We decided in the following winter to announce our marriage. Mother approved and generously offered us a fortnight in Florida for ‘a proper honeymoon’: we planned to spend it looking at boats. In a rather cowardly way we got Mother to tell my father of our marriage on the night before the announcement appeared in the papers. If everything was peaceful, she would put a lamp in a certain window that we could see from the park. If no lamp, we would be off for Florida that night. But the lamp was lit. When we went in, I glanced into the study: ‘Hello, Dad,’ I said. He looked up with a half-smile. ‘Good evening, Son,’ he said. Some day he would say something more, but everything was all right. Next morning we drove off on a roundabout course for Florida, roundabout because we were going to visit my aunt and uncle in the Bluegrass of Kentucky.
We got no farther. Mother rang up next evening: the Navy, despite its being more or less peacetime, was ordering me to sea. A destroyer. As I later found out, at Pearl Harbor. A chapter in our life was ending, and the future was veiled.
But we had shaped our love, and it would endure, whatever came: that we believed. If worst came to worst and one was gone, the other would follow after: ‘whither thou goest. . .’ Somehow we were able to face this separation with less of agony—or anguish better concealed—than our parting for the Grand Canyon. We were rather optimistic by nature, and we had a sort of faith in the future. So we approached parting almost gaily.
All this year we had been working together on a poem that would express what we believed about love: a poem that would tell what we chose:
THE SHINING BARRIER
This present glory, love, once-given grace,
The sum of blessing in a sure embrace,
Must not in creeping separateness decline
But be the centre of our whole design.
We know it’s love that keeps a love secure,
And only by love of love can love endure,
For self’s a killer, reckless of the cost,
And loves of lilactime unloved are lost.
We build our altar, then, to love and keep
The holy flame alight and never sleep:
This darling love shall deepen year by year,
And dearer shall we grow who are so dear.
The magic word is sharing: every stream
Of beauty, every faith and grief and dream;
Go hand in hand in gay companionship —
In sober death no sundering of the grip.
And into love all other loveliness
That we can tease from time we shall impress:
Slow dawns and lilacs, traceries of the trees,
The spring and poems, stars and ancient seas.
This splendour is upon us, high and pure
As heaven: and we swear it shall endure:
Swear fortitude for pain and faith for tears
To hold our shining barrier down the years.
We said goodbyes, Davy and my brother and I, on the bridge at Glenmerle. Laddie was not with us: he had been killed a month before, and we missed him. Then Dad drove down to the bridge and I got in. He was proud of me, though he didn’t say so, and a little envious. Later he would move heaven and earth to get back into the army. As the train drew out after our last handclasp, I saw him standing there on the railway platform, tall and bronzed and young-looking. He gave me a wave and a grin. I was never to see him again, nor ever to see Glenmerle as a living house; but of course I did not know.
A few minutes later the train was flagged down at our village station by special arrangement, and Davy climbed aboard. For two hundred miles we drank sherry and talked about my sending for her as soon as possible. Then there was a quick hug and exchanged smiles and she was gone. She took another train back to Glenmerle, and I went on.
Before I sailed from the west coast for Pearl Harbor, a letter from her came, a letter written late in the night. She described how she and my brother had walked in from the gates in mist and moon-light ‘with the impudent loyal wraith of Laddie at our side’, pausing on the bridge and ‘seeing the big blue spruce a dark mystery on the lawn with the mist creeping about it’. Now, later in the night, ‘as I write, the moonlight makes a ghostly glimmer through the strangely empty rooms of Glenmerle and makes the windows silver—here where your ghost and the ghosts of all of us in our happy times haunt me.’ Perhaps across the years to come she sensed me in my deep-night return to Glenmerle, standing on the bridge when she passed and wandering about the rooms of the house in my imagination.
A day later my ship sailed, westward-bound, and it seemed to me that the long, tumbled-white wake stretched back to Glenmerle— and Davy.
