I was dismayed by Canon Naylor’s animadversions on the Catechism, through which he took us laboriously, line by line. It appeared that this was Holy Writ, and every word in it pregnant with meaning. While we pored over the significance of ‘What is your name? N or M.’, confirmation gradually receded from sight till it became as remote as the Last Judgment. Having successfully banished all reality from the ceremony, Canon Naylor would then speak of it with bated breath, in the same manner as he spoke of the descent of the dove at the Baptism of Jesus, or the Immaculate Conception (which, for all his glosses, I never understood). Confirmation became so mysterious a rite that I could hardly conceive of my mundane self taking part in it and still living. I became as breathless as Canon Naylor. At the fittings of my confirmation dress, I was filled with as much mystic adoration as if I were donning the habit of a nun. I used to go to chapel by myself and say prayers of such mystical rarity that I cannot believe that they ever reached the Deity but must have wandered about, like wisps of smoke, in the Ewigkeit.
Confirmation day brought me my first major disillusionment. There was no mystery, no descent of a dove, no flooding of the soul with heavenly radiance. A stout, elderly man, in gorgeous clothes, laid a soft hand like a bag of feathers on my head, and that was all. I rose from the chancel steps, and with seven or eight other initiates, white-garbed, veiled and blushing, walked down the aisle to the candidates’ reserved pew. I was aware then, as I had not been aware before the laying on of hands, of the gaping crowd who had come to witness the ceremony. There were rows of children in their dark gym tunics. All wore hats for this occasion, in deference to the Bishop whose presence was able, as God’s apparently was not, to bestow consecration upon the chapel. Under the heavily brimmed hats their pink, curious faces looked up at me as I walked slowly down the aisle in my hideous white frock and black stockings. What were they thinking? I suppose they were looking, as I had looked inwardly, for some outer evidence of change. They, like me, were disappointed. I was not transfigured. There was no unearthly light around my drooping head and no stigmata on my hot, clasped hands. I was just Rachel Curgenven – hot, uncomfortable and embarrassed, longing to get out of these clothes into my gym tunic again.
The following Sunday we took our first Communion. For this we had also been prepared by Canon Naylor. He had dealt with the service faithfully in the same manner as he had dealt with the Catechism. Every sentence, every word almost, was dwelt upon. Each had its gloss, and by the time he had finished with it, the naked simplicity, the bare bones of it, had been draped in flowery interpretations. I remember his long dissertation upon the words ‘We do not presume to come to Thy table.’ This was intended to be a text for humility, but I do not think Canon Naylor understood the nature of humility. He told us that we did not presume to come to God’s table simply because we had nothing of worth in us, no gifts, no virtues, however small; because we were worms. It was not therefore a matter of humility, to my mind, but of cringing beggary. In utter destitution we were to approach that table and pick up the crumbs. We were the recipients of God’s condescension. This view of the Eucharist was repugnant to me.
Yet despite the tedious doctrinal teaching of Canon Naylor, despite the profound disappointment that I was not translated at my confirmation, I was ardently desirous of taking my first Communion, and believed that here at last I would by-pass the foolishness of men and make direct contact with the divine presence. I had always been critical and sceptical. I had even ridiculed much of what I heard in school prayers, and chapel, but fundamentally I wanted to believe. I went to my first Communion in a dedicated frame of mind.
I emerged feeling utterly cheated, swindled, defrauded. Maybe I had expected too much – that I accepted and felt to be my own fault. But I had thought that God had a part to play as well. After all, it was I who was in darkness. I could only reach out my hands, and that I had done. There was nothing there. Any competent priest could have torn this to pieces in five minutes, but not to my spiritual satisfaction. The priest had an answer to everything, but I had never wanted the answers at second-hand. I wanted them at first-hand – doubtless a sin of spiritual pride – and when at the age of sixteen I had stumbled on the emptiness that lies beyond our five senses, I was not prepared to fill it either with what others told me must be there, or with my own imagination. I accepted the emptiness for what it was and I have found it impossible to believe in God since.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestis.
Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores.
VIRGIL
(Fortunate that man who knows his country gods, Pan and old Silvanus and the sister spirits of the woods.)
THE May term came, and Rachel felt the acute restlessness of the young animal in springtime. Unable in this nunnery to find any normal outlet for her emotions, she sought violent physical exercise. All over the park, trees had been felled that winter, and left lying, to be carried into the wood sheds in the early summer, sawn up and stacked for the following autumn.
‘Chief,’ said Rachel, one morning, catching Miss Faulkner as she came out of assembly, ‘Chief, I want to do some work in the park.’
Chief slipped her arm over Rachel’s shoulders and propelled her gently down the passage towards the front hall. They paused in front of a huge bowl of red tulips.
‘Wonderful,’ said Chief, appreciatively, and caressed one of the pear-shaped flowers with her smooth hands. ‘Wonderful. Now, come along, my dear Curgenven, we’ll take a walk in the park, and you can tell me what it is you want to do.’
They walked slowly across the deserted cricket pitches.
‘It’s the wood-sawing, and the collecting up of the felled trees,’ said Rachel, at last. ‘I wondered if you’d let me help the men. I like sawing.’
‘Do you? Can you use a saw? Or an axe?’
‘I’ve used one at home.’
‘Let’s walk round to the wood sheds and talk to Tarrant.’
The white house shimmered softly in the heat; the great elms, grouped at one end of the playing fields, smoked in the sun in the humid atmosphere. A little way off the deer were grazing, and Chief’s words were punctuated by their staccato coughs. A pleasant sense of well-being, bred of this flattering intimacy and the soft charm of the scene, came over Rachel, and the weight of Chief’s arm upon her own seemed an honourable burden.
Slowly they walked round, past the Big Hall, past the chapel, past the concrete on which punishment drill took place. In the wood sheds, Tarrant and another man were unloading tree trunks from the cart and stacking them. There was a sweet smell of sawdust.
‘I’ve brought you a second mate, Tarrant,’ said Chief. She got on well with the men of the estate. She had the hereditary gift of dealing with servants, of managing estates, of judging horses and trees and soil. The men touched their caps, and Tarrant looked Rachel up and down.
‘Meaning the young lady, ma’am?’ he asked in his broad Somerset voice.
‘Yes, let her come and work here. Watch her with an axe, Tarrant. If she can use it properly, she has my permission to come whenever she likes.’
‘Right, ma’am.’ Nothing surprised the Bampfield men. ‘Are you starting now, Miss Rachel?’
‘Well, I ought to be doing French, I believe,’ said Rachel guiltily.
‘Go ahead,’ said Chief, increasing the pressure of her arm a little before withdrawing it. ‘Go ahead. It’s not one of your University Entrance subjects. You can say you had my permission to miss it.’
Chief was a woman accustomed to cutting through ordinary routine, to brushing aside convention and habit as often as she created it. At that moment, Rachel could have knelt down and kissed her hand. She waited till Chief had gone and then rolled up her sleeves. The men took her advent as a matter of course. It was thus, by an unexpected act of understanding, that Chief bound to her devotion those spirits like Rachel, whose bent led them towards imaginative fields. At another school, no such permissi
on would have been given, no such work, probably, would have been available. Swinging an axe in the warm, moted sunshine of the woodyard restored Rachel to her sense of proportion. And there were hours of even greater delight, when she would escape from games or prep, and find Tarrant just lifting the last tree from the cart. He would let her take the horse out into the park, with his assistant, a silent, red-faced Somersetshire boy called Jeff, too overcome by the proximity of a young lady to speak a single word, except unintelligible syllables to the aged horse. They would plod solemnly over the soft grass towards the fallen trees. Together they would lift the branches into the cart. Jeff, with perspiring chivalry, always endeavoured to do the main work of heaving up the trunks. Purple with exertion, his hairy arms running with sweat, he grunted and occasionally uttered strange, animal noises that Rachel took to be oaths, and she vied with him in her exertions, till it became almost a contest between them as to which should get the heaviest end of the tree into the cart.
