When he arrived in the dining-room the rest were already at table. A letter lay beside his plate. Its presence somehow embarrassed him. He glanced at it, then glanced at the grown-ups; but no one was looking at him. His grandfather was carefully selecting from a silver dish a piece of bacon, which he laid beside a poached egg on a plate and handed to him with a smile. Aunt Clara was pouring out a cup of coffee. Uncle Bob was reading a printed circular. As he received his plate of bacon and egg, Adrian shot a more attentive glance at the envelope in front of him and saw that it was from his mother. It had an Indian stamp and had been re-addressed from Waldo. He drew it quietly over the edge of the table and slipped it into his pocket. Perhaps no one except Stock had seen the letter: anyhow, no one seemed to be inquisitive about it or even conscious of it.
But, as a matter of fact, before Adrian had come down, Clara had noted it.
“Hallo,” she had said, “another stamp for Adrian’s collection.”
Oliver had raised his brows.
“A prick of conscience from Minnie,” Clara had explained, indicating the Lettter. “There must have been a slackening in the assiduity of the court, or possibly a slight brush with the Colonel.”
The two men exchanged one of the amused glances which Clara’s tongue often evoked.
“Cat!” said Bob.
Clara’s eyes danced. “Yes,” she said, “where Minnie is concerned, I am a cat. I am fully aware of it and I am grateful to Minnie for the opportunity she provides. Minnie is my safety-valve. Or perhaps I’m a rat rather than a cat. Rats, you know, have to gnaw, willy-nilly, to keep their teeth in check: otherwise they grow so long and curly that they can’t eat with them and starve in consequence. That’s why one hears them frantically gnawing beams and timbers in the night. They don’t want to; it’s simply that they have to. It’s the same with me: so long as I can get my teeth into Minnie from time to time, I’m all right. Goodness knows what would happen to me if Minnie were to die.”
“Or to us,” remarked Bob.
Oliver glanced at Bob. “It’s obviously up to us, Bob, to keep The Baggage alive. What a paradox that we should owe our peace and good-humour to Minnie. We must surely be unique in that respect.”
Clara smiled with grim relish. “No doubt it would astound Colonel Clandon to be told of it.”
Adrian was silent and preoccupied after breakfast. He was conscious of the letter in his pocket, and was wondering how soon he could get away by himself and read it. Clara’s belief, which on the previous evening she had expressed in the drawing-room, that he was merely bored and puzzled by his mother’s letters and had almost forgotten her was, like other of her rapid and summary conclusions, quite false. He recalled her vividly with a tantalised and thwarted longing and each letter stirred in him a flicker of hope that she would come to him or send for him and that he would find in her, at last, all that he desired. When he left her letters about, as Clara had reported, it was not because he was bored by them, but because his eagerness had again been met by the inevitable disappointment and perplexity.
Before long he found an opportunity to slink away to his bedroom, and there, having carefully shut the door, he took the letter out of his pocket and opened it. “My own lamb,” he read. “Why have I not heard from you for so long? The months go by, but the postman, horrid man, never brings me a letter from my child. Can he have forgotten his Mummy all these hundreds and thousands of miles away in a strange country? Are your holidays over yet, I wonder, or not yet begun? I never can remember the dates and I can’t find your last letter. No doubt you will go to Yarn as usual. I wrote a long letter to Aunt Clara weeks and weeks ago and not a word have I had in reply. That is the worst of living abroad, every one forgets you, even your nearest and dearest, even my own little Adrian. Well, my dear child, I have no time for more at present. You have no idea how fearfully busy Mummy is. Fondest love and a kiss.”
Having read it through, he lingered for a moment staring vaguely at the letter; then, with a little sigh, he laid it on the dressing-table and, with a sudden change of mood, turned, walked alertly to the door, and went downstairs.
