The boy had been overcome in a more orderly moment. He still lay more or less in the position wherein his mother had settled him but he too had a hand out of the covers. It was clasping the toy-sword drawn from its sheath. His long yellow hair was disordered on the pillow and the lead soldiers were scattered over the bed where he had once more fought an enemy right up to the gateway of his sleep.
‘What a wonderful sight,’ Lawrence remarked as we tiptoed to the door to switch off the light. ‘Odd that you should have had twins so opposite in appearance, one so dark and one so fair. But it makes them more complete, in a way, than if they had been born identical.’
There was a deep undertone of envy in his voice. In this fluid, vulnerable state of our re-discovery of an intimacy tested on all sorts of occasions of life and death in the last war, his remark made me more aware than ever of the lonely role his way of life imposed on him.
But all I could think of saying was: ‘I wish you’d tell that to their mother. It might please her because I suspect she’d have preferred them both to have been fair.’
However, he did not get a chance to do so just then. My wife, who had obviously awaited our return with curiosity, was the first to speak when we rejoined her.
‘I wonder,’ she asked, ‘if the same thing struck you as it did me when you were with the children?’
‘I thought they looked dead beat, poor little devils,’ I answered. ‘What a good thing Christmas comes only once a year!’
‘Of course they’re tired,’ she replied with some resignation. ‘But it wasn’t that that I meant.’
‘They looked very happy,’ Lawrence answered when she looked inquiringly at him. ‘And very lovely too,’ he added: ‘and . . .’
‘Not that either,’ she cut in smiling, clearly happy over his appreciation of the twins and perhaps not at all displeased that he too had failed to get her particular point, confirming her preconceived view that only a woman could really see in her children whatever it was she had observed. ‘But didn’t it strike you that the girl’s last thought, like her first, was for her doll; the boy’s for his sword?’ She paused. ‘How much better the world would be if managed by women. We’d soon have no wars. All this male aggression would disappear and’ – she turned to me – ‘you know, I do feel you should stop giving your son a sword and soldiers to play with. I am certain that’s where the trouble starts.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ Lawrence asked before I could reply. ‘I know numbers of people would agree with you. But I myself feel they’d be wrong.’ He in his turn paused. ‘You say that if boys had no soldiers and swords to play with there would be no wars. Do you also carry that form of reasoning to its logical conclusion and say that if little girls were denied baby-dolls to play with women would cease to have babies?’
‘I’m surprised at you,’ my wife exclaimed, her mind springing to its own spirited defence. ‘You’re using logic in a typically male fashion for a purpose for which it was never intended, and it’s unlike you.’
‘I don’t think I am,’ Lawrence countered laughing with her. ‘I spoke out of my own experience. Though I know many people would agree with you. I believe that the boy’s sword and the girl’s doll do not induce the states of mind that you suggest.’
He stopped as a great blast of wind shook the house so that the thick walls seemed to sway around us. A sound as of horses hooves’ and a battle-cry as if all the Valkyries of Germania were massing for war outside fell on our ears and the flames in the fireplace flickered low before Lawrence went on to say that both sword and doll seemed to him to be expressions of a pattern already deep in life. They were objects in the world without made to express a great invisible need of which both men and women were the subjects. It was only as apprentices of this master need, he thought, that the lives of men and women had any meaning. The two things, therefore, were not separate except as two halves of the same whole. That was why the two children had looked so complete to him, not only in being one dark and the other fair, but also in their choice of toys. Yes! sword and doll belonged to each other: without the sword the doll would have no life; without the doll the sword would have lost its meaning.
I noticed that my wife was becoming more and more interested but, suspicious of generalization and abstraction, she went straight for what was, to her, the heart of any matter: the human factor in Lawrence’s explanation.
‘You’ve just said you spoke out of your own experience!’ she observed keenly, anxious to get on. ‘But what sort of experience? General experience of life, war and men? Or did you have a particular experience in mind?’
Lawrence did not answer at once. To one who knew him as well as I did it was obvious that my wife’s question had found the inner mark of a hidden target. We waited in a silence wherein the sound of the storm spoke unimpeded to us, now howling like a pack of wolves, then suddenly throwing a bar of angel-song on the wild deep of air while the fire strained gallantly up the chimney against the downblast of wind.
‘I was speaking out of both, of course,’ he answered finally with great deliberation. ‘And I must confess that the feeling that prompted your question was almost uncannily right. I did have a particular experience in mind. Only I was not certain that I could speak about it. I was not sure I had come to terms sufficiently with the experience to discuss it with anyone, even those closest to me.’ He paused. ‘However, seeing the twins tonight, has, I think, made the experience clearer to me. Not only that. It has placed it in the company of those other things we have been talking about in connexion with Hara, Yonoi, Celliers and ourselves.’
‘Couldn’t you please tell us about it?’ my wife pleaded.
Lawrence hesitated. ‘I’d have to be intensely personal and more frank than I am both by training and instinct inclined to be.’
‘But it would be good of you.’ My wife made it unnecessary for him to explain more as she gave him an especially warm look.
I knew that look well and it never failed to move me anew. It was for me a sign of how greatly women long, in their deepest being, to help men to bring up into the light of day what is uncertain, fearful and secret within them. So deep is this instinct that they tend to be less afraid of the unpleasant facts of human nature than we are, and to mistrust profoundly only that which shuns the light of truth within us. No matter how unpleasant our secret or how awful the consequences of self-revelation may be for them, all that is best in woman feels triumphant because of the act of trust that makes emergence of the secret possible. So now, noticing the frank and warm look that she gave Lawrence (whom she had only met for the first time the day before) I knew for certain that henceforth all would be well between them.
As for Lawrence, he protested no more. Seeing my wife settling herself deep into her chair, he started straight away on his story.
The particular experience he had in mind, he explained, took place during the war, in a gleaming green and purple island of Insulinda. But, of course, the experience also had been prepared within him long before the war. If there was one thing he found more and more difficult precisely to determine it was this matter of the beginning of things. He realized it was of the utmost importance to place the beginning as accurately as possible for the sake of shape and articulation, but nonetheless the determination of origins was as arbitrary an abstract from the continuity of life as any generalization to which my wife had taken such instinctive exception earlier in the conversation. This understood, he would place his point of departure in some such moment as the one wherein we had just left the twins. He could not remember a time in his own life wherein there was not the image of a sword shining with a most compelling radiance in his imagination. To this day he had never forgotten the shock that went through him at Mallory’s description of Excalibur and King Arthur’s finding of the great sword. From that moment the whole legend of Arthur had held an inexhaustible interest for him, right to the end where Excalibur was reluctantly returned to the waters and an arm covered in white samite raised a hand to pull it down into the deeps below. Even now he suspected there was still far more to the legend than he could ever decipher and learn. But in those early days he was not bothered by such considerations though he accepted the whole legend as a decisive event in the evolution of his own spirit. Even the naming of the sword had seemed right for to him it was never purely a thing of metal but an individual manifestation of living experience. He felt compelled, too, to give a name even to the first wooden version of his own sword. He called it, he said smiling at us, ‘Brightling’ and looking back he would say it was this absolute acceptance of the living significance of the image of the sword which made him the first soldier in a family that had always been scholars, lawgivers and churchmen.