“Yes, he told me. He also told me you were an excellent linguist, that you knew England, where I shall be returning soon, and had some knowledge of the theatre.”
“Anything else?” asked Sebastian sharply.
“Nothing else,” said David gently. “Except a little of your war-time experience. Concentration camp and so on. Not more than that. Nothing personal.”
Sebastian relaxed. This was a man who would never ask questions. Probably, like every artist, he lived in a world of uniquely personal experience and had discovered the impossibility of opening that world to another. Each man within his own world must work out his own salvation. “Prithee go in. Seek thine own ease.” He’d stay courteously outside.
Now Sebastian knew who he was and why he had felt such a sense of kinship with him. Hamilton had taken him to see David Eliot’s Lear and it had been for him a deep catharsis. His gratitude to the actor had been great and so had his sympathy for him. He had thought that only a man who had himself endured much mental suffering could portray it with a power at once so delicate and so inexorable. His portrayal of near madness, outlawry and bereavement had been to Sebastian, who had endured them all, like the lancing of a surgeon’s knife that lets out poison. There had been no slackening until the thing was done, yet it had been carried through with such consummate gentleness. And now he forgot his own inadequacy, his pride, his dread of strangers. This man was no stranger. Each in his own secret world, they had yet reached down to some meeting-place of common suffering. There was in his mind the image of two lakes, separate from each other, yet down in the cool depths the waters mingled. A little while later he found himself talking to David of the things of which he never spoke; nothing personal, but imprisonment in general and its effect on men. He said how it kept a prisoner sane to realize now and then, if only for a moment or two, that though personal suffering can seem to a man an entirely lonely and isolating thing, a prison within a prison, it is in actual fact the exact opposite. Through it he reaches the only real unity, oneness with the whole of suffering creation.
“I can see that a moment when you feel that can be a moment of liberation,” said David. “The self is lost.”
“Yet when the moment is gone,” said Sebastian, “it is hard to believe it was ever there.”
They talked a little longer, and then David got up to go away, and in his good-bye there was a tone of reverence, of gratitude, that Sebastian was unable to account for. It was, he thought, he who had reason to be grateful. He remembered afterwards that he had never said in so many words that he accepted David’s offer, but the next day he went to the theatre as a matter of course.
But that was the end of their intimacy. Between them, next day, there was no recognition. Their interview the night before had been like one of those moments of which they had spoken, something so fleetingly possessed that now it seemed almost as though it had never existed. Nothing remained of it but a mutual gratitude. His employer seemed to Sebastian all that he most disliked: a man of genius who had prostituted his art and had become in consequence the usual streamlined product of the success he had worked for. Lear’s agonies were no more to him than the means to an end. His kindness seemed to Sebastian mere patronage. He had merely been chucked from one rich man to another, from Hamilton to Eliot; who would no doubt chuck him to a third, as soon as playing the good Samaritan produced the inevitable boredom. And the luxury of the life lived by the streamlined infuriated him almost to a return of madness. It was always the sickening contrasts that aroused his hatred.
And David on his side encountered a pride, a dryness, a bitterness that hurt him so intolerably that his defences went up at once, brassy and sparkling, and he withdrew himself behind them. Yet they went on together. Sebastian worked for David as well as he possibly could, to the last ounce of his strength, and David behind his defences was ceaselessly thoughtful for him. They would have liked to part, yet this striving each for the other held them together in a way that made parting impossible.
— 2 —
Sebastian, in his room at Damerosehay, sighed and stirred. That first meeting, that had become dust in his memory, had quickened to life again as though a desert had greened with springing corn. What was that book Eliot had taken from the bookcase and left on the table? He put on his glasses and picked it up. It opened where a marker had been placed between the pages. “World sorrow.” The words caught his eye at once and he read the sonnet slowly through, and then again, and again.
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked “No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.”
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
The desolation of the poem did not drag him down, but lifted him as though on the upward surge of a wave. Had he had the power he could have written every word of it as his own experience. Those cliffs of fall. He’d hung there, and he knew them well. World-sorrow. It was a matter for exultation when one man could so cry out for a silent multitude the sufferings of all. The individual sorrows, like individual drops of water, enclosed each man in his own loneliness but the fellowship of the dark wave was a mighty and glorious thing.
For the moment he read no more, but closed the book. Then he picked up the marker that had been between the pages. It was only an old envelope, addressed to David Eliot, and bearing a date of the year after the war. He sat looking at it as though it could tell him something. Had Eliot had a bad war? Probably. Most men had. Had he read that sonnet, and perhaps others like it, out of a need to escape from his own loneliness into world-sorrow? Why had he taken that book out of the shelf tonight? Had he felt the same need again? And these contrasts which bred such hatred in him. Perhaps they were not as deep as they seemed. Was any man ever as fortunate as he appeared, or as unfortunate as he imagined himself to be? There was no answer to these questions, and Sebastian put the book back in the bookcase and went to bed.
