The weather was with him, long soft days and evenings, and the ground dry and giving underfoot. He took his position from the sun, that only. Home; the word hummed in his ears as he walked along country roads northward, sweeter than any scattering shout of bird-song, filling him up like a meal of bread and good butter.
In a ditch he came upon a rod of smoothed wood that fit his hand perfectly, and with this he beat rhythmically against the dusty surface of the road. His whiskers grew out fine and white and soft.
The hills of England, so rounded and mannerly, grew steeper once he left Carlisle behind, but whenever he felt his legs giving way, he stretched out under a tree for an hour, opened his book and read himself out of his aches and blisters. Can this really be but an island, he said to himself, looking skyward, looking out beyond hedged pastures of sheep and cattle. This wide, green, stony land, this richness of darkness and light. He thought, with happiness, of all the undated winters that had passed over these fields, the snows, and then the slow warming up of spring. Later, reaching the treeless moors past Inverness, it seemed to him he was tramping on God’s broad seamy forehead. After that there was a leveling off, an airy sensation of descent, his mind gloriously emptied and calm.
The country hotels along the way offered a bluff, democratic welcome, and, though not a drinking man, he came to savor his pint of ale at the end of a long day’s walking. He bent his head low over his glass, sniffing, then drinking. Easeful conversation flourished in the public houses—”So what’s it like out there in Canada?” from farmers with red, rude faces — and once, in the town of Jedburgh, the landlady of a lodging house joined him for a few hours between the sheets. Her skin was roughened and full of folds, but smelt freshly of soap. Sometimes children followed him for a bit out of the towns, curious and noisy. A young woman with a ragged cough accompanied him for a day or two, talking about Jesus, talking incoherently, and he was moved to give her a few shillings before they parted.
Reaching Thurso at last, a wild wetted place with the sky pressing down hard on the horizon, he found the baggage he had sent ahead stored in the corner of a railway shed. On impulse he decided against claiming it — what was there anyway but rubbish he could get along perfectly well without. Hadn’t he proven as much?
He caught the St. Ola for Stromness, a short journey over a mercifully calm sea. He was home. He took a great gulp of air into his lungs, and at that moment a thought formed in his head, the notion that life might after all be made sweet. He would find himself a simple house up near the open fields of East Bigging where he’d spent his boyhood, and make it cozy with the help of a coalburning boiler, a warm bed, electric lights if he could manage it.
And a hidey hole to sock away his store of money. He would live like a king in this snug nest. And he would go on living forever.
During all these years Barker Flett has written to young Daisy Goodwill every second month.
Well now, that comes to six letters a year for twenty-two years, making 132 letters or thereabouts. He tells himself, and sometimes others, that he feels a responsibility for the child. He does not use the word duty, as he might have had he been born a generation earlier; but, still, he is a dutiful man. He is also calm, reflective and self-critical. He knows very well what underlies the compulsive side of his nature; it is the wish to escape that which he can’t comprehend, seeking safety in an unbendable estrangement.
He understands perfectly — and prides himself on this knowledge — how those ancient eremites were able to live out their lives in caves, and monks in their stripped cells. Even when he is in Montreal on one of his visits, lying in the arms of women into whose bodies he has discharged his passion, he longs for the simplicity of a narrow bed and a lacerating loneliness. This is what he has to fight against — wildness, chaos. When he is not fighting, he is giddy with pessimism for a cheapened world. Not always, but sometimes, after an Ottawa dinner party, he lies lifelessly in his bed, his mouth dry, thinking: how absurd I am on these occasions, holding forth like an aged actor in tones of fraudulent gladness. And how, afterwards, I beat back the world with a glass of warm whisky, trying to escape it.
He is too serious, he knows that, too willing to believe — and deaf to the comedy of mismatched couples and unseemly flesh. To comfort himself, he imagines the separate layers of his brain; there are spaces there, cavities that exist between the forces of sex and work. What is he to do with these fixed voids? Other people know. He’s never known.
His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided a pulse, gave order to vast incomprehension. Later he found other ways.
He can’t recall when he learned the names of the plants in his mother’s garden, but he remembers how the exactitude of nomenclature lulled him into comfort. Early on, he knew himself to be one of those who are morally unhoused and in need of specific notation, plants, animals, the starry constellations. Soon, besides his mother’s domesticated flowers, he mastered the plantlife of the fields and woods. He had all of it quickly by heart, common names as well as Latin. Each time he was able to match a specimen with the illustration in Spotton’s Botanical Note Book he experienced a spasm of strength. The green world with its varying forms brought out an exotic tolerance in him and kept him calm. The discovery at the age of twelve or thirteen that the whole of the natural world had been classified, that someone other than himself had guessed at the need for this ordering, struck him like a bolt of happiness. He loved particularly the pockets within pockets, the great botanical divisions revealed and broken down into their tiniest branches, the smallest, most peninsular forms of life persisting valiantly in the bent corners of evolution. This miniature world, slime molds, algae, became his elected tongue — the genetics of plants, its odd, stringent beauty. Of his collection of lady’s-slippers — one of the world’s most complete, he likes to think — he loves best that one which is rarest, and of that particular bloom he values its smallest petals above the others, observing them respectfully under his microscope, memorizing the shape of the most minuscule cell, paying tribute to its position and function, and assigning it the dignity of its Latin name.
Like a chart on a wall, the complete organization of the botanic world is suspended in his consciousness. He can only suppose that the heads of other men are filled with comparable systems, with philosophies, histories, logarithm tables, texts, with points of persuasion or mapped cravings that bear them forward, as does his range of living classes, orders, families, species, and sub-species.
And into this system, which is not nearly as neat and logical as he had once believed, has crept the fact of Daisy. She sits far out at the end of one of the branches, laughing, calling to him. He sometimes shuts his eyes and wishes her gone, but she remains steadfastly there, a part of nature, confused with the subtle tendrils of sexual memory; he could no more ignore her presence than erase a subspecies of orchid or sedge. He nurtures his connection from a distance, writing to her regularly and awaiting her replies. The rhythm is fixed in his life now — a support and distraction, the way in which he confirms his most human feelings.
This letter-writing of his has its ritual aspects. He takes up his pen, a dark red Waterman, on Sunday afternoons, the first Sunday of every even-numbered month — February, April, June, and so on.