A Severe Mercy

by Sheldon Vanauken

  Even more important for her than the music perhaps was her painting. She had not, because of working and tiredness, done any painting since Oxford; but I brought her home a new easel as a surprise, and she began to paint. First she finished a painting, very Blakean, begun at Oxford, after we had spent hours at a great Blake show at the Tate in London. The Oxford painting that she completed—after which it went over the mantelpiece—showed in muted colours a nude female form lying prone, eyes shut, while a great wave—the wave of God—crested above her, ready to thunder down upon her.

  Then she began a painting, all in blues and rusty reds, even more Blakean, that revealed something of her soul. And perhaps mine. Set against a background of high, rusty red cliffs in which were two caves or openings filled with blue light, there were six figures. But in reality there were only two, she and I. The caves of blue light were doorways, I think, one very lofty, one low. In front of the low door lay a female figure in an attitude of surrender. A little distance away an angelic figure motioned towards the low door; and from the recumbent form, which was Davy, her soul was shooting off towards the door. The obedient soul— it touched me deeply. On the other side of the picture, a figure sat on a log with praying hands and straight back. A very lordly and Blakean angel gestured imperiously to the high door. But my soul lay on the ground, head propped up on hand and elbow, gesturing back at the lordly angel, clearly arguing with it. This earned my wry smile of recognition. The painting had humour as well as beauty, at least my stiff-backed praying figure and arguing soul were funny in an awful sort of way. And the painting with its combination of deep seeing, seriousness-and-humour, and beauty portrayed the nice balance of Davy’s mind. But what made it ultimately so moving and revealing was that Davy, in her divine humility, saw me called to a high destiny—the high door— and herself called to a low one. Making cookies for the students. Not counting the love poured out. That low door probably leads to a throne.

  The Christian group and our friends, the organ at Grace, the painting, the poems, Davy herself really rested and full of energy, and our restored closeness and sharing: these were the elements of our content as winter moved on towards spring. We of course continued our little ‘family prayers’, hand in hand, in front of the plain wooden cross on the sill of the glass-brick window; and we alternated between Grace and St. Stephen’s, though Davy continued to teach her Sunday class at Grace.

  In March we had a great happiness. Julian was able to come down from his monastery for a short visit, bringing Oxford with him and, it seemed, holiness as well. We took him out to our beloved St. Stephen’s and showed him where we sometimes prayed at night by the old stone cross in the churchyard, and we all three knelt and prayed there. And we had long hours of talk by the fire of England, where he was born, and Oxford and, always, running through all, the Incarnate Lord. Then on the last morning I took him to the train in the Trout, top down despite a rare ‘English’ fog. Davy in her dressing-gown came gaily out to wave goodbye; and as we circled out the driveway we looked back at her, standing at the entrance to the forecourt, and waved to her. For some reason that departure in the mist with Davy waving so gaily remained with extraordinary vividness in both my and Julian’s memories, perhaps because she looked so little in front of the mansion in the grey swirling fog. Julian wrote of his ‘memory of her standing small and alone in her nightclothes by the steps.’ But I remember her eager love and gay waves.

  April and May were lovely that year. One unusual event was that our Rector by our special request celebrated Holy Communion for us and for Shirley, who had been ill, at Mole End. And Flurry soon after was in heat, with dozens of dogs growling and fighting at our low basement windows and she very pleased within. One day during this period I was walking from the back bedroom through the kitchen where Davy was preparing to bake. I was suddenly impelled to sweep her up in a great hug and kiss, flour going everywhere, holding her as though against the world. She said, in a small, astonished, happy voice, ‘Why, dearling . . .’ And then we both started laughing at ourselves all floury.

  But Maytime, above all, was drives in the country in the MG. April and May—Judas trees and dogwood and lilacs. We crept along the winding country roads looking at the flowers and the birds and the newly turned red earth. We went up in the Blue Mountains where it was still early spring. We stopped again and again at St. Stephen’s at night, saying our prayers at the old stone cross, and then sitting under the great oaks in the starlight. Once we drove out to Horsebite, where Flurry was born, and contemplated the black walnut in the meadow and talked about the ‘Sin Picture’ and all that had come to pass. Sometimes we went out to the little house we called ‘Ladywood’, where we would sit in its fine doorway and talk of how in another year we might live there.