CHAPTER
6
— 1 —
The fact that Sebastian was obliged to attend the family party was no one’s fault but his own. He had spent the day working indoors, and when the evening came, and he had finished the supper Mrs. Wilkes brought him in his room, the enchantment of the world outside his window pulled him out of doors. He avoided the garden, for the dining-room windows looked upon it, and the Eliot clan were enjoying a festival meal there, but outside in the drive the only window that looked upon him was his own. From his room he had noticed a plank bridge that spanned the narrow stream separating the marshes from the grass-edged drive, and he crossed it, pushed his way through the rushes, and found a small green lawn entirely surrounded by them. In winter it was probably very squelchy, but now, in spite of the rain yesterday, it was dry after a day of sunshine. There was yet another seat here, and he sat upon it gratefully, even while he wondered, why all these seats in a house and garden dedicated to children? The sitting posture is seldom appreciated by the young. The reeds rustled softly and about him grew marsh-flowers whose names he did not know but whose pungent scents he appreciated.
He could see the Island in front of him. It faced the sunset, and its white cliffs caught the glow. The cloudless sky was a cool clear green behind the Island, bu
t overhead it deepened to a blue so glorious that it dazzled the eyes not so much by its brightness as its power. Strange that color could have such power. A lark had braved it and was singing up there, and two great swans passed overhead with a mighty beating of flame-touched wings. But the lark and the swans had the same power. The small bird, tossing almost unseen now above the music that fell like brightness from the air, had lifted the souls of men out of their mortal weariness more surely than any other musician since the world began. And the passing of the swans was as powerful as a rolling of drums. They were Apollo’s swans, who according to Socrates sing and rejoice on the day of their death because they foresee the blessings of immortal life. Conqueror of the souls of men, conquerors of time and death; the place of the lark and the swans was in the depth of the blue that would still be there when the sky had let fall the stars “even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs.”
There was a faint rustling behind him, nearer than that of the rushes, the murmur of a silk dress, and he got up and turned round with no sense of annoyance or apprehension but of inevitability, for whoever came had a right to come and belonged here. A very old woman stood looking up at the swans and listening to the lark. She had not seen him, and he thought that perhaps neither her sight nor her hearing were very good now, for there was a look of strain upon her face, as though the glory of the sky that was so clear for him was for her only a rumor. That, he thought, must be the hard part of old age, that slow relinquishment while still in this world of the power to see and hear the symbols. “For the eternal things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen in the things which are made.” But when they are no longer clearly seen, and yet the soul has not passed on beyond them, was it as though she fell into a sort of nothingness? Or was the dying rumor of the lark ascending replaced by a new sort of certainty of things to come? He would like to ask this old woman. He was sorry for that look of strain upon her face, and instead of trying to escape he stood quietly where he was, waiting for her and enjoying the picture that she made.
She was tall, and the folds of her black dress fell gracefully. A white rose was tucked in her belt and a white lacy shawl had been flung over her head and draped her shoulders. She leaned upon an ebony stick and he saw the flash of diamonds on her left hand. She looked like some great lady of the eighteenth century and seemed as perfectly in place against the background of Damerosehay as Eliot had looked yesterday, when Sebastian’s fancy had seen him as an oil painting glowing against the shadows of the house. But she was not a Rubens. The clear black and white, the stately dignity, made him think of Holbein’s Duchess of Milan. But the Duchess was a young woman, and this woman was even older than he had imagined when he had first seen her.
She turned and saw him, and smiled as though he were an old friend whom she was pleased but not surprised to see here. “I’ll have your arm to help me sit on that seat, Mr. Weber,” she said. “I have difficulty in getting down when I am up or up when I am down.”
He helped her, and they sat down as companionably as he and Meg had sat together on the other seat in the drive. She turned and looked at him, neither considering him as a problem nor pitying him, but simply accepting him and making him welcome. Her blue eyes had the same steady appraising glance as Meg’s had, and Eliot’s, but in spite of being a little clouded by great age, they saw much more. That sense of belonging nowhere, that had troubled him for so long, suddenly vanished. He settled himself more comfortably on the seat.
“That is how I felt when I first came to this house, before it was mine,” she said.
“How did you feel, Lady Eliot?”
“Anchored.”
“I have no right to feel that.”
“Why not?” she said. “You have come where you are needed.”
“Who needs me here?” he asked her, gently but yet with bitterness.
“Now, that is a very silly question,” she said, answering his bitterness with a touch of asperity. “You should know better than most men that no great artist writes a note or word, or makes one stroke of a brush, that is not necessary to the perfection of the whole. Is God less intelligent than His creatures?” She stopped and smiled at him a little anxiously, her asperity vanishing in childlike uncertainty, “I do not see very well,” she said.
