Then quietly and slowly he came back to consciousness of the room about him and knew the old man to be not himself but another, a monk of some sort, wearing a dark habit. He got up from the table and came up to the open casement window, leaning his hand upon the sill.
“Is it the river one hears?” asked the old man. He had a voice like a frog’s, croaking yet attractive. Standing beneath the window, where Michael had stood upon the day of his coming, he looked less old. His eyes were dark and bright in his brown wrinkled face, his hair iron grey. He seemed vaguely familiar.
“Yes,” said Michael. “The tide’s coming in.”
“The sea’s not far?”
“Only a few miles,” said Michael.
“Then there will be gulls at times,” said the old man.
“Plenty,” said Michael. “And the smell of the sea when the wind’s in the west.”
“I’m not on private property?” asked the old man anxiously.
“No,” said Michael, smiling. He had never set eyes on such a rum old bird but he liked him immensely. “Would you like to come in?” he asked. “If you follow down the hedge and go through the gate between the yew trees and up through the garden I can let you in.”
“No, no,” said the monk with a touch of shyness. “Thank you, but it’s late and I don’t want to intrude. I just want to get the feel of the place.”
Why, wondered Michael. Aloud he said, “I wish you would come in and sit down.”
“I’m not quite as old as I look,” said the monk, smiling. “And I am used to standing. The recitation of the divine office, you know.” Michael did not know and remained silent. “But you’re not used to standing, perhaps, and I mustn’t detain you here at the window. I have friends with a car waiting for me at the field gate. I am on holiday. Good-night, Sir.” And he turned away.
Though his Sir was the natural expression of the courtesy of his generation it touched Michael as old Bob’s had done. He wished the stranger would not go. He did not speak but the old man stopped and half-turned round again, looking out towards the valley and the river.
“A wonderful evening,” he said.
“The light is amazingly lovely,” murmured Michael.
“The light of afterglow, and the moon rising,” said the monk. “And such sweetness in the air. I don’t know why but this particular light of a spring evening always puts me in mind of forgiveness. Good-night.”
He turned away once more and did not pause again or look back. In spite of his lame leg, his stick, his age and his bent figure he seemed to move quickly and the mist soon took him. Had he ever been there? Michael fitted fresh candles in the candlesticks, lit them and sat down again.
Such sweetness in the air. The light of a spring evening. Would Daphne forgive him if he asked her? He had shamed her, but Miss Wentworth had said shame could be offered for shame. If he told her the whole shameful story would she forgive him? He’d tell her on Monday. If she did not forgive him at least he’d have offered his shame.
He put the pages of his poem together and settled down to reread and correct it. It was a depressing experience. He had tried to avoid the gilded dust of everything he had written up to now, but if this had a sound kernel of sincerity that was all it had. The fruit and the rind seemed to him the most sloppy and sentimental stuff he had ever read. And yet what he had written had been the best expression he could encompass of deeply felt experience. Now why? There hadn’t been a trace of sentimentality in the poisonous stuff he had written with the one purpose of feathering a safe nest for himself. And yet, as an example of poison, it had been well written poison, while this, as an example of sincerity, was so completely amateurish that it shocked him. It was not that the medium of verse was unfamiliar to him, for though he had never published it he had written a good deal of verse for his own delight; what was unfamiliar was the new outlook that had come to him at Belmaray and the sincerity with which he had tried to express it, and because in the realms both of vision and morality he was in the kindergarten, his effort at self-expression was comparable to a child’s scribblings with colored chalk on brown paper.
“The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.” That was the artist’s problem as well as the man’s. Progress in evil was quick and easy; Apollyon was not a chap who hid himself and he gave every assistance in his power. The growth in goodness was so slow, at times so flat, so dull, and like the White Queen one had to run so fast to stay where one was, let alone progress; and there were few men who dared to say they had found God. It was easy to be a clever sinner, for the race to an earthly visible goal was short to run, so impossibly hard to be a wise saint, with the goal set at so vast a distance from this world and clouded with such uncertainty. Patience with the apparent hopelessness of spiritual growth was the man’s task, patience with the breaking chalks and the smudgy drawing the artist’s. And for both the grim struggle of faith. It was hard to believe that the pothooks before him were of greater value than his gilded dust. Did men such as John, and the old man who had come from the mist and vanished into it again, at times lose their faith that an hour spent in mental prayer was not a shocking waste of time? Probably, as he would lose faith in the discipline of pothooks. But he was going on struggling with them. He had taken his vow by the rosemary tree and this fight would be part of the greater one in the stony sanctuary.
The vow had been taken only in a dream, of course, but this morning’s dream had been as much a part of the everlastingness of memory as that other dream of the knights riding out of the fortress of the church that was the subject of his poem. He had not understood that dream at the time but he did now. The squires of Belmaray, riding out on their fantastic quests, from Elizabethan Francis who had built the manor to John Wentworth, were not forgotten by Belmaray. No man who loves it and serves it ever leaves a countryside. He cannot. That bit of earth had him and that bit of earth keeps him as he was when he loved it for as long as the earth itself endures, and it only needs some slight shifting of the focus for a newcomer in love with a place to see its former lovers riding by. It was the Lord of Life to whom he had made his vow and the man in the blue cloak had carried a shield in token that the knights of Belmaray did not live within the memory of Belmaray only. One might just as well call eternity the memory of God.
