other, at the end of this; and she smiled so quietly, so serenely.
‘Do you think that I don’t feel that, too?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you see
that the wife who is mother of nothing must feel it more than the
husband who is father of nothing? Besides, you make your books--you are
father to them. What do I do? I order dinner.’
And yet--it seems to me so strange now--I did not see. There was
bitterness in her words, but all I thought was that there was no
bitterness in her voice, or her face, or her smile. I did not quite
understand that, I remember, but Helen has told me since that she did
not mean me to. She wanted--well, her plan evolves itself.
And then she took my arm again.
‘It is nearly a month since dear Legs went away,’ she said, ‘since we
have actually heard and seen him. The last we heard was that he wanted
us to buck up. Do you know, I think we have bucked up. But we have been
doing that singly; we have somehow lived rather apart, dear. Surely it
is better to buck up together. I think the idea of a young museum is a
very good one. Let us put all the things we can’t throw away into his
room. We have never used the room before, because Legs might always rush
down and want a bed; and so let us keep it like that. We might call it
the nursery.’
And so the young museum was started. Helen had all manner of tender
trifles for it, all connected with Legs. She had all sorts of things I
had known nothing of: little baby garments, Legs’ bottle, some baby
socks. Then there were child things as well: ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ the
depressing Swiss family called Robinson, a far better Robinson called
Crusoe.
* * * * *
And thus the nursery grew. ‘Treasure Island’ went there; a
rocking-horse, which I remembered of old days, was brought down from an
attic. Oh, how well, when I saw him again, I remembered him! He had a
green base, nicely curved, on which he pranced to and fro, and my foot
had once been under it when he pranced, so that I lost a toenail, and
was rewarded with sixpence for stopping crying. He had a hollow
interior, the only communication with which were the holes of the
pommels, and on another dreadful day my sister had dropped a
three-penny-bit into one of them, with some idea of making a bank. A
bank it was, but the capital was irrecoverable. The coin was still
there, for now I took up the whole horse with ease, that steed which had
so often carried me, and heard a faint chink from his stomach. He had a
wild eye, too, and flaming red nostrils, and the paint smelt just the
same as ever. And Helen produced a Noah’s ark, in which the paint was of
familiar odour, but different, and there was Ham without a stand, and
Mrs. Noah in a neat brown ulster, and Noah with a beard, and one good
foot, but the other was a pin. Elephants were there with pink trunks (I
never could understand why), and enormous ducks with pink bills (which
now threw a light on the colour of the elephants’ trunks, since I
suppose that a brush full of pink was indiscriminately bestowed), and
small spotted tigers, and nameless beasts which we called lynxes,
chiefly because we did not know what they were, and did not know what
lynxes were, so they were probably the ones. The ark itself had Gothic
windows, and a mean white bird, with a piece of asparagus in its mouth,
painted on the roof, probably indicated the dove and the leaf.
We must have spent two days over the nursery, and during those days we
concentrated there all the young things of the house, and when it was
finished it was a motley room. There were photographs of Legs
everywhere; all his papers were kept; everything that had any connection
with Legs and with youth was crammed into it. And when it was finished
we found that we sat there together, instead of paying secret visits to
the room, and we played at Noah’s ark, sitting on the carpet, and played
at soldiers, clearing a low table which had been Helen’s nursery-table
(for you cannot play soldiers on the floor, since they stagger on a
carpet), and peas from pea-shooters sent whole rows of Grenadiers down
like ninepins. But we could neither of us ride the rocking-horse, so
instead we tilted him backwards and forwards, and pretended he was
charging the foe.
Of course, all reasonably-minded readers will say we were two absurd
people. We both of us disagree altogether. For you have to judge of any
proceedings by its effects, and the effect in this case was that Legs’
injunction that we should ‘buck up’ became a habit. That inimitable
youth which Legs gave the home, he, his bodily presence, had gone. But
somehow the atmosphere was recaptured. We played at youth, at childhood,
till it became real again. For a household without youth in it is a dead
household; a puppy or a kitten may supply it, or an old man of eighty
may supply it. But youth of some kind must be part of one’s environment.
Else the world withers.
