Mrs. Rylands had been back in Casa Terragena two days before the succession of little notes and cards from Philip was broken by a considerable letter again, this time a whale of letter, opening with a long account of the return of the prophet Sempack to his own home. This account seemed to have been written some days ago; the handwriting and paper were different from those of the latter sheets.
It presented that large untidy person in his own distinctive setting. Philip’s curt, clumsy and occasionally incisive sentences, breaking now and then into a new-won fluency, portrayed Sempack like a big but prostrate note of interrogation, lying athwart the whole world. He had been rather more hurt it seemed than the doctors had at first supposed. There was a troublesome displacement of a wrist bone and there was something splintered at the end of a rib. Philip had had to wait longer than he had expected while X-ray examinations and a minor operation were carried out, and he had taken the great man down not in his own Talbot but in a special ambulance car to his home in Dorsetshire.
Philip was evidently surprised by Sempack’s home. “I had expected something very ordinary, something like a small, square, serious house taken out of Clapham, with a rather disagreeable and unwilling housekeeper,” he wrote, “but as a matter of fact he has done himself extremely well. In a compact but very pretty way.” Apparently it was a house built specially for its occupant on the slopes and near the crest of the long hill that runs between Corfe and Studland; Brenscombe Hill said the notepaper. “There are no other houses about there, which is like him somehow, and also along the hogsback above him there are groups of tumuli, which is also in a way characteristic. He always straddles back to pre-history. If ever the man picked up a flint implement he would do so as if he had just dropped it.”
The house was small but lined with books, it spread itself to the light, and the hill and a group of trees checked the burly assaults of the south-west wind. He worked before a big plate-glass window with a veranda outside, facing north of the sunrise. “It’s got a tremendous view. Stretches of heath and then the tidal flats of Poole Harbour, blue razors of sea cutting their way through green weed-banks and grey mud-banks to Poole and Wareham and tumbled bits of New Forest to the north; with Bournemouth and its satellites low and flat across the waters, lighting up in the twilight. It is like old Sempack to have a window with a view that goes away into distance beyond distance for miles and miles and which has differences of climate, clouds or sluggish mists here and sunshine there. ‘I can see thunderstorms gather and showers pass,’ he told me, ‘as if they were animals wandering across a field.’
“There’s a Mrs. Siddon, a sort of housekeeper who can typewrite on occasion, a woman with an interesting face and a quiet way with her — over something that smoulders. Evidently she adores him. She has the instincts of a good nurse. There is a charming little girl of ten or twelve about the place, with whom Sempack is on the best of terms, who belongs to her. Sempack vouchsafed no explanations, but I have a sort of feeling that behind the housekeeper is a story. Though he said nothing, she dropped a phrase or so. It distressed and moved her, more than it would move anyone who was just a common or garden paid servant, to get him back in a broken condition. She liked me from the outset because it was so plain I cared for him, and in the emotion of the occasion her natural reserve gave way a little. She has some tremendous cause for gratitude to him. She was ripe for confidences, but I thought it wasn’t my business to provoke them. I guess and infer that somewhen she had ‘done something,’ something pretty serious, I could imagine even a law court and something penal — just a phrase or so of hers for that — and he had fished her out of the mess she was left in and treated her like any other honourable individual. Put her on her feet when she was down and said nothing much about doing it. That may be all imagination on my part, but anyhow our Sempack has a home, which I never suspected; is extremely comfortable, which is still less what I thought; is tenderly looked after and sits among a loveliness, an English loveliness of rain and green and grey and soft sunlight, which in its way is almost as lovely as the glorious blaze, the stony magnificence, the vigour and strength of colour of dear old Terragena.
“I stayed three nights there and I may go down there again if it can be squeezed in before I come back to you. He can’t write much. He’s one-armed and one-handed for a time. He’s rigged up on a comfortable couch before his big window and he lies watching the late English spring turn into the mild English summer. A pocket-handkerchief garden is foreground, and then comes all that space. This accident of his, the inaction that is necessary, and the other things that have happened to him recently and the way social and political things are going in the world seem all to have conspired to make him turn upon himself and his life and ask himself a lot of new questions. Like the questions we are all asking ourselves. He put it himself better than I can put it. He compared it to travellers going up into big mountains. For a long time you see the road far ahead, plain and sure. Then almost suddenly you realise that there is a deep valley, a gorge perhaps, you never expected. You come out upon it and you look down, and you lose heart.”
Philip, his wife reflected, was learning to write and learning very rapidly. This would have been impossible a few weeks ago. Quick wits he had when he gave them a chance. He had evidently been reading widely and the uncertainty of his spelling was vanishing. All his latent memories of the look of words were reviving. There must be thousands of people, she reflected, who needed only sufficient stimulation to be released in this fashion from the sort of verbal anchylosis that had kept him inexpressive.
He went off into the question of Sempack’s love affair with Lady Catherine. A note of wonder that anything so mature and ungainly could think of passionate love appeared in what he wrote. “We walk, my dear Cynna, in a world of marvels unsuspected. It is only now that I begin to realise that people of fifty or sixty even, may still fall in love. And be horribly mortified when it doesn’t come off.” Much more did Philip marvel that anyone could fall in love with Lady Catherine. It threw a new light on Cynthia’s world for her to read her husband’s unaffected astonishment that this marvellously lovely person could captivate anyone. “He must be blind,” wrote Philip, “to things that are as plain as one-times-one-is-one, to me.” The young man went on with a lucidity that was bracingly brutal. “I cannot imagine anyone loving her. I can’t imagine anyone making love to her honestly. Lots of us, Cynna dear, can make love to all sorts of women, and the game is so attractive that there is a certain effort needed not to wander down that bye way. But I mean loving her for good and keeps and both ways. I can’t imagine that.”