CHAPTER III
The Shadow of a Tree
ON A MAY MORNING, the last morning of the month, a long, narrow destroyer of the generation known as ‘four-stackers’ was steaming slowly just off the white beaches and coconut palms of an island. The deep-blue sea was calm, and great tumbled white clouds, driven by the trade-wind, ambled across the blue sky. A young officer in an immaculate white uniform suddenly came bounding up on deck and ran up the ladder to the bridge. There he snatched up binoculars and from the starboard bridge wing scanned the shoreline ahead. If an emergency existed, no one else appeared to be affected. No bosun’s pipes twittered, and other officers and men went calmly about their duties while the ship steamed slowly on. And yet the young officer still stood tensely on the bridge wing, the morning sun striking glints of gold from his buttons and cap, staring intently at the same spot on the coast, now slowly drawing astern. The island was Molokai in the Hawaiian group, and his binoculars were fixed upon the harbour channel of the town of Kaunakakai. Minutes passed. The channel was now off the starboard quarter. From it a small white cabin cruiser emerged. ‘Sir!’ he said to another officer who had joined him on the bridge wing. ‘There she is, sir! The Ebbtide?
Half an hour earlier a message had come by voice radio from the squadron flagship, presumably at the town, that Davy—Davy! — would shortly be coming out of Kaunakakai in the cruiser Ebbtide, and the message had been relayed from bridge to wardroom by speaking tube. Davy! How could she be there? He hadn’t even known she was in the Islands, though there had been a cable last week before the destroyer sailed that she was coming. But still, Kaunakakai on a motorboat! He raised the glasses. Was that small figure in the bows . . . ?
Davy was, in fact, in the cruiser’s bows, and she was at that instant filled with gloom as she watched the destroyer steaming away. One minute later the gloom turned to joy. The destroyer was turning. She was coming back. There was a stir of excitement among the dozen or so people on the little cruiser; and some sympathetic smiles were directed towards Davy. The cruiser steered to meet the destroyer. Davy saw the young officer on the bridge, ‘looking handsome, brown, and pleased’, as she wrote in our diary. But ‘pleased’ was an understatement.
The destroyer was dead in the water. The cruiser came around in a wide circle. For an instant the shadow of the destroyer’s mast and yardarm fell across the white motorboat and then she was along-side. The young officer looked down at the girl and she looked at him. Everybody else was watching them both with smiles. It was impossible for them to speak of love and joy; they muttered inanities like ‘Good morning’, and they looked at each other with speaking eyes. Love and joy crossed from vessel to vessel in their gaze, and both faces were wreathed in smiles. Davy wrote: ‘People kept prompting me to say something, but I didn’t need to. We were close for five minutes, looking our happiness to the delight of all on board the two vessels. We must have seemed like storybook lovers, or maybe a symbol, to some; for people afterwards came to me to say how touched they were by our evident joy and love. So we had our Maytime after all—Maytime at sea, loving each other just as much, and more if possible, than in the lilac-and-blossom-time Mays of the past.’
An order was given on the destroyer’s bridge; the engines went to slow ahead; the ship gathered way. She went to standard speed and then to full, swinging round to her
former course. Davy watched till she was hull down and then gone.
Thus we met after the longest separation of our lives—almost three whole months. In the midst of debate by letter whether she should come out yet—it was uncertain whether the destroyer would stay in the area—Davy simply sent a cable that she was coming, and came. Since I was going to sea, I hastily arranged for some army air force friends, Allene and Jack—Allene was an old friend of ours—to meet her if she came; and they, with other army people, had laid on the cruise among the islands. Davy’s meeting the destroyer-squadron commodore in Kaunakakai and my ship’s being at hand were merely our Maytime luck.
A chapter in our lives had ended when we left Glenmerle, and a new chapter had begun when we met, appropriately, at sea on a May morning—appropriately because in the oncoming years, almost a decade, a decade that might be called midmorning in our lives, there was to be much of the sea, both ships and yachts. In these colourful and adventurous years, years that were to include, besides the navy and the yachts, a great university, Yale, and a Virginian farmhouse, the single most important fact is that the Shining Barrier held. This book is, after all, the spiritual auto-biography of a love rather than of the lovers. And we had built well when we raised the Shining Barrier. We had that special loveliness that lovers have—inloveness—when we looked into each other’s eyes as our two vessels lay alongside one another in that bright May morning and we had it still, years later, on the eve of a new chapter in our lives set in England.
