The Keys of Heaven

In a way, she was preparing a funeral feast for something that might have been. But the lily-­of-­the-­valley cups, so old and delicate that really they should have been safely under glass in a museum, were not too precious for her lost friend; and she took them out of the china-­cupboard with a deep, sad pleasure, touching them reverently.

Her mother’s portrait looked down from the wall. She, too, had treasured the cups and had kept them for the secret festivals of the heart, in honour of a person here and there whom no one had guessed she delighted to honour. It was the portrait of a lady not so golden as her daughter Irene, and not so brown as her daughter Jane: betwixt and between with mouse-­coloured hair and greenish eyes. She held a rose in her long, pointed fingers, and the artist had set a sparkle in her amethyst ring.

The same amethyst now shone on Jane’s hand as it moved to and fro, between the table and the corner-­cupboard. It always seemed to Jane that the pattern on the cups, the cool lily-­bells and green leaves and faint lines of dark-­blue, vermilion and gold, sang a tune out of the past, like a tinkling air played by an old musical-­box.

A pinch of Orange Pekoe in the tea, and some lemon, perhaps? One never knew. She had no knowledge of his tastes. She knew nothing about him at all, she suddenly realized, not even a little thing like that.

He was sitting in the white, flower-­scented room on the other side of the wall, with her sister Irene; and his presence seemed to burn through bricks and plaster, making a warmth in the sombre red-­walled dining-­room, pervading the entire house, as though it were a desert and he a solitary camp-­fire. When he went, there would be ashes and silence. But no need to think of that yet. No need to think of hereafter.

The portrait on the wall looked down at the younger daughter of the house carefully rubbing up the Queen Anne teapot with a velvet cloth, at the delicate array of china on the tray, the austere mahogany furniture and the vase of chrysanthemums on the table. The original of the portrait had always thought that her daughter Jane had one or two physical attributes which even her daughter Irene might have envied: exquisite dark eyebrows so fine that they might have been printed in with Indian ink, and a long neck that gave her head the air of a harebell delicately poised on its stalk. She had witty fingers, too, with a way of touching even common things as if they were rare. She could dress up a salad so imaginatively that it seemed a pity to mix it up and eat it, and her bowls of wild flowers had the immortal, haphazard look of an Impressionist still-­life. But the portrait was of a lady who had seen more than most people. She had not been too dazzled by the golden daughter to see the brown one with the clear gaze of love . . .

Lizzie, the maid-­of-­all-­work, looked in.

‘Lor, Miss Jane! We don’t have those, not for the Squire and her ladyship,’ she said, round-­eyed.

‘But the pheasant cups are very gay, too, Lizzie,’ said Jane, with circumspection, ‘Lady Rowland likes them.’

Apple-­cheeked Lizzie was experienced in love. She had a peasant’s instinct for divining its hiding-­places and would sometimes confidently assert that some village lad was ‘sweet on’ a girl long before either party had betrayed by word or sign that such was the case. Lizzie, with her turned-­up, inquisitive nose, suddenly took on the aspect of a pig snuffling after a most rare, deep-­hidden root; and Jane felt cold with a kind of agony. She raised her dark eyebrows and looked so quizzically at Lizzie that the maiden retreated somewhat abashed. Miss Jane, in Lizzie’s eyes, was almost ugly; but she could make one feel as if one’s hands and feet were coarse and enormous. Miss Irene had given her ever such a sweet dress, almost new, when Bob Willett had thrown her over. ‘There now, Lizzie,’ she had said, ‘you let him see how little you care!’ But Miss Jane had heard her crying in the night, and had come in and sat on her bed and comforted her. So she loved Jane, while she despised and pitied her. For anyone who went to the movies at the nearest market-­town on her evenings off could tell that Miss Jane had no sex-­appeal. Whereas Miss Irene . . . In Lizzie’s opinion Miss Irene was more beautiful and heartless than any vamp on the screen, and to be in service at the Rectory was almost as good as playing a small part in the pictures oneself . . .

And now, the mysterious dark gentleman who had lately come to the village—a bit of a foreigner he looked—was alone with her in the drawing-­room. To be sure, he had asked for the Rector, who was not at home; but Miss Irene had intercepted Lizzie on her way to the door and had given instructions that he was to be admitted. Perhaps this time she had met her match . . .

