A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken
During the war years we kept our dream of Grey Goose intact. We read our poems and listened to our music, and we came to love the Islands, sun and sea and tangled green mountains. A saddening cablegram announced my father’s sudden death—in his last letter from Glenmerle, where he was staying alone, my mother being at the town house, he had said that he expected to be back on active service in a few months, and he had finished by saying: ‘I just made myself a whisky and soda, and I raised it high in the direction of the Pacific and drank to two good fellows, you and Davy.’ Now, by a doctor’s blunder, he was dead; and I flew briefly home, returning from ‘Frisco in a magnificent heavy cruiser.
In the last year of the war—four years after the lights of Honolulu went out—the yachts of the Honolulu yacht basin, mainly through my efforts, were allowed to resume ocean racing; and we were rewarded with membership in the Yacht Club. We knew most of the people, for we had hung wistfully about the yachts, and all yachtsmen love people that love their boats. We had already bought a tiny sloop, a forerunner—an egg, as it were—of Grey Goose; and now we began to crew on the big yachts, learning a great deal. Once, crewing aboard a forty-foot sloop, I went forward to back the jib as she came about. A flap of the sail knocked my expensive uniform cap over the side. The sloop, up in the wind, was barely moving, and as the cap drifted back along the side Davy reached far out for it, then farther, then—whether she reached too far or jumped we were never certain—she was overboard. At that instant the great mainsail filled with a bang, and the sloop began to move. We were several miles off Diamond Head, not, fortunately, in a race. At first I laughed, knowing Davy could swim like a fish. She laughed, too, and waved the cap. But, then, the skipper tried to come about without enough way on, and the boat was in irons. Suddenly I realised that Davy’s head was very far away in a big ocean. I kicked off my shoes and dived in and swam fast towards her. She was glad to see me, and I, her. I took the cap and put it on my head, and, as the sloop seemed to be getting farther away, we contemplated the long swim to shore. I wasn’t at all sure we could make it—at least four miles—but said, ‘We’ll get there in time for dinner, I think.’ And Davy said, ‘I don’t think I’ ll want any salt on my steak, but, at least, we can see the sunset going in.’ They picked us up though. Aboard, everybody took the whole thing lightly; but that night in bed, to our amazement, we shuddered with a delayed terror at the thought that we might have lost each other.
In this same year, the last year of the war, we had our first— indeed, our only—leave from the navy: ten whole days. We decided to begin it with an extended Navigators’ Council, a review of all our years together, where we had been and where we were going. For three long mornings in a row, mugs of coffee laced with cream beside us, we talked about it, and we concluded that we were still ‘on course’. Our goal in that long-past Glenmerle springtime had been, simply, to keep our love—to keep the magical quality of springtime inloveness. We knew that we had kept it. The Shining Barrier stood. Next morning at dawn we walked up a deep cool valley where we had never been before. Great blue morning glories grew on a wall, and we came at last to a fresh-water pool where we bathed. Sunlight filtered through branches, dappling the water and Davy’s smiling face, and we kissed each other in the fresh morning.
Somehow that morning—one of those moments made eternity— seems in its clear and lovely ‘morningness’ to represent our lives at that point in time.
A few months later came orders to report to Great Lakes pending reassignment. Perhaps the sword was beginning to fall. But, shortly after we arrived, the Bomb was dropped and Japan surrendered. Soon afterwards I, by now a lieutenant-commander, was released from the navy. Picking up precisely where we’d left off, we headed for Florida.
Ten days later, in Miami, we were masters of a sturdy, teak-built, gaff-rigged sloop named Gull. Only eighteen feet on the waterline, she had two long bunks and a tiny galley below. She was the second stage in our progress towards Grey Goose. We lived aboard and sailed the waters off the southern tip of Florida, exploring the keys and inlets, eating fish and lobsters and sand sharks we caught with hook and line or speared. Sometimes we would spend two months at a stretch wandering among the islands, brown and half-naked, our hair long and wild. Then we would come back to a mooring in the filthy Miami River, and I would take my typewriter out under a palm tree in the small adjacent park and knock out a story of cruising and send it off to Yachting magazine, which would send back some money. With it we would buy the odd fitting for the boat and tins of food and be off again.
