“No. I’m no use at all.” He spoke with bitterness.
“People say that when they need a good holiday,” said Sally sagely.
“Well, I’m taking it. Indefinitely.”
“You’ve been ill, haven’t you?”
“I’m ashamed to say I had what they call a nervous breakdown. A thing I’ve always despised in others.”
“I’m so sorry, but I expect it was a blessing in disguise,” said Sally, with practical sympathy. “It’s made you take a good holiday; and it’s humbling, isn’t it, to find that one isn’t as strong-minded as one thought one was? Are you staying in those sea marshes that you told me about?”
“Yes. With my long-suffering grandmother. People talk a lot of nonsense sometimes about the old being a burden to the young, but in my experience it’s the other way round. It’s the old who do all the propping and sustaining. You’d like my grandmother and she’d like you. I think you’d better meet as soon as possible. What about this afternoon? I could drive you over to Damerosehay to tea and bring you back afterwards. I promised Grandmother to take Ben over. They’re en rapport, she and he. Would you like that?”
“Yes, I’d like that,” said Sally. “Only first we’ve got to have lunch at the Herb of Grace, and we can’t go back to lunch without the children.”
David made a noise like an air-raid siren, and then they talked a little about John Adair’s pictures and Sally discovered that David had never met her father. . . . So that sketch made at the rehearsal had been made without his knowledge. . . . Then the siren sounded again and presently there was the pattering of small feet in the wood. Then the twins emerged with lips stained with blackberry juice and leaves in their hair. They were earthy, and trailed behind them clouds of glory in the shape of unraveled wool ripped from their little cardigans. Their cheeks were very pink and their eyes very bright but strangely unfocused, like the eyes of babies who have not yet adjusted themselves to a new environment. Mary, incredibly dirty, and with one boot missing, bustled in the rear. They replied with sweet vague smiles to David’s greeting and climbed immediately into the back of the car with the two old dogs, about whose neck they flung their arms, and against whose furry faces they leaned their cheeks with a warmth of affection never bestowed upon their immediate family. Mary, whose arrogant youth despised the decrepitude of Pooh-Bah and the Bastard, placed an imperious little paw upon the running board and barked to Sally to pick her up. David, suffering from the extraordinarily sharp pangs of hunger that afflict those with overstrained nerves, started the car with a sigh of relief.
Sally, with Mary in her arms, turned round to the twins. “Did you get there?” she asked them eagerly.
They smiled at her with the amused tenderness of a mother whose child asks a question to which the answer would be beyond its comprehension, nodded, but remained silent.
“Oh, please tell me what it was like!” pleaded Sally.
They smiled again, but vouchsafed no answer.
“Did you see the Fairy Person?” asked Sally.
They nodded, and pursed their blackberry-stained lips together like tight dark rosebuds.
Sally looked down at Mary in her arms. The little dog’s body was hot with excitement, and its heart beat fast beneath her hand. It made a leap for her nose and kissed it, but did not utter a sound.
“Just wasting your time,” said David. “Much better talk to me. I’ll answer any question you like to ask to the best of my ability.”
“What exactly is the herb of grace?” asked Sally. “Why did the builders of a pilgrim inn call their house after it? Why in old days did the country people plant it in churchyards? Why is it growing in the wood beside a badger’s holt? What is it?”
“Obviously something without which you can be neither a pilgrim nor a badger,” said David. “Nor get to heaven. The rue is a bitter-leaved herb. Herbs are astringent. Rue is repentance. Rue is compassion. Old Don Quixote was the knight of the rueful countenance, and he was a pilgrim, poor old chap.”
“And Badger was compassionate,” said Sally. “He was so good to Rat and Mole when they were lost in the Wild Wood. Do you remember? And he shared his porridge with the little hedgehogs. . . . But you haven’t really answered my question.”
