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Title: Pan's garden
a volume of nature stories
Author: Algernon Blackwood
Illustrator: W. Graham Robertson
Release date: December 15, 2025 [eBook #77472]
Language: English
Original publication: London: The MacMillan and Co., Limited, 1912
Credits: Charlene Taylor, Tom Trussel, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAN'S GARDEN ***
PAN’S GARDEN
[Illustration: COLOPHON]
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: THE MAN WHOM THE TREES LOVED]
PAN’S GARDEN
A VOLUME OF NATURE STORIES
BY
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
AUTHOR OF ‘THE CENTAUR,’ ‘THE EDUCATION OF UNCLE PAUL,’
‘THE HUMAN CHORD,’ ‘JIMBO,’ ETC.
_WITH DRAWINGS BY W. GRAHAM ROBERTSON_
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1912
COPYRIGHT
To
M. S.-K.
WHO MADE WITH ME THESE LITTLE PATHS
ACROSS PAN’S TANGLED GARDEN.
PREFATORY NOTE
My thanks are due to the Editor of the _Westminster Gazette_ for
permission to include in this volume three stories, ‘The Messenger,’
‘The Attic,’ and ‘The South Wind,’ which originally appeared in his
columns.
A. B.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE MAN WHOM THE TREES LOVED 3
THE SOUTH WIND 105
THE SEA FIT 115
THE ATTIC 137
THE HEATH FIRE 151
THE MESSENGER 167
THE GLAMOUR OF THE SNOW 177
THE RETURN 213
SAND 225
THE TRANSFER 343
CLAIRVOYANCE 363
THE GOLDEN FLY 375
SPECIAL DELIVERY 387
THE DESTRUCTION OF SMITH 405
THE TEMPTATION OF THE CLAY 419
THE MAN WHOM THE TREES
LOVED
[Illustration: THE MAN WHOM THE TREES LOVED]
I
He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their
essential qualities. He understood them. He knew why in an oak forest,
for instance, each individual was utterly distinct from its fellows,
and why no two beeches in the whole world were alike. People asked
him down to paint a favourite lime or silver birch, for he caught the
individuality of a tree as some catch the individuality of a horse.
How he managed it was something of a puzzle, for he never had painting
lessons, his drawing was often wildly inaccurate, and, while his
perception of a Tree Personality was true and vivid, his rendering
of it might almost approach the ludicrous. Yet the character and
personality of that particular tree stood there alive beneath his
brush--shining, frowning, dreaming, as the case might be, friendly or
hostile, good or evil. It emerged.
There was nothing else in the wide world that he could paint; flowers
and landscapes he only muddled away into a smudge; with people he was
helpless and hopeless; also with animals. Skies he could sometimes
manage, or effects of wind in foliage, but as a rule he left these all
severely alone. He kept to trees, wisely following an instinct that was
guided by love. It was quite arresting, this way he had of making a
tree look almost like a being--alive. It approached the uncanny.
‘Yes, Sanderson knows what he’s doing when he paints a tree!’ thought
old David Bittacy, C.B., late of the Woods and Forests. ‘Why, you can
almost hear it rustle. You can smell the thing. You can hear the rain
drip through its leaves. You can almost see the branches move. It
grows.’ For in this way somewhat he expressed his satisfaction, half
to persuade himself that the twenty guineas were well spent (since his
wife thought otherwise), and half to explain this uncanny reality of
life that lay in the fine old cedar framed above his study table.
Yet in the general view the mind of Mr. Bittacy was held to be austere,
not to say morose. Few divined in him the secretly tenacious love of
nature that had been fostered by years spent in the forests and jungles
of the eastern world. It was odd for an Englishman, due possibly to
that Eurasian ancestor. Surreptitiously, as though half ashamed of it,
he had kept alive a sense of beauty that hardly belonged to his type,
and was unusual for its vitality. Trees, in particular, nourished it.
He, also, understood trees, felt a subtle sense of communion with them,
born perhaps of those years he had lived in caring for them, guarding,
protecting, nursing, years of solitude among their great shadowy
presences. He kept it largely to himself, of course, because he knew
the world he lived in. He also kept it from his wife--to some extent.
He knew it came between them, knew that she feared it, was opposed.
But what he did not know, or realise at any rate, was the extent to
which she grasped the power which they wielded over his life. Her fear,
he judged, was simply due to those years in India, when for weeks at
a time his calling took him away from her into the jungle forests,
while she remained at home dreading all manner of evils that might
befall him. This, of course, explained her instinctive opposition to
the passion for woods that still influenced and clung to him. It was a
natural survival of those anxious days of waiting in solitude for his
safe return.
For Mrs. Bittacy, daughter of an evangelical clergyman, was
a self-sacrificing woman, who in most things found a happy
duty in sharing her husband’s joys and sorrows to the point of
self-obliteration. Only in this matter of the trees she was less
successful than in others. It remained a problem difficult of
compromise.
He knew, for instance, that what she objected to in this portrait of
the cedar on their lawn was really not the price he had given for it,
but the unpleasant way in which the transaction emphasised this breach
between their common interests--the only one they had, but deep.
* * * * *
Sanderson, the artist, earned little enough money by his strange
talent; such cheques were few and far between. The owners of fine or
interesting trees who cared to have them painted singly were rare
indeed; and the ‘studies’ that he made for his own delight he also kept
for his own delight. Even were there buyers, he would not sell them.
Only a few, and these peculiarly intimate friends, might even see them,
for he disliked to hear the undiscerning criticisms of those who did
not understand. Not that he minded laughter at his craftsmanship--he
admitted it with scorn--but that remarks about the personality of the
tree itself could easily wound or anger him. He resented slighting
observations concerning them, as though insults offered to personal
friends who could not answer for themselves. He was instantly up in
arms.
‘It really _is_ extraordinary,’ said a Woman who Understood, ‘that you
can make that cypress seem an individual, when in reality all cypresses
are so _exactly_ alike.’
And though the bit of calculated flattery had come so near to saying
the right, true thing, Sanderson flushed as though she had slighted a
friend beneath his very nose. Abruptly he passed in front of her and
turned the picture to the wall.
‘Almost as queer,’ he answered rudely, copying her silly emphasis, ‘as
that _you_ should have imagined individuality in your husband, Madame,
when in reality all men are so _exactly_ alike!’
Since the only thing that differentiated her husband from the mob was
the money for which she had married him, Sanderson’s relations with
that particular family terminated on the spot, chance of prospective
‘orders’ with it. His sensitiveness, perhaps, was morbid. At any rate
the way to reach his heart lay through his trees. He might be said to
love trees. He certainly drew a splendid inspiration from them, and the
source of a man’s inspiration, be it music, religion, or a woman, is
never a safe thing to criticise.
‘I do think, perhaps, it was just a little extravagant, dear,’ said
Mrs. Bittacy, referring to the cedar cheque, ‘when we want a lawn-mower
so badly too. But, as it gives you such pleasure----’
‘It reminds me of a certain day, Sophia,’ replied the old gentleman,
looking first proudly at herself, then fondly at the picture, ‘now
long gone by. It reminds me of another tree--that Kentish lawn in the
spring, birds singing in the lilacs, and some one in a muslin frock
waiting patiently beneath a certain cedar--not the one in the picture,
I know, but----’
‘I was not waiting,’ she said indignantly, ‘I was picking fir-cones for
the schoolroom fire----’
‘Fir-cones, my dear, do not grow on cedars, and schoolroom fires were
not made in June in my young days.’
‘And anyhow it isn’t the same cedar.’
‘It has made me fond of all cedars for its sake,’ he answered, ‘and it
reminds me that you are the same young girl still----’
She crossed the room to his side, and together they looked out of
the window where, upon the lawn of their Hampshire cottage, a ragged
Lebanon stood in solitary state.
‘You’re as full of dreams as ever,’ she said gently, ‘and I don’t
regret the cheque a bit--really. Only it would have been more real if
it had been the original tree, wouldn’t it?’
‘That was blown down long ago. I passed the place last year, and
there’s not a sign of it left,’ he replied tenderly. And presently,
when he released her from his side, she went up to the wall and
carefully dusted the picture Sanderson had made of the cedar on their
present lawn. She went all round the frame with her tiny handkerchief,
standing on tiptoe to reach the top rim.
‘What I like about it,’ said the old fellow to himself when his wife
had left the room, ‘is the way he has made it live. All trees have it,
of course, but a cedar taught it to me first--the “something” trees
possess that make them know I’m there when I stand close and watch. I
suppose I felt it then because I was in love, and love reveals life
everywhere.’ He glanced a moment at the Lebanon looming gaunt and
sombre through the gathering dusk. A curious wistful expression danced
a moment through his eyes. ‘Yes, Sanderson has seen it as it is,’ he
murmured, ‘solemnly dreaming there its dim hidden life against the
Forest edge, and as different from that other tree in Kent as I am
from--from the vicar, say. It’s quite a stranger, too. I don’t know
anything about it really. That other cedar I loved; this old fellow
I respect. Friendly though--yes, on the whole quite friendly. He’s
painted the friendliness right enough. He saw that. I’d like to know
that man better,’ he added. ‘I’d like to ask him how he saw so clearly
that it stands there between this cottage and the Forest--yet somehow
more in sympathy with us than with the mass of woods behind--a sort of
go-between. _That_ I never noticed before. I see it now--through his
eyes. It stands there like a sentinel--protective rather.’
He turned away abruptly to look through the window. He saw the great
encircling mass of gloom that was the Forest, fringing their little
lawn. It pressed up closer in the darkness. The prim garden with its
formal beds of flowers seemed an impertinence almost--some little
coloured insect that sought to settle on a sleeping monster--some
gaudy fly that danced impudently down the edge of a great river that
could engulf it with a toss of its smallest wave. That Forest with
its thousand years of growth and its deep spreading being was some
such slumbering monster, yes. Their cottage and garden stood too near
its running lip. When the winds were strong and lifted its shadowy
skirts of black and purple.... He loved this feeling of the Forest
Personality; he had always loved it.
‘Queer,’ he reflected, ‘awfully queer, that trees should bring me
such a sense of dim, vast living! I used to feel it particularly, I
remember, in India; in Canadian woods as well; but never in little
English woods till here. And Sanderson’s the only man I ever knew who
felt it too. He’s never said so, but there’s the proof,’ and he turned
again to the picture that he loved. A thrill of unaccustomed life ran
through him as he looked. ‘I wonder, by Jove, I wonder,’ his thoughts
ran on, ‘whether a tree--er--in any lawful meaning of the term can
be--alive. I remember some writing fellow telling me long ago that
trees had once been moving things, animal organisms of some sort, that
had stood so long feeding, sleeping, dreaming, or something, in the
same place, that they had lost the power to get away...!’
Fancies flew pell-mell about his mind, and, lighting a cheroot, he
dropped into an armchair beside the open window and let them play.
Outside the blackbirds whistled in the shrubberies across the lawn. He
smelt the earth and trees and flowers, the perfume of mown grass, and
the bits of open heath-land far away in the heart of the woods. The
summer wind stirred very faintly through the leaves. But the great New
Forest hardly raised her sweeping skirts of black and purple shadow.
Mr. Bittacy, however, knew intimately every detail of that wilderness
of trees within. He knew all the purple coombs splashed with yellow
waves of gorse; sweet with juniper and myrtle, and gleaming with
clear and dark-eyed pools that watched the sky. There hawks hovered,
circling hour by hour, and the flicker of the peewit’s flight with its
melancholy, petulant cry, deepened the sense of stillness. He knew
the solitary pines, dwarfed, tufted, vigorous, that sang to every lost
wind, travellers like the gipsies who pitched their bush-like tents
beneath them; he knew the shaggy ponies, with foals like baby centaurs;
the chattering jays, the milky call of cuckoos in the spring, and
the boom of the bittern from the lonely marshes. The undergrowth of
watching hollies, he knew too, strange and mysterious, with their dark,
suggestive beauty, and the yellow shimmer of their pale dropped leaves.
Here all the Forest lived and breathed in safety, secure from
mutilation. No terror of the axe could haunt the peace of its vast
subconscious life, no terror of devastating Man afflict it with the
dread of premature death. It knew itself supreme; it spread and preened
itself without concealment. It set no spires to carry warnings, for no
wind brought messages of alarm as it bulged outwards to the sun and
stars.
But, once its leafy portals left behind, the trees of the countryside
were otherwise. The houses threatened them; they knew themselves in
danger. The roads were no longer glades of silent turf, but noisy,
cruel ways by which men came to attack them. They were civilised, cared
for--but cared for in order that some day they might be put to death.
Even in the villages, where the solemn and immemorial repose of giant
chestnuts aped security, the tossing of a silver birch against their
mass, impatient in the littlest wind, brought warning. Dust clogged
their leaves. The inner humming of their quiet life became inaudible
beneath the scream and shriek of clattering traffic. They longed and
prayed to enter the great Peace of the Forest yonder, but they could
not move. They knew, moreover, that the Forest with its august, deep
splendour despised and pitied them. They were a thing of artificial
gardens, and belonged to beds of flowers all forced to grow one way....
‘I’d like to know that artist fellow better,’ was the thought upon
which he returned at length to the things of practical life. ‘I wonder
if Sophia would mind him here for a bit--?’ He rose with the sound of
the gong, brushing the ashes from his speckled waistcoat. He pulled
the waistcoat down. He was slim and spare in figure, active in his
movements. In the dim light, but for that silvery moustache, he might
easily have passed for a man of forty. ‘I’ll suggest it to her anyhow,’
he decided on his way upstairs to dress. His thought really was that
Sanderson could probably explain this world of things he had always
felt about--trees. A man who could paint the soul of a cedar in that
way must know it all.
‘Why not?’ she gave her verdict later over the bread-and-butter
pudding; ‘unless you think he’d find it dull without companions.’
‘He would paint all day in the Forest, dear. I’d like to pick his
brains a bit, too, if I could manage it.’
‘You can manage anything, David,’ was what she answered, for this
elderly childless couple used an affectionate politeness long since
deemed old-fashioned. The remark, however, displeased her, making her
feel uneasy, and she did not notice his rejoinder, smiling his pleasure
and content--‘Except yourself and our bank account, my dear.’ This
passion of his for trees was of old a bone of contention, though very
mild contention. It frightened her. That was the truth. The Bible, her
Baedeker for earth and heaven, did not mention it. Her husband, while
humouring her, could never alter that instinctive dread she had. He
soothed, but never changed her. She liked the woods, perhaps as spots
for shade and picnics, but she could not, as he did, love them.
* * * * *
And after dinner, with a lamp beside the open window, he read aloud
from _The Times_ the evening post had brought, such fragments as he
thought might interest her. The custom was invariable, except on
Sundays, when, to please his wife, he dozed over Tennyson or Farrar as
their mood might be. She knitted while he read, asked gentle questions,
told him his voice was a ‘lovely reading voice,’ and enjoyed the little
discussions that occasions prompted because he always let her win them
with ‘Ah, Sophia, I had never thought of it quite in _that_ way before;
but now you mention it I must say I think there’s something in it....’
For David Bittacy was wise. It was long after marriage, during his
months of loneliness spent with trees and forests in India, his wife
waiting at home in the Bungalow, that his other, deeper side had
developed the strange passion that she could not understand. And
after one or two serious attempts to let her share it with him, he
had given up and learned to hide it from her. He learned, that is, to
speak of it only casually; for since she knew it was there, to keep
silence altogether would only increase her pain. So from time to time
he skimmed the surface just to let her show him where he was wrong and
think she won the day. It remained a debatable land of compromise. He
listened with patience to her criticisms, her excursions and alarms,
knowing that while it gave her satisfaction, it could not change
himself. The thing lay in him too deep and true for change. But, for
peace’ sake, some meeting-place was desirable, and he found it thus.
It was her one fault in his eyes, this religious mania carried over
from her up-bringing, and it did no serious harm. Great emotion could
shake it sometimes out of her. She clung to it because her father
taught it her and not because she had thought it out for herself.
Indeed, like many women, she never really _thought_ at all, but merely
reflected the images of others’ thinking which she had learned to see.
So, wise in his knowledge of human nature, old David Bittacy accepted
the pain of being obliged to keep a portion of his inner life shut off
from the woman he deeply loved. He regarded her little biblical phrases
as oddities that still clung to a rather fine, big soul--like horns and
little useless things some animals have not yet lost in the course of
evolution while they have outgrown their use.
‘My dear, what is it? You frightened me!’ She asked it suddenly,
sitting up so abruptly that her cap dropped sideways almost to her
ear. For David Bittacy behind his crackling paper had uttered a sharp
exclamation of surprise. He had lowered the sheet and was staring at
her over the tops of his gold glasses.
‘Listen to this, if you please,’ he said, a note of eagerness in
his voice, ‘listen to this, my dear Sophia. It’s from an address by
Francis Darwin before the Royal Society. He is president, you know,
and son of the great Darwin. Listen carefully, I beg you. It is _most_
significant.’
‘I _am_ listening, David,’ she said with some astonishment, looking
up. She stopped her knitting. For a second she glanced behind her.
Something had suddenly changed in the room, and it made her feel
wide awake, though before she had been almost dozing. Her husband’s
voice and manner had introduced this new thing. Her instincts rose in
warning. ‘_Do_ read it, dear.’ He took a deep breath, looking first
again over the rims of his glasses to make quite sure of her attention.
He had evidently come across something of genuine interest, although
herself she often found the passages from these ‘Addresses’ somewhat
heavy.
In a deep, emphatic voice he read aloud:
‘“It is impossible to know whether or not plants are conscious; but it
is consistent with the doctrine of continuity that in all living things
there is something psychic, and if we accept this point of view----”’
‘_If_,’ she interrupted, scenting danger.
He ignored the interruption as a thing of slight value he was
accustomed to.
‘“If we accept this point of view,”’ he continued, ‘“we must
believe that in plants there exists a faint copy of _what we know as
consciousness in ourselves_.”’
He laid the paper down and steadily stared at her. Their eyes met. He
had italicised the last phrase.
For a minute or two his wife made no reply or comment. They stared at
one another in silence. He waited for the meaning of the words to reach
her understanding with full import. Then he turned and read them again
in part, while she, released from that curious driving look in his
eyes, instinctively again glanced over her shoulder round the room. It
was almost as if she felt some one had come in to them unnoticed.
‘We must believe that in plants there exists a faint copy of what we
know as consciousness in ourselves.’
‘_If_,’ she repeated lamely, feeling before the stare of those
questioning eyes she must say something, but not yet having gathered
her wits together quite.
‘_Consciousness_,’ he rejoined. And then he added gravely: ‘That, my
dear, is the statement of a scientific man of the Twentieth Century.’
Mrs. Bittacy sat forward in her chair so that her silk flounces
crackled louder than the newspaper. She made a characteristic little
sound between sniffing and snorting. She put her shoes closely
together, with her hands upon her knees.
‘David,’ she said quietly, ‘I think these scientific men are simply
losing their heads. There is nothing in the Bible that I can remember
about any such thing whatsoever.’
‘Nothing, Sophia, that I can remember either,’ he answered patiently.
Then, after a pause, he added, half to himself perhaps more than to
her: ‘And, now that I come to think about it, it seems that Sanderson
once said something to me that was similar.’
‘Then Mr. Sanderson is a wise and thoughtful man, and a safe man,’ she
quickly took him up, ‘if he said that.’
For she thought her husband referred to her remark about the Bible, and
not to her judgment of the scientific men. And he did not correct her
mistake.
‘And plants, you see, dear, are not the same thing as trees,’ she drove
her advantage home, ‘not quite, that is.’
‘I agree,’ said David quietly; ‘but both belong to the great vegetable
kingdom.’
There was a moment’s pause before she answered.
‘Pah! the vegetable kingdom, indeed!’ She tossed her pretty old head.
And into the words she put a degree of contempt that, could the
vegetable kingdom have heard it, might have made it feel ashamed for
covering a third of the world with its wonderful tangled network of
roots and branches, delicate shaking leaves, and its millions of spires
that caught the sun and wind and rain. Its very right to existence
seemed in question.
II
Sanderson accordingly came down, and on the whole his short visit was a
success. Why he came at all was a mystery to those who heard of it, for
he never paid visits and was certainly not the kind of man to court a
customer. There must have been something in Bittacy he liked.
Mrs. Bittacy was glad when he left. He brought no dress-suit for one
thing, not even a dinner-jacket, and he wore very low collars with big
balloon ties like a Frenchman, and let his hair grow longer than was
nice, she felt. Not that these things were important, but that she
considered them symptoms of something a little disordered. The ties
were unnecessarily flowing.
For all that he was an interesting man, and, in spite of his
eccentricities of dress and so forth, a gentleman. ‘Perhaps,’ she
reflected in her genuinely charitable heart, ‘he had other uses for the
twenty guineas, an invalid sister or an old mother to support!’ She had
no notion of the cost of brushes, frames, paints, and canvases. Also
she forgave him much for the sake of his beautiful eyes and his eager
enthusiasm of manner. So many men of thirty were already blasé.
Still, when the visit was over, she felt relieved. She said nothing
about his coming a second time, and her husband, she was glad to
notice, had likewise made no suggestion. For, truth to tell, the way
the younger man engrossed the older, keeping him out for hours in the
Forest, talking on the lawn in the blazing sun, and in the evenings
when the damp of dusk came creeping out from the surrounding woods, all
regardless of his age and usual habits, was not quite to her taste. Of
course, Mr. Sanderson did not know how easily those attacks of Indian
fever came back, but David surely might have told him.
They talked trees from morning till night. It stirred in her the old
subconscious trail of dread, a trail that led ever into the darkness of
big woods; and such feelings, as her early evangelical training taught
her, were temptings. To regard them in any other way was to play with
danger.
Her mind, as she watched these two, was charged with curious thoughts
of dread she could not understand, yet feared the more on that account.
The way they studied that old mangy cedar was a trifle unnecessary,
unwise, she felt. It was disregarding the sense of proportion which
deity had set upon the world for men’s safe guidance.
Even after dinner they smoked their cigars upon the low branches that
swept down and touched the lawn, until at length she insisted on
their coming in. Cedars, she had somewhere heard, were not safe after
sundown; it was not wholesome to be too near them; to sleep beneath
them was even dangerous, though what the precise danger was she had
forgotten. The upas was the tree she really meant.
At any rate she summoned David in, and Sanderson came presently after
him.
For a long time, before deciding on this peremptory step, she had
watched them surreptitiously from the drawing-room window--her husband
and her guest. The dusk enveloped them with its damp veil of gauze.
She saw the glowing tips of their cigars, and heard the drone of
voices. Bats flitted overhead, and big, silent moths whirred softly
over the rhododendron blossoms. And it came suddenly to her, while
she watched, that her husband had somehow altered these last few
days--since Mr. Sanderson’s arrival in fact. A change had come over
him, though what it was she could not say. She hesitated, indeed, to
search. That was the instinctive dread operating in her. Provided it
passed she would rather not know. Small things, of course, she noticed;
small outward signs. He had neglected _The Times_ for one thing,
left off his speckled waistcoats for another. He was absent-minded
sometimes; showed vagueness in practical details where hitherto he
showed decision. And--he had begun to talk in his sleep again.
These and a dozen other small peculiarities came suddenly upon her with
the rush of a combined attack. They brought with them a faint distress
that made her shiver. Momentarily her mind was startled, then confused,
as her eyes picked out the shadowy figures in the dusk, the cedar
covering them, the Forest close at their backs. And then, before she
could think, or seek internal guidance as her habit was, this whisper,
muffled and very hurried, ran across her brain: ‘It’s Mr. Sanderson.
Call David in at once!’
And she had done so. Her shrill voice crossed the lawn and died away
into the Forest, quickly smothered. No echo followed it. The sound fell
dead against the rampart of a thousand listening trees.
‘The damp is so very penetrating, even in summer,’ she murmured when
they came obediently. She was half surprised at her own audacity,
half repentant. They came so meekly at her call. ‘And my husband is
sensitive to fever from the East. No, _please_ do not throw away your
cigars. We can sit by the open window and enjoy the evening while you
smoke.’
She was very talkative for a moment; subconscious excitement was the
cause.
‘It is so still--so wonderfully still,’ she went on, as no one spoke,
‘so peaceful, and the air so very sweet ... and God is always near to
those who need His aid.’ The words slipped out before she realised
quite what she was saying, yet fortunately, in time to lower her voice,
for no one heard them. They were, perhaps, an instinctive expression of
relief. It flustered her that she could have said the thing at all.
Sanderson brought her shawl and helped to arrange the chairs; she
thanked him in her old-fashioned, gentle way, declining the lamps which
he had offered to light. ‘They attract the moths and insects so, I
think!’
The three of them sat there in the gloaming, Mr. Bittacy’s white
moustache and his wife’s yellow shawl gleaming at either end of the
little horseshoe, Sanderson with his wild black hair and shining eyes
midway between them. The painter went on talking softly, continuing
evidently the conversation begun with his host beneath the cedar. Mrs.
Bittacy, on her guard, listened--uneasily.
‘For trees, you see, rather conceal themselves in daylight. They reveal
themselves fully only after sunset. I never _know_ a tree,’ he bowed
here slightly towards the lady as though to apologise for something he
felt she would not quite understand or like, ‘until I’ve seen it in the
night. Your cedar, for instance,’ looking towards her husband again
so that Mrs. Bittacy caught the gleaming of his turned eyes, ‘I failed
with badly at first, because I did it in the morning. You shall see
to-morrow what I mean--that first sketch is upstairs in my portfolio;
it’s quite another tree to the one you bought. That view’--he leaned
forward, lowering his voice--‘I caught one morning about two o’clock
in very faint moonlight and the stars. I saw the naked being of the
thing----’
‘You mean that you went out, Mr. Sanderson, at that hour?’ the old lady
asked with astonishment and mild rebuke. She did not care particularly
for his choice of adjectives either.
‘I fear it was rather a liberty to take in another’s house, perhaps,’
he answered courteously. ‘But, having chanced to wake, I saw the tree
from my window, and made my way downstairs.’
‘It’s a wonder Boxer didn’t bite you; he sleeps loose in the hall,’ she
said.
‘On the contrary. The dog came out with me. I hope,’ he added, ‘the
noise didn’t disturb you, though it’s rather late to say so. I feel
quite guilty.’ His white teeth showed in the dusk as he smiled. A
smell of earth and flowers stole in through the window on a breath of
wandering air.
Mrs. Bittacy said nothing at the moment. ‘We both sleep like tops,’ put
in her husband, laughing. ‘You’re a courageous man, though, Sanderson;
and, by Jove, the picture justifies you. Few artists would have taken
so much trouble, though I read once that Holman Hunt, Rossetti, or some
one of that lot, painted all night in his orchard to get an effect of
moonlight that he wanted.’
He chattered on. His wife was glad to hear his voice; it made her feel
more easy in her mind. But presently the other held the floor again,
and her thoughts grew darkened and afraid. Instinctively she feared the
influence on her husband. The mystery and wonder that lie in woods, in
forests, in great gatherings of trees everywhere, seemed so real and
present while he talked.
‘The Night transfigures all things in a way,’ he was saying; ‘but
nothing so searchingly as trees. From behind a veil that sunlight
hangs before them in the day they emerge and show themselves. Even
buildings do that--in a measure--but trees particularly. In the daytime
they sleep; at night they wake, they manifest, turn active--live. You
remember,’ turning politely again in the direction of his hostess, ‘how
clearly Henley understood that?’
‘That socialist person, you mean?’ asked the lady. Her tone and accent
made the substantive sound criminal. It almost hissed, the way she
uttered it.
‘The poet, yes,’ replied the artist tactfully, ‘the friend of
Stevenson, you remember, Stevenson who wrote those charming children’s
verses.’
He quoted in a low voice the lines he meant. It was, for once, the
time, the place, and the setting all together. The words floated out
across the lawn towards the wall of blue darkness where the big Forest
swept the little garden with its league-long curve that was like
the shore-line of a sea. A wave of distant sound that was like surf
accompanied his voice, as though the wind was fain to listen too:
Not to the staring Day,
For all the importunate questionings he pursues
In his big, violent voice,
Shall those mild things of bulk and multitude,
The trees--God’s sentinels ...
Yield of their huge, unutterable selves.
* * * * *
But at the word
Of the ancient, sacerdotal Night,
Night of the many secrets, whose effect--
Transfiguring, hierophantic, dread--
Themselves alone may fully apprehend,
They tremble and are changed:
In each the uncouth, individual soul
Looms forth and glooms
Essential, and, their bodily presences
Touched with inordinate significance,
Wearing the darkness like a livery
Of some mysterious and tremendous guild,
They brood--they menace--they appal.
The voice of Mrs. Bittacy presently broke the silence that followed.
‘I like that part about God’s sentinels,’ she murmured. There was no
sharpness in her tone; it was hushed and quiet. The truth, so musically
uttered, muted her shrill objections though it had not lessened her
alarm. Her husband made no comment; his cigar, she noticed, had gone
out.
‘And old trees in particular,’ continued the artist, as though to
himself, ‘have very definite personalities. You can offend, wound,
please them; the moment you stand within their shade you feel whether
they come out to you, or whether they withdraw.’ He turned abruptly
towards his host. ‘You know that singular essay of Prentice Mulford’s,
no doubt, “God in the Trees”--extravagant perhaps, but yet with a fine
true beauty in it? You’ve never read it, no?’ he asked.
But it was Mrs. Bittacy who answered; her husband keeping his curious
deep silence.
‘I never did!’ It fell like a drip of cold water from the face muffled
in the yellow shawl; even a child could have supplied the remainder of
the unspoken thought.
‘Ah,’ said Sanderson gently, ‘but there _is_ “God” in the trees, God
in a very subtle aspect and sometimes--I have known the trees express
it too--that which is _not_ God--dark and terrible. Have you ever
noticed, too, how clearly trees show what they want--choose their
companions, at least? How beeches, for instance, allow no life too
near them--birds or squirrels in their boughs, nor any growth beneath?
The silence in the beech wood is quite terrifying often! And how pines
like bilberry bushes at their feet and sometimes little oaks--all trees
making a clear, deliberate choice, and holding firmly to it? Some trees
obviously--it’s very strange and marked--seem to prefer the human.’
The old lady sat up crackling, for this was more than she could permit.
Her stiff silk dress emitted little sharp reports.
‘We know,’ she answered, ‘that He was said to have walked in the
garden in the cool of the evening’--the gulp betrayed the effort that
it cost her--‘but we are nowhere told that He hid in the trees, or
anything like that. Trees, after all, we must remember, are only large
vegetables.’
‘True,’ was the soft answer, ‘but in everything that grows, has life,
that is, there’s mystery past all finding out. The wonder that lies
hidden in our own souls lies also hidden, I venture to assert, in the
stupidity and silence of a mere potato.’
The observation was not meant to be amusing. It was _not_ amusing. No
one laughed. On the contrary, the words conveyed in too literal a sense
the feeling that haunted all that conversation. Each one in his own
way realised--with beauty, with wonder, with alarm--that the talk had
somehow brought the whole vegetable kingdom nearer to that of man. Some
link had been established between the two. It was not wise, with that
great Forest listening at their very doors, to speak so plainly. The
Forest edged up closer while they did so.
And Mrs. Bittacy, anxious to interrupt the horrid spell, broke suddenly
in upon it with a matter-of-fact suggestion. She did not like her
husband’s prolonged silence, stillness. He seemed so negative--so
changed.
‘David,’ she said, raising her voice, ‘I think you’re feeling the
dampness. It’s grown chilly. The fever comes so suddenly, you know, and
it might be wise to take the tincture. I’ll go and get it, dear, at
once. It’s better.’ And before he could object she had left the room to
bring the homoeopathic dose that she believed in, and that, to please
her, he swallowed by the tumbler-full from week to week.
And the moment the door closed behind her, Sanderson began again,
though now in quite a different tone. Mr. Bittacy sat up in his chair.
The two men obviously resumed the conversation--the real conversation
interrupted beneath the cedar--and left aside the sham one which was so
much dust merely thrown in the old lady’s eyes.
‘Trees love you, that’s the fact,’ he said earnestly. ‘Your service to
them all these years abroad has made them know you.’
‘Know me?’
‘Made them, yes,’--he paused a moment, then added,--‘made them
_aware of your presence_; aware of a force outside themselves that
deliberately seeks their welfare, don’t you see?’
‘By Jove, Sanderson--!’ This put into plain language actual sensations
he had felt, yet had never dared to phrase in words before. ‘They get
into touch with me, as it were?’ he ventured, laughing at his own
sentence, yet laughing only with his lips.
‘Exactly,’ was the quick, emphatic reply. ‘They seek to blend with
something they feel instinctively to be good for them, helpful to their
essential beings, encouraging to their best expression--their life.’
‘Good Lord, Sir!’ Bittacy heard himself saying, ‘but you’re putting
my own thoughts into words. D’you know, I’ve felt something like that
for years. As though--’ he looked round to make sure his wife was not
there, then finished the sentence--‘as though the trees were after me!’
‘“Amalgamate” seems the best word, perhaps,’ said Sanderson slowly.
‘They would draw you to themselves. Good forces, you see, always
seek to merge; evil to separate; that’s why Good in the end must
always win the day--everywhere. The accumulation in the long run
becomes overwhelming. Evil tends to separation, dissolution, death.
The comradeship of trees, their instinct to run together, is a vital
symbol. Trees in a mass are good; alone, you may take it generally,
are--well, dangerous. Look at a monkey-puzzler, or better still, a
holly. Look at it, watch it, understand it. Did you ever see more
plainly an evil thought made visible? They’re wicked. Beautiful too, oh
yes! There’s a strange, miscalculated beauty often in evil----’
‘That cedar, then----?’
‘Not evil, no; but alien, rather. Cedars grow in forests all together.
The poor thing has drifted, that is all.’
They were getting rather deep. Sanderson, talking against time, spoke
so fast. It was too condensed. Bittacy hardly followed that last bit.
His mind floundered among his own less definite, less sorted thoughts,
till presently another sentence from the artist startled him into
attention again.
‘That cedar will protect you here, though, because you both have
humanised it by your thinking so lovingly of its presence. The others
can’t get past it, as it were.’
‘Protect me!’ he exclaimed. ‘Protect me from their love?’
Sanderson laughed. ‘We’re getting rather mixed,’ he said; ‘we’re
talking of one thing in the terms of another really. But what I mean
is--you see--that their love for you, their “awareness” of your
personality and presence involves the idea of winning you--across the
border--into themselves--into their world of living. It means, in a
way, taking you over.’
The ideas the artist started in his mind ran furious wild races to and
fro. It was like a maze sprung suddenly into movement. The whirling
of the intricate lines bewildered him. They went so fast, leaving but
half an explanation of their goal. He followed first one, then another,
but a new one always dashed across to intercept before he could get
anywhere.
‘But India,’ he said, presently in a lower voice, ‘India is so far
away--from this little English forest. The trees, too, are utterly
different for one thing?’
The rustle of skirts warned of Mrs. Bittacy’s approach. This was a
sentence he could turn round another way in case she came up and
pressed for explanation.
‘There is communion among trees all the world over,’ was the strange
quick reply. ‘They always know.’
‘They always know! You think then----?’
‘The winds, you see--the great, swift carriers! They have their ancient
rights of way about the world. An easterly wind, for instance, carrying
on stage by stage as it were--linking dropped messages and meanings
from land to land like the birds--an easterly wind----’
Mrs. Bittacy swept in upon them with the tumbler----
‘There, David,’ she said, ‘that will ward off any beginnings of attack.
Just a spoonful, dear. Oh, oh! not _all_!’ for he had swallowed half
the contents at a single gulp as usual; ‘another dose before you go to
bed, and the balance in the morning, first thing when you wake.’
She turned to her guest, who put the tumbler down for her upon a
table at his elbow. She had heard them speak of the east wind. She
emphasised the warning she had misinterpreted. The private part of the
conversation came to an abrupt end.
‘It is the one thing that upsets him more than any other--an east
wind,’ she said, ‘and I am glad, Mr. Sanderson, to hear you think so
too.’
III
A deep hush followed, in the middle of which an owl was heard calling
its muffled note in the forest. A big moth whirred with a soft
collision against one of the windows. Mrs. Bittacy started slightly,
but no one spoke. Above the trees the stars were faintly visible. From
the distance came the barking of a dog.
Bittacy, relighting his cigar, broke the little spell of silence that
had caught all three.
‘It’s rather a comforting thought,’ he said, throwing the match out of
the window, ‘that life is about us everywhere, and that there is really
no dividing line between what we call organic and inorganic.’
‘The universe, yes,’ said Sanderson, ‘is all one, really. We’re puzzled
by the gaps we cannot see across, but as a fact, I suppose, there are
no gaps at all.’
Mrs. Bittacy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared
long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many
syllables.
‘In trees and plants especially, there dreams an exquisite life that no
one yet has proved unconscious.’
‘Or conscious either, Mr. Sanderson,’ she neatly interjected. ‘It’s
only man that was made after His image, not shrubberies and things....’
Her husband interposed without delay.
‘It is not necessary,’ he explained suavely, ‘to say that they’re alive
in the sense that we are alive. At the same time,’ with an eye to his
wife, ‘I see no harm in holding, dear, that all created things contain
some measure of His life Who made them. It’s only beautiful to hold
that He created nothing dead. We are not pantheists for all that!’ he
added soothingly.
‘Oh, no! Not that, I hope!’ The word alarmed her. It was worse than
pope. Through her puzzled mind stole a stealthy, dangerous thing ...
like a panther.
‘I like to think that even in decay there’s life,’ the painter
murmured. ‘The falling apart of rotten wood breeds sentiency; there’s
force and motion in the falling of a dying leaf, in the breaking up
and crumbling of everything indeed. And take an inert stone: it’s
crammed with heat and weight and potencies of all sorts. What holds its
particles together indeed? We understand it as little as gravity or
why a needle always turns to the “North.” Both things may be a mode of
life....’
‘You think a compass has a soul, Mr. Sanderson?’ exclaimed the lady
with a crackling of her silk flounces that conveyed a sense of outrage
even more plainly than her tone. The artist smiled to himself in the
darkness, but it was Bittacy who hastened to reply.
‘Our friend merely suggests that these mysterious agencies,’ he said
quietly, ‘may be due to some kind of life we cannot understand. Why
should water only run downhill? Why should trees grow at right angles
to the surface of the ground and towards the sun? Why should the
worlds spin for ever on their axes? Why should fire change the form of
everything it touches without really destroying them? To say these
things follow the law of their being explains nothing. Mr. Sanderson
merely suggests--poetically, my dear, of course--that these may be
manifestations of life, though life at a different stage to ours.’
‘The “_breath_ of life,” we read, “He breathed into them.” These things
do not breathe.’ She said it with triumph.
Then Sanderson put in a word. But he spoke rather to himself or to his
host than by way of serious rejoinder to the ruffled lady.
‘But plants do breathe too, you know,’ he said. ‘They breathe, they
eat, they digest, they move about, and they adapt themselves to their
environment as men and animals do. They have a nervous system too ...
at least a complex system of nuclei which have some of the qualities of
nerve cells. They may have memory too. Certainly, they know definite
action in response to stimulus. And though this may be physiological,
no one has proved that it is only that, and not--psychological.’
He did not notice, apparently, the little gasp that was audible behind
the yellow shawl. Bittacy cleared his throat, threw his extinguished
cigar upon the lawn, crossed and recrossed his legs.
‘And in trees,’ continued the other, ‘behind a great forest, for
instance,’ pointing towards the woods, ‘may stand a rather splendid
Entity that manifests through all the thousand individual trees--some
huge collective life, quite as minutely and delicately organised as
our own. It might merge and blend with ours under certain conditions,
so that we could understand it by _being_ it, for a time at least. It
might even engulf human vitality into the immense whirlpool of its
own vast dreaming life. The pull of a big forest on a man can be
tremendous and utterly overwhelming.’
The mouth of Mrs. Bittacy was heard to close with a snap. Her shawl,
and particularly her crackling dress, exhaled the protest that burned
within her like a pain. She was too distressed to be overawed, but
at the same time too confused ‘mid the litter of words and meanings
half understood, to find immediate phrases she could use. Whatever the
actual meaning of his language might be, however, and whatever subtle
dangers lay concealed behind them meanwhile, they certainly wove a
kind of gentle spell with the glimmering darkness that held all three
delicately enmeshed there by that open window. The odours of dewy lawn,
flowers, trees, and earth formed part of it.
‘The moods,’ he continued, ‘that people waken in us are due to their
hidden life affecting our own. Deep calls to deep. A person, for
instance, joins you in an empty room: you both instantly change. The
new arrival, though in silence, has caused a change of mood. May
not the moods of Nature touch and stir us in virtue of a similar
prerogative? The sea, the hills, the desert, wake passion, joy, terror,
as the case may be; for a few, perhaps,’ he glanced significantly at
his host so that Mrs. Bittacy again caught the turning of his eyes,
‘emotions of a curious, flaming splendour that are quite nameless. Well
... whence come these powers? Surely from nothing that is ... dead!
Does not the influence of a forest, its sway and strange ascendancy
over certain minds, betray a direct manifestation of life? It lies
otherwise beyond all explanation, this mysterious emanation of big
woods. Some natures, of course, deliberately invite it. The authority
of a host of trees,’--his voice grew almost solemn as he said the
words--‘is something not to be denied. One feels it here, I think,
particularly.’
There was considerable tension in the air as he ceased speaking. Mr.
Bittacy had not intended that the talk should go so far. They had
drifted. He did not wish to see his wife unhappy or afraid, and he was
aware--acutely so--that her feelings were stirred to a point he did not
care about. Something in her, as he put it, was ‘working up’ towards
explosion.
He sought to generalise the conversation, diluting this accumulated
emotion by spreading it.
‘The sea is His and He made it,’ he suggested vaguely, hoping Sanderson
would take the hint, ‘and with the trees it is the same....’
‘The whole gigantic vegetable kingdom, yes,’ the artist took him up,
‘all at the service of man, for food, for shelter and for a thousand
purposes of his daily life. Is it not striking what a lot of the globe
they cover ... exquisitely organised life, yet stationary, always ready
to our hand when we want them, never running away? But the taking
them, for all that, not so easy. One man shrinks from picking flowers,
another from cutting down trees. And, it’s curious that most of the
forest tales and legends are dark, mysterious, and somewhat ill-omened.
The forest-beings are rarely gay and harmless. The forest life was felt
as terrible. Tree-worship still survives to-day. Woodcutters ... those
who take the life of trees ... you see, a race of haunted men....’
He stopped abruptly, a singular catch in his voice. Bittacy felt
something even before the sentences were over. His wife, he knew, felt
it still more strongly. For it was in the middle of the heavy silence
following upon these last remarks, that Mrs. Bittacy, rising with a
violent abruptness from her chair, drew the attention of the others to
something moving towards them across the lawn. It came silently. In
outline it was large and curiously spread. It rose high, too, for the
sky above the shrubberies, still pale gold from the sunset, was dimmed
by its passage. She declared afterwards that it moved in ‘looping
circles,’ but what she perhaps meant to convey was ‘spirals.’
She screamed faintly. ‘It’s come at last! And it’s you that brought it!’
She turned excitedly, half afraid, half angry, to Sanderson. With a
breathless sort of gasp she said it, politeness all forgotten. ‘I knew
it ... if you went on. I knew it. Oh! Oh!’ And she cried again, ‘Your
talking has brought it out!’ The terror that shook her voice was rather
dreadful.
But the confusion of her vehement words passed unnoticed in the first
surprise they caused. For a moment nothing happened.
‘What is it you think you see, my dear?’ asked her husband, startled.
Sanderson said nothing. All three leaned forward, the men still
sitting, but Mrs. Bittacy had rushed hurriedly to the window, placing
herself of a purpose, as it seemed, between her husband and the lawn.
She pointed. Her little hand made a silhouette against the sky, the
yellow shawl hanging from the arm like a cloud.
‘Beyond the cedar--between it and the lilacs.’ The voice had lost its
shrillness; it was thin and hushed. ‘There ... now you see it going
round upon itself again--going back, thank God! ... going back to the
Forest.’ It sank to a whisper, shaking. She repeated, with a great
dropping sigh of relief--‘Thank God! I thought ... at first ... it was
coming here ... to us!... David ... to _you_!’
She stepped back from the window, her movements confused, feeling in
the darkness for the support of a chair, and finding her husband’s
outstretched hand instead. ‘Hold me, dear, hold me, please ... tight.
Do not let me go.’ She was in what he called afterwards ‘a regular
state.’ He drew her firmly down upon her chair again.
‘Smoke, Sophie, my dear,’ he said quickly, trying to make his voice
calm and natural. ‘I see it, yes. It’s smoke blowing over from the
gardener’s cottage....’
‘But, David,’--and there was new horror in her whisper now--‘it made
a noise. It makes it still. I hear it swishing.’ Some such word she
used--swishing, sishing, rushing, or something of the kind. ‘David, I’m
very frightened. It’s something awful! That man has called it out...!’
‘Hush, hush,’ whispered her husband. He stroked her trembling hand
beside him.
‘It is in the wind,’ said Sanderson, speaking for the first time, very
quietly. The expression on his face was not visible in the gloom, but
his voice was soft and unafraid. At the sound of it, Mrs. Bittacy
started violently again. Bittacy drew his chair a little forward to
obstruct her view of him. He felt bewildered himself, a little, hardly
knowing quite what to say or do. It was all so very curious and sudden.
But Mrs. Bittacy was badly frightened. It seemed to her that what she
saw came from the enveloping forest just beyond their little garden. It
emerged in a sort of secret way, moving towards them as with a purpose,
stealthily, difficultly. Then something stopped it. It could not
advance beyond the cedar. The cedar--this impression remained with her
afterwards too--prevented, kept it back. Like a rising sea the Forest
had surged a moment in their direction through the covering darkness,
and this visible movement was its first wave. Thus to her mind it
seemed ... like that mysterious turn of the tide that used to frighten
and mystify her in childhood on the sands. The outward surge of some
enormous Power was what she felt ... something to which every instinct
in her being rose in opposition because it threatened her and hers. In
that moment she realised the Personality of the Forest ... menacing.
In the stumbling movement that she made away from the window and
towards the bell she barely caught the sentence Sanderson--or was it
her husband?--murmured to himself: ‘It came because we talked of it;
our thinking made it aware of us and brought it out. But the cedar
stops it. It cannot cross the lawn, you see....’
All three were standing now, and her husband’s voice broke in with
authority while his wife’s fingers touched the bell.
‘My dear, I should _not_ say anything to Thompson.’ The anxiety he felt
was manifest in his voice, but his outward composure had returned. ‘The
gardener can go....’
Then Sanderson cut him short. ‘Allow me,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll see if
anything’s wrong.’ And before either of them could answer or object, he
was gone, leaping out by the open window. They saw his figure vanish
with a run across the lawn into the darkness.
A moment later the maid entered, in answer to the bell, and with her
came the loud barking of the terrier from the hall.
‘The lamps,’ said her master shortly, and as she softly closed the door
behind her, they heard the wind pass with a mournful sound of singing
round the outer walls. A rustle of foliage from the distance passed
within it.
‘You see, the wind _is_ rising. It _was_ the wind!’ He put a comforting
arm about her, distressed to feel that she was trembling. But he knew
that he was trembling too, though with a kind of odd elation rather
than alarm. ‘And it _was_ smoke that you saw coming from Stride’s
cottage, or from the rubbish heaps he’s been burning in the kitchen
garden. The noise we heard was the branches rustling in the wind. Why
should you be so nervous?’
A thin whispering voice answered him:
‘I was afraid for _you_, dear. Something frightened me for _you_.
That man makes me feel so uneasy and uncomfortable for his influence
upon you. It’s very foolish, I know. I think ... I’m tired; I feel so
overwrought and restless.’ The words poured out in a hurried jumble and
she kept turning to the window while she spoke.
‘The strain of having a visitor,’ he said soothingly, ‘has taxed you.
We’re so unused to having people in the house. He goes to-morrow.’ He
warmed her cold hands between his own, stroking them tenderly. More,
for the life of him, he could not say or do. The joy of a strange,
internal excitement made his heart beat faster. He knew not what it
was. He knew only, perhaps, whence it came.
She peered close into his face through the gloom, and said a curious
thing. ‘I thought, David, for a moment ... you seemed ... different. My
nerves are all on edge to-night.’ She made no further reference to her
husband’s visitor.
A sound of footsteps from the lawn warned of Sanderson’s return, as he
answered quickly in a lowered tone--‘There’s no need to be afraid on
my account, dear girl. There’s nothing wrong with me, I assure you; I
never felt so well and happy in my life.’
Thompson came in with the lamps and brightness, and scarcely had she
gone again when Sanderson in turn was seen climbing through the window.
‘There’s nothing,’ he said lightly, as he closed it behind him.
‘Somebody’s been burning leaves, and the smoke is drifting a little
through the trees. The wind,’ he added, glancing at his host a moment
significantly, but in so discreet a way that Mrs. Bittacy did not
observe it, ‘the wind, too, has begun to roar ... in the Forest ...
further out.’
But Mrs. Bittacy noticed about him two things which increased her
uneasiness. She noticed the shining of his eyes, because a similar
light had suddenly come into her husband’s; and she noticed, too, the
apparent depth of meaning he put into those simple words that ‘the wind
had begun to roar in the Forest ... further out.’ Her mind retained
the disagreeable impression that he meant more than he said. In his
tone lay quite another implication. It was not actually ‘wind’ he spoke
of, and it would not remain ‘further out’ ... rather, it was coming
in. Another impression she got too--still more unwelcome--was that her
husband understood his hidden meaning.
IV
‘David, dear,’ she observed gently as soon as they were alone upstairs,
‘I have a horrible uneasy feeling about that man. I cannot get rid of
it.’ The tremor in her voice caught all his tenderness.
He turned to look at her. ‘Of what kind, my dear? You’re so imaginative
sometimes, aren’t you?’
‘I think,’ she hesitated, stammering a little, confused, still
frightened, ‘I mean--isn’t he a hypnotist, or full of those theofosical
ideas, or something of the sort? You know what I mean--’
He was too accustomed to her little confused alarms to explain them
away seriously as a rule, or to correct her verbal inaccuracies, but
to-night he felt she needed careful, tender treatment. He soothed her
as best he could.
‘But there’s no harm in that, even if he is,’ he answered quietly.
‘Those are only new names for very old ideas, you know, dear.’ There
was no trace of impatience in his voice.
‘That’s what I mean,’ she replied, the texts he dreaded rising in an
unuttered crowd behind the words. ‘He’s one of those things that we are
warned would come--one of those Latter-Day things.’ For her mind still
bristled with the bogeys of Antichrist and Prophecy, and she had only
escaped the Number of the Beast, as it were, by the skin of her teeth.
The Pope drew most of her fire usually, because she could understand
him; the target was plain and she could shoot. But this tree-and-forest
business was so vague and horrible. It terrified her. ‘He makes me
think,’ she went on, ‘of Principalities and Powers in high places, and
of things that walk in darkness. I did _not_ like the way he spoke of
trees getting alive in the night, and all that; it made me think of
wolves in sheep’s clothing. And when I saw that awful thing in the sky
above the lawn--’
But he interrupted her at once, for that was something he had decided
it was best to leave unmentioned. Certainly it was better not discussed.
‘He only meant, I think, Sophie,’ he put in gravely, yet with a little
smile, ‘that trees may have a measure of conscious life--rather a
nice idea on the whole, surely,--something like that bit we read in
the _Times_ the other night, you remember--and that a big forest may
possess a sort of Collective Personality. Remember, he’s an artist, and
poetical.’
‘It’s dangerous,’ she said emphatically. ‘I feel it’s playing with
fire, unwise, unsafe--’
‘Yet all to the glory of God,’ he urged gently. ‘We must not shut our
ears and eyes to knowledge--of any kind, must we?’
‘With you, David, the wish is always farther than the thought,’ she
rejoined. For, like the child who thought that ‘suffered under Pontius
Pilate’ was ‘suffered under a bunch of violets,’ she heard her proverbs
phonetically and reproduced them thus. She hoped to convey her warning
in the quotation. ‘And we must always try the spirits whether they be
of God,’ she added tentatively.
‘Certainly, dear, we can always do that,’ he assented, getting into bed.
But, after a little pause, during which she blew the light out, David
Bittacy settling down to sleep with an excitement in his blood that was
new and bewilderingly delightful, realised that perhaps he had not said
quite enough to comfort her. She was lying awake by his side, still
frightened. He put his head up in the darkness.
‘Sophie,’ he said softly, ‘you must remember, too, that in any case
between us and--and all that sort of thing--there is a great gulf
fixed, a gulf that cannot be crossed--er--while we are still in the
body.’
And hearing no reply, he satisfied himself that she was already
asleep and happy. But Mrs. Bittacy was not asleep. She heard the
sentence, only she said nothing because she felt her thought was better
unexpressed. She was afraid to hear the words in the darkness. The
Forest outside was listening and might hear them too--the Forest that
was ‘roaring further out.’
And the thought was this: That gulf, of course, existed, but Sanderson
had somehow bridged it.
* * * * *
It was much later that night when she awoke out of troubled, uneasy
dreams and heard a sound that twisted her very nerves with fear. It
passed immediately with full waking, for, listen as she might, there
was nothing audible but the inarticulate murmur of the night. It was
in her dreams she heard it, and the dreams had vanished with it. But
the sound was recognisable, for it was that rushing noise that had come
across the lawn; only this time closer. Just above her face while she
slept had passed this murmur as of rustling branches in the very room,
a sound of foliage whispering. ‘A going in the tops of the mulberry
trees,’ ran through her mind. She had dreamed that she lay beneath a
spreading tree somewhere, a tree that whispered with ten thousand soft
lips of green; and the dream continued for a moment even after waking.
She sat up in bed and stared about her. The window was open at the
top; she saw the stars; the door, she remembered, was locked as usual;
the room, of course, was empty. The deep hush of the summer night
lay over all, broken only by another sound that now issued from the
shadows close beside the bed, a human sound, yet unnatural, a sound
that seized the fear with which she had waked and instantly increased
it. And, although it was one she recognised as familiar, at first she
could not name it. Some seconds certainly passed--and, they were very
long ones--before she understood that it was her husband talking in his
sleep.
The direction of the voice confused and puzzled her, moreover, for it
was not, as she first supposed, beside her. There was distance in it.
The next minute, by the light of the sinking candle flame, she saw his
white figure standing out in the middle of the room, halfway towards
the window. The candle-light slowly grew. She saw him move then nearer
to the window, with arms outstretched. His speech was low and mumbled,
the words running together too much to be distinguishable.
And she shivered. To her, sleep-talking was uncanny to the point of
horror; it was like the talking of the dead, mere parody of a living
voice, unnatural.
‘David!’ she whispered, dreading the sound of her own voice, and half
afraid to interrupt him and see his face. She could not bear the
sight of the wide-opened eyes. ‘David, you’re walking in your sleep.
Do--come back to bed, dear, _please_!’
Her whisper seemed so dreadfully loud in the still darkness. At the
sound of her voice he paused, then turned slowly round to face her.
His widely-opened eyes stared into her own without recognition; they
looked through her into something beyond; it was as though he knew the
direction of the sound, yet could not see her. They were shining, she
noticed, as the eyes of Sanderson had shone several hours ago; and his
face was flushed, distraught. Anxiety was written upon every feature.
And, instantly, recognising that the fever was upon him, she forgot her
terror temporarily in practical considerations. He came back to bed
without waking. She closed his eyelids. Presently he composed himself
quietly to sleep, or rather to deeper sleep. She contrived to make him
swallow something from the tumbler beside the bed.
Then she rose very quietly to close the window, feeling the night air
blow in too fresh and keen. She put the candle where it could not
reach him. The sight of the big Baxter Bible beside it comforted her a
little, but all through her under-being ran the warnings of a curious
alarm. And it was while in the act of fastening the catch with one hand
and pulling the string of the blind with the other, that her husband
sat up again in bed and spoke in words this time that were distinctly
audible. The eyes had opened wide again. He pointed. She stood stock
still and listened, her shadow distorted on the blind. He did not come
out towards her as at first she feared.
The whispering voice was very clear, horrible, too, beyond all she had
ever known.
‘They are roaring in the Forest further out ... and I ... must go
and see.’ He stared beyond her as he said it, to the woods. ‘They are
needing me. They sent for me....’ Then his eyes wandering back again to
things within the room, he lay down, his purpose suddenly changed. And
that change was horrible as well, more horrible, perhaps, because of
its revelation of another detailed world he moved in far away from her.
The singular phrase chilled her blood; for a moment she was utterly
terrified. That tone of the somnambulist, differing so slightly yet so
distressingly from normal, waking speech, seemed to her somehow wicked.
Evil and danger lay waiting thick behind it. She leaned against the
window-sill, shaking in every limb. She had an awful feeling for a
moment that something was coming in to fetch him.
‘Not yet, then,’ she heard in a much lower voice from the bed, ‘but
later. It will be better so.... I shall go later....’
The words expressed some fringe of these alarms that had haunted her
so long, and that the arrival and presence of Sanderson seemed to
have brought to the very edge of a climax she could not even dare to
think about. They gave it form; they brought it closer; they sent her
thoughts to her Deity in a wild, deep prayer for help and guidance. For
here was a direct, unconscious betrayal of a world of inner purposes
and claims her husband recognised while he kept them almost wholly to
himself.
By the time she reached his side and knew the comfort of his touch, the
eyes had closed again, this time of their own accord, and the head lay
calmly back upon the pillows. She gently straightened the bed clothes.
She watched him for some minutes, shading the candle carefully with
one hand. There was a smile of strangest peace upon the face.
Then, blowing out the candle, she knelt down and prayed before getting
back into bed. But no sleep came to her. She lay awake all night
thinking, wondering, praying, until at length with the chorus of the
birds and the glimmer or the dawn upon the green blind, she fell into a
slumber of complete exhaustion.
But while she slept the wind continued roaring in the Forest further
out. The sound came closer--sometimes very close indeed.
V
With the departure of Sanderson the significance of the curious
incidents waned, because the moods that had produced them passed away.
Mrs. Bittacy soon afterwards came to regard them as some growth of
disproportion that had been very largely, perhaps, in her own mind.
It did not strike her that this change was sudden, for it came about
quite naturally. For one thing her husband never spoke of the matter,
and for another she remembered how many things in life that had seemed
inexplicable and singular at the time turned out later to have been
quite commonplace.
Most of it, certainly, she put down to the presence of the artist and
to his wild, suggestive talk. With his welcome removal, the world
turned ordinary again and safe. The fever, though it lasted as usual
a short time only, had not allowed of her husband’s getting up to say
good-bye, and she had conveyed his regrets and adieux. In the morning
Mr. Sanderson had seemed ordinary enough. In his town hat and gloves,
as she saw him go, he seemed tame and unalarming.
‘After all,’ she thought as she watched the pony-cart bear him off,
‘he’s only an artist!’ What she had thought he might be otherwise her
slim imagination did not venture to disclose. Her change of feeling
was wholesome and refreshing. She felt a little ashamed of her
behaviour. She gave him a smile--genuine because the relief she felt
was genuine--as he bent over her hand and kissed it, but she did not
suggest a second visit, and her husband, she noted with satisfaction
and relief had said nothing either.
The little household fell again into the normal and sleepy routine to
which it was accustomed. The name of Arthur Sanderson was rarely if
ever mentioned. Nor, for her part, did she mention to her husband the
incident of his walking in his sleep and the wild words he used. But
to forget it was equally impossible. Thus it lay buried deep within
her like a centre of some unknown disease of which it was a mysterious
symptom, waiting to spread at the first favourable opportunity. She
prayed against it every night and morning: prayed that she might forget
it--that God would keep her husband safe from harm.
For in spite of much surface foolishness that many might have read as
weakness, Mrs. Bittacy had balance, sanity, and a fine deep faith. She
was greater than she knew. Her love for her husband and her God were
somehow one, an achievement only possible to a single-hearted nobility
of soul.
* * * * *
There followed a summer of great violence and beauty; of beauty,
because the refreshing rains at night prolonged the glory of the
spring and spread it all across July, keeping the foliage young and
sweet; of violence, because the winds that tore about the south of
England brushed the whole country into dancing movement. They swept
the woods magnificently, and kept them roaring with a perpetual grand
voice. Their deepest notes seemed never to leave the sky. They sang
and shouted, and torn leaves raced and fluttered through the air long
before their usually appointed time. Many a tree, after days of this
roaring and dancing, fell exhausted to the ground. The cedar on the
lawn gave up two limbs that fell upon successive days, at the same
hour too--just before dusk. The wind often makes its most boisterous
effort at that time, before it drops with the sun, and these two huge
branches lay in dark ruin covering half the lawn. They spread across it
and towards the house. They left an ugly gaping space upon the tree,
so that the Lebanon looked unfinished, half destroyed, a monster shorn
of its old-time comeliness and splendour. Far more of the Forest was
now visible than before; it peered through the breach of the broken
defences. They could see from the windows of the house now--especially
from the drawing-room and bedroom windows--straight out into the glades
and depths beyond.