“I’ve missed something out though,” thought Michael, gloomily reading the last verse of his poem. “How did that end? Not with the knights. There was another chap who came out after them and shut the door. An old monk.”
He stopped, laying down the paper. It was the same old monk who had just disappeared into the mist. He sat without movement for a full five minutes and then gave it up. This was a rum place and only time would show. Meanwhile there was his poem. For another half-hour he struggled with it, then tore the whole thing up. It was no good to anyone. The kernel had been all right but useless to anyone except himself and his God, to whom he now addressed his first prayer in years. “I’ve doubts about you but at least you are now something to have doubts about.”
Chapter 16
1
It was Monday morning and Daphne was gardening in the company of a contented robin. John was at Silverbridge attending a meeting and was to have lunch there, and the children were at school. She and Harriet were going to have a lunch that needed no cooking and all the things she ought to have been doing she had decided not to do. These warm spring days could not last. In a little while it might be snowing, the English climate being what it was, and she was not going to miss the chance of a morning’s gardening in the sunshine in peaceful loneliness. She made no excuses for herself. She did not want to be indoors doing the usual Monday morning washing, she wanted to be in the back garden getting up weeds, and so she was. “And I’m content as the robin,” she said to herself in amazement as she bent to her work. “It’s the spring, when I’m usually mad with restlessness, and yet I’m con
tent.”
There was not a cloud in the sky and all about her was the strong growth of yet another triumphant spring. The smell of the earth was pungent and fresh as she worked, and the scent of violets came to her from John’s frame, open to the sun. The old apple tree outside the kitchen window had become a mass of pink and white blossom. She was kneeling almost under its branches and now and again she could smell the flowers. The birds were singing in every bush and tree in the garden, in every spinney and wood and hedgerow in the countryside beyond, and in the clear still air she could hear depth beyond depth of music. “Have the birds always sung like this?” she wondered, “or is it that I have not noticed it before? The purity is piercing, especially that one song.”
She sat back on her heels, listening. The singer was quite close to her and as she listened his individual song seemed to detach itself from the chorus of praise ringing out for the world and to give itself to her heart only, sharply, like a stiletto. Yet it was a gay, sweet song. “What singer are you?” she wondered. “I don’t know you.” She had been brought up in London and she did not know much about birds. Flowers, because of her love for them, she had studied, but not birds. It was John who knew about birds. Careful to make no sound she moved a little so that she was sitting on the grass patch under the apple tree and could look up into its branches. Above her head in the apple blossom she saw what she thought was a bluebird singing to his unseen lady. Yet when she looked again he was not blue but brown, with white tips to his tail feathers and wing quills, a carmine patch on the crown of his head and carmine upon his breast. For a moment she had been dazzled by the sheen of blue that was in his feathers, as it was on every flower and tree, not dulling the underlying color but burnishing it. It was strange, this heavenly burnishing blue. One did not see it in summer but only on these first cloudless days of spring. Even one’s own dull sight seemed burnished by it. Daphne could see the small bird with astonishing clearness now, and caught her breath at his bright beauty. Yet in spite of the cap and breastplate of carmine that he wore for the wooing of his lady he was an austere little bird and his austerity suited the purity of his song. They both pierced her. “I am a detestable woman,” she thought. “I have no place in this fair blue day.”
She became conscious that she was not alone in the garden. She had heard no sound but she was aware that she was sharing her shame with another. She turned her head and saw Michael sitting on the edge of the violet frame, looking not at her but at the austere little bird. He had come uninvited into her garden, invading her lovely loneliness, yet the anger which had blazed in her when he had come before did not spring up again. She was conscious only of the sharing of this shame. He was so intent on the bird in the apple tree that she could look at him unobserved, quietly and calmly, as she had not been able to do a week ago. Then she had seen Mike Davis, the man who had treated her so badly and whom she had never even wanted to forgive, but now she saw a man whom she hardly recognized. She had not realized that he had changed so much. He had looked a young man then, and superficially, with his spare alert figure, he looked a young man now, but looking at him intently she noticed how sharpened and brittle-looking his face had become. He still had his puckish look but he was a Puck who was afraid of the shadows behind the trees.
The bird finished his song and flew up to the top of the tree, and she said, “Michael.”
He looked at her and smiled and said, “I’m trespassing.”
“Did you want to talk to John?” she asked, “because I’m afraid he’s in Silverbridge.”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“Then come over here,” she said. He looked at her in astonishment, for her voice was gentle and almost welcoming, then got up and came to her. “Sit on the grass with your back against the apple tree,” she went on. “It’s comfortable like that. Do you mind if I go on weeding? I’m close enough to hear what you say. Michael, what was that bird?”
“A linnet.”
