Spring came on fast and Nan, partly to assure Milly she wasn't to be
under foot forever, talked of opening her house and beginning to live
there, for the first time without Aunt Anne. But she predicted it, even
to Milly, with no great interest, and Raven, though he had urged her to
run away from the cloudy weather Milly and Dick made for her, protested
against her living alone. Dick was now strong enough to walk from his
room to the porch, and Raven, watching him, saw in him a greater change
than the languor of low vitality. He had the bright-eyed pallor of the
man knocked down into the abyss and now crawling up a few paces (only a
few, tremulous, hesitating) to get his foothold on the ground again. He
was largely silent, not, it sometimes seemed, from weakness, but the
torpor of a tired mind. He was responsive to their care for him, ready
with the fitting word and look and yet, underneath the good manners of
it all, patently acquiescent.
Then Nan found herself rested, suddenly, in the way of youth. One
morning she got up quite herself again, and wrote her housekeeper to
assemble servants and bring them up, and told Raven he couldn't block
her any longer. She had done it for herself, and she quoted the
over-worked commonplace of the psychological moment. He, also believing
in the moment, refrained from argument and went over to open doors and
windows. He was curiously glad of a word with her house, not so much to
keep up old acquaintance as to ask its unresponsiveness whether it was
going to mean Nan alone for him hence-forth or whether, at a time like
this when he stood interrogating it, Anne Hamilton also stood there, in
her turn interrogating him. Was she there to-day? Everything spoke
mutely of her, the wall-paper she had prized for its ancient quaintness,
the furniture in the lines of grace she loved. At that desk she had sat,
slender figure of the gentlewoman of a time older than her own. Was her
presence so etched in impalpable tracery on the air that he ought to
feel it? Was she aching with defeated hopes because she might almost be
expecting him, not only to remember but even to hear and see? No death
could be more complete than the death of her presence here. He could
not, even by the most remorseful determination, conjure up the living
thought of her. Somehow it had seemed that here at least he might
explain himself to her, feel that he had made himself clear. He did
actually speak to her:
"I can't do it, Anne. Don't you see I can't?"
This was what he had meant when he told Nan he must get hold of her.
What place could be so fortunate as this, full of the broken threads of
her personality? They only needed knitting up by his passionate
challenge, to be Anne. He called upon her, he caught the fluttering
fringes of her presence in his trembling hands. But he could not knit
them up. They broke, they floated away. It seemed, from the dead
unresponsiveness of her house, as if there had never been any Anne. So
he gave it up, and, in extreme dullness of mind, went about opening
windows, and as the breeze idled in and stirred the waiting air and the
sunlight rushed to it, he seemed to be sweeping the last earthly
vestiges of her from the place that had known her best. And at once it
appeared to him that he had done an inexorable, perhaps even a cruel
thing, and he hurried out, leaving the air and sun to be more merciful
than he.
When he went into his own yard he saw Dick sitting under the western
pines, where Raven had set a couple of chairs and had a hammock swung.
Dick had ignored the hammock. He scarcely sat at ease, and Raven had an
idea he was meeting discomfort halfway, with the idea of making himself
fit. He did say a word of thanks for the chairs.
"Only," he added, "don't let it look too sociable. That'll be as bad as
the porch." He laughed a little, and concluded: "I don't mean you, Jack.
You know that, don't you?"
Raven guessed he was allowing himself the indulgence of avoiding his
mother. For now Milly, as he recovered, had struggled hard for her lost
poise and regained it, in a slightly altered form, it is true; but still
she had it pretty well in hand, she was unweariedly attentive to him and
inexorably self-sacrificing in leaving Nan the right of way. Her life
had again become a severely ritualistic social enterprise, but now she
was just far enough lacking in spontaneity to fail in playing her game
as prettily as she used. It was tiring to watch, chiefly because you
could see how it tired her to play.
Raven went down the little foot-path to Dick, and he thought anew how
illness had ravaged him. He had the tired eyes, the hollow cheek of
ineffective youth.
"Hoping you'd come," said Dick. "Now, where's Tenney?"
"Tenney," said Raven, "is at home, so far as I know. I saw him last
night."
"Go up there?"
"Yes."
"What for?"
Raven smiled a little, as if he found himself foolish or at best
incomprehensible.
"Well," he said, "I gave him every chance to skip. I hoped he would.
That would be the simplest way out. But when I found he wasn't going to,
I began to go there every night to let him see I was keeping an eye on
him. I don't go in. I just call him out and we stare over each other's
heads and I inform him you're better or not so well (the probation
dodge, you know) and he never hears me, apparently, and then I go away.
I've got used to doing it. Maybe he's got used to having it done. Maybe
it's a relief to him. I don't know."
"Does he still look like a lunatic at large?"
"More or less. His eyes are less like infuriated shoe buttons, but on
the whole he seems to have quieted a lot."
"You don't suppose," said Dick, "you've put the fear of God into him?"