Another thing has happened to me personally. I have said that at the
beginning of the year I looked forward into the future through two
transparencies, one sunlit, the other dark. But now the dark one (I can
express it in no other way) had been withdrawn. Dear Legs’ death was not
quite identical with it, for it was not withdrawn then. But during the
month that followed it gradually melted away. I can trace just two
causes for it.
The first was this: In ineptitude of spirit I had reasoned to myself
that the death of the body logically implied the merging of the life
into the one central life. But after his death Legs became to my spirit
more individual than ever. And the second cause was this establishment
of the nursery. Though youth might have passed for oneself, it still
lived. One was wrong, too (at least I was), in thinking it had passed
from oneself. Else how did I feel so singularly annoyed when Helen shot
down with a wet pea a whole regiment of my Life Guards? I was annoyed; I
am still. It was a perfect fluke that the Colonel on horseback fell in
such a way that he more than decimated his own regiment. And I am sure
Helen shook the table, else why should the Brigadier-General, posted in
the extreme rear, have fallen off the table altogether? She won.
Meantime in this first week of March the winds were roaring out of the
south-west, and for a while, days together sometimes, squalls which the
Valkyrie maidens might have bridled to make steeds for their swift
going came in unbroken procession from the Atlantic. Helen is a lover of
the sea, and these gales coming out of the waste of waters touch
something within her as mysterious as the sixth sense of animals, who
feel and are excited by things that the five-sensed mortal is unaware
of. To-day, however, was quiet and calm, and we stormed the steep ascent
of the downs till we stood on the highest point of the Beacon, which
looks down on all other land towards the south-west, so that the river
of wind that flows from the Atlantic comes here unbreathed and untamed
by traverse of other country, and you get it fresh and salt as it was
when it left the ocean.
In that interval of quiet weather there was nothing to be perceived by
the ordinary sense, but she sniffed the air like a filly at grass.
‘Wind is coming,’ she said, ‘the great wind from the sea. I don’t care
whether your little barometer has gone up or not; what does it know of
the winds? We shall be at home before it comes, but I will tell you
then, as we sit close to the fire, what is happening in the big
places.’
She was quite right; though the silly barometer had gone up, we were but
half through dinner when the wind, which had been no more than a breeze
all afternoon, struck the house as suddenly as a blow. The wood fire on
the hearth gave a little puff of smoke into the room, and then, thinking
better, suddenly sparkled as if with frost, as the passage of the air
above the chimney drew it up. At that Helen’s eyes were alight. She ate
no more, but sat with her elbows on the table, while I, who have not the
sixth sense, went gravely through mutton and anchovies on toast and an
orange. Then they brought in coffee, and she shook her head to that.
Meantime that first warning of the wind had been justified; a Niagara of
air poured over us, screaming and hooting, and making a mad orchestra of
sound. At times it ceased altogether--the long pause of the
conductor--and then, before one heard the wind at all, a tattoo of the
drums of rain, sounded on the window-pane. Then, heralded by those
drums, the whole mad orchestra burst into a great _tutti_ of screaming,
hooting, sobbing. So much I could hear, but Helen was _of_ it somehow.
Something secret and sensitive within her vibrated to the uproar.
I have seen her in the grip of the wind, as she expresses it, perhaps
half a dozen times, and it always makes me vaguely uneasy. It is no less
than a possession, and yet I can think of no one whom I would have
imagined less liable to such a thing. I can imagine her surrounded by
the terrors of fire or shipwreck, or any catastrophe that overthrows the
reason, and makes men mere panic-stricken maniacs, keeping absolutely
calm, and infecting others by her self-possession. But now and then the
wind takes possession of her, and she becomes like the Pythian
prophetess.
‘Oh, to be alone with the sea and the gale to-night!’ she said. ‘Jack,
what splendid things are happening in the great empty places of the
world! This has been brewing out on the Atlantic for a couple of days by
now, and there are thousands of miles of great white-headed waves rising
and falling in the darkness, and calling to each other, and dancing
together. Up above them, as in the gallery of the ball-room, is the
great mad band of which we hear a little in our stuffy house, and it
will play to them all night and all to-morrow, and the waves will dance
without ceasing, growing bigger as they dance, like some nightmare. Oh,
you can imagine nothing! But I see so clearly Mr. and Mrs. Wave and all
their family dancing, dancing, all young, though white-headed, and
growing bigger as they dance. They are cannibals, too, and a big wave
will eat up a little one, which makes it bigger yet. The wind loves to
see that. He gives a great blare of trumpets when he sees a cannibal
wave. Oh, it must have happened this moment! That scream meant, “Well
done, wave! That was a big one you swallowed!”
