As through the land at eve we wentAnd plucked the ripened ears,My wife and I....
As through the land at eve we wentAnd plucked the ripened ears,My wife and I....
As through the land at eve we wentAnd plucked the ripened ears,My wife and I....
As through the land at eve we went
And plucked the ripened ears,
My wife and I....
“My wife and I ... fell out ... how does it go?”
“Not like that, Guy,” said Teresa, with a short laugh.
Guy blushed to the roots of his yellow hair; he had a secret handicap of which he was horribly ashamed—practically no ear for rhythm; and it was partly the lameness of his verses that had made him fall back on a poetry that had neither rhyme nor rhythm.
When he was absent from Teresa—even during a few hours—his idea of her would undergo a swift change; though remaining aloof, she would turn into a wonderfully sympathetic lady—remote, but not inaccessible; a lady eminently suited to moving gracefully among the Chippendale, coloured prints, and Queen Anne lacquer of his dining-room in St. James’s Street; quite at home, also, among theart nègreand modern French pictures of his drawing-room; receiving hismotswith a whimsically affectionate smile; in society bringing out all that was most brilliant in him—existing, in short, merely for his own greater glory.
It took a very short absence from her—for instance, the interval between dinner and breakfast the next morning—for this idea of her to oust completely the real one. Then he would see her again, and would again be bruised and chilled by the haughty coldness masked by her low, gentle voice, her many silences; and the idea would be shattered; to come together again the minute he was out of her presence.
“Of course! Youwouldbe incapable of appreciating Tennyson,” he said angrily.
“Why? Because I venture to hint that your version doesn’t scan?”
“Oh, it’s not only that,” he almost screamed; “it’sreally because you think it’s sentimental to quote Tennyson. Can’t you see that simple, trite words like these are the only ones suited to expressing the threadbare yet exquisite emotion that one feels when one walks through autumn fields on Sunday evening?”
“Yes; but why not make those simple, trite words scan?... and look here, Guy,” she added with unusual heat, “it seems to me perfectly absurd to admire Tennyson and crab Wordsworth. It makes one wonder if any of your literary tastes are sincere. Everything you dislike in Wordsworth is in Tennyson too—only in Tennyson the prosaicness and flatness, though it may be better expressed, is infinitely more ignoble. I simply don’t understand this attitude to Wordsworth—it makes me think that all you care about is verbal dexterity. I don’t believe you know what real poetry means.”
Poor Guy! How could he know that her irritation had really nothing to do with his attitude to Wordsworth, that, in fact, he and his poetics were merely a scapegoat?
Shattered and sick at heart, he felt that his fears of the previous evening about Oscar Wilde and brilliance had been ruthlessly confirmed.
She looked at him; he actually had tears in his eyes.
“I ... I seem to have lost my temper,” she said apologetically, “but it was only ... I’ve got rather a headache, as a matter of fact, and what you said yesterday about Wordsworth has rankled—he’s my favourite poet. And you know I belong in taste to an older generation; I simply don’t understand modern things. But, as a matter of fact, I often like your poetry very much.”
This mollified him for the moment.
“I say!” he exclaimed suddenly, walking more quickly, “other people seem to be quarrelling.”
Sure enough: the trio ahead was standing still; Concha’s lips were twitching and she was looking self-conscious; Rory’s eyebrows were arched in surprise; and David, glowering and thunderous, was standing with clenched fists. As Teresa and Guy came up to them he was saying fiercely: “... and I’m just sick to death of lairds and that ... and if you want to know, I’m heir-apparent to Munroe of Auchenballoch,” and he laughed angrily.
“You’re a lucky chap then ... Auchenballoch is a very fine place,” said Rory in an even voice.
“What’s up?” said Guy.
“I seem to have annoyed Mr. Munroe, quite unintentionally,” answered Rory.
Slowly, painfully, David blushed under his dark skin.
“I beg your pardon,” he murmured.
Teresa felt a sudden wave of intense sympathy for David, and of equally intense annoyance against Rory; he had, doubtless, been again babbling about his relations—“old Lionel Fane,” “the beautiful Miss Brabazons,” and the rest of them—that was boring enough, in all conscience; but if, as was probably the case, David had been left pointedly out of the conversation, it would become, into the bargain, insulting.
