The fact was that, demoralized by the day’s sport, and having come, by mistake, at last upon a victim in the shape of an unresisting toad, he had recklessly swallowed it alive; and the resulting digestive problem pressed upon him, heavy as lead.
Devoutly hoping that every one had gone to bed, he pushed open the library door and looked in. But Christopher Seddon was sitting up for him, the pen and ink drawings, the maps for his new book laid out on his desk, all ready to be exhibited and explained.
But Hugh stood at the door, nervously smiling, saying that he was so sorry, that he was so terribly sleepy, that he thought he would go straight to bed. …
And to make matters worse, the old boy seemed to take it as a piece of rudeness, or a snub or something—winced, jumped up, whisked away his papers, and conducted him to his room in absolute silence.
Coming downstairs again in a wretched frame of mind to extinguish all the lights, Christopher opened the drawing-room door and beheld Gerald and Clare, both of whom he had completely forgotten. Clare lay on the sofa smoking a cigarette, and Gerald sat on the floor, close beside her head. He heard her laugh and say:
“Oh, Gerald, you are delicious. I’ve never had a compliment in Greek before.”
Now what should he do? thought Christopher, his hand on the switch.
“Well, I suppose we can’t stay here all night,” said Clare.
“I wish we could,” said Gerald.
She laughed again.
“You’re getting quite human. I’ll say good night, I think.” She gave him her hand. He raised it to his lips.
“Is that a Greek custom?” she said.
But he could not answer lightly, he could do nothing but look at her. …
At this moment Christopher Seddon extinguished the lights and silently retired.
They were startled. They had to grope their way upstairs with the aid of matches.
When all the house was still, Ralph left his sleepless pillow and crept downstairs.
There was his letter still on the table: it must have missed the post. No matter. There were several unsatisfactory sentences in it. To-morrow he would write a better one. He put it in his pocket.
Out into the faint transparency of starry darkness. Run towards the dark belt of the trees. Stand among the huge tree-trunks. Be lost, be mingled in their vaster being.
From the strong convulsions of knotted root to topmost quivering shoot, the nerves tingle, the vital energy runs throughout the majestic organism. Life aches in the branches. Huge pangs of birth, growth, death, are within these sentient frames. Listen in the silence to the trees breathing.
Ye vastest breathers of the air. …
And all in a moment he was overpowered. The living giant trees were so strong around him that he thought, with panic: “I am caught for ever! …”
Chained in the earth, cased in his bark he stood. He was a beech tree.
Part Five
Where her holiday was spent she never quite knew. She forgot to ascertain, either by map, or by inquiry, precisely in what direction and locality the village lay; but traveling out by bus from the southern market town where she had spent the night, mile after mile, waiting to detect it, it revealed itself at last, as she had seen it in her mind’s eye, basking in sunlight among corn fields and water meadows; and she had found a thatched cottage, white-washed on the garden side, old pink brick where it faced the lane; and walked up through a small garden packed with flowers and set with a few ancient fruit trees; and there taken lodging.
From her square of window she saw the garden and a row of poplars, pond and village green beyond, and more cottages sitting squat and rosy in their gardens, and sending up threads of smoke from sprawling chimneys; and she heard hens and ducks, sleepy-sounding, and the children coming down the lane to school and back again; carter and cowman calling to their beasts in the fields; and the anvil ringing from the forge at the end of the village.
And she heard, too, warning notes of a new order—the frequent rattle of a motor-bicycle, newly-acquired property of the young man at the public-house, and the roar of the daily bus as it passed to the town and back, picking up, setting down its handful of shoppers and cinema-goers.
But for a little longer there would be peace: no factory stack, no entertainment hall, no railway station, tram-lines, or golf-links. For a little longer time would move kindly here; the changing seasons of all created things would follow one another imperceptibly and bring no change. Men and women, and apple trees, the great cart-horses and the corn, the rose bushes and the swallows, were all gathered up together into one common harmony of the fruitful earth.