In the afternoon Clara and Bob drove out to call on friends, and Adrian and his grandfather were left together. Adrian had accompanied his uncle and aunt to the garage, and as he watched them drive away he felt a sudden misgiving. It was a little disconcerting to be left alone with his grandfather; and he had strolled out of the stable-yard and, turning away from the house, had prowled about the grounds, following a path through a dark, mysterious shrubbery which ended at a door in a wall. The door was open, and Adrian, peeping inside, discovered the kitchen-garden. A man was digging at the far end of it, so Adrian avoided that end, and, taking a straight path that led to some greenhouses, he went to the door of each in turn and, pressing his nose against the glass, inspected the contents. He did not dare to go inside: the opening and shutting of the glass doors would make a noise and perhaps attract the attention of the gardener. Still following the path, he came to another door in the wall: by this he went out, and soon found himself in a pleasant square of lawn enclosed by trees and shrubs and with a fountain in the middle of it and, at the far end, a glass-fronted summerhouse facing the afternoon sun. He crossed the grass and went to inspect the fountain, holding out his hand to catch the drops. It fascinated him, and he stood there for a long time watching it and from time to time putting his hand into the shower. Sometimes the breeze blew it sideways and it streamed out on to the grass like a silver horse-tail. When he had had enough of the fountain, he crossed the grass to the summerhouse. He glanced cautiously into the entrance, and was startled to see his grandfather sitting there with a pencil in his hand and a little writing-pad on his knees. With a little “Oh!” he was on the point of retreating, but his grandfather’s voice stopped him.
“Don’t go, Adrian.”
“I … I thought perhaps … you were busy.”
“So I was, but I shall be very glad to be interrupted. You see, I wasn’t getting along very well.”
“Were you writing a poem?” asked Adrian, feeling that he was being rather personal.
“I was trying to,” said Oliver, “but it won’t start. They don’t always start when you want them to, you know.”
“No, I suppose not,” said Adrian. He stood therewith his hands in his trouser-pockets, shyly treading on one foot with the other. He hoped that his grandfather would pursue the subject. But for a while the old man said nothing: he seemed to be thinking, and next moment Adrian, blushing at his own boldness, asked: “What was it about?”
“It’s about a Chinese sage—a wise man, you know,” said his grandfather, “who was oppressed by the feeling that one never really gets to know anything of the things we see around us—things such as human beings, mountains, birds, beasts, water, rocks, and so on. We know something about them all, he said to himself, but we don’t really know them. There is always some final barrier. We know, for instance, that water is transparent and wet and thirst-quenching and made up of two parts of hydrogen to one of oxygen, but we can never say what it is, never know all there is to know about it. We remain apart from it, baffled, somehow, of true experience of it.”
“Yes, I’ve felt that,” said Adrian, sitting down in a basket-chair beside his grandfather. “We know all about them but we can’t ever get at them.”
“That’s it. You’ve seen what I’m driving at. Well, this poem of mine is going to be a sort of parable made out of that idea. The old Chinee resolves that he will seek patiently for knowledge, real knowledge, of one thing in the world. If he could really get to know even one thing only, he would, he felt, be content. In fact, he half suspected that if he did get to know this one thing completely, he would discover that he had got to know everything—that he had found the key, I mean.”
“Yes, I see,” said Adrian. “I like the story.”
“Well, this old Chinee chose water as the door through which he would attain to knowledge; and he went off into the mountains where there was a lonely lake and built himself a little hut on the edge of it. The lake was cupped in a circle of mountain-tops and was fed by waterfalls that tumbled from their rocky sides. And all day long the old man studied the water, watching and touching the waterfalls as you were doing to the fountain there just now, putting his hands into the lake, and sometimes even flinging off his cloak and diving headlong into it. And he would spend whole days and nights imagining himself to be water, water lying calm and passive under a blue sky or a cloudy sky or a starry sky, still water reflecting all above it and around it and darkly revealing all within it, water with all its glassy skin ruffled by wind or pitted by rain-drops, water wavering out from a centre into widening, undulating circles when a stone is dropped into it, water abandoning itself to leap after leap down cliffs, flinging itself without shrinking or hesitating against stones and rocks and shattering into thousands of drops, each drop having a shape perfect and unique in accordance with the speed and direction in which it is moving; water evaporating, drying, steaming up into the air, giving up its being to another state of being, and turning again into its former being and dropping down through great heights of air to the earth. So he spent his days.