‘Sometimes they see a ship coming along, and they love playing with
ships, because all proper ships like being out in the Atlantic
ball-room, and the waves crowd towards it, seeing which can lift it
highest. Whiz! Can’t you hear the screw racing, as the wave that lifted
the stern runs away from under it? How the masts strike right and left
across a thousand stars, for the sky is quite clear! The winds have
turned out the clouds as you turn out the chairs and tables from a room
where you dance.’
We had gone up to Legs’ room after dinner, and as she talked she went
quickly from place to place, now pausing for a moment to look at a
photograph, now putting coal on the fire, or drawing aside the curtain
to look into the night.
‘Oh, there is the eternal youth of the world,’ she said--‘the song of
the winds and the dance of the waves. I think all the souls of the
little babies that are born come to land in the blowing from the sea. It
is by that that vitality burns higher, and the fruitfulness of the world
is renewed. Millions of blossoms of life are rushing over the land
to-night, ready to drop into lonely homes----’
‘Ah, don’t, don’t,’ I said. ‘Helen, come and sit down and be quiet.’
She paused for a moment opposite me, looking at me with her wonderful
shining eyes.
‘Not I, not I,’ she said.
She still paused, still looking at me, still waiting for me to join her,
as it were. And in that pause a sudden faint far-away light broke on
me. She had said words which must have awoke in her, even as they awoke
in me, the most keen and poignant sorrow that can touch those who love
each other, and yet she was still smiling, and her eyes shone.
I got up. Something of that huge joy that transfigured her was wrapping
me round also. The thrill, the rapture in which she was enveloped, began
to encompass us.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘It is for you to tell me,’ she said. ‘It must be done that way.’
‘You said “ready to drop into lonely homes,”’ I said.
‘“So that they are filled with laughter,”’ said she.
Then I knew.
‘It is here,’ I said--‘the nursery.’
And at that the excitement, the exultation slowly passed from the face
of my beloved, for there was no room there for more than motherhood.
Though the wind still bugled and trumpeted outside, she heard it no
more; the wildness of the dancing waves, grey-headed, growing waves,
passed by outside her.... The blossom ready to drop filled her heart
with the tenderness of the infinite deep love of the mother that shall
be.
She sat there on the floor at my feet, with her arms round my knees and
her head pillowed there.
‘I have got to confess, too,’ she said, ‘though I am not ashamed of my
confession. But don’t allow yourself to be hurt, Jack. Just hold on for
a minute without being hurt, and you will find that you are not. Now I
shall hide my face, and speak to you like that. I have known it quite a
long time: before Legs died I knew it.’
Well, I had to hold on for a minute or two, and not be hurt. If you
think it over, you, will agree it was rather a hard task that I had been
set. On the other hand, about big things, about things that really
matter, you must take my word for it that Helen is never wrong. But I
had not been forbidden to ask a question.
‘Then why did you not tell me?’ I said.
Her head with the sunlit billows just stirred a moment, but she did not
look up, but spoke with a hidden face.
‘Because through all these weeks, my darling, you have been struggling
against some bitterness of soul. You have made light of it to me, but I
had to be quite sure it had gone from you before I told you this. I know
what it was--it was the doubts you talked about to me when we sat one
night at the edge of dear Legs’ grave--when it was dug, but empty. And I
had to be quite sure it had all passed from you before I told you this.
I have not been sure till now, and--and I wanted you so much to guess.
You nearly guessed, I felt, when we arranged this heavenly nursery.’