The dining-­room dreamed in its reddish gloom. The afternoon light spilled itself on the mahogany, making little pools of gold in the polished surfaces. It ran a fingertip along a gilt frame, and shone through the wine in the decanter, and drew sharp odours from the apples on the dish. The Hepplewhite chairs, ranged sedately against the wall, seemed lost in memories. They were remote from the present, withdrawn and delicate; like ancient great-­aunts who no longer care which of the children are in love.

That’s how they seemed to Jane. She was in love, and nobody cared. Nobody, thank heaven, knew. In love . . . but it was more like being possessed by the devil. The very idea that she might ever be attracted by one of Irene’s young men had frightened her, the desolation of it. Irene’s admirers were hard to talk to. They didn’t put themselves out for mousey girls like Jane . . .

Sometimes the two sisters would be asked to dine at some neighbouring house and a car would be sent for them.

‘What a bore!’ Irene would say. She was clever at ringing the changes with a black frock and a white one, and somehow contrived to look as if she had several dresses.

Jane had only one evening frock, an oyster-­coloured silk, with which she wore a brown coat and some amber beads. But it didn’t matter. No one noticed that she wore the same dress over and over again. She was only a shadow in the wake of the white and golden beauty.

Irene was shown off by her hosts to visitors. Jane could see them doing it. She could tell by the expectant look on the faces of strangers that they had been promised a treat.

When they got home, Jane would have to take an aspirin, because her head ached and she was so tired of talking to people who made her feel as if she had been looking into empty biscuit tins and seeing only her own distorted face gazing back at her. But Irene would say, serenely unclasping the pearls about her white neck—‘It was rather amusing after all, wasn’t it?’

One spring morning, Irene came in quite excited from a walk to the village. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘I have just met the new tenant of the thatched cottage. He was buying stamps and seed-­packets at the stores. I looked at him—and he looked at me, very hard indeed. Do you know what he is like? The portrait of Sir Philip Sidney you have in your room . . . one of those haggard, pear-­shaped faces, you know. I think,’ she added, smiling, ‘that he was slightly intrigued.’

Jane looked a long time that evening at her picture of Sir Philip Sidney, and thought for the thousandth time that he had the most beautiful face in history (which, of course, he has); and for some unfathomable reason her heart misgave her.

The stranger’s name, they soon discovered, was Edward Revell. He wrote, or something, and had come to the village for quiet. So much they heard from Lady Rowland. And presently she added that the man had no manners. He had refused her invitations to dine, at first with conventional excuses, and then so curtly that it was clear he thought her importunate.

He seemed as content with his own company as Jane with hers.

Of course he was not really like Sir Philip Sidney, but Jane could see what Irene meant. He had the sort of sharp-­set face that one can tell at a glance is terribly vulnerable to beauty. They met him sometimes in the village . . . and if he looked at Irene with a complete and almost ruthless absorption, assuredly Sir Philip Sidney would have done the same. And sometimes his glance would light on Jane, as of one who might notice some little thing about Iras or Charmian, because of the glory of Egypt that shone accidentally upon them.

But it was not until September that they became acquainted with the elusive stranger.

A short week ago—and yet it seemed like a thousand years—Jane had met him up on the Downs, in the Roman Camp, and they had had so interesting a conversation that she quite forgot she was only the plain Miss Ritchie.

She went to look for a book she had left in a thymey hollow which she had long considered sacred to herself. There were tussocks of grass in it that made restful cushions for a thin body, and it was pied with blue and yellow flowers—coltsfoot and scabious and cold sea-­thistles, and butterflies flew in and out again on their delicate, inconsequent affairs. She would lie there for hours and dream, watching the drifting clouds take on their fantastic metamorphoses. And when one was tired of white and blue and the way of the wind up aloft, one could turn to earth and rest one’s eyes on the dove-­coloured breast of the downs, dappling from fawn to grey as the cloud-­shadows passed over them.

Far away, on the road the Romans made, there might be a horse and cart plodding slowly through the loneliness, or a shepherd on the sky-­line. But no one near to disturb the blessed solitude.

