysuckle, the dew still on it, touched his face. The sudden breath of scent took him by surprise, the coolness of the dew, the perfect trumpets of pale yellow flowers against the glossy green leaves. The fact of it suddenly filled his whole consciousness, blotting out all other facts. He stood looking at it, every one of his senses absorbed by it, until it seemed there was nothing to look at in all the world but just those green leaves and pale flowers, nothing to breathe but the scent of it, nothing to feel but the cool dew on the leaves. Yet the sight of it, the scent and feel, were the least part of its value, even as his body that saw and felt and breathed was no great thing. It had its reality of invisible good, as he is, but though it was a gift to him, he in his ignorance could not even guess at what it was. His consciousness, that had narrowed to such a pinpoint, widened slowly to an awareness of an ocean surface of form and color and movement; the grey faces of men who suffered, the rosy faces of children, women’s pearly fairness or blotched unsightliness, the grace of bodies and their degradation, flowers and birds’ wings and the beautiful pelts of beasts, sunlight on the water and the flames of burning cities; all just an appearance of invisible good or evil that lived in the depths and could not be seen. Yet not in the still depths, only just below the surface where the flow of interchange was unresting and unceasing. One took and gave unendingly, and could not know what one took or what one gave, because one did not know what one was, or who or what it was that gave. One was tossed upon this surface of appearance, and could know nothing of the meaning of it, until one had passed through the fear and agony of its total loss.
He went quickly through the garden, and found Sebastian sitting on the seat with the children, making a jenny wren out of Robin’s plasticine. He had already, in the time it had taken David to subdue his rage, made a swallow and a bust of Yabbit. Stiff though they were, there was very little that he could not make with his hands. And what extraordinary hands he had! thought David, standing in front of the little group and watching. His own hands, that could not even write half a page of a letter in a manner that could be read, had hidden in shame inside his pockets. Sebastian’s hands were ugly, too long and completely wooden looking, with the veins knotted like cords, but, watching them, David was intensely aware of great creative power expressed by them, a power that was in itself an expression of an even greater good that had nothing to do with the man. A terrible power. A terrible good. They touched him, and he felt fear. Only once before had the appearance of a man’s hands moved him in this way, and then the fear had come accompanied by the glory of sound. Yet the sound in itself had been nothing apart from the silence it had yielded to the silence of his own spirit. He groped after the memory, but he could not get hold of it.
The jenny wren was finished, and Meg jumped up and clapped her hands in delight. Robin beat the hot fat cushions on his palms together, too, making a sticky adhesive sort of sound, and David clapped quickly and lightly. To the noise of applause Sebastian rose and bowed to left and right. His hands parted in a gesture of humble appreciation, inimitably graceful, and then he clasped them as he bowed once more. He sat down again, smiling impersonally yet charmingly at his audience, and then his hands fell on his knees, one within the other with palms uppermost. Memory stirred again in David, more sharply than before.
“Run along in to Zelle, kids,” he said. “She wants to give you lunch early. You are to have tea with Grandmother.”
“Gwanny,” said Robin, and grabbing the bust of Yabbit he trundled off. He liked his great-grandmother.
Meg hesitated, touching the jenny wren with the tip of her finger and looking up at Sebastian. She wanted it very badly but she thought perhaps he wanted it more. She flushed a delicate pink and said to him gently, “Would you like the little jenny?”
“No, Meg,” said Sebastian. “I made it for you.”
“Daddy, would you like the jenny?” she asked anxiously.
“No, Meg,” said David. “It’s your jenny.”
“Really and truly?” asked Meg.
“Yes, really and truly.”
Her lips parted in a seraphic smile and she took it tenderly into her keeping, folding both hands about it so that it should not fly away.
“The swallow, too,” said Sebastian.
But Meg shook her head firmly about the swallow. “For Daddy,” she said.
“Certainly,” agreed Sebastian. “Its migratory habits make it a suitably symbolic gift for your father.”
“It has folded wings,” said Meg. She had not understood what Sebastian had said. She was merely pointing out the beauties of the bird.
David, sitting on the bench beside Sebastian, looked down at the swallow lying in his hands. “The spirit of man . . . has folded wings.” The words sang in his mind, and he remembered the day years ago when he had caught the blue bird here in this garden. He remembered it tossing up into the air, and the sound of the singing. The seed of his faith, such as it was, had been sown in him then. Faith in the reality of immortal life. All music sounds its affirmation, from bird-song to the thunder of the Waldstein . . . Suddenly he remembered . . . “Run away, Meg,” he said.
