All love.
What Lewis said about the breaking down of the distinction between the significant and the fortuitous struck deeply into my mind. If he was right—and in reason he was—then nothing, nothing at all, was without meaning. The world was charged with meaning. The rainbow’s significance—since Davy had died— could only be, I thought, that her death had been, in some way as yet unknown to me, her best good. At the time of the rainbow, though, I could not have known its meaning beyond a sense of indefinite assurance. Signs must be read with caution. The history of Christendom is replete with instances of people who misread the signs.
If I may glance ahead, almost a year ahead from this point in the chronological narrative, there occurred then such a misreading of God’s meaning, and it is not without significance concerning my relationship to God in this whole period of loss and grief. At that time, a year later, I was considering my own future, and praying about it. Should I stick to my ‘tent-making’ at the College, or make tents at Wabash, or, so to speak, make sails by cutting all ties and going back to Grey Goose? I wanted God to tell me. One evening in the country, a calm and peaceful evening with the sun going down behind clouds and a golden sky, I was praying for that guidance, asking Him to tell me, somehow, what He wanted me to do. In that instant a sudden sharp wind came out of nowhere, a tremendous gust, and was gone again.
I remembered what Lewis had said about the significant and the fortuitous. Did this wind mean God’s promise to give me the guidance? I thought it did. I suppose I might have interpreted it as meaning a schooner under the wind—or God’s saying that if I did go to sea He would blow the sticks out of the yacht. But I took it to be a promise of guidance.
But no guidance came, and God seemed remote. The world was still empty without Davy, and now God seemed to have withdrawn, too. My sense of desolation increased. God could not be as loving as He was supposed to be, or—the other alternative. One sleepless night, drawing on to morning, I was overwhelmed with a sense of cosmos empty of God as well as Davy. ‘All right,’ I muttered to myself. ‘To hell with God. I’m not going to believe this damned rubbish any more. Lies, all lies. I’ve been had.’ Up I sprang and rushed out to the country. This was the end of God. Ha!
And then I found I could not reject God. I could not. I cannot explain this. One discovers one cannot move a boulder by trying with all one’s strength to do it. I discovered—without any sudden influx of love or faith—that I could not reject Christianity. Why I don’t know. There it was. I could not. That was an end to it.
An hour later I recalled that I had chosen to believe, pledged my fealty to the King. That was another reason why I couldn’t reject God, not without being forsworn.
I wrote to Lewis about the gust of wind and its aftermath. I also told him of remembering what now seemed to me a wrong I had done someone in the past, and what I had now done to make amends. And I spoke of coming to England.
Lewis replied:
I am v. glad to hear of the righted wrong and still more to hear that you are re-visiting England. We must have some good, long talks together and perhaps we shall both get high. At the moment the really important thing seems to be that you were brought to realize the impossibility (strict sense) of rejecting Christ. Of course He must often seem to us to be playing fast and loose with us. The adult must seem to mislead the child, and the Master the dog. They misread the signs. Their ignorance and their wishes twist everything. You are so sure you know what the promise promised! And the danger is that when what He means by ‘wind’ appears you will ignore it because it is not what you thought it would be—as He Himself was rejected because He was not like the Messiah the Jews had in mind. But I am, I fancy, repeating things I said before. I look forward very much to our meeting again. God bless you.
Apart from leaping to conclusions about ‘signs’, the significance of this brief aberration of despair, never to happen again, lay in its indication of how certainly I belonged in the army of the King. I was not allowed to resign. But if this was the way of it now, it was the way of it in that first spring, to which I now return, when I had no thought of quitting God’s camp, which was also Davy’s.
As March moved into April—a quarter of a year since I had last seen Davy—I was at last ready to begin my major effort of the bereavement: the Illumination of the Past, as I came to call it. To begin with it was simply a study of all our years. The other tasks I had set myself were done. I had assembled, and put into chronological order, hundreds of letters Davy had written over the years. I had the diaries and journals we had kept. I had her paintings done in their various periods and our photograph album. But I had gone further than these helps: I had searched out and bought recordings of music we had liked or merely chanced to listen to a good deal in some period, knowing how evocative music is, and I had even bought small flasks of various colognes and scents she had worn in various periods, including especially English lavender. I had all our favorite poems of the years. I had already been reading meaningful books from our past, but I had saved some of the dearest ones, such as Peter Ibbetson, until now.
Every day after classes, sitting in the great silent living-room at Mole End, with the appropriate paintings propped up round me and the record player ready to go at a touch, I sought the past. The diaries and journals made the central thread, of course: most years were very completely recorded. But I would pause to read a letter she had written or read a poem, perhaps aloud, or to listen to music. Or to look anew at a painting and study photographs. I made a few notes as I went along, sometimes of particular insights about the past. Then at night I would write to Davy about them: I was still writing to her, still with a sense of writing to a real person. I even hoped — hoped intensely — that she would, somehow, know what I said.
