A Severe Mercy
Page 19
It seems strange to say it, but these were the most purely happy days since the dreadful announcement had been made, months before. For this one brief period, the awareness of death was lifted from her. And I was filled with a wild hope that, somehow, God might make me His instrument to save her, pour His strength through me into her. There was a sort of joy between us. I was not just loving her, I was as wildly in love as I had ever been, and so was she. We talked of Glenmerle, because it was immediate to our minds through our reading of the Journal under the oak and our pretending on the veranda. So for a few days in the dead of winter, we wandered about Glenmerle in springtime together, down by the old lily pond and in the orchard, and we were young and in love.
She came wholly out of the coma—against all predictions— came out of it with a memory of happiness. But then of course the awareness of death looming over her returned. Yet, still, we felt a sort of hope springing out of the overcoming of the coma. And I reminded her constantly that she had given me the fear of death, and that I was bearing it. I was bearing it, for both of us.
Christmas Day was a good day. She felt livelier and even had a bit of an appetite. The kind hospital invited me to stay, and they brought me a tray of Christmas dinner, too. Because of the hope that was in us, it was a merry little dinner. My Christmas present to her was a poem, in my pocket. It was a poem that I had started long before, but then it had been altogether different, about an imaginary person. Even then she had loved it. Now I had rewritten it completely, making it a song about us—as well as a prayer and a hope: and it was my gift to her. Now, as we finished dinner, I said: ‘Davy—here is my Christmas present to you.’ And I read it gaily:
SONG OF TWO LOVERS
In England over the endless sea
(I dream, my dearling, for you and me:
Tomorrow if not today)
There stands in Dorset by the sea,
In the gentle airs of the West Country,
A house that is tall and grey,
An old grey house beside the sea,
And there two lovers live merrily,
Most merrily and gay.
Two willows near and a great beech tree
Trace starlit patterns of fantasy,
And spring in the breeze by day.
These lovers go walking by the sea,
Their hair in the wind blows light and free,
And their lips are kissed by the spray,
They stroll in the lane and follow the bee,
They lie in the grass beneath a tree,
And they sing as they wander away.
At dusk they turn to the house by the sea,
Lightly and gaily come home to tea,
She carries a bright bouquet.
They stop at the church quite faithfully
And sweetly together they bend the knee—
Oh it’s thanks they give as they pray!
Sometimes they dress most handsomely:
Go up to London Town to see
Some books and a friend and a play.
And twice, O Oxford town, to thee:
First for the joyful ecstasy
Of the dreaming spires and the may;
And then in soft winter dusk to be
In cold empty streets without a key
Yet never alone or astray.
Then home to the tall grey house by the sea
To sit close by the fire and read poetry
As long as the night will stay.
Just so in England right merrily
Two lovers so lightly live and, see!
Hands linked as they go their way.
One lover, oh dearling! looks like thee;
The other lover, dear one, is me—
And to dream can be to pray.
So it was a song for Christmas Day, too; and it was too happy to admit of anything but hope. She listened with tears in her eyes, tears and smiles; but I think that she never in her life loved a Christmas gift so much, just because she so loved that song. But her Christmas was not done. I excused myself on some pretext to go and fetch her final gift, with the collusion of the hospital: Flurry. It is difficult to say who was the more ecstatic: both dog and mistress yelped in joy. Davy embraced Flurry and Flurry, moaning with pleasure, licked her hand. A second later she leaped up on the high bed for one quarter of a second before I whisked her off again.
It was a lovely Christmas. When that night, I drove happily homeward with our happy collie, my thoughts were all of love, of love overcoming death: the love of God and our dear love, triumphant after the years. What we had resolved to do a decade and a half before—to keep the springtime magic of inloveness— we had done. If last year had been a wavering, almost a forget-fulness, now the love was pure as fire. We had had what we had chosen, not business success or scholarly acclaim but a great love. And, under God, perhaps that love would save us.