“Don’t hurry me,” said David. “I’m getting there gradually. (Glad you were brought up on The Wind in the Willows, by the way.) Astringent—that means contraction. Bitter to the taste. Repentant. Compassionate. . . . I’ve got it. . . . Single-mindedness.”
“But I’ve always thought of single-mindedness as a sort of concentration,” said Sally
“Yes. Contraction. Everything gathered in for the giving of yourself. The whole of you. Nothing kept back. No reservations. No loopholes of escape. Like a diver taking the plunge or a man banging a door shut behind him that locks itself so that he can’t go back.”
“And you couldn’t do that without repentance,” said Sally thoughtfully. ‘‘I see that. You’d have to humble yourself before you could let go like that. Pride can’t let go. But compassion?”
“That’s at the root of all giving, don’t you think? At the root of all art. You can’t hoard the beauty you’ve drawn into you; you’ve got to pour it out again for the hungry, however feebly, however stupidly. You’ve just got to.”
“And you said a little while ago that artists are selfish.”
“No, I didn’t; I said they were self-centered. That’s not the same thing. Rather than not tell what they’ve seen they’re prepared to die of the telling, but they aren’t in the least interested in anyone else’s deathbed.”
“I hadn’t realized single-mindedness was so complicated.”
“It isn’t. It’s very simple. It’s what T. S. Eliot calls the ‘condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything.’ ”
“Then only very few wear the herb of grace,” mourned Sally.
“More than you think, perhaps. . . . You’ve got it in your buttonhole yourself. . . . One knows them when one sees them. There’s a look in the eyes. Have you met my uncle Hilary?”
“No, not yet.”
“He’s an extreme case. But I should say that if once, only just once, one had succeeded in giving without reservation, then you’d have got one foot on the pilgrim’s way, you’d get a glimpse of—something.” He paused and looked at her with sudden amusement. “If this is only the second conversation we’ve had together, and I believe it is, we seem to have skipped a good many preliminaries.”
“It was meeting in the wood,” explained Sally. “I believe that wood is a very direct route to wherever it is one is going. Some places are like that; they seem to hurry you on.”
“Where to?” asked David amusedly.
She had spoken impulsively, and she could not answer. He did not want to go where she wanted to go. Forgetting this, she had been for a little while in the seventh heaven of happiness. But now she was in pain, in actual physical pain as though her heart was being squeezed. As they talked her slow brain had been stretched to the uttermost, but he, she realized, had been talking to her as one talks to an intelligent child, delighting in the testing of her intelligence, but not on equal terms with her. His answers had come with the swiftness of a fencer’s passes. . . . Just a game. . . . She held Mary tightly in her arms and pressed her cheek against the little dog’s soft head for comfort. Glancing at her, surprised at her silence, David saw her with blanched face beneath her sunburn, looking as she had looked when he had thought she was going to faint in the heat of Jan’s drawing room. The walk must have tired her out. Couldn’t be as strong as she looked, he decided.
They were slipping now down the delectable lane that led to the Herb of Grace, David looking about him with delight, and as they neared the river they were greeted with a drift of music, like the chiming of fairy bells, very distinctive, a sound that once heard could not be forgotten.
; “Whatever is that?” demanded David, startled. “I’ve heard that before somewhere—whatever—”
“It’s the bunch of bells that hangs on Annie-Laurie’s houseboat,” said Sally. “It chimes like that whenever anything rocks the houseboat.”
“Annie-Laurie—what Annie-Laurie?” asked David sharply.
“Annie-Laurie and her father are the prop and stay of the Herb of Grace,” said Sally. “I suppose you’d say they’re chambermaid and boots, though they’re not quite the type—they’re puzzling people. They live in their own houseboat on the river.”
“Glad Nadine’s got help, puzzling or not,” said David. But he looked for a moment vaguely disturbed, until they drew up before the inn and the beauty of the place overwhelmed him with delight. He had his back to the inn, and was helping Sally out of the car when Nadine appeared at the open front door.