And one day when he was leaning from the window of his hut and gazing intently into the lake, he saw, deep down in the gloomy crystal of the water, a passing of slim ghosts. It was a shoal of fish. They passed and repassed, moving with an unhurrying perfection of motion which entranced him. It was as if the water itself had taken on bodily life in shapes that perfectly expressed its nature.
Then he saw that among these shadowy shapes was one smaller and more lovely than the others, a creature that seemed to be made from the frail rainbow stuff of which bubbles are made, and he knew that this fish was the Genius of the Water, that it was water become alive. And he knew that if only he could tame this fish, not capture it by force or guile, but take it by its own desire, he would come at the knowledge which he sought.
So the old man went away and collected the proper tools for what he had decided to do, and first he set about hewing out of the mountain-side a great rough block of crystal. For days and weeks and months he hewed, till at last, at a final blow from his hammer and chisel, the great block broke away from the mountain-side and went bounding down to the edge of the lake. And there the old man set himself to carve it into a crystal tank, a tank, that should be so transparent and so beautifully wrought that it should be worthy of the Genius of the Water. Slowly and patiently he worked at the block, and months went past and years, and at last he had hollowed it out and polished it till it caught the rays of the sun and shattered them into a hundred rainbow lights. Then, binding ropes round it, he lowered it carefully into the lake, and for the rest of the day he leaned from his window gazing down into the water.
And towards evening the shoal of fish came sliding, dim and arrowy, through the dark water, and among them was the Genius of the Water faintly shining like a delicate slip of rainbow. And the shoal curved suddenly towards the tank and swam three times round the edge of it, while the old man watched from above, breathless with hope. But when they had completed the third circle, with a sudden flick of their tails they curved sideways and vanished into the dimness.
Then the old Chinee knew that his tank was not yet worthy, and he hauled it up again, and for months and years he carved and polished it until it had become like the finest glass. Then again he lowered it with ropes into the lake and watched.
And again the shoal of fish came in the evening, and they swam three times round the lip of the tank, but this time the Genius of the Water dived suddenly over the lip and, followed by the rest, swam three times round the inside of the tank, while the old man leaned staring from his window, trembling with hope.
But having swum three times round the inside of the tank, the fishes with a sudden spiral curve slipped out of it and vanished again into the dimness of the lake. But the old Chinee patiently hauled up his tank again, and again for many months and years he worked upon it, grinding and polishing it till it was as thin as the frailest shell, and he carved upon its walls the shapes of trailing water-weeds and the leaves and flowers of water-lilies.
The crystal tank was now so marvellously fine and frail and perfect that its walls were no thicker than the walls of a bubble, and it was so light and so fragile that it was no longer necessary nor safe to bind ropes about it. But the old man flung off his cloak and with infinite care took it in his arms and waded into the water. And the water crept up to his navel and then to his chest, and then to his shoulders and neck, and then it closed over his head. And holding his breath he waded on, till, stooping down, he set the precious tank in its place. Then, stretching out his arms and clapping them suddenly to his sides, he shot upwards to the surface of the lake and swam ashore. And, hurrying to his cabin, he leaned out of the window and watched.
When he had watched for several hours he became aware of a shadowy movement in the water, and the shoal of fish took shape out of the dimness of the water, and the Genius of the Water was among them. And, as before, they swam three times round the outside of the tank and three times round the inside, and then with a sudden dart aside they slipped over the rim and away into the dark water. And the old man’s heart sank, for he was now very old and very weary and his bodily strength and his hope were almost at an end. And he peered down again upon the tank, wondering how it would be possible to make it more perfect; but when his eyes had found it they were caught by a sudden rainbow glimmer within it, and, trembling with delight he saw that, though the other fishes were gone, the Genius of the Water was still there, swimming slowly and quietly round the inside of the tank. Then, rushing out of his hut and flinging off his cloak, he dived into the lake, and before the circles made by his leap had spent themselves, his head rose again above the surface of the lake and he waded out carrying the precious tank. And there, more beautiful than anything that can be imagined, was the Genius of the Water swimming slowly and quietly round.
