It was so easy to become worldly. The implication, of course, was that Aunt Judith and Uncle Jack had been tainted by worldliness. Poverty had happily preserved the Claxtons from the danger—poverty, and also, Martha insisted, their own meritorious wish. For of course they could have afforded to keep at least one servant, even in these difficult times; but they had preferred to do without, ‘because, you see, serving is better than being served.’ Jesus had said that the way of Mary was better than the way of Martha. ‘But I’m a Martha,’ said Martha Claxton, ‘who tries her best to be a Mary too. Martha and Mary—that’s the best way of all. Practical service and contemplation.
Your father isn’t one of those artists who selfishly detach themselves from all contact with the humble facts of life. He is a creator, but he is not too proud to do the humblest service.’ Poor Herbert! he couldn’t have refused to do the humblest service, if Martha had commanded. Some artists, Martha continued, only thought of immediate success, only worked with an eye to profits and applause. But Sylvia’s father, on the contrary, was one who worked without thought of the public, only for the sake of creating truth and beauty.
On Sylvia’s mind these and similar discourses, constantly repeated with variations and in every emotional key, had a profound effect. With all the earnestness of puberty she desired to be good and spiritual and disinterested, she longed to sacrifice herself, it hardly mattered to what so long as the cause was noble. Her mother had now provided her with the cause. She gave herself up to it with all the stubborn energy of her nature. How fiercely she practised her piano! With what determination she read through even the dreariest books! She kept a notebook in which she copied out the most inspiring passages of her daily reading; and another in which she recorded her good resolutions, and with them, in an agonized and chronically remorseful diary, her failures to abide by the resolutions, her lapses from grace. ‘Greed. Promised I’d eat only one greengage. Took four at lunch. None tomorrow. O.G.H.M.T.B.G.’
‘What does O.G.H.M.T.B.G. mean?’ asked Paul maliciously one day.
Sylvia flushed darkly ‘You’ve been reading my diary!’ she said. ‘Oh, you beast, you little beast.’ And suddenly she threw herself on her brother like a fury. His nose was bleeding when he got away from her. ‘If you ever look at it again, I’ll kill you.’ And standing there with her clenched teeth and quivering nostrils, her hair flying loose round her pale face, she looked as though she meant it. ‘I’ll kill you,’ she repeated. Her rage was justified; O.G.H.M.T.B.G. meant ‘O God, help me to be good.’
That evening she came to Paul and asked his pardon.
Aunt Judith and Uncle Jack had been in America for the best part of a year.
‘Yes, go; go by all means,’ Martha had said when Judith’s letter came, inviting Sylvia to spend a few days with them in London. ‘You mustn’t miss such a chance of going to the opera and all those lovely concerts.’
‘But is it quite fair, mother?’ said Sylvia hesitatingly. ‘I mean, I don’t want to go and enjoy myself all alone. It seems somehow . . .’
‘But you ought to go,’ Martha interrupted her. She felt so certain of Sylvia now that she had no fears of Judith. ‘For a musician like you it’s a necessity to hear Parsifal and the Magic Flute. I was meaning to take you myself next year; but now the opportunity has turned up this year, you must take it. Gratefully,’ she added, with a sweetening of her smile.
Sylvia went. Parsifal was like going to church, but much more so. Sylvia listened with a reverent excitement that was, however, interrupted from time to time by the consciousness, irrelevant, ignoble even, but oh, how painful! that her frock, her stockings, her shoes were dreadfully different from those worn by that young girl of her own age, whom she had noticed in the row behind as she came in. And the girl, it had seemed to her, had returned her gaze derisively. Round the Holy Grail there was an explosion of bells and harmonious roaring. She felt ashamed of herself for thinking of such unworthy things in the presence of the mystery. And when, in the entr’acte, Aunt Judith offered her an ice, she refused almost indignantly.
Aunt Judith was surprised. ‘But you used to love ices so much.’
‘But not now, Aunt Judith. Not now.’ An ice in church—what sacrilege! She tried to think about the Grail. A vision of green satin shoes and a lovely mauve artificial flower floated up before her inward eye.
Next day they went shopping. It was a bright cloudless morning of early summer. The windows of the drapers’ shops in Oxford Street had blossomed with bright pale colours. The waxen dummies were all preparing to go to Ascot, to Henley, were already thinking of the Eton and Harrow match. The pavements were crowded; an immense blurred noise filled the air like a mist. The scarlet and golden buses looked regal and the sunlight glittered with a rich and oily radiance on the polished flanks of the passing limousines. A little procession of unemployed slouched past with a brass band at their head making joyful music, as though they were only too happy to be unemployed, as though it were a real pleasure to be hungry.
Sylvia had not been in London for nearly two years, and these crowds, this noise, this innumerable wealth of curious and lovely things in every shining window went to her head. She felt even more excited than she had felt at Parsifal.
For an hour they wandered through Selfridge’s. ‘And now, Sylvia,’ said Aunt Judith, when at last she had ticked off every item on her long list, ‘now you can choose whichever of these frocks you like best.’ She waved her hand. A display of Summer Modes for Misses surrounded them on every side. Lilac and lavender, primrose and pink and green, blue and mauve, white, flowery, spotted—a sort of herbaceous border of young frocks. ‘Whichever you like,’ Aunt Judith repeated. ‘Or if you’d prefer a frock for the evening . . . .’
Green satin shoes and a big mauve flower. The girl had looked derisively. It was unworthy, unworthy.
‘No, really, Aunt Judith.’ She blushed, she stammered. ‘Really, I don’t need a frock. Really.’
‘All the more reason for having it if you don’t need it. Which one?’
‘No, really. I don’t, I can’t . . .’ And suddenly, to Aunt Judith’s uncomprehending astonishment, she burst into tears.
The year was 1924. The house on the common basked in the soft late-April sunshine. Through the open windows of the drawing-room came the sound of Sylvia’s practising. Stubbornly, with a kind of fixed determined fury, she was trying to master Chopin’s Valse in D flat. Under her conscientious and insensitive fingers the lilt and languor of the dance rhythm was laboriously sentimental, like the rendering on the piano of a cornet solo outside a public house; and the quick flutter of semiquavers in the contrasting passages was a flutter, when Sylvia played, of mechanical butterflies, a beating of nickel-plated wings. Again and again she played, again and again. In the little copse on the other side of the stream at the bottom of the garden the birds went about their business undisturbed. On the trees the new small leaves were like the spirits of leaves, almost immaterial, but vivid like little flames at the tip of every twig.
Herbert was sitting on a tree stump in the middle of the wood doing those yoga breathing exercises, accompanied by autosuggestion, which he found so good for his constipation. Closing his right nostril with a long forefinger, he breathed in deeply through his left—in, in, deeply, while he counted four heart-beats.
Then through sixteen beats he held his breath and between each beat he said to himself very quickly, ‘I’m not constipated, I’m not constipated.’ When he had made the affirmation sixteen times, he closed his left nostril and breathed out, while he counted eight, through his right. After which he began again. The left nostril was the more favoured; for it breathed in with the air a faint cool sweetness of primroses and leaves and damp earth. Near him, on a camp stool, Paul was making a drawing of an oak tree. Art at all costs; beautiful, uplifting, disinterested Art. Paul was bored. Rotten old tree—what was the point of drawing it? All round him the sharp green spikes of the wild hyacinths came thrusting out of the dark mould. One had pierced through a dead leaf and lifted it, transfixed, into the air.
A few more days of sunshine and every spike would break out into a blue flower. Next time his mother sent him into Godalming on his bicycle, Paul was thinking, he’d see if he couldn’t