"Not much. If anybody has, it was you when he saw you topple over and
knew he'd got the wrong man."
"He was laying for you, then," said Dick.
"Why, yes," said Raven. "Tira was there, telling me he'd set up a gun,
and she'd got to the point of letting Nan take her away, when he fired.
What the dickens were you up there for, anyhow?" he ended, not quite
able to deny himself reassurance.
"I'd heard he was out with a gun," said Dick briefly. "Charlotte told
me. And I gathered from your leaving word for Nan that the Tenney woman
was there--at the hut, you know."
"Don't say 'the Tenney woman,'" Raven suggested. "I can't say I feel
much like calling her by his name myself, but 'the Tenney woman' isn't
quite----"
"No," said Dick temperately. "All right, old man, I won't."
"Awfully sorry you got it instead of me," said Raven, apparently without
feeling. He had wanted to say this for a long time. "Wish it had been
the other way round."
"I don't, then," said Dick, gruffly in his turn. "It's been an
eye-opener, the whole business."
"What has?"
"This." He evidently meant his own hurt and the general viewpoint
induced by it. "I'm not going to stay round here, you know," he
continued, presenting this as a proposition he had got to state abruptly
or not at all.
"Why not?"
"I don't believe I could say," Dick temporized, in a way that suggested
he didn't mean to try. "There's Mum, you know. She's going to be at me
again to go in for my degree. Oh, yes, she will, soon as she thinks I
won't come unglued. Well, I don't want it. I simply don't. And I don't
want what she calls a profession: any old thing, you know, so long as
it's a profession. I couldn't go in for that either, Jack. If I do
anything, it's got to be on my own, absolutely on my own. Fact is, I'd
like to go back to France."
"Reconstruction?" Raven suggested, after a minute.
"Maybe. Not that I'm specially valuable. Only it would be something to
get my teeth into."
Was this, too, Raven wondered, an aftermath of the War? Had it shaken
the atoms of his young purpose too far astray for them ever to cohere
again? Dick had had one purpose. Even that didn't seem to be surviving,
in any operative form.
"Writing?" he suggested. "Oxford--and poetry?"
Dick shook his head.
"Well," said Raven, "if it's France then, maybe I'll go with you."
Dick smiled slightly. Did his lip tremble?
"No," he said, at once, as if he'd been waiting for it, "you stay here
and look after Nan."
This gave Raven the slightest opening.
"That's the devil of it," he said, "your leaving Nan."
"Yes," said Dick quietly, his eyes on an orchard tree where an unseen
robin sang, "I'm leaving her."
"She's been devoted to you," Raven ventured.
"Quite so. I've been lying there and seeing----"
He paused and Raven prompted:
"Seeing what?"
Dick finished, with a deeper quiet:
"Seeing her look at you."
Raven, too, stared at the tree where the robin kept up the bright beauty
of his lay. He was conscious, not of any need to combat this finality of
Dick's, but of a sense, more poignant than he could support without
calling on his practiced endurance, of the pity of it, the "tears of
things." Here was youth, its first bitter draught in hand, not recoiling
from it, but taking it with the calmness of the older man who has fewer
years to taste it in. He could not ask the boy to consider, to make no
hasty judgment. Whatever lay behind the words, it was something of a
grave consequence. And Dick himself led the way out of the slough where
they were both caught.
"Curious things come to you," he said, "when you're laid by the heels
and can't do anything but think: I mean, as soon as you get the nerve to
think."
"Such as?"
"Well, poetry, for one thing. When I began to think--and I didn't want
it to be about Nan any more than I could help--I used to have a
temperature, you know--puzzled them, doctor, nurse, all of you. Nan,
that was! I knew it, though the rest of you hadn't the sense. Well, I
made my mind run away from it. I said I'd think about poetry, my long
poem. I'd lie there and say it over to myself, and see if the rest of it
wouldn't come." He laughed a little, though not bitterly. He was frankly
amused. "What do you think? I couldn't even remember the confounded
thing. But I could other things: the verse I despised. Wasn't that the
limit? Omar Khayyam! I lay there and remembered it by the yard."
"That's easy," said Raven. "Nothing like the first impressions. They
stick."
"Evidently," said Dick. "They did stick. And my stuff didn't."
"Is this," Raven ventured, not seeing whether the boy was quivering
under his calm, "a case against the moderns?"
Dick answered promptly, though Raven could only wonder, after all, just
what he meant:
"It's a case against me." He went on, his eyes still on the melodious
orchard converts. It must have been a vagabond robin swaggering there,
really deriding nests, he found so much leisure to sing about them. "I
wanted to say I didn't get you that time when you told me you'd pretty
much done with the world. I though Mum was right: _cafard_, you
remember. But I've swung round into the same rut. It's a rotten system.
I'm done with it."
Raven looked at him in a sudden sharp misery of apprehension. First, Old
Crow, then he, then Dick, one generation following another.
"Don't you go that path, old man," he said. "You'll only lose your way
and have to come back."
