“Horace is yours?” asked Sebastian.
“Had him for years,” said Ben. “John Adair gave him to me.”
“For your birthday, too,” mourned Caroline. Though she liked Tommy better than Ben, her sympathy was now with Ben. He respected other people’s property. If he had the misfortune to knock over her work-basket he always turned it right way up again.
Sebastian felt for his glasses and put them on once more, that he might admire Horace the better, but he did it with care, so as not to disturb Caroline’s hand in his arm. He liked the feel of her firm young fingers there. So strong was the current of her sympathy that it had quieted the shaking of his body. He thought, with no envy but merely as one ageing man congratulating another, that her father was fortunate. Her charm was that of her youth only. With all her gentleness and sympathy, she lacked the beauty and vitality that would capture the attention of young men. Only the discernment of the elderly would appreciate her. From such a state of affairs fathers frequently benefited.
“I have seldom seen a finer skeleton,” he said seriously.
“All the same, it’s a waste of time to look at Horace,” said Caroline. “With tea waiting, I mean. Tommy will be walking the hospitals soon, and then he won’t get home much.” She sighed with naïve satisfaction and added with further satisfaction, “And I don’t suppose Ben will either, from the F.O.”
“I’m not going to the F.O.,” said Ben softly but decidedly from behind them.
Caroline looked back at him over her shoulder, startled and dismayed, but she had already opened the farther door into the kitchen, and the noise of Eliots at tea flowed out and over them.
— 2 —
The tea was so vocal, even though Tommy and the twins and Mary had not yet reappeared, because George had disagreed with David about something and David could be hot in argument, Robin was noisy, Mouse had a barking fit, and Hilary was enjoying Zelle’s vivacity. But Lucilla did not allow the family noise to distress herself and Sebastian. Though the others sat round the large table, she remained enthroned in her chair, a small table before her, and made him sit by her on the cushioned window-seat.
“Let them all sit round a dinner-table for tea if they want to,” she said. “It’s done these days, I know. Either that or one of those dreadful trolleys. Either is equally uncivilized. To have one meal in the day when leaning both elbows on the table, and holding your cup in both hands while you argue, is not physically possible, taught manners. Of course I know you can’t lean elbows on a trolley; but the thing rattles so. And then the dog gets underneath and heaves it up. And it reminds me of the thing the dentist has with instruments on it to probe you with. I have always disliked probing of any sort or kind.”
“As we are now, with this little table and this silver teapot to ourselves, I am reminded of the afternoon tea of the old days in England,” said Sebastian gently.
“Did you know England in the old days?” asked Lucilla.
“Yes, I knew her well in the years between the wars,” he said.
“Those weren’t the old days,” said Lucilla. “Already, then, manners were decaying and noise increasing. I mean the days when you could drive through London in a victoria and smell the wet lilac in the gardens. I don’t know how it is, but lilac always looks and smells dry and dusty these days, or else it’s beaten to pieces in downpours. It’s never shining and fragrant in sunshine after a spring shower, like it used to be.”
“It’s the weather that’s all wrong these days,” said Sebastian, smiling at her. “In the old days spring was spring and summer was summer, winter was winter and behaved accordingly. Now the seasons are in as great confusion as the world, with spring warmth in December and snow in May. It never did that in the old days.”
“You’re laughing at me,” said Lucilla, without pique.
“No, no!” declared Sebastian, in dismay at the mere idea.
“You may not have realized it, but you were,” said Lucilla. “With indulgent affection for me, I’m glad to say, just as my children do. I know the look in the eyes. I am so glad you can laugh at me now. When you first came you were like Queen Victoria.”
“Queen Victoria?” ejaculated Sebastian.
“You were not amused,” said Lucilla. “Did you ever see Queen Victoria?”
“No, Lady Eliot, I can’t say I did,” said Sebastian, and this time he laughed outright. “You see, I was not born when she died.”
