Authors: Rebecca West
The perorative cadence of his voice inspired Uncle Len to say, ‘Hear, hear,’ and Aunt Lily to say, ‘Well, it’s a comfort to really know,’ and Aunt Milly to say, ‘Tea, you must need your tea after all that, Oswald,’ and they rose to their feet and went about their business. But they had spoken so graciously that he was undisturbed by their speed, and told me happily how sorry he was that I hadn’t heard the little thing he had been trying to explain. He said that it was funny to think that when he had started teaching he had found it difficult, now he reckoned that he could make anyone understand anything. He surveyed himself complacently at the chimneypiece and straightened his tie, but instantly lost interest in himself and asked wistfully if I thought there was any chance that Nancy would catch an earlier train. Mary had spoken the truth when she said that no man had ever shown any signs of being as nice as Oswald was about Nancy.
We would not really have liked to be Nancy, because she could not play the piano and she had not been the daughter of Papa and Mamma, nor Richard Quin’s sister. But we would have been quite pleased to be Nancy on her wedding-day. It was one of those weddings at which more than two persons are married, which are as general as springtime, which revive the affections of all present. We went to bed the night before with a comfortable feeling that everything was ready for the first step towards a huge advancement in our happiness. Rosamund could not leave London till the morning, so even though Kate had a bedroom to herself there was a room left over, where Nancy’s white dress and veil lay on the bed like an unfearsome ghost. We would have liked to leave them overnight on a hanger, but that would have meant pinning the shoulders of the dress close to the wood, lest it slip down to the floor, and we could not bear to spoil the gleaming satin even with pinpricks. The bouquet, which had been sent from Mr Morpurgo’s garden that afternoon, had been left on a table in a disused saddle-room so that the cold air should keep it fresh; and we had surrounded the vase with heavy boxes so that it should not be blown over, though it was most unlikely that a tornado should spring up in a closed room with one high window. We were apprehensive too lest the river should rise and flood the church, in spite of our knowledge that that had happened only once in the last twenty years, and this had been a dry autumn. But all this was a game we were playing. We could mimic insecurity because of the security that let us fall asleep as soon as we got into bed.
But in the early morning I woke suddenly because there was someone moving about in the house. For a moment I thought Papa might have come back. He had gone like a thief in the night, he might come back like a thief in the night. I cried out against the new robbery, the new cruelty he might commit, I asked nothing better than that he should commit it. Then I was fully awake, learned again of my father’s death from that strange sense which had told me of it when it had happened, and remembered Uncle Len had said he would get up in the middle of the night to stoke the church boiler; and I rose and kilted up my nightdress and put over it a sweater and a skirt, and tugged on my stockings and my shoes. Mary did not move. She had had a big concert in Edinburgh two nights before, and now lay limp and recipient, drop by drop the night was pouring its fullness into her. Downstairs Uncle Len was on his knees by the door into the garden, wheezing with bulkiness and trying to compel his thick arthritic fingers to free the bolts without noise. As I knelt and slid them back, he whispered, ‘You’ve a quick hand, Rose,’ gripped my shoulders, and heaved himself to his feet, the breath whistling up his chest. Featureless in the dark, he was age and weight and infirmity and nothing else. By day he was Uncle Len, and did not seem old or ill, and I felt a sudden fear at this news about him that had come in the dark.
We stepped out into the fierce, silent, still riot of a winter night. The stars appeared not at all remote. It was as if, not far above us, the bare black branches of the tree-tops were locked in combat with the white and sparkling tree-tops of woods growing downwards through the frosty skies with their roots in outer space. But the moon was calm and private in a coign between these two contending forests, and was itself again in a broken road of light across the river. The grass was furred with moonlight and on it each object drew a picture of itself in soft and sooty shadow, but the ground was hard as steel under our feet, and the air was minerally hard with intense cold. We went into the churchyard through the wicket-gate, treading on its shadows as on a grid, and found the graves rehearsing a resurrection, the stones shining as risen bodies might some day. We halted among them and listened to the falling waters of a weir so far distant that we never heard it by day; and I found myself waiting for the cry that should have come from the open mouth of a cherub carved above an epitaph, now forced into high relief by the moonbeams. But if the stone had spoken it would not have been that which made the hour remarkable. The strong light and the December silence were like the sound of a trumpet blown with a single breath in the past, the present, and the future.
