No man worth his spiritual salt can ever become really entangled in
locality.—A. H. L.
The house, like the description of himself in the letter, was big and
old. It consisted of three rambling wings, each added at a different
period to an original farmhouse, and was thus full of unexpected
staircases, sudden rising passages, and rooms of queer shapes. It
resembled, indeed, the structure of a mind that has grown by chance and
not by system, and was just as difficult for a stranger to find his way
in.
It stood among pine-woods, at the foot of hills that ran on another five
miles to drop their chalk cliffs abruptly into the sea. Where the lawns
stopped on one side and the kitchen-garden on the other began an expanse
of undulating heather-land, dotted with pools of brown water and yellow
with patches of gorse and broom. Here rabbits increased and multiplied;
sea-gulls screamed and flew, using some of the more secluded ponds for
their annual breeding places; foxes lived happily, unhunted and very
bold; and the dainty hoof-marks of deer were sometimes found in the
sandy margins of the freshwater springs.
It was beautiful country, a bit of wild England, out of the world as
very few parts of it now are, and haunted by a loveliness that laid its
spell on the heart of the returned exile the moment he topped the hill
in the dog-cart and saw it spread out before him like a softly coloured
map. The scenery from the train window had somehow disheartened him a
little, producing a curious sense of confinement, almost of
imprisonment, in his mind: the neat meadows holding wooden cattle; the
careful boundaries of ditch and hedge; the five-barred gates, strong to
enclose, the countless notices to warn trespassers, and the universal
network of barbed wire. Accustomed as he was to the vast, unhedged
landscapes of a primitive country, it all looked to him, with its
precise divisions, like a toy garden, combed, washed, swept—exquisitely
cared for, but a little too sweet and perfumed to be quite wholesome.
Only tame things, he felt, could enjoy so gentle a playground, and the
call of his own forests—for this really was what worked in him—sang out
to him with a sterner cry.
But this view from the ridge pleased him more: there were but few hedges
visible; the eye was led to an open horizon and the sea; an impression
of space and freedom rose from the hills and moorlands. Here his
thoughts, accustomed to deal with leagues rather than acres, could at
least find room to turn about in. And although the perfume that rose to
his nostrils was like the perfume of flowers preserved by some
artificial process rather than the great clean smells of a virgin world
such as he was used to, it was nevertheless the smell of his boyhood,
and it moved him powerfully. Odour is the one thing that is impossible
to recall in exile. Sights and sounds the imagination can always
reconstruct after a fashion, but odour is too elusive. It rose now to
his nostrils as something long forgotten, and swept him with a wave of
memory that was extraordinarily keen.
‘That’s a smell to take me back twenty-five years,’ he thought, inhaling
the scent of the heather. He caught his breath sharply, uncertain
whether it was pain or pleasure that predominated. A profound yearning,
too fugitive to be seized, too vague to be definitely labelled, stirred
in the depths of him as his eye roamed over the miles of sunlight and
blue shadow at his feet; again something sang within him as he gazed
over the long ridges of heathland, sprinkled with silvery pools, and
bearing soft purple masses of pine-woods on their sides as they melted
away through haze to the summer sea beyond.
Only when his gaze fell upon the smoke rising from the grey stone roof
of the house nestling far below did the joy of his emotion chill a
little. A vague sense of alarm and nervousness touched him as he
wondered what that grey old building might hold in store for him.
‘It’s silly, I know,’ his thought ran, ‘but I feel like a lost sheep
here. It’s Nature that calls me, not people. I don’t know how I shall
get on in this chess-board sort of a country. They’ll never care for the
things that I care for.’
For a moment a sort of panic came over him. He could almost have turned
and run. Vaguely he felt that he was an unfinished, uncouth article in a
shop of dainty china. He sent the dog-cart on ahead, and walked down the
hillside towards the house, thinking, thinking—wondering almost why he
had ever consented to come, and already conscious of a sense of
imprisonment. He was still impressionable as a boy, with sharp, fleeting
moods like a boy’s.