She stood poised on the ridge and looked down at him, seated on a cushion of thyme with her book in his hands. Her shadow falling sharply across the pale grass caused him to look up. Just as she had come to the conclusion that she would retreat without a word, because he had too formidable an air for approach, his dark glance swept over her, and he rose and bowed gravely, his shadow bowing too, in a stately, Spanish sort of way, and lying very sharp and clear-­cut on the grass.

‘I am sorry to disturb you,’ said Jane, ‘but I came to look for a book I was so careless as to leave here.’

He held it up towards her.

‘I meant to drop it at the Rectory on my way home,’ he said, in a matter-­of-­fact voice, as if they were already well acquainted.

‘But how did you guess where it belonged?’ asked Jane, in surprise, her eyebrows going up into two thin dark arches. ‘I do not think there is a name in it.’

He smiled in that dazzling mysterious way people have whose smiles are an event to their friends and make them feel elated and yet a little unworthy, as though they knew that nothing in them merited such warmth and brightness.

‘I suppose that knowing him’ (he tapped the book) ‘to be rather a recondite ghost, I thought of the likeliest haunt, and you came at once to my mind.’

‘That interests me,’ said Jane, and a faint tremor of surprise seemed to flutter her a little, as if she were a harebell caught in a puff of breeze, ‘especially as I cannot remember that you have ever seen me before—not, I mean, even so much as to notice perhaps that I have brown eyes and hair.’

‘Perhaps not,’ he conceded, looking away into the depths of the valley, ‘details often escape me.’

After a pause during which he seemed to be considering the view—so near that it seemed as if one could scoop it up in one’s hands and dip one’s face into it—he turned towards her again.

‘Do you know the experience of being ravished by a poem and then finding that you cannot remember a single thing about it, except perhaps that there was a star in it? And yet the poem seems to live on, complete and immortal, somewhere deep in your experience.’

‘I think I know what you mean,’ said Jane, doubtfully, hoping that he might return to the opening theme before developing this further fascinating, though impersonal subject (all unused as she was to be talking of herself). ‘But,’ she went on, conscientiously trying to answer his question, ‘I have a very good memory and if I read a poem with concentration, it stays line by line in my head—like a bird in a cage, perhaps, instead of a kingfisher flashing past.’

‘And people . . . do you arrive at your knowledge of them little by little, weighing their qualities in your invisible scales, until at last you have discovered the truth?’ he asked, cocking his head on one side, like a listening bird, and watching her with black, glinting eyes.

‘I think I do,’ said Jane, smiling. ‘It sounds very cold and calculating; but one doesn’t often see the whole truth of a person in a flash—out of the blue.’

‘Brown eyes and hair,’ he said, ‘I see now; but it hasn’t added to my knowledge. It must have been something else that made me say—“This is her book.” But you have not,’ he added, turning over the pages rapidly, ‘marked my favourite passage. Listen now.’

His voice was low-­pitched and resonant and so in time with the music of the downs, the trilling of larks, the crying of plovers and the sound of church bells blown up from the valley, that she was reminded of the ’cello in a concerto. The words she knew very well, but spoken in that lonely place they seemed to have undertones she had not heard before, to reach beyond language into the sphere of music.

She sat down on the bank and her shadow folded itself beside her like a cloak she had dropped. But when she took off her hat and turned a little sideways to the sun, it went further away and became a dark woodcut of a woman in a reverie.

An orange butterfly, as though possessed of an instinctive sense of decoration, fanned its wings on the metallic blue of a sea-­thistle close at hand, and beyond, in the valley, the view was clear and small, like an opal one might wear in a ring.

Mr. Revell finished the chapter and put the book down beside Jane. Her wandering thoughts came back, and she gave a little sigh.

‘What sort of books do you write?’ she asked, resuming her hat.

‘After the Religio Medici, perhaps you would hardly call them books,’ replied Mr. Revell, deprecatingly. ‘I dig about the roots of ancient literatures and worry students with my discoveries. Text-­books, you know.’

‘I suppose,’ said Jane, musingly, ‘that being so very learned makes life an absorbing business.’

‘Let us talk about life, let us scrutinise this mysterious thing. Shall we?’ He sat down beside her on the bank.

‘What do you make of it?’ he asked, clasping his hands about his knees and bending towards her.

