The Heart of the Family Read online

  They were through the gate, the sea wind blowing about them and the gulls circling overhead, and before them was the village green that separated Damerosehay from the harbour and Little Village. It was almost too small to be noticed—no more than one diminutive green patch upon the colored patchwork of the marshes but to Robin at this moment it seemed a vast green sea stretching away into limitless space. This was the edge of the world. This was where he took off. He wrenched his hand out of Meg’s and was away, running over the green turf, although he had not seen, as Meg had, the bonnet of a long grey car coming round the corner and nosing its way between the post office and the harbour wall, like an animal thrusting its head into the burrow that leads to home. Robin, when he took off, was aware of nothing except that the something he had lost when he came to this world was over there, beckoning, and that if he ran hard enough and fast enough and long enough he would find it again.

  But that he could never do. With the buckling up beneath him of his inadequate legs, and the failure of the breath in his fat little body, there came also the fear. He was going to fall into the black pit. It would suddenly open just in front of him, a horrible blackness that was interposed between him and the strong safe thing to which he was running. And yet he could not stop his staggering stumbling run. He never could. It was always the same. He came to the brink of the pit and fell headlong into the blackness and the fear.

  But today it was suddenly different. Just as his legs began to fail, and the first onslaught of the terror came upon him, he looked up and saw an immense figure striding towards him, a rescuing figure of glorious and victorious power. A man. If only he could get to that man before the black pit opened he would not fall headlong but would be saved. The man was holding out his arms. Robin’s knees gave and he stumbled, but he did not fall. He recovered himself and staggered on. Now he was nearly there. He was there. No, he wasn’t. The worst had happened. His left wellington had somehow got itself entangled with his right wellington, his legs were twisted up and he was falling.

  “Got you!” said a triumphant voice from the sky, and upon the very brink of the black pit he was lifted and locked into complete safety. “Daddy,” he said, without knowing in the least what he meant by the word, and with his eyes tight shut he burrowed and screwed himself into the warm strength that encompassed him. This was the source of his being. This was life. This was the thing towards which he ran.

  David was most extraordinarily moved and most deeply honoured. He was used to appreciation, but this highly appreciative scrap of humanity was his own son. He had left a noisy baby and had come home to an appreciative son. He had never had such a welcome. His son. Robin. He detached the limpet-like creature with difficulty from his shoulder and sat him up on his left arm to have a look at him. What a face! Completely circular and very fat, scarlet with exertion, streaked with chocolate and dirt and some sticky substance that was also adhering to his coat. A couple of tears had made tracks through the dirt, and the long golden lashes that fringed the grey-green eyes were clotted together with other tears.

  “What was the trouble, old chap?” asked David. For it was obvious that the trouble had passed. Robin was chuckling now, his eyes sparkling with green fire and his tossed curls like flame in the wind. What a glowing fellow! thought David, and the spit image of his father-in-law. Not that he objected to that, because he liked his father-in-law. And there was something of Sally there, too; the warmth was Sally. Nothing of himself that he could see. Nevertheless the creature was his son, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. The dirty face was unkissable, but the nape of the neck was moderately clean, and he kissed that. The skin was silky soft and smelt of violet powder, and just above it was a twist of a red curl like a drake’s tail. Robin wriggled and chuckled and slid to the ground. “Car,” he said, and staggered in his ridiculous boots to the grey monster purring at the roadside.

  David saw, to his astonishment, that it was empty. Where was Sally? Where was Mouse? Above all, where was Meg? He had had to greet Robin first, for it had been with a queer feeling of imminent disaster that he had caught up the little figure in the stumbling seven-league boots. His son safely in his arms, the feeling had gone in a flash, but it had left him for a moment or two unconscious of anything except Robin’s need of him. While he bundled his son into the car, in a hurry to drive on and find Meg, his mind was busy with his children. Perhaps this scrap here, so unlike himself, would have greater need of him than Meg, so like him that the subtle comfort of her likeness, giving hope to the bitter self-knowledge of his middle life, might give him a greater need of her than she of him. In Meg he saw the child that he might yet become by the grace of God, but in him Robin in years to come must see a man whose greatness of stature in days of danger would be for him both protection and challenge; and that too would come about only by the grace of God.

  As he bumped the car up the drive he deplored with sudden impatience the inescapable and impossible demands that his children make upon a man. It would have been more comfortable to have remained a bachelor and wallowed along in the agreeable state of self-deception that had been his before marriage. Fatherhood revealed one’s inadequacies in an appalling manner, and his triumphant American tour, putting the final polish upon a fame that few men are able to achieve in their lifetime, had further destroyed his worth to himself in his own eyes. The contrasts between the luxury and adulation and the stark dreadfulness of Shakespeare’s thought, between himself and Sebastian Weber, had seemed to batter him backwards and forwards between them and then let him fall into this pit of humiliation.

  Near the front door he overtook Sally, breathless and troubled. “Meg hardly got farther than the gate,” she said. “The minute she saw Robin running towards you she turned and ran back. I thought I’d overtake her, but I haven’t.”

  “She’ll be in the hall,” said David.

  But Meg was not in the hall or in the nursery. They looked for her and called her, but she did not come.