Meg ran a little way and then stopped, came back and stood between Sebastian’s knees. “Good-bye,” she said, and with her hands still holding her bird she lifted her face to be kissed.
“Good-bye, Meg,” said Sebastian, and holding her clasped hands almost ceremoniously in his own, he kissed her gravely. Meg did not as a rule like being kissed, and Sebastian was the least demonstrative of mortals. Their salutation left David shaken, and brought to his mind the old grave word viaticum, in its sense of supplies for a journey. Meg ran off again, without looking at her
father, and Sebastian sat in contented silence. He did not know what he had given the child—the freedom from pain that he might have had in his last moments, perhaps, to give her lifelong freedom from some shape of fear that haunted her—but he knew that the urgency of his wish to give, at whatever present or future cost, had had a selflessness that had been counted to him as prayer and had been answered. Like Sally’s shame. But he would not know what he had been allowed to give Meg, for in this world of appearance he would not see her again.
“What an unutterable ass I am!” said David.
“Particularly at this moment?” asked Sebastian dryly.
“No,” said David. “Throughout. I heard you play the Waldstein in Paris years ago, between the wars. I did not think I could ever forget your name or you, yet I did.”
“But you did not forget the Waldstein,” said Sebastian.
“No. As you played it then it was a great affirmation of terrible good.”
“You were young, then, to be aware of the terror of good.”
“I don’t imagine I was aware of it very often,” said David, smiling. “In my impervious youth I had a magnificent conceit of myself.”
“And not now, of course,” stated Sebastian in his most completely dry-as-dust manner. In their early days together David had often wondered uncomfortably if his secretary was mocking him. Now he no longer cared if he was. When the doubt came he laughed himself.
“Now, too, at times,” he agreed with amusement. “Only I’m not impervious.”
“A most painful state of affairs,” said Sebastian sympathetically, and got up, for Mrs. Wilkes could be heard in the distance ringing the bell for lunch. They walked slowly through the garden, and at the gate he paused. “Will you be at liberty after supper tonight?” he asked. “After your wife has gone to bed?”
“Yes,” said David surprised. “But surely you’ll go to bed early yourself?”
“Not tonight,” said Sebastian. “I have never told you anything about myself, and after your great kindness to me it is in my mind that I should like to do so.”
“But why should you?” asked David. “You don’t want to.”
“Yes, I do,” said Sebastian. “I find it difficult to explain to you why. I have done you a great injustice, and I should like to make reparation. There is only one thing which it is in my power to surrender to you, and that is my reserve, which I have hugged to myself very much in the same way as a miser hugs his gold.” He smiled at the mixture of distress and apprehension on David’s face. “I know it sounds a poor sort of gift, and one which you may not wish to receive.”
“But I do,” said David stoutly. “Even if there is terror for me in your gift, if it is your gold it will be good.”
CHAPTER
17
— 1 —
Zelle had cleared away the tea and was washing up the cups and saucers in the kitchen while Lucilla and Meg played spillikins together. Margaret, in the deep armchair, was perforce resting for once because Robin was on her lap, stolidly and absorbedly turning over and over in his fat hands a glass bowl with a snowstorm inside it that Margaret had had when she was a child. Should he tire of the snowstorm, and of the little man and the red house upon which the snow fell, there was beside them on the table a seashell that sounded like the sea when you held it against your ear, that Lucilla had had when she was a little girl, and down on the floor was his father’s Noah’s ark. But he would not tire of the snowstorm under an hour and a half. Of all the toys at Lavender Cottage, it was the one that most completely stilled his restlessness and silenced his noise. To him it was the most fascinating thing in the universe.
But hardly more fascinating than was Robin himself to Margaret, as she lay back contemplating the bulge of his cheek and the drake’s-tail twist of a red curl at the back of his neck; or Meg to Lucilla as she watched the lights and shadows passing over the child’s absorbed face, and her small deft hands lifting the slithers of pale ivory without a tremor from their nest. Meg was best at spillikins because, though Lucilla had been an adept in her time, she did not now see enough to play well, and her hand shook, but it was not because she always won that Meg loved the game, but because it had belonged to Lucilla’s mother when she was a little girl.
“Wasn’t your Mummy any bigger than me when her Daddy gave her the spillikins?” asked Meg.
“A little bigger,” said Lucilla. “She had them for her sixth birthday.”
Meg knew this perfectly well, for she asked the same question every time they played together, but the question and answer gave her such untold satisfaction that she had to ask, and be told, every time.
“My great-grandmother,” she murmured.