  On the last day of May—I remember the date because we talked of that other last day of May when, in destroyer and motor launch, we met so dramatically at sea in the far Pacific—we drove in the Blue Mountains and then proceeded homewards in the evening along back roads. The sun had set but the mountains glowed an incredible blue as though they were actually made of translucent sapphire, and we were feeling very peaceful and unhurried. The blue faded out of the mountains and the darkness came on, though I could still just see the road in the twilight. Then, as we passed a wood, I heard a whistle and stopped and switched off. It was a whip-poor-will whistling his liquid song, another one answering in the distance. We sat there a long time, holding hands, as the stars came out. This was the Virginia we loved. At last I started the engine again, and we drove on, past St. Stephen’s, to Mole End.

  If May was the month of peace and beauty, June was the month of excitement and decisions. It began with the ring of the telephone: the Dean of Wabash, a fine college in the north, where Lew and Mary Ann were. I knew the Dean and liked him immensely. Would I like to join their faculty in English next year? Would I come up and talk it over? Good, they would be expecting me then. In the next week or so Davy and I talked intensely about it—and prayed. Academically a better college, more pay, the Dean him-self, Lew and Mary Ann. But—lovely Virginia, the Christian group, our own fine Dean John Turner. But, above all, the group that we had felt to be a vocation. Still, things have their time. Perhaps we should now move on, join forces with Lew and Mary Ann?

  After commencement, just as it was time to journey north, Davy came down with a virus. She wasn’t very ill, but she shouldn’t go travelling. So I went alone, making her promise to call Dr. Craddock.

  Briefly, we decided to accept the Wabash post, and I resigned from Lynchburg College. There were moans from our student group, who said we were abandoning them. The college president was reported to have said, ‘There goes my best teacher.’ We looked sadly at Mole End and Grace Church and St. Stephen’s. It was a painful decision.

  Davy recovered from her virus but felt dragged out. Dr. Craddock decided that she should go into the University Hospital at Charlottesville, sixty miles away, where they could run complete tests. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe we’ll have to use a wonder drug on this dern thing.’ Davy said it wasn’t necessary but went. We talked gaily on the telephone every night, and she said she was feeling better. Still, I arranged an appointment with one of the doctors to be told what the tests had shown, if anything.

  It was mid-July and hot when I went up in the MG with Flurry, and I thought I would see the doctor first. He said: ‘She’s a very sick girl. I’ d say no more than one chance in ten. Maybe six months.’ He didn’t cushion it, but then, how could anyone cushion a thing like that?

  The world had changed for ever by the time I replied, an instant later. Quietly I asked him—so quietly that perhaps he thought I didn’t care—what it was. It was her liver, he said: it had passed the point of no return. They did not know why. She would die in coma or in bleeding internally and from her eyeballs.

  I will say here that, although Dr. Craddock struggled in the dark, as it were, with subtlety and devotion, she did die. And even after a post-mortem n
o one could say why. We were only in our thirties and didn’t drink much. It was, it was thought, a subclinical virus, possibly a tropical one harboured in her body from Island days or possibly picked up in June or possibly the year before. That is all that can be said.

  I will also say that I asked Lynchburg College to rehire me, and, though they had already employed someone else, they did so, breaking the budget. I accordingly resigned my brief post at Wabash College, and, though they renewed the offer in later years, I did not ever go there because of gratitude to Lynchburg College.

  As I left the doctor’s cool, air-conditioned office for the hot ward, I had to walk all the way down a corridor that seemed to stretch, white and antiseptic, for miles. A very long corridor with Davy at the end of it. Shock vibrated through me with the impact of my heels. What was I to say to her? A resolution was building in me—to sustain her, to hold her through what lay ahead. I must be strong when I told her, but I was not strong now. I might break. I must not break. Tomorrow I would be strong and then I would tell her and sustain her in her hour of knowing.