“There’s Mrs. Eliot,” said Sally.
His face set suddenly into hard lines. For a fraction of a second he was completely still, as though steeling himself for something. Then he turned round.
“David?” said Nadine. She came slowly down the paved path between the chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies, graceful and most lovely, her eyes blazing with hunger in her carefully composed face.
“Hullo, Nadine,” called David cheerfully. “You’ve got a jolly place here.” And he ran up the steps to join her. They had both of them forgotten Sally’s existence. She saw that they had, and turned away and busied herself in getting the children and dogs out of the car. “Run round to the back,” she said to the twins, “and ask Jill to make you clean and tidy again. Take Mary with you.”
She heard her voice coming from some great distance and had a horrible feeling of isolation and unreality, as though she were separated even from herself, and falling through some dark limbo where there was neither handhold nor foothold, but only emptiness. She was terrified. She did not quite understand that she had given herself to this man with that completeness of which they had just been talking. She had leaped, like the diver, but there was nothing there to receive her. Then abruptly the nightmare feeling passed and she found herself standing on the paved path, looking back towards the car, and she did not know how she had got there.
The children and Mary had disappeared, and the stately chow had presumably followed Nadine and David into the house, but the old furry mongrel, the Bastard, the one who had liked her and leaned his head against her knee, remained. He was trying to get himself up the steps, but his age and his rheumatism, combined with the fact that he had already been for quite a considerable walk in the wood, were making it difficult. Sally ran to him and reached him just as he sat down suddenly at the top of the steps to rest. She sat down beside him. He looked up at her, his eyes bright with affection behind the mat of hair that fell over them, yards of pink tongue hanging out of the corner of his mouth, and wheezed apologetically.
“Yes, the morning has been a bit too much for you,” Sally agreed. “But you’ve always been everywhere with him. You couldn’t possibly be left behind. I see that.” The Bastard gave her another of his bright glances, swung up his tongue, and kissed her on the chin. They sat side by side, much attracted by each other, and also deeply united by the bond of this mutual love for a man who had forgotten all about both of them; until a whiff of rabbit stew from within put new life into the Bastard, and he arose and led the way indoors.
CHAPTER
8
— 1 —
Nadine had a way with a rabbit that was little short of genius, and when she had finished stuffing it with prunes, and doctoring it with herbs and one thing and another, the dish was scarcely recognizable as rabbit at all and was worthy of the grand French name with which she sought to disguise its humble origin. Her apple cream, waiting upon the side table, looked superb too, and George had succeeded in capturing from somewhere some quite extraordinarily good sherry. The talk at lunch was good, for John Adair and David always had plenty to say and the wit to say it well, and the two elderly fishermen, once they could be prized off fish, were men of experience and intelligence. Nadine and Sally talked with unusual animation, and even Ben, who had been deeply happy since the arrival of John Adair, wasn’t afraid to shove in his oar now and again. George, always at home in the role of host, said little but radiated glad hospitality, and Annie-Laurie and Malony waited with their usual almost slick deftness; and the room was full of flowers and the lovely mellow light of a perfect October day.
And yet there was something wrong with this luncheon party, and John Adair was highly intrigued. His keen eyes went from one face to another, missing no shadow of expression; his ears stood alarmingly out from the side of his head, intent upon catching any slightest inflection of a voice that should give him some clue to the emotions of these people, should show him their place in the picture framed by the old walls of the Herb of Grace. Yet all the while, as he watched and listened, the easy flow of his own talk sparkled in and out of the conversation of the others, throwing it into that clear-cut relief that he required for his observations.
Father’s on the warpath again, thought Sally. He’s in one of his detective moods.
That’s a damn clever fellow, thought David uneasily. He was so accustomed to getting on well with everyone that this sensation of unease was unpleasantly unfamiliar. Instinctively he knew that for the moment at any rate John Adair disliked him. He did not return the dislike. On the contrary, he liked the artist immensely. He liked his fierce red beard, his haphazard features, his clear brown tawny eyes. This would be the lion of a fellow to deal with if one got seriously across him.