She would return from these expeditions, or from the wood-cutting in the yard, a different person, would sit in the prefects’ room, working at an essay, impervious to the gossip and by-play around her. She would stand in Georgie’s room, sunburnt and assured, unaware of the impression of vitality she created, murmuring dangerous badinage and talking with a familiarity the effect of which she little understood.
The outdoor work brought her into contact, too, with Punch. As Rachel was not in her house, and had dropped Geography, which was Punch’s chief subject, her contacts with this Bampfield eccentric were few. But Punch was responsible for some of the outdoor organization of the place, and Rachel found great pleasure in some of the odd scraps of conversation they indulged in, when they met at the wood sheds, or walked up the long lime avenue together to the market gardens. More and more, the staff tended to treat Rachel almost as an adult, and Punch would discuss with her the latest biography she had read, or retail for her amusement some strange piece of information she had culled from an obscure journal, or an old book. She was earthy and outspoken, and endlessly curious, and succeeded in destroying some of Rachel’s primness.
Of Miss Burnett, Rachel saw a great deal. Their relations were not always easy. But there were periods when Miss Burnett was moody and irritable; when a feverish look appeared in her eye and a bitter twist to her mouth. On one occasion, they were translating Catullus – ‘Odi et amo.’ Miss Burnett read the words slowly in Latin, lingeringly drawling their syllables. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘translate it.’
‘I hate and I love,’ began Rachel.
‘Oh, leave out that feeble “and”,’ said Miss Burnett.
‘“Et” in Latin has a hundred times the force of “and” in English.’
‘Shall I strengthen it with a “yet”?’ suggested Rachel. ‘I hate and yet I love?’ Her versifying instinct told her that this sounded more melodious.
‘No,’ snarled Miss Burnett. ‘Leave it out. If you cannot find an equivalent word, be forceful by omission. “I hate … I love”.’
Disturbed at the vicious tone of her voice, Rachel ploughed her way solemnly through the second line. There was a moment’s silence.
‘Oh, God,’ groaned Miss Burnett, ‘that I am condemned to teach schoolgirls.’ She rose abruptly, went to the window and lit a cigarette. Turning so that her golden hair appeared like an aureole round her dark, bitter face, and the smoke from her lips suffusing the whole window, she said, ‘How can you possibly understand those words? Go away. Go and play your silly games in the prefects’ room.’
Bitterly hurt, Rachel swept up her books and left the room. Hardly knowing where she was going, she found herself running down the lime avenue towards the stables, without even bothering to see if anyone was watching her or following. All the months of spring the garden had remained in her mind; why had she never visited it since that February night? She could not have answered; its magical quality had been its own invisible protection, perhaps, making a further visit – a visit of curiosity – a violation. But now she was in desperate need of it.
She had no pliers, but the wire where she had last entered the shrubbery was very insecurely fastened and yielded easily to her fingers. Still clasping her Catullus, she stumbled through the undergrowth. Her hands were green as she pushed the branches aside, and then, as she came out into the clearing, she saw before her the silent, weeded lake, the pagoda, bright amid the trees, the little bridges, the tiny peninsula with its rotting boathouse still miraculously faultless, its timbers precariously supporting the carved roof.
She still had not told Margaret that she had found the garden. She shut out from her mind the fact that Margaret knew of it, preferring to imagine it her own domain. It sprang to her mind, in absence, as a complete image, precise in detail. Reason told her that the ponds were no longer clear, but thick with silt and fallen leaves. But it never occurred to her to deplore its decay. She accepted the place as she accepted a poem. It imaged for her an inner order behind chaotic and unlovely everyday existence. It reflected the logic of that other world, and it held within its narrow rim a draught of pure poetry. It was a thing created for delight, no matter how artificial a conception, or how decayed by time. It was subject to spirits, to arcane gods, whose presence she never recognized consciously, but whose influence she felt, benign and revealing. From then on, she went to the garden over and over again. Though any meaning attached to her visits was only dimly apprehended, it was sufficiently within her reach to induce her to pursue it, as she pursued the meaning of a poem, say one by Thomas the Rhymer, and as with that poem one enters a little deeper into its meaning with every reading, so she entered more deeply into the world of the Chinese garden every time she visited it.