The old Chinee set the tank in his hut, and it stood there between the four wooden walls like a great crystal moon. Then the Genius of the Water began to swim swiftly round and round. Swifter and swifter it whirled, until at last it was invisible and the tank held only a shining whirlpool of water.
Then the old Chinee got his cup and ladled out some of the water and drank it; and as he drank there entered into him perfect wisdom, so that he knew and understood everything. But however much he drew from the tank, to quench his thirst or wash his body or cool his head in the summer-time, the tank never grew empty, but remained always a little whirlpool of living water drawn from some deep and unquenchable spring.”
“And did the old Chinee die in the end?” asked Adrian, waking up as if from a dream.
“No,” said his grandfather, “the old man, according to the story, never died.”
“And what does it mean?” Adrian asked.
“It means just what it says,” replied his grandfather.
“But doesn’t it mean something else too?”
“It is a poem, and so, like all poems, it means a great many things. It means whatever you can find in it, but whatever it means cannot be more clearly said than it is said in the poem. After all, it’s quite a clear story, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Adrian,” and when you come to think of it, it would be rather a bother, wouldn’t it, to hunt out the other meanings.”
“Yes. So long as you know they’re there, you don’t want to hunt them out, just as you don’t want to shoot all the birds in this garden so as to be able to count them up and prove they were really here.”
Adrian laughed and then was silent. His grandfather rose from his chair, “I’m beginning to feel as if it were tea-time, aren’t you?” he said. “Shall we go and see?”
“Well,” said Adrian as they walked back together through the shrubbery, “I hope you manage to write the poem.”
Tea was ready, and as they sat down Stock brought in the teapot and a plate of buttered toast; and to Oliver, looking across the tea-table at the small, neat, brighteyed boy sitting opposite him, it seemed once again as if the last twenty-three years had shrunk to nothing and Sandy was sitting there again.
As if in response to that dream, Adrian raised his eyes and said: “Sometimes Father and I used to have tea alone together.”
“Your father? But …” For a moment the old man was bewildered. Then his mind righted itself. No, Sandy was no longer here: he was dead. But he was here, none the less, in the boy’s heart and in his own heart too—the three of them alone together.
“And you liked that?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Adrian with conviction.
“Better than …?”
“Better than when Mother was there?” The boy paused for a moment with a wistful inward gaze. “Yes,” he said, “best of all. But it didn’t happen very often.”
“And what did you talk about at those teas?”
“Oh, everything. We always had lots to talk about. I don’t remember what it was. We just talked, you know.”
The old man nodded. “Yes, that is the best kind of talk, isn’t it? When you just talk without knowing why, like birds singing. Sandy and I used to talk like that.”
“Here, I suppose,” said Adrian.
“Yes, here. He often sat where you are sitting now. He and I often had tea alone together. You see, your Aunt Clara was seven years older than your father, and she and your grandmother would be out together sometimes paying calls, and he and I would be left to ourselves.”
The old man paused, dreaming to himself. Then he said: “You’re very like what your father was as a boy.”
Adrian looked up, blushing a little. “Me?” he said. “I never knew I was like Father. I’m … I’m very glad.” In his mind had risen once more the memory of that occasion on which he and his father had had tea alone together after his mother had rushed from the house in a rage. Why was she like that? She had rushed away from them that day, but it didn’t much matter then, because he had had his father whom he loved more, much more than his mother; but after his father had gone to France and never come back, his heart had fixed itself entirely upon her, and it hurt and bewildered him that she still ran away from him, avoided him, kept him at arm’s length when he longed to get at her. What was it that was so strange and unreliable about her? He had never been able to understand it.
He looked across the tea-table at his grandfather and said: “Aunt Clara doesn’t like Mother, does she?”