Lucilla looked at him. “You are laughing, but I am not,” she said. “You should be thankful I am not the sort of woman who cries, or the arithmetic I am doing would have me weeping. It is not as one of my children that I should be thinking of you, but as one of the grandchildren.”
“Provided you count me among your family that’s all that matters,” he said, his usually hard, dry voice suddenly warm with the delight of the fact that he could love her, a fact that gave him much greater delight than the fact that she could care for him. With his amusement a spark of brightness struggling for existence in his usually lightless eyes, he looked round and saw the burning curiosity in hers only partly veiled by their compassion. He hastened to relieve the curiosity. “I am forty-eight,” he said.
“You look sixty,” she said. “I didn’t probe, did I?”
“You never probe,” he said. “None of you do. I am in peace among you all, and at Damerosehay. To leave you will be infinite distress.”
“Then why do it?” asked Lucilla. “Were you thinking of leaving us?”
“Mr. Eliot’s secretaries come and go. I can hardly have the good fortune to stay here till I die, can I?” he asked her, smiling.
“It depends how long you take about dying,” said Lucilla. “Are you wanting to die?” she continued serenely.
“Yes,” said Sebastian. “I should like to be finished with it now.”
“So should I,” confided Lucilla. “Though I don’t say so to the children, for they would be hurt by my wanting to leave them. Except to my son Hilary, of course, who agrees with me that I can love them just as well there as here, if not better, and that it’s natural that at ninety-one I should have got very tired of dressing and undressing my body. Because, you know, at ninety-one that’s about all one does. By the time you’ve got rested from dressing it’s time to undress.”
“You’re not speaking the strict truth, are you?” said Sebastian quickly.
“No,” said Lucilla, after a moment’s pause. “I am not. I am fond of dressing and undressing, for I like clothes. And that’s not all I do. I pray. I take trips in Hilary’s car on fine days like today. I worry. I talk a great deal, and very sententiously, as you well know. Thank you for reminding me.”
“Ah, but I was not reminding you,” he said in distress. “I was grateful for all you said to me that evening among the rushes. I spoke without thinking. It was just that—”
“I know,” said Lucilla, “As one comes near to death strict truth seems to matter more and more. It’s the awful justice that waits for us that makes us feel that way. I said I wanted to die. I do almost always, but not quite always. Sometimes I feel the terror of death. The soul shrinks from justice and the body from dissolution.”
“That’s justice, too,” said Sebastian. “What else does this body deserve? It has been the garment of our selfishness.”
“Yes,” said Lucilla. “But I have looked sometimes at the bodies of those I love and thought I saw an immortal stamp upon them.”
“So have I,” said Sebastian. “A look or a smile. Something. But the stamp is not the wax. Yet it’s good to get the stamp by heart, for it will make the new body of selflessness recognizable.” He paused and smiled. “I talk as if I know. How can I know? We know nothing. It’s just an idea that came to me this afternoon.”
“How did it come?” asked Lucilla.
“Something about your grandson’s profile gave me the idea.”
“David’s?”
“Yes.”
“Of all of them, David is my dearest,” said Lucilla. “So I’m glad you—I hesitate to use the word and I don’t use it lightly—love him.”
Sebastian was silent, but it was with no sense of insincerity that he held his tongue. He did not examine his silence. He was not ready for that. Instead he changed the subject.
“Who is that quiet-faced woman who is pouring out tea?” he asked.
“Jill. She was the family nanny for years, and even after the twins is still the most serene woman I know.”
“She is not serene just now,” said Sebastian. “She appears to be counting beads, and the sum we add up to disturbs her.”
“So she is,” said Lucilla, and then she laughed. “Poor Jill! She believes all the superstitions, and without Tommy and the twins we are thirteen at a meal.”
“I make it twelve,” said Sebastian, after a pause.
“It shocks me that you should consider Mouse negligible,” said Lucilla.
“I don’t,” cried Sebastian. “But she’s under the table. On Jill’s feet, I expect. It was a mere oversight.”
Jill’s eyes came to rest upon Lucilla and widened in distress, until Lucilla smiled at her.
