James Anderson replied that in different circumstances he was sure Mr. Hepplewhite would have done both those things. The reply was, he hoped, truthful, for given a certain number of circumstances anyone could doubtless do anything. And then suddenly he had a queer mental vision of Mr. Hepplewhite plodding through a blizzard, his head down against the whirl of snow, a massive dogged bulk of obstinacy. “Your husband is a man of great strength,” he said. “And, I think, of resurgence. One cannot imagine him doing anything with a storm except eventually getting the better of it.”
Mrs. Hepplewhite brightened, and then the gleam of light passed as she asked, “How long will he be in prison?”
“I don’t know. Possibly for some years.”
“It’s a long time,” she said. “But it will pass. I suppose I ought to want him to be sorry, repentant, yet do you know I don’t really want him to be anything different from what he is. I’ve always loved him just as he was, however unhappy he made me.”
This was suddenly too much for James. He ought to be saying that they should wish for repentance but just now he couldn’t. What she said was so utterly true of human love at its deepest, blindest and most heartbreaking. All he could say was, “I am sure you will find, when you get him back, that he is still essentially himself.”
He left her and said to Mary, as she let him out, “That is an extremely good woman.”
“But you knew that before, surely?”
“Possibly, but without the humility to recognize my knowledge.”
“And Mr. Hepplewhite?”
“He will emerge. The power to do that is of course a virtue. You are staying here?”
“For the present,” said Mary. “I’ve even brought my cat.”
“When you first came here I should never have suspected you of a cat. Good day.”
Now what does a cat symbolize? Mary wondered as she shut the door on him. Domesticity? Decay, like pears going mushy? Anyway I’ve got the cat. She remembered Tiger with acute pleasure and then turned back to the front door as the afternoon post shot through the letterbox.
She took Mrs. Hepplewhite the mail and went to fetch the tea cart. When she wheeled it into the drawing room she found her in a flood of tears so desperate that Tania had betaken herself to the hearth rug. I never did like poodles, thought Mary briefly, and conquering her native distaste of elderly women in tears she knelt down and put her arms around Mrs. Hepplewhite. The time-honored phrases came to her quite easily. “Do you good to have a good cry, my dear.” And then later, “What you want now is a cup of tea.”
“It was in my stars,” said Mrs. Hepplewhite huskily, accepting the cup of tea. “It was in my stars that we should be great friends. Do you remember that day I called on you and told you I knew we should be friends?”
“I remember,” said Mary, and had a moment of alarm. She had always liked to choose her intimate friends, not have them thrust upon her. Yet why should she have things as she liked them? She abandoned the alarm. “Was there bad news in your post, Hermione?” she asked. It was the first time she had used Mrs. Hepplewhite’s Christian name.
“Oh, my dear, call me Dolly!” Mrs. Hepplewhite begged her with another quick burst of tears. “No, not bad news. It was that he called me Dolly. Fred. I’ve had a letter from him. Just saying that he’d like me to go and see him. Just that, but calling me Dolly. I thought he’d quite forgotten that he used to call me Dolly. That was my name when we got married, my real name, but when we began to get on in life he didn’t like it any more. He didn’t like anything that reminded him of the early days, and being poor and so on. He told me to choose something more dignified. So I chose Hermione. I saw it in a newspaper and thought it was dignified. But I’d like you to call me Dolly.”
“I’d rather go on calling you Hermione,” said Mary. “It suits you.”
“Why, dear?”
“Did you ever read The Winter’s Tale?”
“That’s Shakespeare, isn’t it? No, I don’t read poetry. It muddles me. Why use lots of unnecessary words just so as to get a rhyme at the end of each line?”
“Well, the woman in it is called Hermione. She was not well treated by her husband but she won him back in the end.”
“You mean . . . you think . . . ?”
“Yes, I do.”
“But Mr. Anderson doesn’t think people ever change very much.”