Then, quite suddenly it seemed, he had walked up the drive and passed
through the house, and a figure moved across a lawn to meet him. The
first sight of his sister he had known for twenty years was a tall woman
in white serge, with a prim, still girlish figure and a quiet, smiling
face, moving graciously through patches of sunshine between flower-beds
of formal outline. There was no spontaneous rush of welcome, no gush, or
flood of questions. He felt relieved. With a flash, too, he realised
that her dominant note was still grief for her lost husband. It was
written all over her.
Instantly, however, shyness descended upon him like a cloud. The scene
he had rehearsed so often in imagination vanished before the reality. He
slipped down inside himself, as his habit sometimes was, and watched the
performance curiously, as though he were a spectator of it instead of an
actor.
He saw himself, hot and rather red in the face, walking awkwardly across
the lawn with both hands out, offering his bearded face clumsily to be
kissed. And it was kissed, first on one cheek, then on the other,
calmly, soberly, delicately. He felt the tingling of it for a long time
afterwards. That kiss confused him ridiculously.
At first he could think of nothing to say except the form of address he
always used to the Bosses of the lumber camps—‘How’s everything up your
way?’—which he felt was not quite the most suitable phrase for the
occasion. Then his sister spoke, and quickly set him more at his ease.
‘But you don’t look one little bit like an American, Paul!’
He gazed at her in admiration, just as he might have gazed at a complete
stranger. The soft intonation of her voice was a keen delight to him.
And her matter-of-fact speech put his shyness to flight.
‘Of course not,’ he replied, leaving out her name after a second’s
hesitation, ‘but my voice, I guess——’
‘Not a bit either,’ she repeated, surveying him very critically. ‘You
look like a sailor home from the sea more than anything else.’
She wore a wide garden hat of Panama straw, charmingly trimmed with
flowers. Her face beneath it, Paul thought, was the most refined and
exquisitely delicate he had ever seen. It was like chiselled porcelain.
He thought of Hank Davis’s woman at Deep Bay Camp—whose face he used to
think wonderful rather—and it suddenly seemed by comparison to have been
chopped with a blunt axe out of wood.
They moved to the long chairs upon the lawn, and her brother realised
for the first time that his boots were enormous, and that his
Minneapolis clothes did not sit upon him quite as they might have done.
He trod on a corner of a geranium bed as they went, crushing an entire
plant with one foot. But his sister appeared not to notice it.
‘It’s an awful long time, M—Margaret,’ he stammered as they went.
They both sat down and turned to stare at each other. It was, of course,
idle to pretend that after so long an absence they could feel any very
profound affection. Dick, he realised quickly with a flash of intuition,
was the truer link. And, on the whole, it was all much easier than he
had expected. His mind began to work very quickly in several directions
at once. The beauty of the English garden in its quiet way touched him
keenly, stirring in him little whirls of inner delight, fugitive but
wonderful. Only a portion of him, after all, went out to his sister.
‘I believe you expected a Red Indian, or a bear,’ he said at length.
She laughed gently, returning his stare of genuine admiration. ‘One
couldn’t help wondering a little, Paul dear,—after so many years—could
one?’ She always said ‘one’ instead of the obvious personal pronoun.
‘You had no beard, for instance, when you left?’
‘And more hair, perhaps!’
‘You look splendid. I _shall_ be proud of you!’
Paul blushed furiously. It was the first compliment ever paid to him by
a woman.
‘Oh, I feel all right,’ he stammered. ‘The healthy life in the woods,
open air, and constant moving keep a fellow “fixed-up” to concert pitch
all the time. I’ve never once—consulted a doctor in my life.’ He was
careful to keep the slang out. He felt he managed it admirably. He said
‘consulted.’
‘And you wrote such nice letters, Paul. It _was_ dear of you.’
‘I was lonely,’ he said bluntly. And after a pause he added, ‘I got all
yours.’
‘I’m so glad.’ And then another pause. In which fashion they talked on
for half an hour, each secretly estimating the other—wondering a little
why they did not feel all kind of poignant emotions they had rather
expected to feel.
It was a perfectly natural scene between a brother and sister who had
grown up entirely apart, who were quite honest, who were utterly
different types, and who yet wished to hold to one another as the
nearest blood ties they possessed. They skimmed pleasantly and, so far
as he was concerned, more and more easily, over the surface of things.