  I went in to her with a cheery greeting. I said the tests were not fully in; and I told her the small news from home. I started to say that I was missing her, but decided I couldn’t manage it, and said something else. Finally I said goodbye until tomorrow. But she knew—knew there was something dark in my eyes. We could not hide from each other.

  Then I went away, down to the MG. The Trout we had called it. Flurry frisked to see me but became subdued when I put my hand on her head. I drove out of town, still dry-eyed, praying ‘Thy will be done’ over and over — all I could pray. I remembered her offering up her life for me. Tears came in the country, but they were blown away in the wind.

  CHAPTER VII

  The Deathly Snows

  ON SUNDAY, ONE DAY before the doctor’s fatal word, Julian in his New England priory, knowing nothing of Davy’s illness or the hospital, offered mass for her and me because of ‘a far-off intimation’ that we needed help. An intimation through eternity.

  Monday, walking down the days and years along that hospital corridor with Davy at the end of it, driving down the Virginian counties homeward alone, Monday may have been the worst day of my life. There were to be grim days ahead, but we faced them together in the co-inherence of our love. Today, in shock and grief, I walked down the corridor alone, for I had not told her. The world had turned over in one sudden minute.

  When I reached Mole End, I began to act. Telegrams and telephone calls went forth to friends, particularly Christian friends, including C. S. Lewis and Maurice Wood, our St. Ebbe’s rector. And local friends, too, Shirley and Belle and Preston and Rector Jeffrey. Within minutes and hours a mighty prayer was building. I talked to Dean John Turner and other college officials as well as Dr. Craddock. Non-Christian friends urged me not to tell Davy of what lay ahead; the Christians with one voice, then and later, said she must know. C. S. Lewis said that he was praying steadily and that she must be told. And Julian, saying that he was praying incessantly, wrote: ‘She should know if she is going to her Calvary.’ He added, speaking of her by her Christian name: ‘Poor Jean, so humble, so good, so eager and affectionate, so holy. God keep her in His hand.’

  Above all, that Monday, I tried to face what lay ahead. I cleared for action like a frigate going into battle, throwing out of my life everything not relevant to Davy or to my job at the college. I stood and looked a long time at each of Davy’s paintings in the light of my perilous awareness. Moved by some obscure impulse, I read the first poem I had ever written to Davy, ‘Maytime’ (p. 31) at Glenmerle, whence comes the name of this chapter: ‘For ever Maytime, sweet and gay, —/Until the lilacs close/Beneath the deathly snows.’ An iron resolution built up in me, perhaps the most powerful and unswerving of all my life, that in the months ahead I would do all and be all for her; I would sustain her and hold her up with my love. All I was came into focus in my fierce and almost terrible will to do this, to let nothing impede me from doing this. Then, grimly resolute, I drove to St. Stephen’s to kneel in the night by the old stone cross where we together had knelt so often, and I asked God to sustain us both.

  Then I was ready to tell her. As I drove in the morning sunshine to Charlottesville, I thought of her offering-up her life for me in the previous autumn. Was this the result? Then I thought with a kind of awe of her belief in July a year ago that she might be going to die, and her asking God then for ‘one more year’ for the sake of the student group; now it was another July—one more year, indeed—and I was on my way to tell her of her death. Any recovery is but a stay of the death that is our common doom: she had had what she asked for. One more year. Was it right for me to ask for more? Was it right for me to ask when she had offered-up her life? How should I approach God? What should I say to the Incarnate God who made the world and suffered it to crucify Him? I thought of Grey Goose, never again to sail the waters of this world; I thought of poetry, including my own, and of all dear things; I thought of Islands in the West. Then I rolled it all together into a ball. If she died, I might—since, under God, I must not act to follow her — I might live for years. Those years and all of beauty they might contain I put into the ball. And then I offered-up all of it to the King: take all I have ever dreamed, all I may ever long for including the death I shall certainly long for: I offer it up, oh Christ, for her, for her best good, death or life. This was my offering-up. I asked God to take all, all that was or would ever be, in holy exchange, not for her spared life which would be my good but not perhaps hers, but for her good, whatever it might be. Later I would pray that she might recover but only if it were for her good. That offering-up was perhaps the most purely holy and purely loving act of my life.

