Reaching back to that day, she could not visualize things but she could feel. It was a glow of warmth that she felt, like a drench of sunshine, only possessing not her body only but her whole being, and holding the same annihilation of time and distance that is the miracle of light. All things were present with her then, all things and persons that knowingly she possessed in love, and all to which her awareness reached out in love, but of which her finite mind could make no symbol. She had it all in the glow and the light, in the tiny fraction of time between the closing of her eyes and the opening of them again, and the lifting of her head in renewed purpose. The renewal brought no change in her outlook, no fresh direction to her life, merely a strengthening of all that she had and was. She would not, afterwards, remember much of this moment, though she would remember till she died the brilliant holly tree beside the path and the clump of ferns and the mossy rock.
She looked about her. The hoofprints were there no longer. She was not surprised. She knew there had been no deer in Knyghtwood for many years. As she remembered her childhood, came near the buck pen again after so long, it was natural she should have been fanciful just for the moment. The twins and Mary had also disappeared. She was not surprised at this either, nor disturbed. They’d gone to the buck pen. They’d been there before, they said, and knew the way. She’d not pursue them into a place that she felt belonged only to children. She’d wait for them here and rob that holly bush for the Herb of Grace. She’d never seen such holly, glowing here like fire in the heart of the wood.
— 2 —
José and Jerry and Mary ran eagerly on along the path. Last time they had come to the buck pen it had been autumn, but now it was nearly Christmas. It would be different today. Not that they could really remember what it had been like before, apart from the light and the warmth and the creatures, but it would be bound to be different now. Everything was different at Christmas.
Upon each side of them the ground rose steeply, so that they ran along the narrow path between two walls of gnarled beech roots and great clumps of fern. A rabbit lolloped ahead of them and a jay darted past. The path sloped downhill now, as though coming to a hollow in the wood, what Jill called “a bottom.” Then it took a sharp turn to the right and ended abruptly against a great rampart of holly that completely filled the space between the banks. The rabbit, however, was not discouraged; they saw its white scut disappearing beneath the holly. And they were not discouraged either. They had got through before, they remembered now, led by a blackbird, and though they had got their clothes in a great mess Jill had not scolded. She never scolded about torn and dirty garments. She knew them to be inevitable if one was ever to do anything worth doing. They went flat on their fronts, and Jerry first, followed by José, followed by Mary, they wriggled their way along the small tunnel through the holly that had been made by the passage of many creatures going in and out between the buck pen and the wood. It was extremely prickly, damp, dark, and uncomfortable, but they took no notice of that. “Scrape, scrabble, and scrooge, Rat,” encouraged Mole in the van, and Rat behind him scraped and scrabbled and scrooged.
“How does the Person with the Horns get in?” she wondered aloud, as they paused to get their breath and remove prickles out of themselves. “He couldn’t get through here.”
“Jumps over the top,” said Jerry. “He’s a Fairy Person. He can jump as high as the moon.”
“Hundreds of years ago, when all the deer came here to be fed, did they all jump over the top?”
“No,” said Jerry. “There were breaks in the holly hedge then. It’s grown all round since. Come on.”
They went on again, wriggling downhill all the time, and suddenly they were there. They rolled down a grassy bank, just as they had done before, sat up, and opened their eyes.
As Jerry had guessed, in the last hundred years a great rampart of holly and yew had grown all round the buck pen, keeping it inviolate, so that the feet of men never trod it now. A few of the older country people, or a few of the younger who like Jill had found their way into it as children, knew vaguely that it existed somewhere in Knyghtwood, but that was all. It was now the possession of the creatures only. Once the foresters had fed them here in the winter, but not now. Yet it appeared that in this place they were still cared for. No cold winds could penetrate to this sheltered hollow; there were berries in abundance for the wild things, grass and water. Traps were never set here, and men with their guns never came near with their terror.
A grownup coming to this place would have seen a beautiful green lawn in the midst of the wood, one of those lawns for which this bit of country was famous, with a stream running through it, and built upon its banks the ruins of an old stone building that might have been a chapel in the woods, or a hermitage used by the monks from the Abbey, and later still, perhaps, a shelter used by the foresters when they came to feed the deer.
Three of the walls still stood, with narrow lancet windows in them, but the fourth wall and the roof were gone. Yet it still made an adequate shelter, for the giant yews growing round it stretched their branches to meet each other, and woven together made a thick green roof. Blazing hollies that stood upon either side of the entrance, roots of primrose and violet and foxglove in the grass, tall iris swords by the stream, thickets of bramble here and there, clumps of hawthorn and the long thorny branches of wild rose showed what a bower of flowers must be here in spring and summer. The stream, where it widened out into pools, would itself be emblazoned with color, carrying upon its breast floating islands of flowers, buck bean and water pimpernel and bur reed.