Her talk, like her letters, was sincere, simple, shallow; it concealed
no hidden depths, he felt at once. And by degrees, even in this first
conversation, crept a shadow of other things, so that he realised they
were in reality leagues apart, and could never have anything much in
common below the pleasant surface relations of life.
Yet, even while he sheered off, as oil declines from its very nature to
mingle with water, he felt genuinely drawn to her in another way. She
was his own sister; she was his nearest tie; and she was Dick’s widow.
They would get along together all right; they would be good friends.
‘Twenty years, Margaret.’
‘Twenty years, Paul.’
And then another pause of several minutes during which something that
was too vague to be a real thought passed like a shadow through his
mind. What could his friend Dick have seen in her that was necessary to
his life and happiness—Dick Messenger, who was scholar, poet,
thinker—who sought the everlasting things—God? He instantly suppressed
it as unworthy, something of which he was ashamed, but not before it had
left a definite little trace in his imagination.
‘So at last, Paul, you’ve really come home,’ she resumed; ‘I can hardly
believe it,—and are going to settle down. You are a rich man.’
‘Aunt Alice did her duty,’ he laughed. He ignored the reference to
settling down. It vaguely displeased him. ‘It’s for you as well as me,’
he added, meaning the money. ‘I want to share with you whatever you
need.’
‘Not a penny,’ she said quickly; ‘I have all I need. I live with my
memories, you know. I am only so glad for your sake,—after all your hard
life out there.’
‘The life wasn’t hard; it was rather wonderful,’ he said simply. ‘I
liked it.’
‘For a time perhaps; but you must have had curious experiences and lived
with very rough people in those—lumber camp places you wrote about.’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Simple kind of men, but very decent, very
genuine. Few signs of city polish, I admit, but then you know I never
cared for frills, Margaret.’
‘Frills!’ she exclaimed, without any expression on her face. ‘Of course
not. Still, I am very glad you have left it all. The life must often
have been unsuitable and lonely; one always felt that for you. You can’t
have had any of the society that one’s accustomed to.’
‘Not of that kind,’ he put in hurriedly with a short laugh, ‘but of
other kinds. I struck a pretty good crowd of men on the whole.’
She turned her face slightly away from him; her eyes, he divined, had
been fixed for a moment on his hands. For the first time in his life he
realised that they were large and rough and brown. Her own were so pale
and dainty—like china hands, glossy and smooth—and the gold bangle on
her thin wrist looked as though every second it must slip over her
fingers. His own hands disappeared swiftly into the pockets of his coat.
She turned to him with a gentle smile. ‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘it is simply
too delightful to know that you really are here at last. It must seem
strange to you at first, and there are so many things to talk over—such
a lot to tell. I want to hear all your plans. You’ll get used to us
after a bit, and there are lots of nice people in the neighbourhood who
are dying to meet you.’
Her brother felt inclined to explain that he had no wish to interfere
with their ‘dying’; but, instead, he returned her smile. ‘I’m a poor
hand at meeting people, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I’m not as sociable as I
might be.’
‘But you’ll get over that. Of course, living so long in the backwoods
makes one unsociable. But we’ll try and make you happy and comfortable.
You have no idea how very, very glad I am that you’ve come home.’
Paul believed her. He leaned over and patted her hand, and she smiled
frankly and sweetly in his face. She was a very shadowy sort of
personality, he felt. If he blew hard she might blow away altogether, or
disappear like a soap-bubble.
‘I’m glad too, of course,’ he replied. ‘Only at my age, you know, it’s
not easy to tackle new habits.’
‘No one could take you for a day more than thirty-five,’ she said with
truth; ‘so that shall be our own little private secret. You look quite
absurdly young.’
They laughed together easily and naturally. Paul felt more at home and
soothed than he had thought possible. It had not been in the least
formidable after all, and for the first time in his life he knew a
little of that enervating kind of happiness that comes from being made a
fuss of. As there was still a considerable interval before tea, they
left their chairs and strolled through the garden, and as they went, the
talk turned upon the past, and his sister spoke of Dick and of all he
had meant to do in the world, had he lived. Paul heard the details of
his sudden death for the first time. Her voice and manner were evidence
of the melancholy she still felt, but her brother’s heart was deeply
stirred; he asked for all the particulars he had so often wondered
about, and in her quiet, soothing tone, tinged now with tender sadness,
she supplied the information. Clearly she had never arisen from the
blow. She had worshipped Dick without understanding him.
