“Do you like Sebastian Weber?” she asked suddenly.
“What’s he got to do with Angelo?” asked David. “What irrelevant minds women have!”
She laughed. “No, not really. It’s just that a woman cannot explain to a man the process by which her mind has passed from one point to another. It’s all much too complicated. David, let’s sit down a moment. It is so lovely here.”
They had reached the oak-tree that for her was the heart of the wood, her special place where once she had picked the leaves of the herb of grace, and she sat down at its foot. She was playing for time. She had once helped Annie-Laurie here in the wood, but David was another proposition altogether. Angelo? Now, was he who she thought he was? She wished she knew her Shakespeare better. One was always paid out for intellectual laziness.
“David, you are not looking at this wood,” she said. “The queer thing about you so-called artistic people is that you are supposed to be so sensitive to beauty, and yet when it is stuck down right under your noses you never seem to notice it.”
David laughed and sat down. He realized now that he had always been more absorbed in himself than anything else. He supposed everybody always was, the saints excepted. That was probably the essential difference between a saint and a sinner. As a sinner he was an extreme case, he thought. Yet there had been a time when the momentary switching of attention from himself to an external loveliness had not been much more difficult than the pulling back of curtains in a dark room. The curtain stuck sometimes, but one could do it with a little effort. But now he lived so deeply sunk within himself that it was like living in a pit, and there were no windows, and no light except that one beam that showed him what he was; and that did not come from any beauty of the external world, but from some terrible beauty that was as yet to him unknown and nameless. But one must crawl out of the pit sometimes, even though it meant leaving the light within, because the reflected light of the external world, as well, made its rightful claims upon one. But it was the beam within that was so unspeakably precious, even though without it the wretchedness of self-loathing would have been a thing unknown. He had not realized how precious it was until this moment, and he was intensely grateful for the knowledge. It made his darkness not only bearable but almost welcome. Who had told him? Was it Nadine? In sheer gratitude he set himself to come to Knyghtwood, where she sat waiting for him.
The hot sun beat through the leaves over their heads and was warm on his closed eyelids, and under his hand one of the exposed roots of the old oak was rough and warm and hard. He moved his hand, and between the roots of the tree there were dead leaves and acorns, warm and dry. Behind his back the trunk of the tree had a tough strength; and the earth beneath him seemed to hold his tired body in a hard warm hand of everlastingness that was almost vibrant with power. In the darkness, the silence, the feel of things was immensely reassuring. The silence was vast, yet just as he began to fear its vastness it began to fill with small sounds: the cry of a bird, the scurry of some small beast in the undergrowth, the rustle of leaves and wings, the gentle regular breathing of the woman beside him. The little sounds mounted until the silence was no more than the gold of the cup that held the wine, and the wine brimmed over, and the world was so loud with song that he opened his eyes. But when he looked, the music ebbed away again and it was color and light that filled the cup.
The broken blue of the sky, seen between leaves, is something so near that hands held up could receive it like drifting petals. It even seems to have a scent, fresh beyond that of any earthly flower. Against it the leaves burn with the changing colors of the seasons, and the color of each is its own gift that can never be repeated. The boles of the trees are muted, but they have their color, too, withdrawn a little into the strength of the wood but ready to flash out when the beams of the sun strike through and touch them. When the light pierces and splinters through the leaves, the colors of the mosses and lichens are the loveliest upon earth, and the flash of a jay’s wing or a robin’s breast can dazzle the eyes. And then, when the eyes close against too much glory, the music of the wood mounts again and is older than time, and sinks, and there is no sound but the cooing of a dove. And then there is a cloud over the sun, and the eyes open to a deep green shade full of coolness and peace.
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?
For men, not yet, for “Patience . . . plumes to Peace thereafter.” Yet in the woods there is a foretaste of it.
