The Scent of Water (26 page)

The rest of the story I will copy out in the words of the old chronicle. “His prayer ended, then did Brother William get up on his feet right joyously, and going to the thorn tree he plucked therefrom a curved and thorny branch and set it about his neck as though it were the halter from which his Lord had saved him. Yet he plucked it from the tree not as a halter but as a yoke, for now was he the thrall of Christ, yoke fellow with his Lord in the bearing of the cross. And he went forth singing into the wood and came in the last of the evening light to where the masons were still working upon the church, and he came in among them as eager to be with them as the bee is eager for the honey, and asked if he might work with them on the morrow. The wideness of his smile and his eagerness for their company attracted them mightily, but they laughed much at the comical appearance of the man, and at the notion that the weak and misshapen little fellow could turn mason. He laughed with them, no whit abashed, and then he showed them his hands, broad and strong, and asked if they were not the hands of a craftsman skilled in the carving of stone. So they said he should work with them on the morrow and they found him then as skilled as he had said. Great was his joy in this work, and great also, after he became a brother, was his joy in the care of the sick. And they were as eager to give themselves into his hands as he was to serve them. This he would say was as God willed it, for He is among us both as he that serveth and he that is served.”

When I had finished reading the story for the first time I was ashamed of my despair but I also had a new joy and a new sense of direction. I must use my hands more, I thought. I did not mean it literally, for I am stupid with my hands, I can’t carve or paint and even the seams I sew are never straight. What I meant was that I must build something up for somebody, make something to put into the hands of another when I die. But what could I make, and for whom?

I was wondering about this when the old spaniel began to thump his tail on the floor and then the door opened and Mr. Ambrose came in surrounded by the usual cloud of dogs. Mr. Ambrose is red-faced, awkward and inarticulate. How he comes to be the son of his charming and most articulate parents is a mystery. Yet no one has ever been contemptuous of Mr. Ambrose. His heart, they say, is in the right place. I like Mr. Ambrose immensely and though he seldom speaks to me, and generally blushes furiously when I speak to him, I am somehow aware that he likes me. He came up to my chair, knocking into the furniture as he came, blushed purple, laid a small box on my knee and said, “For you.”

“For me?” I asked. “A present, Mr. Ambrose?”

He nodded and whispered hoarsely, “Saw it in the window. Thought you’d like it.”

I took the lid off the little box and lifted the cotton wool inside. At my elbow Mr. Ambrose was breathing as heavily as though he had been running a race, and all the dogs were trembling and taut with eagerness about me. Mr. Ambrose is so united with his dogs that they share his every emotion. Under the cotton wool was something small and white and delicate. I picked it up and my breath caught in my throat so that I could not speak. It was a carved ivory coach, about the size of a hazelnut, and inside was Queen Mab. There are no words to describe the loveliness of that coach, like a seashell, or the beauty of the little queen’s face half-smiling beneath her tiny crown.

I held it in the palm of my hand and it seemed to be all that there is. With a flash of knowledge I knew that Mr. Ambrose had in truth put into my hand all that there is, all he has. He does more than like me, I know now. For years he has more than liked me and I suppose deep inside me I have more than liked him. Abnormality may forbid the normal course of love between man and woman but it does not preclude the love, as normal people so often seem to think, it merely drives it underground to a great depth. This gift in my hand told me more about the inarticulate man beside me than if he had talked about himself for a week on end. That he should have noticed this tiny thing in a shop window, should have liked it, told me what he was. That he should have known that I would like it told me how much he knew about me. I could have wept, only what I was feeling strangled tears. But the increasing heaviness of Mr. Ambrose’s breathing, the rising anxiety of the dogs, told me that I had to do something, say something, and something simple that Mr. Ambrose would understand. I held the little coach against my cheek and then I got up and took Mr. Ambrose’s hand and laughed for joy. And it really was joy though a moment before I could have wept. I was so glad that he had found the way to tell me, even if he himself was largely unaware of what he had told me, and I was so happy for us both that we had this hidden love. At the sound of my laughter his face was wreathed in smiles and all the dogs relaxed into tail-wagging relief. Then the old butler came in with the tea tray and Mr. Ambrose and I had tea together and talked about my collection of little things.

When he had gone and I was alone again I sat and looked at Queen Mab and I saw that she had a child’s face, and suddenly I knew what I was going to make, a home for the child. Not just the little carved ivory child but for the child whom this toy represents and who will one day come into my life. I cannot even imagine yet who she will be but I feel sure she will come. I have often wondered who will live in The Laurels when I die. My next of kin is my sister but a house like The Laurels, a place like Appleshaw, would neither of them mean anything to her. If The Laurels went to her she would only sell it. But now I see what to do. This child, my child, will come and she will have The Laurels and all I possess. I will set to work to make the garden as lovely as I can. I will plant flowering shrubs and rose trees and make a water-lily pool, and find a cupid or a dolphin boy to watch over it till she comes. And I will take great care of the house for her. She will love my little things. It is for her of course that I have been collecting them. I didn’t know that until now. I feel one with her, as though we were the same woman. She will find great happiness in all that I have prepared for her, and, in her, so shall I. “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.” Perhaps she will even reap my faith, as I believe I have reaped that of the old man.

