The Elderbrook Brothers (19 page)

His glance fell on Faith. He caught her watching him. What would she say if she knew? But she didn't and mustn't know. No one must ever know.

‘A penny for your thoughts, Felix,' said Faith.

‘Better keep it,' said Felix. ‘You'll need it later on.'

‘Shall I?' It was like her that she must add:
‘Why
shall I, Felix?'

‘The woman always pays,' said Felix, unsmiling. ‘Men are accommodated for nothing.'

‘Felix!' Faith's eyebrows went up. She was ready to laugh at his joke, but could not be sure he had made one. ‘What a thing to say!' After an interval of silence she said, as if thinking aloud: ‘There's no point in worrying till we know more.'

It was perhaps her apology for letting her thoughts stray from Nancy's bad news.

On any happier occasion, their slow ambling train-journey across Mershire would have been a friendly and delightful experience. Here was a green, undulating, well-watered country, offering few spectacular features; dull if you chose to think it so; no mountains, no great lakes, no flowering gorges; merely the patchwork of pastoral England, smeared here and there by the thumb of industrialism, yet rural still; village after village where memories were long and ways of life deep-rooted; dark: rich meadows, cottage gardens, the varying shades and shapes of the ploughland, tree-attended streams that seemed to
keep pace with the slow jogging train, tiny railway stations standing level with the lanes that you saw beyond their milk-white fences; and all reflecting, in the play of light and shadow and variable hue, the changeful April sky, which within the narrow compass of a few hours displayed all the moods in her repertory, from storm, and sleet, and dull doomsday gloom, to soft rain and crystal sunshine breaking out of iron clouds. To Felix, as to Faith, it was home, it was England, and they loved it well enough; but living in a tranquil time, in undisputed possession of their heritage, they loved it not with the conscious passion of a later generation, but placidly, without thought or misgiving. The landscape moving past the window was for Felix a mere backcloth for the shabby drama of his thoughts; but, having the compartment to themselves, brother and sister could not but become aware at intervals of each other. Not for years had they had so long a time alone together. In the interval much had happened to them both. The old bond held, but their relationship had entirely changed. She had petted and mothered him as a child: in his eager infant heart she had been second only to the mother whose love they had shared. Now, because he was a grown man, she deferred to him, that being in the natural order of things as she saw it; and to him her limitations, unguessed in childhood, were as visible as her goodness.

‘You're not worried about anything, Felix, are you? Except Mother, I mean.'

He removed his stare from the landscape. ‘Worried? Why should I be?'

‘Would you tell me if you were, I wonder?' said Faith. ‘You would have done, once upon a time.'

It was not quite true. There had been troubles, forgotten now, which he had confided to no one: things too subtle and elusive to be explained or understood. But there was truth enough in what she said. He let it go.

They reached Upmarden in the late afternoon. The men were somewhere in the fields, and Nancy alone greeted them.
Very much alone she seemed. Having embraced her sister, she flung herself upon Felix. By this unprecedented demonstration he knew that his mother was very ill indeed.

‘How is she, darling?' Faith said.

‘She had rather a better night, Nurse says. I'm glad you've come, Faith.'

‘A nurse?'

‘Yes. Dr Waterhouse advised it. She's in charge, of course.' Nancy smiled wanly. ‘It's rather a relief,' she admitted. ‘You'd like a cup of tea before you go up, wouldn't you, both?'

‘She's well enough to be visited then?' said Felix quickly, grasping at the straw.

‘Nurse will know that,' answered Nancy. ‘Nurse knows everything.'

‘Yes, dear,' said Faith, answering what was unsaid, ‘it's been a horrible time for you. Why didn't you write sooner?'

‘I
am
glad you've come,' Nancy said.

She began telling the history of the illness.

‘Is Guy coming?' Felix suddenly asked.

‘I haven't told him yet.'

‘Oh Nancy!' Faith exclaimed.

‘We'd better, hadn't we?' Felix said.

‘He's always so busy, Guy is,' said Nancy, defensively. ‘We've had not a sign from him for I don't know how long. And …' she seemed to shut up her face, as if in pain: ‘I didn't want to frighten her.'

‘Frighten Mother?' said Faith wonderingly.

