“They would be dead, indeed, if they were not sweet for you.” Her cheeks burned bright at the low intensity of his voice, but he turned suddenly away. “Oh, there she sails—there she sails still, my beauty. Isn’t she the proud one, though—straight into the wind!” He hung over the little ship model, thrilled as any child. “The Flying Lady; see where it’s painted on her? Grandfather gave it to me when I was seven—he had it from his father when he was six. Lord, how proud I was!” He stood back to see it better, frowning a little. “One of those ropes is wrong; any fool could tell that.” His hands hovered over it for a moment—dropped. “No matter—the new owners are probably not seafarers! The lacquer chest is at the far end, isn’t it? Yes, here. Are three enough—four? We’re off!” But still he lingered, sweeping the great room with his dark eyes. “It’s full of all kinds of junk; they never liked it—no period, you see. I had the run of it—I loved it as though it were alive; it was alive for me. From Elizabeth’s day down, all the family adventurers brought their treasures here—beaten gold and hammered silver, mother-of-pearl and peacock feathers, strange woods and stranger spices, porcelains and embroideries and blown glass. There was always an adventurer somewhere in each generation—and however far he wandered, he came back to Green Gardens to bring his treasures home. When I was a yellow-headed imp of Satan, hiding my marbles in the lacquer chest, I used to swear that when I grew up I would bring home the finest treasure of all, if I had to search the world from end to end. And now the last adventurer has come home to Green Gardens—and he has searched the world from end to end—and he is empty-handed.”
“No, no,” whispered Daphne. “He has brought home the greatest treasure of all, that adventurer. He has brought home the beaten gold of his love and the hammered silver of his dreams—and he has brought them from very far.”
“He had brought greater treasures than those to you, lucky room,” said the last of the adventurers. “You can never be sad again; you will always be gay and proud—because for just one moment he brought you the gold of her hair and the silver of her voice.”
“He is talking great nonsense, room,” said a very small voice, “but it is beautiful nonsense, and I am a wicked girl, and I hope that he will talk some more. And please, I think we will go into the garden and see.”
All the way back down the flagged path to the herb garden they were quiet; even after he had arranged the cushions against the rose-red wall, even after he had stretched out at full length beside her and lighted another pipe.
After a while he said, staring at the straw hive: “There used to be a jolly little fat brown one that was a great pal of mine. How long do bees live?”
“I don’t know,” she answered vaguely, and after a long pause, full of quiet, pleasant odours from the herb garden, and the happy noises of small things tucking themselves away for the night, and the faint drift of tobacco smoke, she asked: “What was it about ‘honey still for tea’?”
“Oh, that!” He raised himself on one elbow so that he could see her better. “It was a poem I came across while I was in East Africa; someone sent a copy of Rupert Brooke’s things to a chap out there, and this one fastened itself around me like a vise. It starts where he’s sitting in a café in Berlin with a lot of German Jews around him, swallowing down their beer; and suddenly he remembers. All the lost, unforgettable beauty comes back to him in that dirty place; it gets him by the throat. It got me, too.
“‘Ah, God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees....
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?... oh, yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?’”
“That’s beautiful,” she said, “but it hurts.”