  This was done in the MG, the Trout swimming through the bright morning to Charlottesville. And then, to the westward, over against the Blue Mountains, I saw a rainbow for a shimmering few minutes. Chance or Promise? But God would know from the beginning of what we call time that I should be making my prayer and seeing the rainbow.

  With me in the car were yellow roses for her. I do not know why I chose them, except that they were lovely, and I could not bring lilacs. Lilactime was over, for ever now. But the roses had their own beauty; and this was our time of roses. From now on, through the months, there would always be yellow roses with her.

  When the nurse had brought a vase and gone again, I sat beside her bed and took her hand. Then I said, ‘Davy . . .’ She looked at me, and I smiled at her. She smiled back. ‘Dearling,’ I said. ‘This—this illness—is maybe going to mean our parting—for awhile.’ Her hand tightened its grip, but she still smiled. ‘The doctors say that it means that. But a hundred people are praying for you. C. S. Lewis and Maurice. Peter and Bee, Lew and Mary Ann, Thad, Julian. You are in God’s hand, dearling.’ Despite my will, my eyes filled with tears, but I smiled at her.

  She too smiled through tears, and said in a husky voice: ‘Let all be—’ Her voice wavered and she gave a little sob. ‘—according to His perfect will,’ she said in a stronger voice. ‘Yesterday, when you were here, I thought—I thought it might be, well, something bad. Your eyes were unhappy . ..’

  I stood up and leaned over her and put my arms around her. ‘I love you,’ I said, ‘whatever it is to be, for ever.’ I kissed her wet cheeks, and we just held each other for a little. There were tears on my cheeks, too.

  Then I told her exactly what the doctor had said. And all that I had done. I told her of my offering-up and of the rainbow. She would be wrapped in prayer, I said; indeed, she was already. Then I said that the clean Christ, who must abhor disease, would heal her if it were God’s will, if we prayed steadfastly—she, too. I told her of Julian’s mass Sunday and she was awed. Then I gave her my dearest possession: the little gold cross she had given me in Oxford. I put it round her neck.

  Hope rose between us, hope rising out of love. We became cheerful. She got up and went over to the window to look down on Flurry in the MG. She called, and Flurr
y leaped out and ran wildly around looking for her and then attempted to climb the wall of the hospital. Davy laughed and told her to go back to the car, which she did.

  From this day forward we never quite lost hope. We didn’t doubt the medical findings of course, but there are too many inexplicable ‘miraculous’ cures for anyone, including doctors, to suppose that medicine has the last word. Even this doctor had said one chance in ten. So I prayed, as did many, yet I never wavered on my deeper prayer for her best good.

  Davy’s sister came and they wept a little together and laughed together, too. Many people journeyed to Charlottesville to see her, coming away moved and strengthened by her courage and love. A bishop laid his hands upon her and anointed her for healing, if it were the will of God.

  In due course we brought her home. Shirley Rosser made a bed for her in his big car. On the way up, he offered me all his savings when I should need them. Then Davy made it a merry drive home.

  She was very glad to be home in Mole End where it was cool and quiet, with our books all about and us together. I had moved her big bed into the living-room, and she entertained there like a queen all during the month of August. I cooked for her and rubbed her back and gave her injections; and I got a servant to do the cleaning. I also hunted mosquitoes. That was the summer when everyone complained about them; and of course one mosquito could ruin Davy’s precarious sleep. So every night with a torch I hunted them down. Sleep and food were life perhaps, and I took infinite pains to try to make a salt-free diet attractive. Although I controlled visitors to some extent, there were many who came, then and later when she was in hospital. I cannot touch upon a fraction of them, nor can I begin to describe people’s great goodness. There were all sorts of gifts of money, often an anonymous envelope found in the mailbox with perhaps half a hundred dollars, all in ones and silver—a collection in some hall—and sometimes bigger gifts. And later students queueing up to offer her the blood — some twenty or thirty pints—she needed. One of my griefs was that my blood was the wrong type, though I gave blood to others to make up.