After our Maytime meeting, the destroyer kept the sea for another week. One night I had the midwatch from twelve to four in the morning as junior Officer of the Deck. The ship was steaming south at standard speed, out of sight of land, at the head of a column of four destroyers. I stood on the bridge wing, occasionally sweeping the horizon with my glasses or looking aft to make sure the other ships were keeping station. It was a mild night with a yellow half-moon low in the sky, the moonpath glittering across the waves. The long, narrow destroyer rolled in the big Pacific swell, but I was too used to that to notice. The familiar sound of the blowers and the occasional smash of the bow meeting a wave were equally unremarked. I was thinking, not for the first time, of the meeting with Davy at sea.
I saw again the white motorboat curving round to come along-side, with Davy practically hopping up and down on her decks, and I remembered suddenly how the shadow of our mast and signal yardarm had for an instant been sharp and black against Ebbtide’s white hull, making an X. I felt this to be faintly ominous. Maybe at this very moment the motorboat, stove in by a rock, was sinking, Davy swimming along in the sea, looking about for help. Then it occurred to me that the mast and yard had thrown a shadow that was really more like the Christian sign of the cross. This was better, though not much. Christianity was something I wanted nothing to do with. How could anybody believe such rubbish? A mere local religion of earth, quite inadequate for the immensities of the far-flung galaxies. Inadequate, at least, to anyone who had read Stapledon and the other science-fiction greats. I, indeed, had seen through the pretences of Christianity in my teens, and forthwith abandoned it. How could any intelligent person actually believe it, believe that an obscure crucified Jew was God! What was so odd was that quite a lot of people, not just sheep but highly intelligent people, did apparently believe it. T. S. Eliot, for instance. Or Eddington—in fact, quite a few physicists, the very last people one would expect to be taken in by it. Philosophers, too. Was it possible—was there any chance—that there was more to it than I had thought? No, certainly not. Of course not! Still, it was odd. Damned odd. And it wasn’t just a matter of keeping their childhood faith without examination, either. Some of them—intelligent people, too-were actually converts from atheism or agnosticism. Could there be more to it? Something I missed? After all, I was pretty young when I rejected Christianity. Oh, but there can’t be! Everybody knows what Christianity is. But then, those converts? Maybe I ought to have another look at it. Some day. Just to be—well, intellectually honest. Not that it could possibly be true of course. Still, fair play. Hear both sides. Yes, I’ ll do it. Some day.
This train of thought did not appear next morning to be of much importance. The aberrations of a midwatch. One thinks strange thoughts in the deep night. Of course Christianity wasn’t true. And Davy was amused, amused and a bit mocking, when I told her about it. We laughed together, and I put it out of mind. There wasn’t much I could do about it, anyhow: a destroyer’s library usually runs to three old copies of Time magazine. Besides, it all looked like rather a lot of work. But what was odd about it was that I didn’t quite forget it. Didn’t quite forget that, some day, I really ought to have that second look. For years I kept remembering it every now and then, remembering it, indeed, with moderate loathing, and always finding good reason not to do anything about it at the moment. Not now but some day.
Davy and I called ourselves agnostics, but we were really theists. A creator seemed necessary, a creator with an immense intelligence embracing order. Apart from reason, the one quality that we attributed to this creative power was awareness of beauty. Every-thing in nature, in creation, was beautiful, except where marred by man. But we could not, or at least did not, similarly attribute goodness to it, for good was in man, not in wild nature, and was balanced by evil, also in man. So there was a power—a god —of beauty with a high and inscrutable purpose quite unknowable to man except for such inklings as might come through the contemplation of beauty. Beauty was somehow at the very centre of meaning. For us, love was an aspect of beauty, though that might not be true of the power, which perhaps cared nothing for man. We might acknowledge a creating power, but our religion, if it could be called that, was really an adoring of love and beauty. It was the domain of Aphrodite, and, as I have said, we were really pagans. Many an ancient philosopher and, even more, many a Hellenic lyric poet would have approved, or at least sympathised with, our dedication to love and beauty, our trust in reason, and our goal of the good life.