Mrs. Bittacy’s niece and nephew, who were staying on a visit at the
time, enjoyed themselves immensely helping the gardeners carry off
the fragments. It took two days to do this, for Mr. Bittacy insisted
on the branches being moved entire. He would not allow them to be
chopped; also, he would not consent to their use as firewood. Under his
superintendence the unwieldy masses were dragged to the edge of the
garden and arranged upon the frontier line between the Forest and the
lawn. The children were delighted with the scheme. They entered into it
with enthusiasm. At all costs this defence against the inroads of the
Forest must be made secure. They caught their uncle’s earnestness, felt
even something of a hidden motive that he had, and the visit, usually
rather dreaded, became the visit of their lives instead. It was Aunt
Sophia this time who seemed discouraging and dull.
‘She’s got so old and funny,’ opined Stephen.
But Alice, who felt in the silent displeasure of her aunt some secret
thing that half alarmed her, said:
‘I think she’s afraid of the woods. She never comes into them with us,
you see.’
‘All the more reason then for making this wall impreg-- all fat and
thick and solid,’ he concluded, unable to manage the longer word. ‘Then
nothing--simply _nothing_--can get through. Can’t it, Uncle David?’
And Mr. Bittacy, jacket discarded and working in his speckled
waistcoat, went puffing to their aid, arranging the massive limb of the
cedar like a hedge.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘whatever happens, you know, we must finish before
it’s dark. Already the wind is roaring in the Forest further out.’ And
Alice caught the phrase and instantly echoed it. ‘Stevie,’ she cried
below her breath, ‘look sharp, you lazy lump. Didn’t you hear what
Uncle David said? It’ll come in and catch us before we’ve done!’
They worked like Trojans, and, sitting beneath the wistaria tree
that climbed the southern wall of the cottage, Mrs. Bittacy with her
knitting watched them, calling from time to time insignificant messages
of counsel and advice. The messages passed, of course, unheeded.
Mostly, indeed, they were unheard, for the workers were too absorbed.
She warned her husband not to get too hot, Alice not to tear her dress,
Stephen not to strain his back with pulling. Her mind hovered between
the homoeopathic medicine-chest upstairs and her anxiety to see the
business finished.
For this breaking up of the cedar had stirred again her slumbering
alarms. It revived memories of the visit of Mr. Sanderson that had
been sinking into oblivion; she recalled his queer and odious way
of talking, and many things she hoped forgotten drew their heads up
from that subconscious region to which all forgetting is impossible.
They looked at her and nodded. They were full of life; they had no
intention of being pushed aside and buried permanently. ‘Now look!’
they whispered, ‘didn’t we tell you so?’ They had been merely waiting
the right moment to assert their presence. And all her former vague
distress crept over her. Anxiety, uneasiness returned. That dreadful
sinking of the heart came too.
This incident of the cedar’s breaking up was actually so unimportant,
and yet her husband’s attitude towards it made it so significant.
There was nothing that he said in particular, or did, or left undone
that frightened her, but his general air of earnestness seemed so
unwarranted. She felt that he deemed the thing important. He was so
exercised about it. This evidence of sudden concern and interest,
buried all the summer from her sight and knowledge, she realised now
had been buried purposely; he had kept it intentionally concealed.
Deeply submerged in him there ran this tide of other thoughts, desires,
hopes. What were they? Whither did they lead? The accident to the tree
betrayed it most unpleasantly; and, doubtless, more than he was aware.
She watched his grave and serious face as he worked there with the
children, and as she watched she felt afraid. It vexed her that the
children worked so eagerly. They unconsciously supported him. The
thing she feared she would not even name. But it was waiting.
Moreover, as far as her puzzled mind could deal with a dread so vague
and incoherent, the collapse of the cedar somehow brought it nearer.
The fact that, all so ill-explained and formless, the thing yet lay in
her consciousness, out of reach but moving and alive, filled her with
a kind of puzzled, dreadful wonder. Its presence was so very real, its
power so gripping, its partial concealment so abominable. Then, out of
the dim confusion, she grasped one thought and saw it stand quite clear
before her eyes. She found difficulty in clothing it in words, but its
meaning perhaps was this: That cedar stood in their life for something
friendly; its downfall meant disaster; a sense of some protective
influence about the cottage, and about her husband in particular, was
thereby weakened.
‘Why do you fear the big winds so?’ he had asked her several days
before, after a particularly boisterous day; and the answer she
gave surprised her while she gave it. One of those heads poked up
unconsciously, and let slip the truth:
‘Because, David, I feel they--bring the Forest with them,’ she
faltered. ‘They blow something from the trees--into the mind--into the
house.’
He looked at her keenly for a moment.
‘That must be why I love them then,’ he answered. ‘They blow the souls
of the trees about the sky like clouds.’
The conversation dropped. She had never heard him talk in quite that
way before.
And another time, when he had coaxed her to go with him down one of the
nearer glades, she asked why he took the small hand-axe with him, and
what he wanted it for.
‘To cut the ivy that clings to the trunks and takes their life away,’
he said.
‘But can’t the verdurers do that?’ she asked. ‘That’s what they’re paid
for, isn’t it?’
Whereupon he explained that ivy was a parasite the trees knew not how
to fight alone, and that the verdurers were careless and did not do it
thoroughly. They gave a chop here and there, leaving the tree to do the
rest for itself if it could.
‘Besides, I like to do it for them. I love to help them and protect,’
he added, the foliage rustling all about his quiet words as they went.
And these stray remarks, as his attitude towards the broken cedar,
betrayed this curious, subtle change that was going forward in his
personality. Slowly and surely all the summer it had increased.
It was growing--the thought startled her horribly--just as a tree
grows, the outer evidence from day to day so slight as to be
unnoticeable, yet the rising tide so deep and irresistible. The
alteration spread all through and over him, was in both mind and
actions, sometimes almost in his face as well. Occasionally, thus, it
stood up straight outside himself and frightened her. His life was
somehow becoming linked so intimately with trees, and with all that
trees signified. His interests became more and more their interests,
his activity combined with theirs, his thoughts and feelings theirs,
his purpose, hope, desire, his fate----
His fate! The darkness of some vague, enormous terror dropped its
shadow on her when she thought of it. Some instinct in her heart she
dreaded infinitely more than death--for death meant sweet translation
for his soul--came gradually to associate the thought of him with the
thought of trees, in particular with these Forest trees. Sometimes,
before she could face the thing, argue it away, or pray it into
silence, she found the thought of him running swiftly through her mind
like a thought of the Forest itself, the two most intimately linked and
joined together, each a part and complement of the other, one being.
The idea was too dim for her to see it face to face. Its mere
possibility dissolved the instant she focussed it to get the truth
behind it. It was too utterly elusive, mad, protæan. Under the attack
of even a minute’s concentration the very meaning of it vanished,
melted away. The idea lay really behind any words that she could ever
find, beyond the touch of definite thought. Her mind was unable to
grapple with it. But, while it vanished, the trail of its approach and
disappearance flickered a moment before her shaking vision. The horror
certainly remained.
Reduced to the simple human statement that her temperament sought
instinctively it stood perhaps at this: Her husband loved her, and he
loved the trees as well; but the trees came first, claimed parts of him
she did not know. _She_ loved her God and him. _He_ loved the trees and
her.
Thus, in guise of some faint, distressing compromise, the matter shaped
itself for her perplexed mind in the terms of conflict. A silent,
hidden battle raged, but as yet raged far away. The breaking of the
cedar was a visible outward fragment of a distant and mysterious
encounter that was coming daily closer to them both. The wind, instead
of roaring in the Forest further out, now came nearer, booming in
fitful gusts about its edge and frontiers.
Meanwhile the summer dimmed. The autumn winds went sighing through the
woods; leaves turned to golden red, and the evenings were drawing in
with cosy shadows before the first sign of anything seriously untoward
made its appearance. It came then with a flat, decided kind of violence
that indicated mature preparation beforehand. It was not impulsive nor
ill-considered. In a fashion it seemed expected, and indeed inevitable.
For within a fortnight of their annual change to the little village of
Seillans above St. Raphael--a change so regular for the past ten years
that it was not even discussed between them--David Bittacy abruptly
refused to go.
Thompson had laid the tea-table, prepared the spirit lamp beneath the
urn, pulled down the blinds in that swift and silent way she had, and
left the room. The lamps were still unlit. The firelight shone on the
chintz armchairs, and Boxer lay asleep on the black horse-hair rug.
Upon the walls the gilt picture frames gleamed faintly, the pictures
themselves indistinguishable. Mrs. Bittacy had warmed the teapot and
was in the act of pouring the water in to heat the cups when her
husband, looking up from his chair across the hearth, made the abrupt
announcement:
‘My dear,’ he said, as though following a train of thought of which she
only heard this final phrase, ‘it’s really quite impossible for me to
go.’
And so abrupt, inconsequent, it sounded that she at first
misunderstood. She thought he meant go out into the garden or the
woods. But her heart leaped all the same. The tone of his voice was
ominous.
‘Of course not,’ she answered, ‘it would be _most_ unwise. Why should
you----?’ She referred to the mist that always spread on autumn nights
upon the lawn; but before she finished the sentence she knew that _he_
referred to something else. And her heart then gave its second horrible
leap.
‘David! You mean abroad?’ she gasped.
‘I mean abroad, dear, yes.’
It reminded her of the tone he used when saying good-bye years ago
before one of those jungle expeditions she dreaded. His voice then was
so serious, so final. It was serious and final now. For several moments
she could think of nothing to say. She busied herself with the teapot.
She had filled one cup with hot water till it overflowed, and she
emptied it slowly into the slop-basin, trying with all her might not to
let him see the trembling of her hand. The firelight and the dimness of
the room both helped her. But in any case he would hardly have noticed
it. His thoughts were far away....
VI
Mrs. Bittacy had never liked their present home. She preferred a flat,
more open country that left approaches clear. She liked to see things
coming. This cottage on the very edge of the old hunting grounds of
William the Conqueror had never satisfied her ideal of a safe and
pleasant place to settle down in. The sea-coast, with treeless downs
behind and a clear horizon in front, as at Eastbourne, say, was her
ideal of a proper home.
It was curious, this instinctive aversion she felt to being shut in--by
trees especially; a kind of claustrophobia almost; probably due, as has
been said, to the days in India when the trees took her husband off and
surrounded him with dangers. In those weeks of solitude the feeling
had matured. She had fought it in her fashion, but never conquered it.
Apparently routed, it had a way of creeping back in other forms. In
this particular case, yielding to his strong desire, she thought the
battle won, but the terror of the trees came back before the first
month had passed. They laughed in her face.
She never lost knowledge of the fact that the leagues of forest lay
about their cottage like a mighty wall, a crowding, watching, listening
presence that shut them in from freedom and escape. Far from morbid
naturally, she did her best to deny the thought, and so simple and
unartificial was her type of mind that for weeks together she would
wholly lose it. Then, suddenly it would return upon her with a rush of
bleak reality. It was not only in her mind; it existed apart from any
mere mood; a separate fear that walked alone; it came and went, yet
when it went--went only to watch her from another point of view. It was
in abeyance--hidden round the corner.
The Forest never let her go completely. It was ever ready to encroach.
All the branches, she sometimes fancied, stretched one way--towards
their tiny cottage and garden, as though it sought to draw them in
and merge them in itself. Its great, deep-breathing soul resented the
mockery, the insolence, the irritation of the prim garden at its very
gates. It would absorb and smother them if it could. And every wind
that blew its thundering message over the huge sounding-board of the
million, shaking trees conveyed the purpose that it had. They had
angered its great soul. At its heart was this deep, incessant roaring.
All this she never framed in words; the subtleties of language lay far
beyond her reach. But instinctively she felt it; and more besides. It
troubled her profoundly. Chiefly, moreover, for her husband. Merely
for herself, the nightmare might have left her cold. It was David’s
peculiar interest in the trees that gave the special invitation.
Jealousy, then, in its most subtle aspect came to strengthen this
aversion and dislike, for it came in a form that no reasonable wife
could possibly object to. Her husband’s passion, she reflected, was
natural and inborn. It had decided his vocation, fed his ambition,
nourished his dreams, desires, hopes. All his best years of active
life had been spent in the care and guardianship of trees. He knew
them, understood their secret life and nature, ‘managed’ them
intuitively as other men ‘managed’ dogs and horses. He could not live
for long away from them without a strange, acute nostalgia that stole
his peace of mind and consequently his strength of body. A forest made
him happy and at peace; it nursed and fed and soothed his deepest
moods. Trees influenced the sources of his life, lowered or raised the
very heart-beat in him. Cut off from them he languished as a lover
of the sea can droop inland, or a mountaineer may pine in the flat
monotony of the plains.
This she could understand, in a fashion at least, and make allowances
for. She had yielded gently, even sweetly, to his choice of their
English home; for in the little island there is nothing that suggests
the woods of wilder countries so nearly as the New Forest. It has the
genuine air and mystery, the depth and splendour, the loneliness, and
here and there the strong, untamable quality of old-time forests as
Bittacy of the Department knew them.
In a single detail only had he yielded to her wishes. He consented to
a cottage on the edge, instead of in the heart of it. And for a dozen
years now they had dwelt in peace and happiness at the lips of this
great spreading thing that covered so many leagues with its tangle of
swamps and moors and splendid ancient trees.
Only with the last two years or so--with his own increasing age, and
physical decline perhaps--had come this marked growth of passionate
interest in the welfare of the Forest. She had watched it grow,
at first had laughed at it, then talked sympathetically so far as
sincerity permitted, then had argued mildly, and finally come to
realise that its treatment lay altogether beyond her powers, and so had
come to fear it with all her heart.
* * * * *
The six weeks they annually spent away from their English home, each
regarded very differently of course. For her husband it meant a painful
exile that did his health no good; he yearned for his trees--the sight
and sound and smell of them; but for herself it meant release from a
haunting dread--escape. To renounce those six weeks by the sea on the
sunny, shining coast of France, was almost more than this little woman,
even with her unselfishness, could face.
After the first shock of the announcement, she reflected as deeply as
her nature permitted, prayed, wept in secret--and made up her mind.
Duty, she felt clearly, pointed to renouncement. The discipline would
certainly be severe--she did not dream at the moment how severe!--but
this fine, consistent little Christian saw it plain; she accepted it,
too, without any sighing of the martyr, though the courage she showed
was of the martyr order. Her husband should never know the cost. In all
but this one passion his unselfishness was ever as great as her own.
The love she had borne him all these years, like the love she bore her
anthropomorphic deity, was deep and real. She loved to suffer for them
both. Besides, the way her husband had put it to her was singular.
It did not take the form of a mere selfish predilection. Something
higher than two wills in conflict seeking compromise was in it from the
beginning.
‘I feel, Sophia, it would be really more than I could manage,’ he said
slowly, gazing into the fire over the tops of his stretched-out muddy
boots. ‘My duty and my happiness lie here with the Forest and with
you. My life is deeply rooted in this place. Something I can’t define
connects my inner being with these trees, and separation would make
me ill--might even kill me. My hold on life would weaken; here is my
source of supply. I cannot explain it better than that.’ He looked up
steadily into her face across the table so that she saw the gravity of
his expression and the shining of his steady eyes.
‘David, you feel it as strongly as that!’ she said, forgetting the tea
things altogether.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I do. And it’s not of the body only; I feel it in
my soul.’
The reality of what he hinted at crept into that shadow-covered room
like an actual Presence and stood beside them. It came not by the
windows or the door, but it filled the entire space between the walls
and ceiling. It took the heat from the fire before her face. She felt
suddenly cold, confused a little, frightened. She almost felt the rush
of foliage in the wind. It stood between them.
‘There are things--some things,’ she faltered, ‘we are not intended to
know, I think.’ The words expressed her general attitude to life, not
alone to this particular incident.
And after a pause of several minutes, disregarding the criticism as
though he had not heard it--‘I cannot explain it better than that,
you see,’ his grave voice answered. ‘There _is_ this deep, tremendous
link,--some secret power they emanate that keeps me well and happy
and--alive. If you cannot understand, I feel at least you may be able
to--forgive.’ His tone grew tender, gentle, soft. ‘My selfishness, I
know, must seem quite unforgivable. I cannot help it somehow; these
trees, this ancient Forest, both seem knitted into all that makes me
live, and if I go----’
There was a little sound of collapse in his voice. He stopped abruptly,
and sank back in his chair. And, at that, a distinct lump came up into
her throat which she had great difficulty in managing while she went
over and put her arms about him.
‘My dear,’ she murmured, ‘God will direct. We will accept His guidance.
He has always shown the way before.’
‘My selfishness afflicts me----’ he began, but she would not let him
finish.
‘David, He will direct. Nothing shall harm you. You’ve never once been
selfish, and I cannot bear to hear you say such things. The way will
open that is best for you--for both of us.’ She kissed him; she would
not let him speak; her heart was in her throat, and she felt for him
far more than for herself.
And then he had suggested that she should go alone perhaps for a
shorter time, and stay in her brother’s villa with the children, Alice
and Stephen. It was always open to her as she well knew.
‘You need the change,’ he said, when the lamps had been lit and the
servant had gone out again; ‘you need it as much as I dread it. I could
manage somehow till you returned, and should feel happier that way if
you went. I cannot leave this Forest that I love so well. I even feel,
Sophie dear’--he sat up straight and faced her as he half whispered
it--‘that I can _never_ leave it again. My life and happiness lie here
together.’
And even while scorning the idea that she could leave him alone with
the Influence of the Forest all about him to have its unimpeded way,
she felt the pangs of that subtle jealousy bite keen and close. He
loved the Forest better than herself, for he placed it first. Behind
the words, moreover, hid the unuttered thought that made her so uneasy.
The terror Sanderson had brought revived and shook its wings before her
very eyes. For the whole conversation, of which this was a fragment,
conveyed the unutterable implication that while he could not spare the
trees, they equally could not spare him. The vividness with which he
managed to conceal and yet betray the fact brought a profound distress
that crossed the border between presentiment and warning into positive
alarm.
He clearly felt that the trees would miss him--the trees he tended,
guarded, watched over, loved.
‘David, I shall stay here with you. I think you need me really,--don’t
you?’ Eagerly, with a touch of heart-felt passion, the words poured out.
‘Now more than ever, dear. God bless you for your sweet unselfishness.
And your sacrifice,’ he added, ‘is all the greater because you cannot
understand the thing that makes it necessary for me to stay.’
‘Perhaps in the spring instead----’ she said, with a tremor in the
voice.
‘In the spring--perhaps,’ he answered gently, almost beneath his
breath. ‘For they will not need me then. All the world can love them
in the spring. It’s in the winter that they’re lonely and neglected. I
wish to stay with them particularly then. I even feel I ought to--and I
must.’
And in this way, without further speech, the decision was made. Mrs.
Bittacy, at least, asked no more questions. Yet she could not bring
herself to show more sympathy than was necessary. She felt, for one
thing, that if she did, it might lead him to speak freely, and to tell
her things she could not possibly bear to know. And she dared not take
the risk of that.
VII
This was at the end of summer, but the autumn followed close. The
conversation really marked the threshold between the two seasons, and
marked at the same time the line between her husband’s negative and
aggressive state. She almost felt she had done wrong to yield; he grew
so bold, concealment all discarded. He went, that is, quite openly to
the woods, forgetting all his duties, all his former occupations. He
even sought to coax her to go with him. The hidden thing blazed out
without disguise. And, while she trembled at his energy, she admired
the virile passion he displayed. Her jealousy had long ago retired
before her fear, accepting the second place. Her one desire now was to
protect. The wife turned wholly mother.
He said so little, but--he hated to come in. From morning to night
he wandered in the Forest; often he went out after dinner; his mind
was charged with trees--their foliage, growth, development; their
wonder, beauty, strength; their loneliness in isolation, their power
in a herded mass. He knew the effect of every wind upon them; the
danger from the boisterous north, the glory from the west, the eastern
dryness, and the soft, moist tenderness that a south wind left upon
their thinning boughs. He spoke all day of their sensations: how they
drank the fading sunshine, dreamed in the moonlight, thrilled to the
kiss of stars. The dew could bring them half the passion of the night,
but frost sent them plunging beneath the ground to dwell with hopes
of a later coming softness in their roots. They nursed the life they
carried--insects, larvae, chrysalis--and when the skies above them
melted, he spoke of them standing “motionless in an ecstasy of rain,”
or in the noon of sunshine ‘self-poised upon their prodigy of shade.’
And once in the middle of the night she woke at the sound of his voice,
and heard him--wide awake, not talking in his sleep--but talking
towards the window where the shadow of the cedar fell at noon:
O art thou sighing for Lebanon
In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East?
Sighing for Lebanon,
Dark cedar;
and, when, half charmed, half terrified, she turned and called to him
by name, he merely said--
‘My dear, I felt the loneliness--suddenly realised it--the alien
desolation of that tree, set here upon our little lawn in England when
all her Eastern brothers call to her in sleep.’ And the answer seemed
so queer, so ‘un-evangelical,’ that she waited in silence till he slept
again. The poetry passed her by. It seemed unnecessary and out of
place. It made her ache with suspicion, fear, jealousy.
The fear, however, seemed somehow all lapped up and banished soon
afterwards by her unwilling admiration of the rushing splendour of her
husband’s state. Her anxiety, at any rate, shifted from the religious
to the medical. She thought he might be losing his steadiness of mind
a little. How often in her prayers she offered thanks for the guidance
that had made her stay with him to help and watch is impossible to
say. It certainly was twice a day.
She even went so far once, when Mr. Mortimer, the vicar, called, and
brought with him a more or less distinguished doctor--as to tell the
professional man privately some symptoms of her husband’s queerness.
And his answer that there was ‘nothing he could prescribe for’ added
not a little to her sense of unholy bewilderment. No doubt Sir James
had never been ‘consulted’ under such unorthodox conditions before. His
sense of what was becoming naturally overrode his acquired instincts as
a skilled instrument that might help the race.
‘No fever, you think?’ she asked insistently with hurry, determined to
get something from him.
‘Nothing that _I_ can deal with, as I told you, Madam,’ replied the
offended allopathic Knight.
Evidently he did not care about being invited to examine patients in
this surreptitious way before a teapot on the lawn, chance of a fee
most problematical. He liked to see a tongue and feel a thumping pulse;
to know the pedigree and bank account of his questioner as well. It was
most unusual, in abominable taste besides. Of course it was. But the
drowning woman seized the only straw she could.
For now the aggressive attitude of her husband overcame her to the
point where she found it difficult even to question him. Yet in the
house he was so kind and gentle, doing all he could to make her
sacrifice as easy as possible.
‘David, you really _are_ unwise to go out now. The night is damp and
very chilly. The ground is soaked in dew. You’ll catch your death of
cold.’
His face lightened. ‘Won’t you come with me, dear,--just for once? I’m
only going to the corner of the hollies to see the beech that stands so
lonely by itself.’
She had been out with him in the short dark afternoon, and they had
passed that evil group of hollies where the gipsies camped. Nothing
else would grow there, but the hollies throve upon the stony soil.
‘David, the beech is all right and safe.’ She had learned his
phraseology a little, made clever out of due season by her love.
‘There’s no wind to-night.’
‘But it’s rising,’ he answered, ‘rising in the east. I heard it in the
bare and hungry larches. They need the sun and dew, and always cry out
when the wind’s upon them from the east.’
She sent a short unspoken prayer most swiftly to her deity as she
heard him say it. For every time now, when he spoke in this familiar,
intimate way of the life of the trees, she felt a sheet of cold fasten
tight against her very skin and flesh. She shivered. How _could_ he
possibly know such things?
Yet, in all else, and in the relations of his daily life, he was sane
and reasonable, loving, kind and tender. It was only on the subject of
the trees he seemed unhinged and queer. Most curiously it seemed that,
since the collapse of the cedar they both loved, though in different
fashion, his departure from the normal had increased. Why else did
he watch them as a man might watch a sickly child? Why did he linger
especially in the dusk to catch their ‘mood of night’ as he called it?
Why think so carefully upon them when the frost was threatening or the
wind appeared to rise?
As she put it so frequently now to herself--How could he possibly
_know_ such things?
He went. As she closed the front door after him she heard the distant
roaring in the Forest....
* * * * *
And then it suddenly struck her: How could she know them too?
It dropped upon her like a blow that she felt at once all over, upon
body, heart and mind. The discovery rushed out from its ambush to
overwhelm. The truth of it, making all arguing futile, numbed her
faculties. But though at first it deadened her, she soon revived,
and her being rose into aggressive opposition. A wild yet calculated
courage like that which animates the leaders of splendid forlorn hopes
flamed in her little person--flamed grandly, and invincible. While
knowing herself insignificant and weak, she knew at the same time that
power at her back which moves the worlds. The faith that filled her was
the weapon in her hands, and the right by which she claimed it; but the
spirit of utter, selfless sacrifice that characterised her life was
the means by which she mastered its immediate use. For a kind of white
and faultless intuition guided her to the attack. Behind her stood her
Bible and her God.
How so magnificent a divination came to her at all may well be a matter
for astonishment, though some clue of explanation lies, perhaps, in
the very simpleness of her nature. At any rate, she saw quite clearly
certain things; saw them in moments only--after prayer, in the still
silence of the night, or when left alone those long hours in the house
with her knitting and her thoughts--and the guidance which then flashed
into her remained, even after the manner of its coming was forgotten.
They came to her, these things she saw, formless, wordless; she could
not put them into any kind of language; but by the very fact of being
uncaught in sentences they retained their original clear vigour.
Hours of patient waiting brought the first, and the others followed
easily afterwards, by degrees, on subsequent days, a little and a
little. Her husband had been gone since early morning, and had taken
his luncheon with him. She was sitting by the tea things, the cups and
teapot warmed, the muffins in the fender keeping hot, all ready for his
return, when she realised quite abruptly that this thing which took him
off, which kept him out so many hours day after day, this thing that
was against her own little will and instincts--was enormous as the sea.
It was no mere prettiness of single Trees, but something massed and
mountainous. About her rose the wall of its huge opposition to the sky,
its scale gigantic, its power utterly prodigious. What she knew of it
hitherto as green and delicate forms waving and rustling in the winds
was but, as it were, the spray of foam that broke into sight upon the
nearer edge of viewless depths far, far away. The trees, indeed, were
sentinels set visibly about the limits of a camp that itself remained
invisible. The awful hum and murmur of the main body in the distance
passed into that still room about her with the firelight and hissing
kettle. Out yonder--in the Forest further out--the thing that was ever
roaring at the centre was dreadfully increasing.
The sense of definite battle, too--battle between herself and the
Forest for his soul--came with it. Its presentment was as clear as
though Thompson had come into the room and quietly told her that the
cottage was surrounded. ‘Please, ma’am, there are trees come up about
the house,’ she might have suddenly announced. And equally might have
heard her own answer: ‘It’s all right, Thompson. The main body is
still far away.’
Immediately upon its heels, then, came another truth, with a close
reality that shocked her. She saw that jealousy was not confined
to the human and animal world alone, but ran through all creation.
The Vegetable Kingdom knew it too. So-called inanimate nature
shared it with the rest. Trees felt it. This Forest just beyond the
window--standing there in the silence of the autumn evening across
the little lawn--this Forest understood it equally. The remorseless,
branching power that sought to keep exclusively for itself the thing it
loved and needed, spread like a running desire through all its million
leaves and stems and roots. In humans, of course, it was consciously
directed; in animals it acted with frank instinctiveness; but in trees
this jealousy rose in some blind tide of impersonal and unconscious
wrath that would sweep opposition from its path as the wind sweeps
powdered snow from the surface of the ice. Their number was a host with
endless reinforcements, and once it realised its passion was returned
the power increased.... Her husband loved the trees.... They had become
aware of it.... They would take him from her in the end....
Then, while she heard his footsteps in the hall and the closing of the
front door, she saw a third thing clearly;--realised the widening of
the gap between herself and him. This other love had made it. All these
weeks of the summer when she felt so close to him, now especially when
she had made the biggest sacrifice of her life to stay by his side and
help him, he had been slowly, surely--drawing away. The estrangement
was here and now--a fact accomplished. It had been all this time
maturing; there yawned this broad deep space between them. Across the
empty distance she saw the change in merciless perspective. It revealed
his face and figure, dearly-loved, once fondly worshipped, far on the
other side in shadowy distance, small, the back turned from her, and
moving while she watched--moving away from her.
They had their tea in silence then. She asked no questions, he
volunteered no information of his day. The heart was big within her,
and the terrible loneliness of age spread through her like a rising
icy mist. She watched him, filling all his wants. His hair was untidy
and his boots were caked with blackish mud. He moved with a restless,
swaying motion that somehow blanched her cheek and sent a miserable
shivering down her back. It reminded her of trees. His eyes were very
bright.
He brought in with him an odour of the earth and forest that seemed
to choke her and make it difficult to breathe; and--what she noticed
with a climax of almost uncontrollable alarm--upon his face beneath
the lamplight shone traces of a mild, faint glory that made her think
of moonlight falling upon a wood through speckled shadows. It was his
new-found happiness that shone there, a happiness uncaused by her and
in which she had no part.
In his coat was a spray of faded yellow beech leaves. ‘I brought this
from the Forest for you,’ he said, with all the air that belonged
to his little acts of devotion long ago. And she took the spray of
leaves mechanically with a smile and a murmured ‘thank you, dear,’ as
though he had unknowingly put into her hands the weapon for her own
destruction and she had accepted it.
And when the tea was over and he left the room, he did not go to his
study, or to change his clothes. She heard the front door softly shut
behind him as he again went out towards the Forest.
A moment later she was in her room upstairs, kneeling beside the
bed--the side he slept on--and praying wildly through a flood of tears
that God would save and keep him to her. Wind brushed the window panes
behind her while she knelt.
VIII
One sunny November morning, when the strain had reached a pitch that
made repression almost unmanageable, she came to an impulsive decision,
and obeyed it. Her husband had again gone out with luncheon for the
day. She took adventure in her hands and followed him. The power of
seeing-clear was strong upon her, forcing her up to some unnatural
level of understanding. To stay indoors and wait inactive for his
return seemed suddenly impossible. She meant to know what he knew, feel
what he felt, put herself in his place. She would dare the fascination
of the Forest--share it with him. It was greatly daring; but it would
give her greater understanding how to help and save him and therefore
greater Power. She went upstairs a moment first to pray.
In a thick, warm skirt, and wearing heavy boots--those walking boots
she used with him upon the mountains about Seillans--she left the
cottage by the back way and turned towards the Forest. She could not
actually follow him, for he had started off an hour before and she knew
not exactly his direction. What was so urgent in her was the wish to be
with him in the woods, to walk beneath the leafless branches just as
he did: to be there when he was there, even though not together. For
it had come to her that she might thus share with him for once this
horrible mighty life and breathing of the trees he loved. In winter,
he had said, they needed him particularly; and winter now was coming.
Her love _must_ bring her something of what he felt himself--the huge
attraction, the suction and the pull of all the trees. Thus, in some
vicarious fashion, she might share, though unknown to himself, this
very thing that was taking him away from her. She might thus even
lessen its attack upon himself.
The impulse came to her clairvoyantly, and she obeyed without a sign of
hesitation. Deeper comprehension would come to her of the whole awful
puzzle. And come it did, yet not in the way she imagined and expected.
The air was very still, the sky a cold pale blue, but cloudless. The
entire Forest stood silent, at attention. It knew perfectly well that
she had come. It knew the moment when she entered; watched and followed
her; and behind her something dropped without a sound and shut her in.
Her feet upon the glades of mossy grass fell silently, as the oaks and
beeches shifted past in rows and took up their positions at her back.
It was not pleasant, this way they grew so dense behind her the instant
she had passed. She realised that they gathered in an ever-growing
army, massed, herded, trooped, between her and the cottage, shutting
off escape. They let her pass so easily, but to get out again she would
know them differently--thick, crowded, branches all drawn and hostile.
Already their increasing numbers bewildered her. In front, they looked
so sparse and scattered, with open spaces where the sunshine fell;
but when she turned it seemed they stood so close together, a serried
army, darkening the sunlight. They blocked the day, collected all the
shadows, stood with their leafless and forbidding rampart like the
night. They swallowed down into themselves the very glade by which she
came. For when she glanced behind her--rarely--the way she had come was
shadowy and lost.
Yet the morning sparkled overhead, and a glance of excitement ran
quivering through the entire day. It was what she always knew as
‘children’s weather,’ so clear and harmless, without a sign of danger,
nothing ominous to threaten or alarm. Steadfast in her purpose,
looking back as little as she dared, Sophia Bittacy marched slowly and
deliberately into the heart of the silent woods, deeper, ever deeper....
And then, abruptly, in an open space where the sunshine fell
unhindered, she stopped. It was one of the breathing-places of the
forest. Dead, withered bracken lay in patches of unsightly grey. There
were bits of heather too. All round the trees stood looking on--oak,
beech, holly, ash, pine, larch, with here and there small groups of
juniper. On the lips of this breathing-space of the woods she stopped
to rest, disobeying her instinct for the first time. For the other
instinct in her was to go on. She did not really want to rest.
This was the little act that brought it to her--the wireless message
from a vast Emitter.
‘I’ve been stopped,’ she thought to herself with a horrid qualm.
She looked about her in this quiet, ancient place. Nothing stirred.
There was no life nor sign of life; no birds sang; no rabbits scuttled
off at her approach. The stillness was bewildering, and gravity
hung down upon it like a heavy curtain. It hushed the heart in her.
Could this be part of what her husband felt--this sense of thick
entanglement with stems, boughs, roots, and foliage?
‘This has always been as it is now,’ she thought, yet not knowing why
she thought it. ‘Ever since the Forest grew it has been still and
secret here. It has never changed.’ The curtain of silence drew closer
while she said it, thickening round her. ‘For a thousand years--I’m
here with a thousand years. And behind this place stand all the forests
of the world!’
So foreign to her temperament were such thoughts, and so alien to all
she had been taught to look for in Nature, that she strove against
them. She made an effort to oppose. But they clung and haunted just the
same; they refused to be dispersed. The curtain hung dense and heavy as
though its texture thickened. The air with difficulty came through.
And then she thought that curtain stirred. There was movement
somewhere. That obscure dim thing which ever broods behind the visible
appearances of trees came nearer to her. She caught her breath and
stared about her, listening intently. The trees, perhaps because she
saw them more in detail now, it seemed to her had changed. A vague,
faint alteration spread over them, at first so slight she scarcely
would admit it, then growing steadily, though still obscurely,
outwards. ‘They tremble and are changed,’ flashed through her mind the
horrid line that Sanderson had quoted. Yet the change was graceful for
all the uncouthness attendant upon the size of so vast a movement. They
had turned in her direction. That was it. _They saw her._
In this way the change expressed itself in her groping, terrified
thought. Till now it had been otherwise: she had looked at them from
her own point of view; now they looked at her from theirs. They stared
her in the face and eyes; they stared at her all over. In some unkind,
resentful, hostile way, they watched her. Hitherto in life she had
watched them variously, in superficial ways, reading into them what her
own mind suggested. Now they read into her the things they actually
_were_, and not merely another’s interpretation of them.
They seemed in their motionless silence there instinct with life, a
life, moreover, that breathed about her a species of terrible soft
enchantment that bewitched. It branched all through her, climbing to
the brain. The Forest held her with its huge and giant fascination. In
this secluded breathing-spot that the centuries had left untouched,
she had stepped close against the hidden pulse of the whole collective
mass of them. They were aware of her and had turned to gaze with their
myriad, vast sight upon the intruder. They shouted at her in the
silence. For she wanted to look back at them, but it was like staring
at a crowd, and her glance merely shifted from one tree to another,
hurriedly, finding in none the one she sought. They saw her so easily,
each and all. The rows that stood behind her also stared. But she could
not return the gaze. Her husband, she realised, could. And their steady
stare shocked her as though in some sense she knew that she was naked.
They saw so much of her: she saw of them--so little.
Her efforts to return their gaze were pitiful. The constant shifting
increased her bewilderment. Conscious of this awful and enormous sight
all over her, she let her eyes first rest upon the ground; and then she
closed them altogether. She kept the lids as tight together as ever
they would go.
But the sight of the trees came even into that inner darkness behind
the fastened lids, for there was no escaping it. Outside, in the light,
she still knew that the leaves of the hollies glittered smoothly, that
the dead foliage of the oaks hung crisp in the air above her, that the
needles of the little junipers were pointing all one way. The spread
perception of the Forest was focussed on herself, and no mere shutting
of the eyes could hide its scattered yet concentrated stare--the
all-inclusive vision of great woods.
There was no wind, yet here and there a single leaf hanging by its
dried-up stalk shook all alone with great rapidity--rattling. It was
the sentry drawing attention to her presence. And then, again, as once
long weeks before, she felt their Being as a tide about her. The tide
had turned. That memory of her childhood sands came back, when the
nurse said, ‘The tide has turned now; we must go in,’ and she saw the
mass of piled-up waters, green and heaped to the horizon, and realised
that it was slowly coming in. The gigantic mass of it, too vast for
hurry, loaded with massive purpose, she used to feel, was moving
towards herself. The fluid body of the sea was creeping along beneath
the sky to the very spot upon the yellow sands where she stood and
played. The sight and thought of it had always overwhelmed her with
a sense of awe--as though her puny self were the object of the whole
sea’s advance. ‘The tide has turned; we had better now go in.’
This was happening now about her--the same thing was happening in the
woods--slow, sure, and steady, and its motion as little discernible
as the sea’s. The tide had turned. The small human presence that had
ventured among its green and mountainous depths, moreover, was its
objective.
That all was clear within her while she sat and waited with tight-shut
lids. But the next moment she opened her eyes with a sudden realization
of something more. The presence that it sought was after all not hers.
It was the presence of some one other than herself. And then she
understood. Her eyes had opened with a click, it seemed; but the sound,
in reality, was outside herself. Across the clearing where the sunshine
lay so calm and still, she saw the figure of her husband moving among
the trees--a man, like a tree, walking.
With hands behind his back, and head uplifted, he moved quite slowly,
as though absorbed in his own thoughts. Hardly fifty paces separated
them, but he had no inkling of her presence there so near. With mind
intent and senses all turned inwards, he marched past her like a
figure in a dream, and like a figure in a dream she saw him go. Love,
yearning, pity rose in a storm within her, but as in nightmare she
found no words or movement possible. She sat and watched him go--go
from her--go into the deeper reaches of the green enveloping woods.
Desire to save, to bid him stop and turn, ran in a passion through
her being, but there was nothing she could do. She saw him go away
from her, go of his own accord and willingly beyond her; she saw the
branches drop about his steps and hide him. His figure faded out among
the speckled shade and sunlight. The trees covered him. The tide just
took him, all unresisting and content to go. Upon the bosom of the
green soft sea he floated away beyond her reach of vision. Her eyes
could follow him no longer. He was gone.
And then for the first time she realised, even at that distance, that
the look upon his face was one of peace and happiness--rapt, and
caught away in joy, a look of youth. That expression now he never
showed to her. But she _had_ known it. Years ago, in the early days
of their married life, she had seen it on his face. Now it no longer
obeyed the summons of her presence and her love. The woods alone could
call it forth; it answered to the trees; the Forest had taken every
part of him--from her--his very heart and soul....
Her sight that had plunged inwards to the fields of faded memory
now came back to outer things again. She looked about her, and her
love, returning empty-handed and unsatisfied, left her open to the
invading of the bleakest terror she had ever known. That such things
could be real and happen found her helpless utterly. Terror invaded
the quietest corners of her heart, that had never yet known quailing.
She could not--for moments at any rate--reach either her Bible or her
God. Desolate in an empty world of fear she sat with eyes too dry and
hot for tears, yet with a coldness as of ice upon her very flesh. She
stared, unseeing, about her. That horror which stalks in the stillness
of the noonday, when the glare of an artificial sunshine lights up the
motionless trees, moved all about her. In front and behind she was
aware of it. Beyond this stealthy silence, just within the edge of it,
the things of another world were passing. But she could not know them.
Her husband knew them, knew their beauty and their awe, yes, but for
her they were out of reach. She might not share with him the very least
of them. It seemed that behind and through the glare of this wintry
noonday in the heart of the woods there brooded another universe of
life and passion, for her all unexpressed. The silence veiled it, the
stillness hid it; but he moved with it all and understood. His love
interpreted it.
She rose to her feet, tottered feebly, and collapsed again upon the
moss. Yet for herself she felt no terror; no little personal fear
could touch her whose anguish and deep longing streamed all out to him
whom she so bravely loved. In this time of utter self-forgetfulness,
when she realised that the battle was hopeless, thinking she had
lost even her God, she found Him again quite close beside her like a
little Presence in this terrible heart of the hostile Forest. But at
first she did not recognise that He was there; she did not know Him
in that strangely unacceptable guise. For He stood so very close,
so very intimate, so very sweet and comforting, and yet so hard to
understand--as Resignation.
* * * * *
Once more she struggled to her feet, and this time turned successfully
and slowly made her way along the mossy glade by which she came. And at
first she marvelled, though only for a moment, at the ease with which
she found the path. For a moment only, because almost at once she saw
the truth. The trees were glad that she should go. They helped her on
her way. The Forest did not want her.
The tide was coming in, indeed, yet not for her.
And so, in another of those flashes of clear-vision that of late had
lifted life above the normal level, she saw and understood the whole
terrible thing complete.
Till now, though unexpressed in thought or language, her fear had been
that the woods her husband loved would somehow take him from her--to
merge his life in theirs--even to kill him in some mysterious way. This
time she saw her deep mistake, and so seeing, let in upon herself the
fuller agony of horror. For their jealousy was not the petty jealousy
of animals or humans. They wanted him because they loved him, but
they did not want him dead. Full charged with his splendid life and
enthusiasm they wanted him. They wanted him--alive.
It was she who stood in their way, and it was she whom they intended to
remove.
This was what brought the sense of abject helplessness. She stood upon
the sands against an entire ocean slowly rolling in against her. For,
as all the forces of a human being combine unconsciously to eject a
grain of sand that has crept beneath the skin to cause discomfort,
so the entire mass of what Sanderson had called the Collective
Consciousness of the Forest strove to eject this human atom that stood
across the path of its desire. Loving her husband, she had crept
beneath its skin. It was her they would eject and take away; it was
her they would destroy, not him. Him, whom they loved and needed, they
would keep alive. They meant to take him living.
She reached the house in safety, though she never remembered how she
found her way. It was made all simple for her. The branches almost
urged her out.
But behind her, as she left the shadowed precincts, she felt as though
some towering Angel of the Woods let fall across the threshold the
flaming sword of a countless multitude of leaves that formed behind her
a barrier, green, shimmering, and impassable. Into the Forest she never
walked again.
* * * * *
And she went about her daily duties with a calm and quietness that was
a perpetual astonishment even to herself, for it hardly seemed of this
world at all. She talked to her husband when he came in for tea--after
dark. Resignation brings a curious large courage--when there is
nothing more to lose. The soul takes risks, and dares. Is it a curious
short-cut sometimes to the heights?
‘David, I went into the Forest, too, this morning; soon after you I
went. I saw you there.’
‘Wasn’t it wonderful?’ he answered simply, inclining his head a little.
There was no surprise or annoyance in his look; a mild and gentle
_ennui_ rather. He asked no real question. She thought of some garden
tree the wind attacks too suddenly, bending it over when it does not
want to bend--the mild unwillingness with which it yields. She often
saw him this way now, in the terms of trees.
‘It was very wonderful indeed, dear, yes,’ she replied low, her voice
not faltering though indistinct. ‘But for me it was too--too strange
and big.’
The passion of tears lay just below the quiet voice all unbetrayed.
Somehow she kept them back.
There was a pause, and then he added:
‘I find it more and more so every day.’ His voice passed through the
lamp-lit room like a murmur of the wind in branches. The look of youth
and happiness she had caught upon his face out there had wholly gone,
and an expression of weariness was in its place, as of a man distressed
vaguely at finding himself in uncongenial surroundings where he is
slightly ill at ease. It was the house he hated--coming back to rooms
and walls and furniture. The ceilings and closed windows confined him.
Yet, in it, no suggestion that he found _her_ irksome. Her presence
seemed of no account at all; indeed, he hardly noticed her. For whole
long periods he lost her, did not know that she was there. He had no
need of her. He lived alone. Each lived alone.
The outward signs by which she recognised that the awful battle was
against her and the terms of surrender accepted were pathetic. She
put the medicine-chest away upon the shelf; she gave the orders for
his pocket-luncheon before he asked; she went to bed alone and early,
leaving the front door unlocked, with milk and bread and butter in the
hall beside the lamp--all concessions that she felt impelled to make.
For more and more, unless the weather was too violent, he went out
after dinner even, staying for hours in the woods. But she never slept
until she heard the front door close below, and knew soon afterwards
his careful step come creeping up the stairs and into the room so
softly. Until she heard his regular deep breathing close beside her,
she lay awake. All strength or desire to resist had gone for good. The
thing against her was too huge and powerful. Capitulation was complete,
a fact accomplished. She dated it from the day she followed him to the
Forest.
Moreover, the time for evacuation--her own evacuation--seemed
approaching. It came stealthily ever nearer, surely and slowly as the
rising tide she used to dread. At the high-water mark she stood waiting
calmly--waiting to be swept away. Across the lawn all those terrible
days of early winter the encircling Forest watched it come, guiding its
silent swell and currents towards her feet. Only she never once gave
up her Bible or her praying. This complete resignation, moreover, had
somehow brought to her a strange great understanding, and if she could
not share her husband’s horrible abandonment to powers outside himself,
she could, and did, in some half-groping way grasp at shadowy meanings
that might make such abandonment--possible, yes, but more than merely
possible--in some extraordinary sense not evil.
Hitherto she had divided the beyond-world into two sharp
halves--spirits good or spirits evil. But thoughts came to her now,
on soft and very tentative feet, like the footsteps of the gods which
are on wool, that besides these definite classes, there might be other
Powers as well, belonging definitely to neither one nor other. Her
thought stopped dead at that. But the big idea found lodgment in her
little mind, and, owing to the largeness of her heart, remained there
unejected. It even brought a certain solace with it.
The failure--or unwillingness, as she preferred to state it--of her God
to interfere and help, that also she came in a measure to understand.
For here, she found it more and more possible to imagine, was perhaps
no positive evil at work, but only something that usually stands away
from humankind, something alien and not commonly recognised. There
_was_ a gulf fixed between the two, and Mr. Sanderson _had_ bridged
it, by his talk, his explanations, his attitude of mind. Through these
her husband had found the way into it. His temperament and natural
passion for the woods had prepared the soul in him, and the moment he
saw the way to go he took it--the line of least resistance. Life was,
of course, open to all, and her husband had the right to choose it
where he would. He had chosen it--away from her, away from other men,
but not necessarily away from God. This was an enormous concession that
she skirted, never really faced; it was too revolutionary to face. But
its possibility peeped into her bewildered mind. It might delay his
progress, or it might advance it. Who could know? And why should God,
who ordered all things with such magnificent detail, from the pathway
of a sun to the falling of a sparrow, object to his free choice, or
interfere to hinder him and stop?
She came to realise resignation, that is, in another aspect. It gave
her comfort, if not peace. She fought against all belittling of her
God. It was, perhaps, enough that He--knew.
‘You are not alone, dear, in the trees out there?’ she ventured one
night, as he crept on tiptoe into the room not far from midnight. ‘God
is with you?’
‘Magnificently,’ was the immediate answer, given with enthusiasm, ‘for
He is everywhere. And I only wish that you----’
But she stuffed the clothes against her ears. That invitation on his
lips was more than she could bear to hear. It seemed like asking her to
hurry to her own execution. She buried her face among the sheets and
blankets, shaking all over like a leaf.
IX
And so the thought that she was the one to go remained and grew. It
was, perhaps, first sign of that weakening of the mind which indicated
the singular manner of her going. For it was her mental opposition,
the trees felt, that stood in their way. Once that was overcome,
obliterated, her physical presence did not matter. She would be
harmless.
Having accepted defeat, because she had come to feel that his obsession
was not actually evil, she accepted at the same time the conditions of
an atrocious loneliness. She stood now from her husband farther than
from the moon. They had no visitors. Callers were few and far between,
and less encouraged than before. The empty dark of winter was before
them. Among the neighbours was none in whom, without disloyalty to her
husband, she could confide. Mr. Mortimer, had he been single, might
have helped her in this desert of solitude that preyed upon her mind,
but his wife was there the obstacle; for Mrs. Mortimer wore sandals,
believed that nuts were the complete food of man, and indulged in other
idiosyncrasies that classed her inevitably among the ‘latter signs’
which Mrs. Bittacy had been taught to dread as dangerous. She stood
most desolately alone.
Solitude, therefore, in which the mind unhindered feeds upon its own
delusions, was the assignable cause of her gradual mental disruption
and collapse.
With the definite arrival of the colder weather her husband gave up his
rambles after dark; evenings were spent together over the fire; he read
_The Times_; they even talked about their postponed visit abroad in
the coming spring. No restlessness was on him at the change; he seemed
content and easy in his mind; spoke little of the trees and woods;
enjoyed far better health than if there had been change of scene, and
to herself was tender, kind, solicitous over trifles, as in the distant
days of their first honeymoon.
But this deep calm could not deceive her; it meant, she fully
understood, that he felt sure of himself, sure of her, and sure of the
trees as well. It all lay buried in the depths of him, too secure and
deep, too intimately established in his central being to permit of
those surface fluctuations which betray disharmony within. His life
was hid with trees. Even the fever, so dreaded in the damp of winter,
left him free. She now knew why. The fever was due to their efforts to
obtain him, his efforts to respond and go--physical results of a fierce
unrest he had never understood till Sanderson came with his wicked
explanations. Now it was otherwise. The bridge was made. And--he had
gone.
And she, brave, loyal, and consistent soul, found herself utterly
alone, even trying to make his passage easy. It seemed that she stood
at the bottom of some huge ravine that opened in her mind, the walls
whereof instead of rock were trees that reached enormous to the
sky, engulfing her. God alone knew that she was there. He watched,
permitted, even perhaps approved. At any rate--He knew.
During those quiet evenings in the house, moreover, while they sat over
the fire listening to the roaming winds about the house, her husband
knew continual access to the world his alien love had furnished for
him. Never for a single instant was he cut off from it. She gazed at
the newspaper spread before his face and knees, saw the smoke of his
cheroot curl up above the edge, noticed the little hole in his evening
socks, and listened to the paragraphs he read aloud as of old. But
this was all a veil he spread about himself of purpose. Behind it--he
escaped. It was the conjurer’s trick to divert the sight to unimportant
details while the essential thing went forward unobserved. He managed
wonderfully; she loved him for the pains he took to spare her distress;
but all the while she knew that the body lolling in that armchair
before her eyes contained the merest fragment of his actual self. It
was little better than a corpse. It was an empty shell. The essential
soul of him was out yonder with the Forest--farther out near that
ever-roaring heart of it.
And, with the dark, the Forest came up boldly and pressed against the
very walls and windows, peering in upon them, joining hands above the
slates and chimneys. The winds were always walking on the lawn and
gravel paths; steps came and went and came again; some one seemed
always talking in the woods, some one was in the building too. She
passed them on the stairs, or running soft and muffled, very large and
gentle, down the passages and landings after dusk, as though loose
fragments of the Day had broken off and stayed there caught among the
shadows, trying to get out. They blundered silently all about the
house. They waited till she passed, then made a run for it. And her
husband always knew. She saw him more than once deliberately avoid
them--because _she_ was there. More than once, too, she saw him
stand and listen when he thought she was not near, then heard herself
the long bounding stride of their approach across the silent garden.
Already _he_ had heard them in the windy distance of the night, far,
far away. They sped, she well knew, along that glade of mossy turf by
which she last came out; it cushioned their tread exactly as it had
cushioned her own.
It seemed to her the trees were always in the house with him, and in
their very bedroom. He welcomed them, unaware that she also knew, and
trembled.
One night in their bedroom it caught her unawares. She woke out of
deep sleep and it came upon her before she could gather her forces for
control.
The day had been wildly boisterous, but now the wind had dropped;
only its rags went fluttering through the night. The rays of the full
moon fell in a shower between the branches. Overhead still raced the
scud and wrack, shaped like hurrying monsters; but below the earth
was quiet. Still and dripping stood the hosts of trees. Their trunks
gleamed wet and sparkling where the moon caught them. There was a
strong smell of mould and fallen leaves. The air was sharp--heavy with
odour.
And she knew all this the instant that she woke; for it seemed to her
that she had been elsewhere--following her husband--as though she had
been _out_! There was no dream at all, merely this definite, haunting
certainty. It dived away, lost, buried in the night. She sat upright in
bed. She had come back.
The room shone pale in the moonlight reflected through the windows,
for the blinds were up, and she saw her husband’s form beside her,
motionless in deep sleep. But what caught her unawares was the horrid
thing that by this fact of sudden, unexpected waking she had surprised
these other things in the room, beside the very bed, gathered close
about him while he slept. It was their dreadful boldness--herself of
no account as it were--that terrified her into screaming before she
could collect her powers to prevent. She screamed before she realised
what she did--a long, high shriek of terror that filled the room, yet
made so little actual sound. For wet and shimmering presences stood
grouped all round that bed. She saw their outline underneath the
ceiling, the green, spread bulk of them, their vague extension over
walls and furniture. They shifted to and fro, massed yet translucent,
mild yet thick, moving and turning within themselves to a hushed
noise of multitudinous soft rustling. In their sound was something
very sweet and winning that fell into her with a spell of horrible
enchantment. They were so mild, each one alone, yet so terrific in
their combination. Cold seized her. The sheets against her body turned
to ice.
She screamed a second time, though the sound hardly issued from
her throat. The spell sank deeper, reaching to the heart; for it
softened all the currents of her blood and took life from her in a
stream--towards themselves. Resistance in that moment seemed impossible.
Her husband then stirred in his sleep, and woke. And, instantly, the
forms drew up, erect, and gathered themselves in some amazing way
together. They lessened in extent--then scattered through the air like
an effect of light when shadows seek to smother it. It was tremendous,
yet most exquisite. A sheet of pale-green shadow that yet had form and
substance filled the room. There was a rush of silent movement, as the
Presences drew past her through the air,--and they were gone.
But, clearest of all, she saw the manner of their going; for she
recognised in their tumult of escape by the window open at the top, the
same wide ‘looping circles’--spirals it seemed--that she had seen upon
the lawn those weeks ago when Sanderson had talked. The room once more
was empty.
In the collapse that followed, she heard her husband’s voice, as though
coming from some great distance. Her own replies she heard as well.
Both were so strange and unlike their normal speech, the very words
unnatural:
‘What is it, dear? Why do you wake me _now_?’ And his voice whispered
it with a sighing sound, like wind in pine boughs.
‘A moment since something went past me through the air of the room.
Back to the night outside it went.’ Her voice, too, held the same note
as of wind entangled among too many leaves.
‘My dear, it _was_ the wind.’
‘But it called, David. It was calling _you_--by name!’
‘The stir of the branches, dear, was what you heard. Now, sleep again,
I beg you, sleep.’
‘It had a crowd of eyes all through and over it--before and behind----’
Her voice grew louder. But his own in reply sank lower, far away, and
oddly hushed.
‘The moonlight, dear, upon the sea of twigs and boughs in the rain, was
what you saw.’
‘But it frightened me. I’ve lost my God--and you--I’m cold as death!’
‘My dear, it is the cold of the early morning hours. The whole world
sleeps. Now sleep again yourself.’
He whispered close to her ear. She felt his hand stroking her. His
voice was soft and very soothing. But only a part of him was there;
only a part of him was speaking; it was a half-emptied body that lay
beside her and uttered these strange sentences, even forcing her own
singular choice of words. The horrible, dim enchantment of the trees
was close about them in the room--gnarled, ancient, lonely trees of
winter, whispering round the human life they loved.
‘And let me sleep again,’ she heard him murmur as he settled down among
the clothes, ‘sleep back into that deep, delicious peace from which you
called me....’
His dreamy, happy tone, and that look of youth and joy she discerned
upon his features even in the filtered moonlight, touched her again as
with the spell of those shining, mild green presences. It sank down
into her. She felt sleep grope for her. On the threshold of slumber one
of those strange vagrant voices that loss of consciousness lets loose
cried faintly in her heart--
‘There is joy in the Forest over one sinner that----’
Then sleep took her before she had time to realise even that she
was vilely parodying one of her most precious texts, and that the
irreverence was ghastly....
And though she quickly slept again, her sleep was not as usual,
dreamless. It was not woods and trees she dreamed of, but a small and
curious dream that kept coming again and again upon her: that she
stood upon a wee, bare rock in the sea, and that the tide was rising.
The water first came to her feet, then to her knees, then to her waist.
Each time the dream returned, the tide seemed higher. Once it rose
to her neck, once even to her mouth, covering her lips for a moment
so that she could not breathe. She did not wake between the dreams;
a period of drab and dreamless slumber intervened. But, finally, the
water rose above her eyes and face, completely covering her head.
And then came explanation--the sort of explanation dreams bring. She
understood. For, beneath the water, she had seen the world of seaweed
rising from the bottom of the sea like a forest of dense green--long,
sinuous stems, immense thick branches, millions of feelers spreading
through the darkened watery depths the power of their ocean foliage.
The Vegetable Kingdom was even in the sea. It was everywhere. Earth,
air, and water helped it, way of escape there was none.
And even underneath the sea she heard that terrible sound of
roaring--was it surf or wind or voices?--further out, yet coming
steadily towards her.
* * * * *
And so, in the loneliness of that drab English winter, the mind of Mrs.
Bittacy, preying upon itself, and fed by constant dread, went lost in
disproportion. Dreariness filled the weeks with dismal, sunless skies
and a clinging moisture that knew no wholesome tonic of keen frosts.
Alone with her thoughts, both her husband and her God withdrawn into
distance, she counted the days to Spring. She groped her way, stumbling
down the long dark tunnel. Through the arch at the far end lay a
brilliant picture of the violet sea sparkling on the coast of France.
There lay safety and escape for both of them, could she but hold on.
Behind her the trees blocked up the other entrance. She never once
looked back.
She drooped. Vitality passed from her, drawn out and away as by some
steady suction. Immense and incessant was this sensation of her powers
draining off. The taps were all turned on. Her personality, as it
were, streamed steadily away, coaxed outwards by this Power that never
wearied and seemed inexhaustible. It won her as the full moon wins the
tide. She waned; she faded; she obeyed.
At first she watched the process, and recognised exactly what was
going on. Her physical life, and that balance of the mind which
depends on physical well-being, were being slowly undermined. She saw
that clearly. Only the soul, dwelling like a star apart from these
and independent of them, lay safe somewhere--with her distant God.
That she knew--tranquilly. The spiritual love that linked her to her
husband was safe from all attack. Later, in His good time, they would
merge together again because of it. But, meanwhile, all of her that
had kinship with the earth was slowly going. This separation was being
remorselessly accomplished. Every part of her the trees could touch was
being steadily drained from her. She was being--removed.
After a time, however, even this power of realisation went, so that she
no longer ‘watched the process’ or knew exactly what was going on. The
one satisfaction she had known--the feeling that it was sweet to suffer
for his sake--went with it. She stood utterly alone with this terror of
the trees ... mid the ruins of her broken and disordered mind.
She slept badly; woke in the morning with hot and tired eyes; her head
ached dully; she grew confused in thought and lost the clues of daily
life in the most feeble fashion. At the same time she lost sight, too,
of that brilliant picture at the exit of the tunnel; it faded away into
a tiny semicircle of pale light, the violet sea and the sunshine the
merest point of white, remote as a star and equally inaccessible. She
knew now that she could never reach it. And through the darkness that
stretched behind, the power of the trees came close and caught her,
twining about her feet and arms, climbing to her very lips. She woke at
night, finding it difficult to breathe. There seemed wet leaves pressed
against her mouth, and soft green tendrils clinging to her neck. Her
feet were heavy, half rooted, as it were, in deep, thick earth. Huge
creepers stretched along the whole of that black tunnel, feeling about
her person for points where they might fasten well, as ivy or the giant
parasites of the Vegetable Kingdom settle down on the trees themselves
to sap their life and kill them.
Slowly and surely the morbid growth possessed her life and held her.
She feared those very winds that ran about the wintry forest. They were
in league with it. They helped it everywhere.
‘Why don’t you sleep, dear?’ It was her husband now who played the rôle
of nurse, tending her little wants with an honest care that at least
aped the services of love. He was so utterly unconscious of the raging
battle he had caused. ‘What is it keeps you so wide awake and restless?’
‘The winds,’ she whispered in the dark. For hours she had lain watching
the tossing of the trees through the blindless windows. ‘They go
walking and talking everywhere to-night, keeping me awake. And all the
time they call so loudly to you.’
And his strange whispered answer appalled her for a moment until the
meaning of it faded and left her in a dark confusion of the mind that
was now becoming almost permanent.