Which you will do, young man, thought John Adair savagely, if you harm Sally. Touch my girl to her hurt and I’ll tear you limb from limb. He was astonished at the violence of his reaction to the fact of Sally’s love. He had not been seriously disturbed by his discovery of the love between Nadine and David, even though the woman was one by whom he was himself much attracted, for he had never been in the habit of letting his affections disturb him at all seriously. As long as a love served his art (and his tender feeling for Nadine was enabling him to paint a damn good portrait of her), well and good, but as soon as it threatened to disturb his single-minded devotion to his craft, then he stamped upon it (and incidentally upon the woman too) thoroughly and at once. No woman he had ever come across was worth one faulty stroke of a brush upon canvas. . . . Except Sally, though he had not known it until this moment. . . . Sally was bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, and he knew now that he would give his right hand, his painter’s right hand, and go maimed for the rest of his days, in art as well as in body, to save her from this pain. What a child she was, what a naïve child. . . . She couldn’t hide it. . . . She hadn’t even the wit to realize that her very avoidance of David’s glances, her diffidence when he spoke to her, gave the show away by their unnaturalness. Yet child that she was she was putting up a good show and he was proud of her. She was forcing herself to talk with unusual animation, and she was most sweetly and touchingly deferent to the woman whose tenacity was blocking her happiness.
Tenacity. He had stumbled upon the word unaware, yet he thought it was the right one. It occurred to him suddenly that Nadine was holding the man against his will. At first he had been aware only of the love between them and had speculated as to its depth. They were both obviously capable of passion; Nadine had it in her face, David could not have been the actor he was without it; yet he did not think that they were lovers. The hunger in Nadine’s eyes was that of a woman unsatisfied, and there was an austerity about David Eliot that seemed somehow to forbid it. They had, he thought, turned from an impossible love, the man with clean, clear-cut decision, and with the strength that obviously was part of his character, the woman with some reservation. Did she know she was still holding on? He could not be sure of that yet. Did she know the man wanted to be set free? Obviously not, or she would have set him free, for her pride was considerabl
e; she was a woman accustomed to be wooed, not to woo.
Her blindness surprised him, for now that he had got David thoroughly under the microscope there seemed to him little doubt as to his state of mind. He loved her, obviously, and would probably do so in some sort until he died, but in his eyes as he looked at her there was a steady patience, the same sort of patience that he had seen in the eyes of men lying with smashed limbs imprisoned in plaster, waiting for freedom. The artist judged him to be a man of such tempered loyalty that it was not in his power to free himself. He was a fine man, John Adair decided suddenly, and he would not have disliked him had he not been indifferent to the charms of his child, who was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, in fact, a bit of himself.
“Egotism,” he said, apropos of something entirely different, and getting into his lecturer’s stride, “is the foundation stone of our present so-called civilization. We’ve built up the whole thing on a morality based upon self-interest, and then we’re surprised to find the foundation stone disintegrating into as many particles as we are egos, and the building with it.”
“No hope?” inquired one of the fishermen, cheerfully helping himself to more apple cream.
“One might try the application of the Herb of Grace,” suggested David.
“H’m?” asked George.
David smiled at Sally. “Miss Adair and I decided this morning that the astringent rue is the grace of single-mindedness.”
“You can define single-mindedness till the cows come home,” said the second fisherman, “and still be no further on.” And he regarded what was left of the dish of apple cream with a speculative eye, for he was a slow eater and hadn’t got through his first helping yet.
“Miss Adair and I got quite a way, thank you,” said David cheerfully. “And we boiled it down to a complete letting go. Abandonment of the ego for something greater.”
“Letting go,” said John Adair, thoughtfully stroking his beard, his eye on Nadine.