"We shall never know what was in him." Always they came back to that, they dwelt on it, they clung to it. Under all the innocence and the delusion it was as if, through their grief, they touched reality, they felt the unaltered, unapparent splendor, and testified to the mystery, to the ultimate and secret sanctity of man's soul.
Of all that Ransome was aware obscurely, he shared their sense of that hidden and incalculable and enduring life. But his own grief was different from theirs. It was something unique, peculiar to himself and incommunicable.
Even he had not realized what was at the bottom of his grief until he found himself alone with it, walking with it on the road to Southfields. He had left the Randalls with his mother and had escaped, with an irritable longing for the darkness and the open air. He knew that the reason why he wanted to get away from them was that his grief was so different from theirs.
For they were innocent; they had nothing to reproach themselves with. If they had not loved his father quite so much as they thought they did, they had done the next best thing; they had never let him know it. They had behaved to him, they had thought of him, in consequence, more kindly, more tenderly than if they had loved him; in which case they would not have felt the same obligation to be careful. They had never hurt him. Whereas he—
That was why he would give anything to have his father back again. It was all right for them. He couldn't think what they were making such a fuss about. They had carried their behavior to such a pitch of perfection that they could perfectly well afford to let him go. There was no reason why they should want him back again, to show him—
All this Ranny felt obscurely. And the more he thought about it the more it seemed to him horrible that anybody should have lived as his father had lived and die as he had died, without anybody having really loved him. It was horrible that he, Ranny, should not have loved him. For that was what it came to; that was what he knew about himself; that and nothing else was at the bottom of his grief, and it was what made it so different from theirs. It was as if he realized for the first time in his life what pity was. He had never known what a terrible, what an intolerable thing was this feeling that was so like love, that should have been love and yet was not. For he didn't deceive himself about it as his mother (mercifully for her) was deceiving herself at this moment. This intolerable and terrible feeling was not love. In love there would have been some happiness.
Walking slowly, thinking these things, or rather feeling them, vaguely and incoherently, he had come to the grove by the public footpath. It was there that he had sat with his mother more than six years ago, when she had as good as confessed to him that she had not loved her husband; not, that was to say, as she had loved her child.
And it was there, only the other night, that he had sat with Winny. One time seemed as long ago as the other.
And it was there that Winny was sitting now, on their seat, alone, facing the way he came, as if positively she had known that he would come.