The Scent of Water (18 page)

He did not check his advance when he caught sight of them, he tramped on, but as he came across the clearing his eyes flashed like cold blue jewels and the sunlight glanced off his face as though it were polished stone. He seemed to have a shield slung around his shoulders and to be carrying a sword, and it took Mary a couple of minutes to realize that his armor was a sack of wood and a saw laid in rest against his shoulder. He did not deviate in their direction. After that one blue hard glance he dismissed them as unworthy of his attention and tramped on through the door of Fox Barton into the inner sanctuary of his trade and life.

To flee was Mary’s first impulse, to apologize her second, and being a courageous woman she obeyed her second. After a decent interval she came with Edith to the door, waited until the work had stopped for a moment and called out, “Mr. Baker, may we come in?”

There was a moment of complete silence and then Mr. Baker growled, “There’s nought to see but what you’ve seen already.”

“We have seen nothing,” said Mary. “We would not come into your workshop without your permission.”

There was another pause and then, “You may come in if you’ve a mind.”

They came in under the archway into Mr. Baker’s workshop. It must once have been the kitchen of the farm, for the wide hearth, the spit for roasting and the bread oven in the wall were still there. A doorway from which the door had gone led into another large room, now in ruins though showing the remains of an Adam fireplace and oak stairs with a fine balustrade. But the ceilings of both rooms had disappeared and the staircase ended in shadowed space beneath a vaulted roof. Mr. Baker’s workbench was the missing door, a solid slab of oak supported upon sawn tree trunks. Mr. Baker stood before it shaping a chair leg that was revolving in a primitive lathe, the power supplied by a bent ash sapling fixed beneath the bench. Finished chair legs were piled in baskets and upon a shelf were other things that Mr. Baker had made; breadboards, wooden spoons, rolling pins and small wooden dishes; and the stone floor was littered as deep with wood shavings as the floor of the wood beyond with beech mast. Through the narrow window the honey-colored sunbeams slanted down, and a couple of butterflies. Birdsong rang in the place, rising to the great roof and echoing there. The wood had so quickly taken the place to itself that Mary found it hard to visualize the busy farmhouse life, and even more difficult to think of the squire’s family here. For this must be the house in the beech woods where the Roystons had lived until the heiress had rebuilt the manor house. Probably she had come as a bride to this house, and her husband, the man with the periwig, had installed the Adam fireplace for her. She had sat beside it with her parakeet upon her wrist and had had her harpsichord in the window. Did Mr. Baker ever hear the tinkle of her harpsichord?

Looking again at Mr. Baker she imagined not, for he was a man with a one-track mind. He was already deeply absorbed, deftly shaping a chair leg, and she and Edith might not have existed. Yet she dared to ask him a few questions.

“Do you send them to a factory, Mr. Baker?”

He answered, though without looking up. “Aye. There’s still a small factory that takes ’em. When that closes down that’s the end.”

“And these lovely things, spoons and dishes. Do you sell them?”

“To a shop in Westwater. Take a look at the room through there, ma’am. At your age, Miss Edith, you should be outside playing in the sun.”

They were dismissed from his immediate vicinity. He had not spoken rudely, merely with reluctant firmness, as a man does who knows he must guard his loneliness even at the expense of his courtesy. Edith chased the butterflies back into the clearing while Mary went into the parlor. The remains of a plaster garland of flowers still clung above the fireplace and she picked up a fragment that had fallen to the floor. It showed a flower with a bee hovering over it. She held it in her hand and looked at it, grieving for vanished loveliness. Her grieving seemed to stop time, for she lost her human awareness of it as a moving thing and it became instead a still depth of grief. Yet why grieve because a fragment of fine living had passed away in a small house in a small wood, upon an unimportant planet lost in the vastness of space? The myriad stars remained. And for the moment Mr. Baker’s chair legs, and the slanting sunbeams and the shavings on the floor. Beauty not so much vanished as dissolved and itself reshaped, as she had seen the reflected clouds reshaping themselves behind her when she had leaned over the well.