“Was that all? I thought he was something rare and wonderful.”
“So he was, so close to us,” said Michael. “They don’t usually come into gardens. We are favored. Do you remember Robert Bridges on the linnet?
“The phrases of his pleading
Were full of young delight;
And she that gave him heeding
Interpreted aright
His gay, sweet notes—”
“Yes, it was a gay song,” said Daphne. “And yet it made me ashamed of myself.”
“I bracket a linnet with a stormcock for making me ashamed of myself,” said Michael. “With the thrush it’s his courage, with the linnet his—I was going to say the integrity of his song, but that sounds far-fetched.”
“I know what you mean,” said Daphne. “This clear blue day just suited that linnet. When I was a child I was frightened of a cloudless sky. There didn’t seem a thing between me and God. He could look right down and see me, and the wicked things I did. I was so frightened of God that I decided not to believe in Him. And I didn’t until I married John. My Nanny was a Seventh Day Adventist. What was yours?”
Michael laughed. “Daphne, you haven’t changed. You always knew how to talk nonsense while a man got himself to the point. I always admired your social sense.”
“What’s the point, Michael?” she asked.
“Truth,” said Michael. “The linnet’s song was appropriate. I behaved abominably to you once. I want to tell you why. I also want to tell you why I’m at Belmaray.”
“Do you want to tell me for my sake or for yours?” asked Daphne.
“I think for both our sakes. For your sake, I’d like you to know that I’m even more despicable than you thought I was, and be thankful to your merciful stars that you married John. For my sake, because if that is possible I’d like your forgiveness.”
“You have it already,” she said.
“Daphne, what’s come to you?” he asked. “You were loathing me like poison last time I came.”
“I’ll tell you later what’s come to me,” said Daphne. “Now get it off your chest while I go on with my gardening.”
To his relief she turned away from him to the flower border she was weeding. “I’m a coward, Daphne,” he said. “I have been all my life. I’ve been afraid of most things, including poverty and responsibility, but after the war broke out I was chiefly terrified of injury, pain and death. I was chiefly a pacifist from fear.”
“You conquered that fear,” said Daphne quickly.
“To no purpose,” said Michael. “In Crete, towards the end, do you remember that I was shot in the head? I shot myself rather than go on any longer. I’ve always been a rotten shot and I couldn’t even shoot straight into my own head.”
“Did you mean to kill yourself?” she asked quietly.
“Yes. And it was not a sudden temptation. It was deliberate.”
“But you’ve just said you were afraid of death.”
“And injury. Daphne, some injuries are frightful. And you don’t die. Sometimes one fear can entirely conquer another and that was how it was with me. In the confusion of everything it was not realized how I’d come by that wound. I got away with it. And the man who took over my platoon, Bill Harris, a friend of mine, is still alive, blind and mad. Because of what I did he got the injury I’d been trying to escape.”
“Michael, that’s awful,” murmured Daphne. “What a ghastly thing to have to carry with you all your days.”
“Pretty ghastly, but worse for him,” said Michael.
They were silent, and then she said, “But what has it to do with the way you treated me the night before our wedding?”
“I’d always been afraid of marriage, Daphne. Afraid of the responsibility. And then, after Crete, there was the shame of what I’d done. I was too much of a coward to tell you, or anyone, about it. So it ate into me. Then, on the day before our wedding, I heard for the first t
ime what had happened to Bill Harris. The shock sent me crackers I think. Or else completely sane. I saw myself as some sort of a filthy reptile. Marriage with a decent woman was out of the question.”
“I doubt if I’m a decent woman,” said Daphne. And then, after a pause, “Do you remember the wording of the note you sent me?”
“No. I just scribbled something or other.”
“Michael, did you hate me for refusing to go away with you that weekend?”
“Hate you? Good heavens, no!”
“How did you feel about it?”
“Ashamed. You weren’t that sort. I was, but you weren’t. It was because you weren’t that sort that I’d wanted to marry you. And then, it seemed to me, I’d tried to pull you down to my level. I was too ashamed, afterwards, to look you in the face.”
“I see,” said Daphne slowly. “ ‘I see men as trees walking.’ I wish I had not been born blind. Any more, Michael?”
“Not much more,” he said. “Just why I’m here. I’m just out of prison.” Daphne steadied herself and went on gardening. “For embezzlement. I backed a play I’d written with a client’s money and the play failed. It was a cause célèbre, for we were both well-known men.”
“John and I never read the paper thoroughly,” said Daphne. “John is too conscientious to be headline-minded. He reads the Times leading article slowly and repeatedly until he has understood every word, but that’s all he has time for. I read headlines only, and if the children are ill I don’t read even those. Perhaps your trial coincided with Pat’s appendix.”
“Perhaps it did,” said Michael wearily.
Daphne abandoned her gardening, turned round and looked at him. She realized she had been right to think he was a Puck who was afraid of the shadows behind the trees. What could one do or say that healthy breezes might blow again through the Athenian forest? John would know.
“Michael, may I tell John?” she asked.
“I’d like you to tell him,” he said.