God's Sparrows Page 8

  “Who, for instance?”

  “Well … Pen and my husband. They’re talking about war and the institution of marriage and stoicism — whatever that is. Words, Charles! Who cares about war in the Balkans? I don’t! But Daniel says we all think too much about ourselves. He says we should all get along better if we only took life quietly and were a little stoical.… Do you know, sometimes I could almost hate men!”

  This was more than Charles had bargained for, and instinct warned him of something wrong. He was afraid of women when they were like this. He liked to feel gay and frivolous and he did not like to look too closely at things.… Better turn it off lightly, he thought, then she would see that he didn’t want to —

  “Well, Charles, what do you think of me? You think I’m always empty headed?”

  “No, not empty headed.”

  “Empty hearted, then. That’s what you really think of me! … What are you thinking of, Charles? Now! Right this minute!”

  Something to say popped into Charles’s head, and being Charles, he said it without thinking first. “I was thinking of Aurora and Tithonus — but you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Aren’t we literary? … As a matter of fact, I do understand. You mean the myth about Aurora asking every good gift for her lover except one — youth, so that, though Tithonus is immortal, he is old?”

  “I swear to heaven, Tessa — ” began Charles, horrified. “What a God-forgotten fool I am!”

  But Tessa said recklessly: “Why not say it, Charles … only, you see, it isn’t true. Daniel’s sun doesn’t rise by me. And he isn’t immortal — not even old.… And I do love him. It isn’t as simple as that!”

  “Tessa, will you believe me when I say —”

  Tessa leaned forward, laying her hand on his sleeve, and lowered her voice. “We’re good friends, aren’t we, Charles?”

  “Always have been. Always will be!”

  “Then keep it to yourself, dear Charles.… You see, it’s not Daniel’s fault. I’m just a restless person, that’s all.”

  At one end of the table Maud was reflecting how odd it was that men could get so very excited over ideas. “And why do they love to talk about war?” The word always chilled her heart and made her unreasonably angry. “But they like to. In their hearts they think of it as adventure and change: boys to the end of their days, every one of them.”

  She relaxed and took in the family with an affectionate look, feeling at the very centre of it. She thought, if only Daniel could go out to people; so formal, so humourless. Not even to Tessa, so much younger than he. And she is so quiet it frightens one. I’d rather see her flighty and gay as she was before she lost her baby — If only she were well enough to have another child —

  Maud’s thoughts were interrupted by a piercing yell from Dan. “You hound! My shin! You wait!”

  “He was asleep,” explained Alastair coolly, “so I just woke him up.”

  “I wasn’t, I was thinking.… Mother, why do people always speak of Uncle Murdo as restless?”

  Everyone felt that this was an awkward question.… But really, why did people? Each one there had his own private opinion of the matter. Pen secretly suspected that Murdo’s faith had been undermined; Fanny believed that Murdo honestly enjoyed being in the thick of trouble, while Maud merely included Murdo’s restlessness in the eternal restlessness of all males. Euphemia said sentimentally: “I suppose the children are old enough to be told, Maud? Your uncle, children, was unfortunate in his marriage. I think it has preyed on his mind a good deal.”

  “Bosh, Euphemia!” cried Fanny.

  But Alastair, who had reached the brash age of adolescence, was not satisfied. “I suppose you mean about his wife running away with someone better looking? Why didn’t he divorce her and marry someone else, like the Eltons?”

  Euphemia gasped, and Maud exclaimed, “Alastair!”

  “Well, why didn’t he? I would have.”

  “Nice people don’t talk —” began Maud.

  “Let’s hear no more of it, Alastair!” said Pen sternly. “One would think you’d no breeding at all.”

  Dan, who thought slowly, was struggling with an idea. “But I think —” he began.

  “Children! You may all leave the table,” ordered Pen.

  “You see, you juggins?” commented Alastair very unfairly. “You never know when to stop.”