There was a voice in the workshop, speaking from the depths of sorrow, from the past. It was John’s voice. She was not at all startled. She put the fragment of plaster in her pocket and listened, distinguishing no words, only the tones, the rise and fall of them, the dissolving and reshaping of their music. She turned toward the door as he came through it, lifting her hands to lay them on his shoulders. She had never cared about kisses. Her greeting to him after a parting had always been her hands resting lightly on his shoulders. It was not until she felt the rough tweed of his coat under her fingers that she knew it was not John. She withdrew her hands gently and without embarrassment. “I am sorry, Paul,” she said. “I thought you were someone else. I am bemused in this place.”

“One is,” he agreed easily, as unembarrassed as she was. “I am sorry he died.”

“Do you feel the same here?” she asked. They had moved to the window, Bess moving with them, and she leaned back against the stone embrasure, for she found herself suddenly incredibly tired. From where she was she could just see the well and the thorn tree. “I mean, do you feel that here time becomes a well?”

He was opposite her, Bess beside him. “I’ve felt like that for years. When I lost my sight I lost with it the sense of time rushing by. The well is within me and memory springs up with force.”

“More than personal memories?”

“A good deal more. But then I expect that’s the way with all writers.”

She looked at him, studying the lines of his face intently, identifying herself with him in much the same way as she was coming to identify herself with her home, her gaze upon it a recognition of unity. Then she looked away, ashamed that she should so take advantage of his blindness. The sound of Mr. Baker bodging seemed to come from far away and the sorrow begun in her by the sight of the broken fragment of plaster was now welling up as blood does when a wound is not staunched. She was well aware that her love for this man was not going to be staunched, for it was no more in his power to satisfy it than it had been in hers to satisfy John’s. And now John’s grief was her own, and she had never remotely guessed that he had felt like this. The grief came both from the future and the past, for the well was foresight as well as memory, it was both hers that was to come and his that was past and they were not distinguishable. Was this identification what men called empathy? It needed all her strength to steady herself against the surge of feeling that seemed to be sweeping not only through herself but through the wood and the old ruined house, like wind but without sound or outward disturbance. The disturbance was all inward, pulling her and the world about her to pieces to reunite them in a new pattern. With a great effort she tried to remember what Paul had been saying, and to answer him. “You mean you tap ancestral memory?”

“And the memories of people who are in some way near to me. And sometimes the memories of places. I have written stories about this house that I could swear I’ve not imagined.” He laughed. “But how am I to know? Memory and foresight and imagination are so tangled up. Were you well received by Joshua Baker?”

“Mr. Baker likes to work alone,” said Mary, “but he can tell one so without offense. Or is it only women who impede his genius? You can be here with him and he doesn’t mind?”

“He’s not a ladies’ man,” agreed Paul, “and he’s got used to me. Poor chap, he’s had to, for Bess and I take this walk more often than any other. We could take it in our sleep. In fact I often do. I see it then.”

“You mean in dream?”

“Yes. My dreams are very thrilling. Full of color. It’s an odd experience to know places and people in your waking hours and see them in your sleeping ones.”

“I expect the separation increases the deeper knowledge you spoke of once before,” said Mary. “How is Valerie?”

“She’s been tired. But she’s having a day in Westwater today, shopping and so on. That always does her good. Gets her away from me.”

She was aware again of his helpless bewildered sorrow over Valerie, and there was nothing she could do except turn from what was going wrong to what was going right.

“I’ve been reading your poems, Paul. It sounds so tame to say that they are finely wrought and I like them. Yet what else could one have said even to Coleridge? What would you have said to him about
Kubla Khan
?”

“That I was sorry that chap interrupted him so that he couldn’t finish it.”

“Then I’ll say I’m sorry for all that interrupts you, for all the hindrances and sorrows. If I could I’d take them away.”

He quickly and impetuously turned to her and she knew she had touched him on the raw. Then he turned back in quick command of himself. “Thank you. But it was probably just as well that chap did turn up. The promise is magnificent but Coleridge might have disappointed us later on. Even the great ones never tell us all that we hope they will. They grow old and die and haven’t expressed it yet. Even with Beethoven it is still only the promise.”