But it was not to be. After those few good days, she began to go swiftly down hill; and pain came. We knew she was going to die. Once in a confusion of pain, she said pitifully: ‘Please let me go home.’ But after tortured days, the pain diminished, though she was not actually better. One day—though I didn’t know it until afterwards—she told the Rector: ‘It will be one more week— maybe a little longer.’ That same night I jotted down about my time with her: ‘She was dear and sweet, wanting to be kissed.’
A night or two later, she said to me: ‘You must hold on to your promise not to follow me, not to die by your own hand.’ She was, of course, thinking of our old high resolution to go together— even as I had been thinking of it, haunted by it. The resolution to take Grey Goose to sea and sink her. Even now we could still doit.
But I said, ‘I will keep my promise. I will.’ ‘Maybe God will take you,’ she said, a little hopefully. ‘Maybe He will take you at the same moment: that would be sweet.’
‘I pray He does,’ I said. ‘But it will not seem long, if He doesn’t.’
One evening—it was just past the middle of January—I was with her, as always. We prayed together and talked a bit, and I read her one or two short things from C. S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Then she asked me to read the ‘Song of the Two Lovers’. I read it, and she said, ‘Oh, I love it!’ No one said any-thing for a moment. I sat there holding the poem, and she looked at me, her eyes still bright and beautiful in her somewhat ravaged face. She smiled a little and whispered: ‘My golden one!’ Her eyes closed, and we remembered together that flight in the dawn, with the lilac petals streaming out.
Then she seemed drowsy, and I said perhaps I should go soon and let her get a good night’s sleep. She said she thought that would be nice. Then she said sleepily, ‘When you come tomorrow, bring some “proper tea”.’ ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘Go to sleep now, dearling.’ I held her a little while, warm and drowsy, and kissed her; and she snuggled in my arms. Then I stroked her brow and hair until she was asleep, and went quietly out. I blinked the instrument lights as usual, even though I knew she was asleep. After all, she might have awakened.
At three in the morning, the telephone. I think I knew before my eyes were open. It was the hospital. Davy was dying. Her pulse was slowing. There could be no rally. I asked how long. They thought several hours. It had come at last. I took the time to wash and shave, wondering if it was right to use those few minutes that I might have with her. But I had to come to her— I had to face what must be faced—clean.
It was a bitter winter night. The MG’s top was down, but I left it so, and with Flurry raced towards the hospital through deserted streets. Now would be the time for God to cause the steering to give way and take me, too. I felt an immense temptation to swerve into a wall; but I had promised.
Davy said to the nurse that I had come. The nurse thought her mind was wandering. Then I walked in. Davy had heard our recognition signal, whistled in the night. The nurse departed and the hospital staff left us alone. Once St. Joan just put her head in and looked lovingly towards the bed. I nodded, and she went away again.
After we had greeted each other and I had kissed her, she said she was thirsty, and I reached past the yellow roses for the carafe and glass. And I gave her a cup of water in the night—our old symbol of courtesy. Then I prayed one of the prayers we always prayed:
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Then Davy prayed. She prayed aloud for the hospital and the doctors by name and the nurses, including St. Joan, asking God’s blessing on them all, in Jesus’s name. I stroked her hand, looking at her face. I said another prayer; and at the end of it I said: ‘Davy—I love you for ever.’ She whispered: ‘Oh my dearest!’
There was a long silence, I still stroking her hand. Then she said in a stronger voice: ‘Oh God, take me.’ I knew then with certainty that she understood that she was dying. I said: ‘Go under the Love, dearling. Go under the Mercy.’ She murmured: ‘Amen.’ And then she said: ‘Thank you, blessed dearling.’ I kissed her very lightly, so as not to interfere with her breathing.
Then we were silent. Her lips were slightly parted and her eyes were half-open. Every now and then I dipped a swab into the water and moistened her lips. There was no response. I knew with tearless clarity that she was going. I continued to hold her hand.