Just as well, she reflected, for husband and wife to be perfectly frank and open about these things.
“But Catherine doesn’t want love or even good honest lust; she wants drivelling mutual exaggeration. ‘You and I be heroine and hero’ sort of business. She’s got nothing to give anyone but the sensations of being dressed up as Richard C?ur de Lion in a fancy dress ball. You couldn’t even laugh with her. She was made up by Nature and painted when she was born. Not a natural endearment. Not a shadow of tenderness. Pose and swagger. Love in a glare. She and her transmogrified Armenian, Fearon-Owen, pretending to be a lofty British aristocrat, are a fair match. Their great moments are when they come into rooms where there are a lot of people. Conspicuous is the climax. If she couldn’t be a whore she’d be a hoarding. So as to be looked at. What a man of Sempack’s quality can see in her beats me altogether. What did he see in her? I don’t believe he ever saw her. I believe she just stripped for action and threw herself at him and he saw something he had very properly forgotten for years, highly illuminated by the Italian sun — the female of the species. And he fell right back among the elements from which we all arose, strutted, started off to crow. And lo! the hen wasn’t looking any longer.”
Philip was shrewd there, his wife thought, and what followed seemed still shrewder.
“He was at loose ends with his work and worried about the state of the world, and active imaginations in distress fall back upon love affairs just as nervous, under-vitalised people fall back upon brandy. He was exposed to her. She went through the motions of falling in love with him; and as no one else, or at any rate no one else in her class of conspicuous beauty had ever gone through those motions at him before, I suppose it came to him as a tremendous reminder of things he’d put away out of his thoughts for ages. She humbugged him, to be plain about it, that he had made a conquest. To pass the time while she quarrelled with Fearon-Owen. And as a sort of revenge and consolation against Fearon-Owen. She lifted him up and then she heard Fearon-Owen whistle and she let him down, and his humiliation has been immense. Immense. His feelings are as slow and as massive as he is. I have things he has said to me to confirm these interpretations. They haven’t just sprung unbidden in my mind. ‘You are lucky,’ he said to me, praising you. ‘You are happy. You’ve got the personal thing in your life, the harbour of pride, safe and sure. It doesn’t come to us all.’ Then he fell back on his stock consolation just now. ‘Your danger,’ he said, ‘will be contentment. It is easier to attack great masses of work if one has a kind of hunger deep in one’s soul.’ And a little later, still envious, he said: ‘Everyone would like to play the part of the junior lead and be the happy lover. What is the good of hiding what we all desire? Every man, Rylands, dreams of being a lord of love. That is what we were built for in the beginning. Our endocrines cry out for it. Everything else is an adaptation and a perversion.’ Compensation! That was his great word. All vigorous scientific and literary work, he declared, was a ‘compensatory’ effort for what he called the ‘fundamental frustration’. He made a sort of melancholy joke about it and said that if we were going to make everyone healthy and happy and satisfied in the future we might have to create philosophers and savants by amputating a leg or forcing the spinal column into a curvature, or some such soul-awakening mutilation. All that is nonsense fundamentally, but it expressed his mood.
“Queer that so great a man should have to delude himself by such inventions. Queer to think how different we are, he and I. Surely I am as full of — what shall I call it? — public-spirited drive and get something big and general done, as he is. Surely I am. But I don’t see that I lead a thwarted disappointed personal life. I don’t see that as a bit necessary. Am I not a happy husband and a happy lover, and rich and free? Where do the elements of limitation and where does this necessity for sublimation and compensation appear in my case? He was just ill and sore enough, I fancy, to think only of himself and to ignore how things were with me. The truth is of course that he would be a philosopher and a pioneer of progressive ideas if he had never had a trace of humiliation in his life, if personally he had been as beloved and splendid as Solomon in all his glory. But the one thing comes in happily to nurse the wounds of the other. That is how it is with him.”
Mrs. Rylands put the letter down for a moment and thought. Then she looked at certain phases in the handwriting again. Did Philip get all his heart’s desire? Could he ever? How far was his life too now heading for restraint and self-suppression? Heart’s desire can be discursive and change from day to day. Should heart’s desire be imprisoned or left free to wander and return? She pulled up on the edge of a reverie and resumed her reading.
After all, Philip considered, this rather grotesque love disappointment and the collision with the omnibus were neither of them the main cause of Sempack’s troubled mind. They had merely tapped the ladened stratum and released the distress. The broader disappointment was the vast unanticipated valley of reaction that now yawned before him, before this confident preacher of Progress. Progress which had walked with such assurance, had hung arrested by the war and was now only staggering forward. “Has it ever occurred to you,” wrote Philip, “that Sempack could be an indolent man? He says he is. Immensely indolent? Did he say it to you? Probably he did because he harps on it so much. By saying it over repeatedly he has brought me some way to seeing him from his own point of view. To read, talk, discuss, write, to hear criticisms, discuss, read in new directions and write again, has been after all just the easiest line of living for him. Catherine it seems had chanced to get her fingers through exactly that joint in his armour. She taunted him with it when he was already troubled by doubts. His present illness is quite as much his dismay at the prospect of having to change his loose studious way of life for some new kind of exertion, hurry, disputes, dangers, etc., as it is either broken rib or broken heart. His main trouble is getting acclimatised to a new point of view.”
Philip and Sempack seemed to have talked for most of the time on that veranda that looked south of the sunrise. A phrase here and an allusion there conveyed the picture of Sempack sprawling ungainly, “l............