The well-known words rose out of the shadows of the aisles behind him. They bruised his heart with their familiar sweetness.
The candles that jigged in the small draughts of the sanctuary blurred into a cloud of rising incense, and then more thickly into a cloud of unshed tears. He fought them back, ashamed. He was beginning to feel again, and he would rather not feel—like this. It was intolerable, this appeal to his bruised emotion—it was like compelling him to use a wounded limb. He felt as if he could not bear any more of the wan, lilting music, the faint, sweet voices of the faithful, the perfumed cloud that rose like smoke before the altar and then hung among the gilding and shadows of the chancel roof. And now the virile tenor of the Priest seemed to bring a definitely sexual element into the tender dream.... What was this he was saying about love?...
“O God, who has prepared for them that love thee, such good things as pass man’s understanding, pour into our hearts such love towards thee, that we, loving thee above all things....”
§ 23
The clear pale sunlight of late October glittered on the River Tillingham, and seemed to be all light. No warmth was in the evening ray, and Jenny’s woollen scarf was muffled to her throat as she came to the Mocksteeple. From far off she had seen the tall figure waiting beside the kiln. She wondered if he would hear her footsteps in the grass, or whether till she had called his name he would stand looking away towards where the light was thickening at the river’s mouth.
Her feet made a sucking noise in the ground which was spongy with autumn rains. He turned towards her and immediately held out his arms.
“My lovely....”
She was enfolded.
His warmth and strength made her think of the earth, and there was a faint scent of earth about him as she hid her face on his breast. There was also that smell of the clean straw of stables which she had noticed when she first met him. She rubbed her cheek childishly and fondly against the roughness of his coat then lifted her mouth for his slow, hard kisses.... “My lovely—oh, my lovely.”
“How long can you stay?” he asked her a few minutes later, when they had huddled down together under the wall of the Mocksteeple, from which came a faint radiation of warmth, as the tar gave out the heat it had absorbed during the day.
“Not very long, I’m afraid, Benjie. There are people coming to dinner tonight, and I’ll have to be back in good time. But we must fix about Monday. I’ve already told them I’m going up to town for a day’s shopping, and I’ve written to a friend to choose me a couple of frocks at Debenham’s and send them down—to make the lie hold water. I’m afraid I’m getting quite a resourceful liar.”
“But you are going shopping, dear.”
“Yes, but I can’t tell them it’s furniture, stupid. Oh, Ben, won’t it be wildly exciting choosing things for Fourhouses! But we mustn’t be extravagant, and you’ve got some lovely bits already.”
“I want you to have the whole house to please you—nothing in it that you don’t like.”
“I like everything except the parlour, and those iron bedsteads they have upstairs. We’ll want some chests too, to use instead of the washstands. Then Fourhouses will be perfect inside and out.”
“You have real taste—that’s what you have,” he said admiringly.
“It’s so dear of you to give me what I want.”
“It’s my wedding-present to you, sweetheart; and Mother and the girls are giving you sheets and table linen, so reckon we’ll be well set up in our housekeeping.”
She drowsed against him, her head on his shoulder, her arm across his knees. He put his mouth to her ear.
“My sweet,” he murmured—“my little sweet—when is it going to be?”
“I’ve told you, Ben. At the beginning of January.”
“That’s your faithful word?”
“My faithful word.”
“I’m glad—for oh, my dearest, it seems I’ve waited long enough.”
“It won’t seem so very long now—and, Ben, I’ve made up my mind about one thing. I’m not going to tell the family till it’s all over.”
“You’re not!”
“No—because if I told them before it happened they’d try to stop it; and though they couldn’t stop it, it would be a nuisance having them try.”
“Does your brother agree with this?”
“It was he that suggested it.”
“Well, I’ve a great respect for that brother of yours. But, sweetheart, it seems so dreadful, us marrying on the quiet, when I’m so proud of you and ud like to hold you before all the world.”
“You shall hold me before all the world—after our marriage. But there’s no good having a row with the parents, especially as they’re old. It’ll be bad enough for them anyhow, but I think they’ll take it easier if they know it’s too late to do anything.”
He acquiesced, as he usually did, for he respected her judgment, and his natural dignity taught him to ignore this contempt of Alard for Godfrey. The rest of their short time together must not be spoiled by discussion. Once more he drew her close, and his kisses moved slowly from her forehead to her eyes, from her eyes to her cheeks, then at last to her mouth. His love-making gave her the thrill of a new experience, for she knew what a discovery and a wonder it was to him. It was not stale with repetition, distressed with comparison, as it was to so many men—as it was to herself. She felt a stab of remorse, a regret that she too was not making this adventure for the first time. She was younger than he, and yet beside him she felt shabby, soiled.... She strained him to her heart in an agony of tender possession. Oh, she would make his adventure worth while—he should not be disappointed in experience. They would explore the inmost heart of love together.