‘By mustering the whole family, Nancy means,' said Felix. ‘All the same, we must
tell
Guy. And it needn't be frightening either,' he went on. ‘After all, people do go and see their mothers when they're ill. It doesn't mean … anything out of the way. Why doesn't Father come in?' he said, with sudden, reasonless irritation.

‘He won't be long,' said Nancy. ‘Nor Matthew either.
The work has to be done, just the same,' she reminded him mildly.

She went on with her narrative. It was jerky and repetitive, and punctuated by soft words from Faith. In Felix's mind the two voices seemed to murmur together, murmur and rustle, like the wind among trees. They reached him as from a distance, a scene in which he had no part but the meaning of which he could not evade. In spirit he stood aloof, isolated, alone in the house of his childhood. Everything conspired to suggest to him that his mother was about to die. He could not believe it. It was past imagining. Yet he could not in his heart deny it. He stood transfixed.

The scrape of feet in the doorway made him turn. His father stood there, grey and gaunt, a man of earth and fire, an old unbroken men. Joe met his son's glance, and a spark flashed between them, struck from their shared fear.

‘Well, son?' said Joe.

In the few months since Felix had last seen him he had aged by ten years.

GUY, summoned by telegram, arrived two days later. He did not see his mother alive, but he was in time to join the procession of those who came to look upon her dead. During the last days Joe or Matthew or Felix or one of her daughters sat with her, as well as the nurse. Any one of them would come when asked for, come with careful smiles, and sit with her, and talk lightly of what was going on in the world. In her intervals of full consciousness she was happy to have them all so near at hand, happy and grateful. No one could tell whether or not in those moments she knew her end was near. They themselves did not know, did not let themselves know. They were all at one in pretending to believe that a miracle would happen. She asked once where Guy was, and heard with drowsy satisfaction that he too was coming to see her. ‘Such good children,' she
said. ‘I'm a very lucky woman.' In bed she looked very small and young. Her blue eyes, when she was out of pain, were the eyes of a contented child. Even her worn cheeks had a specious bloom.

For Felix these brief sessions with his mother held something of which a lifetime's contemplation could not exhaust the meaning. The crowding childhood memories, the deep habitual love, these could not persuade him that what he now saw belonged entirely to the natural order, to time and space. Too often the veil of illness came between them, making her a stranger, withdrawn; but in the moments when
she
was visible it seemed to him that he was seeing her for the first as well as perhaps for the last time, seeing her on a plane where her being his mother and he her son had no relevance; for though the body ages and the mind may falter, the spirit in its solitude knows nothing of age or time, of growth or begetting; and the years make no mark there, and the busy days no sound. Yet she was nearer to him in such encounters than she had ever been before, or so he persuaded himself: it was as if she had laid aside all distracting burdens and were emptied of everything except the light that still sustained her, a simple and undemanding love. Among those who watched and waited, the least sure in self-command was Joe: Joe who could never brook opposition, Joe who must always have his way. When he saw her in pain he would glare angrily at the nurse, muttering obscenities under his breath; but it was her good moments, her moments of placid shining happiness, that unmanned him, so that once, with tears rolling out of his eyes and down his stern-set face, he had to be manoeuvred out of the room, lest she should see them and wonder.

When they told him his mother was dead Felix could make no sense of the statement. He had been expecting it hour after hour, had imagined the event and lived through it and made terms with it; but the brute fact, when it came, leapt upon him with all the violence of a new, undreamt-of horror. It shattered his carefully built castle of theory. It unpropped the corners
of the sky. Staring out at the day he saw it as empty and unreal, a heartless glittering show. Its actuality was an impertinence, its indifference an outrage. How could it go on, when she was dead? For her it did not go on. For her the world had vanished. He tried, tried very hard, with his head pressed between his hands, to understand what had happened. She who had been alive, a centre of consciousness, was now dead. But what did
dead
mean? The enigma was too monstrous, the truth not to be borne. He hurried away from it, into the past, and the past came to meet him with moments of an intolerable sweetness and intimacy. She was putting him to bed, lifting him over a stile, smoothing his hair, teaching him his alphabet. She paused, in the act of pouring tea into the cups, to receive from his sticky hands a spray of honeysuckle and two dove-grey feathers which he had importantly collected from the hedges for her. He was at her elbow in the kitchen, stealing bits of soft pastry from the board and being playfully threatened with the rolling-pin. He heard her voice, as though she were in the very room with him, coaxing, reproving, caressing, amused, matter-of-fact. And always these flashes must give place to the incredible immovable blank fact, and always they brought in their train the same passion of regret, and though he had loved her he had never loved her enough. He was alone, a lost child. Everything in the house breathed and spoke of her. But she wasn't there. She was gone. The world was motherless.