  “Better ’ave a nice cupper tea,” said Mrs. Wilkes, shutting Robin firmly in the nursery with a now restored Zelle, lest he get lost, too, and evade bedtime, and shepherding the distracted parents downstairs. “Meg, she’s got a good ’ead-piece. Never comes to no ’arm. Mouse is with ’er, too. A cupper tea will do you both good.”

  “It’s late for tea, Mrs. Wilkes,” said Sally, sure that tea would choke her unless she first found Meg. “Nearly six o’clock.”

  “You said as ’ow you’d be ’ome for tea, and tea is ready in the drawing-room according to your orders, Madam,” said Mrs. Wilkes.

  Sally capitulated instantly. Madam was an ominous word in Mrs. Wilkes’s vocabulary. It meant that though Mrs. Wilkes’s temper would not be permitted to rear its head, it was nevertheless writhing underfoot.

  “I’m sorry we’re late,” she said apologetically. “We went to see Lady Eliot.”

  “Too much excitement don’t do ’er no good at ’er age,” said Mrs. Wilkes. “I put tea in the drawing-room, Sir, not in the garden; not in this weather.”

  David had thought of looking out through the garden door, just in case Meg were hiding behind the lavender hedge, but was out-manoeuvred by Mrs. Wilkes. It was never any good trying to slip round her to a door behind her back. Mr. Wilkes, hemmed in the Wilkes’ kitchen with a thirst upon him, knew now that it was no good. Mrs. Wilkes, with a forbidden door behind her, and advancing majestically from the strongly consolidated position of her impregnable virtue, could be no more resisted than a tidal wave. Lifted upon the strong current of her determination, her employers were deposited in the drawing-room before they knew it. Shutting them in, she left them and went to fetch the old silver teapot.

  “That Mr. Whats-It,” she said, returning and setting it down among the delicate Spode cups on the tray, “ ’e’s ’ad ’is tea and ’e’s settling in real comfortable.”

  “I meant to ring you up, Mrs. Wilkes,” said David.

/>   “The road to ’ell is paved with good intentions,” said Mrs. Wilkes. “Glad to see you ’ome, Sir,” she added with great kindliness. “Real peaky you look. Well, that’s to be expected. We don’t none of us get no younger. Now ’ave your tea in comfort. There ain’t no call to worry about Meg.”

  She left them, and they went on worrying about Meg.

  “You see, whenever you come home you always greet Meg first,” said Sally. “And this time it was Robin. You shouldn’t have done that, David.”

  “I had a queer feeling the little fellow was in danger.”

  “Well, so he is when he runs at that pace. He’s not a bit steady on his feet yet. He’d have tumbled headlong if you hadn’t caught him. But you couldn’t expect Meg to understand that.”

  “She wouldn’t be jealous, Sally.”

  “Not jealous exactly. Hurt and wounded. Thinking you didn’t love her any more.”

  “She’d never think that,” said David, with sudden energy. And then he smiled to himself, for not even Sally, he thought, his wife and Meg’s mother, quite understood the closeness of the bond between him and Meg. Sally, watching his face, smiled too. Yes, she understood, and she did not mind in the least that David loved his daughter a little more than he loved his wife. And how absurd of her to think that Meg might have been jealous, for she herself wasn’t, and she knew that in just one thing Meg took after her: both of them could love without possessiveness.

  David turned the trolley round to face himself instead of Sally and poured out with sudden energy. “We are being ridiculous, Sally. Our eldest infant is momentarily mislaid inside the safety of her own home, and we spoil my home-coming by fussing like a couple of demented blackbirds when the cat’s about. Meg will turn up when she wants to. Don’t sit on the edge of your chair like that, sort of watching for the cat. Sit back and relax.”

  Sally sat back in the comfortable depths of the shabby old arm-chair, where Lucilla had always sat when she reigned at Damerosehay. Even after five years of married life in this house she found it hard to think of herself as the mistress of it. Always, whatever she was doing, she remembered Lucilla and tried to think and plan and act for the welfare of this house as Lucilla would have done. And if ever, even in thought, she shrank from the primary duty of hospitality, as she had shrunk just now from the thought of Sebastian Weber, she was deeply ashamed. What was Damerosehay for? Through an open window she could see him moving slowly among the flowers and enjoying them. When she had cleared away tea, and David had gone to his study to sort out his mail, she would go out and tell him she was glad he had come.

  “You’ve scarcely altered a thing in this room, Sally,” said David gratefully, from the depth of his own chair.