“There now,” said Lucilla. “She sees I don’t mind.”
“But it might be me,” said Sebastian with almost a jealous note in his voice.
“It might,” agreed Lucilla. “But I am, after all, forty-three years older than you.” She laughed. “Now don’t let’s be jealous over such an absurdly small matter. For what does it matter which of us goes first? What matters is that pulling up our anchors together like this we have become good friends. Except to Hilary, I have talked to no one for years as I have talked to you . . . I think I hear Tommy and the twins safely home. And Mary.”
Sebastian wondered why she said “I think” when there was no doubt at all that she heard Tommy and the twins, and Mary. Tommy set foot within his home much as Hercules must once have done, his footfall giving rhythmic stress to the thunder of his voice. The twins’ voices were high and sweet, but today the sweetness was more than usually piercing. Though not more so than Mary’s bark. But this time he did not accuse Lucilla of insincerity. The fault lay in the non-committal habit of mind of the English, who never dared use their fairly flexible language in any but the most gingerly fashion. “Not half-bad,” they would say. It had taken him a long time to discover that they intended appreciation by the phrase. Conversation continued desultorily in the kitchen while a herd of elephants moved about upstairs, various articles of furniture being flung to the floor by the wind of their passing. A hissing sound, as of innumerable serpents in great anger, took Sebastian by surprise until he realized that taps had been turned on to their fullest capacity for purposes of cleansing. Then the herd moved downstairs by what was apparently another staircase—judging by the noise, a stone one—and entered the kitchen by another door. Though “enter,” that musical and gracious word, was again an understatement Sebastian could think of no word to describe the arrival of Tommy and the twins in a state of hunger.
“They’d been to the Buckpen and got in a filthy mess in the stream,” explained Tommy, reaching for the loaf, for he disdained cut bread-and-butter as being always inadequate to his needs. “In one place it’s all ooze at the bottom, and that duckweed stuff. They’ve washed. Jam, please. I’ve done nothing about Mary.”
Mary had a low under-carriage, and the beautiful silky white fur on her stomach was clotted together with sticky mud. Duckweed adhered to her slender legs. The silvery foam of her tail, the soft whiteness of her back and her delicate little head rose above the black slime like Venus from the waves. She stood imperiously upon the hearth-rug, her pugnacious whiskered countenance turned towards her mistress, and demanded attention.
Nadine, leaving a cup of tea to get cold, knelt before her little dog and ministered to her with a towel and soft endearments. It astonished Sebastian to see her proud beauty so prostrated and enslaved. He could not picture her kneeling so to remove wet socks from her children’s feet when they’d been small. She would have sat royally enthroned, he thought, and lifted the children to her lap. There is a royalty, either of dynasty or temperament, that can be humbled only by dogs and their Maker, who perhaps made them in part for that purpose. Mouse, one speculative eye and a quivering nose showing from beneath the tablecloth, watched in awe. She had her underneath rubbed with a towel herself on occasions, but not like that. She had not yet reduced her branch of the Eliot family to such complete subservience as she now beheld, but, then, she had not had the time. She was only two and Mary was six. She took a lesson. She withdrew her speculative eye and vanished from sight again. Under the table she looked round at the various pairs of feet, and sniffed. But Jill being now comforted, she could not smell distress of any kind. She curled herself round in a soft grey button and placed her tail over her nose. She thought that, undisturbed by the loud crying of distracting smells, she would now meditate quietly upon the glory she had seen.