There the entry ended and Mary closed the diary, put it on her bedside table and switched off the light. But she did not sleep. She lay awake thinking how the threads stretched back and back into the past and away into the future, and how one’s own small web of life trembled on these threads. For most of the time one was unaware of them yet they were the lifeline. And she thought how marvelous was the tapestry of human oneness and that in a place like this one could know it. In a city the multiplicity of threads forced a whirling confusion on the loom but here the simple pattern and the slow weaving made purpose more discernible. She considered these things to keep herself from thinking of the child whom Cousin Mary had planned and built for, and who had been with her for only a few hours on a spring day. That was all she had had of the child. I cried when I left her, thought Mary, so why did I not ask to be taken there again? Even after Father had died why did I not demand that Mother let me go back? I didn’t know what I meant to her, of course, but surely I ought to have known. I think I did know when I said good-bye, but my knowledge was so quickly covered. Children are such creatures of the hour. They uncover again later in life the things that were important to them, but at the time, as one thing flows upon another, they have eyes only for the immediate thing. But she could not comfort herself with meditation on the nature of children. The fact remained that she, so important and precious to Cousin Mary, had been with her in this world for only a few hours.

But the last person she thought of, before she finally fell asleep, was not Cousin Mary but Mr. Ambrose, who had lived and died in this house. . . . To be succeeded by Mr. Hepplewhite. . . . She thought for a little of the two men, Mr. Ambrose in his rough tweed coat, inarticulate in his cloud of dogs, and the smooth financier. They represented two worlds and between them was the deep chasm that during the years of her own lifetime had cleft human history in two. Though in point of time she and Mr. Hepplewhite were together on this side of the chasm yet he appeared now misted and distant. It was Mr. Ambrose who was close and real to her. She drifted into sleep and dreamed she was a small child walking with him in the woods, hand in hand in the midst of the cloud of dogs.

A
WEEK before Christmas the cold, bitter and iron-gray, clamped down upon London. Charles, who had slept only toward morning, woke about nine o’clock hardly aware of his surroundings, for his morning dream still encompassed him and retained its extraordinary vividness. He had been walking on a warm summer day in the Appleshaw beech woods with a man who was sometimes Paul and sometimes a stranger, a queer little fellow with a humorous ugly face. The two seemed in some odd way to be the same man because the conversation flowed on unchecked, whichever one of them was beside him. Half-awake he had no memory of their talk, only of the delight of the companionship he had enjoyed and the warmth of the summer sun. Then the warmth drained away, leaving him shivering under his inadequate blankets. Awake, but with eyes closed, he still saw the face of the odd little man, but now it was no longer a face of flesh and blood but carved in stone, and about the neck there was a wreath of thorns. It was familiar. He’d seen it before. But where? He did not bother to think where, for full consciousness rolled upon him. He tried to escape from it and could not. He lay rigid and knew himself awake.

He was alone, for Tony Richards had walked out on him ten days ago, leaving him in possession of their flat but broke. The garage idea had crashed with the financier uncle, who had been deeply involved in the Hepplewhite affair and one of the many temporarily overwhelmed in its avalanche. He’ll struggle out, thought Charles, and so will Tony, they’re tough. I shan’t. I’ve had enough. He’d known he couldn’t go on yesterday, a day he had spent in a fog of self-loathing. A failure like himself defiled life and the best thing he could do was to tear himself out of it. He was of the same opinion this morning. Going on was the strong habit of his life but he had forgotten that now. His misery had reached such a pitch that it had blotted out not only habit but memory, a darkness of annihilation admitting consciousness of nothing but the necessity of escaping from it. He had to get out. He raised himself on his elbow and then dropped back again, not from any failure of will but simply from the inertia and exhaustion that were part of the weight of his despair. The gas fire was there, and the shilling on the mantelpiece above it, but he would have to block up the crevices of the drafty little room with newspaper and for the moment the effort of it was beyond him. He rolled over on his back and shut his eyes. Why could not men do what animals did? When life became impossible they simply lay still and died.