Edith had come in and once more inflicted herself upon Mr. Baker. Sounding through the sound of his lathe like birdsong through wind in the trees, came her voice talking to him and his grunts in occasional reply. Mary had not heard her talking in this way before, with such effortless and happy ease. Paul heard it too. “You’ve set that child free in some way,” he said. “What have you done? Love’s not enough.”

“Not without understanding.”

“Not even with it. I understand Valerie as well as love her.” He spoke roughly and it seemed to Mary as though he were tearing the peace of the place to pieces. “And patience added is not enough. There has to be some sort of violence.”

“ ‘The kingdom of heaven cometh by violence,’ ” quoted Mary. “But Edith, not I, did the violence. To herself. She forced herself to tell me something that was worrying her, I hope because she loves me. But you can’t force your love to be violent, Paul. You must wait till it breaks through in its own strength.”

“One may wait too long,” muttered Paul. He moved his heavy shoulders impatiently and with Bess beside him went back to the other room where Edith, silent now, stood entranced beside Mr. Baker. He had finished his chair leg and was now holding in his hand a shallow bowl made from cherry wood, turning it over and over and searching it for imperfections. His huge hands looked like blocks of wood but his fingers were as sensitive upon the bowl as the fingers of a violinist upon the strings. No roughness escaped them. He began to smooth the bowl, slowly and carefully, his grim face ennobled by absorption. They watched him for a few moments, asking no questions, for they thought him oblivious of their presence, but as they went out through the archway he suddenly growled, “You can come again, ma’am, if you’ve a mind. I can’t abide a chattering woman but you’ve shown yourself a quiet body. Miss Edith too. Mr. Randall and Bess, they’re always welcome.”

Mary murmured her astonished thanks and looked back once from outside the door. Mr. Baker sat enthroned, his great boots half-buried in the shavings at his feet, as though in leaves, and the slanting sunbeams clothed him in dusty glory. She felt a deep thankfulness that there were a few men still left alive who were kings in their own right.

The walk home had Edith at its heart. Her happiness was so great that wherever she was, running ahead of the two grown-ups, stopping behind to pick flowers or walking beside Bess, she was the center. The whole beauty of the day seemed to flow into her and out from her. Thinking back to her own childhood, Mary could remember some such experience as she believed now to be Edith’s. Conviction of sin, the first, a thing most terrible to a child, sorrow and difficult confession and then release. There was no joy like release. Paul too, while talking to Mary, was very conscious of Edith. The three of them, the man and woman and the child, had a rightness that both delighted and tormented him. He’d always wanted a child but Valerie had always been ready with a first-rate excuse. First there had been the war. A baby would probably be killed in an air raid. And then there had been his health. How could they hope for a strong child? And now there was their poverty. How could they afford one? And she was afraid. She had never said she was but he had always been aware of her fear. He could not force her and so by her wish they had not been lovers for some years now. He had resigned himself, he thought, but now, emotionally stirred by his admiration for another woman, by Edith and the beauty of the summer day, he found himself longing for her again. They reached the door from Ash Lane to The Laurels and stopped to say good-bye.

“May I read some more?” Mary asked. “I should like to read all you will allow me to read.”

“You’d be bored to distraction.”

“You know I wouldn’t.”

“I’m sorry. I know you wouldn’t and I’ll take you at your word. Come on, Bess.”

“Won’t you come in and let me give you some tea? Edith and I had eaten all the picnic one by the time you came.”

“Thank you but I’d like to get home. Valerie may be back.”

Mary wished him good-bye and accepted the thrust serenely as the first of many. But she felt exhausted as she and Edith walked through the kitchen garden.

“We never had the botany lesson!” said Edith. “We never even brought the book!”

The hours spent by Mary and Paul in the woods, the bloom of legend upon them and drowned in quietness, had been restless for Charles and Valerie. For one thing she could not get Paul out of her mind. She had scarcely been ten minutes with Charles, after she had picked him up under the lime avenue, before she began thinking of Paul. Meticulous as his housekeeper she had left a cold lunch ready for him and told him where to find it. Had he listened? “I hope Paul will find his lunch,” she said to Charles.