One Saturday afternoon several happy months later, Davy and I drove round the island of Oahu in our incredibly ancient, hundred-dollar Ford roadster. We swam at various windward beaches, white sand and the intense blue of the sea, usually without another person even in sight; and we scrambled up a mountain trail. The weather was perfect, neither too hot nor too cold, rather like mid-May. And we, sun-tanned and lithe, plunging through the breakers or lying in the sunlight on bright beaches below the cloud-hung green wall of the mountains, were being pagans in the commoner sense of the word: just loving life. In the late afternoon, salty and sun-soaked, we came back to our flat in Waikiki. We paused briefly to talk to a brother officer from my ship and his wife and then went in to shower and dress, after which we drove out to Hickam Field, the army air force base near the harbour, to dine with Jack and Allene. Aflyingfortress thundered overhead as the sentry snapped to rigid salute.
We had a pleasant evening, not without its own little inner drama. Allene had asked us to bring our recording of Tschaikovsky’s ‘Sixth’, and we knew why: she was still haunted by the memory of the man she had listened to that music with, George, our old friend and fellow-adventurer. During dinner Jack proposed that he and I go flying in the morning—Sunday—in a trainer, but I had some navy business to do. After dinner, we talked a bit and Jack played his violin. Then Allene wanted to hear the ‘Pathetique’. The symphony filled the darkened room. When the last sombre notes died away, we were all silent, deep in our thoughts. At last Allene said slowly, ‘It sounds like the dirge of a dying world.’ Not long after, we said our goodnights and drove back to Honolulu, looking at the jewelled lights cascading down the hills.
Early in the morning, standing on a low hill above Pearl Harbor, I watched the destruction of the Pacific Fleet by Imperial Japan. Farther away the hangars at Hickam burned. A few months earlier my destroyer division had screened the battleship Arizona back to the west coast. On a misty early morning off Point Loma, the task force had encountered a flotilla of Japanes
e sampans fishing. They had scuttled out of the way as the battleship, dark and gigantic on the flat sea, had borne down upon them. This morning at Pearl Harbor I remembered that scene off Point Loma as, my glasses fixed upon Arizona just as her magazines blew up, I momentarily and for ever saw, just on the edge of that immense explosion, a sailor’s body like a little white rag doll, floating, it seemed, quite gently and casually in the air. I saw five Jap aircraft in flames at once from the fire of the fleet. I saw my own ship streaking for the harbour channel with the duty ensign in command. I emptied a pistol at a low-flying Jap plane without, regrettably, noticeable results. A rainbow arched over the burning ships. The Pacific war had come, and the great battleships were sunk at their moorings. We expected invasion momentarily. That night Davy and a dozen other navy wives huddled in the one blacked-out room of the flats. But, though there was no invasion, all the news in the next days and weeks was bad. The Japanese task force escaped.
The captain of one of our heavy cruisers entering Pearl Harbor wept as he saw the battle fleet destroyed without a chance to fight back in the sneak attack. Guam was gone and Wake was falling. The Royal Navy’s Prince of Wales and Repulse went down fighting in Malayan waters. Unbelievably, Singapore, the Lion City, fell. Jack, our host on the last night the lights were on, went down at the controls of his bomber somewhere out towards Midway.
Davy and I had snatched hours together—hours under the sword. At any minute we might be parted for years; but we were not parted. She was not evacuated with the other navy wives, for she had got a sensitive naval job. I was at sea for brief periods in Hawaiian waters. After the battle of Midway, which I was on the remote fringes of in a graceful converted motor yacht armed with popguns, the war moved off to the west. We were not separated, and we knew our-selves to be incredibly fortunate. We had dreamt of sailing to Hawaii in Grey Goose, and the fortunes of war brought us here — both of us—and kept us here. One almost feels a bit guilty about it, but there it was: nobody could have had a happier war, even under the sword.
A Severe Mercy Page 6