He saw his grandfather’s face change. Something which had been there the moment before went out of it. For a moment he did not reply. “Well, you see,” he began at last, “they are so different. You can’t expect people so different to be great friends.”
“But Mother likes her.”
“Do you think she does?”
Adrian nodded. Then, as if a sudden doubt had assailed him, he added: “Well, I think she does.” Then he asked: “Do you like Mother?”
The question troubled the old man. He wished neither to tell the boy a lie nor to pain him by the truth. “I used to feel angry with her,” he said, after a pause, “because I thought she behaved badly to your father.”
“Yes, she did,” said Adrian with a brightness of tears in his eyes.
“But it’s different for you, of course,” said Oliver, “because she’s your mother and you love her, don’t you?”
“Yes,” the boy replied simply, and then added after a moment’s consideration, “at least I want to, but it seems as if she wouldn’t let me.”
The old man could not resist his desire to be assured that the boy preferred his father. “But you were happiest of all,” he asked, “when you and your father were alone together?”
“Yes, it was lovely then,” answered Adrian with a glow in his voice. “And sometimes, but only very seldon, Mother went away on a visit, and we were together for days and days. We had splendid times then.”
Oliver smiled gently. “I’m sure you had,” he said.
“But it was wretched when Father went away, because then I was left alone.”
“Yes, but not so much as when Father was at home. She was nearly always out to tea when Father was away, and often out to lunch too. It was almost as if she was away too, when he was. And it was the same after he was killed in France. She was out a great deal, and when she was in, Miss Cotton said she was too upset to have me bothering her. Of course I wouldn’t have bothered her really. After all, I was seven years old then. And then of course she went away to the South of France.”
“And you went to school?”
“Yes, and to Aunt Clara and Uncle Bob for the holidays.”
“Yes, she ran away from it,” thought the old man to himself, “just as I did. I was no better. The only difference between us was that she ran to the South of France and I to the south of Spain. We both ran away from doing the only thing that would have been of any use.
“And so you had a sad time of it at first, old man,” he said to the boy.
Adrian smiled. “Father used to call me Old Man,” he said.
“I hope you’ll be like your father when you grow up,” said Oliver. “Your father did things instead of sitting still and thinking about them like the rest of us, or, worse still, running away from them because we daren’t so much as think about them. When the war broke out and everybody thought that England was in danger, your father didn’t sit still and chatter as we did. He simply joined the army, so as to be ready to meet the danger when it came. And it was the same when he was killed. Did you ever hear how he died?”
Adrian shook his head.
“Well, it was in the middle of a big advance. The Germans had built great concrete forts which we used to call pill-boxes, in which they put machine-guns. The pill-boxes were so strong that our shells had little effect on them, and one of these pill-boxes was in front of your father’s company and was holding up their advance. They had sent messages to the artillery to try to get our guns to destroy the pill-box, but the guns—they were only eighteen pounders—couldn’t manage it, and time was precious. So your father and a sergeant volunteered to do it themselves, and they did it. They ran out, carrying a bomb or two, right in the teeth of the machinegun fire; the sergeant was hit before they were half-way there, but by a miracle your father reached the pill-box. They saw him throw a bomb into the entrance, they heard it explode, and then they saw him vanish into the entrance. Then there was another explosion. After that the pill-box was silent. Our men went forward, and when, a minute or two later, they reached it they found everyone inside it dead.”
“And Father too?”
“Yes, your father too. He didn’t stop to talk and think, you see. He saw there was something quite simple to be done, so he went and did it. His Colonel told me that what he did certainly saved the lives of many of our men, besides clearing the way for the advance at a very critical moment. Your father didn’t like war: he hated it. But he did the best thing he could have done, once the war had started. He didn’t cry over spilt milk as some of us did: he simply set about cleaning it up. When I think of myself and thousands of other people sitting about the world in chairs, chattering like magpies, or everlastingly scribbling, or, worse still, thinking and thinking, round and round like empty windmills…”
The old man broke off with a sudden savage gesture, and with a deep sigh rose from the tea-table.
