The garden was a square containing one permanent living thing, and one only, an apple tree which bore large fluted apples of palest yellow on the one bough remaining green among the grey barkless ones. All round the tree the muddy gravel had been trodden, by children playing, so hard that not a weed or blade of grass ever pierced it. Up to it and down to it led two narrow and steep flights of steps, the lower for the children and the mother ascending from the kitchen or living room, the upper for Mr Torrance who used to sit in the back room writing books, except in the mornings when he taught drawing at several schools. He wrote at an aged and time-worn black bureau, from which he could sometimes see the sunlight embracing the apple tree. But into that room the sunlight could not enter without a miracle, or by what so seldom happened as to seem one—the standing open of an opposite window just so that it threw a reflection of the late sun for about three minutes. Even supposing that the sunlight came that way, little could have penetrated that study; for the French windows were ponderously draped by tapestry of dark green with a black pattern, and on one side the bureau, on the other a bookcase, stood partly before the panes. No natural light could reach the ceiling or the corners. Instead of light, books covered the walls, books in a number of black-stained bookcases of various widths, all equal in height with the room, except one that was cut short by a grate in which I never saw a fire. The other few interspaces held small old pictures or prints in dark frames, and a dismal canvas darkened, probably, by some friendly hand. Most of the books were old, many were very old. The huge, blackened slabs of theology and drama emitted nothing but gloom. The red bindings which make some libraries tolerable had been exorcised from his shelves by the spirits of black and of darkest brown.
The sullen host of books left little room for furniture. Nevertheless, there was a massive table of ancient oak, always laden with books, and apparently supported by still other books. Six chairs of similar character had long succeeded in retaining places in front of the books, justifying themselves by bearing each a pile or a chaos of books. Dark as wintry heather were the visible portions of the carpet. The door was hung with the same black and green tapestry as the windows; if opened, it disclosed the mere blackness of a passage crowded with more books and ancestral furniture.
Yet Mr Torrance smiled whenever a visitor, or his wife, or one or all of his children, but, above all, when Aurelius entered the room. No doubt he did not always smile when he was alone writing; for he wrote what he was both reluctant and incompetent to write, at the request of a firm of publishers whose ambition was to have a bad, but nice-looking, book on everything and everybody, written by some young university man with private means, by some vegetarian spinster, or a doomed hack like Mr Torrance. Had he owned copies of all these works they would have made a long row of greens and reds decorated by patterns and lettering in gold. He did not speak of his work, or of himself, but listened, smiled, or—with the children—laughed, and allowed himself at worst the remark that things were not so bad as they seemed. He was full of laughter, but all clever people thought him devoid of humour. In his turn, he admired all clever people, but was uninfluenced by them, except that he read the books which they praised and at once forgot them—he had read Sir Thomas Browne’s “Quincunx,” but could not say what a Quincunx was. Aurelius used to tease him sometimes, I think, in order to prove that the smile was invincible. Mr Torrance was one of the slowest and ungainliest of men, but he was never out of love or even out of patience with Aurelius, the most lightsome of men, or of the superfluous race. He had fine wavy hair like silk fresh from the cocoon, and blue eyes of perfect innocence and fearlessness placed well apart in a square, bony, and big-nosed face that was always colourless. As he wrote, one or all of the children were likely to cry until they were brought into his study, where he had frequently to leave them to avoid being submerged in the chaos set moving by their play. He smiled at it, or if he could not smile, he laughed. If the children were silent for more than a little time he would go out into the passage and call downstairs to make sure that all was well, whereupon at least one must cry, and his wife must shriek to him in that high, sour voice which was always at the edge of tears. Often she came before he called, to stand at his door, talking, complaining, despairing, weeping; and though very sorry, Mr Torrance smiled, and as soon as she had slammed the door he went on with his exquisite small handwriting, or, at most, he went out and counted the apples again. One or more of the children was always ill, nor was any ever well. They were untidy, graceless, and querulous, in looks resembling their mother, whose face seemed to have grown and shaped itself to music—a music that would set the teeth of a corpse on edge. She was never at the end of her work, but often of her strength. She was cruel to all in her impatience, and in her swift, giddy remorse cruel to herself also. She seemed to love and enjoy nothing, yet she would not leave the house on any account, and seldom her work. Whatever she did she could not ruffle her husband or wring from him anything but a smile and a slow, kind sentence. Not that he was content, or dull, or made of lead or wood. He would have liked to dress his wife and children as prettily as they could choose, to ride easily everywhere, anywhere, all over the world if it pleased them, seeing, hearing, tasting nothing but what they thought best on earth. But save in verse he never did so. It was one of his pains that seldom more than once or twice a year came the mood for doing what seemed to him the highest he could, namely, write verses. Also he had bad health; his pipe, of the smallest size, half filled with the most harmless and tasteless tobacco, lay cold on the bureau, just tasted and then allowed to go out. Ale he loved, partly for its own sake, partly to please Aurelius, but it did not love him. It was one of the jokes concerning him, that he could not stand the cold of his morning bath unless he repeated the words,
“Up with me, up with me, into the sky,
For thy song, lark, is strong.”
He said them rapidly, and in an agony of solemnity, as he squeezed the sponge, and though this fact had become very widely known indeed, he did not give up the habit. Had he given up every kind of food condemned by himself or his doctors, he would have lived solely on love in that dark, that cold, that dead room. He was fond of company, but he knew nobody in all those thronged streets, unless it was an old woman or two, and their decrepit, needy husbands. He was a farmer’s son, and knew little more of London than Ann, since he had moved into Abbey Road shortly after his first child was born, and had not been able to extricate himself from the books and furniture.
I see him, as soon as I have sat down by the window, swing round in his chair and look grim as he lights his tobacco with difficulty—then smile and let the smoke pour out of his mouth before beginning to talk, which means that in a few minutes he has laid down the pipe unconsciously, and that it will remain untouched. The children come in; he opens the French windows, and goes down the steps to the apple tree, carrying half the children, followed by the other half. Up he climbs, awkwardly in his black clothes, and getting that grim look under the strain, but smiling at last. He picks all of the seven apples and descends with them. The children are perfectly silent. “This one,” he begins, “is for Annie because she is so small. And this for Jack because he is a good boy. And this for Claude because he is bad and we are all sorry for him. And this for Dorothy because she is so big.” He gives me one, and Dorothy another to take down to her mother, and the last he stows away.
Mr Torrance was often fanciful, and as most people said, affected, in speech. He was full of what appeared to be slight fancies that made others blush uncomfortably. He had rash admirations for more conspicuously fanciful persons, who wore extraordinary clothes or ate or drank in some extraordinary manner. He never said an unkind thing. By what aid, in addition to the various brown breads to which he condemned himself, did he live, and move, and have his being with such gladness?
His books are not the man. They are known only to students at the British Museum who get them out once and no more, for they discover hasty compilations, ill-arranged, inaccurate, and incomplete, and swollen to a ridiculous size for the sake of gain. They contain not one mention of the house under the hill where he was born.