Then again there was silence, and I think I never knew till then how
desperately difficult it is to be honest with oneself. It is so much
easier to be honest with other people. At the first glance I told myself
I had got over the bitterness and blindness of which she had spoken when
we talked together over Legs’ grave, but gradually I became aware that I
had not. Somewhere deep down, so that while the days passed it concealed
itself from me, that bitterness had still been there. In this book,
which has tried to be honest, you will, I dare say, find no trace of it
since that night, but I had not probed deep enough. It had been there,
and I think the days when we arranged the nursery finally expelled it.
To-night, at least, I believed it was gone, and since Helen believed so,
too, perhaps we are right about it. She, the witch, the diviner, had
known me so much better than I had known myself all along.
All this took time, for the processes of honesty with me are slow. But
there is no difficulty about the matter, perhaps, if the head you love
best in all the world is pillowed on your knee. That is a stimulant, one
must imagine. So at last I said:
‘Yes, it’s done.’
She came closer yet, and, like Mr. Holmes, we talked below our breath,
in whispers, as if afraid of disturbing this great joy that had come
floating down on us, borne on the sea-spray, borne on the wind-tide,
borne as you will, so that only it came here.
Then, very soon after, she went to bed, and I was left sitting in the
nursery, with its new significance. Yet it was not quite new. I had, as
Helen said, ‘half guessed before,’ and I but wondered, now I knew, how
my imagination had halted half-way, and had not clearly seen the star on
which Helen’s eyes were fixed. Yet who would have known? She had been so
full of art in her wording; even that master-word she had used,
‘nursery,’ seemed but to have slipped in, and I had thought she meant
only--as, indeed, she had said--that it was to be the room of young
things, where she should sit when the shadow of childlessness was chill,
and with the aid of the memories of youth and play keep the mists of
middle age from closing round us, and the frosts of old from settling
too stiffly on the later years of our travel. The room was to be but a
palliative or a tonic, as you will, a consolation for the things that
were not to be for us, and now it showed another face. It was not the
past of which it spoke, but the future.
* * * * *
I suppose I sat long over the embers of the fire, but these were hours
that had escaped from the hand of Time, and were not to be computed by
his scale. Sometimes I threw a log into the open hearth of the fireplace
(ah, but that open hearth must be altered now; it would never do in the
nursery), and sometimes I plied an industrious pair of bellows, but for
the most part I sat idle, looking into the fiery heart of the blaze; for
the news that Helen had made me guess was at first unrealizable. Though
I knew it to be true, I had to absorb, digest it, since a great joy is
as stunning a thing as the stroke of sorrow. And gradually, as gradually
as the workings of the process of beauty, I began to feel, and not only
to know, the name of the room where I sat. It was the nursery.
* * * * *
But Helen was wrong about one thing. She had said that the wind would
play to the dancing of the waves all night and all next day, but before
I went to bed that wild orchestra of the storm had ceased. Its work was
done for us. It had blown the bud of the blossom of life into the house
that so longed for it.
* * * * *
It is strange how quickly the events of life become part of one. Next
morning I woke in full possession of the new knowledge. There was no
question or uncertainty as to what that was which made a rapture of
waking. And with the same suddenness all real knowledge of what life had
been before I knew this had passed from me. I could no longer in the
least realize what I had felt like before the moment came when Helen had
made me guess. Though that moment was so few hours away, yet I could no
more conceive existence without it than one can form any mental picture
of what life would be without the gift of sight or hearing. It is not
that any huge event destroys all that went before it, but it so stains
back through the turned pages of the past that they are all coloured and
suffused with it.
How the blackbirds and thrushes sang on that March morning! I had awoke
before dawn to hear the early tuning-up going on in the bushes, and
before long, since I was too happy to sleep, I got up, dressed quietly,
and went out. The tuning-up was just over, and the birds were all busy
with breakfast, for you must know, as soon as they wake, they get in
singing-trim for the day before their bright-eyed quest, listening, with
head cocked as they scuttle over the lawn, for the sound of a worm
moving. They are so close to the ground themselves that they can
localize this to within a fraction of an inch, and then in goes the
spear-like beak, and the poor thing is dragged out of the soft,
dew-drenched earth. They are not quite tidy eaters, these dear minstrels
of the garden, for the point is to get your breakfast inside you beyond
recall, with the least possible delay. Swallow, gulp, swallow, and the
thing is done. Then you give one long flute-like note of satisfaction,
and listen again for the second course. But one cannot exactly say that
they have bad manners at table, for the extreme sensibleness of the plan
excludes all other considerations. Also, bad manners at table
irresistibly suggest greediness, and no bird is ever greedy. They have
excellent appetites, and when they have had enough they stop eating, and
instantly begin to sing.
