The Scent of Water (25 page)

Mary escaped with thankfulness to her own room next door, feeling loneliness to be the supreme blessing, but she was too tired to sleep and when she was in bed she put her dressing jacket around her shoulders and reached for
Mansfield Park
. The house was centrally heated, which should have been ideal for reading in bed, yet she missed the slight tang of cold that her bedroom at The Laurels had nowadays. It was invigorating and invested a hot-water bottle with a pleasure keen as itself. But
Mansfield Park
failed to hold her. Fanny was good but she lacked the serene depth of Anne Elliot and Jane Bennett. Mary found her a rather tiresome little creature and putting her gently aside turned to another. It was Cousin Mary whom she found she wanted.

So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one’s heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings. Cousin Mary was one of these, coming and going in the pages of her diary, yet greater than the others because when she went it was not into nowhere. Mary knew that now. One morning, waking out of deep sleep, she had, like James Anderson a few hours ago, humbly recognized her knowledge, and known herself mistaken until now, and a follower of the path of least resistance. For unbelief was easier than belief, much less demanding and subtly flattering because the agnostic felt himself to be intellectually superior to the believer. And then unbelief haunted by faith, as she knew by experience, produced a rather pleasant nostalgia, while belief haunted by doubt involved real suffering; that she knew now by intuition, soon probably she would know it by experience also. One had to be haunted by one or the other, she imagined, and to make the choice if only subconsciously. She was ashamed that subconsciously she had chosen not to suffer.

And so here I am, she thought. I came here to get to know Cousin Mary and John and I do know them better than I did. While they lived in this world I knew little, even of John. I know more now, for T. S. Eliot was right when he said,

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Complete knowledge I cannot hope for until I am with them again but I know the essential thing about them, that they’re alive. And because they live so does God, for without Him what would be the point of life beyond death? Life is a reaching out for something or someone. That is its definition. We choose one thing and then another to reach for, climbing to a new rung on the ladder as awareness grows, but they are all only symbols, even human love at its highest and most redemptive. And so now I know, without cataclysm or vision, simply living among the people here, loving them, and growing in the soil of this place.

She opened the diary and the first words she read startled her profoundly. “I am at the Manor.” The date was ten years later than that of the entry which had told her of the finding of the old chest. There had been intervening entries, all valuable to Mary because deepening her knowledge of Cousin Mary, but containing nothing of relevance to her own life in Appleshaw.

It is because Jenny has had to have a holiday. I’ve had a bad time this winter. Jenny got worn out looking after me and Dr. Partridge said she must go away for a rest. And so I came here. I was invited and there seemed nothing else to do, but until a few days ago I didn’t know how to bear it that as well as injuring Jenny I had to be an anxiety to the dear old couple here, and a nuisance to their servants. I was very wretched, for the aftermath of this last bad time has been horrible. I have been despairing, not because of my illness, because I have found meaning and purpose in that, but because of the burden I am to other people and because I was convinced that everyone must be shrinking from me. And so, hating myself, I shrank from them and that created a new sort of loneliness. I was alone with self-hatred and that is utterly vile.

But that was when I first came. I feel different now because of a book I read. I am writing this sitting in the library window, thinking of Sir Charles and Lady Royston but no longer with despair darkening my love for them. That’s gone. They must be very old now. I thought they were old when I came, because I was young then and to the young, people in their seventies seem to have one foot in their grave. Now they must be in their eighties. Yet they are very nearly as vigorous as ever, though smaller and somehow more concentrated, like the residue of perfume in an empty bottle. Or like this February weather, winter but so marvelously alive and warm. They have driven out in the carriage to pay a call at a distance, and Mr. Ambrose is out shooting, and so I am alone in the house except for the servants, and the old blind spaniel who is sleeping at my feet. He and I, both of us cracked pitchers, have a fellow feeling for each other and are always contented together. And I love the library better than any other room in the house. I love the smell and feel of it and the throng of happy ghosts who I like to imagine are with me here. It always surprises me that they don’t step visibly from the books they wrote. When I take only one book from the shelves the whole lot of them seem to me to be tinglingly alive, not only the man who walks beside me as I carry his book to my chair. Craftsmen are deeply united, I think, and rejoice in each other’s artifacts from one generation to another.