Sebastian was meditating upon the twins. Until now they had seemed to spin before his eyes in an almost solid ball of noise, color and speed, and his own shrinking from their impact had increased the confusion he felt at the sight of them. But now, apart from champing jaws and the rise and fall of hands that moved from plate to mouth and back again in a way that reminded him of the movements of small birds, they were still, and he realized that they were unusually beautiful children. Though obviously as physically strong as young ponies, they were delicately made, with small bones and a thin wiriness that would one day become their mother’s slim elegance. Their dark hair curled only a little. José’s lay over her small beautifully shaped head in soft rings, and Jerry’s, cut shorter, crisped above his fawn’s ears. Their grey eyes were bright and needle sharp, their skin so clear and satin-smooth that it still caught and reflected the light, like the skin of very small children, as Meg’s did. They were exactly alike, except that Jerry had more color in his face than José. But she had no less vitality. The air about them seemed almost to sparkle with it, and with the love they had for each other, the sparkle seeming to Sebastian to make a circle of light about them, a small circle within the larger one of family love. Now that he was himself so miraculously able to love again he was quick to notice the love between others. Their conscious absorption in food was not so great as their unconscious absorption in each other. Without looking at her, Jerry knew when José wanted the milk, reached rudely across Caroline for the jug and banged it down before his twin so that the milk slopped over.
“Jerry!” thundered George. “Look what you’re doing!”
“Many apologies,” said Jerry, his sparkling eyes glancing round the table with a wicked insolence that no one could take personally because his tone dripped honey until it dropped into the vernacular. “Wot cheer, folks. I do be a dummle.” He mopped up the milk with a very dirty handkerchief, sneezed explosively and wiped his nose on the back of his hand.
“Jerry!” said Nadine sharply.
“It wasn’t me,” said Jerry. “I was being Wilkes. Well, folks, look see, I do be to ’ave caught a tarble cold in this ’ere clulbery weather.”
“Serve you right,” said Ben hotly.
“That’s enough, Jerry,” said Jill.
Jerry sneezed again, and this time his elbow sent the milk jug flying.
“Apologize to your mother,” said George, the veins on his forehead swelling with anger.
“Sorry, Mother,” said Jerry with no contrition whatever, and sneezed a third time as loudly as he possibly could.
José did not look at him, but her right hand and his left disappeared instantaneously beneath the table, his reappearing immediately with a dainty little handkerchief with red daisies on it. Upon this he blew his nose with that same loud trumpet-blast which punctuated Mr. Wilkes’s conversation at the local. r />
“Young toad!” said Tommy very quietly to Jerry. “You needn’t think you’re going to get away with it. I’m only waiting till we’re finished. I told you in the wood what would happen if you made me late for tea, and after speaking to Mother like that you’ll get the best I can do.”
For just a moment Jerry stopped eating. For the same fraction of time an apprehensive stillness held José. Sebastian did not actually see them lean together, but for that same moment he seemed to see them as one child. He had not been able to picture them in Knyghtwood, but he could now. Knyghtwood was their true home.
With the promise of justice the little storm was allowed to blow over, and he turned his attention to Tommy. In spite of all appearances to the contrary, was he, too, at home there? One could not tell, but he noticed that Tommy, while taking not the slightest notice of Robin, who sat beside him with mouth ajar, was practising some sleight of hand whereby the cherries in the piece of cake in front of him, though not seen to move, were nevertheless disappearing one by one. He liked Tommy the better for it. The burgeoning of spring was fresh and cool. Looking down, it surprised him to see his hands as brown and dry as ever, like dead wood. He had almost expected to find himself bursting into leaf.
“I apologize for my younger grandchildren,” said Lucilla. “I don’t know why it is, but it seems impossible to teach manners to the modern child. We all try, but it can’t be done. Robin will be just as bad in a few years’ time.”
“Meg?” asked Sebastian with a smile.
“Meg,” said Lucilla, making music of the little name. “Meg’s not a modern child. Scarcely even a child. Nor was David at her age. Nor his father before him. Don’t you think that in each generation there is some special person who is a candle lighted for the rest?”
“Yes, I do think so,” said Sebastian, but he could never speak the name of his son Josef.
“ ‘Light me a candle,’ ” quoted Lucilla. “Maurice died in a burning of pain. He bore it, and so did I. Something of the sort must happen to David, and I hope I am as willing as he will be. For Meg, though I shan’t see it, I can’t bear it, and I’m not willing.” Her soft old voice stopped abruptly.