It was just at the end of birds’ breakfast that I got out--that is to
say, it still wanted some minutes to sunrise. The lawn was all
gossamer-webbed and shimmering with dew, as if some thin layer of
moonstone or transparent pearl had been veneered over emerald, and I
felt it almost a vandalism to walk over it, removing with my clumsy
feet whole patches of thin inimitable jewellery. The three-hour gale of
the night before had vanished to give place to a morning of halcyon
calm, and I augured one of those rare and exquisite days which March
sometimes gives us--days of warm windlessness and the promise of spring.
Straight in front of me rose the Beacon, still submerged in clear dark
shadow, but high in the heavens above dawn had come, for it made a
golden fleece--one such as never Jason handled--of the little cirrhus
clouds that the gale had forgotten to sweep away. Dawn would soon strike
the Beacon, too, but before that I hoped to stand on its top, and see
the huge embrace of day and night, the melting and absorption of
darkness into light. Even the river, with its waving water-weeds and
aqueous crystal, did not detain me, and I gave but ten minutes to the
ascent, for I wanted to welcome the dawn from a high place, to stand on
the roof of the hills to greet it.
Slowly dawn descended from the sky, quivering and palpitating with
light. The great golden flood came nearer and nearer the earth, which as
yet caught but the reflection from the radiant heavens. It hung a moment
hovering, the bright-winged iridescent bird of dawn, just above my head,
and then the sun leaped up, vaulting above the eastern hills. The level
shafts of light swept across the land, a mantle of gold, while in the
valleys below the clear dusk still lay like tideless waters. But down
the hill-sides strode the day, throwing its bright arms about the night,
enfolding and encompassing it in miraculous embrace, and I looked to
where home was. Already the big elms in the garden were pillars of
flame, then the roof burned, and suddenly the windows blazed
signal-like. Dawn had come.
That was not half the miracle. Light had awoke, the hills were gilded
with the sun, but at the touch of the gilding larks innumerable sprang
from the warm tussocks of down-grass and aspired. A hundred singing
specks rose against the sky, each infinitesimal, so that they seemed but
like the little motes that swim across the eyeball, but these were
living things with open throat that hailed the sunrise. Perpendicularly
they rose, wings quivering, and throat a-tremble with song, till the
eye lost them against the dazzling azure of day, and only enraptured
voices from the air made the heavens musical, as if the morning stars
sang together. Heaven made holiday. Its company of sweet singers and the
gold of sunrise were one thing--the dawn.
Dear God, dear God, how I thank You for that indestructible minute! I
knew now what the sunlit curtain that lay between the future and me was,
and the very morning after I had known You let me see from this high
place the birth of day. In this physical world there was reproduced that
golden sunlit curtain. You made visible to me what my heart knew. And to
me on the top of the Beacon the windows of my home flashed a beacon to
me. And all was of Your making--the sun and the mounting skylarks, and
down below the trees of the garden, and the beaconing, flushing window
of my beloved, and the fruit of the womb. When I come to die, I want to
remember all that. Truth and Life were there, and the Way also. And what
is the sum of those three things?
Yet was I content even then? Good heavens, no! There were many beautiful
things yet to be, and the glory of His gifts just lies in this--that
there is always something better to come. This great bran-pie of the
earth never gives to our little groping hands its best present. There is
always something more. Your heart’s desire is given you, but at the
moment of giving your heart is enlarged, and you ask for something
better yet. And if you want it enough, you get it. The only difficulty
is to want enough. For you are not given, so I take it, things that you
have not really desired. All sorts of bonuses come in, pleasant
surprises, but the solid dividend is for the man who wills. There are
fluctuations, of course, but to look upwards, without doubt, is a
gilt-edged affair. I correct that. The edge is gilt, and so is the rest
of it, and the gilt is laid over gold.
* * * * *