But today I am here not to read but to write about the book that is lying in my lap, and about one of the craftsmen, William the Hunchback. I cannot understand now how I’ve been so long in finding out about him, since I’ve known him so long. Some years ago I went to the tower room to poke about among the rubbish but I did not connect the W.H. I saw carved on the wall with the W.H. carved inside the lid of my chest, or the ugly humorous monk with the thorns around his neck with my infirmarian, or realize that it was himself he had carved at the bottom of the stairs leading to his workshop in the tower. The book on my lap, which I found a week ago, and in which I read William’s story, is one that was given to Sir Charles by the Rector who was here when Sir Charles was a young man. The Rector, Gervase Jackson, wrote it when he himself was young, so it’s an old book now and all the s’s are f’s and I’d had hard work to make it out. It’s a short book, part of a Latin book which Gervase found in the library of his Oxford college. The whole book, he says in his preface, was a long history of the abbey with a selection of stories about personalities connected with it, some probably true, others perhaps mythical. The most picturesque of these Gervase removed from the original work, like plums from a pudding, and translated into English. It did not take me long to find the one about William and though Gervase in his preface placed it in the perhaps mythical list, I know it is true. I’ll write it out again here, very shortly, just for my own joy. It’s a double joy, for not only, thanks to Gervase, do I now know William better but he has shown me something I did not understand before. Nor did he before it was shown to him.

William was his name in religion and he took it because William was the first lord of the manor of Appleshaw who at his death bequeathed a large tract of land and much of his wealth to the Cistercians, that they might build an abbey around the church that held his tomb. His full name was William de Garland and he went on the disastrous Second Crusade and was knighted on his return. His coat of arms was a cross-handled sword and a beehive, for according to legend he was a fine aspirant, and the abbey kept his coat of arms as their own. William the monk had another reason for wanting to bear the knight’s name, for in his boyhood he had worked for the lord of the manor of his day, Sir William Roche, who had built a Tudor manor house within the ruined walls of the first Sir William’s castle, and Sir William had been good to him. For he was not only hunchbacked but, as the old book says, “mightily misshapen, with short bow-legs and long arms that hung down, sickly and very plain of countenance,” so much so that other children were scared of him, or laughed and threw stones. And he himself, neglected as he was by the uncle whom he lived with and knocked about by his horde of healthy children, grew to be as scared of the human race as a hunted leveret. And a hunted wild creature he might have been until the end had not Sir William rescued him one day from a crowd of jeering children, taken pity on him and given him work to do at the manor. He was dogboy first, and later he was promoted to help with the horses, and then to be bee keeper, for he was wonderfully clever with all animals and wild creatures and they loved him greatly. When any animals in the neighborhood were sick or injured he was sent for to care for them, for he had knowledge of healing herbs and hands gifted with healing. He would have liked to care for human creatures in the same way but to his grief they continued to shrink from him, and so he continued to shrink from them. He was a skillful carver in wood and stone and in this work he found pleasure, and despite frequent sickness of body he did not manage too badly, whatever his inward sorrow, until such time as Sir William had a bad fall while hunting and received injuries from which eventually he died.

Then did grief and despair take hold of the hunchback, for his love and life had been centered upon his master. His only comfort was his bees and soon they too were taken from him, for Sir William had left no heir and the manor passed to another family, the Roystons, who brought their own servants with them. They were repelled by William’s appearance and dismissed him. He went into the woods and lived there alone for some months, finding shelter in bad weather in one of the abbey barns, that had in early days been a guest house and marked the boundary of the abbey lands upon the north. Kindly villagers brought bread and left it by the well beside the barn, and he gathered berries and edible fungi, for he would never kill wild creatures for food, and somehow he managed to live.

