With a friendly little gesture, Sally opened her hands to show him what she held between them, and the moment enabled them both to look away from each other to her treasure. It was a miniature of her children painted on ivory, and framed in gold and pearls so that she could wear it if she chose, a lovely thing that might have been painted by one of the eighteenth-century masters. It lay in a green leather case that was in itself beautiful, and it must have cost a fortune. The familiar rage took hold of Sebastian, so that he could no longer see the delicate smiling painted faces. A small fortune squandered that a rich woman might wear the counterfeit of healthy living children as a gaud upon her breast, while all over the world other children had died of starvation and neglect, and nothing lay on their mothers’ breasts but the dust of their graves.
“That is very beautiful,” he heard himself say, though he saw nothing now but the dust that came up into his face like smoke from the pit at his feet.
“David gave it to me,” said Sally proudly.
Sebastian was not surprised. Eliot’s extravagance had always sickened him. He turned his head blindly towards the card-table where he sat, hating him. The warm liking that he had felt for all these prosperous well-fed people abruptly left him. Even Sally at this moment seemed to him just a rather over-blown woman in a most expensive frock. Yet because he was aware that she wished it, he took the miniature into his hands. His sight cleared suddenly and he saw Meg’s fresh little face. It was good of Meg. And good, too, of the glowing boy. Meg and Robin would grow old, but freshness and warmth do not change. He returned the miniature to their mother and turned to look at their father, impelled by the fascination of his dislike. He saw only David’s empty chair, and it gave him a queer jolt, as though it were the chair in which Banquo’s ghost sat at Macbeth’s feast. His mind was confused again and he was conscious of the dust and the chasm at his feet. He said good night to Sally and stepped across it. But unknown to himself he left the room gracefully, bowing to Nadine, to Lucilla and the group by the fire, inheritance and training still bone of his bone.
“That chap was somebody once,” General Eliot remarked to the room at large.
“Is now,” said Hilary. “I have never felt greater strength in a man.”
Margaret opened her mouth to say she had thought he seemed such a weak sort of man, in every way, but, not liking to contradict Hilary, said instead that she thought Mr. Weber was very nice.
“If there is one adjective that I dislike more than another it is ‘nice,’ ” said Lucilla, and then was sorry she had spoken so sharply. “Dear Margaret,” she added gently.
— 3 —
Sebastian went slowly and breathlessly up the stairs, following the grey figure that so uncannily preceded him with an equal slowness. Twilight had invaded the old house, and at first he guessed the grey figure to be a hallucination of his own bewildered mind. Banquo’s ghost. The ghost of a murdered man. He was always seeing them, for so many murdered men had been his friends. He followed slowly, and saw the ghost cross the landing and go in through the half-open night-nursery door. He was moving so slowly because he was carrying something with great care. Pausing on the landing to get his breath, Sebastian heard the beginning of the murmured conversation within.
“Daddy.”
“Meg.”
“What have you got?”
“A sort of little icy pudding, all whipped up. I don’t know what Mummy calls it.”
“Lemon-snow. Anything else?”
“A bit of the cold fowl we had. It was a dowager and wore an ermine cloak.”
“White hen. That’s not ermine. It’s white sauce with bits of chopped mushroom. Anything else?”
“Greedy pig. What more do you want?”
“A peach.”
“It’s here. And for heaven’s sake, Meg, don’t be sick afterwards.”
“I’m never sick when it’s one of our secret feasts. Did you bring a spoon for you as well as me, or shall we take turns?”
“Take turns. I could only find one clean spoon.”
Sebastian’s breathlessness increased to such an extent that though he wanted to go on to his own room he could not. He had done the same thing so often himself. It is hard on little girls who are not quite old enough to join the fun downstairs’ and yet are kept awake by the noise of it. Elsa had never been sick either. Bad discipline, but fun. Fathers and daughters have great fun in keeping the depth of their love for each other hidden. There was silence in the night nursery except for the clink of a spoon and the creak of Meg’s little bed as David sat upon it. Then there was a deep sigh of concentrated appreciation and the murmur began again.
“Was it a nice party?”
“Not so nice as this one.”
“You eat the other cherry, Daddy.”
“It’s a queer thing, but I don’t really like cherries.”
“Then shall I eat it?”
“Well, it looks sort of lonely where it is, without the other one.”
“It’s not lonely now. Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Tell about when you were a little boy.”
“All right. Comfy?”
“Almost nearly. You’re a bit bony, but you can’t help it. Tell about the time when you and your daddy played cricket out in the street at six in the morning with the cat’s-meat man.”
