"Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?"
He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at school to
conceal some surreptitious document, and answered: "Yes."
"It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the 'Quitasol' Your
father would go crazy about Goya; I don't believe he saw them when he
was in Spain in '92."
In '92--nine years before he had been born! What had been the previous
existences of his father and his mother? If they had a right to share in
his future, surely he had a right to share in their pasts. He looked
up at her. But something in her face--a look of life hard-lived, the
mysterious impress of emotions, experience, and suffering-seemed,
with its incalculable depth, its purchased sanctity, to make curiosity
impertinent. His mother must have had a wonderfully interesting life;
she was so beautiful, and so--so--but he could not frame what he felt
about her. He got up, and stood gazing down at the town, at the plain
all green with crops, and the ring of mountains glamorous in sinking
sunlight. Her life was like the past of this old Moorish city, full,
deep, remote--his own life as yet such a baby of a thing, hopelessly
ignorant and innocent! They said that in those mountains to the
West, which rose sheer from the blue-green plain, as if out of a sea,
Phoenicians had dwelt--a dark, strange, secret race, above the land! His
mother's life was as unknown to him, as secret, as that Phoenician past
was to the town down there, whose cocks crowed and whose children played
and clamoured so gaily, day in, day out. He felt aggrieved that she
should know all about him and he nothing about her except that she loved
him and his father, and was beautiful. His callow ignorance--he had not
even had the advantage of the War, like nearly everybody else!--made him
small in his own eyes.
That night, from the balcony of his bedroom, he gazed down on the roof
of the town--as if inlaid with honeycomb of jet, ivory, and gold; and,
long after, he lay awake, listening to the cry of the sentry as the
hours struck, and forming in his head these lines:
"Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping
Spanish city darkened under her white stars!
"What says the voice-its clear-lingering anguish?
Just the watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety?
Just a road-man, flinging to the moon his song?
"No! Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping,
Just his cry: 'How long?'"
The word "deprived" seemed to him cold and unsatisfactory, but
"bereaved" was too final, and no other word of two syllables short-long
came to him, which would enable him to keep "whose lover's heart is
weeping." It was past two by the time he had finished it, and past
three before he went to sleep, having said it over to himself at least
twenty-four times. Next day he wrote it out and enclosed it in one of
those letters to Fleur which he always finished before he went down, so
as to have his mind free and companionable.