Then one day in early spring he suddenly appeared among the stonemasons who were enlarging the abbey church and with changed and smiling countenance offered them his services, and labored with them until the work was completed. Then with the same cheerful face, quite changed from the man he had been, he presented himself before the Abbot and asked that he might be accepted as a lay brother. He was put in charge of the bees, and later made infirmarian, and the Abbot gave him a workshop in the tower where in his spare time he could continue to use his skill with wood and stone. He lived until old age, dying just before the dissolution of the abbey, and was reckoned at the time of his death to be a very holy man. He himself, however, deemed those mistaken who called him holy, declaring himself to be a great sinner saved from despair only by the mercy of God that came upon him in the vision in the wood.

He delighted to tell this story and believed implicitly in his vision. When it was suggested to him that he had imagined what he saw, he said, dream or vision, what did it matter? Whichever it was, his God had by its means lifted him out of his despair. He had, he said, that afternoon in early spring, taken shelter in the barn from a sudden drenching thunderstorm. Around sunset the rain ceased and he went outside to get himself a drink of water from the well under the thorn tree. He came out into a dazzle of gold and to the east, where the last of the storm clouds made a violet bruise in the sky, there was a rainbow. The trees were rosy with the swelling buds and the grass sparkled. The birds were singing and the first primroses were in bloom around the wall. Yet there was no lightening of his darkness as he stood looking at them, only a deepening of it. Caught in this web of beauty he felt himself a thing of horror, ugly and dirty in body, mind and soul. He wished he could tear himself out of the shining web, that he might no longer defile it. And then the thought came to him, Why not? On the other side of the well was the thorn, a young tree but with stout branches, and inside the barn there was a length of rope. For a short while after, he would continue to defile the web and then he would be found and buried and the fair earth would be quit of him.

He looked hard at the tree, seeing it already as his gallows, and then found that he could not look away. There were no green leaves yet to veil the starkness of it, it was still a winter tree, and the thorns looked long and sharp. He looked deeper and deeper into the tree, into the heart of it, trying to see himself hanging on the tree, and presently, with horror, he did. And then, staring as though nothing of him now existed except his straining eyes and thundering heart, he knew it was not himself but another. And he knew who it was. He would never, afterward, attempt to describe what he saw. He could not. But he did say that he believed the fair Lord of life had accepted a death so shameful by deliberate intent of love, so that nothing that can happen to the body should cause any man to feel himself separated from God. And he said further that fearful though the sight was, it was not what he saw that made him cast himself down upon the ground, with his face hidden in the grass, and weep. It was that the Lord of heaven, giving Himself into the hands of men, that is to say into his hands, to do with what he would, had by his hands been broken. This he said he had never sufficiently considered, and now, considering it, his heart broke. A little later he was able to stop weeping and lifting himself up from the ground he dared to look again into the heart of the tree. It was as it had been, a bare winter tree full of thorns. But he knew now that he need never hang there, since another had chosen to hang there in his place, ridding the world of his ugliness by taking his sin into His own body that it might die with Him. For he saw now that his true ugliness had been withdrawn by his Lord while he wept. His misshapen body remained but men would not again shrink from him. What they had shrunk from had been his own sin of self-hatred, that had made him like a beaten cur in their presence. Why should he hate himself, since God had loved him enough to die for him? He would go back into the world, and smile at all the folk in it, and love them with the same love, and they would no longer shrink from him. When their bodies were sick they would even put themselves gladly into his hands, as the creatures did. He held out his hands and looked at them, remembering how they had treated his Lord. He would make reparation, now, to those other men who mysteriously were his Lord, with his hands. But that was not enough. The least he could do, he, Adam, the man who had so brutally done what he would when his trusting Lord put Himself into his hands, was not to put himself into his Lord’s hands to be done with what his Lord willed. He held out his hands toward the tree, empty to his human sight yet containing all he was, and said aloud, “Into Thy hands.”