And under his easy manners, Rory was so maddeningly patronising—especially to David, with his, “I say! Dashing fellah!” and, “Now then, Munroe, let’s see whatyoucan do.” But ... it was possible that David’s irritation was primarily caused by far more vital things. ’Snice there, lying on his back, his tongue lolling out, his eyes glassy, completely unconscious of the emotional storm raging above him, would probably, if they could have been translated into his own language, have understood David’s feelings better than Teresa and sympathised with them warmly.
“I’m rather tired—do take me home, Mr. Munroe,” said Teresa.
He looked at her gratefully.
For some minutes they walked in silence, both embarrassed, Teresa turning over in her mind possible conversational openings. “You have been in South Africa, haven’t you?” “Do you play golf?”
But she could not get them out.
What she said finally was, “What did you mean exactly last night when you said to my mother that in times like the War one sees the star?”
“I mean the Star of Bethlehem—they’re seasons of Epiphany,” he answered.
“But how do you mean exactly?”
“Just that ... the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.” He said the words slowly, with gusto, as if to him they had not yet become threadbare. “There were a lot of chaps converted to Catholicism during the War,” he went on.
“Were you?”
“Yes.”
He paused, and again they were silent. Then he said, “I was brought up a Presbyterian, but I was never interested in that, I didn’t think of religion at all. But during the War there were several chaps that were Catholics in my regiment, and I used sometimes to go to mass with them, or benediction, because it was quieter in there than anywhere else. Then their padre began talking to me, and I saw that once you had taken the plunge it was all shipshape and logical. But the plunge was the thing—that seemed to me to take a lot of nerve and faith.”
Again he paused, then went on in a lower voice, “Well, it was a wee church, very old, in a village behind the lines, and one day mass was being celebrated there, and just after the Consecration the gas gong and klaxonssounded—that meant we had all to retire in double quick time behind the gas zone. The priest wrapped up the Host in the corporals and hurried off with the rest of us. When the scare was over and he went back to the church—the corporals were soaked in blood.”
The last words were said scarcely above a whisper.
Well, there was no Protestant nonsense here; this was the Holy Mother herself in all her crudity.
Teresa had not the slightest idea what to say; and decided that she had better say nothing at all.
Yes, but it was not the bleeding corporals, really, that had done it. She remembered a curious experience she had once had when waiting to be fetched home in the car by her father from some Chelsea lodgings where she had been spending a fortnight. Her box was packed, she was all ready dressed for the drive; she had nothing to do but to wait in a little valley sheltered from Time, out of the beat of the Recording Angel, her old activities switched off, her new activities not yet switched on. Then the practical relation between her and the shabby familiar furniture suddenly snapped, and she looked at it with new eyes—the old basket-chair, the horse-hair sofa, the little table on which was an aspidistra in a pot—they were now merely arrangements of planes and lines, and, as such, startlingly significant. For the first time she was looking at them æsthetically, and so novel was the sensation that it felt like a mystical experience. The Beatific Vision ... may it not be this æsthetic vision turned on spiritual formula? A shabby threadbare creed suddenly seen as something simple, solid, monumental? Tolstoy must have been reared on the Gospels; but suddenly when he was already middle-aged he thought he had made a discovery which would revolutionise the world; and this was that one must love one’s neighbour as oneself. It was merely that he had, so tospeak for the first time seen the chairs and tables æsthetically. Yes ... heliacal periods, when the star becomes visible. Mr. Munroe had said that he had never before thought about religion at all; and it was a mere chance that the room in which he first saw the tables and chairs should be hung with crucifixes and Catholic prints.
The bells had stopped ringing for evensong, the sun was very near setting. Caroline, the donkey, gave tongue from the paddock of Plasencia—a long, drawn-out wail prefacing a series ofee-aws.
“That means rain,” said David.
“Caroline sings nothing but Handel,” said Teresa, “a long recitative before thearia.”
For a few seconds David looked puzzled, and then threw back his head, and, for the first time since he had been at Plasencia, laughed aloud.
“That’s offly good,” he cried.
But Caroline was not the only singer of Handel. As they crossed the lawn, Jollypot could be heard singing to the cottage piano in the old schoolroom,For He shall feed His flock like a Shepherd.
Among the many traces of Protestantism that had clung to her was a craving for hymns at dusk on Sundays; but being debarred fromHymns Ancient and Modernshe had to fall back upon Handel.
AndHeshallfeedHisflocklike ashe-e-e-e-e-perd.
Her small, sweet voice, like the silver hammer of a gnome, beat out the words of the prophet, to which Handel’s sturdy melody—so square, so steady on its feet—lent an almost insolent confidence.