‘The trees excite them in the night. The winds are the great swift
carriers. Go with them, dear--and not against. You’ll find sleep that
way if you do.’
‘The storm is rising,’ she began, hardly knowing what she said.
‘All the more then--go with them. Don’t resist. They’ll take you to the
trees, that’s all.’
Resist! The word touched on the button of some text that once had
helped her.
‘Resist the devil and he will flee from you,’ she heard her whispered
answer, and the same second had buried her face beneath the clothes in
a flood of hysterical weeping.
But her husband did not seem disturbed. Perhaps he did not hear it, for
the wind ran just then against the windows with a booming shout, and
the roaring of the Forest farther out came behind the blow, surging
into the room. Perhaps, too, he was already asleep again. She slowly
regained a sort of dull composure. Her face emerged from the tangle of
sheets and blankets. With a growing terror over her--she listened. The
storm was rising. It came with a sudden and impetuous rush that made
all further sleep for her impossible.
Alone in a shaking world, it seemed, she lay and listened. That storm
interpreted for her mind the climax. The Forest bellowed out its
victory to the winds; the winds in turn proclaimed it to the Night.
The whole world knew of her complete defeat, her loss, her little
human pain. This was the roar and shout of victory that she listened to.
For, unmistakably, the trees were shouting in the dark. There were
sounds, too, like the flapping of great sails, a thousand at a time,
and sometimes reports that resembled more than anything else the
distant booming of enormous drums. The trees stood up--the whole
beleaguering host of them stood up--and with the uproar of their
million branches drummed the thundering message out across the night.
It seemed as if they all had broken loose. Their roots swept trailing
over field and hedge and roof. They tossed their bushy heads beneath
the clouds with a wild, delighted shuffling of great boughs. With
trunks upright they raced leaping through the sky. There was upheaval
and adventure in the awful sound they made, and their cry was like the
cry of a sea that has broken through its gates and poured loose upon
the world....
Through it all her husband slept peacefully as though he heard it not.
It was, as she well knew, the sleep of the semi-dead. For he was out
with all that clamouring turmoil. The part of him that she had lost was
there. The form that slept so calmly at her side was but the shell,
half emptied....
And when the winter’s morning stole upon the scene at length, with a
pale, washed sunshine that followed the departing tempest, the first
thing she saw, as she crept to the window and looked out, was the
ruined cedar lying on the lawn. Only the gaunt and crippled trunk of
it remained. The single giant bough that had been left to it lay dark
upon the grass, sucked endways towards the Forest by a great wind eddy.
It lay there like a mass of drift-wood from a wreck, left by the
ebbing of a high spring-tide upon the sands--remnant of some friendly,
splendid vessel that once had sheltered men.
And in the distance she heard the roaring of the Forest further out.
Her husband’s voice was in it.
HOLMESLY.
[Illustration]
THE SOUTH WIND
[Illustration: THE SOUTH WIND]
It is impossible to say through which sense, or combination of senses,
I knew that Someone was approaching--was already near; but most
probably it was the deep underlying ‘mother-sense’ including them all
that conveyed the delicate warning. At any rate, the scene-shifters of
my moods knew it too, for very swiftly they prepared the stage; then,
ever soft-footed and invisible, stood aside to wait.
As I went down the village street on my way to bed after midnight,
the high Alpine valley lay silent in its frozen stillness. For days
it had now lain thus, even the mouths of its cataracts stopped with
ice; and for days, too, the dry, tight cold had drawn up the nerves of
the humans in it to a sharp, thin pitch of exhilaration that at last
began to call for the gentler comfort of relaxation. The key had been a
little too high, the inner tautness too prolonged. The tension of that
implacable north-east wind, the _bise noire_, had drawn its twisted
wires too long through our very entrails. We all sighed for some
loosening of the bands--the comforting touch of something damp, soft,
less penetratingly acute.
And now, as I turned, midway in the little journey from the inn to my
room above La Poste, this sudden warning that Someone was approaching
repeated its silent wireless message, and I paused to listen and to
watch.
Yet at first I searched in vain. The village street lay empty--a white
ribbon between the black walls of the big-roofed châlets; there were
no lights in any of the houses; the hotels stood gaunt and ugly with
their myriad shuttered windows; and the church, topped by the Crown of
Savoy in stone, was so engulfed by the shadows of the mountains that it
seemed almost a part of them.
Beyond, reared the immense buttresses of the Dent du Midi, terrible
and stalwart against the sky, their feet resting among the crowding
pines, their streaked precipices tilting up at violent angles towards
the stars. The bands of snow, belting their enormous flanks, stretched
for miles, faintly gleaming, like Saturn’s rings. To the right I could
just make out the pinnacles of the Dents Blanches, cruelly pointed;
and, still farther, the Dent de Bonnaveau, as of iron and crystal,
running up its gaunt and dreadful pyramid into relentless depths of
night. Everywhere in the hard, black-sparkling air was the rigid spell
of winter. It seemed as if this valley could never melt again, never
know currents of warm wind, never taste the sun, nor yield its million
flowers.
And now, dipping down behind me out of the reaches of the darkness,
the New Comer moved close, heralded by this subtle yet compelling
admonition that had arrested me in my very tracks. For, just as I
turned in at the door, kicking the crunched snow from my boots against
the granite step, I _knew_ that, from the heart of all this tightly
frozen winter’s night, the ‘Someone’ whose message had travelled so
delicately in advance was now, quite suddenly, at my very heels.
And while my eyes lifted to sift their way between the darkness and
the snow I became aware that It was already coming down the village
street. It ran on feathered feet, pressing close against the enclosing
walls, yet at the same time spreading from side to side, brushing
the window-panes, rustling against the doors, and even including the
shingled roofs in its enveloping advent. It came, too--_against the
wind_....
It flew up close and passed me, very faintly singing, running down
between the châlets and the church, very swift, very soft, neither
man nor animal, neither woman, girl, nor child, turning the corner of
the snowy road beyond the _Curé’s_ house with a rushing, cantering
motion, that made me think of a Body of water--something of fluid and
generous shape, too mighty to be confined in common forms. And, as it
passed, it touched me--touched me through all skin and flesh upon the
naked nerves, loosening, relieving, setting free the congealed sources
of life which the _bise_ so long had mercilessly bound, so that magic
currents, flowing and released, washed down all the secret byways of
the spirit and flooded again with full tide into a thousand dried-up
cisterns of the heart.
The thrill I experienced is quite incommunicable in words. I ran
upstairs and opened all my windows wide, knowing that soon the
Messenger would return with a million others--only to find that already
it had been there before me. Its taste was in the air, fragrant and
alive; in my very mouth--and all the currents of the inner life ran
sweet again, and full. Nothing in the whole village was quite the same
as it had been before. The deeply slumbering peasants, even behind
their shuttered windows and barred doors; the _Curé_, the servants at
the inn, the consumptive man opposite, the children in the house behind
the church, the horde of tourists in the caravanserai--all knew--more
or less, according to the delicacy of their receiving apparatus--that
Something charged with fresh and living force had swept on viewless
feet down the village street, passed noiselessly between the cracks
of doors and windows, touched nerves and eyelids, and--set them free.
In response to the great Order of Release that the messenger had left
everywhere behind her, even the dreams of the sleepers had shifted into
softer and more flowing keys....
And the Valley--the Valley also knew! For, as I watched from my
window, something loosened about the trees and stones and boulders;
about the massed snows on the great slopes; about the roots of the
hanging icicles that fringed and sheeted the dark cliffs; and down
in the deepest beds of the killed and silent streams. Far overhead,
across those desolate bleak shoulders of the mountains, ran some
sudden softness like the rush of awakening life ... and was gone. A
touch, lithe yet dewy, as of silk and water mixed, dropped softly over
all ... and, silently, without resistance, the _bise noire_, utterly
routed, went back to the icy caverns of the north and east, where it
sleeps, hated of men, and dreams its keen black dreams of death and
desolation....
... And some five hours later, when I woke and looked towards the
sunrise, I saw those strips of pearly grey, just tinged with red, the
Messenger had been to summon ... charged with the warm moisture that
brings relief. On the wings of a rising South Wind they came down
hurriedly to cap the mountains and to unbind the captive forces of
life; then moved with flying streamers up our own valley, sponging from
the thirsty woods their richest perfume....
And farther down, in soft, wet fields, stood the leafless poplars,
with little pools of water gemming the grass between and pouring their
musical overflow through runnels of dark and sodden leaves to join the
rapidly increasing torrents descending from the mountains. For across
the entire valley ran magically that sweet and welcome message of
relief which Job knew when he put the whole delicious tenderness and
passion of it into less than a dozen words: ‘_He comforteth the earth
with the south wind._’
CHAMPÉRY.
[Illustration]
THE SEA FIT
[Illustration: THE SEA FIT]
The sea that night sang rather than chanted; all along the far-running
shore a rising tide dropped thick foam, and the waves, white-crested,
came steadily in with the swing of a deliberate purpose. Overhead, in a
cloudless sky, that ancient Enchantress, the full moon, watched their
dance across the sheeted sands, guiding them carefully while she drew
them up. For through that moonlight, through that roar of surf, there
penetrated a singular note of earnestness and meaning--almost as though
these common processes of Nature were instinct with the flush of an
unusual activity that sought audaciously to cross the borderland into
some subtle degree of conscious life. A gauze of light vapour clung
upon the surface of the sea, far out--a transparent carpet through
which the rollers drove shorewards in a moving pattern.
In the low-roofed bungalow among the sand-dunes the three men sat.
Foregathered for Easter, they spent the day fishing and sailing, and at
night told yarns of the days when life was younger. It was fortunate
that there were three--and later four--because in the mouths of several
witnesses an extraordinary thing shall be established--when they agree.
And although whisky stood upon the rough table made of planks nailed
to barrels, it is childish to pretend that a few drinks invalidate
evidence, for alcohol, up to a certain point, intensifies the
consciousness, focusses the intellectual powers, sharpens observation;
and two healthy men, certainly three, must have imbibed an absurd
amount before they all see, or omit to see, the same things.
The other bungalows still awaited their summer occupants. Only
the lonely tufted sand-dunes watched the sea, shaking their hair
of coarse white grass to the winds. The men had the whole spit to
themselves--with the wind, the spray, the flying gusts of sand, and
that great Easter full moon. There was Major Reese of the Gunners and
his half-brother, Dr. Malcolm Reese, and Captain Erricson, their host,
all men whom the kaleidoscope of life had jostled together a decade ago
in many adventures, then flung for years apart about the globe. There
was also Erricson’s body-servant, ‘Sinbad,’ sailor of big seas, and a
man who had shared on many a ship all the lust of strange adventure
that distinguished his great blonde-haired owner--an ideal servant and
dog-faithful, divining his master’s moods almost before they were born.
On the present occasion, besides crew of the fishing-smack, he was
cook, valet, and steward of the bungalow smoking-room as well.
‘Big Erricson,’ Norwegian by extraction, student by adoption, wanderer
by blood, a Viking reincarnated if ever there was one, belonged to
that type of primitive man in whom burns an inborn love and passion
for the sea that amounts to positive worship--devouring tide, a lust
and fever in the soul. ‘All genuine votaries of the old sea-gods have
it,’ he used to say, by way of explaining his carelessness of worldly
ambitions. ‘We’re never at our best away from salt water--never quite
right. I’ve got it bang in the heart myself. I’d do a bit before the
mast sooner than make a million on shore. Simply can’t help it, you
see, and never could! It’s our gods calling us to worship.’ And he
had never tried to ‘help it,’ which explains why he owned nothing in
the world on land except this tumble-down, one-storey bungalow--more
like a ship’s cabin than anything else, to which he sometimes asked
his bravest and most faithful friends--and a store of curious reading
gathered in long, becalmed days at the ends of the world. Heart and
mind, that is, carried a queer cargo. ‘I’m sorry if you poor devils are
uncomfortable in her. You must ask Sinbad for anything you want and
don’t see, remember.’ As though Sinbad could have supplied comforts
that were miles away, or converted a draughty wreck into a snug, taut,
brand-new vessel.
Neither of the Reeses had cause for grumbling on the score of comfort,
however, for they knew the keen joys of roughing it, and both weather
and sport besides had been glorious. It was on another score this
particular evening that they found cause for uneasiness, if not for
actual grumbling. Erricson had one of his queer sea fits on--the Doctor
was responsible for the term--and was in the thick of it, plunging like
a straining boat at anchor, talking in a way that made them both feel
vaguely uncomfortable and distressed. Neither of them knew exactly
perhaps why he should have felt this growing _malaise_, and each was
secretly vexed with the other for confirming his own unholy instinct
that something uncommon was astir. The loneliness of the sand-spit and
that melancholy singing of the sea before their very door may have
had something to do with it, seeing that both were landsmen; for
Imagination is ever Lord of the Lonely Places, and adventurous men
remain children to the last. But, whatever it was that affected both
men in different fashion, Malcolm Reese, the doctor, had not thought
it necessary to mention to his brother that Sinbad had tugged his
sleeve on entering and whispered in his ear significantly: ‘Full moon,
sir, please, and he’s better without too much! These high spring tides
get him all caught off his feet sometimes--clean sea-crazy’; and the
man had contrived to let the doctor see the hilt of a small pistol he
carried in his hip-pocket.
For Erricson had got upon his old subject: that the gods were not dead,
but merely withdrawn, and that even a single true worshipper was enough
to draw them down again into touch with the world, into the sphere
of humanity, even into active and visible manifestation. He spoke of
queer things he had seen in queerer places. He was serious, vehement,
voluble; and the others had let it pour out unchecked, hoping thereby
for its speedier exhaustion. They puffed their pipes in comparative
silence, nodding from time to time, shrugging their shoulders, the
soldier mystified and bewildered, the doctor alert and keenly watchful.
‘And I like the old idea,’ he had been saying, speaking of these
departed pagan deities, ‘that sacrifice and ritual feed their great
beings, and that death is only the final sacrifice by which the
worshipper becomes absorbed into them. The devout worshipper’--and
there was a singular drive and power behind the words--‘should go to
his death singing, as to a wedding--the wedding of his soul with the
particular deity he has loved and served all his life.’ He swept his
tow-coloured beard with one hand, turning his shaggy head towards
the window, where the moonlight lay upon the procession of shaking
waves. ‘It’s playing the whole game, I always think, man-fashion.... I
remember once, some years ago, down there off the coast by Yucatan----’
And then, before they could interfere, he told an extraordinary tale
of something he had seen years ago, but told it with such a horrid
earnestness of conviction--for it was dreadful, though fine, this
adventure--that his listeners shifted in their wicker chairs, struck
matches unnecessarily, pulled at their long glasses, and exchanged
glances that attempted a smile yet did not quite achieve it. For the
tale had to do with sacrifice of human life and a rather haunting pagan
ceremonial of the sea, and at its close the room had changed in some
indefinable manner--was not exactly as it had been before perhaps--as
though the savage earnestness of the language had introduced some new
element that made it less cosy, less cheerful, even less warm. A secret
lust in the man’s heart, born of the sea, and of his intense admiration
of the pagan gods called a light into his eye not altogether pleasant.
‘They were great Powers, at any rate, those ancient fellows,’ Erricson
went on, refilling his huge pipe bowl; ‘too great to disappear
altogether, though to-day they may walk the earth in another manner.
I swear they’re still going it--especially the----’ (he hesitated for
a mere second) ‘the old water Powers--the Sea Gods. Terrific beggars,
every one of ’em.’
‘Still move the tides and raise the winds, eh?’ from the Doctor.
Erricson spoke again after a moment’s silence, with impressive dignity.
‘And I like, too, the way they manage to keep their names before
us,’ he went on, with a curious eagerness that did not escape the
Doctor’s observation, while it clearly puzzled the soldier. ‘There’s
old Hu, the Druid god of justice, still alive in “Hue and Cry”; there’s
Typhon hammering his way against us in the typhoon; there’s the
mighty Hurakar, serpent god of the winds, you know, shouting to us in
hurricane and _ouragan_; and there’s----’
‘Venus still at it as hard as ever,’ interrupted the Major,
facetiously, though his brother did not laugh because of their host’s
almost sacred earnestness of manner and uncanny grimness of face.
Exactly how he managed to introduce that element of gravity--of
conviction--into such talk neither of his listeners quite understood,
for in discussing the affair later they were unable to pitch upon any
definite detail that betrayed it. Yet there it was, alive and haunting,
even distressingly so. All day he had been silent and morose, but since
dusk, with the turn of the tide, in fact, these queer sentences, half
mystical, half unintelligible, had begun to pour from him, till now
that cabin-like room among the sand-dunes fairly vibrated with the
man’s emotion. And at last Major Reese, with blundering good intention,
tried to shift the key from this portentous subject of sacrifice to
something that might eventually lead towards comedy and laughter,
and so relieve this growing pressure of melancholy and incredible
things. The Viking fellow had just spoken of the possibility of the
old gods manifesting themselves visibly, audibly, physically, and so
the Major caught him up and made light mention of spiritualism and
the so-called ‘materialisation séances,’ where physical bodies were
alleged to be built up out of the emanations of the medium and the
sitters. This crude aspect of the Supernatural was the only possible
link the soldier’s mind could manage. He caught his brother’s eye too
late, it seems, for Malcolm Reese realised by this time that something
untoward was afoot, and no longer needed the memory of Sinbad’s warning
to keep him sharply on the look-out. It was not the first time he had
seen Erricson ‘caught’ by the sea; but he had never known him quite so
bad, nor seen his face so flushed and white alternately, nor his eyes
so oddly shining. So that Major Reese’s well-intentioned allusion only
brought wind to fire.
The man of the sea, once Viking, roared with a rush of boisterous
laughter at the comic suggestion, then dropped his voice to a sudden
hard whisper, awfully earnest, awfully intense. Any one must have
started at the abrupt change and the life-and-death manner of the big
man. His listeners undeniably both did.
‘Bunkum!’ he shouted, ‘bunkum, and be damned to it all! There’s only
one real materialisation of these immense Outer Beings possible, and
that’s when the great embodied emotions, which are their sphere of
action’--his words became wildly incoherent, painfully struggling to
get out--‘derived, you see, from their honest worshippers the world
over--constituting their Bodies, in fact--come down into matter and
get condensed, crystallised into form--to claim that final sacrifice I
spoke about just now, and to which any man might feel himself proud and
honoured to be summoned.... No dying in bed or fading out from old age,
but to plunge full-blooded and alive into the great Body of the god who
has deigned to descend and fetch you----’
The actual speech may have been even more rambling and incoherent than
that. It came out in a torrent at white heat. Dr. Reese kicked his
brother beneath the table, just in time. The soldier looked thoroughly
uncomfortable and amazed, utterly at a loss to know how he had produced
the storm. It rather frightened him.
‘I know it because I’ve seen it,’ went on the sea man, his mind and
speech slightly more under control. ‘Seen the ceremonies that brought
these whopping old Nature gods down into form--seen ’em carry off a
worshipper into themselves--seen that worshipper, too, go off singing
and happy to his death, proud and honoured to be chosen.’
‘Have you really--by George!’ the Major exclaimed. ‘You tell us a
queer thing, Erricson’; and it was then for the fifth time that Sinbad
cautiously opened the door, peeped in and silently withdrew after
giving a swiftly comprehensive glance round the room.
The night outside was windless and serene, only the growing thunder of
the tide near the full woke muffled echoes among the sand-dunes.
‘Rites and ceremonies,’ continued the other, his voice booming with
a singular enthusiasm, but ignoring the interruption, ‘are simply
means of losing one’s self by temporary ecstasy in the God of one’s
choice--the God one has worshipped all one’s life--of being partially
absorbed into his being. And sacrifice completes the process----’
‘At death, you said?’ asked Malcolm Reese, watching him keenly.
‘Or voluntary,’ was the reply that came flash-like. ‘The devotee
becomes wedded to his Deity--goes bang into him, you see, by fire or
water or air--as by a drop from a height--according to the nature of
the particular God; at-one-ment, of course. A man’s death that! Fine,
you know!’
The man’s inner soul was on fire now. He was talking at a fearful pace,
his eyes alight, his voice turned somehow into a kind of sing-song that
chimed well, singularly well, with the booming of waves outside, and
from time to time he turned to the window to stare at the sea and the
moon-blanched sands. And then a look of triumph would come into his
face--that giant face framed by slow-moving wreaths of pipe smoke.
Sinbad entered for the sixth time without any obvious purpose, busied
himself unnecessarily with the glasses and went out again, lingeringly.
In the room he kept his eye hard upon his master. This time he
contrived to push a chair and a heap of netting between him and the
window. No one but Dr. Reese observed the manœuvre. And he took the
hint.
‘The port-holes fit badly, Erricson,’ he laughed, but with a touch of
authority. ‘There’s a five-knot breeze coming through the cracks worse
than an old wreck!’ And he moved up to secure the fastening better.
‘The room _is_ confoundedly cold,’ Major Reese put in; ‘has
been for the last half-hour, too.’ The soldier looked what he
felt--cold--distressed--creepy. ‘But there’s no wind really, you know,’
he added.
Captain Erricson turned his great bearded visage from one to the other
before he answered; there was a gleam of sudden suspicion in his blue
eyes. ‘The beggar’s got that back door open again. If he’s sent for any
one, as he did once before, I swear I’ll drown him in fresh water for
his impudence--or perhaps--can it be already that he expects----?’
He left the sentence incomplete and rang the bell, laughing with a
boisterousness that was clearly feigned. ‘Sinbad, what’s this cold in
the place? You’ve got the back door open. Not expecting any one, are
you----?’
‘Everything’s shut tight, Captain. There’s a bit of a breeze coming up
from the east. And the tide’s drawing in at a raging pace----’
‘We can all hear _that_. But are you expecting any one? I asked,’
repeated his master, suspiciously, yet still laughing. One might
have said he was trying to give the idea that the man had some land
flirtation on hand. They looked one another square in the eye for a
moment, these two. It was the straight stare of equals who understood
each other well.
‘Some one--might be--on the way, as it were, Captain. Couldn’t say for
certain.’
The voice almost trembled. By a sharp twist of the eye, Sinbad managed
to shoot a lightning and significant look at the Doctor.
‘But this cold--this freezing, damp cold in the place? Are you sure no
one’s come--by the back ways?’ insisted the master. He whispered it.
‘Across the dunes, for instance?’ His voice conveyed awe and delight,
both kept hard under.
‘It’s all over the house, Captain, already,’ replied the man, and moved
across to put more sea-logs on the blazing fire. Even the soldier
noticed then that their language was tight with allusion of another
kind. To relieve the growing tension and uneasiness in his own mind he
took up the word ‘house’ and made fun of it.
‘As though it were a mansion,’ he observed, with a forced chuckle,
‘instead of a mere sea-shell!’ Then, looking about him, he added:
‘But, all the same, you know, there _is_ a kind of fog getting into the
room--from the sea, I suppose; coming up with the tide, or something,
eh?’ The air had certainly in the last twenty minutes turned thickish;
it was not all tobacco smoke, and there was a moisture that began to
precipitate on the objects in tiny, fine globules. The cold, too,
fairly bit.
‘I’ll take a look round,’ said Sinbad, significantly, and went out.
Only the Doctor perhaps noticed that the man shook, and was white down
to the gills. He said nothing, but moved his chair nearer to the window
and to his host. It was really a little bit beyond comprehension how
the wild words of this old sea-dog in the full sway of his ‘sea fit’
had altered the very air of the room as well as the personal equations
of its occupants, for an extraordinary atmosphere of enthusiasm that
was almost splendour pulsed about him, yet vilely close to something
that suggested terror! Through the armour of everyday common sense that
normally clothed the minds of these other two, had crept the faint
wedges of a mood that made them vaguely wonder whether the incredible
could perhaps sometimes--by way of bewildering exceptions--actually
come to pass. The moods of their deepest life, that is to say, were
already affected. An inner, and thoroughly unwelcome, change was in
progress. And such psychic disturbances once started are hard to
arrest. In this case it was well on the way before either the Army or
Medicine had been willing to recognise the fact. There was something
coming--coming from the sand-dunes or the sea. And it was invited,
welcomed at any rate, by Erricson. His deep, volcanic enthusiasm and
belief provided the channel. In lesser degree they, too, were caught
in it. Moreover, it was terrific, irresistible.
And it was at this point--as the comparing of notes afterwards
established--that Father Norden came in, Norden, the big man’s nephew,
having bicycled over from some point beyond Corfe Castle and raced
along the hard Studland sand in the moonlight, and then hullood till a
boat had ferried him across the narrow channel of Poole Harbour. Sinbad
simply brought him in without any preliminary question or announcement.
He could not resist the splendid night and the spring air, explained
Norden. He felt sure his uncle could ‘find a hammock’ for him somewhere
aft, as he put it. He did not add that Sinbad had telegraphed for him
just before sundown from the coast-guard hut. Dr. Reese already knew
him, but he was introduced to the Major. Norden was a member of the
Society of Jesus, an ardent, not clever, and unselfish soul.
Erricson greeted him with obviously mixed feelings, and with an
extraordinary sentence: ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ he exclaimed,
after a few commonplaces of talk, ‘for all religions are the same if
you go deep enough. All teach sacrifice, and, without exception, all
seek final union by absorption into their Deity.’ And then, under his
breath, turning sideways to peer out of the window, he added a swift
rush of half-smothered words that only Dr. Reese caught: ‘The Army,
the Church, the Medical Profession, and Labour--if they would only
all come! What a fine result, what a grand offering! Alone--I seem so
unworthy--insignificant...!’
But meanwhile young Norden was speaking before any one could stop him,
although the Major did make one or two blundering attempts. For once
the Jesuit’s tact was at fault. He evidently hoped to introduce a new
mood--to shift the current already established by the single force of
his own personality. And he was not quite man enough to carry it off.
It was an error of judgment on his part. For the forces he found
established in the room were too heavy to lift and alter, their impetus
being already acquired. He did his best, anyhow. He began moving with
the current--it was not the first sea fit he had combated in this
extraordinary personality--then found, too late, that he was carried
along with it himself like the rest of them.
‘Odd--but couldn’t find the bungalow at first,’ he laughed, somewhat
hardly. ‘It’s got a bit of sea-fog all to itself that hides it. I
thought perhaps my pagan uncle----’
The Doctor interrupted him hastily, with great energy. ‘The fog _does_
lie caught in these sand hollows--like steam in a cup, you know,’ he
put in. But the other, intent on his own procedure, missed the cue.
‘----thought it was smoke at first, and that you were up to some
heathen ceremony or other,’ laughing in Erricson’s face; ‘sacrificing
to the full moon or the sea, or the spirits of the desolate places that
haunt sand-dunes, eh?’
No one spoke for a second, but Erricson’s face turned quite radiant.
‘My uncle’s such a pagan, you know,’ continued the priest, ‘that as
I flew along those deserted sands from Studland I almost expected
to hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn ... or see fair Thetis’s
tinsel-slippered feet....’
Erricson, suppressing violent gestures, highly excited, face happy as
a boy’s, was combing his great yellow beard with both hands, and the
other two men had begun to speak at once, intent on stopping the flow
of unwise allusion. Norden, swallowing a mouthful of cold soda-water,
had put the glass down, spluttering over its bubbles, when the sound
was first heard at the window. And in the back room the manservant ran,
calling something aloud that sounded like ‘It’s coming, God save us,
it’s coming in...!’ Though the Major swears some name was mentioned
that he afterwards forgot--Glaucus--Proteus--Pontus--or some such
word. The sound itself, however, was plain enough--a kind of imperious
tapping on the window-panes as of a multitude of objects. Blown sand it
might have been or heavy spray or, as Norden suggested later, a great
watersoaked branch of giant seaweed. Every one started up, but Erricson
was first upon his feet, and had the window wide open in a twinkling.
His voice roared forth over those moonlit sand-dunes and out towards
the line of heavy surf ten yards below.
‘All along the shore of the Ægean,’ he bellowed, with a kind of hoarse
triumph that shook the heart, ‘that ancient cry once rang. But it was a
lie, a thumping and audacious lie. And He is not the only one. Another
still lives--and, by Poseidon, He comes! He knows His own and His own
know Him--and His own shall go to meet Him...!’
That reference to the Ægean ‘cry’! It was so wonderful. Every
one, of course, except the soldier, seized the allusion. It was
a comprehensive, yet subtle, way of suggesting the idea. And
meanwhile all spoke at once, shouted rather, for the Invasion was
somehow--monstrous.
‘Damn it--that’s a bit too much. Something’s caught my throat!’ The
Major, like a man drowning, fought with the furniture in his amazement
and dismay. Fighting was his first instinct, of course. ‘Hurts so
infernally--takes the breath,’ he cried, by way of explaining the
extraordinarily violent impetus that moved him, yet half ashamed
of himself for seeing nothing he could strike. But Malcolm Reese
struggled to get between his host and the open window, saying in
tense voice something like ‘Don’t let him get out! Don’t let him get
out!’ While the shouts of warning from Sinbad in the little cramped
back offices added to the general confusion. Only Father Norden stood
quiet--watching with a kind of admiring wonder the expression of
magnificence that had flamed into the visage of Erricson.
‘Hark, you fools! Hark!’ boomed the Viking figure, standing erect and
splendid.
And through that open window, along the far-drawn line of shore from
Canford Cliffs to the chalk bluffs of Studland Bay, there certainly
ran a sound that was no common roar of surf. It was articulate--a
message from the sea--an announcement--a thunderous warning of
approach. No mere surf breaking on sand could have compassed so deep
and multitudinous a voice of dreadful roaring--far out over the
entering tide, yet at the same time close in along the entire sweep of
shore, shaking all the ocean, both depth and surface, with its deep
vibrations. Into the bungalow chamber came--the SEA!
Out of the night, from the moonlit spaces where it had been steadily
accumulating, into that little cabined room so full of humanity and
tobacco smoke, came invisibly--the Power of the Sea. Invisible, yes,
but mighty, pressed forward by the huge draw of the moon, soft-coated
with brine and moisture--the great Sea. And with it, into the minds
of those three other men, leaped instantaneously, not to be denied,
overwhelming suggestions of water-power, the tear and strain of
thousand-mile currents, the irresistible pull and rush of tides, the
suction of giant whirlpools--more, the massed and awful impetus of
whole driven oceans. The air turned salt and briny, and a welter of
seaweed clamped their very skins.
‘Glaucus! I come to Thee, great God of the deep Waterways.... Father
and Master!’ Erricson cried aloud in a voice that most marvellously
conveyed supreme joy.
The little bungalow trembled as from a blow at the foundations, and the
same second the big man was through the window and running down the
moonlit sands towards the foam.
‘God in Heaven! Did you all see _that_?’ shouted Major Reese, for the
manner in which the great body slipped through the tiny window-frame
was incredible. And then, first tottering with a sudden weakness,
he recovered himself and rushed round by the door, followed by his
brother. Sinbad, invisible, but not inaudible, was calling aloud from
the passage at the back. Father Norden, slimmer than the others--well
controlled, too--was through the little window before either of them
reached the fringe of beach beyond the sand-dunes. They joined forces
halfway down to the water’s edge. The figure of Erricson, towering in
the moonlight, flew before them, coasting rapidly along the wave-line.
No one of them said a word; they tore along side by side, Norden a
trifle in advance. In front of them, head turned seawards, bounded
Erricson in great flying leaps, singing as he ran, impossible to
overtake.
Then, what they witnessed all three witnessed; the weird grandeur of
it in the moonshine was too splendid to allow the smaller emotions
of personal alarm, it seems. At any rate, the divergence of opinion
afterwards was unaccountably insignificant. For, on a sudden, that
heavy roaring sound far out at sea came close in with a swift plunge
of speed, followed simultaneously--accompanied, rather--by a dark line
that was no mere wave moving: enormously, up and across, between the
sea and sky it swept close in to shore. The moonlight caught it for a
second as it passed, in a cliff of her bright silver.
And Erricson slowed down, bowed his great head and shoulders, spread
his arms out and....
And what? For no one of those amazed witnesses could swear exactly what
then came to pass. Upon this impossibility of telling it in language
they all three agreed. Only those eyeless dunes of sand that watched,
only the white and silent moon overhead, only that long, curved beach
of empty and deserted shore retain the complete record, to be revealed
some day perhaps when a later Science shall have learned to develop
the photographs that Nature takes incessantly upon her secret plates.
For Erricson’s rough suit of tweed went out in ribbons across the air;
his figure somehow turned dark like strips of tide-sucked seaweed;
something enveloped and overcame him, half shrouding him from view.
He stood for one instant upright, his hair wild in the moonshine,
towering, with arms again outstretched; then bent forward, turned, drew
out most curiously sideways, uttering the singing sound of tumbling
waters. The next instant, curving over like a falling wave, he swept
along the glistening surface of the sands--and was gone. In fluid form,
wave-like, his being slipped away into the Being of the Sea. A violent
tumult convulsed the surface of the tide near in, but at once, and with
amazing speed, passed careering away into the deeper water--far out. To
his singular death, as to a wedding, Erricson had gone, singing, and
well content.
* * * * *
‘May God, who holds the sea and all its powers in the hollow of His
mighty hand, take them _both_ into Himself!’ Norden was on his knees,
praying fervently.
The body was never recovered ... and the most curious thing of all was
that the interior of the cabin, where they found Sinbad shaking with
terror when they at length returned, was splashed and sprayed, almost
soaked, with salt water. Up into the bigger dunes beside the bungalow,
and far beyond the reach of normal tides, lay, too, a great streak and
furrow as of a large invading wave, caking the dry sand. A hundred
tufts of the coarse grass tussocks had been torn away.
The high tide that night, drawn by the Easter full moon, of course, was
known to have been exceptional, for it fairly flooded Poole Harbour,
flushing all the coves and bays towards the mouth of the Frome. And the
natives up at Arne Bay and Wych always declare that the noise of the
sea was heard far inland even up to the nine Barrows of the Purbeck
Hills--triumphantly singing.
HAVEN HOTEL.
[Illustration]
THE ATTIC
[Illustration: THE ATTIC]
The forest-girdled village upon the Jura slopes slept soundly,
although it was not yet many minutes after ten o’clock. The clang of
the _couvre-feu_ had indeed just ceased, its notes swept far into the
woods by a wind that shook the mountains. This wind now rushed down
the deserted street. It howled about the old rambling building called
La Citadelle, whose roof towered gaunt and humped above the smaller
houses--Château left unfinished long ago by Lord Wemyss, the exiled
Jacobite. The families who occupied the various apartments listened
to the storm and felt the building tremble. ‘It’s the mountain wind.
It will bring the snow,’ the mother said, without looking up from her
knitting. ‘And how sad it sounds.’
But it was not the wind that brought sadness as we sat round the open
fire of peat. It was the wind of memories. The lamplight slanted along
the narrow room towards the table where breakfast things lay ready for
the morning. The double windows were fastened. At the far end stood
a door ajar, and on the other side of it the two elder children lay
asleep in the big bed. But beside the window was a smaller unused bed,
that had been empty now a year. And to-night was the anniversary....
And so the wind brought sadness and long thoughts. The little chap
that used to lie there was already twelve months gone, far, far beyond
the Hole where the Winds came from, as he called it; yet it seemed only
yesterday that I went to tell him a tuck-up story, to stroke Riquette,
the old motherly cat that cuddled against his back and laid a paw
beside his pillow like a human being, and to hear his funny little
earnest whisper say, ‘Oncle, tu sais, j’ai prié pour Petavel.’ For
La Citadelle had its unhappy ghost--of Petavel, the usurer, who had
hanged himself in the attic a century gone by, and was known to walk
its dreary corridors in search of peace--and this wise Irish mother,
calming the boy’s fears with wisdom, had told him, ‘If you pray for
Petavel, you’ll save his soul and make him happy, and he’ll only love
you.’ And, thereafter, this little imaginative boy had done so every
night. With a passionate seriousness he did it. He had wonderful,
delicate ways like that. In all our hearts he made his fairy nests
of wonder. In my own, I know, he lay closer than any joy imaginable,
with his big blue eyes, his queer soft questionings, and his splendid
child’s unselfishness--a sun-kissed flower of innocence that, had he
lived, might have sweetened half a world.
‘Let’s put more peat on,’ the mother said, as a handful of rain like
stones came flinging against the windows; ‘that must be hail.’ And
she went on tiptoe to the inner room. ‘They’re sleeping like two
puddings,’ she whispered, coming presently back. But it struck me she
had taken longer than to notice merely that; and her face wore an odd
expression that made me uncomfortable. I thought she was somehow just
about to laugh or cry. By the table a second she hesitated. I caught
the flash of indecision as it passed. ‘Pan,’ she said suddenly--it was
a nickname, stolen from my tuck-up stories, _he_ had given me--‘I
wonder how Riquette got in.’ She looked hard at me. ‘It wasn’t you,
was it?’ For we never let her come at night since he had gone. It was
too poignant. The beastie always went cuddling and nestling into that
empty bed. But this time it was not my doing, and I offered plausible
explanations. ‘But--she’s on the bed. Pan, _would_ you be so kind----’
She left the sentence unfinished, but I easily understood, for a lump
had somehow risen in my own throat too, and I remembered now that she
had come out from the inner room so quickly--with a kind of hurried
rush almost. I put ‘mère Riquette’ out into the corridor. A lamp stood
on the chair outside the door of another occupant further down, and
I urged her gently towards it. She turned and looked at me--straight
up into my face; but, instead of going down as I suggested, she went
slowly in the opposite direction. She stepped softly towards a door in
the wall that led up broken stairs into the attics. There she sat down
and waited. And so I left her, and came back hastily to the peat fire
and companionship. The wind rushed in behind me and slammed the door.
And we talked then somewhat busily of cheerful things; of the
children’s future, the excellence of the cheap Swiss schools, of
Christmas presents, ski-ing, snow, tobogganing. I led the talk away
from mournfulness; and when these subjects were exhausted I told
stories of my own adventures in distant parts of the world. But
‘mother’ listened the whole time--not to me. Her thoughts were all
elsewhere. And her air of intently, secretly listening, bordered, I
felt, upon the uncanny. For she often stopped her knitting and sat
with her eyes fixed upon the air before her; she stared blankly at
the wall, her head slightly on one side, her figure tense, attention
strained--elsewhere. Or, when my talk positively demanded it, her nod
was oddly mechanical and her eyes looked through and past me. The wind
continued very loud and roaring; but the fire glowed, the room was warm
and cosy. Yet she shivered, and when I drew attention to it, her reply,
‘I do feel cold, but I didn’t know I shivered,’ was given as though she
spoke across the air to some one else. But what impressed me even more
uncomfortably were her repeated questions about Riquette. When a pause
in my tales permitted, she would look up with ‘I wonder where Riquette
went?’ or, thinking of the inclement night, ‘I hope mère Riquette’s not
out of doors. Perhaps Madame Favre has taken her in?’ I offered to go
and see. Indeed I was already half-way across the room when there came
the heavy bang at the door that rooted me to the ground where I stood.
It was not wind. It was something alive that made it rattle. There was
a second blow. A thud on the corridor boards followed, and then a high,
odd voice that at first was as human as the cry of a child.
It is undeniable that we both started, and for myself I can answer
truthfully that a chill ran down my spine; but what frightened me more
than the sudden noise and the eerie cry was the way ‘mother’ supplied
the immediate explanation. For behind the words ‘It’s only Riquette;
she sometimes springs at the door like that; perhaps we’d better let
her in,’ was a certain touch of uncanny quiet that made me feel she
had known the cat would come, and knew also _why_ she came. One cannot
explain such impressions further. They leave their vital touch, then go
their way. Into the little room, however, in that moment there came
between us this uncomfortable sense that the night held other purposes
than our own--and that my companion was aware of them. There was
something going on far, far removed from the routine of life as we were
accustomed to it. Moreover, our usual routine was the eddy, while this
was the main stream. It felt big, I mean.
And so it was that the entrance of the familiar, friendly creature
brought this thing both itself and ‘mother’ _knew_, but whereof I as
yet was ignorant. I held the door wide. The draught rushed through
behind her, and sent a shower of sparks about the fireplace. The lamp
flickered and gave a little gulp. And Riquette marched slowly past,
with all the impressive dignity of her kind, towards the other door
that stood ajar. Turning the corner like a shadow, she disappeared
into the room where the two children slept. We heard the soft thud
with which she leaped upon the bed. Then, in a lull of the wind, she
came back again and sat on the oilcloth, staring into ‘mother’s’ face.
She mewed and put a paw out, drawing the black dress softly with
half-opened claws. And it was all so horribly suggestive and pathetic,
it revived such poignant memories, that I got up impulsively--I think
I had actually said the words, ‘We’d better put her out, mother, after
all’--when my companion rose to her feet and forestalled me. She said
another thing instead. It took my breath away to hear it. ‘She wants us
to go with her. Pan, will you come too?’ The surprise on my face must
have asked the question, for I do not remember saying anything. ‘To the
attic,’ she said quietly.
She stood there by the table, a tall, grave figure dressed in black,
and her face above the lamp-shade caught the full glare of light.
Its expression positively stiffened me. She seemed so secure in her
singular purpose. And her familiar appearance had so oddly given
place to something wholly strange to me. She looked like another
person--almost with the unwelcome transformation of the sleep-walker
about her. Cold came over me as I watched her, for I remembered
suddenly her Irish second-sight, her story years ago of meeting a
figure on the attic stairs, the figure of Petavel. And the idea of
this motherly, sedate, and wholesome woman, absorbed day and night
in prosaic domestic duties, and yet ‘seeing’ things, touched the
incongruous almost to the point of alarm. It was so distressingly
convincing.
Yet she knew quite well that I would come. Indeed, following the
excited animal, she was already by the door, and a moment later, still
without answering or protesting, I was with them in the draughty
corridor. There was something inevitable in her manner that made it
impossible to refuse. She took the lamp from its nail on the wall, and
following our four-footed guide, who ran with obvious pleasure just
in front, she opened the door into the courtyard. The wind nearly put
the lamp out, but a minute later we were safe inside the passage that
led up flights of creaky wooden stairs towards the world of tenantless
attics overhead.
And I shall never forget the way the excited Riquette first stood up
and put her paws upon the various doors, trotted ahead, turned back to
watch us coming, and then finally sat down and waited on the threshold
of the empty, raftered space that occupied the entire length of the
building underneath the roof. For her manner was more that of an
intelligent dog than of a cat, and sometimes more like that of a human
mind than either.
We had come up without a single word. The howling of the wind as we
rose higher was like the roar of artillery. There were many broken
stairs, and the narrow way was full of twists and turnings. It was
a dreadful journey. I felt eyes watching us from all the yawning
spaces of the darkness, and the noise of the storm smothered footsteps
everywhere. Troops of shadows kept us company. But it was on the
threshold of this big, chief attic, when ‘mother’ stopped abruptly to
put down the lamp, that real fear took hold of me. For Riquette marched
steadily forward into the middle of the dusty flooring, picking her way
among the fallen tiles and mortar, as though she went towards--some
one. She purred loudly and uttered little cries of excited pleasure.
Her tail went up into the air, and she lowered her head with the
unmistakable intention of being stroked. Her lips opened and shut. Her
green eyes smiled. She _was_ being stroked.
It was an unforgettable performance. I would rather have witnessed an
execution or a murder than watch that mysterious creature twist and
turn about in the way she did. Her magnified shadow was as large as
a pony on the floor and rafters. I wanted to hide the whole thing by
extinguishing the lamp. For, even before the mysterious action began, I
experienced the sudden rush of conviction that others besides ourselves
were in this attic--and standing very close to us indeed. And, although
there was ice in my blood, there was also a strange swelling of the
heart that only love and tenderness could bring.
But, whatever it was, my human companion, still silent, knew and
understood. She _saw_. And her soft whisper that ran with the wind
among the rafters, ‘Il a prié pour Petavel et le bon Dieu l’a entendu,’
did not amaze me one quarter as much as the expression I then caught
upon her radiant face. Tears ran down the cheeks, but they were
tears of happiness. Her whole figure seemed lit up. She opened her
arms--picture of great Motherhood, proud, blessed, and tender beyond
words. I thought she was going to fall, for she took quick steps
forward; but when I moved to catch her, she drew me aside instead with
a sudden gesture that brought fear back in the place of wonder.
‘Let them pass,’ she whispered grandly. ‘Pan, don’t you see.... He’s
leading him into peace and safety ... by the hand!’ And her joy seemed
to kill the shadows and fill the entire attic with white light. Then,
almost simultaneously with her words, she swayed. I was in time to
catch her, but as I did so, across the very spot where we had just been
standing--two figures, I swear, went past us like a flood of light.
There was a moment next of such confusion that I did not see what
happened to Riquette, for the sight of my companion kneeling on the
dusty boards and praying with a curious sort of passionate happiness,
while tears pressed between her covering fingers--the strange wonder of
this made me utterly oblivious to minor details....
We were sitting round the peat fire again, and ‘mother’ was saying
to me in the gentlest, tenderest whisper I ever heard from human
lips--‘Pan, I think perhaps that’s why God took him....’
And when a little later we went in to make Riquette cosy in the empty
bed, ever since kept sacred to her use, the mournfulness had lifted;
and in the place of resignation was proud peace and joy that knew no
longer sad or selfish questionings.
BÔLE.
[Illustration]
THE HEATH FIRE
[Illustration: THE HEATH FIRE]
The men at luncheon in Rennie’s Surrey cottage that September day were
discussing, of course, the heat. All agreed it had been exceptional.
But nothing unusual was said until O’Hara spoke of the heath fires.
They had been rather terrific, several in a single day, devouring trees
and bushes, endangering human life, and spreading with remarkable
rapidity. The flames, too, had been extraordinarily high and vehement
for heath fires. And O’Hara’s tone had introduced into the commonplace
talk something new--the element of mystery; it was nothing definite
he said, but manner, eyes, hushed voice and the rest conveyed it. And
it was genuine. What he _felt_ reached the others rather than what he
said. The atmosphere in the little room, with the honeysuckle trailing
sweetly across the open windows, changed; the talk became of a sudden
less casual, frank, familiar; and the men glanced at one another across
the table, laughing still, yet with an odd touch of constraint marking
little awkward, unfilled pauses. Being a group of normal Englishmen,
they disliked mystery; it made them feel uncomfortable; for the things
O’Hara hinted at had touched that kind of elemental terror that lurks
secretly in all human beings. Guarded by ‘culture,’ but never wholly
concealed, the unwelcome thing made its presence known--the hint of
primitive dread that, for instance, great thunder-storms, tidal waves,
or violent conflagrations rouse.
And instinctively they fell at once to discussing the obvious causes of
the fires. The stockbroker, scenting imagination, edged mentally away,
sniffing. But the journalist was full of brisk information, ‘simply
given.’
‘The sun starts them in Canada, using a dewdrop as a lens,’ he said,
‘and an engine’s spark, remember, carries an immense distance without
losing its heat.’
‘But hardly miles,’ said another, who had not been really listening.
‘It’s my belief,’ put in the critic keenly, ‘that a lot were done on
purpose. Bits of live coal wrapped in cloth were found, you know.’ He
was a little, weasel-faced iconoclast, dropping the acid of doubt and
disbelief wherever he went, but offering nothing in the place of what
he destroyed. His head was turret-shaped, lips tight and thin, nose
and chin running to points like gimlets, with which he bored into the
unremunerative clays of life.
‘The general unrest, yes,’ the journalist supported him, and tried to
draw the conversation on to labour questions. But their host preferred
the fire talk. ‘I must say,’ he put in gravely, ‘that some of the
blazes hereabouts were uncommonly--er--queer. They started, I mean, so
oddly. You remember, O’Hara, only last week that suspicious one over
Kettlebury way----?’
It seemed he wished to draw the artist out, and that the artist,
feeling the general opposition, declined.
‘Why seek an unusual explanation at all?’ the critic said at length,
impatiently. ‘It’s all natural enough, if you ask me.’
‘Natural! Oh yes!’ broke in O’Hara, with a sudden vehemence that
betrayed feeling none had as yet suspected; ‘provided you don’t
limit the word to mean only what we understand. There’s nothing
anywhere--unnatural.’
A laugh cut short the threatened tirade, and the journalist expressed
the general feeling with ‘Oh _you_, Jim! You’d see a devil in a
dust-storm, or a fairy in the tea-leaves of your cup!’
‘And why not, pray? Devils and fairies are every bit as true as
formulæ.’
Some one tactfully guided them away from a profitless discussion, and
they talked glibly of the damage done, the hideousness of the destroyed
moors, the gaunt, black, ugly slopes, fifty-foot flames, roaring
noises, and the splendour of the enormous smoke-clouds that had filled
the skies. And Rennie, still hoping to coax O’Hara, repeated tales
the beaters had brought in that crying, as though living things were
caught, had been heard in places, and that some had seen tall shapes of
fire passing headlong through the choking smoke. For the note O’Hara
had struck refused to be ignored. It went on sounding underneath the
commonest remark; and the atmosphere to the end retained that curious
tinge that he had given to it--of the strange, the ominous, the
mysterious and unexplained. Until, at last, the artist, having added
nothing further to the talk, got up with some abruptness and left the
room. He complained briefly that the fever he had suffered from still
bothered him and he would go and lie down a bit. The heat, he said,
oppressed him.
A silence followed his departure. The broker drew a sigh as though
the market had gone up. But Rennie, old, comprehending friend, looked
anxious. ‘Excitement,’ he said, ‘not oppression, is the word he meant.
He’s always a bit strung up when that Black Sea fever gets him. He
brought it with him from Batoum.’ And another brief silence followed.
‘Been with you most of the summer, hasn’t he?’ enquired the journalist,
on the trail of a ‘par,’ ‘painting those wild things of his that
no one understands.’ And their host, weighing a moment how much he
might in fairness tell, replied--among friends it was--‘Yes; and this
summer they have been more--er--wild and wonderful than usual--an
extraordinary rush of colour--splendid schemes, “conceptions,” I
believe you critics call ’em, of fire, as though, in a way, the unusual
heat had possessed him for interpretation.’
The group expressed its desultory interest by uninspired interjections.
‘That was what he meant just now when he said the fires had been
mysterious, required explanation, or something--the way they started,
rather,’ concluded Rennie.
Then he hesitated. He laughed a moment, and it was an uneasy,
apologetic little laugh. How to continue he hardly knew. Also,
he wished to protect his friend from the cheap jeering of
miscomprehension. ‘He is very imaginative, you know,’ he went on,
quietly, as no one spoke. ‘You remember that glorious mad thing he
did of the Fallen Lucifer--driving a star across the heavens till the
heat of the descent set a light to half the planets, scorched the old
moon to the white cinder that she now is, and passed close enough
to earth to send our oceans up in a single jet of steam? Well, this
time--he’s been at something every bit as wild, only truer--finer.
And what is it? Briefly, then, he’s got the idea, it seems, that the
unusual heat from the sun this year has penetrated deep enough--in
places--especially on these unprotected heaths that retain their
heat so cleverly--to reach another kindred expression--to waken a
response--in sympathy, you see--from the central fires of the earth.’
He paused again a moment awkwardly, conscious how clumsily he expressed
it. ‘The parent getting into touch again with its lost child, eh? See
the idea? Return of the Fire Prodigal, as it were?’
His listeners stared in silence, the broker looking his obvious relief
that O’Hara was not on ‘Change, the critic’s eyes glancing sharply down
that pointed, boring nose of his.
‘And the central fires have felt it and risen in response,’ continued
Rennie in a lower voice. ‘You see the idea? It’s big, to say the least.
The volcanoes have answered too--there’s old Etna, the giant of ’em
all, breaking out in fifty new mouths of flame. Heat is latent in
everything, only waiting to be called out. That match you’re striking,
this coffee-pot, the warmth in our bodies, and so on--their heat comes
first from the sun, and is therefore an actual part of the sun, the
origin of all heat and life. And so O’Hara, you know, who sees the
universe as a single homogeneous _One_ and--and--well, I give it up.
Can’t explain it, you see. You must get him to do that. But somehow
this year--cloudless--the protecting armour of water all gone too--the
sun’s rays managed to sink in and reach their kind buried deep below.
Perhaps, later, we may get him to show us the studies that he’s
made--whew!--the most--er--amazing things you ever saw!’
The ‘superiority’ of unimaginative minds was inevitable, making Rennie
regret that he had told so much. It was almost as if he had been untrue
to his friend. But at length the group broke up for the afternoon. They
left messages for O’Hara. Two motored, and the journalist took the
train. The critic followed his sharp nose to London, where he might
ferret out the failures that his mind delighted in. And when they were
gone the host slipped quickly upstairs to find his friend. The heat was
unbearable to suffocation, the little bedroom like an oven. But Jim
O’Hara was not in it.
* * * * *
For, instead of lying down as he had said, a fierce revolt, stirred by
the talk of those unvisioned minds below, had wakened, and the deep,
sensitive, poet’s soul in him had leaped suddenly to the acceptance of
an impossible thing. He had escaped, driven forth by the secret call of
wonder. He made full speed for the destroyed moors. Fever or no fever,
he must see for himself. Did no one understand? Was he the only one?...
Walking quickly, he passed the Frensham Ponds, came through that spot
of loneliness and beauty, the Lion’s Mouth, noting that even there
the pool of water had dried up and the rushes waved in the hot air
over a bed of hard, caked mud, and so reached within the hour the wide
expanse of Thursley Common. On every side the world stretched dark and
burnt, a cemetery of cinders. Great thrills rushed through his heart;
and with the power of a tide that yet came at flashing speed the truth
rose up in him.... Half running now, he plunged forward another mile
or two, and found himself, the only living thing, amid the great waste
of heather-land. The blazing sunlight drenched it. It lay, a sheet of
weird dark beauty, spreading like a black, enormous garden as far as
the eye could reach.
Then, breathless, he paused and looked about him. Within his heart
something, long smouldering, ran into sudden flame. Light blazed
upon his inner world. For as the scorch of vehement passion may
quicken tracts of human consciousness that lie ordinarily inert and
unproductive, so here the surface of the earth had turned alive. He
knew; he saw; he understood.
Here, in these open sun-traps that gathered and retained the heat, the
fire of the Universe had dropped and lain, increasing week by week.
These parched, dry months, the soil, free from rejecting and protective
moisture, had let it all accumulate till at length it had sunk
downwards, inwards, and the sister fires below, responding to the touch
of their ancient parent source, too long unfelt, had answered with a
swift uprising roar. They had come up with answering joy, and here and
there had actually reached the surface, and had leaped out with dancing
cry, wild to escape from an age-long prison back to their huge, eternal
origin.
This sunshine, ah! what was it? These farthing dips of heat men
complained about in their tiny, cage-like houses! It scorched the grass
and fields, yes; but the surface never held it long enough to let it
sink to union with its kindred of the darker fires beneath! These
cried for it, but union was ever denied and stifled by the weight of
cooled and cooling rock. And the ages of separation had almost cooled
remembrance too--fire--the kiss and strength of fire--the flaming
embrace and burning lips of the father sun himself.... He could have
cried with the fierce delight of it all, and the picture he would
paint rose there before him, burnt gloriously into the canvas of the
entire heavens. Was not his own heat and life also from the sun?...
He stared about him in the deep silence of the afternoon. The world was
still. It basked in the windless heat. No living thing stirred, for
the common forms of life had fled away. Earth waited. He, too, waited.
And then some touch of intuition, blown to white heat, supplied the
link the pedestrian intellect missed, and he knew that what he waited
for was on the way. For he would _see_. The message he should paint
would come before his outer eye as well, though not, as he had first
stupidly expected, on some grand, enormous scale. Rather would it be
the equivalent of that still, small voice that once had inspired an
entire nation....
The wind passed very softly across the unburnt patch of heather where
he lay; he heard it rustling in the skeletons of scorched birch trees,
and in the gorse and furze bushes that the flame had left so ghostly
pale. Farther off it sang in the isolated pines, dying away like surf
upon some far-off reef. He smelt the bitter perfume of burnt soil, the
pungent, acrid odour of beaten ashes. The purple-black of the moors
yawned like openings in the side of the earth. In all directions for
miles stretched the deep emptiness of the heather-lands, an immense,
dark, magic garden, still black with the feet of wonder that had
flown across it and left it so beautifully scarred. The shadow of the
terrible embrace still trailed and lingered as though Midnight had
screened a time of passion with this curtain of her softest plumes.
And _they_ had called it ugly, had spoken of its marred beauty, its
hideousness! He laughed exultantly as he drank it in, for the weird
and savage splendour everywhere broke loose and spread, passing from
the earth into the receptive substance of his own mind. Even the roots
of gorse and heather, like petrified, shadow-eating snakes, charged
with the mystery of that eternal underworld whence they had risen, lay
waiting for the return of the night of sleep whence Fire had wakened
them. Lost ghosts of a salamander army that the flame had swept above
the ground, they lay anguished and frightened in the glare of the
unaccustomed sun....
And waiting, he stared about him in the deep silence of the afternoon.
Hazy with distance he saw the peak of Crooksbury, dim in its sheet of
pines, waving a blue-plumed crest into the sky for signal; and close
about him rose the more sombre glory of the lesser knolls and boulders,
still cloaked in the swarthy magic of the smoke. Amid pools of ashes in
the nearer hollows he saw the blue beauty of the fire-weed that rushes
instantly into life behind all conflagrations. It was blowing softly
in the wind. And here and there, set like emeralds upon some dusky
bosom, lay the brilliant spires of young bracken that rose to clap a
thousand tiny hands in the heart of exquisite desolation. In a cloud of
green they rustled in the wind above the sea of black.... And so within
himself O’Hara realised the huge excitement of the flame this fragment
of the earth had felt. For Fire, mysterious symbol of universal life,
spirit that prodigally gives itself without itself diminishing, had
passed in power across this ancient heather-land, leaving the soul of
it all naked and unashamed. The sun had loved it. The fires below had
risen up and answered. They had known that union with their source
which some call death....
And the fires were rising still. The poet’s heart in him became
suddenly and awfully aware. Ye stars of fire! This patch of unburnt
heather where he lay had been untouched as yet, but now the flame in
his soul had brought the little needed link and he would _see_. The
thing of wonder that the Universe should teach him how to paint was
already on the way. Called by the sun, tremendous, splendid parent, the
central fires were still rising.
And he turned, weakness and exultation racing for possession of him.
The wind passed softly over his face, and with it came a faint, dry
sound. It was distant and yet close beside him. At the stir of it there
rose also in himself a strange vast thing that was bigger than the
bulk of the moon and wide as the extension of swept forests, yet small
and gentle as a blade of grass that pricks the lawn in spring. And he
realised then that ‘within’ and ‘without’ had turned one, and that
over the entire moorland arrived this thing that was happening too in
a white-hot point of his own heart. He was linked with the sun and the
farthest star, and in his little finger glowed the heat and fire of the
universe itself. In sympathy _his own fires were rising too_.
The sound was born--a faint, light noise of crackling in the heather
at his feet. He bent his head and searched, and among the obscure and
tiny underways of the roots he saw a tip of curling smoke rise slowly
upwards. It moved in a thin, blue spiral past his face. Then terror
took him that was like a terror of the mountains, yet with it at the
same time a realisation of beauty that made the heart leap within him
into dazzling radiance. For the incense of this fairy column of thin
smoke drew his soul out with it--upwards towards its source. He rose to
his feet, trembling....
He watched the line rise slowly to the sky and vanish into blue. The
whole expanse of blackened heather-land watched too. Wind sank away;
the sunshine dropped to meet it. A sense of deep expectancy, profound
and reverent, lay over all that sun-baked moor; and the entire sweep of
burnt world about him knew with joy that what was taking place in that
wee, isolated patch of Surrey heather was the thing the Hebrew mystic
knew when the Soul of the Universe became manifest in the bush that
burned, yet never was consumed. In that faint sound of crackling, as he
stood aside to listen and to watch, O’Hara knew a form of the eternal
Voice of Ages. There was no flame, but it seemed to him that all his
inner being passed in fiery heat outwards towards its source.... He saw
the little patch of dried-up heather sink to the level of the black
surface all about it--a sifted pile of delicate, pale-blue ashes. The
tiny spiral vanished; he watched it disappear, winding upwards out of
sight in a little ghostly trail of beauty. So small and soft and simple
was this wonder of the world. It was gone. And something in himself had
broken, dropped in ashes, and passed also outwards like a tiny mounting
flame.
* * * * *
But the picture O’Hara had thought himself designed to paint was never
done. It was not even begun. The great canvas of ‘The Fire Worshipper’
stood empty on the easel, for the artist had not strength to lift
a brush. Within two days the final breath passed slowly from his
lips. The strange fever that so perplexed the doctor by its rapid
development and its fury took him so easily. His temperature was
extraordinary. The heat, as of an internal fire, fairly devoured him,
and the smile upon his face at the last--so Rennie declared--was the
most perplexingly wonderful thing he had ever seen. ‘It was like a
great, white flame,’ he said.
SANDHILLS.