  Lucilla had taken only the most personal of her treasures to Lavender Cottage, and the Damerosehay drawing-room was much as it had been, with the same beautiful Sheraton chairs and Persian rugs, and the same Dresden china figures standing on the mantelpiece beneath the great carved overmantel of polished wood. The old chintzes and brocade curtains had given way at last, but Sally had replaced them with new ones as like the old as possible, and kept the room filled with flowers, as Lucilla had always done. On chilly summer days, such as this one, there was still always a log fire, the scent of the flowers mingling with the smell of the burning wood. It was an extremely old-fashioned room, belonging to another century, as old-fashioned as the old silver teapot and the miniatures upon the cream-painted paneled walls. Another wife than his, thought David, would have altered the position of the furniture, and cleared away half the ornaments that took so long to dust, and the flower-bowls that took so long to fill, and made some sort of an effort to put the impress of her own personality on her own room. Yet Sally, in effacing herself, had unaware put her impress very firmly on Damerosehay. The sense of continuity that she had worked for and achieved in her home, with its concomitant assurances of peace and safety, was something that was part of her own nature. There was no variableness in Sally. If her mind moved sometimes with a slowness that occasionally irritated her quick-witted husband, it moved to sound convictions from which it did not move again, and if in friendship she lacked the easy demonstrativeness of her generation, she gave her love, when she did give it, with a dedication that no abuse of it could change or tarnish.

  “I like it this way,” said Sally. “I like to sit in this room when I am tired, and watch how the light falls on the panelling, and think of the other women who have sat here and watched it fall in just the same way—Aramanthe, Grandmother, and other people. A sort of freshness comes then. I don’t know why.”

  David knew why. A woman loving her home was something that lay deep where the green pastures are. Bombs could not destroy it, though they might destroy the home, and the woman and her children. He felt in sudden desperation for his cigarette case. The States had been riddled with the dread of war and the talk of it, worse even than here, where blinkers were a normal part of the national costume. It had all added to the wretchedness of the time out there. The stench of war, the reek of burning cities that had once been so sickeningly familiar, had been back with him again. It was with him now in this quiet flower-scented room.

  He lay back in his chair again and listened to the old clock ticking and the settling of the wood-ash in the grate, and Sally talking softly about Robin’s teeth. There was a way, there must be a way, of liberating that freshness of the indestructible and letting it flood over the reek and stench. There must somehow, somewhere, be a way. Just the knowledge that there was a way, even if men were too mad and blind to find it, brought a sense of peace.

  “I must clear away tea and see what Mrs. Wilkes is doing about supper,” said Sally. “And then there’s Meg and your Mr. Weber. I must tell him I’m glad he’s come.” She tried to keep the weariness out of her voice, but it escaped at the edges.

  David piled the things on the trolley and pulled her to her feet. They clung to each other for a moment, thankful to be together again.

  “That damn party tomorrow,” said David. “Why do we always have a party on our wedding day? It’s an insane thing to do.”

  “We do it to please Grandmother,” said Sally. “And all the family like it too.”

  “Damn the family,” groaned David. “Always the family. Never us.”

  “Sometimes,” said Sally. “Now, at this moment. And it is always us deep down.”

  “Five years of it and it’s worked,” said David.

  She was suddenly happy. What if she could not know him as well as she would like to know him, or be to him all that she longed to be? She would have to be perfect, and he too, to achieve a perfect understanding. It was human imperfection that kept human beings so isolated. It was crying for the moon to ask for a perfect relationship with another while one remained what one was. And meanwhile, until one was something different, to say that one’s marriage worked was to count oneself supremely blessed.

  “Five years of you, David,” she said softly.

  “No other woman would have stuck it,” he said, and laughed and kissed her and went away with that disconcerting suddenness of his that always hurt her. For he would vanish so quickly and silently that it was like a repudiation. As she pushed out the trolley, her sudden happiness died, and she was back again with that fear that no growth of which she was capable in this life would ever bring her to be with him where he was.

  — 2 —

  David at his study table savagely tore open envelopes while the waves of his shame went over him. “Five years of you,” she had said, honouring him. She did not know what he was. It was unbearable to think of her knowing, and yet it was unbearable that she should not know. He wanted her not to know and yet he wanted her to know. He imagined that the child she was would be harmed if he were to tell her all he knew of himself, and yet to have her loving and honouring a man that he was not was a deception that seemed equally to harm her. Well, there was nothing he
could do about it. Only endure this darkness in which the one ray of light that shone through it showed him not the man that he had thought himself to be, nor the man that others thought him, but the man that he was.

  He got up and pulled off the coat he wore, exchanging it for the shabby old tweed that Mrs. Wilkes had put ready for him in the cupboard. There was relief in the movement, though he could not so easily tear himself free from the man that he was. Then he went back to the sorting of his letters.

  His study was a small room beyond the dining-room, facing west, which in old days had been called the dump room. Margaret had done the flowers here, and struggled with her housekeeping accounts. The dogs’ baskets had been kept here, garden chairs and catalogues of seeds. It was the only room at Damerosehay that had been entirely refurnished and the only room in the house that looked really luxurious, with its deep comfortable armchairs, warm fitted carpet, plum-colored curtains and book-covered walls. There was a Cézanne over the fireplace and an old French mirror between the bookcases. The big writing-table and chair looked more comfortable than austere, and the reading-lamps had shades cleverly made of old theatre play-bills. The one luxury that David had insisted upon when they came to Damerosehay had been electric light, and the one that Sally had insisted on was this room for David. He had always liked it, yet coming back to it now, and remembering the room in which he had first talked with Sebastian, he felt afraid of its luxury, for it was always these contrasts that increased his darkness. He dropped the letters he held and shut his eyes for a moment, as though with a hope that that darkness might shut out the other.