‘It has everything to do with being,’ said Jane, slowly, pondering the matter with her chin in her hand, ‘and very little to do with doing. Some people are wrapped in it like a cloak they always wear—my mother was like that—but others seem to keep it in a drawer and take it out only when something happens to them. In between events they are not aware of life.’

‘And you?’ he asked.

‘I wear the cloak,’ she said, ‘but it changes its texture. Sometimes it is all the colours of the rainbow, and sometimes—mere sackcloth.’

‘Yes,’ he said, stooping to pick a little flower, ‘one has to pay the price of ecstasy.’

He put the little blue flower in his buttonhole, and with its fairy face and soft black eye, it almost seemed to be taking part in the conversation—so confiding and intelligent it looked, so innocent and gay.

‘But isn’t happiness queer?’ said Jane. ‘The way it comes—oh, just out of the air!’

And after that they talked, as it seemed afterwards, thinking it over, of everything in heaven and earth. Once, in a pause of their conversation, she had time to think—‘I suppose I always knew that there must be people like this on earth to talk to.’

It was on the way home that she remembered Irene. As she went down the hill, she thought with surprise—‘Irene is at this moment arranging the chrysanthemums, or making an apple-­charlotte.’ It almost seemed as if she had stolen a march on Irene, waylaid an adventure that was hers by right. For it had been tacitly assumed between them that the situation was a flower waiting to be picked. When the time was ripe, Irene would stretch out her hand and gather the rose of Mr. Revell’s admiration.

On the threshold of a new adventure, she could be charmingly reticent. It was only afterwards, when the flower was gathered and laid in her lap, that she plucked off the petals for a friend’s amusement.

‘Jane,’ she said once, with her little cynical laugh, ‘thinks that women who talk of their love-­affairs are simply awful. But that’s because she never has any.’

It occurred to Jane that Irene would certainly have discovered what it was that Mr. Revell had seen which told him at once so much and so little about her—not what she looked like, but the kind of books she read. Irene wouldn’t have taken it as a compliment; and perhaps it wasn’t. But more interesting, surely, even than admiration.

For a few days life was radiant. There seemed a richness in the atmosphere, an incense, a fragrance, as of Roman hyacinths in the rain. Some people, Jane reflected, have a quickening power, like music. It wasn’t a question of personal relationships—often they are aloof and impersonal, such people: it was a question of spiritual values. And she made the illuminating discovery that it is by what he thinks important that a man either enriches life or impoverishes it.

And then she remembered that already, perhaps, the shadow of personal relationships lay across the future; already, perhaps, he was caught in Irene’s net.

‘Why should it matter? He will still be himself,’ argued Jane to herself.

But the situation got out of hand. It went on developing in a mysterious way. That hour on the hillside, instead of being complete and rounded-­off like a one-­act play, had become the first act in a never-­ending drama.

Sometimes a word or two of the dream-­conversations survived the night. They made nonsense in the light of day; but had a magical sound—key words to some tremendous secret. It seemed as if she and her friend had progressed so far in intimacy since their first and only encounter that they might have known each other a lifetime. She could scarcely believe that this progress was after all a one-­sided affair, and that for him the experience had ended on the hillside, when she had said good-­bye and walked away with her book under her arm, her long prim shadow following at her heels.

So much happened in the space of a week, and yet nothing at all happened (because she did not see Mr. Revell during that time or even hear his name) that the experience of years seemed compressed into it. He seemed to come between her and life itself, so that it seemed scarcely worth while to do anything but sit with folded hands and dream, drifting she knew not whither; but now and again she was afraid that it was to some bleak island of pain.

At the end of the week the inevitable happened. Irene came back from a dinner-­party at the Hall with the news that the elusive Mr. Revell had been driven at last to accept an invitation.

‘He took me in. Jane, he’s an intriguing wretch,’ she said, looking down at Jane’s pointed face on the pillow.

By the light of the moon, Jane’s eyes looked like two wet dark flowers under her winged eyebrows and the peak of dark hair that grew on her forehead. In the moonlight, her mahogany bed and the white-­and-­black of her pointed face on the pillow and the narrow shape of her body under the coverings had the mysterious look of an old engraving. But Irene in her silver coat seemed to catch all the refulgence of the moon. It shone in the red-­gold of her hair and turned her neck to alabaster; not putting out her colours, but clouding them over with a nacreous lustre.