“A man is not a different person just because he becomes aware. Oh I know it must seem like metamorphosis when the eyes of a blind man are opened, but he’s the same man. We grow, mercifully, and growth is just awareness of more and more.”
“Could you read me The Winter’s Tale? I love your voice and all those words might make some sort of sense if you spoke them.”
“I’ll read it to you,” Mary promised. “Won’t you tell me about the days when you first met Fred?”
For the rest of the day Mrs. Hepplewhite told her, and no poet at his most eloquent had ever had more to say. There was even a lyric quality in Mrs. Hepplewhite’s description of her early years, when Dolly Arnold had been living within her own milieu like a fish in the sea. The sweet ease of those days had invested them with a poetic glow of beauty. For each of us, Mary thought, where we rest and are at home is beautiful. But our conception of home changes as awareness grows and would she be happy now in the Edgware Road and the Gaiety Theatre?
“Would you like to go back there?” she asked.
“Where, dear?”
“To the Edgware Road.”
They were in Mrs. Hepplewhite’s bedroom now and it was night. She shook her head and looked out of the window at the winter trees, their dark sculptured beauty motionless against the starry sky. “No. I don’t think I’d like the television aerials or the noise of the traffic. Not now. But I’d like a little house or a bungalow. All modern, with gadgets.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “There’s going to be one for sale in the village. Julie told me. The Howards are leaving. It’s only two doors off from those dear Adamses.”
Now may heaven strengthen the Adamses, thought Mary. Aloud she said, “You could let this house.”
“If Fred agrees I’ll sell it,” said Mrs. Hepplewhite. “And my jewels and the Bentley.”
“Won’t you miss the Bentley?”
“No. I’ve always longed to travel by bus with all the other people. It’s lonely alone in the Bentley. And I can give the money to the people who will be poor because of Fred.”
Mary knew with James Anderson that it would be as a drop in the ocean, but she agreed. “Shall I stay with you until you sleep?” she asked. She had been doing that these last few nights, sitting by Mrs. Hepplewhite until her sleeping tablets took effect. But tonight she was sufficiently convalescent for the terror of loneliness to be less severe. “With Tania on the bed I’ll be all right,” she said.
2
Mary escaped with thankfulness to her own room next door, feeling loneliness to be the supreme blessing, but she was too tired to sleep and when she was in bed she put her dressing jacket around her shoulders and reached for Mansfield Park. The house was centrally heated, which should have been ideal for reading in bed, yet she missed the slight tang of cold that her bedroom at The Laurels had nowadays. It was invigorating and invested a hot-water bottle with a pleasure keen as itself. But Mansfield Park failed to hold her. Fanny was good but she lacked the serene depth of Anne Elliot and Jane Bennett. Mary found her a rather tiresome little creature and putting her gently aside turned to another. It was Cousin Mary whom she found she wanted.
So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one’s heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings. Cousin Mary was one of these, coming and going in the pages of her diary, yet greater than the others because when she went it was not into nowhere. Mary kne
w that now. One morning, waking out of deep sleep, she had, like James Anderson a few hours ago, humbly recognized her knowledge, and known herself mistaken until now, and a follower of the path of least resistance. For unbelief was easier than belief, much less demanding and subtly flattering because the agnostic felt himself to be intellectually superior to the believer. And then unbelief haunted by faith, as she knew by experience, produced a rather pleasant nostalgia, while belief haunted by doubt involved real suffering; that she knew now by intuition, soon probably she would know it by experience also. One had to be haunted by one or the other, she imagined, and to make the choice if only subconsciously. She was ashamed that subconsciously she had chosen not to suffer.
And so here I am, she thought. I came here to get to know Cousin Mary and John and I do know them better than I did. While they lived in this world I knew little, even of John. I know more now, for T. S. Eliot was right when he said,
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Complete knowledge I cannot hope for until I am with them again but I know the essential thing about them, that they’re alive. And because they live so does God, for without Him what would be the point of life beyond death? Life is a reaching out for something or someone. That is its definition. We choose one thing and then another to reach for, climbing to a new rung on the ladder as awareness grows, but they are all only symbols, even human love at its highest and most redemptive. And so now I know, without cataclysm or vision, simply living among the people here, loving them, and growing in the soil of this place.