Scenes flicker through my mind from those carefree days: Gull wing and wing before a fresh breeze. The two of us, brown as nuts with spears in hand, wading in waist-deep shallows, peering down through the clear water for the feelers of the wily lobster sticking out from beneath a rock or sunken log, and later discussing a huge lobster salad in the cockpit as the sun went down. Or the two of us lying in warm shallows with only our heads, crowned with immense straw hats, and our hands, holding books, out of water—one of us smacking the water now and then to drive away the tiny dorsal fins of little sharks that might fancy a toe or two. And I hear the sounds of the keys: theflapof a sail, the hum of mosquitoes, the wind in the rigging, the wild lost cry of a seabird.
One night, after sailing all day with an old sailor named Cap, who was teaching us out of the kindness of his heart all his sea-lore, we made fast to the stern of his Beachcomber, both boats swinging from Cap’s anchor. Dinner with him over, I stayed there talking awhile after Davy went back to Gull. Then I said goodnight, too. On his deck I hauled Gull up and stepped soundlessly aboard in my bare feet and went aft. Standing there in the cockpit I looked down the companionway. Davy’s head, her hair shining in the light of the tiny oil lamp, was bent over an array of bright seashells on the cabin table. Over my head arched the vast and tonight-mysterious darkness of the wild keys with no light anywhere, not even on Cap’s boat, and, below, that bright warm little world of the cabin in which Davy, unconscious of my gaze, arranged her shells.
Life in Gull, though expansive on deck—the islands and ocean for our garden—was rather like living in a packing case below. But we did not mean to continue it indefinitely—it was only a stage on the way to the blue-water schooner. We were expecting a small post-war depression and drop in boat prices, at which time we would buy Grey Goose. But it hadn’t happened yet. One night we had a long discussion in the cabin, the sloop anchored in the lee of an island. We decided that, while waiting for that drop in boat prices, we would not stay longer in Gull, since we had learnt what she had to teach us, but would turn for a bit to books, a university, Oxford we hoped, where we would gain a further education that would help us in getting the occasional job when we were wandering the world in Grey Goose. But Oxford proved at that moment impossible because of all the men returning from the forces, and we looked elsewhere.
When autumn came, we were at Yale, immersed in a sea of books, fifty-six of which had got to be read by next Thursday. We felt our minds expanding, and we chalked up a thousand intriguing intellectual byways to return to some day. Among the things we studied in the graduate-school seminars, in a broad programme that we could shape as we chose, were the history of ideas, aspects of both American and English literature, and English history and historians. When we wanted to get away from New Haven, especially in the summer, we went to Davy’s mother’s stone cottage at Culver Lake in New Jersey. There we could read peacefully, and walk, and take a canoe along the shores and hear the owls at night.
In New Haven we lived in a single, large, handsome room, originally the dining-room or drawing-room, in an old house full of graduate students. We cooked, mostly, on a hot plate; sometimes in the kitchen. In our room there was a small elegant fireplace, and in it we burned, not coal but beautiful walnut gun-stocks—rejects from an arms factory that we could get for a song. A wheat-coloured, black-muzzled bitch named Gypsy, part collie, part husky, we thought, was abandoned by her owners, and we adopted her.