[Illustration]
THE MESSENGER
[Illustration: THE MESSENGER]
I have never been afraid of ghostly things, attracted rather with a
curious live interest, though it is always out of doors that strange
Presences get nearest to me, and in Nature I have encountered warnings,
messages, presentiments, and the like, that, by way of help or
guidance, have later justified themselves. I have, therefore, welcomed
them. But in the little rooms of houses things of much value rarely
come, for the thick air chokes the wires, as it were, and distorts or
mutilates the clear delivery.
But the other night, here in the carpenter’s house, where my attic
windows beckon to the mountains and the woods, I woke with the
uncomfortably strong suggestion that something was on the way, and
that I was not ready. It came along the byways of deep sleep. I woke
abruptly, alarmed before I was even properly awake. Something was
approaching with great swiftness--and I was unprepared.
Across the lake there were faint signs of colour behind the distant
Alps, but terraces of mist still lay grey above the vineyards, and the
slim poplar, whose tip was level with my face, no more than rustled in
the wind of dawn. A shiver, not brought to me by any wind, ran through
my nerves, for I knew with a certainty no arguing could lessen nor
dispel that something from immensely far away was deliberately now
approaching me. The touch of wonder in advance of it was truly awful;
its splendour, size, and grandeur belonged to conditions I had surely
never known. It came through empty spaces--from another world. While I
lay asleep it had been already on the way.
I stood there a moment, seeking for some outward sign that might betray
its nature. The last stars were fading in the northern sky, and blue
and dim lay the whole long line of the Jura, cloaked beneath still
slumbering forests. There was a rumbling of a distant train. Now and
then a dog barked in some outlying farm. The Night was up and walking,
though as yet she moved but slowly from the sky. Shadows still draped
the world. And the warning that had reached me first in sleep rushed
through my tingling nerves once more with a certainty not far removed
from shock. Something from another world was drawing every minute
nearer, with a speed that made me tremble and half-breathless. It would
presently arrive. It would stand close beside me and look straight into
my face. Into these very eyes that searched the mist and shadow for an
outward sign it would gaze intimately with a Message brought for me
alone. But into these narrow walls it could only come with difficulty.
The message would be maimed. There still was time for preparation. And
I hurried into clothes and made my way downstairs and out into the open
air.
Thus, at first, by climbing fast, I kept ahead of it, and soon the
village lay beneath me in its nest of shadow, and the limestone ridges
far above dropped nearer. But the awe and terrible deep wonder did not
go. Along these mountain paths, whose every inch was so intimate that
I could follow them even in the dark, this sense of breaking grandeur
clung to my footsteps, keeping close. Nothing upon the earth--familiar,
friendly, well-known, little earth--could have brought this sense that
pressed upon the edges of true reverence. It was the awareness that
some speeding messenger from spaces far, far beyond the world would
presently stand close and touch me, would gaze into my little human
eyes, would leave its message as of life or death, and then depart
upon its fearful way again--it was this that conveyed the feeling of
apprehension that went with me.
And instinctively, while rising higher and higher, I chose the darkest
and most sheltered way. I sought the protection of the trees, and ran
into the deepest vaults of the forest. The moss was soaking wet beneath
my feet, and the thousand tapering spires of the pines dipped upwards
into a sky already brightening with palest gold and crimson. There was
a whispering and a rustling overhead as the trees, who know everything
before it comes, announced to one another that the thing I sought to
hide from was already very, very near. Plunging deeper into the woods
to hide, this detail of sure knowledge followed me and laughed: that
the speed of this august arrival was one which made the greatest speed
I ever dreamed of a mere standing still....
I hid myself where possible in the darkness that was growing every
minute more rare. The air was sharp and exquisitely fresh. I heard
birds calling. The low, wet branches kissed my face and hair. A sense
of glad relief came over me that I had left the closeness of the little
attic chamber, and that I should eventually meet this huge New-comer
in the wide, free spaces of the mountains. There must be room where I
could hold myself unmanacled to meet it.... The village lay far beneath
me, a patch of smoke and mist and soft red-brown roofs among the
vineyards. And then my gaze turned upwards, and through a rift in the
close-wrought ceiling of the trees I saw the clearness of the open sky.
A strip of cloud ran through it, carrying off the Night’s last little
dream ... and down into my heart dropped instantly that cold breath of
awe I have known but once in life, when staring through the stupendous
mouth within the Milky Way--that opening into the outer spaces of
eternal darkness, unlit by any single star, men call the Coal Hole.
The futility of escape then took me bodily, and I renounced all further
flight. From this speeding Messenger there was no hiding possible. His
splendid shoulders already brushed the sky. I heard the rushing of his
awful wings ... yet in that deep, significant silence with which light
steps upon the clouds of morning.
And simultaneously I left the woods behind me and stood upon a naked
ridge of rock that all night long had watched the stars.
Then terror passed away like magic. Cool winds from the valleys bore
me up. I heard the tinkling of a thousand cowbells from pastures far
below in a score of hidden valleys. The cold departed, and with it
every trace of little fears. My eyes seemed for an instant blinded, and
I knew that deep sense of joy which seems so ‘unearthly’ that it almost
stains the sight with the veil of tears. The soul sank to her knees in
prayer and worship.
For the messenger from another world had come. He stood beside me on
that dizzy ledge. Warmth clothed me, and I knew myself akin to deity.
He stood there, gazing straight into my little human eyes. He touched
me everywhere. Above the distant Alps the sun came up. His eye looked
close into my own.
BÔLE.
[Illustration]
THE GLAMOUR OF THE SNOW
[Illustration: THE GLAMOUR OF THE SNOW]
I
Hibbert, always conscious of two worlds, was in this mountain village
conscious of three. It lay on the slopes of the Valais Alps, and he had
taken a room in the little post office, where he could be at peace to
write his book, yet at the same time enjoy the winter sports and find
companionship in the hotels when he wanted it.
The three worlds that met and mingled here seemed to his imaginative
temperament very obvious, though it is doubtful if another mind less
intuitively equipped would have seen them so well-defined. There was
the world of tourist English, civilised, quasi-educated, to which he
belonged by birth, at any rate; there was the world of peasants to
which he felt himself drawn by sympathy--for he loved and admired
their toiling, simple life; and there was this other--which he could
only call the world of Nature. To this last, however, in virtue of a
vehement poetic imagination, and a tumultuous pagan instinct fed by
his very blood, he felt that most of him belonged. The others borrowed
from it, as it were, for visits. Here, with the soul of Nature, hid his
central life.
Between all three was conflict--potential conflict. On the skating-rink
each Sunday the tourists regarded the natives as intruders; in the
church the peasants plainly questioned: ‘Why do you come? We are here
to worship; you to stare and whisper!’ For neither of these two worlds
accepted the other. And neither did Nature accept the tourists, for
it took advantage of their least mistakes, and indeed, even of the
peasant-world ‘accepted’ only those who were strong and bold enough to
invade her savage domain with sufficient skill to protect themselves
from several forms of--death.
Now Hibbert was keenly aware of this potential conflict and want
of harmony; he felt outside, yet caught by it--torn in the three
directions because he was partly of each world, but wholly in only one.
There grew in him a constant, subtle effort--or, at least, desire--to
unify them and decide positively to which he should belong and live
in. The attempt, of course, was largely subconscious. It was the
natural instinct of a richly imaginative nature seeking the point of
equilibrium, so that the mind could feel at peace and his brain be free
to do good work.
Among the guests no one especially claimed his interest. The men were
nice but undistinguished--athletic schoolmasters, doctors snatching a
holiday, good fellows all; the women, equally various--the clever, the
would-be-fast, the dare-to-be-dull, the women ‘who understood,’ and the
usual pack of jolly dancing girls and ‘flappers.’ And Hibbert, with his
forty odd years of thick experience behind him, got on well with the
lot; he understood them all; they belonged to definite, predigested
types that are the same the world over, and that he had met the world
over long ago.
But to none of them did he belong. His nature was too ‘multiple’ to
subscribe to the set of shibboleths of any one class. And, since all
liked him, and felt that somehow he seemed outside of them--spectator,
looker-on--all sought to claim him.
In a sense, therefore, the three worlds fought for him: natives,
tourists, Nature....
It was thus began the singular conflict for the soul of Hibbert. _In_
his own soul, however, it took place. Neither the peasants nor the
tourists were conscious that they fought for anything. And Nature, they
say, is merely blind and automatic.
The assault upon him of the peasants may be left out of account, for
it is obvious that they stood no chance of success. The tourist world,
however, made a gallant effort to subdue him to themselves. But the
evenings in the hotel, when dancing was not in order, were--English.
The provincial imagination was set upon a throne and worshipped heavily
through incense of the stupidest conventions possible. Hibbert used to
go back early to his room in the post office to work.
‘It is a mistake on my part to have _realised_ that there is any
conflict at all,’ he thought, as he crunched home over the snow at
midnight after one of the dances. ‘It would have been better to have
kept outside it all and done my work. Better,’ he added, looking back
down the silent village street to the church tower, ‘and--safer.’
The adjective slipped from his mind before he was aware of it. He
turned with an involuntary start and looked about him. He knew
perfectly well what it meant--this thought that had thrust its head
up from the instinctive region. He understood, without being able to
express it fully, the meaning that betrayed itself in the choice of
the adjective. For if he had ignored the existence of this conflict he
would at the same time have remained outside the arena. Whereas now he
had entered the lists. Now this battle for his soul must have issue.
And he knew that the spell of Nature was greater for him than all other
spells in the world combined--greater than love, revelry, pleasure,
greater even than study. He had always been afraid to let himself go.
His pagan soul dreaded her terrific powers of witchery even while he
worshipped.
The little village already slept. The world lay smothered in snow. The
châlet roofs shone white beneath the moon, and pitch-black shadows
gathered against the walls of the church. His eye rested a moment on
the square stone tower with its frosted cross that pointed to the
sky: then travelled with a leap of many thousand feet to the enormous
mountains that brushed the brilliant stars. Like a forest rose the huge
peaks above the slumbering village, measuring the night and heavens.
They beckoned him. And something born of the snowy desolation, born
of the midnight and the silent grandeur, born of the great listening
hollows of the night, something that lay ’twixt terror and wonder,
dropped from the vast wintry spaces down into his heart--and called
him. Very softly, unrecorded in any word or thought his brain could
compass, it laid its spell upon him. Fingers of snow brushed the
surface of his heart. The power and quiet majesty of the winter’s night
appalled him....
Fumbling a moment with the big unwieldy key, he let himself in and went
upstairs to bed. Two thoughts went with him--apparently quite ordinary
and sensible ones:
‘What fools these peasants are to sleep through such a night!’ And the
other:
‘Those dances tire me. I’ll never go again. My work only suffers in
the morning.’ The claims of peasants and tourists upon him seemed thus
in a single instant weakened.
The clash of battle troubled half his dreams. Nature had sent her
Beauty of the Night and won the first assault. The others, routed and
dismayed, fled far away.
II
‘Don’t go back to your dreary old post office. We’re going to have
supper in my room--something hot. Come and join us. Hurry up!’
There had been an ice carnival, and the last party, tailing up the
snow-slope to the hotel, called him. The Chinese lanterns smoked and
sputtered on the wires; the band had long since gone. The cold was
bitter and the moon came only momentarily between high, driving clouds.
From the shed where the people changed from skates to snow-boots he
shouted something to the effect that he was ‘following’; but no answer
came; the moving shadows of those who had called were already merged
high up against the village darkness. The voices died away. Doors
slammed. Hibbert found himself alone on the deserted rink.
And it was then, quite suddenly, the impulse came to--stay and skate
alone. The thought of the stuffy hotel room, and of those noisy people
with their obvious jokes and laughter, oppressed him. He felt a longing
to be alone with the night, to taste her wonder all by himself there
beneath the stars, gliding over the ice. It was not yet midnight, and
he could skate for half an hour. That supper party, if they noticed his
absence at all, would merely think he had changed his mind and gone to
bed.
It was an impulse, yes, and not an unnatural one; yet even at the time
it struck him that something more than impulse lay concealed behind
it. More than invitation, yet certainly less than command, there was
a vague queer feeling that he stayed because he had to, almost as
though there was something he had forgotten, overlooked, left undone.
Imaginative temperaments are often thus; and impulse is ever weakness.
For with such ill-considered opening of the doors to hasty action
may come an invasion of other forces at the same time--forces merely
waiting their opportunity perhaps!
He caught the fugitive warning even while he dismissed it as absurd,
and the next minute he was whirling over the smooth ice in delightful
curves and loops beneath the moon. There was no fear of collision. He
could take his own speed and space as he willed. The shadows of the
towering mountains fell across the rink, and a wind of ice came from
the forests, where the snow lay ten feet deep. The hotel lights winked
and went out. The village slept. The high wire netting could not keep
out the wonder of the winter night that grew about him like a presence.
He skated on and on, keen exhilarating pleasure in his tingling blood,
and weariness all forgotten.
And then, midway in the delight of rushing movement, he saw a figure
gliding behind the wire netting, watching him. With a start that almost
made him lose his balance--for the abruptness of the new arrival was
so unlooked for--he paused and stared. Although the light was dim he
made out that it was the figure of a woman and that she was feeling her
way along the netting, trying to get in. Against the white background
of the snow-field he watched her rather stealthy efforts as she passed
with a silent step over the banked-up snow. She was tall and slim and
graceful; he could see that even in the dark. And then, of course, he
understood. It was another adventurous skater like himself, stolen down
unawares from hotel or châlet, and searching for the opening. At once,
making a sign and pointing with one hand, he turned swiftly and skated
over to the little entrance on the other side.
But, even before he got there, there was a sound on the ice behind him
and, with an exclamation of amazement he could not suppress, he turned
to see her swerving up to his side across the width of the rink. She
had somehow found another way in.
Hibbert, as a rule, was punctilious, and in these free-and-easy places,
perhaps, especially so. If only for his own protection he did not seek
to make advances unless some kind of introduction paved the way. But
for these two to skate together in the semi-darkness without speech,
often of necessity brushing shoulders almost, was too absurd to think
of. Accordingly he raised his cap and spoke. His actual words he seems
unable to recall, nor what the girl said in reply, except that she
answered him in accented English with some commonplace about doing
figures at midnight on an empty rink. Quite natural it was, and right.
She wore grey clothes of some kind, though not the customary long
gloves or sweater, for indeed her hands were bare, and presently when
he skated with her, he wondered with something like astonishment at
their dry and icy coldness.
And she was delicious to skate with--supple, sure, and light, fast as
a man yet with the freedom of a child, sinuous and steady at the same
time. Her flexibility made him wonder, and when he asked where she had
learned she murmured--he caught the breath against his ear and recalled
later that it was singularly cold--that she could hardly tell, for she
had been accustomed to the ice ever since she could remember.
But her face he never properly saw. A muffler of white fur buried her
neck to the ears, and her cap came over the eyes. He only saw that she
was young. Nor could he gather her hotel or châlet, for she pointed
vaguely, when he asked her, up the slopes. ‘Just over there----’ she
said, quickly taking his hand again. He did not press her; no doubt she
wished to hide her escapade. And the touch of her hand thrilled him
more than anything he could remember; even through his thick glove he
felt the softness of that cold and delicate softness.
The clouds thickened over the mountains. It grew darker. They talked
very little, and did not always skate together. Often they separated,
curving about in corners by themselves, but always coming together
again in the centre of the rink; and when she left him thus Hibbert was
conscious of--yes, of missing her. He found a peculiar satisfaction,
almost a fascination, in skating by her side. It was quite an
adventure--these two strangers with the ice and snow and night!
Midnight had long since sounded from the old church tower before
they parted. She gave the sign, and he skated quickly to the shed,
meaning to find a seat and help her take her skates off. Yet when he
turned--she had already gone. He saw her slim figure gliding away
across the snow ... and hurrying for the last time round the rink alone
he searched in vain for the opening she had twice used in this curious
way.
‘How very queer!’ he thought, referring to the wire netting. ‘She must
have lifted it and wriggled under...!’
Wondering how in the world she managed it, what in the world had
possessed him to be so free with her, and who in the world she was, he
went up the steep slope to the post office and so to bed, her promise
to come again another night still ringing delightfully in his ears. And
curious were the thoughts and sensations that accompanied him. Most of
all, perhaps, was the half suggestion of some dim memory that he had
known this girl before, had met her somewhere, more--that she knew him.
For in her voice--a low, soft, windy little voice it was, tender and
soothing for all its quiet coldness--there lay some faint reminder of
two others he had known, both long since gone: the voice of the woman
he had loved, and--the voice of his mother.
But this time through his dreams there ran no clash of battle. He
was conscious, rather, of something cold and clinging that made him
think of sifting snowflakes climbing slowly with entangling touch and
thickness round his feet. The snow, coming without noise, each flake so
light and tiny none can mark the spot whereon it settles, yet the mass
of it able to smother whole villages, wove through the very texture of
his mind--cold, bewildering, deadening effort with its clinging network
of ten million feathery touches.
III
In the morning Hibbert realised he had done, perhaps, a foolish thing.
The brilliant sunshine that drenched the valley made him see this, and
the sight of his work-table with its typewriter, books, papers, and
the rest, brought additional conviction. To have skated with a girl
alone at midnight, no matter how innocently the thing had come about,
was unwise--unfair, especially to her. Gossip in these little winter
resorts was worse than in a provincial town. He hoped no one had seen
them. Luckily the night had been dark. Most likely none had heard the
ring of skates.
Deciding that in future he would be more careful, he plunged into work,
and sought to dismiss the matter from his mind.
But in his times of leisure the memory returned persistently to
haunt him. When he ‘ski-d,’ ‘luged,’ or danced in the evenings, and
especially when he skated on the little rink, he was aware that the
eyes of his mind forever sought this strange companion of the night.
A hundred times he fancied that he saw her, but always sight deceived
him. Her face he might not know, but he could hardly fail to recognise
her figure. Yet nowhere among the others did he catch a glimpse of
that slim young creature he had skated with alone beneath the clouded
stars. He searched in vain. Even his inquiries as to the occupants of
the private châlets brought no results. He had lost her. But the queer
thing was that he felt as though she were somewhere close; he _knew_
she had not really gone. While people came and left with every day, it
never once occurred to him that she had left. On the contrary, he felt
assured that they would meet again.
This thought he never quite acknowledged. Perhaps it was the wish that
fathered it only. And, even when he did meet her, it was a question how
he would speak and claim acquaintance, or whether _she_ would recognise
himself. It might be awkward. He almost came to dread a meeting, though
‘dread,’ of course, was far too strong a word to describe an emotion
that was half delight, half wondering anticipation.
Meanwhile the season was in full swing. Hibbert felt in perfect
health, worked hard, ski-d, skated, luged, and at night danced fairly
often--in spite of his decision. This dancing was, however, an act of
subconscious surrender; it really meant he hoped to find her among the
whirling couples. He was searching for her without quite acknowledging
it to himself; and the hotel-world, meanwhile, thinking it had won him
over, teased and chaffed him. He made excuses in a similar vein; but
all the time he watched and searched and--waited.
For several days the sky held clear and bright and frosty, bitterly
cold, everything crisp and sparkling in the sun; but there was no sign
of fresh snow, and the ski-ers began to grumble. On the mountains was
an icy crust that made ‘running’ dangerous; they wanted the frozen,
dry, and powdery snow that makes for speed, renders steering easier and
falling less severe. But the keen east wind showed no signs of changing
for a whole ten days. Then, suddenly, there came a touch of softer air
and the weather-wise began to prophesy.
Hibbert, who was delicately sensitive to the least change in earth or
sky, was perhaps the first to feel it. Only he did not prophesy. He
knew through every nerve in his body that moisture had crept into the
air, was accumulating, and that presently a fall would come. For he
responded to the moods of Nature like a fine barometer.
And the knowledge, this time, brought into his heart a strange little
wayward emotion that was hard to account for--a feeling of unexplained
uneasiness and disquieting joy. For behind it, woven through it rather,
ran a faint exhilaration that connected remotely somewhere with that
touch of delicious alarm, that tiny anticipating ‘dread,’ that so
puzzled him when he thought of his next meeting with his skating
companion of the night. It lay beyond all words, all telling, this
queer relationship between the two; but somehow the girl and snow ran
in a pair across his mind.
Perhaps for imaginative writing-men, more than for other workers, the
smallest change of mood betrays itself at once. His work at any rate
revealed this slight shifting of emotional values in his soul. Not that
his writing suffered, but that it altered, subtly as those changes
of sky or sea or landscape that come with the passing of afternoon
into evening--imperceptibly. A subconscious excitement sought to push
outwards and express itself ... and, knowing the uneven effect such
moods produced in his work, he laid his pen aside and took instead to
reading that he had to do.
Meanwhile the brilliance passed from the sunshine, the sky grew slowly
overcast; by dusk the mountain tops came singularly close and sharp;
the distant valley rose into absurdly near perspective. The moisture
increased, rapidly approaching saturation point, when it must fall in
snow. Hibbert watched and waited.
And in the morning the world lay smothered beneath its fresh white
carpet. It snowed heavily till noon, thickly, incessantly, chokingly, a
foot or more; then the sky cleared, the sun came out in splendour, the
wind shifted back to the east, and frost came down upon the mountains
with its keenest and most biting tooth. The drop in the temperature was
tremendous, but the ski-ers were jubilant. Next day the ‘running’ would
be fast and perfect. Already the mass was settling, and the surface
freezing into those moss-like, powdery crystals that make the ski run
almost of their own accord with the faint ‘sishing’ as of a bird’s
wings through the air.
IV
That night there was excitement in the little hotel-world, first
because there was a _bal costumé_, but chiefly because the new snow had
come. And Hibbert went--felt drawn to go; he did not go in costume, but
he wanted to talk about the slopes and ski-ing with the other men, and
at the same time....
Ah, there was the truth, the deeper necessity that called. For the
singular connection between the stranger and the snow again betrayed
itself, utterly beyond explanation as before, but vital and insistent.
Some hidden instinct in his pagan soul--heaven knows how he phrased it
even to himself, if he phrased it at all--whispered that with the snow
the girl would be somewhere about, would emerge from her hiding place,
would even look for him.
Absolutely unwarranted it was. He laughed while he stood before the
little glass and trimmed his moustache, tried to make his black tie
sit straight, and shook down his dinner jacket so that it should lie
upon the shoulders without a crease. His brown eyes were very bright.
‘I look younger than I usually do,’ he thought. It was unusual, even
significant, in a man who had no vanity about his appearance and
certainly never questioned his age or tried to look younger than he
was. Affairs of the heart, with one tumultuous exception that left no
fuel for lesser subsequent fires, had never troubled him. The forces
of his soul and mind not called upon for ‘work’ and obvious duties, all
went to Nature. The desolate, wild places of the earth were what he
loved; night, and the beauty of the stars and snow. And this evening he
felt their claims upon him mightily stirring. A rising wildness caught
his blood, quickened his pulse, woke longing and passion too. But
chiefly snow. The snow whirred softly through his thoughts like white,
seductive dreams.... For the snow had come; and She, it seemed, had
somehow come with it--into his mind.
And yet he stood before that twisted mirror and pulled his tie and coat
askew a dozen times, as though it mattered. ‘What in the world is up
with me?’ he thought. Then, laughing a little, he turned before leaving
the room to put his private papers in order. The green morocco desk
that held them he took down from the shelf and laid upon the table.
Tied to the lid was the visiting card with his brother’s London address
‘in case of accident.’ On the way down to the hotel he wondered why he
had done this, for though imaginative, he was not the kind of man who
dealt in presentiments. Moods with him were strong, but ever held in
leash.
‘It’s almost like a warning,’ he thought, smiling. He drew his thick
coat tightly round the throat as the freezing air bit at him. ‘Those
warnings one reads of in stories sometimes...!’
A delicious happiness was in his blood. Over the edge of the hills
across the valley rose the moon. He saw her silver sheet the world of
snow. Snow covered all. It smothered sound and distance. It smothered
houses, streets, and human beings. It smothered--life.
V
In the hall there was light and bustle; people were already arriving
from the other hotels and châlets, their costumes hidden beneath many
wraps. Groups of men in evening dress stood about smoking, talking
‘snow’ and ‘ski-ing.’ The band was tuning up. The claims of the
hotel-world clashed about him faintly as of old. At the big glass
windows of the verandah, peasants stopped a moment on their way home
from the _café_ to peer. Hibbert thought laughingly of that conflict
he used to imagine. He laughed because it suddenly seemed so unreal.
He belonged so utterly to Nature and the mountains, and especially
to those desolate slopes where now the snow lay thick and fresh and
sweet, that there was no question of a conflict at all. The power of
the newly fallen snow had caught him, proving it without effort. Out
there, upon those lonely reaches of the moonlit ridges, the snow lay
ready--masses and masses of it--cool, soft, inviting. He longed for it.
It awaited him. He thought of the intoxicating delight of ski-ing in
the moonlight....
Thus, somehow, in vivid flashing vision, he thought of it while he
stood there smoking with the other men and talking all the ‘shop’ of
ski-ing.
And, ever mysteriously blended with this power of the snow, poured also
through his inner being the power of the girl. He could not disabuse
his mind of the insinuating presence of the two together. He remembered
that queer skating-impulse of ten days ago, the impulse that had let
her in. That any mind, even an imaginative one, could pass beneath
the sway of such a fancy was strange enough; and Hibbert, while fully
aware of the disorder, yet found a curious joy in yielding to it.
This insubordinate centre that drew him towards old pagan beliefs had
assumed command. With a kind of sensuous pleasure he let himself be
conquered.
And snow that night seemed in everybody’s thoughts. The dancing couples
talked of it; the hotel proprietors congratulated one another; it meant
good sport and satisfied their guests; every one was planning trips
and expeditions, talking of slopes and telemarks, of flying speed
and distance, of drifts and crust and frost. Vitality and enthusiasm
pulsed in the very air; all were alert and active, positive, radiating
currents of creative life even into the stuffy atmosphere of that
crowded ball-room. And the snow had caused it, the snow had brought
it; all this discharge of eager sparkling energy was due primarily to
the--Snow.
But in the mind of Hibbert, by some swift alchemy of his pagan
yearnings, this energy became transmuted. It rarefied itself, gleaming
in white and crystal currents of passionate anticipation, which he
transferred, as by a species of electrical imagination, into the
personality of the girl--the Girl of the Snow. She somewhere was
waiting for him, expecting him, calling to him softly from those
leagues of moonlit mountain. He remembered the touch of that cool,
dry hand; the soft and icy breath against his cheek; the hush and
softness of her presence in the way she came and the way she had gone
again--like a flurry of snow the wind sent gliding up the slopes.
She, like himself, belonged out there. He fancied that he heard her
little windy voice come sifting to him through the snowy branches of
the trees, calling his name ... that haunting little voice that dived
straight to the centre of his life as once, long years ago, two other
voices used to do....
But nowhere among the costumed dancers did he see her slender figure.
He danced with one and all, distrait and absent, a stupid partner
as each girl discovered, his eyes ever turning towards the door and
windows, hoping to catch the luring face, the vision that did not come
... and at length, hoping even against hope. For the ball-room thinned;
groups left one by one, going home to their hotels and châlets; the
band tired obviously; people sat drinking lemon-squashes at the little
tables, the men mopping their foreheads, everybody ready for bed.
It was close on midnight. As Hibbert passed through the hall to get his
overcoat and snow-boots, he saw men in the passage by the ‘sport-room,’
greasing their ski against an early start. Knapsack luncheons were
being ordered by the kitchen swing doors. He sighed. Lighting a
cigarette a friend offered him, he returned a confused reply to some
question as to whether he could join their party in the morning.
It seemed he did not hear it properly. He passed through the outer
vestibule between the double glass doors, and went into the night.
The man who asked the question watched him go, an expression of anxiety
momentarily in his eyes.
‘Don’t think he heard you,’ said another, laughing. ‘You’ve got to
shout to Hibbert, his mind’s so full of his work.’
‘He works too hard,’ suggested the first, ‘full of queer ideas and
dreams.’
But Hibbert’s silence was not rudeness. He had not caught the
invitation, that was all. The call of the hotel world had faded. He no
longer heard it. Another wilder call was sounding in his ears.
For up the street he had seen a little figure moving. Close against the
shadows of the baker’s shop it glided--white, slim, enticing.
VI
And at once into his mind passed the hush and softness of the snow--yet
with it a searching, crying wildness for the heights. He knew by some
incalculable, swift instinct she would not meet him in the village
street. It was not there, amid crowding houses, she would speak to him.
Indeed, already she had disappeared, melted from view up the white
vista of the moonlit road. Yonder, he divined, she waited where the
highway narrowed abruptly into the mountain path beyond the châlets.
It did not even occur to him to hesitate; mad though it seemed, and
was--this sudden craving for the heights with her, at least for open
spaces where the snow lay thick and fresh--it was too imperious to be
denied. He does not remember going up to his room, putting the sweater
over his evening clothes, and getting into the fur gauntlet gloves
and the helmet cap of wool. Most certainly he has no recollection of
fastening on his ski; he must have done it automatically. Some faculty
of normal observation was in abeyance, as it were. His mind was out
beyond the village--out with the snowy mountains and the moon.
Henri Défago, putting up the shutters over his _café_ windows, saw him
pass, and wondered mildly: ‘Un monsieur qui fait du ski à cette heure!
Il est Anglais, donc...!’ He shrugged his shoulders, as though a man
had the right to choose his own way of death. And Marthe Perotti, the
hunchback wife of the shoemaker, looking by chance from her window,
caught his figure moving swiftly up the road. She had other thoughts,
for she knew and believed the old traditions of the witches and
snow-beings that steal the souls of men. She had even heard, ’twas
said, the dreaded ‘synagogue’ pass roaring down the street at night,
and now, as then, she hid her eyes. ‘They’ve called to him ... and he
must go,’ she murmured, making the sign of the cross.
But no one sought to stop him. Hibbert recalls only a single incident
until he found himself beyond the houses, searching for her along the
fringe of forest where the moonlight met the snow in a bewildering
frieze of fantastic shadows. And the incident was simply this--that
he remembered passing the church. Catching the outline of its tower
against the stars, he was aware of a faint sense of hesitation. A
vague uneasiness came and went--jarred unpleasantly across the flow of
his excited feelings, chilling exhilaration. He caught the instant’s
discord, dismissed it, and--passed on. The seduction of the snow
smothered the hint before he realised that it had brushed the skirts of
warning.
And then he saw her. She stood there waiting in a little clear space
of shining snow, dressed all in white, part of the moonlight and the
glistening background, her slender figure just discernible.
‘I waited, for I knew you would come,’ the silvery little voice of
windy beauty floated down to him. ‘You _had_ to come.’
‘I’m ready,’ he answered, ‘I knew it too.’
The world of Nature caught him to its heart in those few words--the
wonder and the glory of the night and snow. Life leaped within him. The
passion of his pagan soul exulted, rose in joy, flowed out to her. He
neither reflected nor considered, but let himself go like the veriest
schoolboy in the wildness of first love.
‘Give me your hand,’ he cried, ‘I’m coming...!’
‘A little farther on, a little higher,’ came her delicious answer.
‘Here it is too near the village--and the church.’
And the words seemed wholly right and natural; he did not dream of
questioning them; he understood that, with this little touch of
civilisation in sight, the familiarity he suggested was impossible.
Once out upon the open mountains, ’mid the freedom of huge slopes and
towering peaks, the stars and moon to witness and the wilderness of
snow to watch, they could taste an innocence of happy intercourse free
from the dead conventions that imprison literal minds.
He urged his pace, yet did not quite overtake her. The girl kept always
just a little bit ahead of his best efforts.... And soon they left the
trees behind and passed on to the enormous slopes of the sea of snow
that rolled in mountainous terror and beauty to the stars. The wonder
of the white world caught him away. Under the steady moonlight it was
more than haunting. It was a living, white, bewildering power that
deliciously confused the senses and laid a spell of wild perplexity
upon the heart. It was a personality that cloaked, and yet revealed,
itself through all this sheeted whiteness of snow. It rose, went
with him, fled before, and followed after. Slowly it dropped lithe,
gleaming arms about his neck, gathering him in....
Certainly some soft persuasion coaxed his very soul, urging him ever
forwards, upwards, on towards the higher icy slopes. Judgment and
reason left their throne, it seemed, completely, as in the madness of
intoxication. The girl, slim and seductive, kept always just ahead, so
that he never quite came up with her. He saw the white enchantment of
her face and figure, something that streamed about her neck flying like
a wreath of snow in the wind, and heard the alluring accents of her
whispering voice that called from time to time: ‘A little farther on, a
little higher.... Then we’ll run home together!’
Sometimes he saw her hand stretched out to find his own, but each time,
just as he came up with her, he saw her still in front, the hand and
arm withdrawn. They took a gentle angle of ascent. The toil seemed
nothing. In this crystal, wine-like air fatigue vanished. The sishing
of the ski through the powdery surface of the snow was the only sound
that broke the stillness; this, with his breathing and the rustle of
her skirts, was all he heard. Cold moonshine, snow, and silence held
the world. The sky was black, and the peaks beyond cut into it like
frosted wedges of iron and steel. Far below the valley slept, the
village long since hidden out of sight. He felt that he could never
tire.... The sound of the church clock rose from time to time faintly
through the air--more and more distant.
‘Give me your hand. It’s time now to turn back.’
‘Just one more slope,’ she laughed. ‘That ridge above us. Then we’ll
make for home.’ And her low voice mingled pleasantly with the purring
of their ski. His own seemed harsh and ugly by comparison.
‘But I have never come so high before. It’s glorious! This world of
silent snow and moonlight--and _you_. You’re a child of the snow, I
swear. Let me come up--closer--to see your face--and touch your little
hand.’
Her laughter answered him.
‘Come on! A little higher. Here we’re quite alone together.’
‘It’s magnificent,’ he cried. ‘But why did you hide away so long? I’ve
looked and searched for you in vain ever since we skated----’ he was
going to say ‘ten days ago,’ but the accurate memory of time had gone
from him; he was not sure whether it was days or years or minutes. His
thoughts of earth were scattered and confused.
‘You looked for me in the wrong places,’ he heard her murmur just above
him. ‘You looked in places where I never go. Hotels and houses kill me.
I avoid them.’ She laughed--a fine, shrill, windy little laugh.
‘I loathe them too----’
He stopped. The girl had suddenly come quite close. A breath of ice
passed through his very soul. She had touched him.
‘But this awful cold!’ he cried out, sharply, ‘this freezing cold that
takes me. The wind is rising; it’s a wind of ice. Come, let us turn...!’
But when he plunged forward to hold her, or at least to look, the girl
was gone again. And something in the way she stood there a few feet
beyond, and stared down into his eyes so steadfastly in silence, made
him shiver. The moonlight was behind her, but in some odd way he could
not focus sight upon her face, although so close. The gleam of eyes
he caught, but all the rest seemed white and snowy as though he looked
beyond her--out into space....
The sound of the church bell came up faintly from the valley far below,
and he counted the strokes--five. A sudden, curious weakness seized him
as he listened. Deep within it was, deadly yet somehow sweet, and hard
to resist. He felt like sinking down upon the snow and lying there....
They had been climbing for five hours.... It was, of course, the
warning of complete exhaustion.
With a great effort he fought and overcame it. It passed away as
suddenly as it came.
‘We’ll turn,’ he said with a decision he hardly felt. ‘It will be dawn
before we reach the village again. Come at once. It’s time for home.’
The sense of exhilaration had utterly left him. An emotion that was
akin to fear swept coldly through him. But her whispering answer turned
it instantly to terror--a terror that gripped him horribly and turned
him weak and unresisting.
‘Our home is--_here_!’ A burst of wild, high laughter, loud and shrill,
accompanied the words. It was like a whistling wind. The wind _had_
risen, and clouds obscured the moon. ‘A little higher--where we cannot
hear the wicked bells,’ she cried, and for the first time seized him
deliberately by the hand. She moved, was suddenly close against his
face. Again she touched him.
And Hibbert tried to turn away in escape, and so trying, found for the
first time that the power of the snow--that other power which does not
exhilarate but deadens effort--was upon him. The suffocating weakness
that it brings to exhausted men, luring them to the sleep of death in
her clinging soft embrace, lulling the will and conquering all desire
for life--this was awfully upon him. His feet were heavy and entangled.
He could not turn or move.
The girl stood in front of him, very near; he felt her chilly breath
upon his cheeks; her hair passed blindingly across his eyes; and that
icy wind came with her. He saw her whiteness close; again, it seemed,
his sight passed through her into space as though she had no face.
Her arms were round his neck. She drew him softly downwards to his
knees. He sank; he yielded utterly; he obeyed. Her weight was upon him,
smothering, delicious. The snow was to his waist.... She kissed him
softly on the lips, the eyes, all over his face. And then she spoke his
name in that voice of love and wonder, the voice that held the accent
of two others--both taken over long ago by Death--the voice of his
mother, and of the woman he had loved.
He made one more feeble effort to resist. Then, realising even while
he struggled that this soft weight about his heart was sweeter than
anything life could ever bring, he let his muscles relax, and sank back
into the soft oblivion of the covering snow. Her wintry kisses bore him
into sleep.
VII
They say that men who know the sleep of exhaustion in the snow find no
awakening on the hither side of death.... The hours passed and the moon
sank down below the white world’s rim. Then, suddenly, there came a
little crash upon his breast and neck, and Hibbert--woke.
He slowly turned bewildered, heavy eyes upon the desolate mountains,
stared dizzily about him, tried to rise. At first his muscles would
not act; a numbing, aching pain possessed him. He uttered a long, thin
cry for help, and heard its faintness swallowed by the wind. And then
he understood vaguely why he was only warm--not dead. For this very
wind that took his cry had built up a sheltering mound of driven snow
against his body while he slept. Like a curving wave it ran beside him.
It was the breaking of its over-toppling edge that caused the crash,
and the coldness of the mass against his neck that woke him.
Dawn kissed the eastern sky; pale gleams of gold shot every peak with
splendour; but ice was in the air, and the dry and frozen snow blew
like powder from the surface of the slopes. He saw the points of his
ski projecting just below him. Then he--remembered. It seems he had
just strength enough to realise that, could he but rise and stand, he
might fly with terrific impetus towards the woods and village far
beneath. The ski would carry him. But if he failed and fell...!
How he contrived it Hibbert never knew; this fear of death somehow
called out his whole available reserve force. He rose slowly, balanced
a moment, then, taking the angle of an immense zigzag, started down the
awful slopes like an arrow from a bow. And automatically the splendid
muscles of the practised ski-er and athlete saved and guided him, for
he was hardly conscious of controlling either speed or direction. The
snow stung face and eyes like fine steel shot; ridge after ridge flew
past; the summits raced across the sky; the valley leaped up with
bounds to meet him. He scarcely felt the ground beneath his feet as
the huge slopes and distance melted before the lightning speed of that
descent from death to life.
He took it in four mile-long zigzags, and it was the turning at each
corner that nearly finished him, for then the strain of balancing taxed
to the verge of collapse the remnants of his strength.
Slopes that have taken hours to climb can be descended in a short
half-hour on ski, but Hibbert had lost all count of time. Quite other
thoughts and feelings mastered him in that wild, swift dropping through
the air that was like the flight of a bird. For ever close upon his
heels came following forms and voices with the whirling snow-dust.
He heard that little silvery voice of death and laughter at his
back. Shrill and wild, with the whistling of the wind past his ears,
he caught its pursuing tones; but in anger now, no longer soft and
coaxing. And it was accompanied; she did not follow alone. It seemed a
host of these flying figures of the snow chased madly just behind him.
He felt them furiously smite his neck and cheeks, snatch at his hands
and try to entangle his feet and ski in drifts. His eyes they blinded,
and they caught his breath away.
The terror of the heights and snow and winter desolation urged him
forward in the maddest race with death a human being ever knew; and
so terrific was the speed that before the gold and crimson had left
the summits to touch the ice-lips of the lower glaciers, he saw the
friendly forest far beneath swing up and welcome him.
And it was then, moving slowly along the edge of the woods, he saw a
light. A man was carrying it. A procession of human figures was passing
in a dark line laboriously through the snow. And--he heard the sound of
chanting.
Instinctively, without a second’s hesitation, he changed his course. No
longer flying at an angle as before, he pointed his ski straight down
the mountain-side. The dreadful steepness did not frighten him. He knew
full well it meant a crashing tumble at the bottom, but he also knew it
meant a doubling of his speed--with safety at the end. For, though no
definite thought passed through his mind, he understood that it was the
village _curé_ who carried that little gleaming lantern in the dawn,
and that he was taking the Host to a châlet on the lower slopes--to
some peasant _in extremis_. He remembered her terror of the church and
bells. She feared the holy symbols.
There was one last wild cry in his ears as he started, a shriek of
the wind before his face, and a rush of stinging snow against closed
eyelids--and then he dropped through empty space. Speed took sight from
him. It seemed he flew off the surface of the world.
* * * * *
Indistinctly he recalls the murmur of men’s voices, the touch of strong
arms that lifted him, and the shooting pains as the ski were unfastened
from the twisted ankle ... for when he opened his eyes again to normal
life he found himself lying in his bed at the post office with the
doctor at his side. But for years to come the story of ‘mad Hibbert’s’
ski-ing at night is recounted in that mountain village. He went, it
seems, up slopes, and to a height that no man in his senses ever tried
before. The tourists were agog about it for the rest of the season, and
the very same day two of the bolder men went over the actual ground
and photographed the slopes. Later Hibbert saw these photographs. He
noticed one curious thing about them--though he did not mention it to
any one:
There was only a single track.
CHAMPÉRY.
[Illustration]
THE RETURN
[Illustration: THE RETURN]
It was curious--that sense of dull uneasiness that came over him so
suddenly, so stealthily at first he scarcely noticed it, but with
such marked increase after a time that he presently got up and left
the theatre. His seat was on the gangway of the dress circle, and he
slipped out awkwardly in the middle of what seemed to be the best and
jolliest song of the piece. The full house was shaking with laughter;
so infectious was the gaiety that even strangers turned to one another
as much as to say: ‘Now, isn’t _that_ funny--?’
It was curious, too, the way the feeling first got into him at all,
here in the full swing or laughter, music, light-heartedness, for it
came as a vague suggestion: ‘I’ve forgotten something--something I
meant to do--something of importance. What in the world was it, now?’
And he thought hard, searching vainly through his mind; then dismissed
it as the dancing caught his attention. It came back a little later
again, during a passage of long-winded talk that bored him and set his
attention free once more, but came more strongly this time, insisting
on an answer. What could it have been that he had overlooked, left
undone, omitted to see to? It went on nibbling at the subconscious part
of him. Several times this happened, this dismissal and return, till
at last the thing declared itself more plainly--and he felt bothered,
troubled, distinctly uneasy.
He was wanted somewhere. There was somewhere else he ought to be. That
describes it best, perhaps. Some engagement of moment had entirely
slipped his memory--an engagement that involved another person, too.
But where, what, with whom? And, at length, this vague uneasiness
amounted to positive discomfort, so that he felt unable to enjoy
the piece--and left abruptly. Like a man to whom comes suddenly the
horrible idea that the match he lit his cigarette with and flung into
the waste-paper basket on leaving was not really out--a sort of panic
distress--he jumped into a taxi-cab and hurried to his flat: to find
everything in order, of course; no smoke, no fire, no smell of burning.
But his evening was spoilt. He sat smoking in his armchair at
home--this business man of forty, practical in mind, of character
some called stolid--cursing himself for an imaginative fool. It was
now too late to go back to the theatre; the club bored him; he spent
an hour with the evening papers, dipping into books, sipping a long
cool drink; doing odds and ends about the flat; ‘I’ll go to bed early
for a change,’ he laughed, but really all the time fighting--yes,
deliberately fighting--this strange attack of uneasiness that so
insidiously grew upwards, outwards from the buried depths of him that
sought so strenuously to deny it. It never occurred to him that he was
ill. He was _not_ ill. His health was thunderingly good. He was robust
as a coal-heaver.
The flat was roomy, high up on the top floor, yet in a busy part of
town, so that the roar of traffic mounted round it like a sea. Through
the open windows came the fresh night air of June. He had never
noticed before how sweet the London night air could be, and that not
all the smoke and dust could smother a certain touch of wild fragrance
that tinctured it with perfume--yes, almost perfume--as of the country.
He swallowed a draught of it as he stood there, staring out across the
tangled world of roofs and chimney-pots. He saw the procession of the
clouds; he saw the stars; he saw the moonlight falling in a shower of
silver spears upon the slates and wires and steeples. And something in
him quickened--something that had never stirred before.
He turned with a horrid start, for the uneasiness had of a sudden
leaped within him like an animal. There was some one in the flat.
Instantly, with action, even this slight action, the fancy vanished;
but, all the same, he switched on the electric lights and made a
search. For it seemed to him that some one had crept up close behind
him while he stood there watching the Night--some one, moreover,
whose silent presence fingered with unerring touch both this new
thing that had quickened in his heart and that sense of original deep
uneasiness. He was amazed at himself, angry; indignant that he could
be thus foolishly upset over nothing, yet at the same time profoundly
distressed at this vehement growth of a new thing in his well-ordered
personality. Growth? He dismissed the word the moment it occurred to
him. But it had occurred to him. It stayed. While he searched the
empty flat, the long passages, the gloomy bedroom at the end, the
little hall where he kept his overcoats and golf sticks--it stayed.
Growth! It was oddly disquieting. Growth, to him, involved--though he
neither acknowledged nor recognised the truth perhaps--some kind of
undesirable changeableness, instability, unbalance.
Yet, singular as it all was, he realised that the uneasiness and the
sudden appreciation of Beauty that was so new to him had both entered
by the same door into his being. When he came back to the front room he
noticed that he was perspiring. There were little drops of moisture on
his forehead. And down his spine ran positively chills--little, faint
quivers of cold. He was shivering.
He lit his big meerschaum pipe, and left the lights all burning. The
feeling that there was something he had overlooked, forgotten, left
undone, had vanished. Whatever the original cause of this absurd
uneasiness might be--he called it absurd on purpose, because he now
realised in the depths of him that it was really more vital than he
cared about--it was much nearer to discovery than before. It dodged
about just below the threshold of discovery. It was as close as that.
Any moment he would know what it was: he would remember. Yes, he would
_remember_. Meanwhile, he was in the right place. No desire to go
elsewhere afflicted him, as in the theatre. Here was the place, here in
the flat.
And then it was, with a kind of sudden burst and rush--it seemed to him
the only way to phrase it--memory gave up her dead.
At first he only caught her peeping round the corner at him, drawing
aside a corner of an enormous curtain, as it were; striving for more
complete entrance as though the mass of it were difficult to move.
But he understood; he knew; he recognised. It was enough for that. An
entrance into his being--heart, mind, soul--was being attempted, and
the entrance, because of his stolid temperament, was difficult of
accomplishment. There was effort, strain. Something in him had first to
be opened up, widened, made soft and ready as by an operation, before
full entrance could be effected. This much he grasped, though for the
life of him he could not have put it into words. Also, he knew _who_ it
was that sought an entrance. Deliberately from himself he withheld the
name. But he knew, as surely as though Straughan stood in the room and
faced him with a knife, saying, ‘Let me in, let me in. I wish you to
know I’m here. I’m clearing a way...! You recall our promise...?’
He rose from his chair and went to the open window again, the strange
fear slowly passing. The cool air fanned his cheeks. Beauty, till
now, had scarcely ever brushed the surface of his soul. He had never
troubled his head about it. It passed him by, indifferent; and he
had ever loathed the mouthy prating of it on others’ lips. He was
practical; beauty was for dreamers, for women, for men who had means
and leisure. He had not exactly scorned it; rather it had never
touched his life, to sweeten, cheer, uplift. Artists for him were like
monks--another sex almost, useless beings who never helped the world go
round. He was for action always, work, activity, achievement--as he saw
them. He remembered Straughan vaguely--Straughan, the ever impecunious,
friend of his youth, always talking of colour, sound--mysterious,
ineffective things. He even forgot what they had quarrelled about,
if they _had_ quarrelled at all even; or why they had gone apart all
these years ago. And, certainly, he had forgotten any promise. Memory,
as yet, only peeped round the corner of that huge curtain at him,
tentatively, suggestively, yet--he was obliged to admit it--somewhat
winningly. He was conscious of this gentle, sweet seductiveness that
now replaced his fear.
And, as he stood now at the open window, peering over huge London,
Beauty came close and smote him between the eyes. She came blindingly,
with her train of stars and clouds and perfumes. Night, mysterious,
myriad-eyed, and flaming across her sea of haunted shadows, invaded his
heart and shook him with her immemorial wonder and delight. He found
no words, of course, to clothe the new, unwonted sensations. He only
knew that all his former dread, uneasiness, distress, and with them
this idea of ‘growth’ that had seemed so repugnant to him, were merged,
swept up, and gathered magnificently home into a wave or Beauty that
enveloped him. ‘See it ... and understand,’ ran a secret inner whisper
across his mind. He saw. He understood....
He went back and turned the lights out. Then he took his place again at
that open window, drinking in the night. He saw a new world; a species
of intoxication held him. He sighed ... as his thoughts blundered
for expression among words and sentences that knew him not. But the
delight was there, the wonder, the mystery. He watched, with heart
alternately tightening and expanding, the transfiguring play of moon
and shadow over the sea of buildings. He saw the dance of the hurrying
clouds, the open patches into outer space, the veiling and unveiling
of that ancient silvery face; and he caught strange whispers of the
hierophantic, sacerdotal Power that has echoed down the world since
Time began and dropped strange magic phrases into every poet’s heart
since first ‘God dawned on Chaos’--the Beauty of the Night....
A long time passed--it may have been one hour, it may have been
three--when at length he turned away and went slowly to his bedroom. A
deep peace lay over him. Something quite new and blessed had crept into
his life and thought. He could not quite understand it all. He only
knew that it uplifted. There was no longer the least sign of affliction
or distress. Even the inevitable reaction that, of course, set in could
not destroy that.
And then, as he lay in bed, nearing the borderland of sleep, suddenly
and without any obvious suggestion to bring it, he remembered another
thing. He remembered the promise. Memory got past the big curtain
for an instant, and showed her face. She looked into his eyes. It
must have been a dozen years ago when Straughan and he had made that
foolish, solemn promise that whoever died first should show himself, if
possible, to the other.
He had utterly forgotten it--till now. But Straughan had not forgotten
it. The letter came three weeks later, from India. That very evening
Straughan had died--at nine o’clock. And he had come back--in the
Beauty that he loved.
CHARING CROSS ROAD.
[Illustration]
SAND
[Illustration: SAND]
I
As Felix Henriot came through the streets that January night the fog
was stifling, but when he reached his little flat upon the top floor
there came a sound of wind. Wind was stirring about the world. It blew
against his windows, but at first so faintly that he hardly noticed it.
Then, with an abrupt rise and fall like a wailing voice that sought to
claim attention, it called him. He peered through the window into the
blurred darkness, listening.
There is no cry in the world like that of the homeless wind. A vague
excitement, scarcely to be analysed, ran through his blood. The curtain
of fog waved momentarily aside. Henriot fancied a star peeped down at
him.
‘It will change things a bit--at last,’ he sighed, settling back into
his chair. ‘It will bring movement!’
Already something in himself had changed. A restlessness, as of that
wandering wind, woke in his heart--the desire to be off and away. Other
things could rouse this wildness too: falling water, the singing of a
bird, an odour of wood-fire, a glimpse of winding road. But the cry
of wind, always searching, questioning, travelling the world’s great
routes, remained ever the master-touch. High longing took his mood in
hand. Mid seven millions he felt suddenly--lonely.
‘I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.’
He murmured the words over softly to himself. The emotion that produced
Innisfree passed strongly through him. He too would be over the hills
and far away. He craved movement, change, adventure--somewhere far from
shops and crowds and motor-’busses. For a week the fog had stifled
London. This wind brought life.
Where should he go? Desire was long; his purse was short.
He glanced at his books, letters, newspapers. They had no interest
now. Instead he listened. The panorama of other journeys rolled in
colour through the little room, flying on one another’s heels. Henriot
enjoyed this remembered essence of his travels more than the travels
themselves. The crying wind brought so many voices, all of them
seductive:
There was a soft crashing of waves upon the Black Sea shores, where the
huge Caucasus beckoned in the sky beyond; a rustling in the umbrella
pines and cactus at Marseilles, whence magic steamers start about the
world like flying dreams. He heard the plash of fountains upon Mount
Ida’s slopes, and the whisper of the tamarisk on Marathon. It was
dawn once more upon the Ionian Sea, and he smelt the perfume of the
Cyclades. Blue-veiled islands melted in the sunshine, and across the
dewy lawns of Tempe, moistened by the spray of many water-falls, he
saw--Great Heavens above!--the dancing of white forms ... or was it
only mist the sunshine painted against Pelion?... ‘Methought, among
the lawns together, we wandered underneath the young grey dawn.
And multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds shepherded by the slow,
unwilling wind....’
And then, into his stuffy room, slipped the singing perfume of a
wall-flower on a ruined tower, and with it the sweetness of hot ivy. He
heard the ‘yellow bees in the ivy bloom.’ Wind whipped over the open
hills--this very wind that laboured drearily through the London fog.
And--he was caught. The darkness melted from the city. The fog whisked
off into an azure sky. The roar of traffic turned into booming of the
sea. There was a whistling among cordage, and the floor swayed to and
fro. He saw a sailor touch his cap and pocket the two-franc piece. The
syren hooted--ominous sound that had started him on many a journey of
adventure--and the roar of London became mere insignificant clatter of
a child’s toy carriages.
He loved that syren’s call; there was something deep and pitiless in
it. It drew the wanderers forth from cities everywhere: ‘Leave your
known world behind you, and come with me for better or for worse! The
anchor is up; it is too late to change. Only--beware! You shall know
curious things--and alone!’
Henriot stirred uneasily in his chair. He turned with sudden energy to
the shelf of guide-books, maps and time-tables--possessions he most
valued in the whole room. He was a happy-go-lucky, adventure-loving
soul, careless of common standards, athirst ever for the new and
strange.
‘That’s the best of having a cheap flat,’ he laughed, ‘and no ties in
the world. I can turn the key and disappear. No one cares or knows--no
one but the thieving caretaker. And he’s long ago found out that
there’s nothing here worth taking!’
There followed then no lengthy indecision. Preparation was even shorter
still. He was always ready for a move, and his sojourn in cities was
but breathing-space while he gathered pennies for further wanderings.
An enormous kit-bag--sack-shaped, very worn and dirty--emerged speedily
from the bottom of a cupboard in the wall. It was of limitless
capacity. The key and padlock rattled in its depths. Cigarette ashes
covered everything while he stuffed it full of ancient, indescribable
garments. And his voice, singing of those ‘yellow bees in the ivy
bloom,’ mingled with the crying of the rising wind about his windows.
His restlessness had disappeared by magic.
This time, however, there could be no haunted Pelion, nor shady groves
of Tempe, for he lived in sophisticated times when money markets
regulated movement sternly. Travelling was only for the rich; mere
wanderers must pig it. He remembered instead an opportune invitation
to the Desert. ‘Objective’ invitation, his genial hosts had called
it, knowing his hatred of convention. And Helouan danced into letters
of brilliance upon the inner map of his mind. For Egypt had ever held
his spirit in thrall, though as yet he had tried in vain to touch
the great buried soul of her. The excavators, the Egyptologists, the
archaeologists most of all, plastered her grey ancient face with labels
like hotel advertisements on travellers’ portmanteaux. They told where
she had come from last, but nothing of what she dreamed and thought
and loved. The heart of Egypt lay beneath the sand, and the trifling
robbery of little details that poked forth from tombs and temples
brought no true revelation of her stupendous spiritual splendour.
Henriot, in his youth, had searched and dived among what material he
could find, believing once--or half believing--that the ceremonial
of that ancient system veiled a weight of symbol that was reflected
from genuine supersensual knowledge. The rituals, now taken literally,
and so pityingly explained away, had once been genuine pathways of
approach. But never yet, and least of all in his previous visits to
Egypt itself, had he discovered one single person, worthy of speech,
who caught at his idea. ‘Curious,’ they said, then turned away--to go
on digging in the sand. Sand smothered her world to-day. Excavators
discovered skeletons. Museums everywhere stored them--grinning, literal
relics that told nothing.
But now, while he packed and sang, these hopes of enthusiastic younger
days stirred again--because the emotion that gave them birth was real
and true in him. Through the morning mists upon the Nile an old pyramid
bowed hugely at him across London roofs: ‘Come,’ he heard its awful
whisper beneath the ceiling, ‘I have things to show you, and to tell.’
He saw the flock of them sailing the Desert like weird grey solemn
ships that make no earthly port. And he imagined them as one: multiple
expressions of some single unearthly portent they adumbrated in mighty
form--dead symbols of some spiritual conception long vanished from the
world.
‘I mustn’t dream like this,’ he laughed, ‘or I shall get absent-minded
and pack fire-tongs instead of boots. It looks like a jumble sale
already!’
And he stood on a heap of things to wedge them down still tighter.
But the pictures would not cease. He saw the kites circling high in the
blue air. A couple of white vultures flapped lazily away over shining
miles. Felucca sails, like giant wings emerging from the ground, curved
towards him from the Nile. The palm-trees dropped long shadows over
Memphis. He felt the delicious, drenching heat, and the Khamasin, that
over-wind from Nubia, brushed his very cheeks. In the little gardens
the mish-mish was in bloom.... He smelt the Desert ... grey sepulchre
of cancelled cycles.... The stillness of her interminable reaches
dropped down upon old London....
The magic of the sand stole round him in its silent-footed tempest.
And while he struggled with that strange, capacious sack, the piles of
clothing ran into shapes of gleaming Bedouin faces; London garments
settled down with the mournful sound of camels’ feet, half dropping
wind, half water flowing underground--sound that old Time has brought
over into modern life and left a moment for our wonder and perhaps our
tears.
He rose at length with the excitement of some deep enchantment in his
eyes. The thought of Egypt plunged ever so deeply into him, carrying
him into depths where he found it difficult to breathe, so strangely
far away it seemed, yet indefinably familiar. He lost his way. A touch
or fear came with it.
‘A sack like that is the wonder of the world,’ he laughed again,
kicking the unwieldy, sausage-shaped monster into a corner of the
room, and sitting down to write the thrilling labels: ‘Felix Henriot,
Alexandria _via_ Marseilles.’ But his pen blotted the letters; there
was sand in it. He rewrote the words. Then he remembered a dozen things
he had left out. Impatiently, yet with confusion somewhere, he stuffed
them in. They ran away into shifting heaps; they disappeared; they
emerged suddenly again. It was like packing hot, dry, flowing sand.
From the pockets of a coat--he had worn it last summer down Dorset
way--out trickled sand. There was sand in his mind and thoughts.
And his dreams that night were full of winds, the old sad winds of
Egypt, and of moving, sifting sand. Arabs and Afreets danced amazingly
together across dunes he could never reach. For he could not follow
fast enough. Something infinitely older than these ever caught his
feet and held him back. A million tiny fingers stung and pricked him.
Something flung a veil before his eyes. Once it touched him--his face
and hands and neck. ‘Stay here with us,’ he heard a host of muffled
voices crying, but their sound was smothered, buried, rising through
the ground. A myriad throats were choked. Till, at last, with a
violent effort he turned and seized it. And then the thing he grasped
at slipped between his fingers and ran easily away. It had a grey and
yellow face, and it moved through all its parts. It flowed as water
flows, and yet was solid. It was centuries old.
He cried out to it. ‘Who are you? What is your name? I surely know you
... but I have forgotten...?’
And it stopped, turning from far away its great uncovered countenance
of nameless colouring. He caught a voice. It rolled and boomed and
whispered like the wind. And then he woke, with a curious shaking in
his heart, and a little touch of chilly perspiration on the skin.
But the voice seemed in the room still--close beside him:
‘I am the Sand,’ he heard, before it died away.
* * * * *
And next he realised that the glitter of Paris lay behind him, and a
steamer was taking him with much unnecessary motion across a sparkling
sea towards Alexandria. Gladly he saw the Riviera fade below the
horizon, with its hard bright sunshine, treacherous winds, and its
smear of rich, conventional English. All restlessness now had left him.
True vagabond still at forty, he only felt the unrest and discomfort
of life when caught in the network of routine and rigid streets, no
chance of breaking loose. He was off again at last, money scarce enough
indeed, but the joy of wandering expressing itself in happy emotions of
release. Every warning of calculation was stifled. He thought of the
American woman who walked out of her Long Island house one summer’s day
to look at a passing sail--and was gone eight years before she walked
in again. Eight years of roving travel! He had always felt respect and
admiration for that woman.
For Felix Henriot, with his admixture of foreign blood, was philosopher
as well as vagabond, a strong poetic and religious strain sometimes
breaking out through fissures in his complex nature. He had seen much
life; had read many books. The passionate desire of youth to solve the
world’s big riddles had given place to a resignation filled to the brim
with wonder. Anything _might_ be true. Nothing surprised him. The most
outlandish beliefs, for all he knew, might fringe truth somewhere. He
had escaped that cheap cynicism with which disappointed men soothe
their vanity when they realise that an intelligible explanation of the
universe lies beyond their powers. He no longer expected final answers.