‘Death always frightens me, I think,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘I
try not to think about it.’
She passed on to speak of the children, and told him how difficult she
found it to cope with them—she suffered from frequent headaches and
could not endure noise—and how she hoped when they were a little older
to be more with them. Mademoiselle Fleury, meanwhile, was such an
excellent woman and was teaching them all they should know.
‘Though, of course, I keep a close eye on them so far as I am able,’ she
explained, ‘and only wish I were stronger.’
They sauntered through the rose-garden and down the neat gravel paths
that led to the wilder parts of the grounds where the rhododendron
bushes stood in rounded domes and masses. It was very peaceful, very
beautiful. He trod softly and carefully. The hush of centuries of
cultivation lay over it all. Even the butterflies flew gently, as to the
measure of a leisurely dance that deprecated undue animation. Paul
caught his thoughts wandering to the open spaces of untamed moorland he
had seen from the hill-top. More and more, as his sister’s personality
revealed itself, he got the impression that she lived enclosed like the
wooden cows he had seen from the train, in a little green field, with
precise and neatly trimmed borders. Strong emotions, as all other
symptoms of plain and vigorous life, she shrank from. There were
notice-boards set about her to warn trespassers, stating clearly that
she did not wish to be let out. Yet in her way she was true, loving, and
sweet—only it was such a conventional way, he felt.
Leaving the world of rhododendron bushes behind them, they came to the
beginning of a pine-wood leading to the heather-land beyond. There was a
touch of primitive wildness here. The trees grew straight and tall,
filling the glade, and a stream ran brawling among their roots.
‘This is the Gwyle,’ she said, as they entered the shade, ‘it was Dick’s
favourite part of the whole grounds. I rarely come here; it’s dark even
in summer, and rather damp and draughty, I always think.’
Paul looked about him and drew a long breath. The air was strong with
open-air scents of earth and bark and branches. Far overhead the tufted
pines swayed, murmuring to the sky; the ground ran away downhill,
becoming broken up and uneven; nothing but dark, slender stems rose
everywhere about him, like giant seaweeds, he thought, rising from the
pools of a deep sea. And the soft wind, moving mysteriously between the
shadows and the sunlight, completed the spell. He passed
suddenly—willy-nilly, as his nature would have it—into that mood when
the simplest things about him turned their faces upwards so that he
caught their eyes and their meaning; when the well-known and common
things of the world shone out and revealed the infinite. Something in
this quiet pine-wood that was mighty, and utterly wonderful, entered his
soul, linking him on at a single stroke with the majesty of the great
spirit of the earth. What lay behind it? What was its informing spirit?
How and where could it link on so intimately with his soul? And could it
not be a channel, as he always felt it must be, to the God behind it?
Beauty seized him by the throat and made him tremble.
This sudden rush came over him, sea-like. His moods were ever like the
sea, some strange touch of colour shifting the entire key. Something,
too, made him feel lonely and oppressed. He, who was accustomed to space
in bulk—the space the stars and winds live in—had come to this little,
parcelled-out place. He felt clipped already. He turned to the shadowy
personality beside him, the boyish impulse bursting its way out. After
all, she was his own sister; he could reveal himself to no one if not to
her.
‘By Gosh, Margaret,’ he cried, ‘this is the real thing. This wood must
be alive and haunted just as the James Bay forests are. It’s simply full
of wonder.’
‘It’s the Gwyle wood,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s usually rather damp. But
Dick loved it.’
Her brother hardly heard what she said. ‘Listen,’ he said in a hushed
tone; ‘do you hear the wind up there aloft? The trees are talking. The
wood is full of whispers. There’s no sound in the world like that murmur
of a soft breeze in pine branches. It’s like the old gods sighing, which
only their true worshippers hear! Isn’t it fine and melancholy?
Margaret, d’you know, it goes through me like a fever.’