St. Joan came quietly in and gave me Davy’s wedding ring, taken off when her fingers became so thin. I took Joan’s hand for a minute, and then she went quietly out. I looked at the ring with its ten tiny diamonds—the ten months we had known each other before we were secretly wed in the thunderstorm. Then I put it on Davy’s third finger, saying in a low voice: ‘With this ring I thee wed .. . for all eternity.’ I do not know whether she heard; but I think she did, for her fingers tightened the least bit.
Time passed, a long time; and there was no change. Each time she breathed there was a faint moan. The sky was beginning to lighten a bit in the east. I thought she might be unconscious.
Suddenly her fingers tightened on mine. She said in a clear weak voice: ‘Oh, dearling, look . . .’ She didn’t go on, if there was more. I knew that if I said, ‘What is it?’ she would make an effort and go on; but I did not do so. I don’t know why I didn’t. She might have been saying ‘look’ as one who suddenly understands something, or as one who beholds—what? Her voice was so frail, I could not tell which it was. I wished very much to know; I could have asked her; I did not. And I shall not know this side of eternity, for they were her last words: ‘Oh, dearling, look.’
More time passed. The sky was becoming bright. I was now nearly certain that she was unconscious. I still held her hand, her left hand with the ring on it. I did not wish to hold her to life; I merely wished to be with her. Every now and then I said in a low voice: ‘I am here, Davy; I am with you.’ But there was no response.
Then she stirred. There was no change at all in her half-parted lips or eyes or the hand I held. But then her other hand and arm came slowly up from her side. I could not think what she was doing. The hand moved slowly across her. It found my face. She touched my brow and hair, then each eye in turn. Then my mouth. Her fingers moved to each corner of my mouth, as we had always done. And I gave her fingers little corner-of-the-mouth kisses, as we had always done. Then her arm fell slowly back. Past seeing and past speaking, with the last of her failing strength, she had said goodbye.
In one of her earliest letters, when we were first in love, she had spoken of ‘the gentle awkward yearning I feel for you, just to touch your face’. And touching my face, in the old way, was her last act in this world.
The dawn, the dawn we loved so well, was radiant in the sky. The most glorious dawn for weeks. As the light had grown stronger, she had grown weaker. Perhaps she was taken up into the light, for now the faint moan in her breathing ceased. Then her breathing slowed. My face was close to hers. Then each of three breaths was lighter than the one before. There were no more. I knew on the instant of her dying that she was dead. A little dribble came out of her mouth. I wiped it away, and I shut her mouth and her eyes.
She could not say it to me, so I said it, whispered it, to her: ‘All shall be most well, my dearling.’ Then I kissed her lightly and stood up.
As I stood there in that suddenly empty room, I was suddenly swept with a tide of absolute knowing that Davy still was. I do not mean that I thought her body might still live; I knew it didn’t. But past faith and belief, I knew quite overwhelmingly that she herself—her soul—still was.
The door opened and the head nurse came in, and I formed the words, ‘She’s gone,’ without speaking. The nurse took her wrist for a moment, nodded, and went away.
I began to pack her things. Nurses offered to do it, but I did it.
An orderly came and took the box down to the car. Dr. Craddock came in, his face kind. I told him that I was quite certain that no doctor could have fought more skilfully for a patient’s life, and we shook hands. Just for one second my control broke, and I was nearly torn in two by an enormous sob. I said I was sorry, and he went away.
I looked at Davy, lying there, a last time. She looked as though she were asleep, and I had always especially loved her, warm and relaxed and asleep. I kissed her still-warm lips. Then I took one of the yellow roses and drove away with Flurry in that bright morning. I did not know it, but St. Joan, off duty and not allowed to stay, was keeping vigil by her window in the nurses’ house to see my car go.
The next day a small box, very light, was brought to me: it contained her ashes. I looked at them that night, clean and white. All I could think of was: Of her bones are coral made.