For him, even the smallest journeys held the spice of some adventure;
all minutes were loaded with enticing potentialities. And they shaped
for themselves somehow a dramatic form. ‘It’s like a story,’ his
friends said when he told his travels. It always was a story.
But the adventure that lay waiting for him where the silent streets of
little Helouan kiss the great Desert’s lips, was of a different kind
to any Henriot had yet encountered. Looking back, he has often asked
himself, ‘How in the world can I accept it?’
And, perhaps, he never yet has accepted it. It was sand that brought
it. For the Desert, the stupendous thing that mothers little Helouan,
produced it.
II
He slipped through Cairo with the same relief that he left the Riviera,
resenting its social vulgarity so close to the imperial aristocracy of
the Desert; he settled down into the peace of soft and silent little
Helouan. The hotel in which he had a room on the top floor had been
formerly a Khedivial Palace. It had the air of a palace still. He
felt himself in a country-house, with lofty ceilings, cool and airy
corridors, spacious halls. Soft-footed Arabs attended to his wants;
white walls let in light and air without a sign of heat; there was a
feeling of a large, spread tent pitched on the very sand; and the wind
that stirred the oleanders in the shady gardens also crept in to rustle
the palm leaves of his favourite corner seat. Through the large windows
where once the Khedive held high court, the sunshine blazed upon
vistaed leagues of Desert.
And from his bedroom windows he watched the sun dip into gold and
crimson behind the swelling Libyan sands. This side of the pyramids he
saw the Nile meander among palm groves and tilled fields. Across his
balcony railings the Egyptian stars trooped down beside his very bed,
shaping old constellations for his dreams; while, to the south, he
looked out upon the vast untamable Body of the sands that carpeted the
world for thousands of miles towards Upper Egypt, Nubia, and the dread
Sahara itself. He wondered again why people thought it necessary to go
so far afield to know the Desert. Here, within half an hour of Cairo,
it lay breathing solemnly at his very doors.
For little Helouan, caught thus between the shoulders of the Libyan
and Arabian Deserts, is utterly sand-haunted. The Desert lies all
round it like a sea. Henriot felt he never could escape from it, as he
moved about the island whose coasts are washed with sand. Down each
broad and shining street the two end houses framed a vista of its dim
immensity--glimpses of shimmering blue, or flame-touched purple. There
were stretches of deep sea-green as well, far off upon its bosom. The
streets were open channels of approach, and the eye ran down them as
along the tube of a telescope laid to catch incredible distance out
of space. Through them the Desert reached in with long, thin feelers
towards the village. Its Being flooded into Helouan, and over it. Past
walls and houses, churches and hotels, the sea of Desert pressed in
silently with its myriad soft feet of sand. It poured in everywhere,
through crack and slit and crannie. These were reminders of possession
and ownership. And every passing wind that lifted eddies of dust at
the street corners were messages from the quiet, powerful Thing that
permitted Helouan to lie and dream so peacefully in the sunshine. Mere
artificial oasis, its existence was temporary, held on lease, just for
ninety-nine centuries or so.
This sea idea became insistent. For, in certain lights, and especially
in the brief, bewildering dusk, the Desert rose--swaying towards the
small white houses. The waves of it ran for fifty miles without a
break. It was too deep for foam or surface agitation, yet it knew
the swell of tides. And underneath flowed resolute currents, linking
distance to the centre. These many deserts were really one. A storm,
just retreated, had tossed Helouan upon the shore and left it there
to dry; but any morning he would wake to find it had been carried off
again into the depths. Some fragment, at least, would disappear. The
grim Mokattam Hills were rollers that ever threatened to topple down
and submerge the sandy bar that men called Helouan.
Being soundless, and devoid of perfume, the Desert’s message reached
him through two senses only--sight and touch; chiefly, of course, the
former. Its invasion was concentrated through the eyes. And vision,
thus uncorrected, went what pace it pleased. The Desert played with
him. Sand stole into his being--through the eyes.
And so obsessing was this majesty of its close presence, that Henriot
sometimes wondered how people dared their little social activities
within its very sight and hearing; how they played golf and tennis
upon reclaimed edges of its face, picnicked so blithely hard upon its
frontiers, and danced at night while this stern, unfathomable Thing
lay breathing just beyond the trumpery walls that kept it out. The
challenge of their shallow admiration seemed presumptuous, almost
provocative. Their pursuit of pleasure suggested insolent indifference.
They ran fool-hardy hazards, he felt; for there was no worship in their
vulgar hearts. With a mental shudder, sometimes he watched the cheap
tourist horde go laughing, chattering past within view of its ancient,
half-closed eyes. It was like defying deity.
For, to his stirred imagination the sublimity of the Desert dwarfed
humanity. These people had been wiser to choose another place for the
flaunting of their tawdry insignificance. Any minute this Wilderness,
‘huddled in grey annihilation,’ might awake and notice them...!
In his own hotel were several ‘smart,’ so-called ‘Society’ people
who emphasised the protest in him to the point of definite contempt.
Overdressed, the latest worldly novel under their arms, they strutted
the narrow pavements of their tiny world, immensely pleased with
themselves. Their vacuous minds expressed themselves in the slang of
their exclusive circle--value being the element excluded. The pettiness
of their outlook hardly distressed him--he was too familiar with it at
home--but their essential vulgarity, their innate ugliness, seemed more
than usually offensive in the grandeur of its present setting. Into
the mighty sands they took the latest London scandal, gabbling it over
even among the Tombs and Temples. And ‘it was to laugh,’ the pains they
spent wondering whom they might condescend to know, never dreaming that
they themselves were not worth knowing. Against the background of the
noble Desert their titles seemed the cap and bells of clowns.
And Henriot, knowing some of them personally, could not always escape
their insipid company. Yet he was the gainer. They little guessed how
their commonness heightened contrast, set mercilessly thus beside the
strange, eternal beauty of the sand.
Occasionally the protest in his soul betrayed itself in words, which
of course they did not understand. ‘He is so clever, isn’t he?’
And then, having relieved his feelings, he would comfort himself
characteristically:
‘The Desert has not noticed them. The Sand is not aware of their
existence. How should the sea take note of rubbish that lies above its
tide-line?’
For Henriot drew near to its great shifting altars in an attitude of
worship. The wilderness made him kneel in heart. Its shining reaches
led to the oldest Temple in the world, and every journey that he made
was like a sacrament. For him the Desert was a consecrated place. It
was sacred.
And his tactful hosts, knowing his peculiarities, left their house
open to him when he cared to come--they lived upon the northern edge
of the oasis--and he was as free as though he were absolutely alone.
He blessed them; he rejoiced that he had come. Little Helouan accepted
him. The Desert knew that he was there.
* * * * *
From his corner of the big dining-room he could see the other guests,
but his roving eye always returned to the figure of a solitary man
who sat at an adjoining table, and whose personality stirred his
interest. While affecting to look elsewhere, he studied him as closely
as might be. There was something about the stranger that touched his
curiosity--a certain air of expectation that he wore. But it was more
than that: it was anticipation, apprehension in it somewhere. The man
was nervous, uneasy. His restless way of suddenly looking about him
proved it. Henriot tried every one else in the room as well; but,
though his thought settled on others too, he always came back to the
figure of this solitary being opposite, who ate his dinner as if afraid
of being seen, and glanced up sometimes as if fearful of being watched.
Henriot’s curiosity, before he knew it, became suspicion. There was
mystery here. The table, he noticed, was laid for two.
‘Is he an actor, a priest of some strange religion, an enquiry agent,
or just--a crank?’ was the thought that first occurred to him. And
the question suggested itself without amusement. The impression of
subterfuge and caution he conveyed left his observer unsatisfied.
The face was clean shaven, dark, and strong; thick hair, straight
yet bushy, was slightly unkempt; it was streaked with grey; and an
unexpected mobility when he smiled ran over the features that he seemed
to hold rigid by deliberate effort. The man was cut to no quite common
measure. Henriot jumped to an intuitive conclusion: ‘He’s not here for
pleasure or merely sight-seeing. Something serious has brought him
out to Egypt.’ For the face combined too ill-assorted qualities: an
obstinate tenacity that might even mean brutality, and was certainly
repulsive, yet, with it, an undecipherable dreaminess betrayed by
lines of the mouth, but above all in the very light blue eyes, so
rarely raised. Those eyes, he felt, had looked upon unusual things;
‘dreaminess’ was not an adequate description; ‘searching’ conveyed it
better. The true source of the queer impression remained elusive. And
hence, perhaps, the incongruous marriage in the face--mobility laid
upon a matter-of-fact foundation underneath. The face showed conflict.
And Henriot, watching him, felt decidedly intrigued. ‘I’d like to know
that man, and all about him.’ His name, he learned later, was Richard
Vance; from Birmingham; a business man. But it was not the Birmingham
he wished to know; it was the--other: cause of the elusive, dreamy
searching. Though facing one another at so short a distance, their
eyes, however, did not meet. And this, Henriot well knew, was a sure
sign that he himself was also under observation. Richard Vance, from
Birmingham, was equally taking careful note of Felix Henriot, from
London.
Thus, he could wait his time. They would come together later. An
opportunity would certainly present itself. The first links in a
curious chain had already caught; soon the chain would tighten, pull as
though by chance, and bring their lives into one and the same circle.
Wondering in particular for what kind of a companion the second cover
was laid, Henriot felt certain that their eventual coming together
was inevitable. He possessed this kind of divination from first
impressions, and not uncommonly it proved correct.
Following instinct, therefore, he took no steps towards acquaintance,
and for several days, owing to the fact that he dined frequently with
his hosts, he saw nothing more of Richard Vance, the business man from
Birmingham. Then, one night, coming home late from his friend’s house,
he had passed along the great corridor, and was actually a step or so
into his bedroom, when a drawling voice sounded close behind him. It
was an unpleasant sound. It was very near him too----
‘I beg your pardon, but have you, by any chance, such a thing as a
compass you could lend me?’
The voice was so close that he started. Vance stood within touching
distance of his body. He had stolen up like a ghostly Arab, must have
followed him, too, some little distance, for further down the passage
the light of an open door--he had passed it on his way--showed where he
came from.
‘Eh? I beg your pardon? A--compass, did you say?’ He felt disconcerted
for a moment. How short the man was, now that he saw him standing.
Broad and powerful too. Henriot looked down upon his thick head of
hair. The personality and voice repelled him. Possibly his face, caught
unawares, betrayed this.
‘Forgive my startling you,’ said the other apologetically, while the
softer expression danced in for a moment and disorganised the rigid set
of the face. ‘The soft carpet, you know. I’m afraid you didn’t hear
my tread. I wondered’--he smiled again slightly at the nature of the
request--‘if--by any chance--you had a pocket compass you could lend
me?’
‘Ah, a compass, yes! Please don’t apologise. I believe I have one--if
you’ll wait a moment. Come in, won’t you? I’ll have a look.’
The other thanked him but waited in the passage. Henriot, it so
happened, had a compass, and produced it after a moment’s search.
‘I am greatly indebted to you--if I may return it in the morning. You
will forgive my disturbing you at such an hour. My own is broken, and I
wanted--er--to find the true north.’
Henriot stammered some reply, and the man was gone. It was all over
in a minute. He locked his door and sat down in his chair to think.
The little incident had upset him, though for the life of him he could
not imagine why. It ought by rights to have been almost ludicrous, yet
instead it was the exact reverse--half threatening. Why should not a
man want a compass? But, again, why should he? And at midnight? The
voice, the eyes, the near presence--what did they bring that set his
nerves thus asking unusual questions? This strange impression that
something grave was happening, something unearthly--how was it born
exactly? The man’s proximity came like a shock. It had made him start.
He brought--thus the idea came unbidden to his mind--something with him
that galvanised him quite absurdly, as fear does, or delight, or great
wonder. There was a music in his voice too--a certain--well, he could
only call it lilt, that reminded him of plainsong, intoning, chanting.
Drawling was _not_ the word at all.
He tried to dismiss it as imagination, but it would not be dismissed.
The disturbance in himself was caused by something not imaginary, but
real. And then, for the first time, he discovered that the man had
brought a faint, elusive suggestion of perfume with him, an aromatic
odour, that made him think of priests and churches. The ghost of it
still lingered in the air. Ah, here then was the origin of the notion
that his voice had chanted: it was surely the suggestion of incense.
But incense, intoning, a compass to find the true north--at midnight in
a Desert hotel!
A touch of uneasiness ran through the curiosity and excitement that he
felt.
And he undressed for bed. ‘Confound my old imagination,’ he thought,
‘what tricks it plays me! It’ll keep me awake!’
But the questions, once started in his mind, continued. He must find
explanation of one kind or another before he could lie down and sleep,
and he found it at length in--the stars. The man was an astronomer of
sorts; possibly an astrologer into the bargain! Why not? The stars were
wonderful above Helouan. Was there not an observatory on the Mokattam
Hills, too, where tourists could use the telescopes on privileged days?
He had it at last. He even stole out on to his balcony to see if the
stranger perhaps was looking through some wonderful apparatus at the
heavens. Their rooms were on the same side. But the shuttered windows
revealed no stooping figure with eyes glued to a telescope. The stars
blinked in their many thousands down upon the silent desert. The night
held neither sound nor movement. There was a cool breeze blowing across
the Nile from the Lybian Sands. It nipped; and he stepped back quickly
into the room again. Drawing the mosquito curtains carefully about the
bed, he put the light out and turned over to sleep.
And sleep came quickly, contrary to his expectations, though it was a
light and surface sleep. That last glimpse of the darkened Desert lying
beneath the Egyptian stars had touched him with some hand of awful
power that ousted the first, lesser excitement. It calmed and soothed
him in one sense, yet in another, a sense he could not understand, it
caught him in a net of deep, deep feelings whose mesh, while infinitely
delicate, was utterly stupendous. His nerves this deeper emotion left
alone: it reached instead to something infinite in him that mere nerves
could neither deal with nor interpret. The soul awoke and whispered in
him while his body slept.
And the little, foolish dreams that ran to and fro across this veil of
surface sleep brought oddly tangled pictures of things quite tiny and
at the same time of others that were mighty beyond words. With these
two counters Nightmare played. They interwove. There was the figure of
this dark-faced man with the compass, measuring the sky to find the
true north, and there were hints of giant Presences that hovered just
outside some curious outline that he traced upon the ground, copied
in some nightmare fashion from the heavens. The excitement caused by
his visitor’s singular request mingled with the profounder sensations
his final look at the stars and Desert stirred. The two were somehow
inter-related.
Some hours later, before this surface sleep passed into genuine
slumber, Henriot woke--with an appalling feeling that the Desert had
come creeping into his room and now stared down upon him where he lay
in bed. The wind was crying audibly about the walls outside. A faint,
sharp tapping came against the window panes.
He sprang instantly out of bed, not yet awake enough to feel actual
alarm, yet with the nightmare touch still close enough to cause a sort
of feverish, loose bewilderment. He switched the lights on. A moment
later he knew the meaning of that curious tapping, for the rising wind
was flinging tiny specks of sand against the glass. The idea that they
had summoned him belonged, of course, to dream.
He opened the window, and stepped out on to the balcony. The stone was
very cold under his bare feet. There was a wash of wind all over him.
He saw the sheet of glimmering, pale desert near and far; and something
stung his skin below the eyes.
‘The sand,’ he whispered, ‘again the sand; always the sand. Waking or
sleeping, the sand is everywhere--nothing but sand, sand, Sand....’
He rubbed his eyes. It was like talking in his sleep, talking to
Someone who had questioned him just before he woke. But was he really
properly awake? It seemed next day that he had dreamed it. Something
enormous, with rustling skirts of sand, had just retreated far into the
Desert. Sand went with it--flowing, trailing, smothering the world.
The wind died down.
And Henriot went back to sleep, caught instantly away into
unconsciousness; covered, blinded, swept over by this spreading thing
of reddish brown with the great, grey face, whose Being was colossal
yet quite tiny, and whose fingers, wings and eyes were countless as the
stars.
But all night long it watched and waited, rising to peer above the
little balcony, and sometimes entering the room and piling up beside
his very pillow. He dreamed of Sand.
III
For some days Henriot saw little of the man who came from Birmingham
and pushed curiosity to a climax by asking for a compass in the middle
of the night. For one thing, he was a good deal with his friends upon
the other side of Helouan, and for another, he slept several nights in
the Desert.
He loved the gigantic peace the Desert gave him. The world was
forgotten there; and not the world merely, but all memory of it.
Everything faded out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.
An Arab boy and donkey took out sleeping-bag, food and water to the
Wadi Hof, a desolate gorge about an hour eastwards. It winds between
cliffs whose summits rise some thousand feet above the sea. It opens
suddenly, cut deep into the swaying world of level plateaux and
undulating hills. It moves about too; he never found it in the same
place twice--like an arm of the Desert that shifted with the changing
lights. Here he watched dawns and sunsets, slept through the mid-day
heat, and enjoyed the unearthly colouring that swept Day and Night
across the huge horizons. In solitude the Desert soaked down into him.
At night the jackals cried in the darkness round his cautiously-fed
camp fire--small, because wood had to be carried--and in the daytime
kites circled overhead to inspect him, and an occasional white vulture
flapped across the blue. The weird desolation of this rocky valley, he
thought, was like the scenery of the moon. He took no watch with him,
and the arrival of the donkey boy an hour after sunrise came almost
from another planet, bringing things of time and common life out of
some distant gulf where they had lain forgotten among lost ages.
The short hour of twilight brought, too, a bewitchment into the silence
that was a little less than comfortable. Full light or darkness he
could manage, but this time of half things made him want to shut his
eyes and hide. Its effect stepped over imagination. The mind got lost.
He could not understand it. For the cliffs and boulders of discoloured
limestone shone then with an inward glow that signalled to the Desert
with veiled lanterns. The misshapen hills, carved by wind and rain into
ominous outlines, stirred and nodded. In the morning light they retired
into themselves, asleep. But at dusk the tide retreated. They rose from
the sea, emerging naked, threatening. They ran together and joined
shoulders, the entire army of them. And the glow of their sandy bodies,
self-luminous, continued even beneath the stars. Only the moonlight
drowned it. For the moonrise over the Mokattam Hills brought a white,
grand loveliness that drenched the entire Desert. It drew a marvellous
sweetness from the sand. It shone across a world as yet unfinished,
whereon no life might show itself for ages yet to come. He was alone
then upon an empty star, before the creation of things that breathed
and moved.
What impressed him, however, more than everything else was the enormous
vitality that rose out of all this apparent death. There was no hint of
the melancholy that belongs commonly to flatness; the sadness of wide,
monotonous landscape was not here. The endless repetition of sweeping
vale and plateau brought infinity within measurable comprehension.
He grasped a definite meaning in the phrase ‘world without end’: the
Desert had no end and no beginning. It gave him a sense of eternal
peace, the silent peace that star-fields know. Instead of subduing
the soul with bewilderment, it inspired with courage, confidence,
hope. Through this sand which was the wreck of countless geological
ages, rushed life that was terrific and uplifting, too huge to include
melancholy, too deep to betray itself in movement. Here was the
stillness of eternity. Behind the spread grey masque of apparent death
lay stores of accumulated life, ready to break forth at any point. In
the Desert he felt himself absolutely royal.
And this contrast of Life, veiling itself in Death, was a contradiction
that somehow intoxicated. The Desert exhilaration never left him. He
was never alone. A companionship of millions went with him, and he
_felt_ the Desert close, as stars are close to one another, or grains
of sand.
It was the Khamasin, the hot wind bringing sand, that drove him
in--with the feeling that these few days and nights had been
immeasurable, and that he had been away a thousand years. He came
back with the magic of the Desert in his blood, hotel-life tasteless
and insipid by comparison. To human impressions thus he was fresh and
vividly sensitive. His being, cleaned and sensitized by pure grandeur,
‘felt’ people--for a time at any rate--with an uncommon sharpness of
receptive judgment. He returned to a life somehow mean and meagre,
resuming insignificance with his dinner jacket. Out with the sand
he had been regal; now, like a slave, he strutted self-conscious and
reduced.
But this imperial standard of the Desert stayed a little time beside
him, its purity focussing judgment like a lens. The specks of smaller
emotions left it clear at first, and as his eye wandered vaguely over
the people assembled in the dining-room, it was arrested with a vivid
shock upon two figures at the little table facing him.
He had forgotten Vance, the Birmingham man who sought the North at
midnight with a pocket compass. He now saw him again, with an intuitive
discernment entirely fresh. Before memory brought up her clouding
associations, some brilliance flashed a light upon him. ‘That man,’
Henriot thought, ‘might have come with me. He would have understood
and loved it!’ But the thought was really this--a moment’s reflection
spread it, rather: ‘He belongs somewhere to the Desert; the Desert
brought him out here.’ And, again, hidden swiftly behind it like a
movement running below water--‘What does he want with it? What is the
deeper motive he conceals? For there _is_ a deeper motive; and it _is_
concealed.’
But it was the woman seated next him who absorbed his attention really,
even while this thought flashed and went its way. The empty chair was
occupied at last. Unlike his first encounter with the man, she looked
straight at him. Their eyes met fully. For several seconds there was
steady mutual inspection, while her penetrating stare, intent without
being rude, passed searchingly all over his face. It was disconcerting.
Crumbling his bread, he looked equally hard at her, unable to turn
away, determined not to be the first to shift his gaze. And when at
length she lowered her eyes he felt that many things had happened,
as in a long period of intimate conversation. Her mind had judged him
through and through. Questions and answer flashed. They were no longer
strangers. For the rest of dinner, though he was careful to avoid
direct inspection, he was aware that she felt his presence and was
secretly speaking with him. She asked questions beneath her breath.
The answers rose with the quickened pulses in his blood. Moreover, she
explained Richard Vance. It was this woman’s power that shone reflected
in the man. She was the one who knew the big, unusual things. Vance
merely echoed the rush of her vital personality.
This was the first impression that he got--from the most striking,
curious face he had ever seen in a woman. It remained very near him all
through the meal: she had moved to his table, it seemed she sat beside
him. Their minds certainly knew contact from that moment.
It is never difficult to credit strangers with the qualities and
knowledge that oneself craves for, and no doubt Henriot’s active fancy
went busily to work. But, none the less, this thing remained and grew:
that this woman was aware of the hidden things of Egypt he had always
longed to know. There was knowledge and guidance she could impart. Her
soul was searching among ancient things. Her face brought the Desert
back into his thoughts. And with it came--the sand.
Here was the flash. The sight of her restored the peace and splendour
he had left behind him in his Desert camps. The rest, of course, was
what his imagination constructed upon this slender basis. Only,--not
all of it was imagination.
Now, Henriot knew little enough of women, and had no pose of
‘understanding’ them. His experience was of the slightest; the love
and veneration felt for his own mother had set the entire sex upon
the heights. His affairs with women, if so they may be called, had
been transient--all but those of early youth, which having never known
the devastating test of fulfilment, still remained ideal and superb.
There was unconscious humour in his attitude--from a distance; for
he regarded women with wonder and respect, as puzzles that sweetened
but complicated life, might even endanger it. He certainly was not
a marrying man! But now, as he felt the presence of this woman so
deliberately possess him, there came over him two clear, strong
messages, each vivid with certainty. One was that banal suggestion
of familiarity claimed by lovers and the like--he had often heard of
it--‘I have known that woman before; I have met her ages ago somewhere;
she is strangely familiar to me’; and the other, growing out of it
almost: ‘Have nothing to do with her; she will bring you trouble and
confusion; avoid her, and be warned’;--in fact, a distinct presentiment.
Yet, although Henriot dismissed both impressions as having no shred of
evidence to justify them, the original clear judgment, as he studied
her extraordinary countenance, persisted through all denials. The
familiarity, and the presentiment, remained. There also remained this
other--an enormous imaginative leap!--that she could teach him ‘Egypt.’
He watched her carefully, in a sense fascinated. He could only describe
the face as black, so dark it was with the darkness of great age.
Elderly was the obvious, natural word; but elderly described the
features only. The expression of the face wore centuries. Nor was it
merely the coal-black eyes that betrayed an ancient, age-travelled soul
behind them. The entire presentment mysteriously conveyed it. This
woman’s heart knew long-forgotten things--the thought kept beating up
against him. There were cheek-bones, oddly high, that made him think
involuntarily of the well-advertised Pharaoh, Ramases; a square, deep
jaw; and an aquiline nose that gave the final touch of power. For the
power undeniably was there, and while the general effect had grimness
in it, there was neither harshness nor any forbidding touch about it.
There was an implacable sternness in the set of lips and jaw, and, most
curious of all, the eyelids over the steady eyes of black were level as
a ruler. This level framing made the woman’s stare remarkable beyond
description. Henriot thought of an idol carved in stone, stone hard and
black, with eyes that stared across the sand into a world of things
non-human, very far away, forgotten of men. The face was finely ugly.
This strange dark beauty flashed flame about it.
And, as the way ever was with him, Henriot next fell to constructing
the possible lives of herself and her companion, though without much
success. Imagination soon stopped dead. She was not old enough to
be Vance’s mother, and assuredly she was not his wife. His interest
was more than merely piqued--it was puzzled uncommonly. What was
the contrast that made the man seem beside her--vile? Whence came,
too, the impression that she exercised some strong authority, though
never directly exercised, that held him at her mercy? How did he
guess that the man resented it, yet did not dare oppose, and that,
apparently acquiescing good-humouredly, his will was deliberately held
in abeyance, and that he waited sulkily, biding his time? There was
furtiveness in every gesture and expression. A hidden motive lurked in
him; unworthiness somewhere; he was determined yet ashamed. He watched
her ceaselessly and with such uncanny closeness.
Henriot imagined he divined all this. He leaped to the guess that his
expenses were being paid. A good deal more was being paid besides. She
was a rich relation, from whom he had expectations; he was serving his
seven years, ashamed of his servitude, ever calculating escape--but,
perhaps, no ordinary escape. A faint shudder ran over him. He drew in
the reins of imagination.
Of course, the probabilities were that he was hopelessly astray--one
usually is on such occasions--but this time, it so happened, he was
singularly right. Before one thing only his ready invention stopped
every time. This vileness, this notion of unworthiness in Vance, could
not be negative merely. A man with that face was no inactive weakling.
The motive he was at such pains to conceal, betraying its existence by
that very fact, moved, surely, towards aggressive action. Disguised,
it never slept. Vance was sharply on the alert. He had a plan deep out
of sight. And Henriot remembered how the man’s soft approach along
the carpeted corridor had made him start. He recalled the quasi shock
it gave him. He thought again of the feeling of discomfort he had
experienced.
Next, his eager fancy sought to plumb the business these two had
together in Egypt--in the Desert. For the Desert, he felt convinced,
had brought them out. But here, though he constructed numerous
explanations, another barrier stopped him. Because he _knew_. This
woman was in touch with that aspect of ancient Egypt he himself had
ever sought in vain; and not merely with stones the sand had buried so
deep, but with the meanings they once represented, buried so utterly by
the sands of later thought.
And here, being ignorant, he found no clue that could lead to any
satisfactory result, for he possessed no knowledge that might guide
him. He floundered--until Fate helped him. And the instant Fate helped
him, the warning and presentiment he had dismissed as fanciful, became
real again. He hesitated. Caution acted. He would think twice before
taking steps to form acquaintance. ‘Better not,’ thought whispered.
‘Better leave them alone, this queer couple. They’re after things that
won’t do you any good.’ This idea of mischief, almost of danger, in
their purposes was oddly insistent; for what could possibly convey it?
But, while he hesitated, Fate, who sent the warning, pushed him at the
same time into the circle of their lives: at first tentatively--he
might still have escaped; but soon urgently--curiosity led him
inexorably towards the end.
IV
It was so simple a manœuvre by which Fate began the innocent game. The
woman left a couple of books behind her on the table one night, and
Henriot, after a moment’s hesitation, took them out after her. He knew
the titles--_The House of the Master_, and _The House of the Hidden
Places_, both singular interpretations of the Pyramids that once had
held his own mind spellbound. Their ideas had been since disproved,
if he remembered rightly, yet the titles were a clue--a clue to that
imaginative part of his mind that was so busy constructing theories and
had found its stride. Loose sheets of paper, covered with notes in a
minute handwriting, lay between the pages; but these, of course, he did
not read, noticing only that they were written round designs of various
kinds--intricate designs.
He discovered Vance in a corner of the smoking-lounge. The woman had
disappeared.
Vance thanked him politely. ‘My aunt is so forgetful sometimes,’ he
said, and took them with a covert eagerness that did not escape the
other’s observation. He folded up the sheets and put them carefully in
his pocket. On one there was an ink-sketched map, crammed with detail,
that might well have referred to some portion of the Desert. The points
of the compass stood out boldly at the bottom. There were involved
geometrical designs again. Henriot saw them. They exchanged, then, the
commonplaces of conversation, but these led to nothing further. Vance
was nervous and betrayed impatience. He presently excused himself and
left the lounge. Ten minutes later he passed through the outer hall,
the woman beside him, and the pair of them, wrapped up in cloak and
ulster, went out into the night. At the door, Vance turned and threw
a quick, investigating glance in his direction. There seemed a hint
of questioning in that glance; it might almost have been a tentative
invitation. But, also, he wanted to see if their exit had been
particularly noticed--and by whom.
This, briefly told, was the first manœuvre by which Fate introduced
them. There was nothing in it. The details were so insignificant, so
slight the conversation, so meagre the pieces thus added to Henriot’s
imaginative structure. Yet they somehow built it up and made it solid;
the outline in his mind began to stand foursquare. That writing,
those designs, the manner of the man, their going out together, the
final curious look--each and all betrayed points of a hidden thing.
Subconsciously he was excavating their buried purposes. The sand was
shifting. The concentration of his mind incessantly upon them removed
it grain by grain and speck by speck. Tips of the smothered thing
emerged. Presently a subsidence would follow with a rush and light
would blaze upon its skeleton. He felt it stirring underneath his
feet--this flowing movement of light, dry, heaped-up sand. It was
always--sand.
Then other incidents of a similar kind came about, clearing the way
to a natural acquaintanceship. Henriot watched the process with
amusement, yet with another feeling too that was only a little less
than anxiety. A keen observer, no detail escaped him; he saw the
forces of their lives draw closer. It made him think of the devices of
young people who desire to know one another, yet cannot get a proper
introduction. Fate condescended to such little tricks. They wanted a
third person, he began to feel. A third was necessary to some plan
they had on hand, and--they waited to see if he could fill the place.
This woman, with whom he had yet exchanged no single word, seemed so
familiar to him, well known for years. They weighed and watched him,
wondering if he would do.
None of the devices were too obviously used, but at length Henriot
picked up so many forgotten articles, and heard so many significant
phrases, casually let fall, that he began to feel like the villain in
a machine-made play, where the hero for ever drops clues his enemy is
intended to discover.
Introduction followed inevitably. ‘My aunt can tell you; she knows
Arabic perfectly.’ He had been discussing the meaning of some local
name or other with a neighbour after dinner, and Vance had joined
them. The neighbour moved away; these two were left standing alone,
and he accepted a cigarette from the other’s case. There was a rustle
of skirts behind them. ‘Here she comes,’ said Vance; ‘you will let me
introduce you.’ He did not ask for Henriot’s name; he had already taken
the trouble to find it out--another little betrayal, and another clue.
It was in a secluded corner of the great hall, and Henriot turned to
see the woman’s stately figure coming towards them across the thick
carpet that deadened her footsteps. She came sailing up, her black
eyes fixed upon his face. Very erect, head upright, shoulders almost
squared, she moved wonderfully well; there was dignity and power in
her walk. She was dressed in black, and her face was like the night.
He found it impossible to say what lent her this air of impressiveness
and solemnity that was almost majestic. But there _was_ this touch of
darkness and of power in the way she came that made him think of some
sphinx-like figure of stone, some idol motionless in all its parts but
moving as a whole, and gliding across--sand. Beneath those level lids
her eyes stared hard at him. And a faint sensation of distress stirred
in him deep, deep down. Where had he seen those eyes before?
He bowed, as she joined them, and Vance led the way to the armchairs
in a corner of the lounge. The meeting, as the talk that followed, he
felt, were all part of a preconceived plan. It had happened before. The
woman, that is, was familiar to him--to some part of his being that had
dropped stitches of old, old memory.
Lady Statham! At first the name had disappointed him. So many folk
wear titles, as syllables in certain tongues wear accents--without
them being mute, unnoticed, unpronounced. Nonentities, born to names,
so often claim attention for their insignificance in this way. But
this woman, had she been Jemima Jones, would have made the name
distinguished and select. She was a big and sombre personality. Why
was it, he wondered afterwards, that for a moment something in him
shrank, and that his mind, metaphorically speaking, flung up an arm
in self-protection? The instinct flashed and passed. But it seemed to
him born of an automatic feeling that he must protect--not himself,
but the woman from the man. There was confusion in it all; links were
missing. He studied her intently. She was a woman who had none of
the external feminine signals in either dress or manner, no graces,
no little womanly hesitations and alarms, no daintiness, yet neither
anything distinctly masculine. Her charm was strong, possessing; only
he kept forgetting that he was talking to a--woman; and the thing she
inspired in him included, with respect and wonder, somewhere also this
curious hint of dread. This instinct to protect her fled as soon as it
was born, for the interest of the conversation in which she so quickly
plunged him obliterated all minor emotions whatsoever. Here, for the
first time, he drew close to Egypt, the Egypt he had sought so long. It
was not to be explained. He _felt_ it.
Beginning with commonplaces, such as ‘You like Egypt? You find here
what you expected?’ she led him into better regions with ‘One finds
here what one brings.’ He knew the delightful experience of talking
fluently on subjects he was at home in, and to some one who understood.
The feeling at first that to this woman he could not say mere
anythings, slipped into its opposite--that he could say everything.
Strangers ten minutes ago, they were at once in deep and intimate
talk together. He found his ideas readily followed, agreed with up
to a point--the point which permits discussion to start from a basis
of general accord towards speculation. In the excitement of ideas he
neglected the uncomfortable note that had stirred his caution, forgot
the warning too. Her mind, moreover, seemed known to him; he was often
aware of what she was going to say before he actually heard it; the
current of her thoughts struck a familiar gait, and more than once he
experienced vividly again the odd sensation that it all had happened
before. The very sentences and phrases with which she pointed the turns
of her unusual ideas were never wholly unexpected.
For her ideas were decidedly unusual, in the sense that she accepted
without question speculations not commonly deemed worth consideration
at all, indeed not ordinarily even known. Henriot knew them, because
he had read in many fields. It was the strength of her belief that
fascinated him. She offered no apologies. She knew. And while he
talked, she listening with folded arms and her black eyes fixed upon
his own, Richard Vance watched with vigilant eyes and listened too,
ceaselessly alert. Vance joined in little enough, however, gave no
opinions, his attitude one of general acquiescence. Twice, when pauses
of slackening interest made it possible, Henriot fancied he surprised
another quality in this negative attitude. Interpreting it each time
differently, he yet dismissed both interpretations with a smile. His
imagination leaped so absurdly to violent conclusions. They were not
tenable: Vance was neither her keeper, nor was he in some fashion a
detective. Yet in his manner was sometimes this suggestion of the
detective order. He watched with such deep attention, and he concealed
it so clumsily with an affectation of careless indifference.
There is nothing more dangerous than that impulsive intimacy strangers
sometimes adopt when an atmosphere of mutual sympathy takes them
by surprise, for it is akin to the false frankness friends affect
when telling ‘candidly’ one another’s faults. The mood is invariably
regretted later. Henriot, however, yielded to it now with something
like abandon. The pleasure of talking with this woman was so
unexpected, and so keen.
For Lady Statham believed apparently in some Egypt of her dreams. Her
interest was neither historical, archaeological, nor political. It was
religious--yet hardly of this earth at all. The conversation turned
upon the knowledge of the ancient Egyptians from an unearthly point of
view, and even while he talked he was vaguely aware that it was _her_
mind talking through his own. She drew out his ideas and made him say
them. But this he was properly aware of only afterwards--that she had
cleverly, mercilessly pumped him of all he had ever known or read upon
the subject. Moreover, what Vance watched so intently was himself, and
the reactions in himself this remarkable woman produced. That also he
realised later.
His first impression that these two belonged to what may be called
the ‘crank’ order was justified by the conversation. But, at least,
it was interesting crankiness, and the belief behind it made it even
fascinating. Long before the end he surprised in her a more vital form
of his own attitude that anything _may_ be true, since knowledge has
never yet found final answers to any of the biggest questions.
He understood, from sentences dropped early in the talk, that she was
among those few ‘superstitious’ folk who think that the old Egyptians
came closer to reading the eternal riddles of the world than any
others, and that their knowledge was a remnant of that ancient Wisdom
Religion which existed in the superb, dark civilization of the sunken
Atlantis, lost continent that once joined Africa to Mexico. Eighty
thousand years ago the dim sands of Poseidonis, great island adjoining
the main continent which itself had vanished a vast period before, sank
down beneath the waves, and the entire known world to-day was descended
from its survivors. Hence the significant fact that all religions and
‘mythological’ systems begin with a story of a flood--some cataclysmic
upheaval that destroyed the world. Egypt itself was colonised by a
group of Atlantean priests who brought their curious, deep knowledge
with them. They had foreseen the cataclysm.
Lady Statham talked well, bringing into her great dream this strong,
insistent quality of belief and fact. She knew, from Plato to
Donelly, all that the minds of men have ever speculated upon the
gorgeous legend. The evidence for such a sunken continent--Henriot
had skimmed it too in years gone by--she made bewilderingly complete.
He had heard Baconians demolish Shakespeare with an array of evidence
equally overwhelming. It catches the imagination though not the
mind. Yet out of her facts, as she presented them, grew a strange
likelihood. The force of this woman’s personality, and her calm and
quiet way of believing all she talked about, took her listener to some
extent--further than ever before, certainly--into the great dream after
her. And the dream, to say the least, was a picturesque one, laden
with wonderful possibilities. For as she talked the spirit of old
Egypt moved up, staring down upon him out of eyes lidded so curiously
level. Hitherto all had prated to him of the Arabs, their ancient faith
and customs, and the splendour of the Bedouins, those Princes of the
Desert. But what he sought, barely confessed in words even to himself,
was something older far than this. And this strange, dark woman
brought it close. Deeps in his soul, long slumbering, awoke. He heard
forgotten questions.
Only in this brief way could he attempt to sum up the storm she roused
in him.
She carried him far beyond mere outline, however, though afterwards
he recalled the details with difficulty. So much more was suggested
than actually expressed. She contrived to make the general modern
scepticism an evidence of cheap mentality. It was so easy; the depth
it affects to conceal, mere emptiness. ‘We have tried all things,
and found all wanting’--the mind, as measuring instrument, merely
confessed inadequate. Various shrewd judgments of this kind increased
his respect, although her acceptance went so far beyond his own. And,
while the label of credulity refused to stick to her, her sense of
imaginative wonder enabled her to escape that dreadful compromise, a
man’s mind in a woman’s temperament. She fascinated him.
The spiritual worship of the ancient Egyptians, she held, was a
symbolical explanation of things generally alluded to as the secrets
of life and death; their knowledge was a remnant of the wisdom of
Atlantis. Material relics, equally misunderstood, still stood to-day at
Karnac, Stonehenge, and in the mysterious writings on buried Mexican
temples and cities, so significantly akin to the hieroglyphics upon the
Egyptian tombs.
‘The one misinterpreted as literally as the other,’ she suggested,
‘yet both fragments of an advanced knowledge that found its grave in
the sea. The Wisdom of that old spiritual system has vanished from the
world, only a degraded literalism left of its undecipherable language.
The jewel has been lost, and the casket is filled with sand, sand,
sand.’
How keenly her black eyes searched his own as she said it, and how
oddly she made the little word resound. The syllable drew out almost
into chanting. Echoes answered from the depths within him, carrying it
on and on across some desert of forgotten belief. Veils of sand flew
everywhere about his mind. Curtains lifted. Whole hills of sand went
shifting into level surfaces whence gardens of dim outline emerged to
meet the sunlight.
‘But the sand may be removed.’ It was her nephew, speaking almost for
the first time, and the interruption had an odd effect, introducing a
sharply practical element. For the tone expressed, so far as he dared
express it, disapproval. It was a baited observation, an invitation to
opinion.
‘We are not sand-diggers, Mr. Henriot,’ put in Lady Statham, before he
decided to respond. ‘Our object is quite another one; and I believe--I
have a feeling,’ she added almost questioningly, ‘that you might be
interested enough to help us perhaps.’
He only wondered the direct attack had not come sooner. Its bluntness
hardly surprised him. He felt himself leap forward to accept it. A
sudden subsidence had freed his feet.
Then the warning operated suddenly--for an instant. Henriot _was_
interested; more, he was half seduced; but, as yet, he did not mean to
be included in their purposes, whatever these might be. That shrinking
dread came back a moment, and was gone again before he could question
it. His eyes looked full at Lady Statham. ‘What is it that you know?’
they asked her. ‘Tell me the things we once knew together, you and I.
These words are merely trifling. And why does another man now stand in
my place? For the sands heaped upon my memory are shifting, and it is
_you_ who are moving them away.’
His soul whispered it; his voice said quite another thing, although the
words he used seemed oddly chosen:
‘There is much in the ideas of ancient Egypt that has attracted me
ever since I can remember, though I have never caught up with anything
definite enough to follow. There was majesty somewhere in their
conceptions--a large, calm majesty of spiritual dominion, one might
call it perhaps. I _am_ interested.’
Her face remained expressionless as she listened, but there was grave
conviction in the eyes that held him like a spell. He saw through them
into dim, faint pictures whose background was always sand. He forgot
that he was speaking with a woman, a woman who half an hour ago had
been a stranger to him. He followed these faded mental pictures, though
he never caught them up.... It was like his dream in London.
Lady Statham was talking--he had not noticed the means by which she
effected the abrupt transition--of familiar beliefs of old Egypt;
of the Ka, or Double, by whose existence the survival of the soul
was possible, even its return into manifested, physical life; of the
astrology, or influence of the heavenly bodies upon all sublunar
activities; of terrific forms of other life, known to the ancient
worship of Atlantis, great Potencies that might be invoked by ritual
and ceremonial, and of their lesser influence as recognised in certain
lower forms, hence treated with veneration as the ‘Sacred Animal’
branch of this dim religion. And she spoke lightly of the modern
learning which so glibly imagined it was the animals themselves that
were looked upon as ‘gods’--the bull, the bird, the crocodile, the
cat. ‘It’s there they all go so absurdly wrong,’ she said, ‘taking the
symbol for the power symbolised. Yet natural enough. The mind to-day
wears blinkers, studies only the details seen directly before it. Had
none of us experienced love, we should think the first lover mad. Few
to-day know the Powers _they_ knew, hence deny them. If the world were
deaf it would stand with mockery before a hearing group swayed by an
orchestra, pitying both listeners and performers. It would deem our
admiration of a great swinging bell mere foolish worship of form and
movement. Similarly, with high Powers that once expressed themselves
in common forms--where best they could--being themselves bodiless. The
learned men classify the forms with painstaking detail. But deity has
gone out of life. The Powers symbolised are no longer experienced.’
‘These Powers, you suggest, then--their Kas, as it were--may still----’
But she waved aside the interruption. ‘They are satisfied, as the
common people were, with a degraded literalism,’ she went on. ‘Nut
was the Heavens, who spread herself across the earth in the form of a
woman; Shu, the vastness of space; the ibis typified Thoth, and Hathor
was the Patron of the Western Hills; Khonsu, the moon, was personified,
as was the deity of the Nile. But the high priest of Ra, the sun, you
notice, remained ever the Great One of Visions.’
The High Priest, the Great One of Visions!--How wonderfully again she
made the sentence sing. She put splendour into it. The pictures shifted
suddenly closer in his mind. He saw the grandeur of Memphis and
Heliopolis rise against the stars and shake the sand of ages from their
stern old temples.
‘You think it possible, then, to get into touch with these High Powers
you speak of, Powers once manifested in common forms?’
Henriot asked the question with a degree of conviction and solemnity
that surprised himself. The scenery changed about him as he listened.
The spacious halls of this former khedivial Palace melted into Desert
spaces. He smelt the open wilderness, the sand that haunted Helouan.
The soft-footed Arab servants moved across the hall in their white
sheets like eddies of dust the wind stirred from the Libyan dunes. And
over these two strangers close beside him stole a queer, indefinite
alteration. Moods and emotions, nameless as unknown stars, rose through
his soul, trailing dark mists of memory from unfathomable distances.
Lady Statham answered him indirectly. He found himself wishing that
those steady eyes would sometimes close.
‘Love is known only by feeling it,’ she said, her voice deepening a
little. ‘Behind the form you feel the person loved. The process is an
evocation, pure and simple. An arduous ceremonial, involving worship
and devotional preparation, is the means. It is a difficult ritual--the
only one acknowledged by the world as still effectual. Ritual is the
passage way of the soul into the Infinite.’
He might have said the words himself. The thought lay in him while she
uttered it. Evocation everywhere in life was as true as assimilation.
Nevertheless, he stared his companion full in the eyes with a touch of
almost rude amazement. But no further questions prompted themselves;
or, rather, he declined to ask them. He recalled, somehow uneasily,
that in ceremonial the points of the compass have significance,
standing for forces and activities that sleep there until invoked, and
a passing light fell upon that curious midnight request in the corridor
upstairs. These two were on the track of undesirable experiments, he
thought.... They wished to include him too.
‘You go at night sometimes into the Desert?’ he heard himself saying.
It was impulsive and miscalculated. His feeling that it would be wise
to change the conversation resulted in giving it fresh impetus instead.
‘We saw you there--in the Wadi Hof,’ put in Vance, suddenly breaking
his long silence; ‘you too sleep out, then? It means, you know, the
Valley of Fear.’
‘We wondered--’ It was Lady Statham’s voice, and she leaned forward
eagerly as she said it, then abruptly left the sentence incomplete.
Henriot started; a sense of momentary acute discomfort again ran over
him. The same second she continued, though obviously changing the
phrase--‘we wondered how you spent your day there, during the heat. But
you paint, don’t you? You draw, I mean?’
The commonplace question, he realised in every fibre of his being,
meant something _they_ deemed significant. Was it his talent for
drawing that they sought to use him for? Even as he answered with a
simple affirmative, he had a flash of intuition that might be fanciful,
yet that might be true: that this extraordinary pair were intent upon
some ceremony of evocation that should summon into actual physical
expression some Power--some type of life--known long ago to ancient
worship, and that they even sought to fix its bodily outline with the
pencil--his pencil.
A gateway of incredible adventure opened at his feet. He balanced on
the edge of knowing unutterable things. Here was a clue that might lead
him towards the hidden Egypt he had ever craved to know. An awful hand
was beckoning. The sands were shifting. He saw the million eyes of the
Desert watching him from beneath the level lids of centuries. Speck by
speck, and grain by grain, the sand that smothered memory lifted the
countless wrappings that embalmed it.
And he was willing, yet afraid. Why in the world did he hesitate
and shrink? Why was it that the presence of this silent, watching
personality in the chair beside him kept caution still alive, with
warning close behind? The pictures in his mind were gorgeously
coloured. It was Richard Vance who somehow streaked them through with
black. A thing of darkness, born of this man’s unassertive presence,
flitted ever across the scenery, marring its grandeur with something
evil, petty, dreadful. He held a horrible thought alive. His mind was
thinking venal purposes.
In Henriot himself imagination had grown curiously heated, fed by
what had been suggested rather than actually said. Ideas of immensity
crowded his brain, yet never assumed definite shape. They were
familiar, even as this strange woman was familiar. Once, long, ago,
he had known them well; had even practised them beneath these bright
Egyptian stars. Whence came this prodigious glad excitement in his
heart, this sense of mighty Powers coaxed down to influence the very
details of daily life? Behind them, for all their vagueness, lay an
archetypal splendour, fraught with forgotten meanings. He had always
been aware of it in this mysterious land, but it had ever hitherto
eluded him. It hovered everywhere. He had felt it brooding behind the
towering Colossi at Thebes, in the skeletons of wasted temples, in
the uncouth comeliness of the Sphinx, and in the crude terror of the
Pyramids even. Over the whole of Egypt hung its invisible wings. These
were but isolated fragments of the Body that might express it. And the
Desert remained its cleanest, truest symbol. Sand knew it closest. Sand
might even give it bodily form and outline.
But, while it escaped description in his mind, as equally it eluded
visualisation in his soul, he felt that it combined with its vastness
something infinitely small as well. Of such wee particles is the giant
Desert born....
Henriot started nervously in his chair, convicted once more of
unconscionable staring; and at the same moment a group of hotel
people, returning from a dance, passed through the hall and nodded him
good-night. The scent of the women reached him; and with it the sound
of their voices discussing personalities just left behind. A London
atmosphere came with them. He caught trivial phrases, uttered in a
drawling tone, and followed by the shrill laughter of a girl. They
passed upstairs, discussing their little things, like marionettes upon
a tiny stage.
But their passage brought him back to things of modern life, and to
some standard of familiar measurement. The pictures that his soul had
gazed at so deep within, he realised, were a pictorial transfer caught
incompletely from this woman’s vivid mind. He had seen the Desert as
the grey, enormous Tomb where hovered still the Ka of ancient Egypt.
Sand screened her visage with the veil of centuries. But She was there,
and She was living. Egypt herself had pitched a temporary camp in him,
and then moved on.
There was a momentary break, a sense of abruptness and dislocation. And
then he became aware that Lady Statham had been speaking for some time
before he caught her actual words, and that a certain change had come
into her voice as also into her manner.
V
She was leaning closer to him, her face suddenly glowing and alive.
Through the stone figure coursed the fires of a passion that deepened
the coal-black eyes and communicated a hint of light--of exaltation--to
her whole person. It was incredibly moving. To this deep passion was
due the power he had felt. It was her entire life; she lived for it,
she would die for it. Her calmness of manner enhanced its effect. Hence
the strength of those first impressions that had stormed him. The woman
had belief; however wild and strange, it was sacred to her. The secret
of her influence was--conviction.
His attitude shifted several points then. The wonder in him passed
over into awe. The things she knew were real. They were not merely
imaginative speculations.
‘I knew I was not wrong in thinking you in sympathy with this line of
thought,’ she was saying in lower voice, steady with earnestness, and
as though she had read his mind. ‘You, too, know, though perhaps you
hardly realise that you know. It lies so deep in you that you only get
vague feelings of it--intimations of memory. Isn’t that the case?’
Henriot gave assent with his eyes; it was the truth.
‘What we know instinctively,’ she continued, ‘is simply what we are
trying to remember. Knowledge is memory.’ She paused a moment watching
his face closely. ‘At least, you are free from that cheap scepticism
which labels these old beliefs as superstition.’ It was not even a
question.
‘I--worship real belief--of any kind,’ he stammered, for her words and
the close proximity of her atmosphere caused a strange upheaval in his
heart that he could not account for. He faltered in his speech. ‘It is
the most vital quality in life--rarer than deity.’ He was using her own
phrases even. ‘It is creative. It constructs the world anew----’
‘And may reconstruct the old.’
She said it, lifting her face above him a little, so that her eyes
looked down into his own. It grew big and somehow masculine. It was the
face of a priest, spiritual power in it. Where, oh where in the echoing
Past had he known this woman’s soul? He saw her in another setting, a
forest of columns dim about her, towering above giant aisles. Again
he felt the Desert had come close. Into this tent-like hall of the
hotel came the sifting of tiny sand. It heaped softly about the very
furniture against his feet, blocking the exits of door and window. It
shrouded the little present. The wind that brought it stirred a veil
that had hung for ages motionless....
She had been saying many things that he had missed while his mind went
searching. ‘There were types of life the Atlantean system knew it might
revive--life unmanifested to-day in any bodily form,’ was the sentence
he caught with his return to the actual present.
‘A type of life?’ he whispered, looking about him, as though to see
who it was had joined them; ‘you mean a--soul? Some kind of soul, alien
to humanity, or to--to any forms of living thing in the world to-day?’
What she had been saying reached him somehow, it seemed, though he had
not heard the words themselves. Still hesitating, he was yet so eager
to hear. Already he felt she meant to include him in her purposes, and
that in the end he must go willingly. So strong was her persuasion on
his mind.
And he felt as if he knew vaguely what was coming. Before she answered
his curious question--prompting it indeed--rose in his mind that
strange idea of the Group-Soul: the theory that big souls cannot
express themselves in a single individual, but need an entire group for
their full manifestation.
He listened intently. The reflection that this sudden intimacy was
unnatural, he rejected, for many conversations were really gathered
into one. Long watching and preparation on both sides had cleared
the way for the ripening of acquaintance into confidence--how long
he dimly wondered? But if this conception of the Group-Soul was not
new, the suggestion Lady Statham developed out of it was both new and
startling--and yet always so curiously familiar. Its value for him lay,
not in far-fetched evidence that supported it, but in the deep belief
which made it a vital asset in an honest inner life.
‘An individual,’ she said quietly, ‘one soul expressed completely in
a single person, I mean, is exceedingly rare. Not often is a physical
instrument found perfect enough to provide it with adequate expression.
In the lower ranges of humanity--certainly in animal and insect
life--one soul is shared by many. Behind a tribe of savages stands
one Savage. A flock of birds is a single Bird, scattered through the
consciousness of all. They wheel in mid-air, they migrate, they obey
the deep intelligence called instinct--all as one. The life of any one
lion is the life of all--the lion group-soul that manifests itself in
the entire genus. An ant-heap is a single Ant; through the bees spreads
the consciousness of a single Bee.’
Henriot knew what she was working up to. In his eagerness to hasten
disclosure he interrupted----
‘And there may be types of life that have no corresponding bodily
expression at all, then?’ he asked as though the question were forced
out of him. ‘They exist as Powers--unmanifested on the earth to-day?’
‘Powers,’ she answered, watching him closely with unswerving stare,
‘that need a group to provide their body--their physical expression--if
they came back.’
‘Came back!’ he repeated below his breath.
But she heard him. ‘They once had expression. Egypt, Atlantis knew
them--spiritual Powers that never visit the world to-day.’
‘Bodies,’ he whispered softly, ‘actual bodies?’
‘Their sphere of action, you see, would be their body. And it might be
physical outline. So potent a descent of spiritual life would select
materials for its body where it could find them. Our conventional
notion of a body--what is it? A single outline moving altogether in one
direction. For little human souls, or fragments, this is sufficient.
But for vaster types of soul an entire host would be required.’
‘A church?’ he ventured. ‘Some Body of belief, you surely mean?’
She bowed her head a moment in assent. She was determined he should
seize her meaning fully.
‘A wave of spiritual awakening--a descent of spiritual life upon a
nation,’ she answered slowly, ‘forms itself a church, and the body of
true believers are its sphere of action. They are literally its bodily
expression. Each individual believer is a corpuscle in that Body. The
Power has provided itself with a vehicle of manifestation. Otherwise
we could not know it. And the more real the belief of each individual,
the more perfect the expression of the spiritual life behind them all.
A Group-soul walks the earth. Moreover, a nation naturally devout could
attract a type of soul unknown to a nation that denies all faith. Faith
brings back the gods.... But to-day belief is dead, and Deity has left
the world.’
She talked on and on, developing this main idea that in days of
older faiths there were deific types of life upon the earth, evoked
by worship and beneficial to humanity. They had long ago withdrawn
because the worship which brought them down had died the death. The
world had grown pettier. These vast centres of Spiritual Power found no
‘Body’ in which they now could express themselves or manifest.... Her
thoughts and phrases poured over him like sand. It was always sand he
felt--burying the Present and uncovering the Past....
He tried to steady his mind upon familiar objects, but wherever he
looked Sand stared him in the face. Outside these trivial walls the
Desert lay listening. It lay waiting too. Vance himself had dropped out
of recognition. He belonged to the world of things to-day. But this
woman and himself stood thousands of years away, beneath the columns
of a Temple in the sands. And the sands were moving. His feet went
shifting with them ... running down vistas of ageless memory that woke
terror by their sheer immensity of distance....
Like a muffled voice that called to him through many veils and
wrappings, he heard her describe the stupendous Powers that evocation
might coax down again among the world of men.
‘To what useful end?’ he asked at length, amazed at his own temerity,
and because he knew instinctively the answer in advance. It rose
through these layers of coiling memory in his soul.
‘The extension of spiritual knowledge and the widening of life,’
she answered. ‘The link with the “unearthly kingdom” wherein this
ancient system went forever searching, would be re-established.
Complete rehabilitation might follow. Portions--little portions
of these Powers--expressed themselves naturally once in certain
animal types, instinctive life that did not deny or reject them. The
worship of sacred animals was the relic of a once gigantic system of
evocation--not of monsters,’ and she smiled sadly, ‘but of Powers that
were willing and ready to descend when worship summoned them.’
Again, beneath his breath, Henriot heard himself murmur--his own voice
startled him as he whispered it: ‘Actual bodily shape and outline?’
‘Material for bodies is everywhere,’ she answered, equally low; ‘dust
to which we all return; sand, if you prefer it, fine, fine sand. Life
moulds it easily enough, when that life is potent.’
A certain confusion spread slowly through his mind as he heard her.
He lit a cigarette and smoked some minutes in silence. Lady Statham
and her nephew waited for him to speak. At length, after some inner
battling and hesitation, he put the question that he knew they waited
for. It was impossible to resist any longer.
‘It would be interesting to know the method,’ he said, ‘and to revive,
perhaps, by experiment----’
Before he could complete his thought, she took him up:
‘There are some who claim to know it,’ she said gravely--her eyes a
moment masterful. ‘A clue, thus followed, might lead to the entire
reconstruction I spoke of.’
‘And the method?’ he repeated faintly.
‘Evoke the Power by ceremonial evocation--the ritual is obtainable--and
note the form it assumes. Then establish it. This shape or outline
once secured, could then be made permanent--a mould for its return at
will--its natural physical expression here on earth.’
‘Idol!’ he exclaimed.
‘Image,’ she replied at once. ‘Life, before we can know it must have a
body. Our souls, in order to manifest here, need a material vehicle.’
‘And--to obtain this form or outline?’ he began; ‘to fix it, rather?’
‘Would be required the clever pencil of a fearless looker-on--some
one not engaged in the actual evocation. This form, accurately made
permanent in solid matter, say in stone, would provide a channel always
open. Experiment, properly speaking, might then begin. The cisterns of
Power behind would be accessible.’
‘An amazing proposition!’ Henriot exclaimed. What surprised him was
that he felt no desire to laugh, and little even to doubt.
‘Yet known to every religion that ever deserved the name,’ put in
Vance like a voice from a distance. Blackness came somehow with his
interruption--a touch of darkness. He spoke eagerly.
To all the talk that followed, and there was much of it, Henriot
listened with but half an ear. This one idea stormed through him with
an uproar that killed attention. Judgment was held utterly in abeyance.
He carried away from it some vague suggestion that this woman had
hinted at previous lives she half remembered, and that every year she
came to Egypt, haunting the sands and temples in the effort to recover
lost clues. And he recalled afterwards that she said, ‘This all came to
me as a child, just as though it was something half remembered.’ There
was the further suggestion that he himself was not unknown to her; that
they, too, had met before. But this, compared to the grave certainty
of the rest, was merest fantasy that did not hold his attention. He
answered, hardly knowing what he said. His preoccupation with other
thoughts deep down was so intense, that he was probably barely polite,
uttering empty phrases, with his mind elsewhere. His one desire was to
escape and be alone, and it was with genuine relief that he presently
excused himself and went upstairs to bed. The halls, he noticed, were
empty; an Arab servant waited to put the lights out. He walked up, for
the lift had long ceased running.
And the magic of old Egypt stalked beside him. The studies that had
fascinated his mind in earlier youth returned with the power that had
subdued his mind in boyhood. The cult of Osiris woke in his blood
again; Horus and Nephthys stirred in their long-forgotten centres.
There revived in him, too long buried, the awful glamour of those
liturgal rites and vast body of observances, those spells and formulæ
of incantation of the oldest known rescension that years ago had
captured his imagination and belief--the Book of the Dead. Trumpet
voices called to his heart again across the desert of some dim past.
There were forms of life--impulses from the Creative Power which is the
Universe--other than the soul of man. They could be known. A spiritual
exaltation, roused by the words and presence of this singular woman,
shouted to him as he went.
Then, as he closed his bedroom door, carefully locking it, there stood
beside him--Vance. The forgotten figure of Vance came up close--the
watching eyes, the simulated interest, the feigned belief, the
detective mental attitude, these broke through the grandiose panorama,
bringing darkness. Vance, strong personality that hid behind assumed
nonentity for some purpose of his own, intruded with sudden violence,
demanding an explanation of his presence.
And, with an equal suddenness, explanation offered itself then and
there. It came unsought, its horror of certainty utterly unjustified;
and it came in this unexpected fashion:
Behind the interest and acquiescence of the man ran--fear: but behind
the vivid fear ran another thing that Henriot now perceived was vile.