Sebastian moved on down the landing and came again to the quiet of his own room. He sat down in the chair by the window and told himself that he should not have left it, for social contacts did him no good. He felt less wretchedly ill if he lived as much as possible alone. One’s fellow human beings drained one of strength. Yet was that quite true? They took and they gave. And could one be alone, in the lonely sense, at Damerosehay? The place was a well of peace, but peace is not emptiness. There is life in it, and life is never impersonal. Even now he was not lonely, because that boy was here again—the boy who had played cricket in the street at six in the morning and grown up into the man he hated. Yet whom did he hate? The actor who had given him the relief of catharsis, or the employer who had been so thoughtful for his comfort? The father telling stories to his little girl, or the grey ghost going up the stairs? Was it possible that he hated a mere ghost, the ghost who had been sitting in Banquo’s chair when he looked across and saw it empty? A dead man, or a man whose eventual death was so certain that he could be already counted as dead. A man who was being done to death in David Eliot by some terrible adversary; terrible and glorious. The glory smote suddenly upon him so that he winced from the light. Then it was dark again and he was cold and shivering.
“And crazy as a coot,” he said, and switching on the reading lamp he reached across to the bookcase for a book; just any book. He took one out at random and opened it at random. It was the same book that he had had before, and it opened where it had opened before, and he read another poem.
Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done d
arkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
If that was it, he had not been so coot-like as he thought. Even a confused mind can feel through its delusions to the truth. Not many men are chosen in this life for that appalling struggle. Most of them experience only a shadow-play of what is to come. If David Eliot were one of the chosen, had the poor devil any idea of what was happening to him? And only at the beginning of it yet. Poor devil! Who could help him? Who had passed that way? Not Sebastian himself, so far as he knew. He remembered the old parson with the pipe and the strength in him. Not quite the same, perhaps, because the experience was never the same in different men, but perhaps a darkness as deep in its own way. He felt a great desire to talk to Hilary Eliot again; though what he would say he had no idea.
Lying in bed a little later, the words of an old prayer that he thought he had forgotten came to him.
“Take, O Lord, from our hearts all jealousy, indignation, wrath, and contention, and whatsoever may injure charity and lessen brotherly love. Have mercy, O Lord, have mercy on those that crave Thy mercy; give grace to them that stand in need thereof; and grant that we may be worthy to enjoy Thy grace, and attain to everlasting life. Amen.”
He said the prayer several times to himself, as he sometimes said lines of poetry, merely to drug himself with the beauty of words. Then he found he was really meaning what he said, praying as he would have prayed in the days of his childhood, when, as children do, he had held his parents’ faith without question. And a moment before he had been thinking of the Adversary with objective faith. It was as though the years of question, the years of stark unbelief, had vanished and he was back again in his childhood. What had happened to him in this place? At what point had his mind admitted again the possibility of faith? He had said to Lady Eliot that he envied her her faith, yet all the time he had talked to her he had shared it. He had shared the faith of Socrates while he watched the swan. “Everlasting life.” He had believed in it again as soon as he had come into this house and felt its tough spirit, made by the endurance of those who had lived here. Endurance was never for nothing. Something enduring came out of it, or it was not endurance. If it took you nowhere, then it was just nonsense, and he had clung to it for too long for him to think it that. The lifeline to which the wrecked sailor clings in a raging sea is not nonsense, but, for him, the most important fact of existence, and it would not be there at all if it were not held firmly upon some shore that through the blinding spume he cannot see. The problem for him is simply that of holding on.
The wind had risen and was sighing across the marshes. The moon was up, and the window-curtains, blowing in the wind, were white like the sails of a ship. Half asleep now, the imagery of his thoughts changed, and he thought of the old house as a ship burdened with souls, not a wrecked ship but a ship in full sail, lifting and dipping gently over a sea that was quiet now between the storms. And into this ship, this sanctuary for souls, he had come with his hatred. Abruptly he was awake once more, forcing himself to ask again, of whom? and to give a truthful answer. Of a man who possessed all that he had once possessed—fame and the gifts of fame, wife and home and children—and who like himself might one day lose them. Of a man as extravagant, emotional, egocentric and arrogant for all the world to see as he had once been himself, and as deeply sinful in ways known only to himself and to his God, or even only to his God, as he was now. Of himself, in fact. Of that dying self who, in the eyes of the “terrible” purging the grain, was only the flying chaff.
O God, the idiocy of jealousy, indignation, wrath and contention. Yet it would be hard to stop hating, when hatred had been the source of his strength for so long. It had been like food to him while he clung to his endurance. It had been life. Without hatred he would feel hideously weak. It might take him a long time to learn to let go of hatred, to learn to endure after some different fashion. “Give grace to them that stand in need thereof.” What exactly did Christians mean by grace? Hilary Eliot would know. He was half asleep again, dipping over the quiet sea in the quiet ship, with her burden of souls bound for the country of everlasting life.