"Come back?"
"Yes. Old Crow did. Remember the book. He challenged the whole business,
and then he swung round to adoring it all, the world and Whoever made
it. He didn't understand it a whit better, but he believed, he accepted,
he adored."
"What would you say?" Dick asked curiously, after a moment. "Just what
happened to him?"
"Why, I suppose," said Raven, "in the common phrase, he found God."
They were silent for a time and both of them tried desperately to think
of the vagabond robin. Raven, his mind released by this fascination of
dwelling on Dick apart from any responsibility of talking to him, found
it running here, there, back and forth, over these weeks of their stay
together. It halted, it ran on, it stopped again to consider, but always
it was of Dick and incidentally of himself who didn't matter so much,
but who had to be in it all. Were they at one in this epidemic of world
sickness? As the great explosive forces of destruction and decay seemed
to have released actual germs to attack the physical well-being of
races, had the terrible crashes of spiritual destinies unsettled the
very air of life, poisoned it, drugged it with madness and despair? Was
there a universal disease of the mind, following this wholesale
slaughter, which the human animal hadn't been able really to bear though
it had come to a lull in it, so that now it was, in sheer shrieking
panic, clutching at its various antidotes to keep on living? One
antidote was forgetfulness. They were forgetting the War, some thousands
of decent folk who clearly had meant to remember. A horrible antidote
that, but perhaps they had to take it to save themselves. Too big a
price to pay for living (and such thread-paper lives!) but still there
did seem to be a prejudice in favor of the mere drawing of breath. Maybe
you couldn't blame them, spinning in the sunshine like insects of a day.
Some of the others had to save themselves by the wildness of a new
intoxication. They danced, their spirits danced: a carmagnole it was, a
dance of death, the death of the spirit as he saw it. But maybe, with
this preposterous love of life in them they, too, had to do it. Maybe
you couldn't blame them. He and Dick--they had been like two children,
scared out of their wits, crying out, hitting at each other in the dark.
Youth and age, that was what they had fought about. It had been an
unseemly scrap, a "you're another." Dick had been brought up against
life as it looks when you see it naked, the world--and what a world! No
wonder he swore it was a world such as neither he nor his fellows, like
him aghast, would have made. He would simply have to live some quarter
century to find out what sort of a world he and his fellows did actually
make.
And Raven: Lord! Lord! what was the use of having traveled his own
quarter century along the everlasting road if it didn't make him at
least silent in sheer pity of it: youth singing along to the Dark Tower,
jingling spurs and caracoling nag, something it didn't quite know the
feeling of shut in its nervous hand? What was it shut there? The key,
that was it: the key to the Dark Tower. Youth made no doubt it was the
key, easy to hold, quick to turn, and the gate would fly open and, if
youth judged best, even the walls would fall. And yet, and yet, hasn't
all youth held the key for that borrowed interval and do the walls ever
really fall? But if age doesn't know enough to include youth in its
understanding, as youth (except the poets) couldn't possibly include
age, why then!
"I am," thought Raven, returning to the Charlottian vernacular, "very
small potatoes and few in a hill."
And what was the Dick, the permanent Dick who would remain after a few
more years had stripped him of the merely imitative coloring he caught
from his fellows? Dick talked about "herd madness," and here was he, at
one with his own herd. He piped in verse because a few could sing,
he--but what was the use hammering along on the old dissonance: youth,
age, age, youth. And yet they needn't be dissonant. They weren't always.
There was Nan! But as to Dick, he was simply Dick, a good substratum of
his father, Anthony Powell, in him, a man who had had long views on
trade and commerce and could manage men. And a streak of Raven, not too
much but enough to imagine the great things the Powell streak would show
him how to put his hand to.
Dick had been staring at him, finding him a long way off, and now he
spoke, shyly if still curiously:
"Would you say you'd found God?"
Raven came back; he considered.
"No," he said, at last, "I couldn't say anything of the sort: it sounds
like such awful swank. But I rather stand in with Old Crow. The fact is,
Dick"--it was almost impossible to get this clarified in his own mind to
the point of passing it on--"Old Crow's made me feel somehow--warm. As
if there's a continuity, you know. As if they keep a hand on us, the
generations that have passed. If that's so, we needn't be so infernally
lonesome, now need we?"
"Well," said Dick, "we are pretty much alone."
"But we needn't be," said Raven, painfully sticking to his text,
"because there are the generations. The being loyal to what the
generations tried to build up, what they demand of us. And behind the
whole caboodle of 'em, there's something else, something bigger,
something warmer still. Really, you know, if only as a matter of
convenience, we might call it--God."
A silence came here and he rather forgot Dick in fantastically thinking
how you might have to climb to the shoulders of a man (Old Crow's, for
instance) to make your leap to God. You couldn't do it from the ground.
Dick had taken off his glasses to wipe them and Raven, recalling himself
and glancing up, found his eyes suffused and soft.
"Jackie," said Dick, "you're a great old sport."