Nadine was wearing a green dress, and the pattern of the leaves lay upon it, and upon her hands lying in her lap. Her hands were white and thin, and the blue veins on the wrists showed more than they used to do. David had not noticed before what she was wearing, or how her hands had aged since he had last looked at them with attention. Looking at her hands he could visualize the wings of white in her hair and the lines about her eyes. The woman he had once loved so ardently was growing old, and so was he. Yet they still loved each other in some serene and peaceful fashion that was at home in this deep green shade.
“What were you trying to tell me just then?” he asked her.
“I don’t think I said anything,” said Nadine.
“You don’t need to put it into words in a place like this,” he said.
“Then why ask?” she murmured sleepily.
“Just to get it verified,” he said.
“I was thinking,” she said slowly, “of the Damascus Road. That sounds odd, I know, for a woman who mostly thinks of hats, but one can’t live at The Herb of Grace, with the story of Saint Eustace painted on the chapel walls, and not think of conversion occasionally. So often it seems to follow a bad break, and then the light pierces. Have you ever thought about what St. Paul saw when he was blind? Darkness, of course, but a gleam of the light he had seen still there showing him its awfulness. Perhaps he was even sorry when he was dragged out of the darkness back to the light of the outer world again because he had to leave that other light. Whatever would Grandmother say if she could hear me talking like this? It’s not my style at all.”
“I asked for the verification,” said David. “Thank you. It’s unfair, isn’t it, that the sinful heathen sometimes have these visitations vouchsafed to them when the devout have to go without?”
“If there’s been a bad break there’s been a bad shock,” said Nadine. “One thinks, I was so sure of my own decency, yet I could do this thing. I thought myself so safely grounded in fidelity, or whatever the particular virtue may be upon which one prides oneself, that no temptation could shake me, yet I went down like a rootless tree. The shock shatters one’s self-complacency, and that, I suppose, gives the light its chance.”
“And yet, you know, I was not actually unfaithful,” said David.
“Then why all this talk of Angelo?” asked Nadine.
“Well, nor was he, as it turned out,” said David. “But the credit was another man’s, not his. Damned hypocrite! So am I. Think of it, Nadine. After having loved you, after five years of happy married life with a trustful child like Sally, it was only an accident that saved me from what might have ended in a really bad mess. You didn’t know I was quite such a cad as that?”
She turned her head to say that given the circumstances, separated from his wife, over-worked and emotionally over-strained, a man whom women fell for quite mercilessly, a passing love affair was hardly a matter for such great blame, but decided sutdenly not to insult him with the suggestion. Even to console him she would not relegate him to the company of those who take their own failings lightly, or argue that sin which is halted before it becomes disaster is not sin. Instead she asked, “What sort of accident?”
“A chance meeting with Sebastian Weber,” said David. “It was the contrasts.” And then, before he could explain what he meant, shame and confusion fell upon him. “Go
od heavens! Nadine, I must be crackers to talk to you like this. You of all people.”
She laughed. “Why me of all people? I suppose you think that because half a lifetime ago you fell in love with me I’ll be insulted because you have lately fallen for another woman? What a dear jackass you are! Sit back. Relax. He is a disturbing man, that Sebastian Weber. I felt the contrasts, too. Several of them. One seems to fall into the pits between them, and it is most uncomfortable, but very good for one. Look, there’s a kingfisher!”
David leaned back against the trunk of the tree, and the sudden miraculous shaft of blue pierced him.
“There was one the day I met Sally here,” he said. “One of our great days.”
“Whatever you do, don’t tell her,” said Nadine. “You’d feel much more comfortable, but it would be extremely selfish. Let her keep her trust in you. You know now what a cad you are. (Your word, not mine.) Keep the knowledge as a private hair-shirt.”