Though it was December there was no lack of color in the buck pen because of the birds, robins and tits, bullfinches, jays, yellowhammers, a couple of kingfishers, and the green woodpecker. The white owl was here too, sitting motionless and beautiful upon a branch of the yew that stretched like a lintel over the front of the stone building by the stream. All the birds from Knyghtwood seemed to have gathered here this afternoon, and their glancing wings made a web of color in the dear air. So golden was the air, so bright and warm, that it was as though amber wine brimmed the buck pen like a cup.
The animals were not so much in evidence as the birds, but small stirrings in the grass, a glimmer of bright eyes peeping from the bushes, the outline of small furred bodies seen and then not seen, told of their presence. They were here in their numbers, and they were evidently not afraid, for they did not scamper away from the children. That was the wonder of the buck pen; nothing here seemed afraid. Some strong influence, lasting through the centuries, had made of this place a sanctuary, so that the creatures did not prey upon each other here. And more than that, at Christmas time this seemed a place where they not only did not hurt each other, but came for healing after they had been hurt. A rabbit hopped past the children on three legs, holding up a fourth that had been injured, and disappeared inside the little ruined building where the owl sat. And a little later a bird with a hurt wing flew after him with ungainly flight. And he was followed by a badger—yes—actually—a real stripy badger. And the children saw other little creatures darting through the grass and going in with their hurts.
“Did we go in, too, when we were here before?” Jerry asked José, looking at the ruined building where the owl sat.
“I don’t ’member,” said José, puzzled.
“Let’s go now,” said Jerry.
But for a little while they stood still, hand in hand, just looking, awed and shy. The sun was setting now and the glory dazzled them.
“Is there a light inside?” whispered José, rubbing her eyes.
“Yes,” whispered Jerry. “There’s someone there.”
They looked at each other inquiringly.
“We haven’t anything the matter with us,” said José.
“ ’Specs we have, that we don’t know about,” said Jerry hopefully. “People have things the matter with their hearts and fall down, and don’t know abou
t it until they wake up dead.”
The sunset deepened all about them. The sky above, feathered and delicately tinted with small clouds of saffron and rose-pink, bent over them like the arched wings of a bird; and in the stream below, in every polished leaf and blade of grass, the glory was reflected. The birds of earth, beneath the great brooding wings, were singing softly, the radiance of their feathers deepening in the golden light. There was a fragrance in the air as though the fires of sunset drew from the heart of things a distillation of worship, and behind the clear bird voices, within the great silence, a rhythm, like heartbeats felt but not heard. The berries on the holly bushes that stood one on each side of the ruined chapel glowed like a thousand lamps, and within, the light shone more and more brightly and made a gold path from the door to the children’s feet.
Hand in hand they trod the bright path through the warm and golden air and came to the ruined chapel, and hand in hand they went inside.
— 3 —
When she had filled her basket with holly Jill sat down on the rock and waited happily for the twins. She did not find the waiting irksome, for she had been born one of those fortunate people who are never in a hurry and never restless. She had never felt restless in her life. In all that she did, in all that she saw, she was aware of a deep upspringing wonder, as though she did it or saw it for the first time. She was blessed with a mind neither retrospective nor anxious; the past and the future did not pull her two ways with remorse and dread, and the lovely freshness of each new-made moment was apparent to her focused vision.
As she sat on the rock she was not consciously thinking any more of the mystery of that moment when she had thought she saw the shining hoofprints on the path; she was watching a nuthatch running like a little mouse up the trunk of the tree opposite her, listening for the tap of its beak, feasting her eyes upon the glow of the holly berries above; yet because of it she saw a little more deeply into the beauty of bird and berry, heard a music in the tappings that she would not have heard before. And so it would be for the rest of her life.
The music of the nuthatch was lost in the music of small feet running, and the twins and Mary were with her again, incredibly dirty, leaves in their hair, mud on their faces and their reefer coats, but with very pink cheeks and candle eyes. Jerry was carrying a great branch of holly whose berries were so bright and lovely that even those in Jill’s basket looked a little dim in comparison, and José clutched (wonderful for December) a tiny bunch of wild white violets. “They were growing inside,” she said. Jill did not ask inside where; she did not, like Sally, question them as to where they had been or what they had seen. She knew how worrying, even how agonizing sometimes, the questions of grownups can be to children whose capacity for experience so far outstrips their capacity for talking about it. And in afterlife it’s the other way round, thought Jill; adult and educated folks seemed to experience so little of any consequence and yet to say such a vast and wearisome amount about it. Besides, she thought, questions are intrusive in any case. What people did not tell you about themselves was none of your business.
“Come along now, my ducks,” was all she said. “We must hurry if we’re to get home before it’s dark.”
But they astonished her. Before she had time to get up from her rock José had flung herself into her arms. Jerry didn’t commit himself that far, but he butted his head against her shoulder, and then stood smiling at her out of his candle eyes. Mary meanwhile leaped from the rock to her shoulder and draped herself there like a dirty white feather boa, licking her ear. Jill, her arms full of José, smiled at by Jerry, licked by Mary, felt herself as though wrapped round in warmth and light. It might have been a cloak of fire that she wore, only she was neither burned nor blinded; she had not felt this way since Alf had held her in his arms and loved her. These three, also, were loving her.