  Sulkily the children trooped from the room. Alastair and Joanna went upstairs to get some sheet music.

  It seemed to Dan that he had got hold of an important idea, and he wanted to be by himself to wrestle with it. He went into the drawing room where there was a fine fire blazing away; moving a sofa in front of the hearth, he lay down and watched the flames.

  In the dining room, with the constraint of the children removed, the grown-ups were talking more freely. With her infallible instinct for saying the wrong thing, Euphemia was discussing divorce. “Divorce is much commoner nowadays because people lack the spiritual resources they used to have.” Secretly it pleased Euphemia a little when marriages were unsuccessful.

  Placing the tips of his fingers together with precision, Daniel Thatcher ventured to disagree with his sister-in-law . “I believe the usual cause of divorce is that one partner demands too much of the other. ‘There is always one who loves and one who is loved’ is a French proverb containing much shrewd truth. Yes. No one should place his whole life utterly in the hands of his partner, keeping nothing back for his private life. No. A man should always possess his own soul away from even those closest to him. How else can he be secure? He should guard his reserve against all importunings. Indeed, yes!”

  To Tessa, her husband’s dry, precise voice had suddenly become intolerable. She could not reach him at all. No matter what happened he would regard it judicially as an intellectual problem. He would put his finger tips carefully together, look at her mildly from that inner place you could not reach, and say: “Let us consider it calmly, my dear.” … If only she could really shake his self-sufficiency just once and make him suffer!

  She burst out: “Oh, Daniel! Daniel! That’s just selfish! I think people ought to spend themselves on others even if it destroys them!”

  All around the table, chairs creaked from the slight, startled movements of those sitting on them. Daniel blinked and changed colour. Called back to the domestic relations from the pure intellectual pleasure of expressing an idea with precision, he remembered that Tessa always had the faculty of making him feel uneasy. She made one feel that one’s ideas always had some personal application.

  Maud tried to change the subject, but Tessa would not let her. Flushed and panting, she released a reckless torrent of words: “Why shouldn’t Murdo have got a divorce, and why shouldn’t his wife? You have only one life to live, and after a woman’s forty, she might as well be dead! … I’m sorry! I know I’m making a scene.… I didn’t mean to.… I don’t want to! I’m so ashamed!” She bit her lip and shook her head to keep the tears back.

  Daniel said: “Tessa!” and coming round, tried clumsily to take her hands. She pushed him away with an inarticulate cry and rushed from the room with her hands over her face. Complete silence ensued for a moment. Maud gathered her wits together and quietly accepted the situation.

  “Tessa hasn’t been herself since the baby died,” she said. “Go to her, Daniel. And, Daniel — coax her to talk to you.” Daniel went, looking bewildered.

  Charles said tentatively: “A good bust-up once in a while is the very best thing for a family. Clears the air.” And Euphemia whispered to Fanny: “I’ve been thinking for some time that the child has been going through a religious crisis of some sort.” Fanny exclaimed: “Rubbish!” And Pen snorted derisively.

  Tessa had flung herself on a chesterfield in the drawing room. Dan’s tousled head peered over the back of the sofa before the fire
like a startled deer from a covert, and he saw a woman with her face buried in the cushions — crying. What ought he to do? If he stole away she might see him, and dimly he felt that that would never do. Then Uncle Daniel came into the room. Too late to go now.

  Daniel sat on the couch beside her. For a long time she would neither answer him nor move, except to shake his hand from her shoulder.

  Daniel said miserably: “When I said that, I didn’t mean us . I wasn’t thinking of us.”

  Tessa sat up at last. “Oh, Daniel. This is a miserable life we lead!”

  There was fear in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Tessa.”

  “Why are we like this together?”

  Daniel gave a mirthless laugh. “I am old, Tessa; you are young.”

  “No! It isn’t that. But you are so stiff and cold and unnatural with me. It freezes me.”