For the first time in his life, Henriot knew it at close quarters,
actual, ready to operate. Though familiar enough in daily life to be
of common occurrence, Henriot had never realised it as he did now, so
close and terrible. In the same way he had never _realised_ that he
would die--vanish from the busy world of men and women, forgotten as
though he had never existed, an eddy of wind-blown dust. And in the man
named Richard Vance this thing was close upon blossom. Henriot could
not name it to himself. Even in thought it appalled him.
* * * * *
He undressed hurriedly, almost with the child’s idea of finding safety
between the sheets. His mind undressed itself as well. The business of
the day laid itself automatically aside; the will sank down; desire
grew inactive. Henriot was exhausted. But, in that stage towards
slumber when thinking stops, and only fugitive pictures pass across
the mind in shadowy dance, his brain ceased shouting its mechanical
explanations, and his soul unveiled a peering eye. Great limbs of
memory, smothered by the activities of the Present, stirred their
stiffened lengths through the sands of long ago--sands this woman had
begun to excavate from some far-off pre-existence they had surely
known together. Vagueness and certainty ran hand in hand. Details were
unrecoverable, but the emotions in which they were embedded moved.
He turned restlessly in his bed, striving to seize the amazing clues
and follow them. But deliberate effort hid them instantly again;
they retired instantly into the subconsciousness. With the brain of
this body he now occupied they had nothing to do. The brain stored
memories of each life only. This ancient script was graven in his soul.
Subconsciousness alone could interpret and reveal. And it was his
subconscious memory that Lady Statham had been so busily excavating.
Dimly it stirred and moved about the depths within him, never
clearly seen, indefinite, felt as a yearning after unrecoverable
knowledge. Against the darker background of Vance’s fear and sinister
purpose--both of this present life, and recent--he saw the grandeur of
this woman’s impossible dream, and _knew_, beyond argument or reason,
that it was true. Judgment and will asleep, he left the impossibility
aside, and took the grandeur. The Belief of Lady Statham was not
credulity and superstition; it was Memory. Still to this day, over the
sands of Egypt, hovered immense spiritual potencies, so vast that they
could only know physical expression in a group--in many. Their sphere
of bodily manifestation must be a host, each individual unit in that
host a corpuscle in the whole.
The wind, rising from the Lybian wastes across the Nile, swept up
against the exposed side of the hotel, and made his windows rattle--the
old, sad winds of Egypt. Henriot got out of bed to fasten the outside
shutters. He stood a moment and watched the moon floating down behind
the Sakkara Pyramids. The Pleiades and Orion’s Belt hung brilliantly;
the Great Bear was close to the horizon. In the sky above the Desert
swung ten thousand stars. No sounds rose from the streets of Helouan.
The tide of sand was coming slowly in.
And a flock of enormous thoughts swooped past him from fields of
this unbelievable, lost memory. The Desert, pale in the moon, was
coextensive with the night, too huge for comfort or understanding,
yet charged to the brim with infinite peace. Behind its majesty of
silence lay whispers of a vanished language that once could call with
power upon mighty spiritual Agencies. Its skirts were folded now, but,
slowly across the leagues of sand, they began to stir and rearrange
themselves. He grew suddenly aware of this enveloping shroud of
sand--as the raw material of bodily expression: Form.
The sand was in his imagination and his mind. Shaking loosely the
folds of its gigantic skirts, it rose; it moved a little towards him.
He saw the eternal countenance of the Desert watching him--immobile
and unchanging behind these shifting veils the winds laid so carefully
over it. Egypt, the ancient Egypt, turned in her vast sarcophagus of
Desert, wakening from her sleep of ages at the Belief of approaching
worshippers.
Only in this insignificant manner could he express a letter of the
terrific language that crowded to seek expression through his soul....
He closed the shutters and carefully fastened them. He turned to
go back to bed, curiously trembling. Then, as he did so, the whole
singular delusion caught him with a shock that held him motionless. Up
rose the stupendous apparition of the entire Desert and stood behind
him on that balcony. Swift as thought, in silence, the Desert stood
on end against his very face. It towered across the sky, hiding Orion
and the moon; it dipped below the horizons. The whole grey sheet of it
rose up before his eyes and stood. Through its unfolding skirts ran ten
thousand eddies of swirling sand as the creases of its grave-clothes
smoothed themselves out in moonlight. And a bleak, scarred countenance,
huge as a planet, gazed down into his own....
Through his dreamless sleep that night two things lay active and
awake ... in the subconscious part that knows no slumber. They were
incongruous. One was evil, small and human; the other unearthly and
sublime. For the memory of the fear that haunted Vance, and the
sinister cause of it, pricked at him all night long. But behind, beyond
this common, intelligible emotion, lay the crowding wonder that caught
his soul with glory:
The Sand was stirring, the Desert was awake. Ready to mate with them in
material form, brooded close the Ka of that colossal Entity that once
expressed itself through ancient Egypt.
VI
Next day, and for several days following, Henriot kept out of the
path of Lady Statham and her nephew. The acquaintanceship had grown
too rapidly to be quite comfortable. It was easy to pretend that he
took people at their face value, but it was a pose; one liked to
know something of antecedents. It was otherwise difficult to ‘place’
them. And Henriot, for the life of him, could not ‘place’ these
two. His Subconsciousness brought explanation when it came--but the
Subconsciousness is only temporarily active. When it retired he
floundered without a rudder, in confusion.
With the flood of morning sunshine the value of much she had said
evaporated. Her presence alone had supplied the key to the cipher. But
while the indigestible portions he rejected, there remained a good deal
he had already assimilated. The discomfort remained; and with it the
grave, unholy reality of it all. It was something more than theory.
Results would follow--if he joined them. He would witness curious
things.
The force with which it drew him brought hesitation. It operated in him
like a shock that numbs at first by its abrupt arrival, and needs time
to realise in the right proportions to the rest of life. These right
proportions, however, did not come readily, and his emotions ranged
between sceptical laughter and complete acceptance. The one detail
he felt certain of was this dreadful thing he had divined in Vance.
Trying hard to disbelieve it, he found he could not. It was true.
Though without a shred of real evidence to support it, the horror of it
remained. He knew it in his very bones.
And this, perhaps, was what drove him to seek the comforting
companionship of folk he understood and felt at home with. He told
his host and hostess about the strangers, though omitting the actual
conversation because they would merely smile in blank miscomprehension.
But the moment he described the strong black eyes beneath the level
eyelids, his hostess turned with a start, her interest deeply roused:
‘Why, it’s that awful Statham woman,’ she exclaimed, ‘that must be Lady
Statham, and the man she calls her nephew.’
‘Sounds like it, certainly,’ her husband added. ‘Felix, you’d better
clear out. They’ll bewitch you too.’
And Henriot bridled, yet wondering why he did so. He drew into his
shell a little, giving the merest sketch of what had happened. But he
listened closely while these two practical old friends supplied him
with information in the gossiping way that human nature loves. No doubt
there was much embroidery, and more perversion, exaggeration too, but
the account evidently rested upon some basis of solid foundation for
all that. Smoke and fire go together always.
‘He _is_ her nephew right enough,’ Mansfield corrected his wife, before
proceeding to his own man’s form of elaboration; ‘no question about
that, I believe. He’s her favourite nephew, and she’s as rich as a pig.
He follows her out here every year, waiting for her empty shoes. But
they _are_ an unsavoury couple. I’ve met ’em in various parts, all over
Egypt, but they always come back to Helouan in the end. And the stories
about them are simply legion. You remember--’ he turned hesitatingly to
his wife--‘some people, I heard,’ he changed his sentence, ‘were made
quite ill by her.’
‘I’m sure Felix ought to know, yes,’ his wife boldly took him up, ‘my
niece, Fanny, had the most extraordinary experience.’ She turned to
Henriot. ‘Her room was next to Lady Statham in some hotel or other at
Assouan or Edfu, and one night she woke and heard a kind of mysterious
chanting or intoning next her. Hotel doors are so dreadfully thin.
There was a funny smell too, like incense of something sickly, and
a man’s voice kept chiming in. It went on for hours, while she lay
terrified in bed----’
‘Frightened, you say?’ asked Henriot.
‘Out of her skin, yes; she said it was so uncanny--made her feel icy.
She wanted to ring the bell, but was afraid to leave her bed. The room
was full of--of things, yet she could see nothing. She _felt_ them, you
see. And after a bit the sound of this sing-song voice so got on her
nerves, it half dazed her--a kind of enchantment--she felt choked and
suffocated. And then----’ It was her turn to hesitate.
‘Tell it all,’ her husband said, quite gravely too.
‘Well--something came in. At least, she describes it oddly, rather;
she said it made the door bulge inwards from the next room, but
not the door alone; the walls bulged or swayed as if a huge thing
pressed against them from the other side. And at the same moment
her windows--she had two big balconies, and the Venetian shutters
were fastened--both her windows _darkened_--though it was two
in the morning and pitch dark outside. She said it was all _one_
thing--trying to get in; just as water, you see, would rush in through
every hole and opening it could find, and all at once. And in spite
of her terror--that’s the odd part of it--she says she felt a kind of
splendour in her--a sort of elation.’
‘She saw nothing?’
‘She says she doesn’t remember. Her senses left her, I believe--though
she won’t admit it.’
‘Fainted for a minute, probably,’ said Mansfield.
‘So there it is,’ his wife concluded, after a silence. ‘And that’s
true. It happened to my niece, didn’t it, John?’
Stories and legendary accounts of strange things that the presence
of these two brought poured out then. They were obviously somewhat
mixed, one account borrowing picturesque details from another, and
all in disproportion, as when people tell stories in a language they
are little familiar with. But, listening with avidity, yet also with
uneasiness, somehow, Henriot put two and two together. Truth stood
behind them somewhere. These two held traffic with the powers that
ancient Egypt knew.
‘Tell Felix, dear, about the time you met the nephew--horrid
creature--in the Valley of the Kings,’ he heard his wife say presently.
And Mansfield told it plainly enough, evidently glad to get it done,
though.
‘It was some years ago now, and I didn’t know who he was then, or
anything about him. I don’t know much more now--except that he’s a
dangerous sort of charlatan-devil, _I_ think. But I came across him
one night up there by Thebes in the Valley of the Kings--you know,
where they buried all their Johnnies with so much magnificence and
processions and masses, and all the rest. It’s the most astounding,
the most haunted place you ever saw, gloomy, silent, full of gorgeous
lights and shadows that seem alive--terribly impressive; it makes you
creep and shudder. You feel old Egypt watching you.’
‘Get on, dear,’ said his wife.
‘Well, I was coming home late on a blasted lazy donkey, dog-tired
into the bargain, when my donkey boy suddenly ran for his life and
left me alone. It was after sunset. The sand was red and shining, and
the big cliffs sort of fiery. And my donkey stuck its four feet in
the ground and wouldn’t budge. Then, about fifty yards away, I saw a
fellow--European apparently--doing something--Heaven knows what, for
I can’t describe it--among the boulders that lie all over the ground
there. Ceremony, I suppose you’d call it. I was so interested that
at first I watched. Then I saw he wasn’t alone. There were a lot of
moving things round him, towering big things, that came and went like
shadows. That twilight is fearfully bewildering; perspective changes,
and distance gets all confused. It’s fearfully hard to see properly. I
only remember that I got off my donkey and went up closer, and when I
was within a dozen yards of him--well, it sounds such rot, you know,
but I swear the things suddenly rushed off and left him there alone.
They went with a roaring noise like wind; shadowy but tremendously big,
they were, and they vanished up against the fiery precipices as though
they slipped bang into the stone itself. The only thing I can think of
to describe ’em is--well, those sand-storms the Khamasin raises--the
hot winds, you know.’
‘They probably _were_ sand,’ his wife suggested, burning to tell
another story of her own.
‘Possibly, only there wasn’t a breath of wind, and it was hot as
blazes--and--I had such extraordinary sensations--never felt anything
like it before--wild and exhilarated--drunk, I tell you, drunk.’
‘You saw them?’ asked Henriot. ‘You made out their shape at all, or
outline?’
‘Sphinx,’ he replied at once, ‘for all the world like sphinxes.
You know the kind of face and head these limestone strata in the
Desert take--great visages with square Egyptian head-dresses where
the driven sand has eaten away the softer stuff beneath? You see it
everywhere--enormous idols they seem, with faces and eyes and lips
awfully like the sphinx--well, that’s the nearest I can get to it.’ He
puffed his pipe hard. But there was no sign of levity in him. He told
the actual truth as far as in him lay, yet half ashamed of what he
told. And a good deal he left out, too.
‘She’s got a face of the same sort, that Statham horror,’ his wife said
with a shiver. ‘Reduce the size, and paint in awful black eyes, and
you’ve got her exactly--a living idol.’ And all three laughed, yet a
laughter without merriment in it.
‘And you spoke to the man?’
‘I did,’ the Englishman answered, ‘though I confess I’m a bit ashamed
of the way I spoke. Fact is, I was excited, thunderingly excited, and
felt a kind of anger. I wanted to kick the beggar for practising such
bally rubbish, and in such a place too. Yet all the time--well, well,
I believe it was sheer funk now,’ he laughed; ‘for I felt uncommonly
queer out there in the dusk, alone with--with that kind of business;
and I was angry with myself for feeling it. Anyhow, I went up--I’d
lost my donkey boy as well, remember--and slated him like a dog. I
can’t remember what I said exactly--only that he stood and stared at me
in silence. That made it worse--seemed twice as real then. The beggar
said no single word the whole time. He signed to me with one hand to
clear out. And then, suddenly out of nothing--she--that woman--appeared
and stood beside him. I never saw her come. She must have been behind
some boulder or other, for she simply rose out of the ground. She stood
there and stared at me too--bang in the face. She was turned towards
the sunset--what was left of it in the west--and her black eyes shone
like--ugh! I can’t describe it--it was shocking.’
‘She spoke?’
‘She said five words--and her voice--it’ll make you laugh--it was
metallic like a gong: “You are in danger here.” That’s all she said. I
simply turned and cleared out as fast as ever I could. But I had to go
on foot. My donkey had followed its boy long before. I tell you--smile
as you may--my blood was all curdled for an hour afterwards.’
Then he explained that he felt some kind of explanation or apology was
due, since the couple lodged in his own hotel, and how he approached
the man in the smoking-room after dinner. A conversation resulted--the
man was quite intelligent after all--of which only one sentence had
remained in his mind.
‘Perhaps you can explain it, Felix. I wrote it down, as well as I
could remember. The rest confused me beyond words or memory; though
I must confess it did not seem--well, not utter rot exactly. It was
about astrology and rituals and the worship of the old Egyptians, and
I don’t know what else besides. Only, he made it intelligible and
almost sensible, if only I could have got the hang of the thing enough
to remember it. You know,’ he added, as though believing in spite of
himself, ‘there _is_ a lot of that wonderful old Egyptian religious
business still hanging about in the atmosphere of this place, say what
you like.’
‘But this sentence?’ Henriot asked. And the other went off to get a
note-book where he had written it down.
‘He was jawing, you see,’ he continued when he came back, Henriot and
his wife having kept silence meanwhile, ‘about direction being of
importance in religious ceremonies, West and North symbolising certain
powers, or something of the kind, why people turn to the East and all
that sort of thing, and speaking of the whole Universe as if it had
living forces tucked away in it that expressed themselves somehow when
roused up. That’s how I remember it anyhow. And then he said this
thing--in answer to some fool question probably that I put.’ And he
read out of the note-book:
‘“You were in danger because you came through the Gateway of the West,
and the Powers from the Gateway of the East were at that moment rising,
and therefore in direct opposition to you.”’
Then came the following, apparently a simile offered by way of
explanation. Mansfield read it in a shamefaced tone, evidently prepared
for laughter:
‘“Whether I strike you on the back or in the face determines what kind
of answering force I rouse in you. Direction is significant.” And he
said it was the period called the Night of Power--time when the Desert
encroaches and spirits are close.’
And tossing the book aside, he lit his pipe again and waited a moment
to hear what might be said. ‘Can you explain such gibberish?’ he asked
at length, as neither of his listeners spoke. But Henriot said he
couldn’t. And the wife then took up her own tale of stories that had
grown about this singular couple.
These were less detailed, and therefore less impressive, but all
contributed something towards the atmosphere of reality that framed the
entire picture. They belonged to the type one hears at every dinner
party in Egypt--stories of the vengeance mummies seem to take on those
who robbed them, desecrating their peace of centuries; of a woman
wearing a necklace of scarabs taken from a princess’s tomb, who felt
hands about her throat to strangle her; of little Ka figures, Pasht
goddesses, amulets and the rest, that brought curious disaster to those
who kept them. They are many and various, astonishingly circumstantial
often, and vouched for by persons the reverse of credulous. The modern
superstition that haunts the desert gullies with Afreets has nothing in
common with them. They rest upon a basis of indubitable experience; and
they remain--inexplicable. And about the personalities of Lady Statham
and her nephew they crowded like flies attracted by a dish of fruit.
The Arabs, too, were afraid of her. She had difficulty in getting
guides and dragomen.
‘My dear chap,’ concluded Mansfield, ‘take my advice and have nothing
to do with ’em. There _is_ a lot of queer business knocking about
in this old country, and people like that know ways of reviving it
somehow. It’s upset you already; you looked scared, I thought, the
moment you came in.’ They laughed, but the Englishman was in earnest.
‘I tell you what,’ he added, ‘we’ll go off for a bit of shooting
together. The fields along the Delta are packed with birds now:
they’re home early this year on their way to the North. What d’ye say,
eh?’
But Henriot did not care about the quail shooting. He felt more
inclined to be alone and think things out by himself. He had come to
his friends for comfort, and instead they had made him uneasy and
excited. His interest had suddenly doubled. Though half afraid, he
longed to know what these two were up to--to follow the adventure to
the bitter end. He disregarded the warning of his host as well as the
premonition in his own heart. The sand had caught his feet.
There were moments when he laughed in utter disbelief, but these
were optimistic moods that did not last. He always returned to the
feeling that truth lurked somewhere in the whole strange business, and
that if he joined forces with them, as they seemed to wish, he would
witness--well, he hardly knew what--but it enticed him as danger does
the reckless man, or death the suicide. The sand had caught his mind.
He decided to offer himself to all they wanted--his pencil too. He
would see--a shiver ran through him at the thought--what they saw,
and know some eddy of that vanished tide of power and splendour the
ancient Egyptian priesthood knew, and that perhaps was even common
experience in the far-off days of dim Atlantis. The sand had caught his
imagination too. He was utterly sand-haunted.
VII
And so he took pains, though without making definite suggestion, to
place himself in the way of this woman and her nephew--only to find
that his hints were disregarded. They left him alone, if they did
not actually avoid him. Moreover, he rarely came across them now.
Only at night, or in the queer dusk hours, he caught glimpses of them
moving hurriedly off from the hotel, and always desertwards. And their
disregard, well calculated, enflamed his desire to the point when he
almost decided to propose himself. Quite suddenly, then, the idea
flashed through him--how do they come, these odd revelations, when the
mind lies receptive like a plate sensitised by anticipation?--that they
were waiting for a certain date, and, with the notion, came Mansfield’s
remark about ‘the Night of Power,’ believed in by the old Egyptian
Calendar as a time when the supersensuous world moves close against the
minds of men with all its troop of possibilities. And the thought, once
lodged in its corner of imagination, grew strong. He looked it up. Ten
days from now, he found, Leyel-el-Sud would be upon him, with a moon,
too, at the full. And this strange hint of guidance he accepted. In
his present mood, as he admitted, smiling to himself, he could accept
anything. It was part of it, it belonged to the adventure. But, even
while he persuaded himself that it was play, the solemn reality of what
lay ahead increased amazingly, sketched darkly in his very soul.
These intervening days he spent as best he could--impatiently, a prey
to quite opposite emotions. In the blazing sunshine he thought of it
and laughed; but at night he lay often sleepless, calculating chances
of escape. He never did escape, however. The Desert that watched little
Helouan with great, unwinking eyes watched also every turn and twist he
made. Like this oasis, he basked in the sun of older time, and dreamed
beneath forgotten moons. The sand at last had crept into his inmost
heart. It sifted over him.
Seeking a reaction from normal, everyday things, he made tourist trips;
yet, while recognising the comedy in his attitude, he never could
lose sight of the grandeur that banked it up so hauntingly. These
two contrary emotions grafted themselves on all he did and saw. He
crossed the Nile at Bedrashein, and went again to the Tomb-World of
Sakkara; but through all the chatter of veiled and helmeted tourists,
the _bandar-log_ of our modern Jungle, ran this dark under-stream of
awe their monkey methods could not turn aside. One world lay upon
another, but this modern layer was a shallow crust that, like the
phenomenon of the ‘desert-film,’ a mere angle of falling light could
instantly obliterate. Beneath the sand, deep down, he passed along
the Street of Tombs, as he had often passed before, moved then merely
by historical curiosity and admiration, but now by emotions for which
he found no name. He saw the enormous sarcophagi of granite in their
gloomy chambers where the sacred bulls once lay, swathed and embalmed
like human beings, and, in the flickering candle light, the mood of
ancient rites surged round him, menacing his doubts and laughter. The
least human whisper in these subterraneans, dug out first four thousand
years ago, revived ominous Powers that stalked beside him, forbidding
and premonitive. He gazed at the spots where Mariette, unearthing them
forty years ago, found fresh as of yesterday the marks of fingers and
naked feet--of those who set the sixty-five ton slabs in position. And
when he came up again into the sunshine he met the eternal questions of
the pyramids, over-topping all his mental horizons. Sand blocked all
the avenues of younger emotion, leaving the channels of something in
him incalculably older, open and clean swept.
He slipped homewards, uncomfortable and followed, glad to be with a
crowd--because he was otherwise alone with more than he could dare
to think about. Keeping just ahead of his companions, he crossed the
desert edge where the ghost of Memphis walks under rustling palm trees
that screen no stone left upon another of all its mile-long populous
splendours. For here was a vista his imagination could realise; here he
could know the comfort of solid ground his feet could touch. Gigantic
Ramases, lying on his back beneath their shade and staring at the sky,
similarly helped to steady his swaying thoughts. Imagination could deal
with these.
And daily thus he watched the busy world go to and fro to its scale of
tips and bargaining, and gladly mingled with it, trying to laugh and
study guide-books, and listen to half-fledged explanations, but always
seeing the comedy of his poor attempts. Not all those little donkeys,
bells tinkling, beads shining, trotting beneath their comical burdens
to the tune of shouting and belabouring, could stem this tide of
deeper things the woman had let loose in the subconscious part of him.
Everywhere he saw the mysterious camels go slouching through the sand,
gurgling the water in their skinny, extended throats. Centuries passed
between the enormous knee-stroke of their stride. And, every night,
the sunsets restored the forbidding, graver mood, with their crimson,
golden splendour, their strange green shafts of light, then--sudden
twilight that brought the Past upon him with an awful leap. Upon the
stage then stepped the figures of this pair of human beings, chanting
their ancient plainsong of incantation in the moonlit desert, and
working their rites of unholy evocation as the priests had worked them
centuries before in the sands that now buried Sakkara fathoms deep.
Then one morning he woke with a question in his mind, as though it had
been asked of him in sleep and he had waked just before the answer
came. ‘Why do I spend my time sight-seeing, instead of going alone into
the Desert as before? What has made me change?’
This latest mood now asked for explanation. And the answer, coming up
automatically, startled him. It was so clear and sure--had been lying
in the background all along. One word contained it:
Vance.
The sinister intentions of this man, forgotten in the rush of other
emotions, asserted themselves again convincingly. The human horror, so
easily comprehensible, had been smothered for the time by the hint of
unearthly revelations. But it had operated all the time. Now it took
the lead. He dreaded to be alone in the Desert with this dark picture
in his mind of what Vance meant to bring there to completion. This
abomination of a selfish human will returned to fix its terror in
him. To be alone in the Desert meant to be alone with the imaginative
picture of what Vance--he knew it with such strange certainty--hoped to
bring about there.
There was absolutely no evidence to justify the grim suspicion. It
seemed indeed far fetched enough, this connection between the sand and
the purpose of an evil-minded, violent man. But Henriot saw it true. He
could argue it away in a few minutes--easily. Yet the instant thought
ceased, it returned, led up by intuition. It possessed him, filled his
mind with horrible possibilities. He feared the Desert as he might have
feared the scene of some atrocious crime. And, for the time, this dread
of a merely human thing corrected the big seduction of the other--the
suggested ‘super-natural.’
Side by side with it, his desire to join himself to the purposes of
the woman increased steadily. They kept out of his way apparently;
the offer seemed withdrawn; he grew restless, unable to settle to
anything for long, and once he asked the porter casually if they were
leaving the hotel. Lady Statham had been invisible for days, and Vance
was somehow never within speaking distance. He heard with relief that
they had not gone--but with dread as well. Keen excitement worked in
him underground. He slept badly. Like a schoolboy, he waited for the
summons to an important examination that involved portentous issues,
and contradictory emotions disturbed his peace of mind abominably.
VIII
But it was not until the end of the week, when Vance approached
him with purpose in his eyes and manner, that Henriot knew
his fears unfounded, and caught himself trembling with sudden
anticipation--because the invitation, so desired yet so dreaded, was
actually at hand. Firmly determined to keep caution uppermost, yet he
went unresistingly to a secluded corner by the palms where they could
talk in privacy. For prudence is of the mind, but desire is of the
soul, and while his brain of to-day whispered wariness, voices in his
heart of long ago shouted commands that he knew he must obey with joy.
It was evening and the stars were out. Helouan, with her fairy
twinkling lights, lay silent against the Desert edge. The sand was at
the flood. The period of the Encroaching of the Desert was at hand, and
the deeps were all astir with movement. But in the windless air was a
great peace. A calm of infinite stillness breathed everywhere. The flow
of Time, before it rushed away backwards, stopped somewhere between the
dust of stars and Desert. The mystery of sand touched every street with
its unutterable softness.
And Vance began without the smallest circumlocution. His voice was
low, in keeping with the scene, but the words dropped with a sharp
distinctness into the other’s heart like grains of sand that pricked
the skin before they smothered him. Caution they smothered instantly;
resistance too.
‘I have a message for you from my aunt,’ he said, as though he brought
an invitation to a picnic. Henriot sat in shadow, but his companion’s
face was in a patch of light that followed them from the windows of the
central hall. There was a shining in the light blue eyes that betrayed
the excitement his quiet manner concealed. ‘We are going--the day after
to-morrow--to spend the night in the Desert; she wondered if, perhaps,
you would care to join us?’
‘For your experiment?’ asked Henriot bluntly.
Vance smiled with his lips, holding his eyes steady, though unable to
suppress the gleam that flashed in them and was gone so swiftly. There
was a hint of shrugging his shoulders.
‘It is the Night of Power--in the old Egyptian Calendar, you know,’
he answered with assumed lightness almost, ‘the final moment of
Leyel-el-Sud, the period of Black Nights when the Desert was held to
encroach with--with various possibilities of a supernatural order.
She wishes to revive a certain practice of the old Egyptians. There
_may_ be curious results. At any rate, the occasion is a picturesque
one--better than this cheap imitation of London life.’ And he indicated
the lights, the signs of people in the hall dressed for gaieties and
dances, the hotel orchestra that played after dinner.
Henriot at the moment answered nothing, so great was the rush of
conflicting emotions that came he knew not whence. Vance went calmly
on. He spoke with a simple frankness that was meant to be disarming.
Henriot never took his eyes off him. The two men stared steadily at one
another.
‘She wants to know if you will come and help too--in a certain way
only: not in the experiment itself precisely, but by watching merely
and----’ He hesitated an instant, half lowering his eyes.
‘Drawing the picture,’ Henriot helped him deliberately.
‘Drawing what you see, yes,’ Vance replied, the voice turned graver
in spite of himself. ‘She wants--she hopes to catch the outlines of
anything that happens----’
‘Comes.’
‘Exactly. Determine the shape of anything that comes. You may remember
your conversation of the other night with her. She is very certain of
success.’
This was direct enough at any rate. It was as formal as an invitation
to a dinner, and as guileless. The thing he thought he wanted lay
within his reach. He had merely to say yes. He did say yes; but first
he looked about him instinctively, as for guidance. He looked at the
stars twinkling high above the distant Libyan Plateau; at the long arms
of the Desert, gleaming weirdly white in the moonlight, and reaching
towards him down every opening between the houses; at the heavy mass
of the Mokattam Hills, guarding the Arabian Wilderness with strange,
peaked barriers, their sand-carved ridges dark and still above the Wadi
Hof.
These questionings attracted no response. The Desert watched him, but
it did not answer. There was only the shrill whistling cry of the
lizards, and the sing-song of a white-robed Arab gliding down the sandy
street. And through these sounds he heard his own voice answer: ‘I will
come--yes. But how can I help? Tell me what you propose--your plan?’
And the face of Vance, seen plainly in the electric glare, betrayed
his satisfaction. The opposing things in the fellow’s mind of darkness
fought visibly in his eyes and skin. The sordid motive, planning a
dreadful act, leaped to his face, and with it a flash of this other
yearning that sought unearthly knowledge, perhaps believed it too. No
wonder there was conflict written on his features.
Then all expression vanished again; he leaned forward, lowering his
voice.
‘You remember our conversation about there being types of life too vast
to manifest in a single body, and my aunt’s belief that these were
known to certain of the older religious systems of the world?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘Her experiment, then, is to bring one of these great Powers back--we
possess the sympathetic ritual that can rouse some among them to
activity--and win it down into the sphere of our minds, our minds
heightened, you see, by ceremonial to that stage of clairvoyant vision
which can perceive them.’
‘And then?’ They might have been discussing the building of a house, so
naturally followed answer upon question. But the whole body of meaning
in the old Egyptian symbolism rushed over him with a force that shook
his heart. Memory came so marvellously with it.
‘If the Power floods down into our minds with sufficient strength for
actual form, to note the outline of such form, and from your drawing
model it later in permanent substance. Then we should have means of
evoking it at will, for we should have its natural Body--the form it
built itself, its signature, image, pattern. A starting-point, you see,
for more--leading, she hopes, to a complete reconstruction.’
‘It might take actual shape--assume a bodily form visible to the eye?’
repeated Henriot, amazed as before that doubt and laughter did not
break through his mind.
‘We are on the earth,’ was the reply, spoken unnecessarily low since
no living thing was within earshot, ‘we are in physical conditions,
are we not? Even a human soul we do not recognise unless we see it in
a body--parents provide the outline, the signature, the sigil of the
returning soul. This,’ and he tapped himself upon the breast, ‘is the
physical signature of that type of life we call a soul. Unless there
is life of a certain strength behind it, no body forms. And, without a
body, we are helpless to control or manage it--deal with it in any way.
We could not know it, though being possibly _aware_ of it.’
‘To be aware, you mean, is not sufficient?’ For he noticed the italics
Vance made use of.
‘Too vague, of no value for future use,’ was the reply. ‘But once
obtain the form, and we have the natural symbol of that particular
Power. And a symbol is more than image, it is a direct and concentrated
expression of the life it typifies--possibly terrific.’
‘It may be a body, then, this symbol you speak of.’
‘Accurate vehicle of manifestation; but “body” seems the simplest word.’
Vance answered very slowly and deliberately, as though weighing how
much he would tell. His language was admirably evasive. Few perhaps
would have detected the profound significance the curious words he next
used unquestionably concealed. Henriot’s mind rejected them, but his
heart accepted. For the ancient soul in him was listening and aware.
‘Life, using matter to express itself in bodily shape, first traces
a geometrical pattern. From the lowest form in crystals, upwards to
more complicated patterns in the higher organisations--there is always
first this geometrical pattern as skeleton. For geometry lies at the
root of all possible phenomena; and is the mind’s interpretation of a
living movement towards shape that shall express it.’ He brought his
eyes closer to the other, lowering his voice again. ‘Hence,’ he said
softly, ‘the signs in all the old magical systems--skeleton forms into
which the Powers evoked descended; outlines those Powers automatically
built up when using matter to express themselves. Such signs are
material symbols of their bodiless existence. They attract the life
they represent and interpret. Obtain the correct, true symbol, and the
Power corresponding to it can approach--once roused and made aware. It
has, you see, a ready-made mould into which it can come down.’
‘Once roused and made aware?’ repeated Henriot questioningly, while
this man went stammering the letters of a language that he himself had
used too long ago to recapture fully.
‘Because they have left the world. They sleep, unmanifested. Their
forms are no longer known to men. No forms exist on earth to-day that
could contain them. But they may be awakened,’ he added darkly. ‘They
are bound to answer to the summons, if such summons be accurately made.’
‘Evocation?’ whispered Henriot, more distressed than he cared to admit.
Vance nodded. Leaning still closer to his companion’s face, he thrust
his lips forward, speaking eagerly, earnestly, yet somehow at the same
time, horribly: ‘And we want--my aunt would ask--your draughtsman’s
skill, or at any rate your memory afterwards, to establish the outline
of anything that comes.’
He waited for the answer, still keeping his face uncomfortably close.
Henriot drew back a little. But his mind was fully made up now. He had
known from the beginning that he would consent, for the desire in him
was stronger than all the caution in the world. The Past inexorably
drew him into the circle of these other lives, and the little human
dread Vance woke in him seemed just then insignificant by comparison.
It was merely of To-day.
‘You two,’ he said, trying to bring judgment into it, ‘engaged in
evocation, will be in a state of clairvoyant vision. Granted. But shall
I, as an outsider, observing with unexcited mind, see anything, know
anything, be aware of anything at all, let alone the drawing of it?’
‘Unless,’ the reply came instantly with decision, ‘the descent of Power
is strong enough to take actual material shape, the experiment is a
failure. Anybody can induce subjective vision. Such fantasies have no
value though. They are born of an overwrought imagination.’ And then
he added quickly, as though to clinch the matter before caution and
hesitation could take effect: ‘You must watch from the heights above.
We shall be in the valley--the Wadi Hof is the place. You must not be
too close----’
‘Why not too close?’ asked Henriot, springing forward like a flash
before he could prevent the sudden impulse.
With a quickness equal to his own, Vance answered. There was no
faintest sign that he was surprised. His self-control was perfect. Only
the glare passed darkly through his eyes and went back again into the
sombre soul that bore it.
‘For your own safety,’ he answered low. ‘The Power, the type of life,
she would waken is stupendous. And if roused enough to be attracted by
the patterned symbol into which she would decoy it down, it will take
actual, physical expression. But how? Where is the Body of Worshippers
through whom it can manifest? There is none. It will, therefore, press
inanimate matter into the service. The terrific impulse to form itself
a means of expression will force all loose matter at hand towards
it--sand, stones, all it can compel to yield--everything must rush into
the sphere of action in which it operates. Alone, we at the centre, and
you, upon the outer fringe, will be safe. Only--you must not come too
close.’
But Henriot was no longer listening. His soul had turned to ice. For
here, in this unguarded moment, the cloven hoof had plainly shown
itself. In that suggestion of a particular kind of danger Vance had
lifted a corner of the curtain behind which crouched his horrible
intention. Vance desired a witness of the extraordinary experiment,
but he desired this witness, not merely for the purpose of sketching
possible shapes that might present themselves to excited vision. He
desired a witness for another reason too. Why had Vance put that idea
into his mind, this idea of so peculiar danger? It might well have lost
him the very assistance he seemed so anxious to obtain.
Henriot could not fathom it quite. Only one thing was clear to him. He,
Henriot, was not the only one in danger.
They talked for long after that--far into the night. The lights went
out, and the armed patrol, pacing to and fro outside the iron railings
that kept the desert back, eyed them curiously. But the only other
thing he gathered of importance was the ledge upon the cliff-top where
he was to stand and watch; that he was expected to reach there before
sunset and wait till the moon concealed all glimmer in the western
sky, and--that the woman, who had been engaged for days in secret
preparation of soul and body for the awful rite, would not be visible
again until he saw her in the depths of the black valley far below,
busy with this man upon audacious, ancient purposes.
IX
An hour before sunset Henriot put his rugs and food upon a donkey, and
gave the boy directions where to meet him--a considerable distance from
the appointed spot. He went himself on foot. He slipped in the heat
along the sandy street, where strings of camels still go slouching,
shuffling with their loads from the quarries that built the pyramids,
and he felt that little friendly Helouan tried to keep him back. But
desire now was far too strong for caution. The desert tide was rising.
It easily swept him down the long white street towards the enormous
deeps beyond. He felt the pull of a thousand miles before him; and
twice a thousand years drove at his back.
Everything still basked in the sunshine. He passed Al Hayat, the
stately hotel that dominates the village like a palace built against
the sky; and in its pillared colonnades and terraces he saw the
throngs of people having late afternoon tea and listening to the music
of a regimental band. Men in flannels were playing tennis, parties
were climbing off donkeys after long excursions; there was laughter,
talking, a babel of many voices. The gaiety called to him; the everyday
spirit whispered to stay and join the crowd of lively human beings.
Soon there would be merry dinner-parties, dancing, voices of pretty
women, sweet white dresses, singing, and the rest. Soft eyes would
question and turn dark. He picked out several girls he knew among the
palms. But it was all many, oh so many leagues away; centuries lay
between him and this modern world. An indescribable loneliness was in
his heart. He went searching through the sands of forgotten ages, and
wandering among the ruins of a vanished time. He hurried. Already the
deeper water caught his breath.
He climbed the steep rise towards the plateau where the Observatory
stands, and saw two of the officials whom he knew taking a siesta
after their long day’s work. He felt that his mind, too, had dived and
searched among the heavenly bodies that live in silent, changeless
peace remote from the world of men. They recognised him, these two
whose eyes also knew tremendous distance close. They beckoned, waving
the straws through which they sipped their drinks from tall glasses.
Their voices floated down to him as from the star-fields. He saw the
sun gleam upon the glasses, and heard the clink of the ice against
the sides. The stillness was amazing. He waved an answer, and passed
quickly on. He could not stop this sliding current of the years.
The tide moved faster, the draw of piled-up cycles urging it. He
emerged upon the plateau, and met the cooler Desert air. His feet went
crunching on the ‘desert-film’ that spread its curious dark shiny
carpet as far as the eye could reach; it lay everywhere, unswept and
smooth as when the feet of vanished civilizations trod its burning
surface, then dipped behind the curtains Time pins against the stars.
And here the body of the tide set all one way. There was a greater
strength of current, draught and suction. He felt the powerful
undertow. Deeper masses drew his feet sideways, and he felt the rushing
of the central body of the sand. The sands were moving, from their
foundation upwards. He went unresistingly with them.
Turning a moment, he looked back at shining little Helouan in the blaze
of evening light. The voices reached him very faintly, merged now in a
general murmur. Beyond lay the strip of Delta vivid green, the palms,
the roofs of Bedrashein, the blue laughter of the Nile with its flocks
of curved felucca sails. Further still, rising above the yellow Lybian
horizon, gloomed the vast triangles of a dozen Pyramids, cutting their
wedge-shaped clefts out of a sky fast crimsoning through a sea of
gold. Seen thus, their dignity imposed upon the entire landscape. They
towered darkly, symbolic signatures of the ancient Powers that now
watched him taking these little steps across their damaged territory.
He gazed a minute, then went on. He saw the big pale face of the moon
in the east. Above the ever-silent Thing these giant symbols once
interpreted, she rose, grand, effortless, half-terrible as themselves.
And, with her, she lifted up this tide of the Desert that drew his
feet across the sand to Wadi Hof. A moment later he dipped below the
ridge that buried Helouan and Nile and Pyramids from sight. He entered
the ancient waters. Time then, in an instant, flowed back behind his
footsteps, obliterating every trace. And with it his mind went too. He
stepped across the gulf of centuries, moving into the Past. The Desert
lay before him--an open tomb wherein his soul should read presently of
things long vanished.
The strange half-lights of sunset began to play their witchery then
upon the landscape. A purple glow came down upon the Mokattam Hills.
Perspective danced its tricks of false, incredible deception. The
soaring kites that were a mile away seemed suddenly close, passing in a
moment from the size of gnats to birds with a fabulous stretch of wing.
Ridges and cliffs rushed close without a hint of warning, and level
places sank into declivities and basins that made him trip and stumble.
That indescribable quality of the Desert, which makes timid souls avoid
the hour of dusk, emerged; it spread everywhere, undisguised. And the
bewilderment it brings is no vain, imagined thing, for it distorts
vision utterly, and the effect upon the mind when familiar sight goes
floundering is the simplest way in the world of dragging the anchor
that grips reality. At the hour of sunset this bewilderment comes upon
a man with a disconcerting swiftness. It rose now with all this weird
rapidity. Henriot found himself enveloped at a moment’s notice.
But, knowing well its effect, he tried to judge it and pass on. The
other matters, the object of his journey chief of all, he refused to
dwell upon with any imagination. Wisely, his mind, while never losing
sight of it, declined to admit the exaggeration that over-elaborate
thinking brings. ‘I’m going to witness an incredible experiment in
which two enthusiastic religious dreamers believe firmly,’ he repeated
to himself. ‘I have agreed to draw--anything I see. There may be truth
in it, or they may be merely self-suggested vision due to an artificial
exaltation of their minds. I’m interested--perhaps against my better
judgment. Yet I’ll see the adventure out--because I _must_.’
This was the attitude he told himself to take. Whether it was the real
one, or merely adopted to warm a cooling courage, he could not tell.
The emotions were so complex and warring. His mind, automatically,
kept repeating this comforting formula. Deeper than that he could not
see to judge. For a man who knew the full content of his thought at
such a time would solve some of the oldest psychological problems in
the world. Sand had already buried judgment, and with it all attempt
to explain the adventure by the standards acceptable to his brain
of to-day. He steered subconsciously through a world of dim, huge,
half-remembered wonders.
The sun, with that abrupt Egyptian suddenness, was below the horizon
now. The pyramid field had swallowed it. Ra, in his golden boat,
sailed distant seas beyond the Lybian wilderness. Henriot walked on
and on, aware of utter loneliness. He was walking fields of dream, too
remote from modern life to recall companionship he once had surely
known. How dim it was, how deep and distant, how lost in this sea of
an incalculable Past! He walked into the places that are soundless.
The soundlessness of ocean, miles below the surface, was about him.
He was with One only--this unfathomable, silent thing where nothing
breathes or stirs--nothing but sunshine, shadow and the wind-borne
sand. Slowly, in front, the moon climbed up the eastern sky, hanging
above the silence--silence that ran unbroken across the horizons to
where Suez gleamed upon the waters of a sister sea in motion. That moon
was glinting now upon the Arabian Mountains by its desolate shores.
Southwards stretched the wastes of Upper Egypt a thousand miles to meet
the Nubian wilderness. But over all these separate Deserts stirred the
soft whisper of the moving sand--deep murmuring message that Life was
on the way to unwind Death. The Ka of Egypt, swathed in centuries of
sand, hovered beneath the moon towards her ancient tenement.
For the transformation of the Desert now began in earnest. It grew
apace. Before he had gone the first two miles of his hour’s journey,
the twilight caught the rocky hills and twisted them into those
monstrous revelations of physiognomies they barely take the trouble
to conceal even in the daytime. And, while he well understood the
eroding agencies that have produced them, there yet rose in his mind a
deeper interpretation lurking just behind their literal meanings. Here,
through the motionless surfaces, that nameless thing the Desert ill
conceals urged outwards into embryonic form and shape, akin, he almost
felt, to those immense deific symbols of Other Life the Egyptians knew
and worshipped. Hence, from the Desert, had first come, he felt, the
unearthly life they typified in their monstrous figures of granite,
evoked in their stately temples, and communed with in the ritual of
their Mystery ceremonials.
This ‘watching’ aspect of the Lybian Desert is really natural
enough; but it is just the natural, Henriot knew, that brings the
deepest revelations. The surface limestones, resisting the erosion,
block themselves ominously against the sky, while the softer sand
beneath sets them on altared pedestals that define their isolation
splendidly. Blunt and unconquerable, these masses now watched him
pass between them. The Desert surface formed them, gave them birth.
They rose, they saw, they sank down again--waves upon a sea that
carried forgotten life up from the depths below. Of forbidding, even
menacing type, they somewhere mated with genuine grandeur. Unformed,
according to any standard of human or of animal faces, they achieved
an air of giant physiognomy which made them terrible. The unwinking
stare of eyes--lidless eyes that yet ever succeed in hiding--looked
out under well-marked, level eyebrows, suggesting a vision that
included the motives and purposes of his very heart. They looked up
grandly, understood why he was there, and then--slowly withdrew their
mysterious, penetrating gaze.
The strata built them so marvellously up; the heavy, threatening brows;
thick lips, curved by the ages into a semblance of cold smiles; jowls
drooping into sandy heaps that climbed against the cheeks; protruding
jaws, and the suggestion of shoulders just about to lift the entire
bodies out of the sandy beds--this host of countenances conveyed a
solemnity of expression that seemed everlasting, implacable as Death.
Of human signature they bore no trace, nor was comparison possible
between their kind and any animal life. They peopled the Desert here.
And their smiles, concealed yet just discernible, went broadening with
the darkness into a Desert laughter. The silence bore it underground.
But Henriot was aware of it. The troop of faces slipped into that
single, enormous countenance which is the visage of the Sand. And he
saw it everywhere, yet nowhere.
Thus with the darkness grew his imaginative interpretation of the
Desert. Yet there was construction in it, a construction, moreover,
that was _not_ entirely his own. Powers, he felt, were rising,
stirring, wakening from sleep. Behind the natural faces that he saw,
these other things peered gravely at him as he passed. They used, as
it were, materials that lay ready to their hand. Imagination furnished
these hints of outline, yet the Powers themselves were real. There
_was_ this amazing movement of the sand. By no other manner could his
mind have conceived of such a thing, nor dreamed of this simple, yet
dreadful method of approach.
Approach! that was the word that first stood out and startled him.
There was approach; something was drawing nearer. The Desert rose and
walked beside him. For not alone these ribs of gleaming limestone
contributed towards the elemental visages, but the entire hills, of
which they were an outcrop, ran to assist in the formation, and were a
necessary part of them. He was watched and stared at from behind, in
front, on either side, and even from below. The sand that swept him on,
kept even pace with him. It turned luminous too, with a patchwork of
glimmering effect that was indescribably weird; lanterns glowed within
its substance, and by their light he stumbled on, glad of the Arab boy
he would presently meet at the appointed place.
The last torch of the sunset had flickered out, melting into the
wilderness, when, suddenly opening at his feet, gaped the deep, wide
gully known as Wadi Hof. Its curve swept past him.
This first impression came upon him with a certain violence: that the
desolate valley rushed. He saw but a section of its curve and sweep,
but through its entire length of several miles the Wadi fled away. The
moon whitened it like snow, piling black shadows very close against the
cliffs. In the flood of moonlight it went rushing past. It was emptying
itself.
For a moment the stream of movement seemed to pause and look up into
his face, then instantly went on again upon its swift career. It was
like the procession of a river to the sea. The valley emptied itself to
make way for what was coming. The approach, moreover, had already begun.
Conscious that he was trembling, he stood and gazed into the depths,
seeking to steady his mind by the repetition of the little formula
he had used before. He said it half aloud. But, while he did so, his
heart whispered quite other things. Thoughts the woman and the man had
sown rose up in a flock and fell upon him like a storm of sand. Their
impetus drove off all support of ordinary ideas. They shook him where
he stood, staring down into this river of strange invisible movement
that was hundreds of feet in depth and a quarter of a mile across.
He sought to realise himself as he actually was to-day--mere visitor
to Helouan, tempted into this wild adventure with two strangers. But
in vain. That seemed a dream, unreal, a transient detail picked out
from the enormous Past that now engulfed him, heart and mind and soul.
_This_ was the reality.
The shapes and faces that the hills of sand built round him were the
play of excited fancy only. By sheer force he pinned his thought
against this fact: but further he could not get. There _were_ Powers
at work; they were being stirred, wakened somewhere into activity.
Evocation had already begun. That sense of their approach as he had
walked along from Helouan was not imaginary. A descent of some type of
life, vanished from the world too long for recollection, was on the
way,--so vast that it would manifest itself in a group of forms, a
troop, a host, an army. These two were near him somewhere at this very
moment, already long at work, their minds driving beyond this little
world. The valley was emptying itself--for the descent of life their
ritual invited.
And the movement in the sand was likewise true. He recalled the
sentences the woman had used. ‘My body,’ he reflected, ‘like the bodies
life makes use of everywhere, is mere upright heap of earth and dust
and--sand. Here in the Desert is the raw material, the greatest store
of it in the world.’
And on the heels of it came sharply that other thing: that this
descending Life would press into its service all loose matter within
its reach--to form that sphere of action which would be in a literal
sense its Body.
In the first few seconds, as he stood there, he realised all this, and
realised it with an overwhelming conviction it was futile to deny. The
fast-emptying valley would later brim with an unaccustomed and terrific
life. Yet Death hid there too--a little, ugly, insignificant death.
With the name of Vance it flashed upon his mind and vanished, too tiny
to be thought about in this torrent of grander messages that shook the
depths within his soul. He bowed his head a moment, hardly knowing
what he did. He could have waited thus a thousand years it seemed.
He was conscious of a wild desire to run away, to hide, to efface
himself utterly, his terror, his curiosity, his little wonder, and not
be seen of anything. But it was all vain and foolish. The Desert saw
him. The Gigantic knew that he was there. No escape was possible any
longer. Caught by the sand, he stood amid eternal things. The river of
movement swept him too.
These hills, now motionless as statues, would presently glide forward
into the cavalcade, sway like vessels, and go past with the procession.
At present only the contents, not the frame, of the Wadi moved. An
immense soft brush of moonlight swept it empty for what was on the
way.... But presently the entire Desert would stand up and also go.
Then, making a sideways movement, his feet kicked against something
soft and yielding that lay heaped upon the Desert floor, and Henriot
discovered the rugs the Arab boy had carefully set down before he
made full speed for the friendly lights of Helouan. The sound of his
departing footsteps had long since died away. He was alone.
The detail restored to him his consciousness of the immediate present,
and, stooping, he gathered up the rugs and overcoat and began to make
preparations for the night. But the appointed spot, whence he was to
watch, lay upon the summit of the opposite cliffs. He must cross the
Wadi bed and climb. Slowly and with labour he made his way down a steep
cleft into the depth of the Wadi Hof, sliding and stumbling often, till
at length he stood upon the floor of shining moonlight. It was very
smooth; windless utterly; still as space; each particle of sand lay in
its ancient place asleep. The movement, it seemed, had ceased.
He clambered next up the eastern side, through pitch-black shadows,
and within the hour reached the ledge upon the top whence he could
see below him, like a silvered map, the sweep of the valley bed. The
wind nipped keenly here again, coming over the leagues of cooling
sand. Loose boulders of splintered rock, started by his climbing,
crashed and boomed into the depths. He banked the rugs behind him,
wrapped himself in his overcoat, and lay down to wait. Behind him was
a two-foot crumbling wall against which he leaned; in front a drop of
several hundred feet through space. He lay upon a platform, therefore,
invisible from the Desert at his back. Below, the curving Wadi formed
a natural amphitheatre in which each separate boulder fallen from the
cliffs, and even the little _silla_ shrubs the camels eat, were plainly
visible. He noted all the bigger ones among them. He counted them over
half aloud.
And the moving stream he had been unaware of when crossing the bed
itself, now began again. The Wadi went rushing past before the broom
of moonlight. Again, the enormous and the tiny combined in one single
strange impression. For, through this conception of great movement,
stirred also a roving, delicate touch that his imagination felt as
bird-like. Behind the solid mass of the Desert’s immobility flashed
something swift and light and airy. Bizarre pictures interpreted it
to him, like rapid snap-shots of a huge flying panorama: he thought
of darting dragon-flies seen at Helouan, of children’s little dancing
feet, of twinkling butterflies--of birds. Chiefly, yes, of a flock
of birds in flight, whose separate units formed a single entity. The
idea of the Group-Soul possessed his mind once more. But it came with
a sense of more than curiosity or wonder. Veneration lay behind it, a
veneration touched with awe. It rose in his deepest thought that here
was the first hint of a symbolical representation. A symbol, sacred and
inviolable, belonging to some ancient worship that he half remembered
in his soul, stirred towards interpretation through all his being.
He lay there waiting, wondering vaguely where his two companions were,
yet fear all vanished because he felt attuned to a scale of things too
big to mate with definite dread. There was high anticipation in him,
but not anxiety. Of himself, as Felix Henriot, indeed, he hardly seemed
aware. He was some one else. Or, rather, he was himself at a stage he
had known once far, far away in a remote pre-existence. He watched
himself from dim summits of a Past, of which no further details were as
yet recoverable.
Pencil and sketching-block lay ready to his hand. The moon rose higher,
tucking the shadows ever more closely against the precipices. The
silver passed into a sheet of snowy whiteness, that made every boulder
clearly visible. Solemnity deepened everywhere into awe. The Wadi
fled silently down the stream of hours. It was almost empty now. And
then, abruptly, he was aware of change. The motion altered somewhere.
It moved more quietly; pace slackened; the end of the procession that
evacuated the depth and length of it went trailing past and turned the
distant bend.
‘It’s slowing up,’ he whispered, as sure of it as though he had watched
a regiment of soldiers filing by. The wind took off his voice like a
flying feather of sound.
And there _was_ a change. It had begun. Night and the moon stood still
to watch and listen. The wind dropped utterly away. The sand ceased its
shifting movement. The Desert everywhere stopped still, and turned.
Some curtain, then, that for centuries had veiled the world, drew
softly up, leaving a shaded vista down which the eyes of his soul
peered towards long-forgotten pictures. Still buried by the sands too
deep for full recovery, he yet perceived dim portions of them--things
once honoured and loved passionately. For once they had surely been
to him the whole of life, not merely a fragment for cheap wonder to
inspect. And they were curiously familiar, even as the person of this
woman who now evoked them was familiar. Henriot made no pretence to
more definite remembrance; but the haunting certainty rushed over
him, deeper than doubt or denial, and with such force that he felt no
effort to destroy it. Some lost sweetness of spiritual ambitions, lived
for with this passionate devotion, and passionately worshipped as men
to-day worship fame and money, revived in him with a tempest of high
glory. Centres of memory stirred from an age-long sleep, so that he
could have wept at their so complete obliteration hitherto. That such
majesty had departed from the world as though it never had existed, was
a thought for desolation and for tears. And though the little fragment
he was about to witness might be crude in itself and incomplete, yet
it was part of a vast system that once explored the richest realms of
deity. The reverence in him contained a holiness of the night and of
the stars; great, gentle awe lay in it too; for he stood, aflame with
anticipation and humility, at the gateway of sacred things.
And this was the mood, no thrill of cheap excitement or alarm to weaken
in, in which he first became aware that two spots of darkness he had
taken all along for boulders on the snowy valley bed, were actually
something very different. They were living figures. They moved. It was
not the shadows slowly following the moonlight, but the stir of human
beings who all these hours had been motionless as stone. He must have
passed them unnoticed within a dozen yards when he crossed the Wadi
bed, and a hundred times from this very ledge his eyes had surely
rested on them without recognition. Their minds, he knew full well, had
not been inactive as their bodies. The important part of the ancient
ritual lay, he remembered, in the powers of the evoking mind.
Here, indeed, was no effective nor theatrical approach of the principal
figures. It had nothing in common with the cheap external ceremonial
of modern days. In forgotten powers of the soul its grandeur lay,
potent, splendid, true. Long before he came, perhaps all through the
day, these two had laboured with their arduous preparations. They
were there, part of the Desert, when hours ago he had crossed the
plateau in the twilight. To them--to this woman’s potent working of
old ceremonial--had been due that singular rush of imagination he had
felt. He had interpreted the Desert as alive. Here was the explanation.
It _was_ alive. Life was on the way. Long latent, her intense desire
summoned it back to physical expression; and the effect upon him had
steadily increased as he drew nearer to the centre where she would
focus its revival and return. Those singular impressions of being
watched and accompanied were explained. A priest of this old-world
worship performed a genuine evocation; a Great One of Vision revived
the cosmic Powers.
Henriot watched the small figures far below him with a sense of
dramatic splendour that only this association of far-off Memory could
account for. It was their rising now, and the lifting of their arms
to form a slow revolving outline, that marked the abrupt cessation of
the larger river of movement; for the sweeping of the Wadi sank into
sudden stillness, and these two, with motions not unlike some dance of
deliberate solemnity, passed slowly through the moonlight to and fro.
His attention fixed upon them both. All other movement ceased. They
fastened the flow of Time against the Desert’s body.
What happened then? How could his mind interpret an experience so long
denied that the power of expression, as of comprehension, has ceased
to exist? How translate this symbolical representation, small detail
though it was, of a transcendent worship entombed for most so utterly
beyond recovery? Its splendour could never lodge in minds that conceive
Deity perched upon a cloud within telephoning distance of fashionable
churches. How should he phrase it even to himself, whose memory drew
up pictures from so dim a past that the language fit to frame them lay
unreachable and lost?
Henriot did not know. Perhaps he never yet has known. Certainly, at
the time, he did not even try to think. His sensations remain his
own--untranslatable; and even that instinctive description the mind
gropes for automatically, floundered, halted, and stopped dead. Yet
there rose within him somewhere, from depths long drowned in slumber,
a reviving power by which he saw, divined and recollected--remembered
seemed too literal a word--these elements of a worship he once had
personally known. He, too, had worshipped thus. His soul had moved amid
similar evocations in some aeonian past, whence now the sand was being
cleared away. Symbols of stupendous meaning flashed and went their way
across the lifting mists. He hardly caught their meaning, so long it
was since he had known them; yet they were familiar as the faces seen
in dreams, and some hint of their spiritual significance left faint
traces in his heart by means of which their grandeur reached towards
interpretation. And all were symbols of a cosmic, deific nature; of
Powers that only symbols can express--prayer-books and sacraments used
in the Wisdom Religion of an older time, but to-day known only in the
decrepit, literal shell which is their degradation.
Grandly the figures moved across the valley bed. The powers of the
heavenly bodies once more joined them. They moved to the measure of a
cosmic dance, whose rhythm was creative. The Universe partnered them.
There was this transfiguration of all common, external things. He
realised that appearances were visible letters of a soundless language,
a language he once had known. The powers of night and moon and desert
sand married with points in the fluid stream of his inmost spiritual
being that knew and welcomed them. He understood.
Old Egypt herself stooped down from her uncovered throne. The stars
sent messengers. There was commotion in the secret, sandy places of the
desert. For the Desert had grown Temple. Columns reared against the
sky. There rose, from leagues away, the chanting of the sand.
The temples, where once this came to pass, were gone, their ruin
questioned by alien hearts that knew not their spiritual meaning. But
here the entire Desert swept in to form a shrine, and the Majesty that
once was Egypt stepped grandly back across ages of denial and neglect.
The sand was altar, and the stars were altar lights. The moon lit up
the vast recesses of the ceiling, and the wind from a thousand miles
brought in the perfume of her incense. For with that faith which shifts
mountains from their sandy bed, two passionate, believing souls invoked
the Ka of Egypt.
And the motions that they made, he saw, were definite harmonious
patterns their dark figures traced upon the shining valley floor.
Like the points of compasses, with stems invisible, and directed from
the sky, their movements marked the outlines of great signatures of
power--the sigils of the type of life they would evoke. It would come
as a Procession. No individual outline could contain it. It needed for
its visible expression--many. The descent of a group-soul, known to
the worship of this mighty system, rose from its lair of centuries and
moved hugely down upon them. The Ka, answering to the summons, would
mate with sand. The Desert was its Body.
Yet it was not this that he had come to fix with block and pencil. Not
yet was the moment when his skill might be of use. He waited, watched,
and listened, while this river of half-remembered things went past
him. The patterns grew beneath his eyes like music. Too intricate and
prolonged to remember with accuracy later, he understood that they were
forms of that root-geometry which lies behind all manifested life. The
mould was being traced in outline. Life would presently inform it. And
a singing rose from the maze of lines whose beauty was like the beauty
of the constellations.
This sound was very faint at first, but grew steadily in volume.
Although no echoes, properly speaking, were possible, these precipices
caught stray notes that trooped in from the further sandy reaches.
The figures certainly were chanting, but their chanting was not all he
heard. Other sounds came to his ears from far away, running past him
through the air from every side, and from incredible distances, all
flocking down into the Wadi bed to join the parent note that summoned
them. The Desert was giving voice. And memory, lifting her hood yet
higher, showed more of her grey, mysterious face that searched his soul
with questions. Had he so soon forgotten that strange union of form and
sound which once was known to the evocative rituals of olden days?
Henriot tried patiently to disentangle this desert-music that their
intoning voices woke, from the humming of the blood in his own veins.