AndHeshallfeedHisflocklike ashe-e-e-e-e-perd....
“Is that—is that the wee lady?” asked David, gently.
Teresa nodded.
They stood still and listened; Teresa was smiling, alittle sadly: the old optimists, Isaiah and Handel, had certainly succeeded in cozening Jollypot’s papa; for on a living worth £200 a year and no private means he had begotten seven daughters. Nevertheless, the little voice went on unfalteringly.
AndHeshallfeedHisflocklike ashe-e-e-e-e-perd.
David glanced at the slim, graceful young woman standing beside him, looking gentler than she usually did, but still very remote.
She, and Jollypot’s singing, and the scent of roses, and the great stretch behind them of Sabbath-hushed English fields, brought back, somehow or other, one of the emotions of his boyhood. Not being introspective, he had never analysed it, but he knew that it was somehow connected with a vague dissatisfaction with his lot, and with a yearning for the “gentry,” and hence, because when he was a boy he thought they were the same thing, a yearning also for the English. He remembered how badly he had had it one Sunday morning when he had played truant from the service in his father’s church, and had slunk into the “wee Episcopalian chapel” in the grounds of the laird. The castle had been let that summer to an English judge and his family, and the judge’s “high-English” voice, monotonous, refined, reading the lessons in a sort of chant, pronouncingwhenaswen, andpooraspaw, had thrilled him as the dramatic reading of his father had never done. Then some years later he had slipped into evensong, and the glossy netted “bun” at the nape of the neck of Miss Stewart (the laird’s daughter), and her graceful genuflections at the name of Jesus had thrilled him in the same way. Finally the emotion had crystallised into dreams of a tall, kind, exquisitely tidy lady, with a “high-English” voice and a rippling laugh, sitting in a tent during the whole of a June afternoon scoring at the English game of cricket... or at a school treat, standing tall and smiling, her arms stretched out, her hands clasped in those of her twin pillar, warbling:
Oranges and lemonsSing the bells of St. Clement’s,
Oranges and lemonsSing the bells of St. Clement’s,
Oranges and lemonsSing the bells of St. Clement’s,
Oranges and lemons
Sing the bells of St. Clement’s,
while under the roof of arms scampered the hot, excited children.
Anyway, it was an emotion that gave him a strange, sweet nausea.
As to Teresa; as if her mind had caught a reflection from his, she was pondering the line:
The ancient English dower of inward happiness.
The ancient English dower of inward happiness.
The ancient English dower of inward happiness.
The ancient English dower of inward happiness.
Wordsworth mourned it as a thing of the past; but had it ever been? Did Jollypot possess it? Who could say. Certainly none of the rest of them did.
David left early the next morning. Evidently from him, too, Concha had received an invitation to a dinner and a play, for as they said good-bye she said, “Well then, Thursday, 16th, at the Savoy—it will bedivine.”
Rory did not leave till after tea.
Teresa’s offer of sleeping, owing to the shortage of rooms, in her father’s dressing-room during the week-end, had been accepted, and Rory had been put into her bedroom; when she went up to dress for dinner on Monday night she had noticed, on going near the bed, a smell which seemed familiar. Suddenly she realised that it was the smell of Rory’s hair-wash—the housemaid had actually forgotten to change the sheets.
Teresa had flushed, and her heart had begun to beat in an odd, fluttering way; but she went down to dinner without ringing for the housemaid.
When she came up for the night the smell was still there. She undressed, and stood for some seconds by the bed, her eyes shut, her hands clenched; and then, blushing crimson, all over her face and neck, and, flinging on her dressing-gown, driven by some strange instinct, she flew to Concha’s room.
Concha’s light was out. She walked up to the bed and gently shaking her said, “Concha! Concha! May I sleep with you? They’ve forgotten to change the sheets on my bed.”
“Sheets? What sheets?” said Concha in a sleepy voice.
“In my room ... you know Captain Dundas has been sleeping there.”
“Poor darling, how filthy! Get in,” and Concha, so as to leave room for her, rolled over to one side.
Τὸ συγγενές τοι δεινόν, close physical kinship is a mysterious thing; for, however much they may think they dislike each other, it nearly always entails what can only be called a bodily affection between the members it unites.
For instance, since Pepa’s death, Concha’s was the only plate Teresa would not have shrunk from eating off, Concha’s the only clothes she would not have shrunk from wearing.
That night they fell asleep holding each other’s hands.