Suddenly the church windows were bright. I stared, expecting again that a miracle had happened. It seemed possible that my father and my mother might be standing on the steps of the altar, come to give their blessing to take back to Nancy, who also was to be married. But of course Uncle Len had gone ahead of me and switched on the electric light. He was standing in the aisle, his eyes on the new white sanctuary that Mr Morpurgo’s gardeners had made with lilies and chrysanthemums. White flowers were wound round the pillars too, and Uncle Len’s hands went up in timid wonder to trace the wires that held them. It would have looked more beautiful had there not been so many memorials in the church. The north and south transepts and the little lady chapel were cluttered with them. A Tudor marchioness and her duchess daughter in their ermined crimson robes and their coronets knelt face to face on a high tomb, their heads bowed over their wide ruffs in recognition of God, their tie of blood, their rank; a Victorian statesman reclined under a coarse imitation of a Gothic canopy; two bearded and armoured brothers of the Renaissance age, who had alike been the King’s envoys and were alike killed in his wars, lay side by side; an Edwardian boy in knickerbockers prayed between his two labradors; a heraldic swan spread its wings on an obelisk enamelled with coats of arms. It did not matter that some of these memorials were beautiful, they were still an obstacle to the eye and prevented it laying on the shape of the buildings which signified the meaning of the church. They did wrong in their incongruity, for they were a reminder that life is committed to disorder because all men are not dead and do not die at the same moment. There might have been perfect order round me, had my father and my mother and Richard Quin and Mary and I been contemporaneous, none of us having to wait until the rest were born, none of us having to lose the others. Time, I saw, was the fault of the universe, and because of it grief and expectation, equally mischievous, would prevent us having peace to watch the present. Yet the altar could be seen as never before, because it was decked with white flowers for Nancy’s wedding, and the value of the wedding, which gave the flowers their power, lay in time. All the years that Nancy had lived till now she had not been Oswald’s wife; and the years that were to come she was to be his wife. That was the marvel of her wedding-day.
Uncle Len had left me. Through the open door of the boiler-room I heard the sober and dutiful sounds of stoking; the deliberate, stubborn push of the shovel under the coal, the prudent, measured tipping-out of the load. I hurried to him. He had propped back the boiler door with an iron bar but it always gave. I held the iron bar in place. He wheezed softly, ‘Good girl.’ We went out into the churchyard and found ourselves in another night. The river had been unseen when we came in, a mere trough of darkness between the furthest graves and the nearest woods. Now a mist had risen from it, and suffused with moonlight flowed above it like another less substantial river. The tombstones did not shine like resurrected bodies, but glowed softly, like some bright thing that was sleeping. The wind had changed, and the sound of the falling weir-water was even louder than before. The past was irrecoverable. Nancy and Mary and Richard Quin and I would never be children again, eating mealy chestnuts round the fire after we had washed our hair, with our towels on our knees, in our little warm house; Nancy would go to meet her happiness and be borne away from it, and then would only for a short while persist in the memory of a few, and then the rumour of her would become as remote as the sound of waters falling over a distant weir, and then she would be wholly forgotten, there would be nothing left of her in any place. I wept. It was very cold, beneath my sweater my flesh was frozen for an inch below the skin, it was as if I were wearing icy armour. Uncle Len put his arm in mine and, whispering out of respect for the graves, said, ‘A cup of tea for us and back to our beds,’ and we went back to the wicket-gate. Above us the night sky, hard with vague light, faceted with stars, fitted over the horizon of the sensitive earth like an inflexible helmet. Beyond the gate Uncle Len paused and looked on the inn, frail as cardboard under the strong moon. Stroking my arm, he murmured the names of all that were sleeping under its roof, and said, ‘Funny to think of them, all lying there, funny.’ I looked up and my sight travelled between the stars to outer space, where there is no more universe. Nothing divided me from it. I was here, I was there, my father and mother and Richard Quin were there and were here, and Nancy would not be destroyed. The light and the silence blew their blast on the trumpet.