She fell into a summer trance.
Beauty is a visitor, coming without warning, transforming for an hour, a day—sometimes for longer; crumbling at a breath, vanished again.
She wove herself into an iridescent web, linking small charm with frail enchantment until the shining fabric hid from her the commonplace noon, the ordinary night.
She was in love with her room, with its cracked pink crockery, its four-poster, whose mattress reversed every property requisite for rest and comfort, the texts, the wedding group, and the photograph of a grave on the wall. She was in love with the acrid smell of the damp old walls, with the square of window that let in the stars by night and the sighing rustle of the poplar trees, and the fragrance of meadowsweet from laden fields.
She heard the young swallows at daybreak, stirring in their mud nests beneath the eaves, greeting the light with a tender chatter.
She found upon her window-sill a moth of palest jade, with a lime-green wavering track across each wing. It lay there in the evening outspread in swooning stillness; but later she saw its life start into consciousness and sharply quiver, spinning towards her candle before she blew it out.
In the garden were large poppies and strong, straggling plants of borage. She picked some of each, mingling their harsh stems, their pure flames of red and blue in a tall vase of sea-blue glass.
By the gate grew a bush of yellow lupin; and later, when its spires began to tumble, delphinium raised its solider dark blue towers.
When the sun was hot she lay in the fret-sawed shade of an apple-tree wreathed through all its limbs with a creeping white rose. She watched a tiny kind of bird, a fly catcher, that flitted all day in the standard rosebushes. A host of young birds, swifts, martins, wagtails, swallows, were in the garden, and sharp parent cries rang out, plucking in anguish on one urgent string, while the tortoise-shell cat slid from ambush to ambush among the flowers. Nothing in the world, she thought, can match for brilliance the wet wings of birds flashing in sunlight after a shower.
She found a young swallow on the path one evening. She picked it up and brought it into the house, thinking: “It is injured and will die; and when its eye glazes reality will return.” It sat in her hand and its eye was bright, without film of pain or terror, watching her. It would not eat the crumbs she sprinkled; but after a while, when the sun was gone—making a single abrupt movement, a backward curve of the neck, a rapid burrowing,—breast puffed, beak beneath wing, it slept. She sat still in her chair, feeling the strangeness of infinitesimal claws, the tingling of warm feathers upon her palm; contemplating with delight and awe the diminutive life, unalienated in an alien contact, trusting its shelter. She carried it up and set it, lapped in unstirring infant sleep, in the fold of a woollen scarf by the open sill. She woke before dawn and discerned it still motionless there, dark and round as a ball. When next she woke the sun was up and all the birds were calling; and it had flown away.
She took this for a message, a happy omen. For the first time, she told herself, she had touched something to save, not to destroy it. Now she too would be saved. And the little dream of the bird became mingled with the essential dream of the young man. She walked holding the thought of him lovingly sheltered in the hollow of her hand.
Later came the crimson ramblers, massed and full-flowering, making a midsummer pattern rich and heavy over the yellow-green warp, the blue-green woof of all the gardens.
The grass was cut in the fields, swathe after swathe curving and falling. She sat beneath a hedge of bryony and dog-roses, breathing in the smell of the fresh mow, and watching the hay-makers at work in the sun. All the village was there in the evenings, men, women, and children; and mothers brought their infants and nursed them in the shade.
She saw the last load gathered in and piled upon the scarlet and yellow hay-cart; and the children scrambling up and riding home to the farm with shouts and laughter.
Morning and evening now she looked out from her window at the hay-stacks in the field, two shapes whose beauty of strong, balanced lines and volumes, seemed not accidental but designed—the composition of an artist. Once in the dawn after rain, she leaned out and saw them floating in white mist, half shrouded; and she heard the horse stamping in his stall. The chill river vapours had started again to haunt this valley of streams and marshes, shadowing forth October in the last days of July. Often now a vaporous opalescence lay over the meadows when the sun was sinking.