His sister stopped and stared at him. She wore a little frightened
expression. His sudden enthusiasm puzzled her evidently.
‘It’s the Gwyle wood,’ she repeated mechanically. ‘It’s very pretty, I
think. Dick always thought so too.’
Her brother, surprised at his own rush of ready words, and already
ashamed of the impulse that had prompted him to reveal himself, fell
into silence.
‘Nature excites me sometimes,’ he said presently. ‘I suppose it’s
because I’ve known nothing else.’
‘That’s quite natural, I’m sure, Paul dear,’ she rejoined, turning to
lead the way back to the sunshine of the open garden; ‘it’s very pretty;
I love it too. But it rather alarms me, I think, sometimes.’
‘Perhaps the natural tendency in solitude is to personify nature, and
make it take the place of men and women. It has become a profound need
of my being certainly.’ He spoke more quietly, chilled by her utter
absence of comprehension.
‘In its place I think it is ever so nice. But, Paul, you surprise me. I
had no idea you were clever like that.’ She was perfectly sincere in
what she said.
Her brother blushed like a boy. ‘It’s my foolishness, I suppose,
Margaret,’ he said with a shy laugh. ‘I am certainly not clever.’
‘Anyhow, you can be foolish or clever here to your heart’s content. You
must use the place as though it were your own exactly.’
‘Thank you, Margaret.’
‘Only I don’t think I quite understand all those things,’ she added
vaguely after a pause. ‘Nixie talks rather like that. She has all poor
Dick’s ideas and strange fancies. I really can’t keep up with her at
all.’
Paul stiffened at the reference to the children; he remembered his
attitude. Already he had been guilty of a serious lapse from his good
intentions.
‘She comes down to this wood far too much, and I’m sure it’s not quite
healthy for her. I always forget to speak to Mlle. Fleury.’ Then she
turned to him and smiled. ‘But they are all so excited about your
coming. They will simply devour you.’
‘I’m a poor hand at children, I’m afraid,’ he said, falling back upon
his usual formula, ‘but, of course, I shall be delighted to see them.’
She gathered up her white skirts about her trim ankles and led the way
out of the wood, her brother following and thinking how slim and
graceful she was, and what a charming figure she made among the
rose-trees. He got the impression of her as something unreal and
shadowy, a creature but half alive. It would hardly have surprised him
to see her suddenly flit off into mist and sunshine and disappear from
view, leaving him with the certainty that he had been talking with a
phantasm of a dream. Between himself and her, however, he realised now,
there was a gulf fixed. They looked at one another as it were down the
large end of a telescope, and talked down a long-distance telephone that
changed all their words and made the sense unintelligible and
meaningless. The scale of values between them had no common denominator.
Yet he could love her, and he meant to.
They crossed the lawns and went through the French window into the cool
of the drawing-room, and while he was sipping his first cup of afternoon
English tea, struggling with a dozen complex emotions that stirred
within him, there suddenly darted across the lawn a vision of flying
children, with a string of animals at their heels. They swept out of
some laurel shrubberies into the slanting evening sunlight, and came to
a dead stop on the gravel path in front of the window.
Their eyes met. They had seen him.
There they stood, figures of suddenly arrested motion, staring at him
through the glass. ‘So that’s Uncle Paul!’ was the thought in the mind
of each. He was being inspected, weighed, labelled. The meeting with his
sister was nothing compared to this critical examination, conducted
though it was from a distance.
But it lasted only a moment. With a sudden quietness the children passed
away from the window towards another door round the corner, and so out
of sight.
‘They’ve gone up to get tidy before coming to see you,’ explained his
sister; and Paul used the short respite to the best possible advantage
by collecting his thoughts, remembering his ‘attitude and disguise,’ and
seeing to it that his armour was properly fastened on, leaving no
loopholes for sudden attack. He retired cautiously to the only place in
a room where a shy man feels really safe—the mat before the fireplace.
He almost wished for his gun and hunting-knife. The idea made him laugh.
‘They already love you,’ he heard his sister’s gentle whispering voice,
‘and I know you’ll love them too. You must never let them annoy you, of
course.’
‘They’re your children—and Dick’s,’ he answered quietly. ‘I shall get on
with them famously, I’m sure.’