But he succeeded only in part. Sand was already in the air. There
was reverberation, rhythm, measure; there was almost the breaking
of the stream into great syllables. But was it due, this strange
reverberation, to the countless particles of sand meeting in mid-air
about him, or--to larger bodies, whose surfaces caught this friction
of the sand and threw it back against his ears? The wind, now rising,
brought particles that stung his face and hands, and filled his eyes
with a minute fine dust that partially veiled the moonlight. But was
not something larger, vaster these particles composed now also on the
way?
Movement and sound and flying sand thus merged themselves more and
more in a single, whirling torrent. But Henriot sought no commonplace
explanation of what he witnessed; and here was the proof that all
happened in some vestibule of inner experience where the strain of
question and answer had no business. One sitting beside him need not
have seen anything at all. His host, for instance, from Helouan, need
not have been aware. Night screened it; Helouan, as the whole of modern
experience, stood in front of the screen. This thing took place behind
it. He crouched motionless, watching in some reconstructed ante-chamber
of the soul’s pre-existence, while the torrent grew into a veritable
tempest.
Yet Night remained unshaken; the veil of moonlight did not quiver;
the stars dropped their slender golden pillars unobstructed. Calmness
reigned everywhere as before. The stupendous representation passed on
behind it all.
But the dignity of the little human movements that he watched had
become now indescribable. The gestures of the arms and bodies
invested themselves with consummate grandeur, as these two strode
into the caverns behind manifested life and drew forth symbols that
represented vanished Powers. The sound of their chanting voices broke
in cadenced fragments against the shores of language. The words Henriot
never actually caught, if words they were; yet he understood their
purport--these Names of Power to which the type of returning life gave
answer as they approached. He remembered fumbling for his drawing
materials, with such violence, however, that the pencil snapped in two
between his fingers as he touched it. For now, even here, upon the
outer fringe of the ceremonial ground, there was a stir of forces that
set the very muscles working in him before he had become aware of it....
Then came the moment when his heart leaped against his ribs with a
sudden violence that was almost pain, standing a second later still as
death. The lines upon the valley floor ceased their mazelike dance.
All movement stopped. Sound died away. In the midst of this profound
and dreadful silence the sigils lay empty there below him. They waited
to be informed. For the moment of entrance had come at last. Life was
close.
And he understood why this return of life had all along suggested a
Procession and could be no mere momentary flash of vision. From such
appalling distance did it sweep down towards the present.
Upon this network, then, of splendid lines, at length held rigid, the
entire Desert reared itself with walls of curtained sand, that dwarfed
the cliffs, the shouldering hills, the very sky. The Desert stood on
end. As once before he had dreamed it from his balcony windows, it rose
upright, towering, and close against his face. It built sudden ramparts
to the stars that chambered the thing he witnessed behind walls no
centuries could ever bring down crumbling into dust.
He himself, in some curious fashion, lay just outside, viewing it
apart. As from a pinnacle, he peered within--peered down with straining
eyes into the vast picture-gallery Memory threw abruptly open. And the
picture spaced its noble outline thus against the very stars. He gazed
between columns, that supported the sky itself, like pillars of sand
that swept across the field of vanished years. Sand poured and streamed
aside, laying bare the Past.
For down the enormous vista into which he gazed, as into an avenue
running a million miles towards a tiny point, he saw this moving Thing
that came towards him, shaking loose the countless veils of sand the
ages had swathed about it. The Ka of buried Egypt wakened out of sleep.
She had heard the potent summons of her old, time-honoured ritual.
She came. She stretched forth an arm towards the worshippers who
evoked her. Out of the Desert, out of the leagues of sand, out of the
immeasurable wilderness which was her mummied Form and Body, she rose
and came. And this fragment of her he would actually see--this little
portion that was obedient to the stammered and broken ceremonial. The
partial revelation he would witness--yet so vast, even this little bit
of it, that it came as a Procession and a host.
For a moment there was nothing. And then the voice of the woman rose
in a resounding cry that filled the Wadi to its furthest precipices,
before it died away again to silence. That a human voice could produce
such volume, accent, depth, seemed half incredible. The walls of
towering sand swallowed it instantly. But the Procession of life,
needing a group, a host, an army for its physical expression, reached
at that moment the nearer end of the huge avenue. It touched the
Present; it entered the world of men.
X
The entire range of Henriot’s experience, read, imagined, dreamed,
then fainted into unreality before the sheer wonder of what he saw. In
the brief interval it takes to snap the fingers the climax was thus
so hurriedly upon him. And, through it all, he was clearly aware of
the pair of little human figures, man and woman, standing erect and
commanding at the centre--knew, too, that she directed and controlled,
while he in some secondary fashion supported her--and ever watched.
But both were dim, dropped somewhere into a lesser scale. It was the
knowledge of their presence, however, that alone enabled him to keep
his powers in hand at all. But for these two _human_ beings there
within possible reach, he must have closed his eyes and swooned.
For a tempest that seemed to toss loose stars about the sky swept round
about him, pouring up the pillared avenue in front of the procession.
A blast of giant energy, of liberty, came through. Forwards and
backwards, circling spirally about him like a whirlwind, came this
revival of Life that sought to dip itself once more in matter and in
form. It came to the accurate outline of its form they had traced for
it. He held his mind steady enough to realise that it was akin to
what men call a ‘descent’ of some ‘spiritual movement’ that wakens a
body of believers into faith--a race, an entire nation; only that he
experienced it in this brief, concentrated form before it has scattered
down into ten thousand hearts. Here he knew its source and essence,
behind the veil. Crudely, unmanageable as yet, he felt it, rushing
loose behind appearances. There was this amazing impact of a twisting,
swinging force that stormed down as though it would bend and coil the
very ribs of the old stubborn hills. It sought to warm them with the
stress of its own irresistible lifestream, to beat them into shape, and
make pliable their obstinate resistance. Through all things the impulse
poured and spread, like fire at white heat.
Yet nothing visible came as yet, no alteration in the actual landscape,
no sign of change in things familiar to his eyes, while impetus
thus fought against inertia. He perceived nothing form-al. Calm and
untouched himself, he lay outside the circle of evocation, watching,
waiting, scarcely daring to breathe, yet well aware that any minute the
scene would transfer itself from memory that was subjective to matter
that was objective.
And then, in a flash, the bridge was built, and the transfer was
accomplished. How or where he did not see, he could not tell. It was
there before he knew it--there before his normal, earthly sight. He
saw it, as he saw the hands he was holding stupidly up to shield
his face. For this terrific release of force long held back, long
stored up, latent for centuries, came pouring down the empty Wadi bed
prepared for its reception. Through stones and sand and boulders it
came in an impetuous hurricane of power. The liberation of its life
appalled him. All that was free, untied, responded instantly like
chaff; loose objects fled towards it; there was a yielding in the
hills and precipices; and even in the mass of Desert which provided
their foundation. The hinges of the Sand went creaking in the night. It
shaped for itself a bodily outline.
Yet, most strangely, nothing definitely moved. How could he express the
violent contradiction? For the immobility was apparent only--a sham,
a counterfeit; while behind it the essential _being_ of these things
did rush and shift and alter. He saw the two things side by side: the
outer immobility the senses commonly agree upon, _and_ this amazing
flying-out of their inner, invisible substance towards the vortex
of attracting life that sucked them in. For stubborn matter turned
docile before the stress of this returning life, taught somewhere to
be plastic. It was being moulded into an approach to bodily outline. A
mobile elasticity invaded rigid substance. The two officiating human
beings, safe at the stationary centre, and himself, just outside the
circle of operation, alone remained untouched and unaffected. But a few
feet in any direction, for any one of them, meant--instantaneous death.
They would be absorbed into the vortex, mere corpuscles pressed into
the service of this sphere of action of a mighty Body....
How these perceptions reached him with such conviction, Henriot could
never say. He knew it, because he _felt_ it. Something fell about him
from the sky that already paled towards the dawn. The stars themselves,
it seemed, contributed some part of the terrific, flowing impulse that
conquered matter and shaped itself this physical expression.
Then, before he was able to fashion any preconceived idea of
what visible form this potent life might assume, he was aware of
further change. It came at the briefest possible interval after the
beginning--this certainty that, to and fro about him, as yet however
indeterminate, passed Magnitudes that were stupendous as the desert.
There was beauty in them too, though a terrible beauty hardly of this
earth at all. A fragment of old Egypt had returned--a little portion of
that vast Body of Belief that once was Egypt. Evoked by the worship of
one human heart, passionately sincere, the Ka of Egypt stepped back to
visit the material it once informed--the Sand.
Yet only a portion came. Henriot clearly realised that. It stretched
forth an arm. Finding no mass of worshippers through whom it might
express itself completely, it pressed inanimate matter thus into its
service.
Here was the beginning the woman had spoken of--little opening clue.
Entire reconstruction lay perhaps beyond.
And Henriot next realised that these Magnitudes in which this
group-energy sought to clothe itself as visible form, were curiously
familiar. It was not a new thing that he would see. Booming softly as
they dropped downwards through the sky, with a motion the size of them
rendered delusive, they trooped up the Avenue towards the central point
that summoned them. He realised the giant flock of them--descent of
fearful beauty--outlining a type of life denied to the world for ages,
countless as this sand that blew against his skin. Careering over the
waste of Desert moved the army of dark Splendours, that dwarfed any
organic structure called a body men have ever known. He recognised
them, cold in him of death, though the outlines reared higher than
the pyramids, and towered up to hide whole groups of stars. Yes, he
recognised them in their partial revelation, though he never saw the
monstrous host complete. But, one of them, he realised, posing its
eternal riddle to the sands, had of old been glimpsed sufficiently to
seize its form in stone,--yet poorly seized, as a doll may stand for
the dignity of a human being or a child’s toy represent an engine that
draws trains....
And he knelt there on his narrow ledge, the world of men forgotten. The
power that caught him was too great a thing for wonder or for fear; he
even felt no awe. Sensation of any kind that can be named or realised
left him utterly. He forgot himself. He merely watched. The glory
numbed him. Block and pencil, as the reason of his presence there at
all, no longer existed....
Yet one small link remained that held him to some kind of consciousness
of earthly things: he never lost sight of this--that, being just
outside the circle of evocation, he was safe, and that the man and
woman, being stationary in its untouched centre, were also safe.
But--that a movement of six inches in any direction meant for any one
of them instant death.
What was it, then, that suddenly strengthened this solitary link so
that the chain tautened and he felt the pull of it? Henriot could
not say. He came back with the rush of a descending drop to the
realisation--dimly, vaguely, as from great distance--that he was with
these two, now at this moment, in the Wadi Hof, and that the cold of
dawn was in the air about him. The chill breath of the Desert made him
shiver.
But at first, so deeply had his soul been dipped in this fragment of
ancient worship, he could remember nothing more. Somewhere lay a little
spot of streets and houses; its name escaped him. He had once been
there; there were many people, but insignificant people. Who were they?
And what had he to do with them? All recent memories had been drowned
in the tide that flooded him from an immeasurable Past.
And who were they--these two beings, standing on the white floor of
sand below him? For a long time he could not recover their names. Yet
he remembered them; and, thus robbed of association that names bring,
he saw them for an instant naked, and knew that one of them was evil.
One of them was vile. Blackness touched the picture there. The man, his
name still out of reach, was sinister, impure and dark at the heart.
And for this reason the evocation had been partial only. The admixture
of an evil motive was the flaw that marred complete success.
The names then flashed upon him--Lady Statham--Richard Vance.
Vance! With a horrid drop from splendour into something mean and
sordid, Henriot felt the pain of it. The motive of the man was so
insignificant, his purpose so atrocious. More and more, with the name,
came back--his first repugnance, fear, suspicion. And human terror
caught him. He shrieked. But, as in nightmare, no sound escaped his
lips. He tried to move; a wild desire to interfere, to protect, to
prevent, flung him forward--close to the dizzy edge of the gulf below.
But his muscles refused obedience to the will. The paralysis of common
fear rooted him to the rocks.
But the sudden change of focus instantly destroyed the picture; and
so vehement was the fall from glory into meanness, that it dislocated
the machinery of clairvoyant vision. The inner perception clouded and
grew dark. Outer and inner mingled in violent, inextricable confusion.
The wrench seemed almost physical. It happened all at once, retreat
and continuation for a moment somehow combined. And, if he did not
definitely see the awful thing, at least he was aware that it had come
to pass. He knew it as positively as though his eye were glued against
a magnifying lens in the stillness of some laboratory. He witnessed it.
The supreme moment of evocation was close. Life, through that awful
sandy vortex, whirled and raged. Loose particles showered and pelted,
caught by the draught of vehement life that moulded the substance of
the Desert into imperial outline--when, suddenly, shot the little evil
thing across that marred and blasted it.
Into the whirlpool flew forward a particle of material that was a human
being. And the Group-Soul caught and used it.
The actual accomplishment Henriot did not claim to see. He was a
witness, but a witness who could give no evidence. Whether the woman
was pushed of set intention, or whether some detail of sound and
pattern was falsely used to effect the terrible result, he was helpless
to determine. He pretends no itemised account. She went. In one second,
with appalling swiftness, she disappeared, swallowed out of space
and time within that awful maw--one little corpuscle among a million
through which the Life, now stalking the Desert wastes, moulded itself
a troop-like Body. Sand took her.
There followed emptiness--a hush of unutterable silence, stillness,
peace. Movement and sound instantly retired whence they came. The
avenues of Memory closed; the Splendours all went down into their sandy
tombs....
* * * * *
The moon had sunk into the Libyan wilderness; the eastern sky was red.
The dawn drew out that wondrous sweetness of the Desert, which is as
sister to the sweetness that the moonlight brings. The Desert settled
back to sleep, huge, unfathomable, charged to the brim with life that
watches, waits, and yet conceals itself behind the ruins of apparent
desolation. And the Wadi, empty at his feet, filled slowly with the
gentle little winds that bring the sunrise.
Then, across the pale glimmering of sand, Henriot saw a figure moving.
It came quickly towards him, yet unsteadily, and with a hurry that was
ugly. Vance was on the way to fetch him. And the horror of the man’s
approach struck him like a hammer in the face. He closed his eyes,
sinking back to hide.
But, before he swooned, there reached him the clatter of the murderer’s
tread as he began to climb over the splintered rocks, and the faint
echo of his voice, calling him by name--falsely and in pretence--for
help.
HELOUAN.
[Illustration]
THE TRANSFER
[Illustration: THE TRANSFER]
The child first began to cry in the early afternoon--about three
o’clock, to be exact. I remember the hour, because I had been listening
with secret relief to the sound of the departing carriage. Those wheels
fading into distance down the gravel drive with Mrs. Frene, and her
daughter Gladys to whom I was governess, meant for me some hours’
welcome rest, and the June day was oppressively hot. Moreover, there
was this excitement in the little country household that had told upon
us all, but especially upon myself. This excitement, running delicately
behind all the events of the morning, was due to some mystery, and
the mystery was of course kept concealed from the governess. I had
exhausted myself with guessing and keeping on the watch. For some deep
and unexplained anxiety possessed me, so that I kept thinking of my
sister’s dictum that I was really much too sensitive to make a good
governess, and that I should have done far better as a professional
clairvoyante.
Mr. Frene, senior, ‘Uncle Frank,’ was expected for an unusual visit
from town about tea-time. That I knew. I also knew that his visit was
concerned somehow with the future welfare of little Jamie, Gladys’
seven-year-old brother. More than this, indeed, I never knew, and this
missing link makes my story in a fashion incoherent--an important bit
of the strange puzzle left out. I only gathered that the visit of
Uncle Frank was of a condescending nature, that Jamie was told he must
be upon his very best behaviour to make a good impression, and that
Jamie, who had never seen his uncle, dreaded him horribly already in
advance. Then, trailing thinly through the dying crunch of the carriage
wheels this sultry afternoon, I heard the curious little wail of the
child’s crying, with the effect, wholly unaccountable, that every nerve
in my body shot its bolt electrically, bringing me to my feet with a
tingling of unequivocal alarm. Positively, the water ran into my eyes.
I recalled his white distress that morning when told that Uncle Frank
was motoring down for tea and that he was to be ‘very nice indeed’ to
him. It had gone into me like a knife. All through the day, indeed, had
run this nightmare quality of terror and vision.
‘The man with the ’normous face?’ he had asked in a little voice of
awe, and then gone speechless from the room in tears that no amount of
soothing management could calm. That was all I saw; and what he meant
by ‘the ’normous face’ gave me only a sense of vague presentiment. But
it came as anti-climax somehow--a sudden revelation of the mystery and
excitement that pulsed beneath the quiet of the stifling summer day.
I feared for him. For of all that commonplace household I loved Jamie
best, though professionally I had nothing to do with him. He was a
high-strung, ultra-sensitive child, and it seemed to me that no one
understood him, least of all his honest, tender-hearted parents; so
that his little wailing voice brought me from my bed to the window in a
moment like a call for help.
The haze of June lay over that big garden like a blanket; the
wonderful flowers, which were Mr. Frene’s delight, hung motionless; the
lawns, so soft and thick, cushioned all other sounds; only the limes
and huge clumps of guelder roses hummed with bees. Through this muted
atmosphere of heat and haze the sound of the child’s crying floated
faintly to my ears--from a distance. Indeed, I wonder now that I heard
it at all, for the next moment I saw him down beyond the garden,
standing in his white sailor suit alone, two hundred yards away. He
was down by the ugly patch where nothing grew--the Forbidden Corner.
A faintness then came over me at once, a faintness as of death, when
I saw him _there_ of all places--where he never was allowed to go,
and where, moreover, he was usually too terrified to go. To see him
standing solitary in that singular spot, above all to hear him crying
there, bereft me momentarily of the power to act. Then, before I could
recover my composure sufficiently to call him in, Mr. Frene came round
the corner from the Lower Farm with the dogs, and, seeing his son,
performed that office for me. In his loud, good-natured, hearty voice
he called him, and Jamie turned and ran as though some spell had broken
just in time--ran into the open arms of his fond but uncomprehending
father, who carried him indoors on his shoulder, while asking ‘what all
this hubbub was about?’ And, at their heels, the tail-less sheep-dogs
followed, barking loudly, and performing what Jamie called their
‘Gravel Dance,’ because they ploughed up the moist, rolled gravel with
their feet.
I stepped back swiftly from the window lest I should be seen. Had I
witnessed the saving of the child from fire or drowning the relief
could hardly have been greater. Only Mr. Frene, I felt sure, would not
say and do the right thing quite. He would protect the boy from his own
vain imaginings, yet not with the explanation that could really heal.
They disappeared behind the rose trees, making for the house. I saw no
more till later, when Mr. Frene, senior, arrived.
* * * * *
To describe the ugly patch as ‘singular’ is hard to justify, perhaps,
yet some such word is what the entire family sought, though never--oh,
never!--used. To Jamie and myself, though equally we never mentioned
it, that treeless, flowerless spot was more than singular. It stood
at the far end of the magnificent rose garden, a bald, sore place,
where the black earth showed uglily in winter, almost like a piece of
dangerous bog, and in summer baked and cracked with fissures where
green lizards shot their fire in passing. In contrast to the rich
luxuriance of the whole amazing garden it was like a glimpse of death
amid life, a centre of disease that cried for healing lest it spread.
But it never did spread. Behind it stood the thick wood of silver
birches and, glimmering beyond, the orchard meadow, where the lambs
played.
The gardeners had a very simple explanation of its barrenness--that the
water all drained off it owing to the lie of the slopes immediately
about it, holding no remnant to keep the soil alive. I cannot say. It
was Jamie--Jamie who felt its spell and haunted it, who spent whole
hours there, even while afraid, and for whom it was finally labelled
‘strictly out of bounds’ because it stimulated his already big
imagination, not wisely but too darkly--it was Jamie who buried ogres
there and heard it crying in an earthy voice, swore that it shook its
surface sometimes while he watched it, and secretly gave it food in
the form of birds or mice or rabbits he found dead upon his wanderings.
And it was Jamie who put so extraordinarily into words the _feeling_
that the horrid spot had given me from the moment I first saw it.
‘It’s bad, Miss Gould,’ he told me.
‘But, Jamie, nothing in Nature is bad--exactly; only different from the
rest sometimes.’
‘Miss Gould, if you please, then it’s empty. It’s not fed. It’s dying
because it can’t get the food it wants.’
And when I stared into the little pale face where the eyes shone so
dark and wonderful, seeking within myself for the right thing to say to
him, he added, with an emphasis and conviction that made me suddenly
turn cold: ‘Miss Gould’--he always used my name like this in all his
sentences--‘it’s hungry, don’t you see? But _I_ know what would make it
feel all right.’
Only the conviction of an earnest child, perhaps, could have made so
outrageous a suggestion worth listening to for an instant; but for me,
who felt that things an imaginative child believed were important,
it came with a vast disquieting shock of reality. Jamie, in this
exaggerated way, had caught at the edge of a shocking fact--a hint of
dark, undiscovered truth had leaped into that sensitive imagination.
Why there lay horror in the words I cannot say, but I think some power
of darkness trooped across the suggestion of that sentence at the
end, ‘I know what would make it feel all right.’ I remember that I
shrank from asking explanation. Small groups of other words, veiled
fortunately by his silence, gave life to an unspeakable possibility
that hitherto had lain at the back of my own consciousness. The way
it sprang to life proves, I think, that my mind already contained it.
The blood rushed from my heart as I listened. I remember that my knees
shook. Jamie’s idea was--had been all along--my own as well.
And now, as I lay down on my bed and thought about it all, I understood
why the coming of his uncle involved somehow an experience that wrapped
terror at its heart. With a sense of nightmare certainty that left me
too weak to resist the preposterous idea, too shocked, indeed, to argue
or reason it away, this certainty came with its full, black blast of
conviction; and the only way I can put it into words, since nightmare
horror really is not properly tellable at all, seems this: that there
_was_ something missing in that dying patch of garden; something
lacking that it ever searched for; something, once found and taken,
that would turn it rich and living as the rest; more--that there _was_
some living person who could do this for it. Mr. Frene, senior, in a
word, ‘Uncle Frank,’ was this person who out of his abundant life could
supply the lack--unwittingly.
For this connection between the dying, empty patch and the person of
this vigorous, wealthy, and successful man had already lodged itself in
my subconsciousness before I was aware of it. Clearly it must have lain
there all along, though hidden. Jamie’s words, his sudden pallor, his
vibrating emotion of fearful anticipation had developed the plate, but
it was his weeping alone there in the Forbidden Corner that had printed
it. The photograph shone framed before me in the air. I hid my eyes.
But for the redness--the charm of my face goes to pieces unless my eyes
are clear--I could have cried. Jamie’s words that morning about the
‘’normous face’ came back upon me like a battering-ram.
Mr. Frene, senior, had been so frequently the subject of conversation
in the family since I came, I had so often heard him discussed,
and had then read so much about him in the papers--his energy, his
philanthropy, his success with everything he laid his hand to--that
a picture of the man had grown complete within me. I knew him as he
was--within; or, as my sister would have said--clairvoyantly. And the
only time I saw him (when I took Gladys to a meeting where he was
chairman, and later _felt_ his atmosphere and presence while for a
moment he patronisingly spoke with her) had justified the portrait I
had drawn. The rest, you may say, was a woman’s wild imagining; but I
think rather it was that kind of divining intuition which women share
with children. If souls could be made visible, I would stake my life
upon the truth and accuracy of my portrait.
For this Mr. Frene was a man who drooped alone, but grew vital in a
crowd--because he used their vitality. He was a supreme, unconscious
artist in the science of taking the fruits of others’ work and
living--for his own advantage. He vampired, unknowingly no doubt,
every one with whom he came in contact; left them exhausted, tired,
listless. Others fed him, so that while in a full room he shone, alone
by himself and with no life to draw upon he languished and declined. In
the man’s immediate neighbourhood you felt his presence draining you;
he took your ideas, your strength, your very words, and later used them
for his own benefit and aggrandisement. Not evilly, of course; the
man was good enough; but you felt that he was dangerous owing to the
facile way he absorbed into himself all loose vitality that was to be
had. His eyes and voice and presence devitalised you. Life, it seemed,
not highly organised enough to resist, must shrink from his too near
approach and hide away for fear of being appropriated, for fear, that
is, of--death.
Jamie, unknowingly, put in the finishing touch to my unconscious
portrait. The man carried about with him some silent, compelling trick
of drawing out all your reserves--then swiftly pocketing them. At first
you would be conscious of taut resistance; this would slowly shade
off into weariness; the will would become flaccid; then you either
moved away or yielded--agreed to all he said with a sense of weakness
pressing ever closer upon the edges of collapse. With a male antagonist
it might be different, but even then the effort of resistance would
generate force that _he_ absorbed and not the other. He never gave out.
Some instinct taught him how to protect himself from that. To human
beings, I mean, he never gave out. This time it was a very different
matter. He had no more chance than a fly before the wheels of a
huge--what Jamie used to call--‘attraction’ engine.
So this was how I saw him--a great human sponge, crammed and soaked
with the life, or proceeds of life, absorbed from others--stolen. My
idea of a human vampire was satisfied. He went about carrying these
accumulations of the life of others. In this sense his ‘life’ was not
really his own. For the same reason, I think, it was not so fully under
his control as he imagined.
* * * * *
And in another hour this man would be here. I went to the window.
My eye wandered to the empty patch, dull black there amid the rich
luxuriance of the garden flowers. It struck me as a hideous bit of
emptiness yawning to be filled and nourished. The idea of Jamie
playing round its bare edge was loathsome. I watched the big summer
clouds above, the stillness of the afternoon, the haze. The silence
of the overheated garden was oppressive. I had never felt a day so
stifling, motionless. It lay there waiting. The household, too, was
waiting--waiting for the coming of Mr. Frene from London in his big
motor-car.
And I shall never forget the sensation of icy shrinking and distress
with which I heard the rumble of the car. He had arrived. Tea was
all ready on the lawn beneath the lime trees, and Mrs. Frene and
Gladys, back from their drive, were sitting in wicker chairs. Mr.
Frene, junior, was in the hall to meet his brother, but Jamie, as I
learned afterwards, had shown such hysterical alarm, offered such bold
resistance, that it had been deemed wiser to keep him in his room.
Perhaps, after all, his presence might not be necessary. The visit
clearly had to do with something on the uglier side of life--money,
settlements, or what not; I never knew exactly; only that his parents
were anxious, and that Uncle Frank had to be propitiated. It does not
matter. That has nothing to do with the affair. What has to do with
it--or I should not be telling the story--is that Mrs. Frene sent for
me to come down ‘in my nice white dress, if I didn’t mind,’ and that I
was terrified, yet pleased, because it meant that a pretty face would
be considered a welcome addition to the visitor’s landscape. Also, most
odd it was, I felt my presence was somehow inevitable, that in some
way it was intended that I should witness what I did witness. And the
instant I came upon the lawn--I hesitate to set it down, it sounds so
foolish, disconnected--I could have sworn, as my eyes met his, that
a kind of sudden darkness came, taking the summer brilliance out of
everything, and that it was caused by troops of small black horses that
raced about us from his person--to attack.
After a first momentary approving glance he took no further notice of
me. The tea and talk went smoothly; I helped to pass the plates and
cups, filling in pauses with little under-talk to Gladys. Jamie was
never mentioned. Outwardly all seemed well, but inwardly everything was
awful--skirting the edge of things unspeakable, and so charged with
danger that I could not keep my voice from trembling when I spoke.
I watched his hard, bleak face; I noticed how thin he was, and the
curious, oily brightness of his steady eyes. They did not glitter,
but they drew you with a sort of soft, creamy shine like Eastern
eyes. And everything he said or did announced what I may dare to
call the _suction_ of his presence. His nature achieved this result
automatically. He dominated us all, yet so gently that until it was
accomplished no one noticed it.
Before five minutes had passed, however, I was aware of one thing only.
My mind focussed exclusively upon it, and so vividly that I marvelled
the others did not scream, or run, or do something violent to prevent
it. And it was this: that, separated merely by some dozen yards or so,
this man, vibrating with the acquired vitality of others, stood within
easy reach or that spot of yawning emptiness, waiting and eager to be
filled. Earth scented her prey.
These two active ‘centres’ were within fighting distance; he so thin,
so hard, so keen, yet really spreading large with the loose ‘surround’
of others’ life he had appropriated, so practised and triumphant; that
other so patient, deep, with so mighty a draw of the whole earth behind
it, and--ugh!--so obviously aware that its opportunity at last had come.
I saw it all as plainly as though I watched two great animals prepare
for battle, both unconsciously; yet in some inexplicable way I saw
it, of course, within me, and not externally. The conflict would be
hideously unequal. Each side had already sent out emissaries, how
long before I could not tell, for the first evidence _he_ gave that
something was going wrong with him was when his voice grew suddenly
confused, he missed his words, and his lips trembled a moment and
turned flabby. The next second his face betrayed that singular and
horrid change, growing somehow loose about the bones of the cheek, and
larger, so that I remembered Jamie’s miserable phrase. The emissaries
of the two kingdoms, the human and the vegetable, had met, I make it
out, in that very second. For the first time in his long career of
battening on others, Mr. Frene found himself pitted against a vaster
kingdom than he knew and, so finding, shook inwardly in that little
part that was his definite actual self. He felt the huge disaster
coming.
‘Yes, John,’ he was saying, in his drawling, self-congratulating voice,
‘Sir George gave me that car--gave it to me as a present. Wasn’t
it char----?’ and then broke off abruptly, stammered, drew breath,
stood up, and looked uneasily about him. For a second there was a
gaping pause. It was like the click which starts some huge machinery
moving--that instant’s pause before it actually starts. The whole
thing, indeed, then went with the rapidity of machinery running down
and beyond control. I thought of a giant dynamo working silently and
invisible.
‘What’s that?’ he cried, in a soft voice charged with alarm. ‘What’s
that horrid place? And some one’s crying there--who is it?’
He pointed to the empty patch. Then, before any one could answer, he
started across the lawn towards it, going every minute faster. Before
any one could move he stood upon the edge. He leaned over--peering down
into it.
It seemed a few hours passed, but really they were seconds, for time is
measured by the quality and not the quantity of sensations it contains.
I saw it all with merciless, photographic detail, sharply etched amid
the general confusion. Each side was intensely active, but only one
side, the human, exerted _all_ its force--in resistance. The other
merely stretched out a feeler, as it were, from its vast, potential
strength; no more was necessary. It was such a soft and easy victory.
Oh, it was rather pitiful! There was no bluster or great effort, on
one side at least. Close by his side I witnessed it, for I, it seemed,
alone had moved and followed him. No one else stirred, though Mrs.
Frene clattered noisily with the cups, making some sudden impulsive
gesture with her hands, and Gladys, I remember, gave a cry--it was like
a little scream--‘Oh, mother, it’s the heat, isn’t it?’ Mr. Frene, her
father, was speechless, pale as ashes.
But the instant I reached his side, it became clear what had drawn
me there thus instinctively. Upon the other side, among the silver
birches, stood little Jamie. He was watching. I experienced--for
him--one of those moments that shake the heart; a liquid fear ran all
over me, the more effective because unintelligible really. Yet I felt
that if I could know all, and what lay actually behind, my fear would
be more than justified; that the thing _was_ awful, full of awe.
And then it happened--a truly wicked sight--like watching a universe in
action, yet all contained within a small square foot of space. I think
he understood vaguely that if some one could only take his place he
might be saved, and that was why, discerning instinctively the easiest
substitute within reach, he saw the child and called aloud to him
across the empty patch, ‘James, my boy, come here!’
His voice was like a thin report, but somehow flat and lifeless, as
when a rifle misses fire, sharp, yet weak; it had no ‘crack’ in it. It
was really supplication. And, with amazement, I heard my own ring out
imperious and strong, though I was not conscious of saying it, ‘Jamie,
don’t move. Stay where you are!’ But Jamie, the little child, obeyed
neither of us. Moving up nearer to the edge, he stood there--laughing!
I heard that laughter, but could have sworn it did not come from him.
The empty, yawning patch gave out that sound.
Mr. Frene turned sideways, throwing up his arms. I saw his hard,
bleak face grow somehow wider, spread through the air, and downwards.
A similar thing, I saw, was happening at the same time to his
entire person, for it drew out into the atmosphere in a stream of
movement. The face for a second made me think of those toys of
green india-rubber that children pull. It grew enormous. But this
was an external impression only. What actually happened, I clearly
understood, was that all this vitality and life he had transferred from
others to himself for years was now in turn being taken from him and
transferred--elsewhere.
One moment on the edge he wobbled horribly, then with that queer
sideways motion, rapid yet ungainly, he stepped forward into the
middle of the patch and fell heavily upon his face. His eyes, as he
dropped, faded shockingly, and across the countenance was written
plainly what I can only call an expression of destruction. He looked
utterly destroyed. I caught a sound--from Jamie?--but this time not of
laughter. It was like a gulp; it was deep and muffled and it dipped
away into the earth. Again I thought of a troop of small black horses
galloping away down a subterranean passage beneath my feet--plunging
into the depths--their tramping growing fainter and fainter into buried
distance. In my nostrils was a pungent smell of earth.
* * * * *
And then--all passed. I came back into myself. Mr. Frene, junior, was
lifting his brother’s head from the lawn where he had fallen from
the heat, close beside the tea-table. He had never really moved from
there. And Jamie, I learned afterwards, had been the whole time asleep
upon his bed upstairs, worn out with his crying and unreasoning alarm.
Gladys came running out with cold water, sponge and towel, brandy
too--all kinds of things. ‘Mother, it _was_ the heat, wasn’t it?’ I
heard her whisper, but I did not catch Mrs. Frene’s reply. From her
face it struck me that she was bordering on collapse herself. Then the
butler followed, and they just picked him up and carried him into the
house. He recovered even before the doctor came.
But the queer thing to me is that I was convinced the others all had
seen what I saw, only that no one said a word about it; and to this day
no one _has_ said a word. And that was, perhaps, the most horrid part
of all.
From that day to this I have scarcely heard a mention of Mr. Frene,
senior. It seemed as if he dropped suddenly out of life. The papers
never mentioned him. His activities ceased, as it were. His after-life,
at any rate, became singularly ineffective. Certainly he achieved
nothing worth public mention. But it may be only that, having left the
employ of Mrs. Frene, there was no particular occasion for me to hear
anything.
The after-life of that empty patch of garden, however, was quite
otherwise. Nothing, so far as I know, was done to it by gardeners, or
in the way of draining it or bringing in new earth, but even before I
left in the following summer it had changed. It lay untouched, full of
great, luscious, driving weeds and creepers, very strong, full-fed, and
bursting thick with life.
SANDHILLS.
[Illustration]
CLAIRVOYANCE
[Illustration: CLAIRVOYANCE]
In the darkest corner, where the firelight could not reach him, he
sat listening to the stories. His young hostess occupied the corner
on the other side; she was also screened by shadows; and between them
stretched the horseshoe of eager, frightened faces that seemed all
eyes. Behind yawned the blackness of the big room, running as it were
without a break into the night.
Some one crossed on tiptoe and drew a blind up with a rattle, and at
the sound all started: through the window, opened at the top, came a
rustle of the poplar leaves that stirred like footsteps in the wind.
‘There’s a strange man walking past the shrubberies,’ whispered a
nervous girl; ‘I saw him crouch and hide. I saw his eyes!’ ‘Nonsense!’
came sharply from a male member of the group; ‘it’s far too dark to
see. You heard the wind.’ For mist had risen from the river just
below the lawn, pressing close against the windows of the old house
like a soft grey hand, and through it the stir of leaves was faintly
audible.... Then, while several called for lights, others remembered
that the hop-pickers were still about in the lanes, and the tramps
this autumn overbold and insolent. All, perhaps, wished secretly for
the sun. Only the elderly man in the corner sat quiet and unmoved,
contributing nothing. He had told no fearsome story. He had evaded,
indeed, many openings expressly made for him, though fully aware that
to his well-known interest in psychical things was partly due his
presence in the week-end party. ‘I never have experiences--that way,’
he said shortly when some one asked him point blank for a tale; ‘I
have no unusual powers.’ There was perhaps the merest hint of contempt
in his tone, but the hostess from her darkened corner quickly and
tactfully covered his retreat. And he wondered. For he knew why she
invited him. The haunted room, he was well aware, had been specially
allotted to him.
And then, most opportunely, the door opened noisily and the host came
in. He sniffed at the darkness, rang at once for lamps, puffed at
his big curved pipe, and generally, by his mere presence, made the
group feel rather foolish. Light streamed past him from the corridor.
His white hair shone like silver. And with him came the atmosphere
of common sense, of shooting, agriculture, motors, and the rest. Age
entered at that door. And his young wife sprang up instantly to greet
him, as though his disapproval of this kind of entertainment might need
humouring.
It may have been the light--that witchery of half-lights from the
fire and the corridor, or it may have been the abrupt entrance of
the Practical upon the soft Imaginative that traced the outline with
such pitiless, sharp conviction. At any rate, the contrast--for those
who had this inner clairvoyant sight all had been prating of so
glibly!--was unmistakably revealed. It was poignantly dramatic, pain
somewhere in it--naked pain. For, as she paused a moment there beside
him in the light, this childless wife of three years’ standing, picture
of youth and beauty, there stood upon the threshold of that room the
presence of a true ghost story.
And most marvellously she changed--her lineaments, her very figure, her
whole presentment. Etched against the gloom, the delicate, unmarked
face shone suddenly keen and anguished, and a rich maturity, deeper
than any mere age, flushed all her little person with its secret
grandeur. Lines started into being upon the pale skin of the girlish
face, lines of pleading, pity, and love the daylight did not show,
and with them an air of magic tenderness that betrayed, though for a
second only, the full soft glory of a motherhood denied, yet somehow
mysteriously enjoyed. About her slenderness rose all the deepbosomed
sweetness of maternity, a potential mother of the world, and a mother,
though she might know no dear fulfilment, who yet yearned to sweep into
her immense embrace all the little helpless things that ever lived.
Light, like emotion, can play strangest tricks. The change pressed
almost upon the edge of revelation.... Yet, when a moment later lamps
were brought, it is doubtful if any but the silent guest who had told
no marvellous tale, knew no psychical experience, and disclaimed the
smallest clairvoyant faculty, had received and registered the vivid,
poignant picture. For an instant it had flashed there, mercilessly
clear for all to see who were not blind to subtle spiritual wonder
thick with pain. And it was not so much mere picture of youth and age
ill-matched, as of youth that yearned with the oldest craving in the
world, and of age that had slipped beyond the power of sympathetically
divining it.... It passed, and all was as before.
The husband laughed with genial good-nature, not one whit annoyed.
‘They’ve been frightening you with stories, child,’ he said in his
jolly way, and put a protective arm about her. ‘Haven’t they now?
Tell me the truth. Much better,’ he added, ‘have joined me instead at
billiards, or for a game of Patience, eh?’ She looked up shyly into his
face, and he kissed her on the forehead. ‘Perhaps they have--a little,
dear,’ she said, ‘but now that you’ve come, I feel all right again.’
‘Another night of this,’ he added in a graver tone, ‘and you’d be at
your old trick of putting guests to sleep in the haunted room. I was
right after all, you see, to make it out of bounds.’ He glanced fondly,
paternally down upon her. Then he went over and poked the fire into a
blaze. Some one struck up a waltz on the piano, and couples danced.
All trace of nervousness vanished, and the butler presently brought
in the tray with drinks and biscuits. And slowly the group dispersed.
Candles were lit. They passed down the passage into the big hall,
talking in lowered voices of to-morrow’s plans. The laughter died away
as they went up the stairs to bed, the silent guest and the young wife
lingering a moment over the embers.
‘You have not, after all then, put me in your haunted room?’ he asked
quietly. ‘You mentioned, you remember, in your letter----’
‘I admit,’ she replied at once, her manner gracious beyond her years,
her voice quite different, ‘that I wanted you to sleep there--some one,
I mean, who really knows, and is not merely curious. But--forgive my
saying so--when I _saw_ you’--she laughed very slowly--‘and when you
told no marvellous story like the others, I somehow felt----’
‘But I never _see_ anything----’ he put in hurriedly.
‘You _feel_, though,’ she interrupted swiftly, the passionate
tenderness in her voice but half suppressed. ‘I can tell it from
your----’
‘Others, then,’ he interrupted abruptly, almost bluntly, ‘have slept
there--sat up, rather?’
‘Not recently. My husband stopped it.’ She paused a second, then added,
‘I had that room--for a year--when first we married.’
The other’s anguished look flew back upon her little face like a shadow
and was gone, while at the sight of it there rose in himself a sudden
deep rush of wonderful amazement beckoning almost towards worship. He
did not speak, for his voice would tremble.
‘I had to give it up,’ she finished, very low.
‘Was it so terrible?’ after a pause he ventured.
She bowed her head. ‘I had to change,’ she repeated softly.
‘And since then--_now_--you see nothing?’ he asked.
Her reply was singular. ‘Because I will not, not because it’s gone.’
... He followed her in silence to the door, and as they passed along
the passage, again that curious great pain of emptiness, of loneliness,
of yearning rose upon him, as of a sea that never, never can swim
beyond the shore to reach the flowers that it loves....
‘Hurry up, child, or a ghost will catch you,’ cried her husband,
leaning over the banisters, as the pair moved slowly up the stairs
towards him. There was a moment’s silence when they met. The guest took
his lighted candle and went down the corridor. Good-nights were said
again. They moved away, she to her loneliness, he to his un-haunted
room. And at his door he turned. At the far end of the passage,
silhouetted against the candle-light, he watched them--the fine old man
with his silvered hair and heavy shoulders, and the slim young wife
with that amazing air as of some great bountiful mother of the world
for whom the years yet passed hungry and unharvested. They turned the
corner, and he went in and closed his door.
Sleep took him very quickly, and while the mist rose up and veiled the
countryside, something else, veiled equally for all other sleepers in
that house but two, drew on towards its climax.... Some hours later he
awoke; the world was still, and it seemed the whole house listened; for
with that clear vision which some bring out of sleep, he remembered
that there had been no direct denial, and of a sudden realised that
this big, gaunt chamber where he lay was after all the haunted room.
For him, however, the entire world, not merely separate rooms in it,
was ever haunted; and he knew no terror to find the space about him
charged with thronging life quite other than his own.... He rose and
lit the candle, crossed over to the window where the mist shone grey,
knowing that no barriers of walls or door or ceiling could keep out
this host of Presences that poured so thickly everywhere about him.
It was like a wall of being, with peering eyes, small hands stretched
out, a thousand pattering wee feet, and tiny voices crying in a chorus
very faintly and beseeching.... The haunted room! Was it not, rather,
a temple vestibule, prepared and sanctified by yearning rites few men
might ever guess, for all the childless women of the world? How could
she know that _he_ would understand--this woman he had seen but twice
in all his life? And how entrust to him so great a mystery that was her
secret? Had she so easily divined in him a similar yearning to which,
long years ago, death had denied fulfilment? Was she clairvoyant in the
true sense, and did all faces bear on them so legibly this great map
that sorrow traced?...
And then, with awful suddenness, mere feelings dipped away, and
something concrete happened. The handle of the door had faintly
rattled. He turned. The round brass knob was slowly moving. And first,
at the sight, something of common fear did grip him, as though his
heart had missed a beat, but on the instant he heard the voice of his
own mother, now long beyond the stars, calling to him to go softly yet
with speed. He watched a moment the feeble efforts to undo the door,
yet never afterwards could swear that he saw actual movement, for
something in him, tragic as blindness, rose through a mist of tears and
darkened vision utterly....
He went towards the door. He took the handle very gently, and very
softly then he opened it. Beyond was darkness. He saw the empty
passage, the edge of the banisters where the great hall yawned below,
and, dimly, the outline of the Alpine photograph and the stuffed deer’s
head upon the wall. And then he dropped upon his knees and opened wide
his arms to something that came in upon uncertain, viewless feet. All
the young winds and flowers and dews of dawn passed with it ... filling
him to the brim ... covering closely his breast and eyes and lips.
There clung to him all the small beginnings of life that cannot stand
alone ... the little helpless hands and arms that have no confidence
... and when the wealth of tears and love that flooded his heart
seemed to break upon the frontiers of some mysterious yet impossible
fulfilment, he rose and went with curious small steps towards the
window to taste the cooling, misty air of that other dark Emptiness
that waited so patiently there above the entire world. He drew the
sash up. The air felt soft and tender as though there were somewhere
children in it too--children of stars and flowers, of mists and wings
and music, all that the Universe contains unborn and tiny.... And when
at length he turned again the door was closed. The room was empty of
any life but that which lay so wonderfully blessed within himself. And
this, he felt, had marvellously increased and multiplied....
Sleep then came back to him, and in the morning he left the house
before the others were astir, pleading some overlooked engagement. For
he had seen Ghosts indeed, but yet not ghosts that he could talk about
with others round an open fire.
THE LAVENDER ROOM.
[Illustration]
THE GOLDEN FLY
[Illustration: THE GOLDEN FLY]
It fell upon him out of a clear sky just when existence seemed on
its very best behaviour, and he savagely resented the undeserved
affliction of it. Involving him in an atrocious scandal that reflected
directly upon his honour, it destroyed in a moment the erection his
entire life had so laboriously built up--his reputation. In the eyes
of the world he was a broken, discredited man, at the very moment,
moreover, when his most cherished ambitions touched fulfilment. And
the cruelty of it appalled his sense of justice, for it was impossible
to vindicate himself without inculpating others who were dearer to
him than life. It seemed more than he could bear; and the grim course
he contemplated--decision itself as yet hung darkly waiting in the
background--appeared the only way of escape that offered.
He had discussed the matter with friends until his brain whirled. Their
sympathy maddened him, with hints of _qui s’excuse s’accuse_, and
he turned at last in desperation to something that could not answer
back. For the first time in his life he turned to Nature--to that
dead, inanimate Nature he had left to poets and rhapsodising women:
‘I must face it alone,’ he put it. For the Finger of God was a phrase
without meaning to him, and his entire being contained no trace of
the religious instinct. He was a business man, honest, selfish, and
ambitious; and the collapse of his worldly position was paramount to
the collapse of the universe itself--his universe, at any rate. This
‘crumbling of the universe’ was the thought he took out with him. He
left the house by the path that led into solitude, and reached the
heathery expanse that formed one of the breathing-places of the New
Forest. There he flung himself down wearily in the shadow of a little
pine-copse. And his crumbled universe lay down with him, for he could
not escape it.
Taking the pistol from the hip-pocket where it hurt him, he lay upon
his back and watched the clouds. Half stunned, half dazed, he stared
into the sky. The perfumed wind played softly on his eyes; he smelt
the heather-honey; golden flies hung motionless in the air, like
coloured pins fastening the sunshine against the blue curtain of the
summer, while dragon-flies, like darting shuttles, wove across its
pattern their threads of gleaming bronze. He heard the petulant crying
of the peewits, and watched their tumbling flight. Below him tinkled
a rivulet, its brown water rippling between banks of peaty earth.
Everywhere was singing, peace, and careless unconcern.
And this lordly indifference of Nature calmed and soothed him.
Neither human pain nor the injustice of man could shift the key of
the water, alter the peewits’ cry a single tone, nor influence one
fraction of an inch those cloudy frigates of vapour that sailed the
sky. The earth bulged sunwards as she had bulged for centuries. The
power of her steady gait, superbly calm, breathed everywhere with
grandeur--undismayed, unhasting, and supremely confident.... And, like
the flash of those golden flies, there leaped suddenly upon him this
vivid thought: that his world of agony lay neatly buttoned up within
the tiny space of his own brain. Outside himself it had no existence at
all. His mind contained it--the minute interior he called his heart.
From this vaster world about him it lay utterly apart, like deeds in
the black boxes of japanned tin he kept at the office, shut off from
the universe, huddled in an overcrowded space within his skull.
How this commonplace thought reached him, garbed in such startling
novelty, was odd enough; for it seemed as though the fierceness of his
pain had burned away something. His thoughts it merely enflamed; but
this other thing it consumed. Something that had obscured clear vision
shrivelled before it as a piece of paper, eaten up by fire, dwindles
down into a thimbleful of unimportant ashes. The thicket of his mind
grew half transparent. At the farther end he saw, for the first
time--light. The perspective of his inner life, hitherto so enormous,
telescoped into the proportions of a miniature. Just as momentous
and significant as before, it was somehow abruptly different--seen
from another point of view. The suffering had burned up rubbish he
himself had piled over the head of a little Fact. Like a point of
metal that glows yet will not burn, he discerned in the depths of him
the essential shining fact that not all this ruinous conflagration
could destroy. And this brilliant, indestructible kernel was--his
Innocence. The rest was self-reared rubbish: opinion of the world. He
had magnified an atom into a universe....
Pain, as it seemed, had cleared a way for the sublimity of Nature to
approach him. The calm old Universe rolled past. The deep, majestic Day
gave him a push, as though the shoulder of some star had brushed his
own. He had thought his feelings were the world: instead, they were
merely his way of looking at it. The actual ‘world’ was some glorious,
unchanging thing he never saw direct. His attitude of mind was but a
peephole into it. The choice of his particular peephole, moreover, lay
surely within the power of his individual will. The anguish, centred
upon so small a point, had seemed to affect the entire spread universe
around him, whereas in reality it affected nothing but his attitude of
mind towards it. The truism struck him like a blow between the eyes,
that a man is what he thinks or feels himself to be. It leaped the
barrier between words and meaning. The intellectual concept became a
hard-edged fact, because he realised it--for the first time in his
very circumscribed life. And this dreadful pain that had made even
suicide seem desirable was entirely a fabrication of his own mind.
The universe about him rolled on just the same in the majesty of its
eternal purpose. His tiny inner world was clouded, but the glory of
this stupendous world about him was undimmed, untroubled, unaffected.
Even death itself....
With a swift smash of the hand he crushed the golden fly that settled
on his knee. The murder was done impulsively, utterly without
intention. He watched the little point of gold quiver for a moment
among the hairs of the rough tweed; then lie still for ever ... but
the scent of heather-honey filled the air as before; the wind passed
sighing through the pines; the clouds still sailed their uncharted
sea of blue. There lay the whole spread surface of the Forest in the
sun. Only the attitude of the golden fly towards it all was gone. A
single, tiny point of view had disappeared. Nature passed on calmly and
unhasting; she took no note.
Then, with a rush of awe, another thought flashed through him: Nature
_had_ taken note. There was a difference everywhere. Not a sparrow
falleth, he remembered, without God knowing. God was certainly in
Nature somewhere. His clumsy senses could not register this difference,
yet it was there. His own small world, fed by these senses, was after
all the merest little corner of Existence. To the whole of Existence,
that included himself, the golden fly, the sun, and all the stars, he
must somehow answer for his crime. It was a wanton interference with
a sublime and sovereign Purpose that he now divined for the first
time. He looked at the wee point of gold lying still and silent in the
forest of hairs. He realised the enormity of his act. It could not
have been graver had he put out the sun, or the little, insignificant
flame of his own existence. He had done a criminal, evil thing, for
he had put an end to a certain point of view; had wiped it out; made
it impossible. Had the fly been quicker, less easily overwhelmed,
or more tenacious of the scrap of universal life it used, Nature
would at this instant be richer for its little contribution to the
whole of things--to which he himself also belonged. And wherein, he
asked himself, did he differ from that fly in the importance, the
significance of his contribution to the universe? The soul...? He had
never given the question a single thought; but if the scrap of life
he owned was called a soul, why should that point of golden glory not
comprise one too? Its minute size, its trivial purpose, its few hours
of apparently futile existence ... these formed no true criterion...!
Similarly, the thought rushed over him, a Hand was being stretched out
to crush himself. His pain was the shadow of its approach; anger in his
heart, the warning. Unless he were quick enough, adroit and skilled
enough, he also would be wiped out, while Nature continued her slow,
unhasting way without him. His attitude towards the personal pain was
really the test of his ability, of his merit--of his right to survive.
Pain teaches, pain develops, pain brings growth: he had heard it since
his copybook days. But now he realised it, as again thought leaped the
barrier between familiar words and meaning. In his attitude of mind to
his catastrophe lay his salvation or his ... death.
In some such confused and blundering fashion, because along
unaccustomed channels, the truth charged into him to overwhelm, yet
bringing with it an unwonted sense of joy that seemed to break a crust
which long had held back--life. Thus tapped, these sources gushed forth
and bubbled over, spread about his being, flooded him with hope and
courage, above all with--calmness. Nature held forces just as real and
living as human sympathy, and equally able to modify the soul. And
Nature was always accessible. A sense of huge companionship, denied
him by the littleness of his fellow-men, stole sweetly over him. It
was amazingly uplifting, yet fear came close behind it, as he realised
the presumption of his former attitude of cynical indifference. These
Powers were aware of his petty insolence, yet had not crushed him....
It was, of course, the awakening of the religious instinct in a man who
hitherto had worshipped merely a rather low-grade form of intellect.
And, while the enormous confusion of it shook him, this sense of
incommunicable sweetness remained. Bright haunting eyes, with love in
them, gazed at him from the blue; and this thing that came so close,
stood also far away upon the line of the horizon. It was everywhere.
It filled the hollows, but towered over him as well towards the
pinnaces of cloud. It was in the sharpness of the peewits’ cry, and
in the water’s murmur. It whispered in the pine-boughs, and blazed
in every patch of sunlight. And it was glory, pure and simple. It
filled him with a sense of strength for which he could find but one
description--Triumph.
And so, first, the anger faded from his mind and crept away. Resentment
then slunk after it. Revolt and disappointment also melted, and
bitterness gave place to the most marvellous peace the man had ever
known. Then came resignation to fill the empty places. Pain, as a
means and not an end, had cleared the way, though the accomplishment
was like a miracle. But Conversion _is_ a miracle. No ordinary pain
can bring it. This anguish he understood now in a new relation to
life--as something to be taken willingly into himself and dealt with,
all regardless of public opinion. What people said and thought was in
their world, not in his. It was less than nothing. The pain cultivated
dormant tracts. The terror also purged. It disclosed....
He watched the wind, and even the wind brought revelation; for without
obstacles in its path it would be silent. He watched the sunshine,
and the sunshine taught him too; for without obstacles to fling it
back against his eye, he could never see it. He would neither hear
the tinkling water nor feel the summer heat unless both one and other
overcame some reluctant medium in their pathways. And, similarly with
his moral being--his pain resulted from the friction of his personal
ambitions against the stress of some noble Power that sought to lift
him higher. That Power he could not know direct, but he recognised its
strain against him by the resistance it generated in the inertia of his
selfishness. His attitude of mind had switched completely round. It was
what the preachers termed development through suffering.
Moreover, he had acquired this energy of resistance somehow from the
wind and sun and the beauty of a common summer’s day. Their peace and
strength had passed into himself. Unconsciously on his way home he drew
upon it steadily. He tossed the pistol into a pool of water. Nature had
healed him; and Nature, should he turn weak again, was always there. It
was very wonderful. He wanted to sing....
BREAMORE.
[Illustration]
SPECIAL DELIVERY
[Illustration: SPECIAL DELIVERY]
Meiklejohn, the curate, was walking through the Jura when this thing
happened to him. There is only his word to vouch for it, for the inn
and its proprietor are now both of the past, and the local record of
the occurrence has long since assumed the proportions of a picturesque
but inaccurate legend. As a true story, however, it stands out from
those of its kidney by the fact that there seems to have been a
deliberate intention in it. It saved a life--a life the world had need
of. And this singular rescue of a man of value to the best order of
things makes one feel that there was some sense, even logic, in the
affair.
Moreover, Meiklejohn asserts that it was the only psychic experience he
ever knew. Things of the sort were not a ‘habit’ with him. His rescue,
thus, was not one of those meaningless interventions that puzzle the
man in the street while they exhilarate the psychologist. It was a
deliberate and very determined affair.
Meiklejohn found himself that hot August night in one of the valleys
that slip like blue shadows hidden among pine-woods between the Swiss
frontier and France. He had passed Ste. Croix earlier in the day; Les
Rasses had been left behind about four o’clock; Buttes, and the Val de
Travers, where the cement of many a London street comes from, was his
goal. But the light failed long before he reached it, and he stopped
at an inn that appeared unexpectedly round a corner of the dusty road,
built literally against the great cliffs that formed one wall of the
valley. He was so footsore, and his knapsack so heavy, that he turned
in without more ado.
Le Guillaume Tell was the name of the inn--dirty white walls, with
thin, almost mangy vines scrambling over the door, and the stream
brawling beneath shuttered windows with green and white stripes all
patched by sun and rain. His room was sevenpence, his dinner of soup,
omelette, fruit, cheese, and coffee, a franc. The prices suited his
pocket and made him feel comfortable and at home. Immediately behind
the hotel--the only house visible, except the sawmill across the road,
rose the ever-crumbling ridges and precipices that formed the flanks
of Chasseront and ran on past La Sagne towards the grey Aiguilles de
Baulmes. He was in the Jura fastnesses where tourists rarely penetrate.
Through the low doorway of the inn he carried with him the strong
atmosphere of thoughts that had accompanied him all day--dreams of
how he intended to spend his life, plans of sacrifice and effort.
For his hopes of great achievement, even then at twenty-five, were
a veritable passion in him, and his desire to spend himself for
humanity a devouring flame. So occupied, indeed, was his mind with the
emotions belonging to this line of thinking, that he hardly noticed
the singular, though exceedingly faint, sense of alarm that stirred
somewhere in the depths of his being as he passed within that doorway
where the drooping vine-leaves clutched at his hat. He remembered
it a little later. The sense of danger had been touched in him. He
felt at the moment only a hint of discomfort, too vague to claim
definite recognition. Yet it was there--the instant he stepped within
the threshold--and afterwards he distinctly recalled its sudden and
unaccountable advent.
His bedroom, though stuffy, as from windows long unopened, was clean;
carpetless, of course, and primitive, with white pine floor and walls,
and the short bed, smothered under its duvet, very creaky. And very
short! For Meiklejohn was well over six feet.
‘I shall have to curl up, as usual, in a knot,’ was his reflection as
he measured the bed with his eye; ‘though to-night I think--after my
twenty miles in this air----’
The thought refused to complete itself. He was going to add that he was
tired enough to have slept on a stone floor, but for some undefined
reason the same sense of alarm that had tapped him on the shoulder as
he entered the inn returned now when he contemplated the bed. A sharp
repugnance for that bed, as sudden and unaccountable as it was curious,
swept into him--and was gone again before he had time to seize it
wholly. It was in reality so slight that he dismissed it immediately
as the merest fancy; yet, at the same time, he was aware that he would
rather have slept on another bed, had there been one in the room--and
then the queer feeling that, after all, perhaps, he would _not_ sleep
there in the end at all. How this idea came to him he never knew. He
records it, however, as part of the occurrence.
After eight o’clock a few peasants, and workmen from the sawmill,
came in to drink their _demi-litre_ of red wine in the common room
downstairs, to stare at the unexpected guest, and to smoke their vile
tobacco. They were neither picturesque nor amusing--simply dirty and
slightly malodorous. At nine o’clock Meiklejohn knocked the ashes from
his briar pipe upon the limestone window-ledge, and went upstairs,
overpowered with sleep. The sense of alarm had utterly disappeared; his
mind was busy once more with his great dreams of the future--dreams
that materialised themselves, as all the world knows, in the famous
Meiklejohn Institutes....
Berthoud, the proprietor, short and sturdy, with his faded brown coat
and no collar, slightly confused with red wine and a ‘tourist’ guest,
showed him the way up. For, of course, there was no _femme de chambre_.
‘You have the corridor all to yourself,’ the man said; showed him
the best corner of the landing to shout from in case he wanted
anything--there being no bell--eyed his boots, knapsack, and flask with
considerable curiosity, wished him good-night, and was gone. He went
downstairs with a noise like a horse, thought the curate, as he locked
the door after him.
The windows had been open now for a couple of hours, and the room smelt
sweet with the odours of sawn wood and shavings, the resinous perfume
of the surrounding hosts of pines, and the sharp, delicate touch of
a lonely mountain valley where civilisation has not yet tainted the
air. Whiffs of coarse tobacco, pungent without being offensive, came
invisibly through the cracks of the floor. Primitive and simple it all
was--a sort of vigorous ‘backwoods’ atmosphere. Yet, once again, as he
turned to examine the room after Berthoud’s steps had blundered down
below into the passage, something rose faintly within him to set his
nerves mysteriously a-quiver.
Out of these perfectly simple conditions, without the least apparent
cause, the odd feeling again came over him that he was--in danger.
The curate was not much given to analysis. He was a man of action
pure and simple, as a rule. But to-night, in spite of himself, his
thoughts went plunging, searching, asking. For this singular message of
dread that emanated as it were from the room, or from some article of
furniture in the room perhaps--that bed still touched his mind with a
peculiar repugnance--demanded somewhat insistently for an explanation.
And the only explanation that suggested itself to his unimaginative
mind was that the forces of nature hereabouts were--overpowering;
that, after the slum streets and factory chimneys of the last twelve
months, these towering cliffs and smothering pine-forests communicated
to his soul a word of grandeur that amounted to awe. Inadequate and
far-fetched as the explanation seems, it was the only one that occurred
to him; and its value in this remarkable adventure lies in the fact
that he connected his sense of danger partly with the bed and partly
with the mountains.