Within a few days of his arrival at Abbot’s Randale, Adrian had lost all fear of his grandfather and they had become great friends. The old man showed him the room which had been his father’s nursery, the bedroom he had had as a boy and a young man, the gun he had used as a boy, the one and a half pound trout he had caught at the age of sixteen and insisted on having stuffed and mounted in a glass case, and the pictures he had painted at various times of his childhood. And he took Adrian into his study and showed him treasures of his own: an ancient Chinese carving in flame-coloured jade of a horse lying down, its head alertly raised as if at a sudden noise; a pebble of opal as big as a walnut; a little vellum-bound book with jewelled clasps which had belonged to Mary Queen of Scots; a silver and enamel triptych of Byzantine workmanship, minute and gay as the illuminated page of a missal, and an ebony snuff-box inlaid with gold and silver which, his grandfather told him, was said to have belonged to the poet Pope. Adrian opened it: it was empty, but it gave out a queer, spicy smell like gingerbread. And after showing him all these things, the old man had taken him over to what seemed to be a coffin of polished and inlaid mahogany, set on a stand near the windows, and, opening a lid in its side, had revealed a small keyboard, the ivories worn hollow and tawny with age, the satinwood panel behind the keys inlaid with garlands of mother-o’pearl, and on a pearl shield in the centre the date 1775. On the wall above it in a black and silver frame hung a grim little picture in black. It was, it appeared, a portrait of a corpse, a gaunt, grinning, bearded face, hooded in grave clothes which were tied in an absurd topknot on the top of the head. Under it was written John Donne. Having studied it in horrified fascination for a moment, Adrian glanced down at the little piano again.
“Docs it play?” he asked, delighted: and, for answer, Oliver sat down, and a sweet, wiry sound, like the sound of a musical box, awoke under his touch.
Adrian loved music, and this music held him bewitched. “I know that,” he said when the piece was finished; “that’s Handel.”
The old man turned and looked at him. “So you like music, do you?” he said, smiling with pleasure at the discovery. “Can you play yourself?”
“I can’t play real pieces,” said Adrian, “but I play to myself. Mrs. Winser—our head-master’s wife, you know—said I might play on their piano when they were out, because she knew I wanted to. She plays to us on Sunday evenings. She’s very good. She plays Beethoven and Handel and Mozart and Chopin and … and lots of other things too.”
“And does she give you lessons?”
“She gives me one sometimes, because she knows I’m so keen on music, but I don’t really have lessons, you know.”
“Would you like to?”
Adrian’s face lit up. “Yes!” he said, as if he were being offered a priceless gift.
“Then you shall,” said his grandfather. “We’ll arrange for you to start next term. Meanwhile you can play on this, whenever you feel like it. Just come in and start off. Don’t bother about me, if I’m here. If I’m working and don’t want you to play, I’ll just say so. I’ll say’ Sorry, I’m busy!’ and you can go away and try again later.”
And so during the rest of his visit Adrian played a great deal on the funny little piano: not a day passed on which he did not steal into the study and play over the four pieces he had invented during the last year at Waldo; and he invented other pieces too, which seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful. Often as he played he glanced up at the grim, fascinating face of John Donne that hung on the wall almost on a level with his eyes. He was shy at first when he found his grandfather there, but the old man seemed so absorbed in a book or in writing letters that Adrian soon came to feel that he did not so much as hear him, and never suspected until just before the end of the holidays that he had been slyly listening. It was one afternoon when Adrian had finished playing and had just closed the lid of the piano. His grandfather, who was sitting at his desk, called to him. “Here,” he said, “here’s something for you.”
Adrian took the sheets of music-paper which his grandfather was handing to him and glanced at the outer page. On it was written in a beautiful script, surrounded by scrolls and flourishes: “Four Pieces for the Piano, by Adrian Glynde.”
As he stared, still puzzled, at the page, his grandfather took the manuscript from him, went to the piano, and to Adrian’s astonishment and delight played his own four pieces to him.