But, although our minds were stimulated and expanded, although we were impressed by Yale, although we had a houseful of friends, and although—as I wrote in our Journal—’ we rediscovered leafless northern trees in all their bare grace’, we did not ever forget Grey Goose. In that Journal I also wrote: ‘Somewhere, beyond the buildings that loom against this lowering winter sky, the trade-winds blow, the long blue rollers crash upon the reef in white foam, and a rakish schooner swings, tugging at her anchor. God! what are we doing here ?’ Moved as we were by the great library, by that ‘quiet disrespect of libraries’ of E. B. White’s line, we sometimes suspected that the little bespectacled scholars who crawled about in the stacks of that splendid aspiring library, writing the learned commentaries and the footnotes upon the footnotes, had forgotten what the poem meant. I wrote a disrespectful poem about them, and I wrote in the Journal of scholars who ‘forget in a world of grey stone and parchment that stars shine on a tree in the quad, that the poem sings. And we, Davy and I—if we don’t stay close to the wind and the stars, we shall be lost in a cloud of ambiguities.’ We, too, of course were writing learned papers, and publishing them, also, but we were not forgetting the poem and the wind on the sea.
One evening after a seminar I walked home through the snow and icy air thinking that I’ d get everything ready or cooking for dinner before Davy came home from the library, but I found that she had got there first. A bright gun-stock fire blazed in the fireplace, candles burned on the mantelpiece, and the table was drawn up to the fire with a grand dinner upon it—and the first notes of the Bruch violin concerto were softly sounding. Davy smiled at my pleased look. Suddenly it was—the whole scene—the innermost heart of love. I snatched her into my arms, staggered by my love for her, aware of joy and the brief lovely warmth of life, with all the freezing darkness, the endless night, of death beyond. I murmured something of this in her ear, still holding her while the concerto sang on. We both had tears, tears of joy, in our eyes: whatever the darkness beyond, now, now the candle of our love held back the dark.
In the spring Davy decided one afternoon to take her book into the city park. She read peacefully, looking up now and then to watch children at play. They went away after awhile. She read on. She heard a hoarse cry somewhere behind her. It was repeated, and she twisted round to look. A man exposing himself. The loose lips smirked. Awareness of dusk and an empty park but for him swept over her. The man ran towards her. Although I had taught her some methods of defence, Davy sprang up and ran like a hare out of the park, the man pounding along behind her till she proved faster. She leaped out into the street, sobbing a little and filled with loathing, and came home. That was all—a man whose whole being was a monstrous ego, consumed in self. It would have given me a terrible pleasure to exterminate him. Davy was able to smile at herself later that night, but she did not forget the feeling of being prey.
In our time at Yale we had read immensely; and we had heard the poets’ cries of despair, all the way from Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ to Auden’s ‘Faces along the bar’. And we had been reflecting upon Hawthorne and his theme of the stain of guilt upon the soul. Perhaps that had something to do with it, and perhaps the man in the park, all but consumed in the evil of self, had something to do with it. At all events, on this night, a couple of months after the man in the park, I had gone to the library to hunt something up, leaving Davy cheerfully curled up with a book.
I came home to find her face streaked with tears, and she clung to me desperately and wept. It was some time before she could try to tell me what had happened. The two lines she wrote next day of a poem that was never completed are the beginning point:
All the world fell away last night,
Leaving you, only you, and fright.
Her sins, she said, had come out and paraded before her, ghastly in appearance and mocking in demeanour. What sins? What sins could this eager, loving creature have committed? Not sins as the world counts sins. Not one person had she murdered, nor one gold ingot stolen. No unfaithfulness, no secret drinking, no dishonesty, no sloth, no kicking dogs. But sometimes she had been grouchy or snappish. She had said cruel things to people, perhaps to her mother or brother. Once in the war, when a young officer—a friend who had been brought up a Catholic-had said that, some day, he would no doubt return to the Church, Davy had said with mocking scorn: ‘Whatever for? Not brave enough to stand alone?’ And he had changed the subject. Now her words haunted her. Sin: she knew there was such a thing as plain sin, not something any psychiatrist could absolve or explain away. Even worse, the sins of omission. She quoted some poet whose name she did not know: ‘O unattempted loveliness !/O costly valour never won!’ She was shaken to the depths, shaken as I had never known her to be. I knew that. I knew it had been a huge and dreadful experience. But how could I understand—I who had never known the like? I held her and soothed her and gave her my love. But, I told myself, a strange mood, a result of the man in the park, some curious aberration of mind and heart like our strange terror the night after we had been in the sea off Diamond Head. For she was clearly not a sinner, merely human and the dearer for it. What she needed, what we both needed was the sea and the sky, nature, to soothe our souls. So I held her and comforted her, up against something I could not comprehend; but something I would help her fight.
