He had gone down with his ship at the battle of Jutland. But by that time Jimmy had come, and gone for ever; so that no other death, not even poor George’s, seemed particularly important.
But she saw him now very clearly—his sturdy form, his cheerful sailor’s face, touched by transfiguration in the distance: as much alive—or dead, poor George—as the girl beside him.
She walked on, savouring his solitude, treading with light and supple movements over the rough turf. When she was a young girl she had danced with such a particular, swimming grace, that she had actually thought of embarking on a professional training. The war and being a V.A.D. had put a stop to all that. Pity. It was her one claim to distinction. But Gerald, from some twist of puritanism or jealousy, disliked even a reference to her dancing days. Yet sometimes, when she tried to see through his eyes, it seemed to her that it was that very happy rhythm in her, the simplicity of response to life that perhaps it expressed, which had made him need her and say so pitifully, almost directly after their first meeting—two worn-out relics of war service thrown up by the Armistice—that she must marry him.
And ever since he had tried to do her down.
She stopped, and said aloud: “Why should I live with my enemy?”
She would go on walking and walking, and perhaps she would never come back.
The whole of Christopher Seddon’s collection of clocks struck seven o’clock. They sounded from every part of the house with a variety of voices, harsh or musical—a few chiming in unison, most of them treading on each other’s heels. The friendly voice, the warning voice, the jocular, the nervous, the complacent, the exasperating, the malicious one that woke you in the night—all awoke and gave tongue. Last of all, from the centre of the house, came the huge and weary one, summing up (thought Ralph Seddon, listening in his room) with an absolute pessimism, subduing the many different voices of humanity with: All is vanity.
Subject for a poem, he thought; or a symbolical poetic drama in one act. But rather trite. He whispered: “I must write, I must write.” He must justify now, this very summer, that faith in him which the letter in his pocket expressed. He took it out again and read the last lines:
I shall never write anything now, but it’s obvious you will; especially since you survived your time at Oxford without publishing—and without wrecking yourself with a hopeless love affair. I advise you to stick to people of your own sort, because whatever they do to you, you can talk about it to them—explain yourself—use their own weapons against them—and that’s a comfort. It doesn’t matter to be hurt in your own way—in fact, though I hate to admit it, it may profit a man. But un-understanding—the hoof unconscious—that’s too brutal and too bloody.
You ask me if I am happy. I don’t know yet. Meanwhile be you happy in your ancestral retreat: but don’t stay in it too long. Art does not thrive upon a cloistered virtue, whatever you may think now. See everything, try everything. You have the natural integrity to stand no matter what. That’s (partly) why I love you and (chiefly) why I have faith in your future. Some learn honesty when parents, schools, etc., have done their worst: but you, I feel, were born with it—though of course your lack of parents has given you an advantage. You are the first person I have believed in since Oxford, when I believed—in myself, I suppose. Write to me.—O.
Underneath was scribbled, in a hurried, irregular hand: Forgive all this advice and heaviness. I am not like that really. Thank you, Ralph, for being so sweet to me that evening at the party. It made my visit more pleasure almost than pain. When may I see you again? Will you come to Italy in June?
He put the envelope back in his pocket. He must answer it at once, and then, how time would drag until his answer arrived! No excitement was so curiously penetrating, so concentrated and instantaneous, as that caused by the sight of the letter one awaited, lying sealed and pregnant upon the dark table.
He looked out of the window and saw those people still on the tennis-lawn. Now and then their voices came up to him. When would they go? How he loathed them! They had forced him to explain his presence, and then gaped at him and tied him up with self-consciousness and then expected him to join in their jolly fun … thought him rude, probably, for making no pretence of joining in. Yes, he had been exposed by an idiot of a woman, helpless in his ghastly shyness. How like a woman! He had seen one of them, the pretty one, smiling: laughing at him, no doubt.
As he watched, he saw the long, bowed figure of the old gentleman going down the steps, moving with his odd, stealthy stride towards them. And then his grandmother came out of the house, dressed in a flowing, flowered lilac silk, and a vast beribboned straw hat, perched quivering on her white hair. She went down to the garden and wandered among the beds, pausing and stooping now and then over the flowers.
Ah, she was the only woman who was all right. She was impregnable in her tower of deafness. She would go on stooping over her flowers, and nobody would know what she thought about, and nobody would try to recall to her the old days; (for you could not shout at the top of your voice about them: he knew enough to know that they were not that kind).
And when he looked at her he thought her so accomplished, so rare and beneficent, so wise with so few words, so courageous (bearing, as it were, the last fruits of some long-past necessity for courage) that it seemed miraculously fitting that in her old age it should be granted to her to stoop in unbroken silence above her flowers. …
He sat down and wrote his letter and addressed it in his neat Oxford hand. It lay on the hall table ready for the post: Oliver Digby, Esq.—with a London address.
The shadows lengthened on the lawn. White-bearded, pallid of eye and cheek, stealthy of stride, Christopher Seddon crept towards his guests.
He offered his hand to them each in turn, limply, in silence, averting his eyes. He summoned no social smile. He made them feel nervous.