There was a bang on the door, and then another, thundering impatiently. At first his dulled mind registered the noise without curiosity, then mechanically he rolled out of bed, went to the door and opened it. An indifferent postman thrust a registered envelope at him, with a pencil and scrap of paper. He scrawled his signature, banged the door on the departing postman and sat down on the side of his bed, the letter in his hand. The post. It took ten minutes of staring at it before bewildered surprise stirred feebly. For no one knew where he was except Tony, and he had parted from him with a bitterness that precluded further contact. He never told his parents where he was, for fear the old man should visit him, and he had not told Paul. For he’d seen in the paper that Paul’s play was a success and Paul himself the latest literary lion. Good luck for Paul was what he had hoped for but paradoxically now it had come he had suffered a savage revulsion of feeling, as though Paul in pulling himself out of the rut of misfortune that had held them both had left him behind deliberately. He had written no line of congratulation, for it would have looked like toadying to the fellow. So no one knew where he was. So what? He was incapable of caring, and flopping back on the bed he shut his eyes again.

But presently the memory of his father thrust upon him. It came again and again as though someone were trying to wake him. Was the old man dead? That, possibly, if he’d seen it in the paper, would have made Tony write to him. A childish panic seized him as though he were a two-year-old who had waked up alone in the dark, and he rolled out of bed and grabbed the letter.

It contained sixty pounds in notes with a covering typewritten letter. Charles looked at it stupidly, his mind registering nothing. Then he looked at the signature. Paul Randall. How had he tracked him down? And the fool, to send a sum like that through the post in notes. Had he never heard of money orders? It was just the sort of fool thing he would do. Anger gave Charles a sudden clarity of mind and he could read the letter. “I’ve had the devil of a job to find you. Why this hibernation? It was only a fluke that I got hold of your address at last. Valerie and I were in town last week and a man in my play brought along your friend, Tony Richards, to a party. You told me of him and I remembered the name and asked him for your address. Just a coincidence but I’d have spent a rotten Christmas if Richards and I had not coincided.” There was a good deal more, friendly and tactful. The letter ended, “Best wishes for a happy Christmas.”

That phrase, and the careful tact, further infuriated Charles. A happy Christmas! Was the man mad? He’d be happy all right, with success and money, a wife and home. He was like all the rest, as soon as good luck came his way he’d built it about him like an ivory tower and now he just nodded out of the window at the poor devils down below, and threw a few coins down to salve his conscience. But if he thinks I’ll touch his conscience money, raged Charles, he’s very much mistaken. Yet what was he to do with it? He sat stupidly on the side of his bed, looking at the notes in his hand. Pay the rent? There were several weeks owing. Or post the money straight back to Paul? Yes, get a money order, to teach him the right way to go about these things, then post it and come back and finish the business. That would pay him out all right.

He found that he was slowly dressing, and then stumbling down the stairs, the notes in his pocket. Out in the gray street, shivering in the wind, he forgot what he had come out for and was thinking of the stone man. Where had he seen him? His mind fumbled at the question, round and round, unable to leave the problem. It was like one of those maddening tunes that play themselves over and over in the mind when one is feverish. Over and over. Where had he seen the stone man? The wind came around the corner of a street like a knife, and hungry and cold as he was, it bent him over as though it had plunged its steel into his body, pushing him back into the shelter of a shop entry.

He straightened and waited a moment to get his breath. Beyond the plate glass lights shone on holly berries, and garlands of tinsel and greenery made a glitter of softness over the hard rectangular shapes that filled the shop window. They were like blocks of stone. Stone. Who was the stone man? Holly. Christmas. One thing suggesting another, his mind groped back to the last time Christmas had had any significance for him. Some years ago he had actually gone home for Christmas. It had been the only Christmas he had ever spent at Appleshaw and he had nearly passed out with boredom. But it had pleased his parents. He’d been broke at the time and it had been necessary to please them, for he’d wanted money. He’d even gone to church with them on Christmas Day. He was suddenly back in Appleshaw church, filing out with the congregation at the end of the service. There was holly everywhere and the lights shone on the red berries, and upon the wreaths of greenery that softened the old gray stone. It was then that he had seen the stone man at one side of the door that led to the tower stairs. He had stopped a moment, arrested by the man’s face, but the people behind had carried him on with them and in five minutes he had forgotten about the fellow. Profound relief swept over him, almost like the relief of pain ended, simply because he had remembered where he had seen the stone man, and relaxing he saw that the rectangular shapes were television sets. Television. That was a rotten old radio he had given his parents that Christmas. He’d picked it up cheap, secondhand, just to make Christmas at home less embarrassing for himself, and had been shamed by the old people’s pleasure in it. The thing was more or less worn out now yet they still listened to it, his father especially. There was a television set in the window marked fifty-eight pounds. That letter had not been to tell him of his father’s death but to bring him sixty pounds.