“You have great insight,” he said. “You knew my sense of exile.”
“Oh, yes, that,” she said. “When you get old, and must lose your hold upon so much, there are new insights. I meant I was not sure that you were you, after all. But I see now that you are. I heard you play in Paris, between the wars. It was my last holiday abroad before I got too old to want to leave Damerosehay. David was with me.”
“You cannot recognize me, Lady Eliot,” he said. “It is not possible that I can bear the slightest resemblance, now, to the young man I was then. You recollect my name, perhaps. I did not bother to change it because I did not imagine that anyone would remember it.”
“I did not remember the name until I saw you,” said Lucilla. “You have changed less than you think you have. You know, however altered we may be by age or illness, there always looks out from us, now and again, the young creature we once were and will be again. And then I never remember any other pianist with hands just like yours, nor with that trick of resting them as you do, one within the other with palms upwards. I looked down upon them, I remember. You played the Waldstein. What an evening of delight you gave us! David and I said that we would never forget, and I have not forgotten.”
Sebastian smiled. “He has.”
“He was very young then. He will remember again. Something will remind him.”
“I sincerely hope not,” said Sebastian with vigor. “The young man that I was is dead and buried. Don’t resuscitate him, Lady Eliot. Let him rot.” Then he saw that the harshness of his tone had hurt her, and he made a gesture of apology. “Forgive me. I am afraid that my manners are a thing of the past.”
“Then you should play again,” said Lucilla severely. “Music recaptures the past.”
“That is why I shall never play again,” said Sebastian. “Even if my hands were not stiffened, as they are, I should never play again for that reason.”
“How very ridiculous of you!” said Lucilla. “Do you imagine that past happiness is lost? You will come round to it again when the circle is complete, and at the end of it all nothing will be eternally lost except evil.”
“So they say,” remarked Sebastian grimly. “Meanwhile for most of us at present, it appears to be the good that is eternally lost.”
“How can good be lost if it is remembered?” asked Lucilla. “It can be pain to remember, I know, but it is one of those pains that are incumbent on us, and the pain lessens if one does not shrink from the duty.”
“How can it be a duty to remember?” asked Sebastian.
“I think it is all part of the purging,” said Lucilla. “That hard deliberate remembering of good leaves no room for the remembrance of evil. That way we hasten the time. Don’t you sometimes think, Mr. Weber, that one of the dreadful discoveries that we shall make in the life to come will be the extent to which we have put the clock back, and kept humanity upon the rack, by the mere unwilled thinking of idle moments?”
“The mind has pits,” murmured Sebastian. “You have to be in a moderate state of normality to control your mind, Lady Eliot. A haunted mind, a sick mind, or even a mind weakened and bewildered by a sick body, hangs always over a pit of darkness.”
He was aware of something very odd happening between them. She remained sitting regally upright beside him for a moment, and then she got up, helping herself with her stick. The rose she was wearing fell out of her belt and lay at his feet. “Let it stay there,” she said when he bent to pick it up. “It’s where I should be. It’s where I am. Old age imagines itself wise and experienced. I’m sure I don’t know why. One knows no more about how it feels to be wet through if one sit
s watching the storm from inside a warm room for one hour or one minute.”
He picked up the rose, but it was full blown and the petals fell. Holding them in his hand he got up and faced her. “I am glad that the room from which you have watched the storm has been sheltered,” he said. “We need warm people; they distil the sun. And even in a warm room there can be pain. And I think old age is wise. Taught by long watching, you feel your way from the lesser pain to the greater, and bear something of that too, and that sympathy. The actual storm sometimes blinds the eyes, but sympathy can be very clear-sighted.”
Absent-mindedly he put the rose-petals in his pocket, and as they crossed the little bridge together he smiled to himself, thinking how ridiculous their conversation would have sounded to an eavesdropper: almost like an interchange of civilities between two grandees of old Castile. Yet for him it had been a refreshment because in this old lady, as in Mrs. Wilkes, he was aware of a well of quiet; this time the quiet not so much of acceptance as of unshakeable faith.
“I envy you your faith,” he said to her.
“It is a special gift to age,” she told him. “When the symbols grow dim they are replaced by a new sort of certainty of things to come.”
She had answered the question he had asked himself, and he dared to probe her further. “The dead return?” he asked her.
“They are where they always were,” said Lucilla. “Only you know it.”
“I had wondered,” he said.
She was glad of his arm going back to the house, and in the hall they both sat down on the settle, slightly breathless.
“I hope you appreciate the numbers of seats in this house and garden,” said Lucilla.
“I do,” said Sebastian in heartfelt tones.