We enjoyed the marriage better than anything that had happened to us since we were alone. The only sadness about it was that Mr Morpurgo’s youngest daughter asked if she might come, and of course Nancy and Oswald said that they would be very pleased, and she came and watched everything with a certain desperate attention. Also she wore her beautiful clothes carelessly, she slumped down inside them, as if she were not young. We realised that she was in trouble, that she would have liked to tell her father all about it, but she felt that she did not really know him. She was aware that he liked coming to the Dog and Duck, and she had thought that if she found out why, she would understand him better, and could break down the barrier between them. But it was no use. He kept on going where she was not, coming back to see how she was getting on out of kindness; and she was too miserable to make friends with us at once. This was one of the times we missed our mother, who would have flashed her eyes across the dull girl’s face and imparted some of her brilliance to it, and fused her with her father by the power of that electric force. But that was the one flaw in the day.
A year later, on Christmas Eve, I met Mary walking along La Salle Street in Chicago, smiling at a memory, almost laughing. I said, ‘You are thinking of Nancy’s wedding,’ and I was right. That was a wonderful meeting. We had both been on tour longer than we liked. Mary had been playing in a Bach festival week that a millionaire was giving to six universities in turn, and I had been going the rounds of the symphony concerts with the French concerto I had played for the first time just before we heard of Nancy’s engagement. It had grown dear to me, I thought of it always as the Chestnut Leaves Concerto, for they had fallen bronze about me every morning when I went out for a walk before the rehearsals in Paris, and it built up a stoically pleasant place in my mind, a place such as the Champs Elysées might be; there were no houses there but only the arch at its crown and beyond the arch a wide-open eye, and the first splendid cold of the year. But it was exhausting to play, as all new music is, the audience’s incomprehension presses in as a resistant ambient, which has to be beaten back and dissolved by an act of will, a conscious care to explain as well as interpret. So I was tired, as Mary was for another reason, because she had to play only the greatest music for a long period, which meant participating in occasions when people who did not take music as musicians do were excited in a way the nerves could not ignore. Many nice people asked us to spend Christmas with them, for Americans are very kind, but we made a plot with our secretaries and agents and arranged to lose ourselves for three days, to say to the hosts we left before Christmas that we were going straight to the hosts who were taking us in after Christmas, and during the stolen three days to hide together and sleep and eat as we chose in a hotel by the lake in Chicago which we had both liked when we had stayed there on other tours.
Mary got there first. When I arrived in the afternoon the bathroom was already hung with stockings. That is how one recognises the female interpretative artist: on their travels they cannot find themselves near a supply of hot water without immediately washing their clothes. She had left a note saying she had gone out shopping to replace some things she had lost. I found that I had left my manicure set in San Francisco, so I went out to get another, and so it was that I met Mary outside Marshall Fields, smiling to herself over Nancy’s wedding, in spite of the high wind that was like invisible ice splinters about us.
We put our arms round each other and kissed, and I said, ‘Just look, we’re both of us too thin,’ and Mary said, ‘Yes, it’s wonderful, we shall be able to eat what we like during these three days, we will have waffles and maple syrup whenever we think of it.’
‘And no squab,’ I said.
‘Why do Americans like squab?’ asked Mary. ‘And those horrid clams, embittered spinster oysters. And toast all leathery in a napkin instead of in a toast-rack, as God decreed. But everything else is nice. This is a lovely continent to be given the run of. Shall we go and look at the Christmas trees in the big stores?’
‘No, we are too tired,’ I said.
‘Of course we are,’ said Mary. ‘Kate would not let us go if she could see us now. But it will be nice just to be alone together in that big room. Can you ever get used to the big hotel rooms we can afford now?’