  Daniel began to stride up and down. Several times he began to speak, but each time he stopped, defeated. “If —” he said at last “— if you want — I mean, if I don’t — if I can’t make you happy, you could — sometimes I think the devil is between us, Tessa!”

  “I don’t want a divorce, Daniel. But I want to feel alive. Life’s passing, and I feel as if I’d never truly lived it.… Make me feel alive, Daniel!”

  He came to her, put his hand awkwardly on her shoulder, then removed it, feeling her muscles tense against him. “Tessa, why must we? You know the sort of torment this leads us to.”

  “Put your hands on my shoulders again, Daniel. Please.”

  He did as she asked. She was trembling.

  “Now say you love me, Daniel.”

  He tried to utter the simple sentence, but he could not. What he felt he could not utter — no, not if his life were to depend upon it.… And at times like these, the tension rising, like a sudden demon out of nothing, would unfurl to their minds and nerves a mortal hell divided between them.

  “If only —” began Daniel, but he did not finish the phrase. But both of them knew what he meant: if only, while she was with child, Tessa had been quiet and hadn’t gadded about and played games. Daniel said heavily: “The doctor says there must never be another. It might mean —”

  “I’m willing! I don’t care!”

  She fingered the lapel of his coat and dropped her eyes. “Daniel. Other people —” She stopped.

  “I know, my dear. But it wouldn’t be right. It isn’t right. We’ve talked about that before, over and over again. It wouldn’t be right.”

  Presently, they went slowly out of the room together, and a sorely perplexed and abashed boy stood up. His mind was in a turmoil. He did not completely understand what he had heard, but he understood enough to be frightened. Was this what it was like to be grown up? he wondered. He felt obscurely that he was looking for the first time into a fearful world.… He began to jingle some loose cartridges in his coat pocket. He did not want to think of it. “Tomorrow I’ll get up at dawn and set up a target against the escarpment. Two bulls and four inners last time; not bad!”

  III

  On the way to the garden Dan stopped, as usual, to stare at the portrait of Great-Great-Grandmother Burnet which stood in a panel of the dining room beside that of her husband, General Sir Murdo Burnet. Sir Murdo had a hooked nose, a smoky look, and a face that always reminded Dan of the graven image in Joanna’s coloured Bible. Uncle Charles always called him Sir Tradition Gruff, and he might have been Dan’s own Uncle Murdo.

  But it was Sir Rae’s lady that teased the boy’s imagination. She was dressed in flowing Gainsborough silks, as befitted a general’s lady of the eighteenth century, but the artist — perhaps with intentional irony — had left out of the picture the usual picture hat and shepherdess crook; instead, he had painted her with uncovered head, and in her blue-black hair above one ear was thrust a flower — not an English rose but some vivid flower of the south. She was dark and beautiful and strange, and out of her frame she stared not at her descendants, the most British Burnets, but beyond them — at what?

  Charles Burnet came into the dining room and followed the boy’s glance. “The mysterious Lady Burnet,” thought Charles. “And worth looking at, too. Fifty devils in her eyes, and in her body the sway of an angel — no peace there.… But let the boy find out all that for himself.”

  “Well, Dan, what do you think of your great-grandmother ?”

  “She has a strange look in her eyes, hasn’t she?”

  “Spells and incantations, my lad. Haven’t they told you about her?”

  “Not much.”

  “Want to know?”

  “Yes. I bet there’s a lot to know.”

  “Very discerning of you. I dare say there is, too, and I wish I knew it.… Would you say she was an aristocrat?”

  “No-o — I see what you mean. She looks as if she didn’t care a hang for people.”

  “Not much for people and less for their things , Dan. Her name was Faa and she belonged to a very special sort of aristocracy, the aristocracy of poverty and freedom.”

  “Faa is Mother’s second name.”

  “Quite. The Burnets have always been proud of her. She was a gipsy, Dan, a full-blooded Romany rawnie. What d’you think of that?”

  Dan stared at his gipsy ancestor.

