Flowering Wilderness

“Aunt Em,” said Di

“So wise! Lawrence, tell Michael that. Blore! Give Miss Di

Di

In the taxi for Paddington she had such a vivid vision of Wilfrid, alone, with this hanging over him, that she very nearly leaned out to say: “Cork Street.” The cab turned a corner. Praed Street? Yes, it would be! All the worry in the world came from the conflict of love against love. If only her people didn’t love her, and she them, how simple things would be!

A porter was saying: “Any luggage, Miss?”

“None, thank you.” As a little girl she had always meant to marry a porter! That was before her music master came from Oxford. He had gone off to the war when she was ten. She bought a magazine and took her seat in the train. But she was very tired and lay back in her corner of the third-class carriage; railway travelling was a severe tax on her always slender purse. With head tilted, she went to sleep.

When she alighted from the train there was a nearly full moon, and the night was blowy and sweet-smelling. She would have to walk. It was light enough to take the short cut, and she climbed the first stile into the field path. She thought of the night, nearly two years ago, when she came back by this train with the news of Hubert’s release and found her father sitting up, grey and worn, in his study, and how years had seemed to drop off him when she told him the good news. And now she had news that must grieve him. It was her father she really dreaded facing. Her mother, yes! Mother, though gentle, was stubborn; but women had not the same hard-and-fast convictions about what was not ‘done’ as men. Hubert? In old days she would have minded him most. Curious how lost he was to her! Hubert would be dreadfully upset. He was rigid in his views of what was ‘the game.’ Well! she could bear his disapproval. But Father! It seemed so unfair to him, after his forty years of hard service!

A brown owl floated from the hedge over to some stacks. These moony nights were owl-nights, and there would be the screams of captured victims, so dreadful in the night-time. Yet who could help liking owls, their blunt soft floating flight, their measured stirring calls? The next stile led her on to their own land. There was a linhay in this field where her father’s old charger sheltered at night. Was it Plutarch or Pliny who had said: ‘For my part I would not sell even an old ox who had laboured for me’? Nice man! Now that the sound of the train had died away it was very quiet: only the brushing of a little wind on young leaves, and the stamp of old Kismet’s foot in the linhay. She crossed a second field and came to the narrow tree-trunk bridge. The night’s sweetness was like the feeling always within her now. She crossed the plank and slipped in among the apple-trees. They seemed to live brightly between her and the moving, moonlit, wind-brushed sky. They seemed to breathe, almost to be singing in praise at the unfolding of their blossoms. They were lit in a thousand shapes of whitened branches, and all beautiful, as if someone had made each with a rapt and moonstruck pleasure and brightened it with starshine. And this had been done in here each spring for a hundred years and more. The whole world seemed miraculous on a night like this, but always the yearly miracle of the apple blooming was to Di

Across the low-walled fruit garden and lawn she came to the terrace. Past eleven! Only her father’s study window lighted on the ground floor! How like that other night!

‘Shan’t tell him,’ she thought, and tapped on it.

He let her in.

“Hallo, Di

“No, Dad, there’s a limit to my powers of borrowing nightgowns.”

“Sit down and have some tea. I was just going to make some.”

“Darling, I came through the orchard, and I’m wet to the knees.”

“Take off your stockings; here’s an old pair of slippers.”

Di

“Want’s a new wick,” he said. “There’s going to be bad trouble in India, I’m afraid.”

“India seems to be getting almost more trouble than it’s worth to us.”

The General turned his face with its high but small cheekbones; his eyes rested on her, and his thin lips beneath the close little grey moustache smiled.

“That often happens with trusts, Di

“So I ought, dear, considering you and mother.”

“Mine are all right for a boot—stringy. Did you ask Mr. Desert down?”

“No, not today.”

The General put his hands into his side-pockets. He had taken off his di

“I don’t understand that change of religion, you know, Di

“Lemon, please.”

She was thinking: ‘Now is the moment, after all. Courage!’

“Two lumps?”

“Three, with lemon, Dad.”

The General took up the tongs. He dropped three lumps into the cup, then a slice of lemon, put back the tongs, and bent down to the kettle.

“Boiling,” he said, and filled up the cup; he put a covered spoonful of tea into it, withdrew the spoon and handed the cup to his daughter.

Di

“I can explain it, Dad,” she said, and thought: ‘It will only make him understand even less.’

The General filled his own cup, and sat down. Di

“You see, when Wilfrid was far out in Darfur he ran into a nest of fanatical Arabs, remaining from the Mahdi times. The chief of them had him brought into his tent and offered him his life if he would embrace Islam.”

She saw her father make a little convulsive movement, so that some of the tea was spilled into his saucer. He raised the cup and poured it back. Di

“Wilfrid is like most of us nowadays about belief, only a great deal more so. It isn’t only that he doesn’t believe in Christianity, he actually hates any set forms of religion, he thinks they divide mankind and do more harm and bring more suffering than anything else. And then, you know—or you would if you’d read his poetry, Dad—the war left him very bitter about the way lives are thrown away, simply spilled out like water at the orders of people who don’t know what they’re about.”