‘But if that’s so,’ my wife exclaimed, ‘what on earth’s the explanation of her silence?’
It was to be looked for, Lawrence told her, in that young woman’s conception of what she had called luck. Looking back at the little time he had had with her and poring continuously over the few words they had spoken to each other, he was amazed how often she had referred to it. All put together it was clear to him that she had thought deeply and reverently about the nature of luck. As a result he was pretty certain that she would have left the decision as to their re-meeting largely to the chance which had brought them together. For instance, he was convinced that had she had a child, she would have regarded that as a sign from life that her relationship with Lawrence was meant to continue. If not, then their experience, so unique in its context of time and circumstances, was complete in itself. It was as if she knew intuitively what he himself now believed consciously, that by freely forfeiting a renewal of their relationship that relationship could become more meaningful. Did we know, he asked, that poem of Manley Hopkins:
. . . The thing we freely forfeit, is kept with fonder a care;
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it), finer, fonder
A care kept . . .
He was sure that something of that profound faith in chance, fate, coincidence of life or whatever we call these mysterious and incalculable manifestations of the will of God, had made her decide not to see him again. Men had a terrible tendency to institutionalize life. Fear of life, born from their own wilful estrangement from it, made men build fortresses to hold what they had chosen to select from life. Instead of striving to make permanent the passing forms and shapes of meaning it would be more creative if they entrusted themselves to the natural processes of change and so refused to become ensnared in surface patterns. One of the many things for which he had to thank this woman was that her silence since had taught him not to bend life to his own narrow will. It was amazing once he had believed he understood her silence how alive and near to him she had become again. He could hardly feel closer to her than he was now. All the time he had spoken to us it was as if she had been standing beside him whispering the words he was to use. There was not a day that passed wherein he did not hear her voice again in the wind, not a year wherein he did not see her face in the spring and witness her fulfilled in summer. It was in one sense inadequate even to think of her as having been childless. Looking back to their brief time together he had come to realize that what he was today, what he could become tomorrow was, in a sense, the child of their union. He was reborn through it into a timeless dimension.
And that was his end but not ours. My wife, as he finished speaking, had got up and quietly gone to him. Taking his head between her hands she kissed him tenderly on the forehead. It is difficult to express how happy that made me. I had not mentioned before my anxiety as to how she would accept Lawrence in our relationship, since she had only just met him, but it was real and deep. I knew now I need never fear again in that regard. The image of the young woman of Insulinda, and her insight into the nature of chance and circumstance, I felt had joined us too for good. Even the voice of the storm outside in that silence seemed to confirm it. I mentioned at the beginning the strange harmony at the heart of the storm. Let me end with it because at that moment all the confused and frantic tides of noise outside were gathered together and resolved as if into the music of a vast orchestra combining to render a single theme which rose high above the tempest and the night.
fn1 Malay foreman.
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Epub ISBN: 9781407073187
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Copyright © Laurens van der Post 1963
First published in Great Britain by
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