§ 24
Jenny was glad that the numbers in the drawing-room made it unnecessary for her to sit down to cards. She and Rose Alard had both cut out, and as Rose liked to sit and watch the play, Jenny felt she had an excuse to mutter something about “having one or two things to see to,” and escape from the room. She wanted to be alone if only for half an hour, just to savour again in memory the comfort of her lover’s arms, his tender breathing, the warmth of his kisses and the darkness of his embrace. She shut her eyes and heard him say “My lovely ... oh, my lovely!”
A full moon was spilling her light over the garden, and instinctively Jenny turned out of doors. She had put on her fur coat, and the still, moon-dazzled night was many degrees from frost. In the garden she would be sure of solitude, and at the same time would not be without the response of nature, so necessary to her mood. “One deep calleth another,” and her heart in its new depth of rapture called to the moon and trees and grass, and received from them an answer which those self-absorbed human beings, crowded over cards, could never give.
She walked to and fro on the wide path beside the tennis lawn then turned into the darkness of the shrubbery, threading her way through moon-spattered arbutus and laurel till she came to a little garden-house which had been built in the reign of Queen Anne. It had the characteristics of its age—solid brick walls, high deepset windows, and a white pediment which now gleamed like silver in the light of the moon. It had been built by the non-juring Gervase Alard, and here he had studied after his deprivation of the Vicarage of Leasan, and written queer crabbed books on a revised liturgy and on reunion with the Eastern Church. No one ever worked in it now, and it contained nothing but a bench and a few dilapidated garden chairs—it would hold only just enough warmth for her to sit down and rest.
To her surprise she found it was not empty; a movement startled her as she crossed the threshold, and the next moment she discovered Gervase, leaning back in one of the chairs. He was just a blot of shadow in the deeper darkness, except where his face, hands and shirt front caught the moonshine in ghostly patches of white.
“Hullo, Gervase—I’d no notion you’d come here.”
He had left the drawing-room before coffee was brought in.
“I’ve been strolling about and got rather cold.”
“Same here. Is there a whole chair beside you?”
At first she had been sorry to find him and had meant to go away, but now she realised that he was the only person whose company would not be loss.
“If not, there’s one under me, and you shall have that.... Ah, here’s something luxurious with rockers. Probably you and I are mad, my dear, to be sitting here. But I felt I simply must run away from the party.”
“So did I.”
She sat down beside him. In spite of the ghastly moonlight that poured over his face, he looked well—far less haggard than he had seemed in the kinder light a month ago. It struck her that he had looked better ever since his holiday, and his parting from Stella Mount, which he had told her of a few days after it happened. He had had a bad time, she knew, but he seemed to have come through it, and to have found a new kind of settlement. As she looked at him more closely in the revealing light, she saw that his mouth was perhaps a little too set, and that there were lines between nose and chin which she had not noticed before. He looked happy, but he also looked older.
“And how goes it, my dear?” he asked.
“Well, Gervase—extremely well.”
She was too shy of intimate things to enquire how it went with him.
“I saw Ben this afternoon,” she continued, “and I told him what you and I thought about not telling the parents till afterwards.”
“And did he agree?”
“Yes, he agreed. I really think he’s been wonderful about it all—when you consider how he must feel....”
“He’s got some sense of proportion—he’s not going to let his love be spoilt by family pride. Jenny, if I’ve learnt anything in these first years of my grown-up life, it is that love must come before everything else.”
She was surprised at this from him.
“You would put it before religion?”
“Religion is the fulfilment of love.”
She repelled the awkward feelings which invariably oppressed her at the mention of such things. She wanted to know more of this young brother of hers, of the conflicts in which he triumphed mysteriously.
“Gervase, I wish I understood you better. I can’t make out how it is that you, who’re so modern and even revolutionary in everything else, should be so reactionary in your religion. Why do you follow tradition there, when you despise it in other things.”
“Because it’s a tradition which stands fast when all the others are tumbling down. It’s not tradition that I’m out against, but all the feeble shams and conventions that can’t stand when they’re shaken.”
“But does religion stand? I thought it was coming down like everything else.”
“Some kinds are. Because they’re built on passing ideas instead of on unchanging instincts. But Catholic Christianity stands fast because it belongs to an order of things which doesn’t change. It’s made of the same stuff as our hearts. It’s the supernatural satisfaction of all our natural instincts. It doesn’t deal with abstractions, but with everyday life. The sacraments are all common things—food, drink, marriage, birth and death. Its highest act of worship is a meal—its most sacred figures are a dying man, and a mother nursing her child. It’s traditional in the sense that nature and life are traditional....”
