Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
Jane, going into the walled garden, made her way round the end of the house under the sightless Venetian window: she roamed zigzag across the garden, and, getting out again through a gap, found herself facing the sealike uplands. Step quickening, she kept in close to the flank of the woods raggedly edging the river gorge. Some way along an elder grew leaning forward, its branches clotted with waxen blossom within themselves forming a cave. Heavy was the scent, rank the inside darkness which filtered through. The girl, having reached the spot, without hesitation parted the branches and dived between them.
For the women left behind in the dining-room, it became impossible to remain together, alone with the situation, once Jane had gone. If they eyed one another, it had been only in wonder as to which of them could get out of the room first. Lilia had acted—ringing the bell for Kathie, then giving out that, herself, must lie down. She had been heard ascending the stairs as though to some further degree of martyrdom. Antonia, some minutes later, moved across to a window, pulled up the blind, put on her sunglasses and, seating herself aslant on the sill, stared out diagonally across the country. She did not know what she expected, until she caught the faraway pink flicker of Jane’s frock disappearing into the flowering elder. ‘So that’s where she has hidden them,’ she then knew.
Antonia thought, so there
is
more to happen.
Life works to dispossess the dead, to dislodge and oust them. Their places fill themselves up; later people come in; all the room is wanted. Feeling alters its course, is drawn elsewhere or seeks renewal from other sources. When of love there is not enough to go round, inevitably it is the dead who must go without: we tell ourselves that they do not depend on us, or that they have not our requirements. Their continous dying while we live, their repeated deaths as each of us die who knew them, are not in nature to be withstood. Obstinate rememberers of the dead seem to queer themselves or show some signs of a malady; in part they come to share the dead’s isolation, which it is not in their power to break down—for the rest of us, so necessary is it to let the dead go that we expect they may be glad to be gone. Greatest of our denials to them is a part to play: it appears that they now cannot touch or alter whatever may be the existent scene—not only are they not here to participate, but there would be disorder if they
were
here. Their being left behind in their own time caused enstrangement between them and us, who must live in ours.
But the recognition of death may remain uncertain, and while that is so nothing is signed and sealed. Our sense of finality is less hard-and-fast: two wars have raised their query to it. Something has challenged the law of nature: it is hard, for instance, to see a young death in battle as in any way the fruition of a destiny, hard not to sense the continuation of the apparently cut-off life, hard not to ask, but
was
dissolution possible so abruptly, unmeaningly and soon? And if not dissolution, instead, what? This had been so, so far, for Antonia in the case of her cousin Guy: yes, though a generation was mown down his death seemed to her an invented story. Not that it was unlike him to be killed—lightly he had on the whole taken that for granted; they all sooner or later were; why should he not be?—but that it was unlike him to be dead. She knew he had not envisaged that, not entertained the idea of it for a moment. His sense of connection, of consequence had been always faulty: death, yes, why not?—but deadness, no. What was a man like Guy ever to make of
that?
He and life had had much the same tricky temperament; they kept one another in play; they were on terms. It would be long before Guy was done with life… Antonia’s reading of the War Office telegram had been followed by a blasphemous incredulity which she could not believe to be hers alone.
What in her had outwardly passed for grief had seemed to her to be something of his frenzy. She recollected how he had kicked a door down when a defective lock kept him stuck in a lavatory during a tennis party—he was a participator: how could he be expected to cease to act or agree to hold off? She could have felt something irreligious about an attempt to see Guy’s quandary in a religious light. He had had it in him to make a good end, but not soon; he would have been ready to disengage himself when the hour came, but rightfully speaking it had not. Earthbound?—no, she was never to think of him like that, nor had he the makings of any ghost. It was simply that these years she went on living belonged to him, his lease upon them not having run out yet. The living were living his lifetime; and of this his contemporaries—herself, Lilia, Fred—never were unaware. They were incomplete.
