On this walk, as on the longer walk on the downs past Jack’s cottage, I lived not with the idea of decay — that idea I quickly shed — so much as with the idea of change. I lived with the idea of change, of flux, and learned, profoundly, not to grieve for it. I learned to dismiss this easy cause of so much human grief. Decay implied an ideal, a perfection in the past. But would I have cared to be in my cottage while the sixteen gardeners worked? When every growing plant aroused anxiety, every failure pain or criticism? Wasn’t the place now, for me, at its peak? Finding myself where I was, I thought — after the journey that had begun so long before — that I was blessed.
And then one day, quite unexpectedly, walking with freedom at the back of the manor, walking at the edge of both the ruined water meadow and the wild manor lawn, I saw my landlord.
THIS WAS my second glimpse of my landlord; there never was to be another. And it was as confusing as my first, when I had seen him sitting beside Mr. Phillips in the motorcar, driving along the narrow road below the beeches planted by his father. I had barely seen him that time in the motorcar, had barely had time to focus on him, and the car had moved on, leaving me with a more precise, and surprising, picture of Mr. Phillips — happy, not at all irritable in the company of his master, more like an impresario, like a man who was fully himself, had a proper idea of his duties and worth.
And just as after that first sighting my imagination had played with a half-impression of my landlord, now making him benign, now making him buttoned up, with dark glasses and the long hair of a Howard Hughes recluse, so now, because (being as nervous myself of being seen as he was) I turned away as soon as I saw him and never looked back, my memories were as much of the shock of the moment as of the man I had glimpsed.
I saw him from a great distance, almost as soon as I had walked past the old rose bed (without roses now, a brier wilderness, long after that first summer of thorny, densely petaled, scented, lilac-pink roses) and had stepped onto the lawn proper, full of daisies.
He was sitting in the pool of sunlight between the great evergreen that shaded much of the lawn, the big, partly broken greenhouse, and the wood at the side of the house, through which I had seen little paths, which I had never explored, for fear of intruding, for fear of disturbing my landlord, for fear of something very like this moment.
He was sitting (as I thought or felt afterwards) in a canvas-backed easy chair in the sunlight, facing south, with his back to me. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat. That hat obscured the shape or the baldness or otherwise of his head, just as the canvas back of his chair obscured the bulk or otherwise of his back or torso.
From the first sighting I had had of him I had retained one clear physical detaiclass="underline" the little low wave he had given against the dashboard of his car. I had invested that wave with his shyness, the shyness of his illness, the shyness that went at the same time (as I thought) with a great vanity, the shyness that wasn’t so much a wish not to be seen as a wish to be applauded on sight, to be recognized on sight as someone stupendous and of interest; and I had also invested that wave with his benevolence.
From this second glimpse I again retained just one clear physical detaiclass="underline" it was of his crossed leg and his bare bent knee — shining in the sun. He was wearing shorts; they were tight around the plump thigh I saw. This wish of my landlord for nakedness and physical self-cherishing — stories had come my way, from the Phillipses and from Bray, the car-hire man, whose father had worked in the manor long ago, of the great beauty of my landlord as a young man — this idea of beauty and the flesh now went with an opposite reality: the fatness of self-indulgence and inactivity.
It is that detail — the pool of sunlight in the wilderness, the sun on the fat shining leg — that fixes the season for me. I knew of course that he kept to his room in the cold weather, and went out of doors only in fine weather. He had been granted at birth a great house and a wide view in the dampest part of the county, on the riverbank, in a valley (which often, looking down from the viewing point on my other walk, I had seen covered entirely with mist). But his instincts were Mediterranean, tropical; he loved the sun. Inertia, habit, friendships, a wish to be where his worth was known — perhaps these things had kept him in his inherited house. Perhaps if he could have taken friends and social connections, the knowledge in others of his social worth, everything that protected him, he might have moved. But he stayed in his house, which was his setting, and dreamed of being elsewhere, dreamed in his own way.
He had sent me poems — in my first year as his tenant — about Krishna and Shiva. Mrs. Phillips had typed the poems out and then she had brought them over in person to the cottage. It was my landlord’s gesture of welcome to me; and so Mrs. Phillips treated it, adding to the gesture her own surprising reverence for the act of poetry making. Mrs. Phillips typed out and brought over more poems. She became as it were the living link between my landlord and me. I don’t think he intended the courtesy to be quite like that; but that was how it fell out, and it made my settling into the cottage very much easier.
Krishna and Shiva! There, beside that river (Constable and Shepard), in those grounds! There was nothing of contemporary cult or fashion in my landlord’s use of these divinities. His Indian romance was in fact older, even antiquated, something he had inherited, like his house, something from the days of imperial glory, when — out of material satiety and the expectation of the world’s continuing to be ordered as it had been ordered for a whole century and more — power and glory had begun to undo themselves from within. Ruskinism, a turning away from the coarseness of industrialism, upper-class or cultivated sensibilities, sensibilities almost drugged by money, the Yellow Book, philosophy melting away into sensuousness, sensation — my landlord’s Indian romance partook of all of those impulses and was rooted in England, wealth, empire, the idea of glory, material satiety, a very great security.
His Indian romance — which had very little to do with me, my past, my life or my ambitions — suited his setting. His Krishna and Shiva were names and in his poems they were like Greek divinities, given the color of antique sculpture, literally touched with night-blue, the color of wantonness, the promise of a pleasure (and beauty and Keatsian truth) that made the senses reel.
The conceit about the painted statues was pleasing (I felt it was an old poem). And there was knowledge of a sort of the blue, aboriginal gods of the Hindu pantheon, the lascivious Krishna, the drug-taking Shiva (blue standing, in fact, for the black of the aboriginal inhabitants of India). But in later poems — some typed by Mrs. Phillips, some printed (single sheets, with drawings) — a similar heady sensuousness was attributed to Italian youths of apparently the previous century or young Conradian sailors (again of apparently the previous century) in Peruvian or Malayan or Brazilian ports.
His fantasies (sensual rather than explicitly sexual, to judge by the poems) were unconfined but also unfocused: a warm blur, something that was owed him but which perhaps might disappear with definition: something out there, outside himself, and eventually an aspect of his acedia, the curious death of the soul that had befallen him so early in his life. His anchor was his house, his knowledge of his social worth. Through all the ups and downs of his illness or his acedia, the knowledge of who he was remained with him. All the poems he had sent by Mrs. Phillips had been signed, extravagantly. There was about his signature — in addition to its size — something of the experimental nature of a boy’s signature; it spoke of someone still savoring his personality.
And now he sat before me, in a pool of sunlight in the grounds of his house, the house he had known all his life, next to the broken-paned weed-filled greenhouse, in the ruin of his garden. Seminude, his legs crossed, the fat right thigh (the thigh that was raised, and which I saw) tightly encased in his shorts.