She was devoured with curiosity to know more about the woman. Was she tall and dark and soignée? Young and lovely as she had been once? Or gold and chestnut like Sally? Or was the creature blonde and blue-eyed, for a change? That would be a thorough change. French? American? But the subject was closed now. She would be devoured with curiosity for the rest of her life, but she’d never know. It was amazing that he had told her as much. And amazing that she had spoken as she did, for she was really not in the least interested in St. Paul. It was this wood. It always did odd things to one. Gently she began to talk again about the children.
“We’ll fail them at times, of course,” she said. “Parents always do. But when one is really—how shall I put it?—dedicated to the children, really loving them to the best of one’s ability, as you love Meg and Robin, I think the vital moments are taken care of. Not that we know what they are. They come so quietly, and we don’t take care of them ourselves, except in holding to that first dedication. How can we when we don’t recognize them?”
— 2 —
The sun had come out again and she relaxed in its warmth and shut her eyes. David remembered how quiet had been that moment when he had turned in through the doorway that led to Sebastian’s room, instead of going on up the street and round the corner to Anne’s flat. He had stopped and pulled out his wallet to see if he had that letter he wanted to show her. It was there, and on the back of it he had scribbled, the address of the man Hamilton had asked him to take on as his secretary. It was this street, and this house by which he was standing now. He looked up and saw a dim light in a window far above him. Though the traffic roared by he did not hear it. The restless city night was for a moment or two quiet about him, as though it held its breath and looked up as he did at the dimly lighted window. He looked at his watch, and found it was still early. Anne would scarcely have had time to get back from her party. It would not take him five minutes to go up and see that fellow Weber and get the thing settled and off his mind. He met someone who directed him, and when he had gone up several flights of stairs he found Weber’s name on the door. He knocked and went in.
He had never felt so near to anyone as he did for a shocked moment or two to the man who welcomed him. Not to Grandmother, to Nadine when he had first loved her, to Sally his wife or Meg. Not even to Anne, whom he had met on the liner coming out, and later loved in that mad and evil fashion that annihilates the past and the future, in the destructive and not the creative sense, and makes only the beloved seem real in a world of wraiths. But this man seemed even more real. He seemed the self upon whom he had lately had no grip, benighted as he had been in a fog of weariness and unreality, feverish with the strain of his love and his genius. He had not been a man at all just lately, only a cracking scorched sort of skin through which the two passions poured their power. But this was his lost self. This was a man. Himself.
They sat down and began to talk, and the feverish fire, the unreality and illusion seemed to drain out of David, and cold and certain knowledge took their place. This man was a great man; not himself, but himself as he might have been. The self that he had thought he was, and upon whom he thought he had lost his grip, did not exist at all; or existed only in an immeasurably distant future, personified for him by the man sitting at the table. The man he actually was he did not as yet know, though he knew with sickening fear that he was going to know him. He knew only this about David Eliot: that he was the husband of Sally and the father of Meg and had not kept faith with either. The eyes of the man talking to him were strangely lightless in his parched face, yet that added to David’s consciousness of another pair of eyes looking through them that saw what he was. Sebastian Weber’s conscious mind would perhaps not know what he had seen, but presently he would instinctively hate the man whom at the moment he liked extremely.
For they were getting on very well, talking as easily as if they had known each other for a long time, completely in accord in this moment of quietness that seemed to lift them not only above the city’s roar but also above all confusion of place and time. The slow cold shame did not affect the working of David’s conscious mind, which was clear and steady now as it had not been for many weeks, but the contrasts were shocking. Between this man here that he was and that man there that he might have been. Between the life of comparative ease that lay behind him and the bitter experience that lay behind Sebastian. Between all that he possessed and Sebastian’s present dereliction. And he was condemning himself and Sebastian to live with these contrasts for an indefinite future. They would possibly shock Sebastian into deeper dislike, but what did that matter if he himself was shocked into some sort of sanity and knowledge of himself?