‘You didn’t tell me, Jane, how easy he is to talk to. I had imagined that he would be rather silent and formidable; very deep water to fish in,’ Irene said, with her light, tinkling laugh, and walking across to the mirror, she looked at the faintly-­tinted image reflected there.

‘I look,’ she said, ‘like the ghost of Mary Queen of Scots. Tell me, Jane, what did you talk of, that time he found your book on the downs?’

‘Oh, I don’t know—poetry and things,’ said Jane, in a flat, weary voice.

‘Are you very sleepy, darling? Aren’t you interested in my dark man?’

‘Oh, yes. You know I told you he seemed very nice,’ said Jane, turning her face to the pillow.

‘You know,’ Irene went on, idly unscrewing a scent bottle on the table, ‘one isn’t just a pretty woman in the eyes of a man like that.’

‘Anyone can tell from the way he stares that he thinks you as lovely as Venus; and so, of course, you are,’ said Jane.

‘Mark my words,’ Irene laughed softly, as she opened the door, ‘he will return Father’s call in a day or two.’ And Jane heard her singing ‘Madam, will you walk?’ through the wall. She lay awake long after Irene had ceased creaking about in the next room and singing . . .

* * *

So that was why Jane lingered in the hall with her hand on the door-­knob. Their voices came muffled to her ear. She saw the white room with the eye of her mind. She had filled it with the sweet, uncertain roses of September, which either open all their petals at once, passing from tight buds to a full-­blown precarious grace, or else remain obstinately buttoned up and wither with their sweetness all unknown. And she knew that the light would be intensely golden, with the still quality it has in rooms which face east after the sun has gone on.

A sound of approaching footsteps—the ubiquitous Lizzie’s—made her turn the handle and walk in.

Irene said—‘You have met my sister, I think,’ and she found herself shaking hands and meeting the gaze of his dark eyes as composedly as if Irene’s remark were entirely adequate to describe the situation. As perhaps, she remembered, it might very well be so far as he was concerned.

Her first feeling was one of astonishment that he was, after all, quite a small thin man. It was like seeing an actor after a great performance without his make-­up. She was almost elated to find that his eyes, which had seemed deep enough to fall into, were not so large after all. Indeed, they had almost a beady look, she told herself.

‘What a dance you have led me!’ she thought, smiling. And with that little mysterious smile still curving her lips, she dropped his hand.

Irene went on with the talk that had been interrupted. Her voice was apt to linger over words, pulling them out with her drawl until one thought of toffee, making them memorable and fascinating.

‘I think Chopin is too divine,’ she was saying. ‘Jane says he is all roses and moonlight and someone creeping broken-hearted down an avenue of yews, but I adore his melancholy. I should like the Ballade in A flat to be played when I am dying. I should like the little phrase’ (she hummed it, beating the air with her hand) ‘to be the last sound I hear on earth. Remember, Jane!’

‘My dear,’ said Jane, in a bitter-­sweet voice, ‘you must tell your grand-­daughter. I hope to be dead long before that.’

‘Have you no wish, then,’ asked Mr. Revell, smiling, ‘to be a great-­aunt? But I think, you know, that I see you as the little old lady who knows the best fairy-­tales.’

‘Why?’ enquired Jane, surprised.

‘Well,’ he said, considering her with his head a little on one side, ‘it seems to me that I have seen you look out of the window at the end of a Hans Andersen story. You have raised your eyebrows at me, standing out in the snow, and pulled down the blind. Wouldn’t it be a pity,’ he said, turning to Irene, ‘to waste such ironical eyebrows?’

‘Of course,’ said Irene, smiling, ‘and I can imagine the young ones taking her their broken hearts to patch up. She’d be kind, but caustic. She’d say—“There are as good fish in the sea!” and “where’s your pride, boy?” ’

‘But I shouldn’t need to,’ said Jane, quietly, ‘if they took after their grandmother.’

Irene made a little grimace, and Mr. Revell laughed, looking from one to the other under half-­closed lids.

‘But suppose,’ thought Jane, suddenly troubled, ‘she were to break his heart.’