I know now, of course, that she had experienced the classical conviction of sin. Christianity knows all about it, but I didn’t know all about Christianity. If I had actually understood what was hap-pening, understood it as spiritual process, I should have been wildly alarmed. Or, again, if I had deeply understood, perhaps I shouldn’t have been alarmed—but for deep understanding I’ d have had to be a Christian. For the Hound of Heaven was after her, following after with unwearied pace. But I did not understand. Neither did she of course; but then, when ‘all the world falls away’ one night, one doesn’t quite forget the experience.
Now it was time to leave Yale, M.A. in hand, and move towards Grey Goose. I would take a job teaching in a small Virginian college whilst a schooner was a-building. We found an old farmhouse near the college, which, since the farm’s friendly white horse had gently nipped Davy the first day, we christened Horsebite Hall. There we and our New Haven street dog, Gypsy, were ensconced.
And a builder on the Eastern Shore of Maryland laid down the keel of a thirty-six-foot schooner. Slender she was with a lovely clipper bow, designed by Howard Chapelle, with whom we had long talks. Later I should write more articles for Yachting about these talks, about the building and launching of the ship, and about cruising in her. She was a centre-boarder, gaff-rigged, and very fast. We travelled often to the Eastern Shore to see her taking shape. From a drawing Davy made, a sculptor friend was carving a block of mahogany into a figurehead: a girl breasting the wind, valiant and graceful. Under the tall, raked mainmast was a sliver of wood, liberated by me from a northern museum, from the Confederate ironclad Virginia that fought the Monitor in Hampton Roads. Still, we said, this ship would be the last forerunner of the deep-keel ocean-keeping schooner that is to be; this ship is not Grey Goose. But she was Grey Goose, and so I shall call her. When she was launched, Davy christened her, breaking a bottle of wine against the lovely-curving bow, and crying as the schooner slipped into the water: ‘Keep us out of the set ways of life!’
We camped ashore while the schooner, anchored in a pool of a tidal creek, was being rigged and fitted. One soft dark night we were seized by a desire to row out to her. The only problem was that we couldn’t see her at all from the shore; there wasn’t even starlight. Still, the pool was small; we should find her eventually. So we rowed out into the darkness in our dinghy, a tiny double-ender surfboat that we had brought from the Islands and towed after Gull in the Keys. We quested about the pool but no schooner. After a bit I stopped rowing to light a cigarette. The brief flare of the match pushed back the darkness; and there within arm’s reach was the graceful bow soaring up, and high above us the figurehead with the long white
While the schooner was being built for her spring launching, I of course taught my classes and we lived in our farmhouse, Horsebite Hall. We drank pure springwater and we kept chickens. A big collie came courting, and Gypsy, to her apparent amazement, produced puppies that we gave sailor names to: Jib and Tops’l, Spinnaker and Flurry—a flurry of wind over the waters. It was Flurry that we kept and loved through the years, Flurry swift and graceful and intelligent. Once while she was still a puppy we went out in a hurry after dinner, leaving everything, including a whole country ham, on the table. Out of Flurry’s reach—we supposed. She gave the thing a bit of thought. She seized the corner of the tablecloth in her sharp little teeth and braced her small paws and tugged. And tugged. We came home and gasped: a ruin of broken crockery. And the whole ham inside Flurry who could scarcely walk. She heard our horrified gasp and my sharp invocation of my God. Perhaps she had been wondering in any case about all those smashing dishes. Anyhow, she raised her small muzzle and roared—the queerest, most mournful, most guiltily repentant roar ever emitted by any creature, possibly excepting a guilty lion. We broke up in laughter, unable to punish her.