This term had brought an important change to Rachel and one which had considerable bearing on her happiness. She was made a prefect. This diverted her restless, domineering side (described in school reports as a gift for leadership) into more legitimate channels.
The appointment as prefect coincided with a period of intellectual pleasure which balanced the physical delights of the park and woodyard. It was, therefore, a period of equilibrium, one which rarely offers itself to any personality, and it brought Rachel the last measure of content which Bampfield was to afford her. Just as her flowering physical strength had found an immediate outlet in her work with the tree-fellers, so her growing intellectual powers found plentiful material to work on in the fields of literature which were opening up before her. Rachel’s English work was now entirely done in private coaching with a member of the staff with whom she had previously had little contact. This was Miss Naylor.
Miss Naylor was stone deaf and precluded from class teaching by this disability. She did only coaching work and secretarial chores for Chief. She lived in a small world of her own, seemingly armed against Bampfield’s rigours and eccentricities by her inner philosophic content: Teres atque rotundus, like Horace’s happy man, and smoothed and rounded in her own person too – a kind of human Mrs Tiggy-Winkle in appearance. If her deafness was a barrier, it was also a protection. Perhaps also it affected her olfactory sense, for her ill-furnished room smelt overpoweringly of cat and cat’s fish. She had two tabby beasts and kept for them an earth-box which never appeared to have been emptied when I saw it, while saucers of stale fish and dusty milk were arranged in one corner. The room was full of books, good, solid, old-fashioned editions of the poets and novelists, books which at most had been names to me, and which opened up a very different world from that of Chief’s favourite poets – Masefield, Noyes and Kipling. I remember well when I first heard these words from Coleridge’s Christabel, read to me in Miss Naylor’s even voice:
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.
The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.
The moon is behind, and at the full;
And yet she looks both small and dull.
The night is chill, the cloud is g
ray:
’Tis a month before the month of May,
And the Spring comes slowly up this way.
The whole room – cats, earth-box, books and all – dissolved into a sheeted moonlight, and I felt at my heart the spell of evil that haunts the poem, and that lurked in the reedy park of Bampfield itself.
For my University Entrance, I studied the Romantics. Shut off from the everyday world by her deafness, Miss Naylor seemed to have slipped into and to belong to the world of Lamia and Isabella, and The Corsair. As she read, her eye and voice had much the same compelling power over me as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. She gave me the impression of having participated in the writing of the poems herself, so complete was her identification.
She opened my eyes not only to the Romantics but to the Moderns and for this I am profoundly grateful to her. They did not enter into my syllabus, but one day she produced a newly published book of modern verse. She did not read a great deal with me – she was too wise for that – but in the two or three poems that she did read, she succeeded in conveying to me her own delight in the discovery of these, as they then seemed, outlandish poets. I can hear her now, reading E. E. Cummings with enormous gusto and relish:
(the
Flics, tidiyum, are
very tidiyum reassuringly similar,
they all have very tidiyum
mustaches, and very
tidiyum chins, and just above
their very tidiyum ears their
very tidiyum necks begin)
And a phrase from another poet – I have forgotten who – still sticks in my mind:
Or a great cloud entering the room of the sky,
Napoleon of his century,
Heard come to knowing music consciously.
And, of course, there was Eliot’s The Waste Land, which I hardly understood, but found myself returning to over and over again. It was at least ten years before I bought myself a copy of that anthology. The barren years at the University and the still more barren struggle to earn a living, destroyed temporarily my desire for poetry, but I came back to it in the end, and when I reread those poems, I could hear Miss Naylor’s keen, humorous and appreciative tones, and I picked up, as an adult, my old enthusiasms and carried them forward.
The Chinese Garden Page 10