Responding at last to Faith's gentle importunities he went upstairs, reluctant and rebellious, but unable to withstand his longing to see his mother once again. He had no idea of what he would see, his mind refused to think of it, and Faith's fond murmurings of how beautiful and peaceful she looked gave him no warning. Trembling he pushed open the door; entered; looked. Beautiful? Peaceful? The impact of the sight was like a blast of icy air. This had been his mother that was now a mask, coldly impersonal, aloof, unmeaning. The likeness and the unlikeness made his heart stand still. The frozen
dignity of the dead face appalled him. Mother's not here, he said: where is she? In face of what he saw he could not believe that she was anywhere. The consolations of religious faith seemed infinitely remote, trivial, unreal. Only death was real, the one inescapable fact: all the rest was brittle fantasy and fond pretence. This alone was real, this emptiness, this silence, this mockery of heart's desire; and to this we must all come. The secret was out, the huge trite fact that made of love and strife and hope and all endeavour the merest nonsense, a set of mechanical tricks, a pathetic evasion of reality. But ultimately there was no evading it, so why go on? Since everything must come to nothing, why trouble about anything? At this moment
I believe in death
was the beginning and end of his creed. Well, one went on because there was nothing else one could do. But at least, now that life's bluff had been called, one would never for a moment forget its essential inanity.

So, in that room of death, Felix thought. So he resolved. But life had other plans. This experience left a permanent mark on him. He was a changed man and could never revert to what he had been before. But, though bitterness persisted and his sombre conviction held, once the funeral was over he became aware, half-guiltily, of a quickening within him, a rising as from the dead. Life, within and without, claimed him, restored him, drew his thoughts away from their dark obsession, and made ready his heart for new suffering.

IN the train with Faith, on their way back to Stanton, Felix found himself thinking of Ellen again. His thoughts were sober and charitable. He remembered the extravagances of his former attitude only to repudiate them. In the context of his mother's death Ellen Winter had had no place. She had belonged so decidedly to another world that though he did not forget her existence there had been moments when he almost
ceased to believe in it. Had he been assured of her love, the thought of her, however shadowy, would have been something to cling to: being not so assured he had found little room for her in a mind tormented with a new anxiety and then with an all-obliterating grief. But now, since whatever one said life had to go on, he could think of her again, and more calmly. His new knowledge of death gave him a new vision of life. It put everything into a different perspective. Since we were all mortal creatures, fellow-passengers in the same leaking boat, and doomed as soon as begotten, we must put away pride and shame and make the best of ourselves and each other in the little time we had. Felix did not argue so, but the conviction was implicit in all his thoughts of the future, a future in which, as he could not doubt, Ellen was to play a part. But what part? That question could not yet be answered, but as he saw clearly that he could only lose her by bitterness, so he began first to hope and then to assume that he could win her by sympathy and understanding. Added to his love, which now pervaded his reflections with a gentle glow instead of burning them up, was the ambition to rescue her, by whatever devious strategy, from a situation which he still regarded as shabby and odious, though he had the wit to see that it did not seem so to her. But even to her, he argued sagely, it must seem highly inconvenient. I can marry her: he can't. Sooner or later she'll get sick of the secrecy and the subterfuge, and then … we can build up a new life together. His thought paused there, wincing a little. It was a very different programme from his first romantic flight, and it carried implications which he did not care to consider. Nevertheless he felt himself equal to it, seeing no alternative except to give up all hope of her. And the longer he dwelt on the plan, the more attractive and inevitable it seemed. By faithful friendship, by listening and sympathizing, he could both comfort her and win her confidence. By asking nothing for himself he could get, in time, everything. In the pride of his newly acquired maturity he was able to smile at Ellen's ingenuous view of herself. ‘I shall never marry,' she
had told him; and she was not yet thirty. She calls me young, he thought tenderly; but she must be younger still if she really believes that.