Pinks and hollyhocks, clumps of phlox, madonna lilies, came out in the gardens.
A row of hollyhocks bloomed against the fruit wall at the end of the garden. She fancied that their round heads were notes of music painted upon an outspread scroll; chords and scales splashed down in tones of rose and crimson upon the green keyboard of the espalier. Soon, she thought, in the present heightening and harmony of the interplay of all her senses, they would strike audibly upon her ears.
The fragrance of night-scented stock blew in through the window now.
She walked through the cornfields. In the wind, something more bodiless than flame flickered and ran over the green grain and the blond. The spirit moved upon the face of the corn.
She climbed the slopes and lay at the edge of a crowning grove of beeches. She wished to be as large as the hill, to sprawl against its side from top to bottom, great limbs at ease, and contemplate the view with giant’s eyes: eyes big enough to hold all, on every hand—fields, trees, downs, and the clouds above them, as far as the horizon.
The wind came in soft puffs, swaying the loose floating plumes of the border of beech-branches. She saw fat bees asleep in the thyme around her, and ladybirds crawling with infinite labour over thread-like blade and root. The clouds streamed over the sky, repeating in ashen white the dark masses of elm beneath her and the long shapes of distant woods upon the downs.
When evening came the tree-tops seemed to be sailing with slow majestic motion, launched all together upon a full flood tide, leaning bright-gilded into the west; and above them the clouds sailed too.
Into the furnace of the west flew the clouds; and the sun tore down, burnt up their strong fabric to smoky shreds and tatters; and around the fiery core the dying wind drifted their ashes.
Mrs. Crawley was the name of her landlady. She was a village woman born and bred, dark, small, and shy. She had a child called Frank, six years old, and her husband was a gardener. He worked all day in the Rectory garden, and then came home and tended his own till dark: a man of wood, silent, brownish, fibrous, knotted in the joints; forty perhaps, or sixty. … Was it a vegetable quiescence, she wondered, or passion, that bowed his shoulders for ever with such patient tenacity above the soil?
Mrs. Crawley, bringing the eggs and bacon, smiled good morning; laying the loaf, honey, teapot on the table, whispered that the afternoon was wet or fine; called good-night as she set down the quart jug of hot water outside the door. But one day she brought a wild orchid, pressed by Frank, fastened with stamp-paper to a sheet of foolscap. For the excellence of this specimen, she explained, Frank had received a prize of half a crown in a competition at school. “It’s nice to know that they get on,” she said; and she stroked Frank’s head as he sidled round the door—but did not wipe his nose, which always needed wiping.
The coin could not be framed; to wear it on a chain as a medal would be, they felt, unsuitable. What was to be done?
Grace gave him a round, cut-glass, silver-topped box, a small maternal relic designed but never used for pins, buttons, and such oddments. Within this shrine lay the coin, secluded yet visible upon the parlour mantelpiece. After this, Mrs. Crawley spoke now and then, offering fragments of her life and thoughts with a flitting, diffident smile.
She said:
“I’ve never been to London, nor yet seen the sea. I’ll never go to London, but I’d like Frank to see the sea. Perhaps I’ll take him this year, with the Band of ’Ope outing. But I don’t know. These sharabongs don’t look safe to me. …”
She stared wistfully. It was plain that the venture was more than she could compass, even in imagination. Yet Frank, he ought to see the sea.
The child was slighter and whiter than many a child of northern slums. The stock was poor, inbred, unproductive.
She said:
“’E’s ’ardy, Frank is. The doctor examined ’im at school, and the report said no disease of ’eart or lungs. Only it seems they want to ’ave out something in ’is throat.”
Candour shone in her eyes, and a hint—no more—of something else in her, a kind of charm, caressing, playful, that had been buried and forgotten. For now she was all given over to the unchanging round of daily tasks and the shadowing doubts and hesitations of her shuttered and dependent spirit.