She opened the diary and the first words she read startled her profoundly. “I am at the Manor.” The date was ten years later than that of the entry which had told her of the finding of the old chest. There had been intervening entries, all valuable to Mary because deepening her knowledge of Cousin Mary, but containing nothing of relevance to her own life in Appleshaw.
It is because Jenny has had to have a holiday. I’ve had a bad time this winter. Jenny got worn out looking after me and Dr. Partridge said she must go away for a rest. And so I came here. I was invited and there seemed nothing else to do, but until a few days ago I didn’t know how to bear it that as well as injuring Jenny I had to be an anxiety to the dear old couple here, and a nuisance to their servants. I was very wretched, for the aftermath of this last bad time has been horrible. I have been despairing, not because of my illness, because I have found meaning and purpose in that, but because of the burden I am to other people and because I was convinced that everyone must be shrinking from me. And so, hating myself, I shrank from them and that created a new sort of loneliness. I was alone with self-hatred and that is utterly vile.
But that was when I first came. I feel different now because of a book I read. I am writing this sitting in the library window, thinking of Sir Charles and Lady Royston but no longer with despair darkening my love for them. That’s gone. They must be very old now. I thought they were old when I came, because I was young then and to the young, people in their seventies seem to have one foot in their grave. Now they must be in their eighties. Yet they are very nearly as vigorous as ever, though smaller and somehow more concentrated, like the residue of perfume in an empty bottle. Or like this February weather, winter but so marvelously alive and warm. They have driven out in the carriage to pay a call at a distance, and Mr. Ambrose is out shooting, and so I am alone in the house except for the servants, and the old blind spaniel who is sleeping at my feet. He and I, both of us cracked pitchers, have a fellow feeling for each other and are always contented together. And I love the library better than any other room in the house. I love the smell and feel of it and the throng of happy ghosts who I like to imagine are with me here. It always surprises me that they don’t step visibly from the books they wrote. When I take only one book from the shelves the whole lot of them seem to me to be tinglingly alive, not only the man who walks beside me as I carry his book to my chair. Craftsmen are deeply united, I think, and rejoice in each other’s artifacts from one generation to another.
But today I am here not to read but to write about the book that is lying in my lap, and about one of the craftsmen, William the Hunchback. I cannot understand now how I’ve been so long in finding out about him, since I’ve known him so long. Some years ago I went to the tower room to poke about among the rubbish but I did not connect the W.H. I saw carved on the wall with the W.H. carved inside the lid of my chest, or the ugly humorous monk with the thorns around his neck with my infirmarian, or realize that it was himself he had carved at the bottom of the stairs leading to his workshop in the tower. The book on my lap, which I found a week ago, and in which I read William’s story, is one that was given to Sir Charles by the Rector who was here when Sir Charles was a young man. The Rector, Gervase Jackson, wrote it when he himself was young, so it’s an old book now and all the s’s are f’s and I’d had hard work to make it out. It’s a short book, part of a Latin book which Gervase found in the library of his Oxford college. The whole book, he says in his preface, was a long history of the abbey with a selection of stories about personalities connected with it, some probably true, others perhaps mythical. The most picturesque of these Gervase removed from the original work, like plums from a pudding, and translated into English. It did not take me long to find the one about William and though Gervase in his preface placed it in the perhaps mythical list, I know it is true. I’ll write it out again here, very shortly, just for my own joy. It’s a double joy, for not only, thanks to Gervase, do I now know William better but he has shown me something I did not understand before. Nor did he before it was shown to him.