“No, darling,” said Lucilla. “I’m that. Your great-great-grandmother.”
Meg sighed in ecstasy. Unconsciously, both to her and to Robin, that was the fascination of the beautiful and unfamiliar toys at Lavender Cottage. They had belonged to old, old people, their father, their great-uncles and their great-aunt, their great-grandmother, and back beyond them to people older still—people so old that they were now in heaven with Abraham and Elijah, when those old people had been little children. But the toys weren’t old. The snowstorm was perennially young, and so was the seashell that sounded like the sea. And the spillikins were more beautiful than ever, for the ivory took on a deeper and lovelier color with every year that passed, though the little girl who had had them on her sixth birthday was now with Elijah. The whole mystery of time and eternity breathed like a perfume from the fragile toys. Grandmother kept the spillikins in an old cedarwood box; and for the rest of her life Meg would never smell cedarwood without thinking of Elijah.
For Meg’s religious ideas at this time had been formed more by Mrs. Wilkes than by her mother, and Mrs. Wilkes leaned more to the Old Testament than the New. Sally told Meg shyly and beautifully about the Baby in the manger and the lambs carried in the arms of the Good Shepherd, and Meg listened courteously but was not as yet very deeply impressed, but Mrs. Wilkes’s dramatic accounts of the adventures of the Old Testament heroes sent her trembling to her bed and were quite unforgettable.
“And up to ’eaven ’e went,” Mrs. Wilkes would say of Elijah, “with such a clanging and a banging of that fiery chariot that you could ’ave ’eard it from ’ere to Radford. And all the angels shouted, ducks, and all the archangels blew their trumpets till the sky split right across to let ’im in. Like a thunderstorm it was, ducks. Somethink awful.”
And then Mrs. Wilkes would fling her apron over her head and herself back in the kitchen chair to demonstrate the awfulness of the noise and light. And that was the way people went to heaven. To Meg it was wondrous strange and deliciously alarming that such happenings could engulf a little girl who had once played spillikins.
“Did Elijah play spillikins, Grandmother?” she asked Lucilla.
“Yes, darling,” said Lucilla.
“Really, Mother!” protested Margaret.
“They tell me it’s a very old game, Margaret,” said Lucilla mildly. “One of the oldest. I expect Elijah played it as a little boy with bits of bone. I expect he played it with his Granny.”
“Did Daddy play spillikins with you when he was little?” asked Meg.
“Yes, darling,” said Lucilla. “He played it very well. He always beat me, as you do.”
“Did his Daddy play it with you when he was a little boy?” asked Meg.
“Yes, darling. He played well, too, but he didn’t always beat me because when your grandfather was a little boy I wasn’t so very old myself.”
Meg laid down the last spillikin, that made her victor, and folded her hands in her lap while she considered the mysteries that surrounded her. “Maurice,” she said, gravely and sweetly, as though he were beside her. Of the two little boys, he was the most real to her because she had never seen him as a man, and because Lucilla often spoke to her of the wa
y he came in and out. It was as a little boy that she thought of his coming in and out, even though she knew he had been a man when he first went to heaven in his fiery chariot.
“Does his fiery chariot make much noise?” she asked.
“When, darling?” asked Lucilla.
“When he drives down from heaven to see you,” said Meg.
Margaret picked up Robin, snowstorm and all, and went out to see how Zelle was getting on in the kitchen. It gave her the shivers when Lucilla and Meg started these conversations. She didn’t approve of them, either. Meg had far too much imagination as it was, without Lucilla inflaming it with all her ridiculous ideas. They didn’t want another genius in the family. David was more than enough.
When she had gone a crystal stillness held Lucilla and Meg. They were within their own world, as the little man and the house and the snowstorm were within theirs.
“No noise at all, darling,” said Lucilla. “Indeed, I don’t think people really go backwards and forwards from earth to heaven in real fiery chariots.”
“Mrs. Wilkes and the Bible say they do,” said Meg.
Lucilla was humbly silent, while magnificent words sounded like trumpets in her mind. “I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about. As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it I fell upon my face.” But how could she explain to Meg the meaning of the word appearance? She had not yet seen the necessity for symbols. For her the picture of a rose was a rose, cool to touch and sweet to smell. For a little while longer she would be conscious only of the unity.
“They come and go, as sunbeams do,” was all Lucilla could think of to say. “You could call a sunbeam a fiery chariot, couldn’t you? It’s warm and bright, and when it finds a chink in a curtain it runs into a room quicker than anything I can think of. But it doesn’t make any noise.”