Frequently she spoke of her confinement, her one occasion, her own; measuring time by that supreme event, as who should say: Before the birth of Christ or after. Remembering the ten days’ rest in bed, the baby, the importance, the ministering district nurse, she smiled dreamily, re-living the miracle of the laying down of her burden, the bewilderment both of pain and joy.
“When ’e was born,” she said, “the cord was twisted three times round ’is little neck. I nearly lorst him.”
And once she murmured: “Happiest time of my life it was.”
She was not curious, asked no questions. Bringing Tom’s weekly letter, she would hold it out with a dubious smile and glance, guessing perhaps: her husband—hoping maybe to see a gleam, a hand stretched out with eagerness; dimly apprehending the negation in her lodger of all that such hope implied; thinking this a pity, for she herself was lucky—Mr. Crawley was a good man to work, and never touched a drop.
Passing the open door of the kitchen one evening on her way to bed, Grace saw them all three sitting together in silence at the table. Empty plates and cups were set before them; and the light of one candle modelled the human group in tender masses of light and shade, and illumined their calm and empty faces She was moved by the simplicity of their wants, the pathos of their elementary possessions: the hard wood chairs, set side by side, to support such weariness, such repose; the slice of bread to satisfy such well-earned hunger. The child was on her lap asleep. There was not a sound, or a movement. Out of the luminous obscurity emerged the domestic union of their figures, with the significance at once placid and poignant, illustrative and transcendental, particular and symbolic, of a Dutch painting.
Tom’s holiday did not prove a success. He stayed away nine days, and then came back to the town. There was nobody to greet him; the house was shut up and Annie was on her holiday, not due back till the end of the week. Pulling back drawn curtains, removing dust-sheets, hearing his own feet echoing up and down the stairs, peering into bare kitchen and larder—that larder and kitchen empty of her whose very presence had seemed to create comforting puddings and well-stocked shelves—he had a sense of desolation that was like a physical ache. He procured himself a raw-boned daily char who made his bed and cooked him smoky bacon; for his other meals he sampled in turn every cheap eating-house in the town, hating them all. Annie would grieve, he thought, when she returned, to see his pass. Grace would be sorry too … would she be sorry? Would she care that his holiday had bee
n a gloomy, ghastly failure? More than a month now she had been away on her own, scarcely communicating with him. …
Potter had lent him his motor-bicycle—supreme token of a friendship matured over many a whisky and soda and a game of billiards—and upon this unreliable machine he had travelled gingerly but hopefully to Scarborough, to see life and be a bachelor again. But it had rained at Scarborough; and been expensive and unprofitable. Never, he thought, would he forget the dreariness of the rain-and-wind-swept promenade, his half-hearted attempts to scrape acquaintance here and there, the bleak chill of his bedroom, his liverishness, a feeling he had had of being a figure of fun when he tried to dance foxtrots with unattached young ladies in the lounge: an old fool, a figure of fun, he thought they were whispering and giggling. Romance, intoxication, the kind of adventure he had heard about from Potter—nothing of that sort had come his way. He lacked Potter’s recklessness. His frame of mind had been all wrong.
From the hollow mockery of Scarborough he had fled, travelling across England, still more gingerly and now unhopefully, to the outskirts of Chester, upon a pious pilgrimage. But he had found no satisfaction, no purging influence of memory and sorrow, in the laying of a wreath upon his mother’s grave; no sense of filial duty adequately performed in the inspection of the newly-erected marble headstone. It looked all right: nothing cheap about it: more tasteful than granite, and imposing enough even without the addition of the words, Her children rise up and call her blessed, which, in the first generosity of mourning, he had considered no more than was fitting. After all, perhaps it would have been a trifle much, applied to Mother. She had not been exactly what you would call … Grace, he knew, would have risen up and called her something quite different, given the chance. There she lay in her coffin, the old lady, Bertha Fairfax, never a beauty: he could only wonder, with morbid detachment, what she must look like now.
A Note in Music Page 14
