Chapter Fifty-Seven
Lieutenant Denny had been eleven weeks at Longbourn, or rather at the Philipses' in Meryton, from which he walked out to Longbourn every day and had long since stopped pretending it was for any other reason.
His commission was gone. The letter had come in October: he was struck off, without a court, for absence; there was a paragraph about the leniency of not pursuing a charge of desertion in a time of no active service, which everyone understood to be Captain Harding's hand, reaching back from wherever the regiment now was to do the one thing he could still do for the man.
Denny had read it twice and folded it and said that it was better than he had expected, and had not spoken of it again.
He had a little money of his own, a hundred and thirty a year, from a grandmother; it was the whole of his prospects, and it was enough to be poor on and not enough to marry on, and he knew it, and so did Mary, and neither of them had said a word about any of that either.
She found him on the Saturday in the churchyard, which was where he was to be found most mornings now, walking the wall with his hand on the stone, doing out of habit the thing he had been trained to do and no longer had any standing to do anywhere.
"I want to ask you about Selsey," said Mary.
Denny took his hand off the wall.
"I have been wondering when you would," he said.
---
They sat on the flat table-tomb by the south porch, which was the driest place, and out of the wind, and from which you could see the pale ground beginning nine yards off among the graves; and Mary took out a pocket-book, and Denny looked at it and said, "Not this time."
"I always write things down."
"I know you do. Not this. If you write it down you will be listening as a person who is writing it down, and I want you to hear it as the thing it was." He put his hands between his knees. "You may write it after. I shall not say anything I am not willing to have written."
Mary put the pocket-book away.
"Ask me," said Denny.
"What is it like. Hour to hour. On the inside. Everybody tells me what a ward is and nobody has ever told me what it is to be the person holding one, and I am trying to decide something and I will not decide it out of ignorance."
Denny was quiet for a while, looking at the wrong-colored grass.
"At the beginning it is not like anything," he said.
"That is the first thing nobody tells you.
You lay it, and it is the hardest thing you have ever done, and you are proud of it, and then for a week it is like having laid a good hedge — it is there, you made it, you look at it.
And you think, this is not so much. Men make too much of this.
"And then it starts asking."
---
"A ward is not a wall," said Denny. "They tell you it is a wall because it is the quickest way to make a recruit understand which side he is on. It is not a wall. A wall, you build it and it stands and you go away.
"A ward is a thing you are holding shut.
Every hour. Waking and sleeping. It does not matter what else you are doing — you may be eating, or marching, or asleep, or drunk, or in a fever — some part of you is holding that thing shut the entire time, and it never stops, and you cannot put it down, and after a while you cannot remember what it was like not to be holding it.
"At Selsey I held nine miles of coast for fourteen months. There were four of us to begin and then three and then, for the last five months, two, and then it was Fenn and me, and then it was me."
"Fenn," said Mary. "The one who—"
"The one they wrote down as a deserter, yes.
He did not desert. He gave out. It is not a thing that happens all at once; a man does not fall down.
He gets thinner, the way your father is getting thinner, and quieter, and one morning he cannot lift his part of it, and he says so, and you take up his part as well as your own, because there is no one else, and he sits in the sun for a fortnight getting no better and then his people come and take him home.
And in the book it says deserted, because there is no other word the army has got for a man who is standing right there and is no longer any use. "
Mary said nothing.
"I am telling you the worst of it first," said Denny, "because you did not come to me to be comforted, and everybody else will comfort you, and you have Mr. Darcy who will tell you the honorable version and your sister who loves you and will tell you the brave version, and I am the only one who has actually done it and I am not going to do you the discourtesy of making it sound bearable. "
---
"Then tell me the rest of it," said Mary. "The part that is not the worst."
Denny looked at her.
"There is a part that is not the worst," he said. "I did not expect you to ask for it. Most people do not; they hear the worst and they have got what they came for.
"The rest of it is this. When you are holding a thing that would drown four hundred people if you let go — when you have been doing it for a year, and it has cost you the most of what you had, and you know it is going to cost the rest — there is an hour, usually about first light, when you are out at the edge of it alone, and everybody you are holding it for is asleep in their beds and does not know your name and never will.
"And it is the only hour of your life when you are entirely certain that you are not wasting your time.
"I have never been able to explain that to anybody and I have stopped trying.
It is not happiness. I was not happy at Selsey; I was frightened and tired and I ached in my back and my chest for fourteen months.
But I have not, since, ever again been certain, the way I was certain at four in the morning on that shingle.
And I think about it every day, and I would not go back, and I miss it the way you miss a person. "
Mary sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the pale ground among the graves.
"That is the thing I needed," she said at last. "Not the cost. I had worked out the cost; I am good at arithmetic.
It was the other side of the ledger that nobody would give me, because nobody will say a true good thing about a course that is going to hurt you, in case they are thought to be pushing you toward it. "
"I am not pushing you toward it," said Denny.
"I know you are not. That is why I could hear it."
---
They sat a while. The frost was going off the grass where the sun had reached it, but not on the wrong-colored part, which stayed white a great deal longer than the rest, which was a thing Mary had written down in October and had not understood and understood now.
"Ask me the other question," said Denny.
"What other question."
"The one you have not asked, because it is the real one, and you have been circling it since you sat down. You did not come to ask what it is like. You came to ask whether I think you can do it."
Mary was quiet.
"Yes," she said. "That is the question. And you are the only person who can answer it, because you are the only person who has held one and the only person who knows what I am, both at once.
Mr. Darcy holds Pemberley but it answers him; it was made to.
My father is inside a keeping that has held itself for four hundred years without anybody doing anything at all.
Nobody now living has taken up a thing like this cold.
But you took up nine miles at Selsey when you were one-and-twenty, and you are the nearest thing there is. "
Denny thought about it for a long time. He did not answer quickly, and Mary was grateful for it; a quick answer would have been a kindness and she had had enough kindnesses.
"I will tell you what I think," he said at last, "and I have thought about it a great deal, more than you know, because I saw where this was going before you did, in about September, and I have lain awake over it.
"Holding a ward wants two things. It wants something to hold with — a gift, a line, whatever a man has in him; that is the part everyone talks about, and it is why they send us out of families that have it.
And it wants something to hold steady — a temper, a habit of mind, a person who can do the same dull exact thing at the same hour every day for years and not be worn down by the sameness of it, and not dramatize it, and not need to be told it matters.
"The army has spent a hundred years learning that the second thing is rarer than the first. We turn away men with strong gifts every year because they cannot bear the tedium of it — they want a battle, and warding is not a battle, it is a Tuesday, and then another Tuesday, for fourteen months.
The men who last are not the strong ones.
They are the ones who can rule a line in a book in the same hand for four months and take a strange satisfaction in the sameness of the figures. "
He looked at her.
"I have watched you go out to that wall at half past six every morning since August," said Denny.
"In the rain. In the frost. Alone. And write the same measurement in the same hand, and be exact about it, and not make anything of it, and go again the next day.
You have been doing the discipline of the thing for four months already, without the thing itself, for no reward at all except knowing the number.
"I do not know whether you have the gift for it.
Nobody does; it has never been tried by anybody like you.
But you are the only person I have ever met, in or out of the regiment, who I am certain has the temper for it.
And I have met a great many, because it is my trade, and most of them were braver than they were steady, and you are the other way about. "
---
Mary did not say anything for some time.
When she did, her voice was not quite as level as it had been.
"That is a very great deal to have said to me," she said, "by somebody who would rather I did not do it."
"I would rather you did not do it," said Denny.
"You have not said so."