“Have you enjoyed yourselves?” he said at last. His voice was faint.
It was Clare who answered, composedly, while the others murmured corroboration.
“We have, indeed. We’ve fished and played tennis, and eaten the most delicious strawberries. They’re the first I have had this year. I suppose this lovely weather has brought them on.”
“Hot-house.”
“What did you say?”
“Hot-house.”
He closed his eyes rapidly as if to dismiss her from his field of vision; then addressed Gerald:
“Norah’s husband, aren’t you? Where is she?”
Nobody knew.
Hugh said shyly, but with an engaging smile:
“I caught you a fat trout for your supper, sir.”
“Thank you.” A gleam shot for the first time from beneath his hollowed brows.
“I hope we haven’t been an awful bore, rampaging all over the garden. It was frightfully nice of you to let us come.”
“And now,” said Clare, “we must find Norah and be off.”
“You must all stay to supper,” said Cousin Christopher, faintly but distinctly.
“Oh, good,” cried Hugh, covering any silence there might have been. “Then I can fit in a bathe. May I bathe? I saw there was a diving-board.”
“Ah, yes, a bathe. … Are you equipped?”
“Am I what?”
“Equipped … with a garment?”
“Oh! no. But anything will do, I don’t mind.” (He seldom gave his attention to equipment.) … “We might all bathe if we could get fitted out. What do you think?” He turned to the others.
Gerald and Clare thought they would like to bathe. Hugh turned hopefully to his host. The bounty of a house that had provided fishing-tackle, tennis-balls, and hot-house strawberries could not, he felt, find bathing apparel a stumbling-block.
“I seem to remember,” whispered Mr. Seddon, almost smiling, “in times past, lakefuls of nephews of my wife’s. I daresay there are garments p
ut away. Nothing for ladies. …” He winced.
“Oh! I can wear any boy’s thing,” said Clare, observing her hips and thighs complacently.
Hugh turned to Grace.
“You oughtn’t to, I’m afraid,” he said doubtfully, “not on top of ’flu.”
“No! No!” She shook her head vigorously, laughing. At his instigation she had run about hitting at tennis-balls and missing them, but not even he should make her step into the lake, her Victorian limbs encased in a one-piece male swimming suit.
He swept them all after him as he led the way back to the house, talking easily, abolishing difficulties, unconcernedly mingling incongruous elements by dint of sheer enthusiasm for existence. She heard him inquire of the silent and peculiar figure at his side if he were sure he wouldn’t have a quick dip too; if he ever got any duck or snipe over the water; telling him what kind of fly he had used for his trout; saying how absolutely topping the garden was—and weren’t there some Roman remains somewhere near? …
Soon the faint voice of his companion gathered a little strength, floated back to her in fragments.
“Much bothered” … she heard … “a rapid growth of water weed coming up again this year … thinking of getting an expert …”
And soon: “The history of the county I am engaged on … some difficulty … a few illustrations and maps … might care to see the kind of thing …”
By the time they reached the house, they were pacing shoulder to shoulder, talking as men talk once they have recognized in each other the mutual background of country gentlemanhood. Grace caught the expression on Christopher Seddon’s face: a sort of dawning liveliness was touching its mournful clayey contours, so that he began to seem very nearly (but not quite) what Hugh—probably owing to the beard—certainly thought him: simple and kindly, a dear old gentleman.
When the sun was setting, the dark and serious young man walked out of the house and down towards the lake.
He listened. They were still about, those people—bathing now. Their loud voices called and hung on the windless evening air. A woman cried out, with an ascending inflection: “Icy! Icy! Icy!—” and laughter followed; and in silence he heard the crystalline splash of a diver. He took the lake path through the trees, where already there was twilight; and blackbirds were singing. When he came to the lake’s edge he peered round a tree-trunk and saw the fair young man standing solitary upon the bank, gazing into the water. The others had disappeared. He was a shape of beauty and repose: leaning his weight slightly, easily, upon one foot, the other thrust a little outward, a hand on his hip, languid but firm—a pose for a sculptor.
A pose for a sculptor; and yet, thought Ralph, the attitude was curiously individual. He had seen it before. Somewhere in the past he had seen that form—not in the flesh, but in representation, drawn or photographed. … His mind flashed suddenly to Oliver’s album that they had looked through together that day in London … among the many groups and places of Oliver’s undergraduate days, a page of rocks and sea-coast and bathers, and somewhere on that page this figure alone, looking down into the water. He had noticed it specially, because Oliver, contrary to his custom, had written beneath it neither name nor initial; and because something that seemed romantically significant in the look of him, lonely, and turned away, had called to mind that poem, On An Athlete Dying Young. … “One of my hearty acquaintances,” Oliver had said in answer to his inquiry—and that was all.
The figure stirred suddenly, as if roused from musing, dived, cutting the water clear and deep; emerged, dried itself vigorously with a small towel, rubbed its hair up on end, put on shirt and trousers, started whistling, and lounged away.