It was many months since she had heard him talk like this. It reminded her of the old days when they were both at school, and he had brought her all his ideas on men and things, all his latest enthusiasms and discoveries.
“Jenny,” he continued, “I believe that we’ve come to the end of false traditions—to the ‘removing of those things which are shaken, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.’”
“Is there anything besides religion which can’t be shaken?”
“Yes—my dear, the earth. The land will still be there though the Squires go, just as the faith will still be there though the Parsons go. The Parson and the Squire will go, and their places will be taken by the Yeoman and the Priest who were there before them.”
“Go back to the Middle Ages?”
“Lord, no! Too much has happened since then. We’ve got industry and machinery and science—we can’t go back to sack and maypoles. What I mean is that, instead of the country being divided among a few big landlords who don’t and can’t farm their own land, it will be divided into a lot of small farms of manageable size. Instead of each country parish being in the charge of a small country gentleman who has to keep up state on an income of two hundred a year, and is cut off from his parishioners by his social position and the iron gates of his parsonage, there’ll be a humble servant living among them as one of themselves, set above them only by his vocation. It’ll be a democracy which will have the best of aristocracy kept alive in it. The Parson and the Squire don’t belong to any true aristocracy—they’re Hanoverian relics—and they’re going, and I’m glad.”
“Yes, I think they’re going all right, but I can’t feel so glad as you, because I’m not so sure as to who will take their place. The yeoman isn’t the only alternative to the squire—there’s also the small-holder and the garden-city prospector. As for the parson—I don’t know much about church affairs, but I should think he’s just as likely to lose the spiritual side of himself as the material, and we’ll have men that aren’t much better than relieving officers or heads of recreation clubs.”
“Don’t try and burst my dream, Jenny. It’s a very good sort of dream, and I like to think it will come true. And I know it will come true in a sense, though possibly in a sense which will be nonsense to most people. That’s a way some of the best dreams have.”
He was silent and thoughtful for a moment. Perhaps he was thinking of another Gervase Alard, who had long ago sat where he sat, and dreamed a dream which had not come true.
“But don’t let’s have any more of me and my dreams,” he said after a while. “Talk to me about Ben. We started talking about him, you know, and then drifted off into Utopia. I should think that was a good sign.”
“I’m meeting him in London on Monday to do some shopping.”
“What are you going to buy?”
“Furniture. I want to pick up one or two really nice old pieces for Fourhouses. They’re to be his wedding-present to me. First of all we’ll go to Duke Street, and then to Puttick and Simpson’s in the afternoon.”
“Are you going to refurnish the house?”
“No, only get rid of one or two abominations. I had thought of doing up the Best Parlour, but now I’ve decided to let that stand. If I’m to be a farmer’s wife I must get used to the Family Bible and aspidistras and wool mats.”
“I think you’re wise. It’s just as well not to try to alter more of his life than you can help.”
“I don’t want to alter his life. I’m quite persuaded that his life is better than mine. And as for him not having our taste, or rather a different kind of bad taste from what we’ve got—it doesn’t matter. I’ve made up my mind I must take Ben as he comes and as a whole, and not try to ignore or alter bits of him. I’m going to do the thing properly—make his friends my friends, pour out tea for the old ladies of Icklesham, ask the farmers who call round on business to stay to dinner or supper, go to see them at their farms and make friends with their wives. I know I can do it if only I do it thoroughly and don’t make any reservations. Of course I’ll go on being friends with our set if they’ll let me, but if they won’t, it’s they who’ll have to go and not the others. Gervase, I’m sick of Jenny Alard, and I’m thankful that she’s going to die early next year, and a new creature called Jenny Godfrey take her place.”
“My dear, you’re going to be very happy.”
“I know I am. I’m going to be the only happy Alard.”
“The only one?”
“Yes—look at the others. There’s Doris, a dreary middle-aged spinster, trodden on by both the parents, and always regretting the lovers she turned down because they weren’t good enough for the family. There’s Mary, living alone in private hotels and spending all her money on clothes; there’s Peter, who’s married a rich girl who’s too clever for him, and who—worst of all—thinks he’s happy and has become conventional. No—I can’t help it—I pity them all.”
“And what about me, Jenny? You’ve left me out. Do you pity me?”
She had ignored him deliberately—perhaps because she did not quite know where to place him.
“O Gervase, I hope you’ll be happy—I’m sure you will, because you’re different from the rest.”
“Yes, I’m sure too. I’m going to be happy—as happy as you. I don’t quite know how”—and he gave her a wry smile—“but I know that I shall be.”