She stole a look at him. He was leaning back in his chair, looking at Irene with his bright, dark gaze. Last night she had been smoked by the moon into mother-­of-­pearl, but in the mellow afternoon light she was as sparkling as a May morning.

‘Talking of Chopin, I hope you will play to me some day, Miss Ritchie,’ said Mr. Revell.

‘I don’t play to everyone,’ Irene said, with her little ensnaring smile in which her eyelashes also took part fluttering an instant on her cheeks and looking so alluringly black in contrast to the tawny brightness of her hair. ‘But perhaps,’ she added, choosing a pink rosebud from a vase near by and fastening it into her dress, ‘perhaps, one day, I’ll play to you.’

‘But sing to us, Irene, till tea is ready,’ said Jane.

So Irene went to the piano and sang some German lieder—some of the love-­songs of Brahms.

Jane leaned her cheek on her long thin hand.

‘Love isn’t the whole of life,’ she thought, with a feeling of tears in her throat. ‘There is all that loveliness out there—that used to be enough.’

She thought wistfully of the time when happiness came out of the air; of the High Lakes at sunset, and the little dark birds floating over the glassy deeps, the cool rushy smell, the mystery, as of water gods hiding. She remembered the winter twilights, with a shell of a moon in the east; and the thought of spring was a pain in her heart. Windflowers and yellow palm and cowslips . . . the keys of heaven. Would the spring keep for her its ancient ecstasy?

The Keys of Heaven. Once they were hers for the asking, but now it seemed that the dark man in the corner had taken them and put them in his pocket. It was queer that Irene with her passionless heart should sing so beautifully that one wanted to cry.

She turned her head to look at him, to watch him secretly whilst his being was emptied of everything but music, as hers could not be in his disturbing presence, and was startled to find herself looking into his dark shining eyes.

He looked away quickly, with such a guilty air that she knew he must have been studying her, defenceless and unaware, with her thoughts printed on her face. Goodness only knew how much those penetrating eyes had seen!

She had an odd feeling that the music had made her as clear as glass, and her cheeks were faintly flushed as she bent over the tray.

Irene swung round on the stool, and Mr. Revell thanked her in a very quiet voice that revealed his deep delight.

‘It would be interesting to know if one would sing them better or much worse for being in love,’ said Irene in a conversational tone. But Mr. Revell was looking at Jane with rather an abstracted expression and did not reply.

As she filled the lily-­of-­the-­valley cups, Jane thought that no one but herself would ever hear their little tune. Mr. Revell carried Irene’s cup across to her and coming back for his own startled Jane. Holding it up he said, suddenly—‘What an enchanting design—like a little air by Scarlatti!’

Jane looked at him almost with panic in her brown eyes. It was a remark that did not belong to reality . . . like something he might have said in her dreams.

‘Why, Jane, it’s poor Mother’s precious china. We have not used it for years,’ said Irene, surprised. ‘You know,’ she went on, turning to Mr. Revell, ‘you ought to be flattered that she has taken out the best china, which Mother used to keep for special little feasts.’

‘Did you guess,’ asked Mr. Revell, in his disconcerting way, ‘that I should like it very much?’

‘So few of our visitors,’ murmured Jane, confused, ‘ever notice anything that is lovely. I think of the time when people quoted Pope and wore red-­heeled shoes and tea was called “tay”. I think of them drinking out of these cups, and someone, perhaps, playing the spinet. And it makes the tea taste rather delicious,’ she ended, breathlessly, looking from one to the other of her listeners with an apologetic air.

‘But it is rather a prim little pattern,’ Irene said. ‘There is nothing in it except a few faint lines.’

Mr. Revell and Jane smiled at each other as though they shared a secret. And his smile, always like a falling star, seemed to drop through Jane’s eyes into her heart.

It was Lizzie, after all, who was the first to understand. Coming in with a plate of hot scones, she nearly dropped them.

‘The love-­light!’ said Lizzie, so thrilled that she almost said it aloud. And going back to the kitchen, she sang, out of the fulness of her gay, experienced heart, the song Miss Irene was always humming about the house. ‘I will give you the keys of heaven,’ sang Lizzie, with the abandonment of a thrush in springtime.