So it had gone on. Meantime, another war had peopled the world with another generation of the not-dead, overlapping and crowding the living’s senses still more with that sense of unlived lives. Antonia and others younger were creatures of an impossible time, breathing in wronged air—air either too empty or too full, one could not say which. Jane, on the other hand, unaware of loss, should be taken to be in balance perfectly: she had come late enough (had she not?) to be at no known disadvantage. What
she
thought, no one had thought of asking until this morning—but then, what an alien she’d seemed to be!
Somewhere away in the fields, the tractor jerked back again into sound.
From the woods the elder stood out, like a chalked mark. What
a stupid hiding-place, what a cramped bower—just room to sit on one’s heels inside! Nettles there would be, an old tin lid left behind after some rite of Maud’s—that thicket held, though Jane might not know it, signs of its infestation by many childhoods. Or, was the elder masking a secret gateway, outlet of a precipitous brambled dog-path to the river? Had the girl gone down break neck to where, near Gay David’s Hole, light from the current ran up the rock? Antonia pictured all but the act of reading.
Kathie wandered in to clear the dining-room table; she stopped behind Antonia’s shoulder to join her in staring out of the window. ‘Nothing much to see,’ she ventured to say.
‘I suppose not.’
‘Miss, the wasps are beginning.’
‘Tell them I’ve gone to the sea,’ commanded Antonia, with a sudden, inspired pluck at her pearls.
‘Tell the wasps, is it?’
‘No, the mistress when she comes down.’
Kathie, off to the table with her tray, asked: ‘Is it true you’re going? They say the sea’s as far as you can go.’
‘That’s why.’
‘And there’s no end to it, once you’d get there.—And Miss Jane also?’
‘No.—And cut me a sandwich.’
‘Out of what?—She’ll be lonely after you.’
‘No.—Out of whatever you have.’
‘There’s the shop ham.—Am I to say to Miss Jane you’re gone to the sea?’
‘As you like; but cut me the sandwich now. And first, for heaven’s sake, wash your hands!’
Kathie glanced down to her hands with some curiosity.
‘Miss,’ she asked, ‘do you mean to go
on
the sea?’
‘In it.’
‘Then that would be swimming.—You’d never drown?’
‘I never could,’ said Antonia regretfully.
‘Only wait, then,’ Kathie exclaimed, ‘till we find the sandwich!’
Five minutes later, Antonia filled her flask, pitched what more she needed into the back of the Ford, and drove away: it would be about forty miles. The Ford tearing off down the avenue was
heard by Lilia, who went to her bedroom window to try to see who was in it, but too late. There being at least one person gone from the place somehow lessened the pressure on Montefort; yet as against that, one felt more deserted. Nobody had spoken of any plans—in her kimono she sighed and returned to bed, to a pillow clammy though not with tears. Meantime, the outgoing Ford’s sound not only fanned out widely over the country but entered the valley, where the low-running river slipped on its way between necks of sand and archipelagos of little dry stones. The summer-idle water dawdled in shallows, slid on in skeins where it had brightly appeared to be least moving, and in a tea-brown clear pool mirrored the cliff above. Also Maud was photographed on the water, crouched on the ledge of Gay David’s Hole, a small low cave under the cliff’s face. ‘
Ca-ar
!’
she bawled across to Jane.
Jane lay face down among growing bracken, on the Montefort side. Water-mint wet in the dwindling current and meadowsweet creamily frothing the river bank sent up a scented oblivion round her; a hot tang came from the bracken fronds crushed into bedding by her body. Languidly she neither answered nor raised her head, merely caught at a frond by the tip, bending it down to let a ladybird make its way more easily. ‘Car, car, car!’ Maud repeated, each time for emphasis punching Gay David in the unseen ribs—the ladybird paused as though it could hear; Jane yawned, pushed her hands up into her hair and, for peace sake, shouted back: ‘Not the tractor?’
‘No: our car: too fast.’ Maud again fiercely harkened. ‘It’s gone now.’