CHAPTER
7
— 1 —
After an early lunch Meg and Robin were getting ready to go and have tea with Jerry and José at The Herb of Grace. Meg, buttoning her new strap shoes, was in two minds about it. She was a little frightened of Jerry and José, who at eleven years old were so very grown up, so polished and slippery. Older than anyone except Aunty Nadine. Much older than Uncle George, Ben or Caroline, or Jill, who used to be their nanny, who were not grown-up at all. Tommy was not grown-up either, but he had the same hard slippery polish as the twins, and Meg found the same difficulty in adhering to him. Meg liked to join on to people; not in the physical sense, because she was not very fond of endearments, but in the sense of not feeling herself a separate and lonely island in the sea, miles away from the person she was with. She liked to feel there was a causeway between herself and other people, so that they could go backwards and forwards to each other. But there was no causeway between herself and Jerry and José, only sea.
On the other hand, going to The Herb of Grace meant being driven there by Mummy or Daddy in the car. She sat beside the one who was driving, and when they were not attending to hens on the road they attended to her, and that was heaven. Today Daddy was going to drive them over while Mummy stayed at home and knitted clothes for the new baby. She did not knit very well, and Zelle gave little private cries of distress over the way she sewed the seams up, but she liked making them, and so Zelle did not discourage her. She would sit and knit in the wild garden, as she liked to do when Meg and Robin did not want it, and the children who came sometimes to the wild garden would play around her as though she were their mother. But she would not know they were there. Meg, coming in unexpectedly early once and running to the wild garden, had found her there with the children around her and had been most surprised when she had called out, “Meg, come and sit with me. I’m all alone.” Meg had not argued about it, because she never argued, but she had thought it most odd that Mummy should not know about the children. Because Mr. Weber did. With Meg’s and Robin’s permission he worked in the wild garden quite a lot, and once when Meg went to fetch him to lunch he had said, “Here comes another. That makes six.” And Meg, looking round and counting, had seen that it did. Perhaps he would point them out to Mummy one day. Meg knew that he went and sat with her sometimes when she was knitting in the wild garden. It was Meg’s belief that he was joined on rather firmly to Mummy. They seemed to go backwards and forwards a good deal.
“Now then, Meg, your bonnet,” said Zelle. “The sun is ’ot.”
Zelle spoke the most beautiful English—indeed, much prettier English than the English do, except just for the dropping of the h’s. Neither she nor Mrs. Wilkes seemed to possess that particular little bellows in the throat which enabled the wolf in the story to Huff and to Haw and to blow the House down.
Meg got up from the floor, where she had been sitting to button her new shoes, and Zelle tied her sun-bonnet under her chin. It was blue, and so were Meg’s new shoes, and so was the smocking on her crisp white frock. Zelle was wearing a white frock too, with small red roses on it, and her lipstick matched the roses. Her eyes were bright and sparkling and she had washed her curly dark hair yesterday, so that it was fluffy and soft about her face. Meg thought that she looked ravishingly beautiful; and indeed there was about Zelle today an atmosphere of enchantment, as though she were not living in the usual world, but in some private fairy tale that enclosed her like a delicate soap-bubble. One saw her through its rainbow wall, soft and shining and transformed by its magic.
Robin wore diminutive garments of a delicate shade of elfin green, and did not look his best. Sally imagined that green suited him, and he did look well in the brilliant shouting green of grass after rain, but the fragile color of his present outfit only made his bulging scarlet cheeks and blazing curls and
fat legs look more than ever of the earth earthy. He had put on even more weight since Mr. Weber had found Yabbit and mended him and made him as good as new again. And he had had no screaming fits. He was clasping Yabbit to him at this moment, and Meg had her doll Maria Flinders. Mouse, circling round and round on her beam end, was trying to catch a source of irritation situated in the exact centre of her back. If she took it to Mary, the pampered white pekinese at The Herb of Grace, she knew there would be trouble.
David, waiting for them in the car below, expressed impatience on the horn, and Zelle swung her scarlet leather bag with the long strap over her shoulder, hurried them all out of the night nursery and down the stairs. Robin had got a bit quicker on the stairs lately. He still had to lower the right foot first with a mighty thump, but the left foot came to it with more precision than formerly. Mouse, too, was less muddled about her back legs, and fell on her face less often. In fact, they came down in grand style, watched admiringly by Sally, Sebastian and Mrs. Wilkes, who had issued respectively from the drawing-room, the study and the kitchen to see them off.
This seeing the children off was part of the normal routine of Damerosehay. As soon as the familiar thumping was heard on the stairs, everyone dropped what they were doing and ran to the front door. They did the same when the car was heard returning, hooting at two-second intervals, which it always did from the oak-wood onward if the children happened to be aboard. The children were royalty. They could not leave their kingdom nor return to it without the event being marked by demonstrations of loyalty and esteem. Sebastian had been delighted to conform to established habit in this matter, and followed Sally and Mrs. Wilkes out to the drive to see the start.