I travelled through the past at the rate of a month or two a day. I could not go much faster and still listen to the music —often whole symphonies — and read the poems. The books, novels and the like, I read at night, after I had written to her.
Another reason for not going faster was that what I was doing was emotionally exhausting. There was no day, no hour, without tears, as I had known there would be. The music tore me with longing for her. And yet there was joy, too. And humour — often I laughed aloud, only to be crying an instant later.
It came to me quite early on in this study of times past that she — that Davy — did, in fact, know what I was doing and approved. And even more strongly I received, or seemed to receive, an intimation that she, wherever she was and in whatever state, was missing me, too. I have no evidence for the truth of this beyond my own growing conviction that it was so. Naturally, with Davy so vividly present in my mind, and so loved, I might well be in a psychic state to receive such intimations, if they do, in fact, happen — or to persuade myself that I was having them, of course. But I heard no voices nor saw any beloved ghost (much as I should have welcomed her); and yet I remain convinced of my two intimations: that she did, in truth, know and approve of the Illumination of the Past; and that she was longing for me as well as I for her.
In a pocket-diary note that survives, I wrote: ‘I am up to Davy’s visit to the Grand Canyon, and I am reading The Transients. Then comes Peter Ibbetson. And I love you so much I could die. How I hope you know!’
In my letters to her I accepted that these intimations were true. Also in those letters were the insights that came to me from our past, seen in the light of all that was to be. I saw where we had made mistakes and where we seemed sometimes to have chosen so rightly that it was as though we had some dim inkling from the God we were yet to discover.
One insight from the past, which I might have closed my mind to but for Christianity, was not quite so shocking as it would have been if Davy in that last year or so had not seemed increasingly to accept St Paul’s dictum on the relationship of husband and wife: that the man is head of the wife as Christ is head of the Church. Although we should fiercely have denied it, except perhaps for Davy in that last year,
I saw that I had exercised a sort of headship — in the sense of the initiatory or leadership role — that was accepted, even desired, by Davy without either of us being aware of it. It had been loving and gentle, all decisions were discussed, there was never a hint of command, and yet, despite mutual tenderness and deference, it was, I now saw, there: that veiled and loving head-ship. We had eschewed husbandly authority from the first, Davy was combative and intelligent, we believed everything a modern feminist would have urged: yet something of headship had all along been there. Having known one woman deeply, having myself made every effort to see with a woman’s eyes, I could not now believe that my subtle headship or Davy’s acceptance of it was merely conditioning. Now I wrote to her about it, wondering without decision whether, despite all feminist denial, such a relationship were not inbuilt in the creation and effectively denied — which, after all, we, loving deeply, had not been able to do —only at heavy cost to love.
The Illumination of the Past was a quite incredible experience. An analogy might be something like this: one is seated in a dark room around the walls of which is a complex mural—the past — and in one’s hand is a tiny, brilliant spotlight. As the spotlight touches the mural, one scene leaps into vivid colour and illumination. Foot by foot the spotlight creeps about the walls, down the vista of the years.
As I travelled through the past, month by month, year by year, so it leaped into life. I remembered not only that which was written down but a hundred things besides. Most astonishing of all, I found myself thinking as I had thought then. I was a pagan again; I could hardly believe I should become Christian—nor did I like the prospect. Everything—the written word, the music, the scents, the pictures—carried me into the particular period I was illuminating. I was not merely looking at it: we, Davy and I, were living there again. Without exaggeration, it was one of the two or three most amazing experiences of my life. Even though I had planned it, I had not had the faintest idea that the past could be recreated with such extraordinary brilliance and reality.
Apart from what I learned of the past, the Illumination was, despite all the tears, worth doing for the joy. I spoke earlier of being desolated by the MG, little and lonely, as I came out to it on the day following the St. Stephen’s night, adding that it never called forth the tears again. And of course going through her clothes, as well as that old Bible, brought forth tears often. Now I learned a great principle of the way that grief operates. As I went through the past, day by day, ten thousand forgotten or half-forgotten memories of Davy came to me with all the colour and vividness of life. For one instant that particular Davy—gay or mocking or inquisitive or adventurous or loving—stands before me, warm and real and alive. I respond to her with a surge of love and pure joy. That is followed an instant later by the awful awareness that this Davy, too, is dead. Then, irresistibly, come the tears—the tears for this particular Davy. Until now she has not been touched by death—and she, too, must die. On the day following, if I reread that bit in the Journal, she will not stand before me: there will be no tears. Each memory calls forth warm living reality once: it is followed by another little death and the tears.
One day, for example, we were living again in the Virginian farmhouse, Horsebite Hall, with Gypsy and her puppies. Down on the Eastern Shore the schooner was a-building. On this particular day, at this particular moment, I looked out of the kitchen window, and there was Davy coming along the fence with a small basket. She had gone to fetch the eggs from the henhouse. I went out to meet her in the mild spring weather. She smiles at me. I catch her in my arms and hold her close and kiss the top of her head: her hair is sunny and warm and sweet. I have not thought of this moment since her death or, indeed, for years. Now for one lovely moment she is alive and warm in my arms, and I smell and feel her hair. Then the little death and the tears. I shall always love the memory, but I shall never again be able to evoke this Davy. But tomorrow, perhaps, I shall be summoning up memories on the decks of Grey Goose.