The astonishing demonstration of affection ended as abruptly as it had begun. Jerry, suddenly recalling crumpets for tea, headed immediately for home, holding his blazing branch of holly aloft like a torch, and Mary dived off Jill’s shoulder and bustled after him, but José, though she scrambled off Jill’s lap, still kept close. “For you,” she said, holding up the bunch of violets.
“For Mummy,” prompted Jill.
“No,” said José. “For you.”
“For Mummy,” insisted Jill. “I’ve had you all the afternoon. Mummy hasn’t. Let Mummy have the violets.”
José scowled, then capitulated, for when they were out for a walk she was used to Jill finding pretty things for her to take back to Mummy. Then suddenly she smiled and ran along the path after Jerry, holding her violets very carefully. This time she had picked them herself for somebody. The sensation was quite novel, and most extraordinary, yet pleasing, and lent wings to her feet. Jill, contented, followed after.
At the door of the Herb of Grace they paused and looked back. It was nearly dark now, with the stars pricking through. The last fires of sunset were still flaming low in the west and a thousand candles had been lit upon the trees that stretched their shade deep beyond deep in the dark wood.
CHAPTER
18
— 1 —
Every grownup at the Herb of Grace and at Damerosehay was determined that this should be the children’s Christmas, such a Christmas as they had not known before in their unsettled young lives. They themselves looked forward to it with a certain amount of dread. . . . The state of the world and their own fatigue combined to make them feel that a condition of mind humble and prayerful, meals requiring the minimum of preparation, and recreation consisting of nothing more strenuous than dozing in an armchair with a detective story were their idea of a suitable Christmas under the circumstances. . . . But that would not do for the children, and they girded themselves with heroism for the fray. And as it turned out, not in vain, for when the time came it was for all of them, the grownups as well as the children, a day of sheer delight, one of those magical times that are not forgotten while life lasts, a time when it seems as though nothing can go wrong, as though human imperfection were aided and sustained by something outside itself, and just for once allowed to bring to perfection everything that it attempted. John Adair, looking back afterwards, remembered that from the very beginning he had been aware of the pulse of creative joy beating in the house. So great was its strength that he should not have been taken by surprise when it broke right through the crust of things and took them all in charge.
Yet he was surprised, for during the week before Christmas, in common with the rest of the grownups, his emotional state had been one chiefly of profound exasperation. As if it were not enough to try to prepare festival meals with not enough sugar, less butter, and no suet at all, to decorate a large Christmas tree when you couldn’t buy so much as a silver star or a strip of tinsel, to purchase Christmas presents when you hadn’t a single coupon left and all the books you ordered were out of print. Ben had decreed that there must be a dramatic entertainment, and not only an entertainment but a carol service in the chapel to inaugurate it properly as a chapel and not a storeroom.
“Must we have both?” Nadine had asked patiently, trying hard to keep the weariness out of her voice, as she and George, David, Sally, and Ben sat round the fire at tea one day a few days before the twins’ visit to the buck pen. “Wouldn’t the carols be enough without the entertainment?”
“But we said when we first came that we’d have a play at Christmas,” Ben reminded her. “Don’t you remember? They always did in the old inns. The actors used the gallery and the audience sat in the yard below.”
“If you want to sit us all out in the stable yard in midwinter and prance about up on that outdoor gallery of Malony’s, just say the word, old boy, and I’ll order a large hearse for the lot of us and have done with it,” said George resignedly.
“No, we’ll do that in the summer,” said Ben. “This time we’ll act in here, in the hall. We’ll have the stage at the foot of
the stairs, and use the stairs for exits and entrances. Part of the show we’ll stage actually on the stairs, where they branch in front of the alcove. It’ll be awfully effective. You and Father needn’t have anything to do with it, Mother. Tommy and I and Caroline and the twins will do it all. At least, Sally will coach us in the carols, won’t you, Sally? You’re awfully musical. And, of course, David must do something spectacular. And you, sir—” he said shyly and sweetly to John Adair, “you’ll help me make the costumes, won’t you?”
Only Sally showed enthusiasm for the task assigned. John Adair growled tragically, yet with a gleam of interest in his eye, for exasperating though it would be to have to set aside his work for a week and play the fool with bits of colored paper and what not, yet it would interest him to see what ideas his pupil Ben had on the subject of costume design. But David groaned with no gleam in the eye, for he had to the full the professional actor’s hatred of getting mixed up in amateur efforts.
“What were you thinking of doing, old boy?” he asked gloomily. “It will be darned awkward getting about on those stairs. There’s no space.”
“We can do the getting-about parts on the stage below. First we’ll have a dramatization of The Wind in the Willows that I’ve planned out. Rat and Mole and so on. That’ll be just us five, so you needn’t bother with it. And after that you and Sally can do the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet—”
“What?” interrupted David in horror.