Afterward he had no clear recollection of walking from the shop to the post office, but when he got there his mind was clear. He bought a money order and a stamped envelope and borrowed two pieces of paper from the man behind the counter. He had an agonizing moment trying to remember the name of the radio shop at Westwater but it came to him suddenly as though spoken in his ear. He wrote a letter and asked them to deliver a television set to his father by Christmas Day, and he enclosed a note of good wishes to his parents to be sent with it, and mailed the letter. With the loose change in his pocket he had almost three pounds left. He went out into the street and dizziness overwhelmed him. He had scarcely eaten yesterday. In this state he’d not get home. There was an espresso bar almost next door to the post office. He went there and got himself a large cup of hot sweet coffee and a couple of sandwiches. Sitting alone in a corner he ate and drank and as the warmth spread in his body he remembered the warmth of the summer day in his dream, and the two men who had seemed one man. Shutting his eyes he saw first one face and then the other, not in the least alike but stamped with the same quality, something indefinable yet as clearly to be recognized as that quality of light that differentiates the real jewel from a fake. His bitter thoughts about Paul had vanished. He was a good chap and he was intensely grateful to him, for now his parents would have a Christmas gift to remember him by. It would soften the blow.

Would it?

It was as though a voice had spoken in his ear. In his despair he had not remembered his parents, for nothing had existed except the necessity of escape. Now his mind was suddenly flooded with memories, a chain of them reaching back into childhood, even to a forgotten memory of being carried on his father’s shoulder through a garden, and the ecstasy of knowing himself taller than the hollyhocks. Even, he felt vaguely, further back than that, back to the memories of other men whose lives were in some way linked with his. Forward to other men. It was a chain he could not break without injuring not only his father but the past and future. He could not tear himself out. Therefore he must go on. He had always known he had to and he could not understand now that refusal of a few hours ago.

He tried to think what to do next. He must go back to the flat, fetch the bare necessities and leave the rest in lieu of the rent. Then disappear and lead the usual wretched between-whiles existence, a doss house at night, washing up at some hotel while he searched for a better job. The same old dreary round. Yet this time he felt more hopeful than usual. It was not that he had any hope of being a different sort of man. From what you are there is no escape, he knew that, but it is possible to live in such a manner that the burden of what you are bears less heavily upon other people. And in that he vaguely felt there might be help for himself too. He’d write to Paul and thank him for his gift and when he was more or less on his feet again he’d go and see his parents, not to ask for money this time or to get free lodging but simply to see them. As he walked back to the flat he was thinking of the bar of the Dog and Duck and its homeliness. It would be good to be there again with Jack Beckett, Joshua Baker, Bert Eeles and the rest. And Paul. He remembered their first meeting there and the thought of Paul gave him a sense of extraordinary strength. And also, strangely, did the thought of the stone man.

Mary had made several plans for her first Christmas at Appleshaw but they none of them materialized. That, she thought, was the way of Christmas plans. There was something disruptive about Christmas and not only in the merely material way. The original Christmas had proved exceedingly disrupting to the entire world and the tremors of the original event vibrated through every life year by year.

She had thought Catherine would spend Christmas with her, but Catherine had formed a poor opinion of Appleshaw at her first visit and preferred to go to her brother at York. Mary was secretly relieved; she felt she needed to be alone with the pain of her love for Paul and the joy of her new-found faith. Yet the two seemed united, for she would not have chosen not to love Paul and she did not suppose for a moment that anything worth having, and she now knew faith to be supremely worth having, was ever easy to have. She had wondered once if the human love she had longed for, and now knew, was symbolic and she realized with the approach of Christmas that the love of God contains the human power of love in its supernatural state. It was that that burst forth two thousand years ago and disrupted the world like a tidal wave.

But rejoicing in the thought of aloneness, she suddenly realized that Mrs. Hepplewhite must spend Christmas with her. Instead of wallowing in what she had hoped would be a spiritual experience she must wallow in the warm flow of Hermione’s conversation. The realization was bleak, and her first taste of the extraordinary contrariness of the will of God. Mrs. Hepplewhite, invited, clasped Mary in her arms in tearful relief and pleasure and said she would come for a week.

She came and at first Mary wondered hourly if she would survive, for now that the first shock was over, Mrs. Hepplewhite was finding intense relief in the conversational recapitulation of her troubles. From the beginning to the end they rehearsed it all and then went back to the beginning again. Mary could expect no escape in packing up Christmas gifts in her bedroom, or in a little lonely washing up; wherever she went Mrs. Hepplewhite came too, loving, helpful and verbose. There was relief in the occasional presence of Mrs. Baker and the Christmas visits of neighbors, bringing gifts and invitations, for though the conversation continued, the impact of it was shared. And two of these visits Mary by some miracle was able to receive alone.