Should he run after him, thought Ralph—approach this other walking by himself in the garden?
But no … better to be alone: to indulge the lonely mood, to wait for image and phrase to arise and take shape in the teeming mind.
Empty now was the landscape, air and water steeped in the same nacreous essence of draining light. The last of the sun still hid among the tree-trunks. Light in the evening woods stands still, stands still in golden shapes of semi-transparency. (Remember this.) … See beneath the glass-still, silk-skinned water, the reflections, solid-seeming, another world. O World intangible, we touch thee. … Lean down and see your own face looking back at you, floating wraith-like among roots and foliage. And your own footsteps meeting you. And all things going as they came. …
It had all been said. … Be more complex, more elaborate. Consciousness is a cut crystal with a million million facets: a million million lights and colours must be apprehended and gathered up together to make one truth. (Put this in your note-book.)
There were once two lovers who wandered by a pool. They kneeled by the brink and looked down and saw their own reflections. He held her with his arm; she turned her face to his. But, as their lips met, a shoal of fish came darting through the water and shattered their image into a thousand pieces; and when the surface was still again, it was empty of their faces: they were gone.
So, in that moment, out of one image of reality, three were born: three worlds, or dreams, were made. There was the dream of two happy lovers; and in the pool another dream, where human shadows made symbols of love and life: love wavering and frustrated at the very apex of fulfilment: life scattered and fleeting. And the third was the world of the fishes: beings sentient in their own element, darting from the dark alarm of alien lives into their own separateness again.
Something might be made of that, in an irregular, wandering rhythmical pattern. This might be the line to pursue: to see one reality and turn it inside out again and again, making of one many, and all conflicting; and ending with a question mark. … But Pirandello had done this, and Oliver said it was tiresome.
Write a play. Revive the poetic drama, but on new lines: no Elizabethan pastiche. Let the age speak. Catch the complex and subtle rhythms of speech and action peculiar to modern consciousness; and yet be universal, be simple and direct. Leave symbolism alone. It has no guts—transforms live flesh and blood into a sawdust parcel of tainted literary and cinematographic devices.
Yes, one must live first, go everywhere, explore everything: then suck out the life-blood of experience, lay bare the quick of joy and pain on paper.
“I will wander over the whole world.
“I will keep a notebook of extraordinary value and beauty to be published after I die young.
“Besides writing poetry I will know everything about music, painting, sculpture, architecture.
“I will go nowhere, but retire from the world now and live as a hermit, absorbed and dissolved in nature; with no human contacts to blur and hinder the intensity of my concentration.
“Or I will be in love for ever. …”
He pressed his hand against the envelope in his pocket. … Yes, but was it this one? Sometimes it seemed not this one but another, an unknown. Sometimes he felt as if he could never love, did not want to love, was not capable of it. Sometimes it seemed that if the emotion within him was not to suffocate him, he must fling off all restrictions, burst through all local habitations and names, and be free, and be in love with all things, and embrace the whole of creation at once.
“I am all air and fire, burning, burning. … I am dark and secret, capable of every vice. … I am too young, too old. …”
Down the lake path came a woman running. She was the one called Norah, who had been so enraging. She was flushed, panting; and her eyes looked dark and wide-open. She caught sight of him as she ran past, and stopped with a startled exclamation.
“I must hurry, I must hurry,” she said. She looked round vaguely, and seemed to be speaking to herself. Like the white rabbit, he thought.
“Why?” he said, leaning against his tree-trunk and feeling that this time the advantage was his.
“I went a long way, a fearfully long way, much farther than I meant, and then I
suddenly realized I must go back. I don’t know what the time is, and they’ll be looking for me, and—all sorts of things. We must get back.”
“Back where?”
“Back—home—back to the town.” He thought she gave a quick shudder. “Where are they all?”
“They’re all right. You needn’t worry about them. They’ve been bathing and goodness knows what. I expect you’ve been asked to supper.”
“Oh! …” She reflected, and then, with a curious expression: “Gerald bathing? … And Grace? I shouldn’t be surprised. … How funny!” She started to laugh, but not mirthfully. “Well—what it is to have young ideas! I dare say they haven’t missed me. Oh, dear!” She took a deep breath. “And I’m dead beat.”
She seemed to wake up suddenly and gazed at him out of bright brown eyes—(rather nice eyes).
“Tell me, who are you? Why does everything seem queer to-day? I’m sorry I made you cross, but you needn’t have been so nasty.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, flushing a little. His voice sounded for a moment young, sincere, distressed.
“Is it true you are their grandson?”
“Yes, it’s true. At least, in point of fact, her grandson. My father was her sort.”
“Was she married twice, then? Fancy my not knowing!”
“I think not. She had lovers, I suppose you know: or at least a lover.”
He threw all the nonchalance at his command into his tone and expression: for most likely she was the sort of woman who would be shocked. But she did not wince at all; she only went on looking bewildered.
“Lovers! Oh, was that it? … Didn’t Cousin Christopher mind?”
He stared at her, laughed, and shrugged his shoulders.
A Note in Music Page 11