Some people run away from grief, go on world cruises or move to another town. But they do not escape, I think. The memories, unbidden, spring into their minds, scattered perhaps over the years. There is, maybe, something to be said for facing them all deliberately and straightaway. At all events, it is what I did in the Illumination of the Past.
Davy and I, after a journey in which we had seen some old friends that we hadn’t seen for a decade or longer, observed and discussed a curious thing. On first remeeting someone not seen for years, one may feel: Who is this stranger, grown so fat, so cynical, so something? But in a few minutes, whatever the changes, one finds the person one knew. The unique person abides. Always. The peculiar quality of ‘Johnness’ in John or ‘Maryness’ in Mary. And we decided that that unchanging ‘Johnness’ was the soul.
Now I was discovering it anew in Davy, going through the years: I was touching her soul, the very essence of her being. I described earlier how all the Davys began to flow back to me shortly after her death, and I recovered the wholeness of her. Now with the Illumination of the Past the process was completed. It is sometimes said that the fourth dimension is time or duration: one does not see a person or thing in any one instant of seeing. And I was seeing Davy in all her years—I even had her baby and childhood pictures and scribblings. As nearly as a lover can do, I was seeing the whole of her—a wholeness I would never lose—and knowing her soul.
It is often said that both Heaven and Hell are retroactive, that all of one’s life will eventually be known to have been one or the other. In the co-inherence of lovers I had seen in hospital the Christ in her—the Co-inherence. Did she see Him in me, I wonder? More dimly perhaps. At all events, I was now seeing in the Illumination of the Past the Christ in her, even in that ‘playmate of lost pagan years’ of my poem, the Heaven in her, from the beginning. The pain of the thousand deaths of past Davys in earthly flesh was worthwhile, not only because the joy outweighed the pain, but because I touched her soul. I knew her, at least partially, as her —and my—Incarnate Lord must do.
As the gentle heartbreaking spring—April and our magic May-time—came on, I went more and more out into the flowering country to walk or just sit and think, alone with her. The Illumination of the Past was still going forward, though approaching its end, but, still, I spent hundreds of hours in the country, going especially to the deserted house we had called Ladywood. I developed a fancy that Davy was in the wind—perhaps she was— and the light touch of the breeze on my face seemed her touch. But there were no tears, ever, in the country: there were too many intimations of heaven. I thought, as I walked along country roads or sat in the doorway of Ladywood, of how full our years, brief as they were, had been of love and joy and beauty. Although we should never have even a silver anniversary, it seemed to me that we perhaps had known more of adventure and all the loveliness and play of life than many who reach golden anniversaries. And it seemed to me that we were bound each to each, she in me and I in her, through all eternity, both of us Companions of the Co-inherence. Although the tears would be with me for many a day One afternoon at Ladywood I went to sleep in the grass and dreamt of Davy. The dream harked back to a summer afternoon in England when she and I, travelling to a nearby village on a doubledecker bus, had yielded to a shared and wordless impulse to get off the bus and walk. But the dream seemed to me so much future and present as well as past that I wrote a poem of it:
SUMMER
O love! do you remember? country bus
And England, meadows and blue sky?
The drowsy-sweet lost summer calling us
To walk there, you and I?
And how you drew my eyes to yours, still gazing
Till quietly between us two,
Across the bus, our eyes grown soft and praising,
A summer sweetness grew.
A country stop. A glance. And out we went
With joy to walk knee-deep in heather,
To drink with summer, holiness: content
To be in Christ tog
ether.
The red bus ambled off. Larks sang. ‘Dear one,’
I murmured. ‘On that hill, the tree.’
The moment, underneath that long-gone sun,
Became eternity.
I woke. It was a dream at dusk, but this—
A heaven on an English hill,
The sweet surrendering glory of the kiss
We gave—is with me still.
Yet was it but a dream? Or my dream only?
Somewhere are you remembering, too?
Or is it only I, remembering, lonely,
And waiting still for you?
CHAPTER IX
The Severe Mercy
MAY AT LADYWOOD WAS a month of thought. A month of searching after the meaning of things. At Mole End the Illumination of the Past was still going forward, with many tears that marked the death of the successive brief realities, almost in the flesh, of the images of Davy from the past; and her mortal body had perished four months before. A third of a year since I had seen her in the flesh, longer now than we had ever been apart. But the final separation still lay ahead, although I was not clearly aware that it must be. Davy was still with me, not only in my letters to her but, I half-believed, in the wind. I was strangely happy amidst my sorrow that May, sitting often in the doorway of Ladywood with the birds singing round me and the Blue Mountains hanging in the sky.
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