Late in the night, I went out to the MG with the box, leaving Flurry at home. The top was still down, and I left it so because that was the way it was when we drove in May. I headed for St. Stephen’s under an almost starless sky. Once, long before, we had had an argument over Browning’s poem, ‘The Last Ride Together’, and I had finally convinced her, over stubborn resistance, that a ‘ride’ meant horses, not a carriage. I smiled faintly, there in the MG, at the memory: she liked the carriage. But now we were having a sort of a last ride together, and it was a carriage, after all, or at least the MG. As we turned into the St. Stephen’s road, I said lightly: ‘You win, dearling.’
At St. Stephen’s I turned in, under the oaks. I could see only one or two dim stars through the bare twisting branches. I got out and picked up the box. There was something else, dimly, on the seat. It was the rose, so I took that, too, and walked into the graveyard. Still holding the box, I knelt a moment by the old stone cross and prayed. Something cold touched my neck: snowflakes were drifting down. I stood up. It was cold—the dead of winter. I opened the box and began to scatter the ashes, using a sower’s motion. When I had done, the flakes were coming down hard. I left the rose on the old cross. I said aloud: ‘Go under the Mercy.’ Then I went away, and her ashes were covered with the blanket of the snow. The deathly snows.
CHAPTER VIII
The Way of Grief
DEATHS
My dearest died at dawn: to some far strand
A lonely soul sailed down the long bright seas.
Alone I sowed her ashes under trees,
Cold, starlit-bare, and sad—where hand in hand,
When moonlight haloed churchyard oaks in May,
We’d knelt beneath an old stone cross to pray.
THE GRIM AND ALMOST fierce will to do all and be all for Davy that I had held before me like a sword for half a year became now, upon her death, tired though I was, a no less resolute will to face the whole meaning of loss, to drink the cup of grief to the lees. I came, thereby, to see something of the nature of loss and grief.
First there were the immediate duties. Davy and I had done it our way: the night dr
ive to St. Stephen’s—our last ‘ride’ together —and, as I said in my poem, the sowing of the ashes. And I would face the grief alone; I would not show it before others. I felt I must allow the sorrowing Rector a small service for her at Grace Church, and another with both Rectors at St. Stephen’s. But Davy and I, outdoors alone in the night, had had our service.
The next day I taught my classes. By then I had written some sixty letters, each one ending: ‘And in Davy’s words: “All shall be most well”.’ I caused it to be known that I did not want condolence calls, and I believe some people thought me callous. I ordered tract racks for both churches in her name, as she had asked me to do. I went through her things like a storm—a sorrowing storm—giving to friends what she had told me to give them. And I set about keeping another promise to her: transferring her hundreds of marginal notes from the pages of her father’s crumbling old Bible to our newer one.
The Christian student group came again, week by week, to Mole End. I saw a letter written by one of the boys, Bill, in the group to a friend, describing his reaction to the news of Davy’s death. He wandered blindly, half-stunned, into the college library, thinking: ‘She no longer exists in the world. I can’t ever again drop in on a rainy afternoon and sip tea with her and talk. The question kept beating through my mind—“Why did she have to die? She was so young and so good—why?”’ In the library he saw two girls of the group and they smiled at him. How could they? he wondered. Then he found himself smiling, under-standing suddenly what their smiles meant: ‘Davy IS.’ And then: ‘We all three clasped hands and smiled at each other. And I think Davy smiled at us that day.’
I could smile, too. And I was conscious of a sort of amazement that the sky was still blue and a steak still tasted good. How could things go on when the world had come to an end? How could things—how could /—go on in this void? How could one person, not very big, leave an emptiness that was galaxy-wide? Every-thing—every object—was pervaded by the void. I could teach my classes smilingly, even to calmly reading a poem about loss; and I perceived that in teaching one part of the mind—the subjective part—is cut off. But that first day of teaching after the St. Stephen’s night, when I left the class to go home, I saw the MG, small and somehow forlorn, invaded by that void, and I was barely able to get off campus before the tears came. But I observed next day that the MG did not have that effect again. There were, though, thousands of other things and memories, each of which must be seen once in that piercingly bleak emptiness.