He said good-bye quietly and went away and walked straight back to his hotel. He did not see Anne again, but left her to her unhappiness. For unfortunately she had loved him deeply, as women always did if he gave them half a chance. His knowledge of her unhappiness increased his own wretchedness in the weeks that followed. And richly he deserved it, he told himself. If he was ever tempted to think that love welcomed and enjoyed outside marriage is not infidelity if it stops short of the act, he had only to think of Anne’s unhappiness to have that argument refuted. The innocent always suffer for the guilty. For if it had been she who started their flirtation it had been he who had submitted to her will and let it develop into passion.
Looking back, he saw now that that moment of quiet in the street had been a moment that had been taken care of; perhaps for Meg’s sake, for he did not deserve that it should have been for his own. Perhaps too, in some way that he did not understand, for Sebastian’s sake also. As Nadine had said, one did not know.
— 3 —
He fell suddenly and exhaustedly asleep in the sun, but Nadine, once she knew that her example of relaxation had been followed, was wide-eyed and alert again. She slept well at night these days, and did not need these catnaps in the sun to keep her going. Not that she would have allowed herself to indulge in them even if she had needed them, for she allowed no one to look at her in unguarded moments; not even, if she could help it, George, though, as he insisted on their still sharing the same room, that was not always easy. But, then, George, dear old thing, was such a creature of habit that, having once believed her beautiful, nothing that could happen to her looks would be likely to alter his belief. Nor his love. Her old George was now sixty-two and had never, since the day he married her, looked at another woman with any emotion stronger than a tepid mental acknowledgement of the creature’s existence. How unhappy they had been once! And now how happy!
Yes, she was a happy woman. With a shock she realized that until now she had not acknowledged that to herself. Under this very tree, some years ago, she had died a sort of death and been born again. She had let her passion for David fall into dust with the failing breath and dedicated herself to love life as it was held within the walls of her home. “The lover of life sees the flame in our dust and a gift in our breath.” But she had not seen it. It had pleased her to walk through
her days for a long time with serene melancholy, wearing her martyr’s crown of lilies and roses with an exquisite sad grace that suited her dark pale beauty to perfection, or she would not have worn it so. It had in truth been a martyr’s crown for a little while, for it had been a real death that she had died, but she had admired herself for her self-denial, and had not removed the crown when it had become entirely outmoded.
“And I have always prided myself upon my hats,” she said to herself. “Dear heaven, I am a foolish woman. I acknowledge it and that hat is in the river. But a happy fool! Most happy. Dear old George. If I had married David I would have had five years of heaven and then he would have fallen in love with another woman. And I’d have known it. He may pull wool over Sally’s eyes, but he wouldn’t have pulled it over mine. I would have ferreted out the whole thing, and what a row we would have had! I believe I’d have hated him for it. And now I don’t hate him. I love him, with all his failings, just as I love Ben and Tommy. Though they will never be so unutterably silly. George has brought them up too well. They’ll treat their wives as dear old George has treated me.”
She did not look at David. Though she had made all possible excuses for him, she found that she was shocked at what he had told her. In another man she would have thought nothing of it, but she had always loved the integrity and austerity which she thought she had seen in him. Had she only imagined them? Was David really just the same as all the rest of the men whom he and she had known in the careless days before the war? She forced herself to turn and look at him. Yes, it was an austere face, clear-cut, a little hard, and deeply worn. Even in sleep, when youth so often reasserts itself, he looked older than he was. And yet, as lives went these days, his had been easier than many. What exactly was this fiery thing called genius? Was it something from beyond this life that could scarcely be held by human personality as it existed in the world? If so, the genius, be he artist or mystic, was vulnerable to the attacks of evil as other men are not, for he was strained and exhausted as other men are not. He would fail in ways unlike himself when, if the fire of genius had not been poured into him, he would have stood firm. But “he is a chosen vessel unto me.” Fire annealed as well as cracked. If the personality did not break in pieces altogether it might finally become something rather glorious. But what a process the annealing might be! She thanked heaven she was an entirely ordinary woman married to an entirely ordinary man, and that her dear old George.