William was his name in religion and he took it because William was the first lord of the manor of Appleshaw who at his death bequeathed a large tract of land and much of his wealth to the Cistercians, that they might build an abbey around the church that held his tomb. His full name was William de Garland and he went on the disastrous Second Crusade and was knighted on his return. His coat of arms was a cross-handled sword and a beehive, for according to legend he was a fine aspirant, and the abbey kept his coat of arms as their own. William the monk had another reason for wanting to bear the knight’s name, for in his boyhood he had worked for the lord of the manor of his day, Sir William Roche, who had built a Tudor manor house within the ruined walls of the first Sir William’s castle, and Sir William had been good to him. For he was not only hunchbacked but, as the old book says, “mightily misshapen, with short bow-legs and long arms that hung down, sickly and very plain of countenance,” so much so that other children were scared of him, or laughed and threw stones. And he himself, neglected as he was by the uncle whom he lived with and knocked about by his horde of healthy children, grew to be as scared of the human race as a hunted leveret. And a hunted wild creature he might have been until the end had not Sir William rescued him one day from a crowd of jeering children, taken pity on him and given him work to do at the manor. He was dogboy first, and later he was promoted to help with the horses, and then to be bee keeper, for he was wonderfully clever with all animals and wild creatures and they loved him greatly. When any animals in the neighborhood were sick or injured he was sent for to care for them, for he had knowledge of healing herbs and hands gifted with healing. He would have liked to care for human creatures in the same way but to his grief they continued to shrink from him, and so he continued to shrink from them. He was a skillful carver in wood and stone and in this work he found pleasure, and despite frequent sickness of body he did not manage too badly, whatever his inward sorrow, until such time as Sir William had a bad fall while hunting and received injuries from which eventually he died.
Then did grief and despair take hold of the hunchback, for his love and life had been centered upon his master. His only comfort was his bees and soon they too were taken from him, for Sir William had left no heir and the
manor passed to another family, the Roystons, who brought their own servants with them. They were repelled by William’s appearance and dismissed him. He went into the woods and lived there alone for some months, finding shelter in bad weather in one of the abbey barns, that had in early days been a guest house and marked the boundary of the abbey lands upon the north. Kindly villagers brought bread and left it by the well beside the barn, and he gathered berries and edible fungi, for he would never kill wild creatures for food, and somehow he managed to live.
Then one day in early spring he suddenly appeared among the stonemasons who were enlarging the abbey church and with changed and smiling countenance offered them his services, and labored with them until the work was completed. Then with the same cheerful face, quite changed from the man he had been, he presented himself before the Abbot and asked that he might be accepted as a lay brother. He was put in charge of the bees, and later made infirmarian, and the Abbot gave him a workshop in the tower where in his spare time he could continue to use his skill with wood and stone. He lived until old age, dying just before the dissolution of the abbey, and was reckoned at the time of his death to be a very holy man. He himself, however, deemed those mistaken who called him holy, declaring himself to be a great sinner saved from despair only by the mercy of God that came upon him in the vision in the wood.
He delighted to tell this story and believed implicitly in his vision. When it was suggested to him that he had imagined what he saw, he said, dream or vision, what did it matter? Whichever it was, his God had by its means lifted him out of his despair. He had, he said, that afternoon in early spring, taken shelter in the barn from a sudden drenching thunderstorm. Around sunset the rain ceased and he went outside to get himself a drink of water from the well under the thorn tree. He came out into a dazzle of gold and to the east, where the last of the storm clouds made a violet bruise in the sky, there was a rainbow. The trees were rosy with the swelling buds and the grass sparkled. The birds were singing and the first primroses were in bloom around the wall. Yet there was no lightening of his darkness as he stood looking at them, only a deepening of it. Caught in this web of beauty he felt himself a thing of horror, ugly and dirty in body, mind and soul. He wished he could tear himself out of the shining web, that he might no longer defile it. And then the thought came to him, Why not? On the other side of the well was the thorn, a young tree but with stout branches, and inside the barn there was a length of rope. For a short while after, he would continue to defile the web and then he would be found and buried and the fair earth would be quit of him.