‘Yes.’
‘Suppose Satan’s got it?’
‘Suppose he has.’ This time indifference caused Jane’s voice to fade out halfway across the river. ‘
Whaa-t
?’ insisted the child.
‘Nothing—nothing—nothing.’ On that descending note Jane again became as she was before, letting the deep keen dream come combing through her, keeping her being running like tressy water-weed, like Ophelia’s drowned hair. Nowhere was silence: flies droned over the bracken, far off the tractor patiently drew the mower—and at the instant, with a cave-echoed splash Maud swung her legs into the pool; while all through the minutes conspiratorially the child and her familiar gabbled together in the afternoon distance across the river. Yet all blent into a sort of hush.
The particular secret of the place where Jane lay was that it was pre-inhabited. An ardent hour of summer had gone by here—yes,
here
, literally where she was, to her certain knowledge. Evidence was in the breast of her dress, the letter. This narrow tract of the valley had been thought in, as a walker waded through the resilient bracken or stood, looking up at the cliff, here where the turf itself broke off into a miniature cliff this side of the water. It had been June then too: everything he had said he saw stamped the scene again, so that the landscape became a vision and Jane could hardly believe it was still before her. But it was, and not only still here but poetically immortal; and better still it had comicalities which his eye had noted—out of the cliff, for instance, out of the vagaries and traceries of the limestone did look a clown’s face, ferns for eyebrows, loony eye-hollows, neb awry, fallen-open mouth where the cave yawned; and the clown did seem to be swallowing terrified gold fish as light-spangles went darting under the rock. And here, three paces from where she lay, was the thorn tree; also part of the story, for that it grew wickedly crooked he had perceived, passing for a minute into its shadow then out again into the golden-yellow beyond. But all this he had been beholding not for its own sake only; through it he was seeking a speaking language—he was in love.
’
I
thought,’
he wrote,
’
if only YOU had been here!’
A thread lay dropped on the grass, for Jane to pick up. ‘But here I am. Oh, here I
am!’
she protested.
Seeing how brief all time was it seemed impossible she could be too late: this valley held waiting in its keeping, suspense in the glitter of its air. Here was the hour, still to be lived! Impatient the letter shifted inside her dress as rolling over she put an ear to the ground, to one of the turfy spaces between bracken, to seem to be hearing returning footsteps as a pulse in her head started to beat down. Between him and her dwindled the years: where indeed was he if not beside her? They could not now miss one another, surely?
His letter had been no more than delayed on its way to her.
Footsteps, however, came no nearer. To bring herself into unmistakable view Jane got up and, dazzled, stood thigh-deep in the bracken, shading her eyes—to be
seen,
there was no one
this side of the river. Almost in actual despair she walked to the thorn tree, the wicked witness, propitiatingly to rub its bark with her hand.
‘What ar
e you
playing?’ yelled out the observant Maud.
‘Nothing,’ Jane cried back—dismayed, affronted.
‘Oh, no you’re not!’
Jane searched the cliff: its face of the clown was gone—below it the water, disenchanted, now wore nothing but Maud’s reflection. And even while one looked the child moved from her station over the pool, edging her way on the narrowing rock-lip till, that ended, she swung on tufts of ivy. Her sister, instinctively fending off, cried: ‘Oh Maud, why can’t you stay where you were?’
‘Because it’s teatime.’ Maud, frock stuffed into her drawers, already answered from mid-stream, picking her way onward from shoal to shallow.
‘What is?’ Jane asked, backing against the thorn tree.
‘Now is.’
‘Then don’t tell them I’m here.’
‘Who cares? Cousin Antonia’s out—unless that
was
Satan.’ Maud, having made the landing, tore off fistfuls of bracken to scratch her legs with. ‘Nothing cools my blood today, even water,’ she stated, suffering on the bank; then, with one of her closer looks: ‘What are you pretending about that tree?’