  “It’s a fact. It’s the family skeleton — though we’re secretly proud of it — that her grandfather was hanged for theft in the seventeen-thirties at the Tolbooth in Edinburgh.”

  “It must have been strange to be married to a gipsy. I wonder what she was like. Did she have children and was she happy, I wonder?”

  “Children? Scads of them. Happy? I don’t know. Somehow — perhaps after her marriage — she learned to read and write. She could play the violin and sing like a bird. They say she met Robert Burns and Mr. Hume and the rest of them; she’d only have to be herself to be distinguished — look at her portrait! She left her husband twice, and twice she came back.”

  “Went back to the tribe?”

  Charles grinned impishly. “Oh, I dare say she had a gipsy husband, too. Shocks you? Lord bless you, she was a gipsy. I think she paid the Burnets a great compliment, loving my great-great-grandfather enough to come back to him twice.”

  “I wonder what she’s looking at, Uncle Charles?”

  “Strange look, isn’t it. As if she saw through things. I always think she is looking at things as they really are, and people, too. I should think that might be a terrifying experience even for a gipsy. You know the pagans believed that anyone who saw Pan — that is, nature — died. Why should she be bound by our conventional prejudices?”

  “She wasn’t, was she?”

  “Not if the stories about her are true.”

  “Did she always do what she wanted to?”

  “How can we tell? … I think there was always something she was afraid of.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s just a guess. Don’t forget I’ve a little of her blood in me.… When she was an old woman, she became bedridden, and one day she suddenly fell silent, not because she was stricken dumb, but through sheer determination not to speak to a soul, not even to her husband. No one thought she could walk a step, but one night, without a word to anyone, she walked out into the dark, and when they found her next day, she was miles away, lying in the middle of a meadow looking up at the stars.”

  “And was she dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did she do that, Uncle Charles?”

  “Who knows? They say a cat goes in and a gipsy goes out, to die. Escape from walls and a roof — or from the body, it’s all the same, very likely.”

  “Escape?”

  “It must be strange, Dan, to be born free of all the restrictions — moral codes and that sort of thing — we’re born into and can never escape from. If we could escape, I won
der whether we should really find it was an escape. Perhaps she found herself even more bound than we; perhaps that’s what her look means.… But you probably don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Yes, I do, I think. For instance, last week at the dance — I wouldn’t tell this to anyone but you — Mother told us beforehand to try and see that Joanna had a good time. Well, Alastair promised easily without a moment’s hesitation, you know what Alastair is like. But me it made quite irritable for a minute, not because she asked it but because she looked — well, wistful in a way, you know. That’s something you can’t get over, do you see what I mean? Then, of course, I promised and I meant it a lot more than Alastair did. Well, at the dance, I wanted to take Cynthia Elton in to supper. I wanted to badly because I knew if I didn’t, Alastair would. She’s the sort of girl I’d like to marry someday.… Are you laughing at me?”

  “No, laddie. Not I.”

  “Just before supper Joanna became ill, and of course, I had to bring her home. And the strange thing was that I forgot all about Cynthia.”

  “And Alastair took her in to supper?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, he did.”

  Charles grinned at his favourite nephew. “I see you’re thinking of becoming a man these days.”

  “Why didn’t you get married, Uncle Charles?”

  “Several reasons. I wasn’t caught young enough, for one. Spoiled, for another; too popular with women, you know. But mainly it was because I could never make up my mind to be satisfied with the many in one; it always seemed more exciting to discover the one in many … as usual I’m talking too much. I’m rightly considered a bad influence on the young.”

  “Do you know I’ve thought of that a lot, too. Answer me a question honestly, Uncle Charles. Does the gipsy blood ever bother us?”

  “Oho! Well, maybe. It breaks out every so often; the upfling of the satyr’s heels, you know. A scandal here, an elopement there, and the production of a number of irresponsible scamps — brilliant and likable, usually — like yours truly.”