‘I felt once or twice,’ he said afterwards, ‘as though some powerful
agency of a spiritual kind were all the time trying to beat into my
stupid brain a message of warning.’ And this way of expressing it is
more true and graphic than many paragraphs of attempted analysis.
Meiklejohn hung his clothes by the open window to air, washed, read
his Bible, looked several times over his shoulder without apparent
cause, and then knelt down to pray. He was a simple and devout soul;
his Self lost in the yearning, young but sincere, to live for humanity.
He prayed, as usual, with intense earnestness that his life might be
preserved for use in the world, when in the middle of his prayer--there
came a knocking at the door.
Hastily rising from his knees, he opened. The sound of rushing water
filled the corridor. He heard the voices of the workmen below in
the drinking-room. But only darkness stood in the passages, filling
the house to the very brim. No one was there. He returned to his
interrupted devotions.
‘I imagined it,’ he said to himself. He continued his prayers,
however, longer than usual. At the back of his thoughts, dim, vague,
half-defined only, lay this lurking sense of uneasiness--that he was in
danger. He prayed earnestly and simply, as a child might pray, for the
preservation of his life....
Again, just as he prepared to get into bed, struggling to make the
heaped-up duvet spread all over, came that knocking at the bedroom
door. It was soft, wonderfully soft, and something within him thrilled
curiously in response. He crossed the floor to open--then hesitated.
Suddenly he understood that that knocking at the door was connected
with the sense of danger in his heart. In the region of subtle
intuitions the two were linked. With this realisation there came over
him, he declares, a singular mood in which, as in a revelation, he knew
that Nature held forces that might somehow communicate directly and
positively with--human beings. This thought rushed upon him out of the
night, as it were. It arrested his movements. He stood there upon the
bare pine boards, hesitating to open the door.
The delay thus described lasted actually only a few seconds, but in
those few seconds these thoughts tore rapidly and like fire through his
mind. The beauty of this lost and mysterious valley was certainly in
his veins. He felt the strange presence of the encircling forests, soft
and splendid, their million branches sighing in the night airs. The
crying of the falling water touched him. He longed to transfer their
peace and power to the hearts of suffering thousands of men and women
and children. The towering precipices that literally dropped their
pale walls over the roof of the inn lifted his thoughts to their own
wind-swept heights; he longed to convey their message of inflexible
strength to the weak-kneed folk in the slums where he worked. He was
peculiarly conscious of the presence of these forces of Nature--the
irresistible powers that regenerate as easily as they destroy.
All this, and far more, swept his soul like a huge wind as he stood
there, waiting to open the door in answer to that mysterious soft
knocking.
And there, when at length he opened, stood the figure of a man--staring
at him and smiling.
Disappointment seized him instantly. He had expected, almost believed,
that he would see something un-ordinary; and instead, there stood a man
who had merely mistaken the door of his room, and was now bowing his
apology for the interruption. Then, to his amazement, he saw that the
man beckoned: the figure was some one who sought to draw him out.
‘Come with me,’ it seemed to say.
But Meiklejohn only realised this afterwards, he says, when it was too
late and he had already shut the door in the stranger’s face. For the
man had withdrawn into the darkness a little, and the curate had taken
the movement for a mere acknowledgment of his mistake instead of--as he
afterwards felt--a sign that he should follow.
‘And the moment the door was shut,’ he says, ‘I felt that it would have
been better for me to have gone out into the passage to see what he
wanted. It came over me that the man had something important to say to
me. I had missed it.’
For some seconds, it seemed, he resisted the inclination to go after
him. He argued with himself; then turned to his bed, pulled back the
sheets and heavy duvet, and was met sharply again with the sense of
repugnance, almost of fear, as before. It leaped out upon him--as
though the drawing back of the blankets had set free some cold blast of
wind that struck him across the face and made him shiver.
At the same moment a shadow fell from behind his shoulder and dropped
across the pillow and upper half of the bed. It may, of course, have
been the magnified shadow of the moth that buzzed about the pale-yellow
electric light in the ceiling. He does not pretend to know. It passed
swiftly, however, and was gone; and Meiklejohn, feeling less sure
of himself than ever before in his life, crossed the floor quickly,
almost running, and opened the door to go after the man who had
knocked--twice. For in reality less than half a minute had passed since
the shutting of the door and its reopening.
But the corridor was empty. He marched down the pine-board floor for
some considerable distance. Below he saw the glimmer of the hall, and
heard the voices of the peasants and workmen from the sawmill as they
still talked and drank their red wine in the public room. That sound
of falling water, as before, filled the air. Darkness reigned. But
the person--the _messenger_--who had twice knocked at his door was
gone utterly.... Presently a door opened downstairs, and the peasants
clattered out noisily. He turned and went back to bed. The electric
light was switched off below. Silence fell. Conquering his strange
repugnance, Meiklejohn, with a prayer on his lips, got into bed, and in
less than ten minutes was sound asleep.
‘I admit,’ he says, in telling the story, ‘that what happened
afterwards came so swiftly and so confusingly, yet with such a storm
of overwhelming conviction of its reality, that its sequence may be
somewhat blurred in my memory, while, at the same time, I see it after
all these years as though it was a thing of yesterday. But in my
sleep, first of all, I again heard that soft, mysterious tapping--not
in the course of a dream of any sort, but sudden and alone out of the
dark blank of forgetfulness. I tried to wake. At first, however, the
bonds of unconsciousness held me tight. I had to struggle in order
to return to the waking world. There was a distinct effort before I
opened my eyes; and in that slight interval I became aware that the
person who had knocked at the door had meanwhile opened it and passed
into the room. I had left the lock unturned. The person was close
beside me in the darkness--not in utter darkness, however, for a rising
three-quarter moon shed its faint silver upon the floor in patches,
and, as I sprang swiftly from the bed, I noticed something alive
moving towards me across the carpetless boards. Upon the edges of a
patch of moonlight, where the fringe of silver and shadow mingled, it
stopped. Three feet away from it I, too, stopped, shaking in every
muscle. It lay there crouching at my very feet, staring up at me. But
was it man or was it animal? For at first I took it certainly for a
human being on all fours; but the next moment, with a spasm of genuine
terror that half stopped my breath, it was borne in upon me that the
creature was--nothing human. Only in this way can I describe it. It was
identical with the human figure who had knocked before and beckoned to
me to follow, but it was another presentation of that figure.
‘And it held (or brought, if you will) some tremendous message for
me--some message of tremendous importance, I mean. The first time I
had argued, resisted, refused to listen. Now it had returned in a form
that ensured obedience. Some quite terrific power emanated from it--a
power that I understood instinctively belonged to the mountains and the
forests and the untamed elemental forces of Nature. Amazing as it may
sound in cold blood, I can only say that I felt as though the towering
precipices outside had sent me a direct warning--that my life was in
immediate danger.
‘For a space that seemed minutes, but was probably less than a few
seconds, I stood there trembling on the bare boards, my eyes riveted
upon the dark, uncouth shape that covered all the floor beyond. I saw
no limbs or features, no suggestion of outline that I could connect
with any living form I know, animate or inanimate. Yet it moved and
stirred all the time--_whirled within itself_, describes it best;
and into my mind sprang a picture of an immense dark wheel, turning,
spinning, whizzing so rapidly that it appears motionless, and uttering
that low and ominous thunder that fills a great machinery-room of a
factory. Then I thought of Ezekiel’s vision of the Living Wheels....
‘And it must have been at this instant, I think, that the muttering and
deep note that issued from it formed itself into words within me. At
any rate, I heard a voice that spoke with unmistakable intelligence:
‘“Come!” it said. “Come out--at once!” And the sense of power that
accompanied the Voice was so splendid that my fear vanished and I
obeyed instantly without thinking more. I followed; it led. It altered
in shape. The door _was_ open. It ran silently in a form that was
more like a stream of deep black water than anything else I can think
of--out of the room, down the stairs, across the hall, and up to the
deep shadows that lay against the door leading into the road. There I
lost sight of it.’
Meiklejohn’s only desire, he says, then was to rush after it--to
escape. This he did. He understood that somehow it had passed through
the door into the open air. Ten seconds later, perhaps even less,
he, too, was in the open air. He acted almost automatically; reason,
reflection, logic all swept away. Nowhere, however, in the soft
moonlight about him was any sign of the extraordinary apparition that
had succeeded in drawing him out of the inn, out of his bedroom, out
of his--bed. He stared in a dazed way at everything--just beginning to
get control of his faculties a bit--wondering what in the world it all
meant. That huge spinning form, he felt convinced, lay hidden somewhere
close beside him, waiting for the end. The danger it had enabled him to
avoid was close at hand.... He _knew_ that, he says....
There lay the meadows, touched here and there with wisps of floating
mist; the stream roared and tumbled down its rocky bed to his left;
across the road the sawmill lifted its skeleton-like outline, moonlight
shining on the dew-covered shingles of the roof, its lower part hidden
in shadow. The cold air of the valley was exquisitely scented.
To the right, where his eye next wandered, he saw the thick black
woods rising round the base of the precipices that soared into the
sky, sheeted with silvery moonlight. His gaze ran up them to the far
ridges that seemed to push the very stars farther into the heavens.
Then, as he saw those stars crowding the night, he staggered suddenly
backwards, seizing the wall of the road for support, and catching his
breath. For the top of the cliff, he fancied, moved. A group of stars
was for a fraction of a second--hidden. The earth--the scenery of the
valley, at least--turned about him. Something prodigious was happening
to the solid structure of the world. The precipices seemed to bend over
upon the valley. The far, uppermost ridge of those beetling cliffs
shifted downwards. Meiklejohn declares that the way its movement hid
momentarily a group of stars was the most startling--for some reason
horrible--thing he had ever witnessed.
Then came the roar and crash and thunder as the mass toppled, slid,
and finally--took the frightful plunge. How long the forces of rain
and frost had been chiselling out the slow detachment of the giant
slabs that fell, or whence came the particular extra little push that
drove the entire mass out from the parent rock, no one can know. Only
one thing is certain: that it was due to no chance, but to the nicely
and exactly calculated results of balanced cause and effect. From the
beginning of time it had been known--it might have been accurately
calculated, rather--that this particular thousand tons of rock would
break away from the crumbling tops of the precipices and crash
downwards with the roar of many tempests into the lost and mysterious
mountain valley where Meiklejohn the curate spent such and such a
night of such and such a holiday. It was just as sure as the return of
Halley’s comet.
‘I watched it,’ he says, ‘because I couldn’t do anything else. I would
far rather have run--I was so frightfully close to it all--but I
couldn’t move a muscle. And in a few seconds it was over. A terrific
wind knocked me backwards against the stone wall; there was a vast
clattering of smaller stones, set rolling down the neighbouring
couloirs; a steady roll of echoes ran thundering up and down the
valley; and then all was still again exactly as it had been before. And
the curious thing was--ascertained a little later, as you may imagine,
and not at once--that the inn, being so closely built up against the
cliffs, had almost entirely escaped. The great mass of rock and trees
had taken a leap farther out, and filled the meadows, blocked the road,
crushed the sawmill like a matchbox, and dammed up the stream; but the
inn itself was almost untouched.
‘_Almost_--for a single block of limestone, about the size of a grand
piano, had dropped straight upon one corner of the roof and smashed
its way through my bedroom, carrying everything it contained down to
the level of the cellar, so terrific was the momentum of its crushing
journey. Not a stick of the furniture was afterwards discoverable--as
such. The bed seems to have been caught by the very middle of the
fallen mass.’
The confusion in Meiklejohn’s mind may be imagined--the rush of feeling
and emotion that swept over him. Berthoud and the peasants mustered in
less than a dozen minutes, talking, crying, praying. Then the stream,
dammed up by the accumulation of rock, carried off the debris of the
broken roof and walls in less than half an hour. The rock, however,
that swept the room and the _empty_ bed of Meiklejohn the curate into
dust, still lies in the valley where it fell.
‘The only other thing that I remember,’ he says, in telling the story,
‘is that, as I stood there, shaking with excitement and the painful
terror of it all, before Berthoud and the peasants had come to count
over their number and learn that no one was missing--while I stood
there, leaning against the wall of the road, something rose out of the
white dust at my feet, and, with a noise like the whirring of some
immense projectile, passed swiftly and invisibly away up into space--so
far as I could judge, towards the distant ridges that reared their
motionless outline in moonlight beneath the stars.’
NOIRVAUX.
[Illustration]
THE DESTRUCTION OF SMITH
[Illustration: THE DESTRUCTION OF SMITH]
Ten years ago, in the western States of America, I once met Smith.
But he was no ordinary member of the clan: he was Ezekiel B. Smith of
Smithville. He _was_ Smithville, for he founded it and made it live.
It was in the oil region, where towns spring up on the map in a few
days like mushrooms, and may be destroyed again in a single night by
fire and earthquake. On a hunting expedition Smith stumbled upon a
natural oil well, and instantly staked his claim; a few months later he
was rich, grown into affluence as rapidly as that patch of wilderness
grew into streets and houses where you could buy anything from an
evening’s gambling to a tin of Boston baked pork-and-beans. Smith was
really a tremendous fellow, a sort of human dynamo of energy and pluck,
with rare judgment in his great square head--the kind of judgment that
in higher walks of life makes statesmen. His personality cut through
the difficulties of life with the clean easy force of putting his whole
life into anything he touched. ‘God’s own luck,’ his comrades called
it; but really it was sheer ability and character and personality. The
man had power.
From the moment of that ‘oil find’ his rise was very rapid, but while
his brains went into a dozen other big enterprises, his heart remained
in little Smithville, the flimsy mushroom town he had created. His own
life was in it. It was his baby. He spoke tenderly of its hideousness.
Smithville was an intimate expression of his very self.
Ezekiel B. Smith I saw once only, for a few minutes; but I have
never forgotten him. It was the moment of his death. And we came
across him on a shooting trip where the forests melt away towards the
vast plains of the Arizona desert. The personality of the man was
singularly impressive. I caught myself thinking of a mountain, or of
some elemental force of Nature so sure of itself that hurry is never
necessary. And his gentleness was like the gentleness of women. Great
strength often--the greatest always--has tenderness in it, a depth of
tenderness unknown to pettier life.
Our meeting was coincidence, for we were hunting in a region where
distances are measured by hours and the chance of running across white
men very rare. For many days our nightly camps were pitched in spots of
beauty where the loneliness is akin to the loneliness of the Egyptian
Desert. On one side the mountain slopes were smothered with dense
forest, hiding wee meadows of sweet grass like English lawns; and on
the other side, stretching for more miles than a man can count, ran the
desolate alkali plains of Arizona where tufts of sage-brush are the
only vegetation till you reach the lips of the Colorado Canyons. Our
horses were tethered for the night beneath the stars. Two backwoodsmen
were cooking dinner. The smell of bacon over a wood fire mingled
with the keen and fragrant air--when, suddenly, the horses neighed,
signalling the approach of one of their own kind. Indians, white
men--probably another hunting party--were within scenting distance,
though it was long before my city ears caught any sound, and still
longer before the cause itself entered the circle of our firelight.
I saw a square-faced man, tanned like a redskin, in a hunting shirt and
a big sombrero, climb down slowly from his horse and move towards us,
keenly searching with his eyes; and at the same moment Hank, looking up
from the frying-pan where the bacon and venison spluttered in a pool of
pork-fat, exclaimed, ‘Why, it’s Ezekiel B.!’ The next words, addressed
to Jake, who held the kettle, were below his breath: ‘And if he ain’t
all broke up! Jest look at the eyes on him!’ I saw what he meant--the
face of a human being distraught by some extraordinary emotion, a soul
in violent distress, yet betrayal well kept under. Once, as a newspaper
man, I had seen a murderer walk to the electric chair. The expression
was similar. Death was _behind_ the eyes, not in them. Smith brought in
with him--terror.
In a dozen words we learned he had been hunting for some weeks, but
was now heading for Tranter, a ‘stop-off’ station where you could flag
the daily train 140 miles south-west. He was making for Smithville,
the little town that was the apple of his eye. Something ‘was wrong’
with Smithville. No one asked him what--it is the custom to wait
till information is volunteered. But Hank, helping him presently to
venison (which he hardly touched), said casually, ‘Good hunting, Boss,
your way?’; and the brief reply told much, and proved how eager he
was to relieve his mind by speech. ‘I’m glad to locate your camp,
boys,’ he said. ‘That’s luck. There’s something going wrong’--and
a catch came into his voice--‘with Smithville.’ Behind the laconic
statement emerged somehow the terror the man experienced. For Smith
to confess cowardice and in the same breath admit mere ‘luck,’ was
equivalent to the hysteria that makes city people laugh or cry. It was
genuinely dramatic. I have seen nothing more impressive by way of human
tragedy--though hard to explain why--than this square-jawed, dauntless
man, sitting there with the firelight on his rugged features, and
saying this simple thing. For how in the world could he know it----?
In the pause that followed, his Indians came gliding in, tethered the
horses, and sat down without a word to eat what Hank distributed. But
nothing was to be read on their impassive faces. Redskins, whatever
they may feel, show little. Then Smith gave us another pregnant
sentence. ‘_They_ heard it too,’ he said, in a lower voice, indicating
his three men; ‘they saw it jest as I did.’ He looked up into the
starry sky a second. ‘It’s hard upon our trail right now,’ he added, as
though he expected something to drop upon us from the heavens. And from
that moment I swear we all felt creepy. The darkness round our lonely
camp hid terror in its folds; the wind that whispered through the dry
sage-brush brought whispers and the shuffle of watching figures; and
when the Indians went softly out to pitch the tents and get more wood
for the fire, I remember feeling glad the duty was not mine. Yet this
feeling of uneasiness is something one rarely experiences in the open.
It belongs to houses, overwrought imaginations, and the presence of
evil men. Nature gives peace and security. That we all felt it proves
how real it was. And Smith, who felt it most, of course, had brought it.
‘There’s something gone wrong with Smithville’ was an ominous statement
of disaster. He said it just as a man in civilised lands might say, ‘My
wife is dying; a telegram’s just come. I must take the train.’ But
how he felt so sure of it, a thousand miles away in this uninhabited
corner of the wilderness, made us feel curiously uneasy. For it was an
incredible thing--yet true. We all felt _that_. Smith did not imagine
things. A sense of gloomy apprehension settled over our lonely camp,
as though things were about to happen. Already they stalked across the
great black night, watching us with many eyes. The wind had risen, and
there were sounds among the trees. I, for one, felt no desire to go to
bed. The way Smith sat there, watching the sky and peering into the
sheet of darkness that veiled the Desert, set my nerves all jangling.
He expected something--but what? It was following him. Across this
tractless wilderness, apparently above him against the brilliant stars,
Something was ‘hard upon his trail.’
Then, in the middle of painful silences, Smith suddenly turned
loquacious--further sign with him of deep mental disturbance. He asked
questions like a schoolboy--asked them of me too, as being ‘an edicated
man.’ But there were such queer things to talk about round an Arizona
camp-fire that Hank clearly wondered for his sanity. He knew about the
‘wilderness madness’ that attacks some folks. He let his green cigar
go out and flashed me signals to be cautious. He listened intently,
with the eyes of a puzzled child, half cynical, half touched with
superstitious dread. For, briefly, Smith asked me what I knew about
stories of dying men appearing at a distance to those who loved them
much. He had read such tales, ‘heard tell of ’em,’ but ‘are they dead
true, or are they jest little feery tales?’ I satisfied him as best I
could with one or two authentic stories. Whether he believed or not I
cannot say; but his swift mind jumped in a flash to the point. ‘Then,
if that kind o’ stuff is true,’ he asked, simply, ‘it looks as though a
feller had a dooplicate of himself--sperrit maybe--that gits loose and
active at the time of death, and heads straight for the party it loves
best. Ain’t that so, Boss?’ I admitted the theory was correct. And then
he startled us with a final question that made Hank drop an oath below
his breath--sure evidence of uneasy excitement in the old backwoodsman.
Smith whispered it, looking over his shoulder into the night: ‘Ain’t it
jest possible then,’ he asked, ‘seeing that men an’ Nature is all made
of a piece like, that places too have this dooplicate appearance of
theirselves that gits loose when they go under?’
It was difficult, under the circumstances, to explain that such a
theory _had_ been held to account for visions of scenery people
sometimes have, and that a city may have a definite personality made up
of all its inhabitants--moods, thoughts, feelings, and passions of the
multitude who go to compose its life and atmosphere, and that hence is
due the odd changes in a man’s individuality when he goes from one city
to another. Nor was there any time to do so, for hardly had he asked
his singular question when the horses whinnied, the Indians leaped to
their feet as if ready for an attack, and Smith himself turned the
colour of the ashes that lay in a circle of whitish-grey about the
burning wood. There was an expression in his face of death, or, as the
Irish peasants say, ‘destroyed.’
‘That’s Smithville,’ he cried, springing to his feet, then tottering so
that I thought he must fall into the flame; ‘that’s my baby town--got
loose and huntin’ for me, who made it, and love it better’n anything
on Gawd’s green earth!’ And then he added with a kind of gulp in his
throat as of a man who wanted to cry but couldn’t: ‘And it’s going to
bits--it’s dying--and I’m not thar to save it----!’
He staggered and I caught his arm. The sound of his frightened,
anguished voice, and the shuffling of our many feet among the stones,
died away into the night. We all stood, staring. The darkness came
up closer. The horses ceased their whinnying. For a moment nothing
happened. Then Smith turned slowly round and raised his head towards
the stars as though he saw something. ‘Hear that?’ he whispered. ‘It’s
coming up close. That’s what I’ve bin hearing now, on and off, two
days and nights. Listen!’ His whispering voice broke horribly; the man
was suffering atrociously. For a moment he became vastly, horribly
animated--then stood still as death.
But in the hollow silence, broken only by the sighing of the wind among
the spruces, we at first heard nothing. Then, most curiously, something
like rapid driven mist came trooping down the sky, and veiled a group
of stars. With it, as from an enormous distance, but growing swiftly
nearer, came noises that were beyond all question the noises of a city
rushing through the heavens. From all sides they came; and with them
there shot a reddish, streaked appearance across the misty veil that
swung so rapidly and softly between the stars and our eyes. Lurid it
was, and in some way terrible. A sense of helpless bewilderment came
over me, scattering my faculties as in scenes of fire, when the mind
struggles violently to possess itself and act for the best. Hank,
holding his rifle ready to shoot, moved stupidly round the group,
equally at a loss, and swearing incessantly below his breath. For this
overwhelming certainty that Something living had come upon us from the
sky possessed us all, and I, personally, felt as if a gigantic Being
swept against me through the night, destructive and enveloping, and
yet that it was not one, but many. Power of action left me. I could
not even observe with accuracy what was going on. I stared, dizzy and
bewildered, in all directions; but my power of movement was gone, and
my feet refused to stir. Only I remember that the Redskins stood like
figures of stone, unmoved.
And the sounds about us grew into a roar. The distant murmur came past
us like a sea. There was a babel of shouting. Here, in the deep old
wilderness that knew no living human beings for hundreds of leagues,
there was a tempest of voices calling, crying, shrieking; men’s hoarse
clamouring, and the high screaming of women and children. Behind it
ran a booming sound like thunder. Yet all of it, while apparently so
close above our heads, seemed in some inexplicable way far off in the
distance--muted, faint, thinning out among the quiet stars. More like a
_memory_ of turmoil and tumult it seemed than the actual uproar heard
at first hand. And through it ran the crash of big things tumbling,
breaking, falling in destruction with an awful detonating thunder of
collapse. I thought the hills were toppling down upon us. A shrieking
city, it seemed, fled past us through the sky.
How long it lasted it is impossible to say, for my power of measuring
time had utterly vanished. A dreadful wild anguish summed up all the
feelings I can remember. It seemed I watched, or read, or dreamed
some desolating scene of disaster in which human life went overboard
wholesale, as though one threw a hatful of insects into a blazing fire.
This idea of burning, of thick suffocating smoke and savage flame,
coloured the entire experience. And the next thing I knew was that it
had passed away as completely as though it had never been at all; the
stars shone down from an air of limpid clearness, and--there was a
smell of burning leather in my nostrils. I just stepped back in time to
save my feet. I had moved in my excitement against the circle of hot
ashes. Hank pushed me back roughly with the barrel of his rifle.
But, strangest of all, I understood, as by some flash of divine
intuition, the reason of this abrupt cessation of the horrible tumult.
The Personality of the town, set free and loosened in the moment of
death, had returned to him who gave it birth, who loved it, and of
whose life it was actually an expression. The Being of Smithville was
literally a projection, an emanation of the dynamic, vital personality
of its puissant creator. And, in death, it had returned on him with the
shock of an accumulated power impossible for a human being to resist.
For years he had provided it with life--but _gradually_. It now rushed
back to its source, thus concentrated, in a single terrific moment.
‘That’s him,’ I heard a voice saying from a great distance as it
seemed. ‘He’s fired his last shot--!’ and saw Hank turning the body
over with his rifle-butt. And, though the face itself was calm beneath
the stars, there was an attitude of limbs and body that suggested the
bursting of an enormous shell that had twisted every fibre by its awful
force yet somehow left the body as a whole intact.
We carried ‘it’ to Tranter, and at the first real station along the
line we got the news by telegraph: ‘Smithville wiped out by fire.
Burned two days and nights. Loss of life, 3000.’ And all the way in my
dreams I seemed still to hear that curious, dreadful cry of Smithville,
the shrieking city rushing headlong through the sky.
HANK’S CAMP.
[Illustration]
THE TEMPTATION OF THE CLAY
[Illustration: THE TEMPTATION OF THE CLAY]
I
Some men grow away from places, others grow into them: It is a curious
and delicate matter. Before now, a man has been thrown out by his own
property, yet his successor made immediately at home there. Once let
Imagination dwell upon this psychology of places and it will travel
very far. Here lies a great mystery, entangled with the mystery of life
itself, delicately baited, too. Only the utterly obtuse, one thinks,
can ignore the hint offered by Nature--that there is this very definite
relationship existing between places and human beings, and that the
aggressive attitude is not always chiefly upon the side of the latter.
So it is that there are spots of country--mere bits of scenery, a
valley, plain, or river bank, estate or even garden--that undeniably
bid a man stay, and welcome; or for no ascertainable reason reject
him, and make him anxious to leave. Campers, looking for a night’s
resting-place, know this well; and so may owners of estates and
houses,--campers on a larger scale, seeking to settle somewhere for the
few years of a life-time. Neither one nor other, however, one thinks,
unless he be a swift-minded poet with vivid divination, gets quite to
the root of the matter.
Very suggestive are the mysterious processes by which such results
are sometimes brought about, a certain pathos in them too. For the
rejected owner is usually of that hard intellectual type that is
utterly insensible to the fairy flails of Beauty, and seeks, therefore,
in vain through all his stores of logic for a reasonable cause and
effect; whereas the accepted one, exquisitely adjusted though he may
be to the seduction of the place that takes him in, yet is unable to
tell in words what really happens, or to express a tithe of that sweet
marvellous explanation that lies concealed within his heart. The one
denies it, the other makes wild, poetic guesses; but neither really
knows.
Dick Eliot understood something of the two points of view perhaps,
because he experienced both acceptance and rejection; and this story,
of how a place first welcomed him, then violently tossed him out
again, is as queer a case of such relationship as one may ever hear.
But, then, Dick Eliot combined in himself a measure of both types
of mind; he was intellectual, and knew that two and two make four,
but he was also mystical, and knew that they make five or nothing,
or a million--that everything is One, and One is everything. Neither
was, perhaps, very strong in him, because life had not provided the
opportunity for one or other’s exclusive development; but both existed
side by side in his general mental composition. And they resulted
in a level so delicately poised that the apparent balance yet had
instability at its roots.
* * * * *
Leaving England at twenty-two or three--there were misunderstandings
with his University, where in classics and philosophy he had promised
well; with his step-parents who regarded him as well lost; and in a
sense, that yet did not affect his honour, with his country’s law--he
had since met life in difficult, rough places. He had lived. All manner
of experiences had been his; he had known starvation in strange cities,
and had more than once been close to death--queer kinds of death. But,
also, he had been close to earth, and the earth had wonderfully taught
him. The results of this teaching, not recognised at the time, came out
later to puzzle and amaze him. For years he dwelt in the wilderness
with life reduced to its essentials--the big, crude, thundering facts
of it--so that he had come to regard scholarship, once so valued, as
over-rated, and action as the sole reality. The poetic, mystical side
of him passed into temporary abeyance. Worldly achievement and ambition
led him. This, however, was a mood of youth only, a reaction due to the
resentment of his exile, and to the grievance he cherished against the
academic conventions--so he deemed them--that had cut him off from his
inheritance.
At thirty, or thereabouts, he fell in love and married--a vigorous
personality of a woman with Red Indian in her blood, picked up in
some wild escapade along the frontiers of Arizona and New Mexico;
and, within six months of marriage, the death of an aunt had left him
unexpected master of this little gem of an estate in the south of
England where the following experience took place.
This impulsive action of an aunt whom he had seen but once, due to
her wish to spite the other claimants rather than to any pretended
love for himself, resulted in a radical change of life. He came home,
ignored by his relations, and ignoring them in turn. The former love
of books revived; the imaginative point of view re-asserted itself;
he saw life from another angle. Action, after all, was but a part of
it, another form of play. The mental life was the reality; he studied,
meditated, wrote. Once more the deep, poetic mystery of things lit all
his thoughts with wonder. Corrected by the hard experiences of his
early years, the philosopher and dreamer in him assumed the upper hand,
though the speculative dreams he indulged were more sanely regulated
than before. The imagination was now more finely tempered.
To look at, he was sometimes obviously forty-five, yet at others could
easily have passed for thirty:--a tall, lean figure of a man; spare,
as though the wilderness had taken that toll of him which no amount of
subsequent easy living could efface. To see him was to think of men
toiling in a hard, stern land where all things had to be conquered
and nothing yielded of itself, where, moreover, human life was cheap
and of small account. He was alert, always in training, cheeks thin,
neck sinewy, knees ready instantly to turn a horse by grip alone, the
reins unnecessary so that both hands were free to fight. The eyes were
keen and dark, moustache clipped very short and partly grizzled; deep
furrows marked the jaw and forehead; but the muscular hands were young,
the fling of the shoulders young, the toss and set of the big head
young as well. And he always dressed in riding breeches, with a strap
about the waist instead of braces. You might see him hitch them up as
he stepped back to leap the stream, or to take the pine knolls with a
run downhill.
Indeed, the imaginative side of him seemed almost incongruous; and that
such a figure could conceal a mystical, tenderly poetic side not one
man in a thousand need have guessed. But, in spite of these severer
traits, the character, you felt, was tender enough upon its under
side. It was merely that the control of the body and emotions acquired
in the wilds had never been unlearned, and that no amount of softer
living could let it be forgotten.
About the rather grim and over-silent mouth, for instance, there were
marks like the touches of a flower that sometimes made the sternness
seem a clumsy mask. An intuitive woman, or a child, must have found him
out at once.
II
After years spent as he had spent them among the conditions of
primitive lands, Dick Eliot came back with his ‘uncivilised’ wife,
to find that with the old established values of English ‘County’
existence they had little or nothing in common. Their ostracism by the
neighbourhood has no place in this story, except to show how it threw
them back intensely into the little property he had inherited. They
lived there a dozen years, isolated, childless, knowing that solitude
in a crowd which yet is never loneliness.
The ‘Place,’ as they always called it, took them, and welcome, to
itself. The land, running to several hundred acres, was comparatively
worthless, mere jumbled stretch of sand and pines and heathery hills;
too remote from any building centre to be easily sold, and of no avail
for agricultural purposes. For which, since he had just enough to live
on quietly, both were grateful: they could keep it lovely and unspoilt.
All round it, however, was an opulent, over-built-upon country that
they loathed, since they felt that its quality, once admitted, would
cause the Place to wither and die. The gross surfeit of prosperous
houses, preserved woods, motoring hotels, and the rest would settle on
its virgin face. Builders and business men would commercially appraise
it, financiers undress it publicly so that it would know itself naked
and ashamed. Deep down its soul would turn weakly and diseased, then
disappear, and their own assuredly go with it.
For both had loved the Place at sight. She in particular loved it--with
a kind of rude enthusiasm she forced, as it were, upon his gentler
character. Its combination of qualities fascinated her--the old-world
mellowness with the unkempt, untidy wildness. The way it kept alive
that touch of the wilderness she had known from childhood, set in the
midst of so much over-civilised country all about, gave her the feeling
of having a little, precious secret world entirely to herself. She
forced this view with all the vigour of her primitive poetry upon her
husband till he accepted it as his own. It became his own; only she
realised it more vitally than he did. The contrast laid a spell upon
her, and she would not hear of going away. They lived there, in this
miniature world, until they knew it with such close intimacy that it
became identified with their very selves. She made him see it through
her eyes, so that the place was haunted, saturated, invested with their
moods of worship, love, and wonder. It became a little mystery-world
that their feelings had turned living.
* * * * *
Thus when, after twelve years’ happiness together, she died there, he
stayed on, sole guardian as it were of all she had loved so dearly.
Too vital a man to permit the slightest morbid growth which comes from
brooding, he yet lived among fond memories, aware of her presence in
every nook and glade, in every tree, her voice in the tinkle of the
stream, new values everywhere. Each ridge and valley, made familiar
by her step and perfume, strengthened recollection, and more than
ever before the Place seemed interwoven with herself and him, subtle
expression of vanished joys. The Past stayed on in it; it did not move
away; it remained the Present. Her death had doubly consecrated the
little estate, making it, so to speak, a sacrament of dear communion.
The only change, it seemed, was that he identified it with her being
more than with himself or with the two of them. He guarded it unspoilt
and sweet because of her who held it once so dear--as another man might
have kept a flower she had touched, a picture, or a dress that she had
worn. Now it was doubly safe from the damage she had feared--commercial
spoliation. ‘Keep the Place as it is, Dick,’ she had so often said with
a vehemence that belonged to her vigorous type, ‘I’d hate to see it
dirtied!’ For her the civilised country round had always been ‘dirty.’
And he did so, almost with the feeling that he was keeping her person
clean at the same time; for what a man thinks about is real, and he had
come to regard the Place and herself as one.
Throwing himself into definite work to occupy his mind, he kept it
as the apple of his eye, living in solitude, and cared for only by a
motherly old housekeeper (years ago his mother’s maid) whose services
he had by fortunate chance secured. He spent his leisure time in
writing--studies of obscure periods in forgotten history that, when
published, merely added to the clutter of the world’s huge mental
lumber-room, to judge by the reviews. Once he made a journey to
his haunts of youth, _their_ youth, in Arizona, but only to return
dissatisfied, with added pain. He settled down finally then, throwing
himself with commendable energy into his studies, till the hurrying
years brought him thus to forty-five. Rarely he went to London and
pored over musty volumes in the British Museum Reading-room, but after
a day or two would hear the murmur of the mill-wheel singing round that
portentous, dreary dome, and back he would come again, post-haste.
And perhaps he chose his line of study, rather than more imaginative
work, because it reasonably absorbed him, while yet it stole no single
emotion from his past with her, nor trespassed upon the walking of one
dear faint ghost.
III
And it was upon this gentle, solitary household that suddenly Mánya
Petrovski descended with her presence of wonder and of magic. Out of
a clear blue sky she dropped upon him and made herself deliciously at
home. Only daughter of his widowed sister, married to a Russian, she
was fourteen at the time of her mother’s death; and the duty seemed
forced upon him with a conviction that admitted of no denial. He had
never seen the child in his life, for she was born in the year that
he returned to England, family relations simply non-existent; but he
had heard of her, partly from Mrs. Coove, his housekeeper, and partly
from tentative letters his sister wrote from time to time, aiming
at reconciliation. He only knew that she was backward to the verge
of being stupid, that she ‘loved Nature and life out of doors,’ and
that she shared with her strange father a certain sulking moodiness
that seemed to have been so strong in his own half-civilised Slav
temperament. He also remembered that her mother, a curious mixture of
puritanism and weakly dread of living, had brought her up strictly in
the manufacturing city of the midlands where they dwelt ‘wealthily,’
surrounded by an atmosphere of artificiality that he deemed almost
criminal. For his sister, fostering old-fashioned religious
tendencies, believed that a visible Satan haunted the frontiers of
her narrow orthodoxy, and would devour Mánya as soon as look at her
once she strayed outside. She too had claimed, he remembered, to love
Nature, though her love of it consisted solely in looking cleverly
out of windows at passing scenery she need never bother herself to
reach. Her husband’s violent tempers she had likewise ascribed to
his possession by a devil, if not by _the_--her own personal--devil
himself. And when this letter, written on her death-bed, came begging
him, as the only possible relative, to take charge of the child, he
accepted it, as his character was, unflinchingly, yet with the greatest
possible reluctance. Significant, too, of his character was the detail
that, out of many others surely far more important, first haunted him:
‘She’ll love Nature (by which he meant the Place) in the way her mother
did--artificially. We shan’t get on a bit!’--thus, instinctively,
betraying what lay nearest to his heart.
None the less, he accepted the position without hesitation. There was
no money; his sister’s property was found to be mortgaged several times
above its realisable value, and the child would come to him without
a penny. He went headlong at the problem, as at so many other duties
that had faced him--puzzling, awkward duties--with a kind of blundering
delicacy native to his blood. ‘Got to be done, no good dreaming about
it,’ he said to himself within a few hours of receiving the letter; and
when a little later the telegram came announcing his sister’s death,
he added shortly with a grim expression, ‘Here goes, then!’ In this
plucky, yet not really impulsive decisiveness, the layer of character
acquired in Arizona asserted itself. Action ousted dreaming.
And in due course the preparations for the girl’s reception were
concluded. She would make the journey south alone, and Mrs. Coove would
meet her. Moreover, evidence to himself at least of true welcome, Mánya
should have the bedroom which had been for years unoccupied--his wife’s.
For all that, he dreaded her arrival unspeakably. ‘She’ll be bored
here. She’ll dislike the Place--perhaps hate it. And I shall dislike
her too.’
IV
Eliot ruled his little household well, because he ruled himself. No
one, from the tri-weekly gardener to the rough half-breed Westerner who
managed the modest stable, felt the least desire to trifle with him.
Even Mrs. Coove, in the brief morning visits to his study, did not care
about asking him to repeat some sentence that she had not quite caught
or understood. Yet, in a sense, as with all such men, it was the woman
who really managed him. ‘Mrs.’ Coove, big, motherly, spinster, divined
the child beneath the grim exterior, and simply played with him. She
it was who really ‘ran’ the household, relieving him of all domestic
worries, and she it was, had he fallen ill--which, even for a day,
he never did--who would have nursed him into health again with such
tactfully concealed devotion that, while loving the nursing, he would
never have guessed the devotion.
So it was largely upon Mrs. Coove that he secretly relied to welcome,
manage, and look after his little orphaned niece, while, of course,
pretending that he did it all himself.
‘She’ll want a companion, sir, of sorts--if I may make so bold--some
one to play with,’ she told him when he had mentioned that later, of
course, he would provide a ‘governess or something’ when he had first
‘sized up’ the child.
He looked hard at her for a moment. He realised her meaning, that the
hostile neighbourhood could be relied on to supply nothing of that kind.
‘Of course,’ he said, as though he had thought of it himself.
‘She’ll love the pony, sir, if she ain’t one of the booky sort, which
I seem to remember she ain’t,’ added Mrs. Coove, looking as usual as
though just about to burst into tears. For her motherly face wore a
lachrymose expression that was utterly deceptive. Her contempt for
books, too, and writing folk was never quite successfully concealed.
In silence he watched the old woman wipe her moist hands upon a black
apron, and the perplexities of his new duties grew visibly before his
eyes. She had little notion that secretly her master stood a little in
awe of her superior domestic knowledge.
‘The pony and the woods,’ he suggested briefly.
‘A puppy or a kitten, sir, would help a bit--for indoors, if I may make
so bold,’ the housekeeper ventured, with a passing gulp at her own
audacity; ‘and out of doors, sir, as you say, maybe she’ll be ’appy
enough. Her pore mother taught----’
The long breath she had taken for this sentence she meant to use to the
last gasp if possible. But her master cut her short.
‘Miss Mánya arrives at six,’ he said, turning to his books and papers.
‘The dog-cart, with you in it, to meet her--please.’ The ‘please’
was added because he knew her vivid dislike of being too high from
the ground, while judging correctly that the pleasure would more
than compensate her for this risk of elevation. It was also intended
to convey that he appreciated her help, but deplored her wordiness.
Laconic even to surliness himself, he disliked long phrases. It was a
perpetual wonder to him why even lazy people who detested effort would
always use a dozen words where two were more effective.
So Mrs. Coove, accustomed to his ways, departed, with a curtsey that
more than anything else resembled a sudden collapse of the knees
beneath more than they could carry comfortably.
‘Thank you, sir; I’ll see to it all right,’ she said, obedient to his
glance, beginning the sentence in the room but finishing it in the
passage. She looked as though she would weep hopelessly once outside,
whereas really she felt beaming pleasure. The compliment of being sent
to meet Miss Mánya made her forget her dread of the elevated, swaying
dog-cart, as also of the silent half-breed groom who drove it. Full of
importance she went off to make preparations.
And later, when Mrs. Coove was on her way to the station five miles
off, dangerously perched, as it seemed to her, in mid-air, he made his
way out slowly into the woods, a vague feeling in him that there was
something he must say good-bye to. The Place henceforth, with Mánya in
it, would be--not quite the same. What change would come he could not
say, but something of the secrecy, the long-loved tender privacy and
wonder would depart. Another would share it with him, a trespasser, in
a sense an outsider. And, as he roamed the little pine-grown vales,
the mossy coverts, and the knee-high bracken, there stole into him
this queer sensation that it all was part of a living Something that
constituted almost a distinct entity. His wife inspired it, but, also,
the Place had a personality of its own, apart from the qualities he
had read into it. He realised, for the first time, that it too might
take an attitude towards the new arrival. Everywhere, it seemed, there
was an air of expectant readiness. It was aware.... It might possibly
resent it.
And, for moments here and there, as he wandered, rose other ideas in
him as well, brought for the first time into existence by the thought
of the new arrival. This element, like a sudden shaft of sunlight on
a landscape, discovered to him a new aspect of the mental picture.
It was vague; yet perplexed him not a little. And it was this: that
the thing he loved in all this little property, thinking it always as
his own, was in reality what _she_ had loved in it, the thing that
_she_ had made him see through the lens of her own more wild, poetic
vision. What he was now saying good-bye to, the thing that the expected
intruder might change, or even oust, was after all but a phantom
memory--the aspect she had built into it. This curious, painful doubt
assailed him for the first time. Was his love and worship of the Place
really an individual possession of his own, or had it been all these
years but her interpretation of it that he enjoyed vicariously? The
thought of Mánya’s presence here etched this possibility in sharp
relief. Unwelcome, and instantly dismissed, the thought yet obtruded
itself--that his feelings had not been quite genuine, quite sincere,
and that it was her memory, her so vital vision of the Place he loved
rather than the Place itself at first hand.
For the idea that another was on the way to share it stirred the
unconscious query: What precisely was it she would share?
And behind it came a still more subtle questioning that he put away
almost before it was clearly born: Was he really _quite_ content
with this unambitious guardianship of the dream-estate, and was the
grievance of his exile so completely dead that he would, under all
possible conditions, keep its loveliness inviolate and free from
spoliation?
The coming of the child, with the new duties involved, and the probable
later claims upon his meagre purse, introduced a worldly element that
for so long had slept in him. He wondered. The ghosts all walked.
But beside them walked other ghosts as well. And this new, strange
pain of uncertainty came with them--sinister though exceedingly faint
suggestion that he had been worshipping a phantom fastened into his
heart by a mind more vigorous than his own.
Ambition, action, practical achievement stirred a little in their sleep.
* * * * *
And on his way back he picked some bits of heather and bracken, a few
larch twigs with little cones upon them, and several sprays of pine.
These he carried into the house and up into the child’s bedroom, where
he stuck them about in pots and vases. The flowers Mrs. Coove had
arranged he tossed away. For flowers in a room, or in a house at all,
he never liked; they looked unnatural, artificial. Flowers and food
together on a table seemed to him as dreadful as the sickly smelling
wreaths people loved to put on coffins. But leaves were different; and
earth was best of all. In his own room he had two wide, deep boxes of
plain earth, watered daily, renewed from time to time, and more sweetly
scented than any flowers in the world.
Opening the windows to let in all the sun and air there was, he glanced
round him with critical approval. To most the room must have seemed
bare enough, yet he had put extra chairs and tables in it, a sofa too,
because he thought the child would like them. Personally, he preferred
space about him; his own quarters looked positively unfurnished; rooms
were cramped enough as it was, and useless upholstery gave him a
feeling of oppression. He still clung to essentials; and an empty room,
like earth and sky, was fine and dignified.
But Mánya, he well knew, might feel differently, and he sought to
anticipate her wishes as best he might. For Mánya came from a big house
where the idea was to conceal every inch of empty space with something
valuable and useless; and her playground had been gardens smothered
among formal flower-beds--triangles, crescents, circles, anything that
parodied Nature--paths cut cleanly to neat patterns, and plants that
acknowledged their shame by growing all exactly alike without a trace
of individuality.
He moved to the open window, gazing out across the stretch of hill and
heathery valley, thick with stately pines. The wind sighed softly past
his ears. He heard the murmur of the droning mill-wheel, the drum and
tinkle of falling water mingling with it. And the years that had passed
since last he stood and looked forth from this window came up close
and peered across his shoulder. The Past rose silently beside him and
looked out too.... He saw it all through other eyes that once had so
large a share in fashioning it.
Again came this singular impression--that, while he waited, the whole
Place waited too. It knew that she was coming. Another pair of feet
would run upon its face and surface, another voice wake all its little
echoes, another mind seek to read its secret and share the mystery of
its being.
‘If Mánya doesn’t like it----!’ struck with real pain across his heart.
But the thought did not complete itself. Only, into the strong face
came a momentary expression of helplessness that sat strangely there.
Whether the child would like himself or not seemed a consideration of
quite minor importance.
A sound of wheels upon the gravel at the front of the house disturbed
his deep reflections, and, shutting the door carefully behind him,
he gave one last look round to see that all was right, and then went
downstairs to meet her. The sigh that floated through his mind was not
allowed to reach the lips; but another expression came up into his
face. His lips became compressed, and resolution passed into his eyes.
It was the look--and how he would have laughed, perhaps, could he have
divined it!--the look of set determination that years ago he wore when
in some lonely encampment among the Bad Lands something of danger was
reported near.
With a sinking heart he went downstairs to meet his duty.
But in the hall, scattering his formal phrases to the winds, a boyish
figure, yet with loose flying hair, ran up against him, then stepped
sharply back. There was a moment’s pitiless examination.
‘Uncle Dick!’ he heard, cried softly. ‘Is _that_ what you’re like? But
how wonderful!’ And he was aware that a pair of penetrating eyes, set
wide apart in a grave but eager face, were mercilessly taking him in.
It was he who was being ‘sized up.’ No redskin ever made a more rapid
and thorough examination, nor, probably, a more accurate one.
‘Oh! I _never_ thought you would look so kind and splendid!’
‘Me!’ he gasped, forgetting every single thing he had planned to say in
front of this swift-moving creature who attacked him.
She came close up to him, her voice breathless still but if possible
softer, eyes shining like two little lamps.
‘I expected--from what Mother said--you’d be--just Uncle Richard! And
instead it’s only Uncle--Uncle Dick!’
Here was unaffected sincerity indeed. He had dreaded--he hardly knew
why--some simpering sentence of formality, or even tears at being
lonely in a strange house. And, in place of either came this sort of
cowboy verdict, straight as a blow from the shoulder. It took his
breath away. In his heart something turned very soft and yearning. And
yet he--winced.
‘Nice drive?’ he heard his gruff voice asking. For the life of him he
could think of nothing else to say. And the answer came with a little
peal of breathless laughter, increasing his amazement and confusion.
‘I drove all the way. I made the blackie let me. And the mothery person
held on behind like a bolster. It was glorious.’
At the same moment two strong, quick arms, thin as a lariat, were
round his neck. And he was being kissed--once only, though it felt all
over his face. She stood on tiptoe to reach him, pulling his head down
towards her lips.
‘How are you, Uncle, please?’
‘Thanks, Mánya,’ he said shortly, straightening up in an effort to keep
his balance, ‘all right. Glad you are, too. Mrs. Coove, your “mothery
person who held on like a bolster,” will take you upstairs and wash
you. Then food--soon as you like.’
He had not indulged in such a long sentence for years. It increased his
bewilderment to hear it. Something ill-regulated had broken loose.
Mrs. Coove, who had watched the scene from the background and doubtless
heard the flattering description of herself, moved forward with a
mountainous air of possession. Her face as usual seemed to threaten
tears, but there was a gleam in her eyes which could only come from
the joy of absolute approval. With a movement of her arm that seemed
to gather the child in, she went laboriously upstairs. The back of her
alone proved to any seeing eye that she had already passed willingly
into the state of abject slavery that all instinctive mothers love.
‘We shan’t be barely five minutes, sir,’ she called respectfully when
halfway up; and the way she glanced down upon her grim master, who
stood still with feet wide apart watching them, spoke further her
opinion--and her joy at it--that he too was caught within her toils.
‘She’ll manage you, sir, if I may make so bold,’ was certainly the
thought her words did not express.
They vanished round the corner--the heavy tread and the light,
pattering step. And he still stood on there, waiting in the hall.
A mist rose just before his eyes; he did not see quite clearly. In
his heart a surge of strong, deep feeling struggled upwards, but was
instantly suppressed. Mánya had said another thing that moved him far
more than her childish appreciation of himself, something that stirred
him to the depths most strangely.
For, when he asked her how she enjoyed the drive, the girl had replied
with undeniable sincerity, looking straight into his eyes:
‘The last bit was like a fairy-tale. Uncle, _how_ awfully this place
must love you!’
She did not say, ‘How you must love the place!’ And--she loathed the
‘dirty’ country all about.
Then, the first rush of excitement over, a sort of shyness, curiously
becoming, had settled down all over her like a cloud. It settled down
upon himself as well. But--she had said the perfect thing. And his
doubts all vanished. It _was_--yes, surely--the Place she loved.
And yet, when all was over, there passed through him an unpleasant
afterthought--as though Mánya had applied a test by which already
something in himself was found gravely wanting.
V
With its sharp, pine-grown declivities, its tumbling streams, stretches
of open heather, and its miniature forests of bracken, the dream-estate
was like a liliputian Scotland compressed into a few hundred acres. All
was in exquisite proportion.
The old house of rough grey stone, set in one corner, looked out upon
a wild, untidy garden that melted unobserved into woods of mystery
beyond, and farther off rose sharp against the sky a series of peaked
knolls and ridges that in certain lights looked like big hills many
miles away. There were diminutive fairy valleys you could cross in
twenty minutes; and several rivulets, wandering from the moorlands
higher up, formed the single stream that once had worked the Mill.
But the Mill, standing a stone’s-throw from the study windows, so that
he heard the water singing and gurgling almost among his book-shelves,
had for a century ground nothing more substantial than sunshine,
air, and shadow. For the gold-dust of the stars is too fine for
grinding. But it ground as well the dreams of the lonely occupant of
the grey-toned house. And he let it stand there, falling gradually
into complete decay, because beneath those crumbling wooden walls--he
remembered it as of yesterday--the sudden stroke had come that in a
moment, dropping as it seemed out of eternity, had robbed him of his
chief possession--fashioner of the greatest dream of all. The splash
and murmur of the water, the drone of the creaking wheel in flood
time, the white weed that gathered thickly over the pond formed by the
ancient dam, and the red-brown tint of walls and rotting roof,--all
were like the colour of the water’s singing, the colour of her memory,
and the colour of his thinking too, made sweetly visible.
Indeed, despite his best control, _she_ still lurked everywhere,
so that he could not recall a single experience of the past years
without at the same time some vivid aspect of the scenery, as she
saw it, rising up clearly to accompany it. In every corner stood the
ghost of a still recoverable mood. Here he had suffered, fought, and
prayed; here he had loved and hated; here he had lost and found. All
the kaleidoscope aspects of growing older, of hopes and fears and
disappointments, were visualised for him in terms of the Place where
he had met and dealt with them for his soul’s good or ill. But behind
them always stood that Figure in Chief; it was she who directed the
ghostly band; and she it was who coaxed the romantic scenery thus into
the support of all his personal moods, and continued to do so with even
greater power after she was gone.
His respect for the Place seemed, therefore, involved with his respect
for himself and her. That tumbling stream had an inalienable right
of way; that mill of golden-brown claimed ancient lights as truly as
any mental palace of thoughts within his mind; and the little dips
and rises in the woods were as sacred--so he had always felt--as were
those twists and turns of character that he called his views of life
and his beliefs. This blending of himself with the Place and her had
been very carefully reared. The notion that its foundations were not
impregnable for ever was a most disturbing one. That the mere arrival
of an intruder could shake it, possibly shatter it, touched sacrilege.
And for long he suppressed the outrageous notion so successfully that
he almost entirely forgot about it.
* * * * *
This strip of vivid land whereon he dwelt acquired, moreover, a
heightened charm from the character of the odious land surrounding it.
For on all sides was that type of country best described as over-fed
and over-lived-upon. The scenery was choked and smothered unto death;
it breathed, if at all, the breath of a fading life pumped through it
artificially and with labour. Heavily beneath the skies it lay--acres
of inert soil.
There were, indeed, people who admired it, calling it typical of
something or other in the south of England; but for him these people,
like the land itself, were bourgeois, dull, insipid, and phlegmatic as
the back of a sheep. Like rooms in a big club, it was over-furnished
with too solid upholstery--thick, fat hedges, formal oak woods,
lifeless copses stuck upon slopes from which successful crops had
sucked long ago the last vestiges of spontaneous life; and spotted with
self-satisfied modern cottages, ‘improved’ beyond redemption, that
made him think with laughter of some scattered group of city aldermen.
‘They’re pompous City magnates,’ he used to tell his wife, ‘strayed
from the safety of Cornhill, and a little frightened by the wind and
rain.’
Everywhere, amid bushy trees that looked so pampered they were almost
sham, stood ‘country houses,’ whole crops of them, dozing after heavy
meals among gardens of sleek tulip and geraniums. They plastered
themselves, with the atmosphere of small Crystal Palaces, upon every
available opening, comfortably settled down and weighted with every
conceivable modern appliance, and in ‘Parks’ all cut to measure like
children’s wooden toys. They stood there, heavy and respectable,
living close to the ground, and in them, almost without exception,
dwelt successful business men who owned a ‘country seat.’ From his
uncivilised, wild-country point of view, they epitomised the soul
of the entire scenery about them--something gross and sluggish that
involved stagnation. They brooded with an air of vulgar luxury that was
too stupid even to be active. Here ‘resided,’ in a word, the wealthy.
When he walked or drove through the five miles of opulent ugliness
that lay between Mill House and the station, it seemed like crossing
an inert stretch of adipose tissue, then lighting suddenly upon a
pulsating nerve-centre. To step back into the fresh and hungry beauty
of his pine valley, with its tumbling waters and its fragrance of wild
loveliness, was an experience he never ceased to take delight in. The
air at once turned keen, the trees gave out sharp perfumes, waters
rustled, foliage sang. Oh! here was life, activity, and movement.
Vital currents flowed through and over it. The grey house among the
fir-trees, beckoning to the Mill beyond, was a place where things might
happen and pass swiftly. Here was no stagnation possible. Thrills of
beauty, denied by that grosser landscape, returned electrically upon
the heart. With every breath he drew in wonder and enchantment.
And all this, for some years now, he had enjoyed alone. Rather than
diminishing with his middle age, the spell had increased. Then came
this sudden question of another’s intrusion upon his dream-estate, and
he had dreaded painful alteration. The presence of another, most likely
stupid, and certainly unsympathetic, must cause a desolating change.
Alteration there was bound to be, or at the best a readjustment of
values that would steal away the wild and accustomed flavour. He had
dreaded the child’s arrival unspeakably. It had turned him abruptly
timid, and this timidity betrayed the sweetness of the treasure that he
guarded. For it came close to fear--the fear men know when they realise
an attack they cannot, by any means within their power, hope to defeat.
And alteration, as he apprehended, came; yet not the alteration he had
dreaded. Mánya’s arrival had been a surprise that was pure joy. Its
wonder almost woke suspicion. And the surprise, he found, grew into a
series of surprises that at first took his breath away. The alchemy
that her little shining presence brought persisted, grew from day
to day, till it operated with such augmenting power that it changed
himself as well. No stranger fairy-tale was ever written.
VI
Next day he put his work aside and devoted himself whole-heartedly to
the lonely child. It was not only duty now. She had stirred his love
and pity from the first. They would get on together. Unconsciously, by
saying the very thing to win him--‘Uncle, _how_ the Place must love
you!’--she had struck the fundamental tone that made the three of them
in harmony, and set the whole place singing. The sense of an intruding
trespasser had vanished. The Place accepted her.
It was only later that he realised this completely and in detail,
though on looking back he saw clearly that the verdict had been given
instantly. For no revision changed it. ‘I’m all right here with
Uncle,’ was the child’s quick intuition, meeting his own halfway:--‘We
three are all right here together.’ For she leaped upon his beloved
dream-estate and made it seem twice as wild and living as before. She
delighted in its loneliness and mystery. She clapped her hands and
laughed, pointed and asked questions, made her eyes round with wonder,
and, in a word, put her own feelings from the start into each nook
and corner where he took her. There was no shyness, no confusion; she
made herself at home with a little air of possession that, instead of
irritating as it might have done, was utterly enchanting. It was like
the chorus of approval that increases a man’s admiration for the woman
he has chosen.
She brought her own interpretations, too, yet without destroying his
own. They even differed from his own, yet only by showing him points
and aspects he had not realised. The child saw things most oddly from
another point of view. From the very first she began to say astonishing
things. They piqued and puzzled him to the end, these things she said.
He felt they unravelled something. In his own mind the personality of
the Place and the memory of his wife had become confused and jumbled,
as it were. Mánya’s remarks and questions disentangled something. Her
child’s divination cleared his perceptions with a singular directness.
She had strong in her that divine curiosity of children which is as far
removed from mere inquisitiveness as gold-dust from a vulgar-finished
ornament. Wonder in her was vital and insatiable, and some of these
questions that he could not answer stirred in him, even on that first
day of acquaintance, almost the sense of respect.
Morning and afternoon they spent together in visiting every corner
of the woods and valleys; no inch was left without inspection; they
followed the stream from the moorlands to the Mill, plunged through
the bracken, leaped the high tufts of heather, and scrambled together
down the precipitous sand-pits. She did not jump as well as he did,
but showed equal recklessness. And the depths of shadowy pinewood made
her hushed and silent like himself. In her childish way she _felt_ the
wild charm of it all deeply. Not once did she cry ‘How lovely’ or ‘How
wonderful’; but showed her happiness and pleasure by what she did.
‘Better than yesterday, eh?’ he suggested once, to see what she would
answer, yet sure it would be right.
She darted to his side. ‘That was all stuffed,’ she said, laconically
as himself, and making a wry face. And then she added with a grave
expression, half anxious and half solemn, ‘Fancy, if _that_ got in! Oh,
Uncle!’
‘Couldn’t,’ he comforted himself and her, delighted secretly.
But it was on their way home to tea in the dusk, feeling as if they
had known one another all their lives, so quickly had friendship been
cemented, that she said her first genuinely strange thing. For a long
time she had been silent by his side, apparently tired, when suddenly
out popped this little criticism that showed her mind was actively
working all the time.
‘Uncle, you _have_ been busy--keeping it so safe. I suppose you did
most of it at night.’
He started. His own thoughts had been travelling in several directions
at once.
‘I don’t walk in my sleep,’ he laughed.
‘I mean when the stars are shining,’ she said. She felt it as
delicately as that, then! She felt the dream quality in it. ‘I mean, it
loves you best when the sun has set and it comes out of its hole,’ she
added, as he said nothing.
‘Mánya, it loves you too--already,’ he said gently.
Then came the astonishing thing. The voice was curious; the words
seemed to come from a long way off, taking time to reach him. They took
time to reach her too, as though another had first whispered them. It
almost seemed as though she listened while she said them. A sense of
the uncanny touched him here in the shadowy dark wood:
‘It’s a woman, you see, really, and that’s why you’re so fond of it.
That’s why it likes me too, and why I can play with it.’
The amazing judgment gave him pause at once, for he felt no child
ought to know or say such things. It savoured of precociousness, even
of morbidity, both of which his soul loathed. But reflection brought
clearer judgment. The sentence revealed something he had already been
very quick to divine, namely, that while the ordinary mind in her was
undeveloped, backward, almost stunted, by her bringing up, another part
of her was vividly aware. And this other part was taught of Nature;
it was the fairy thing that children had the right to know. She stood
close to the earth. Landscape and scenery brought her vivid impressions
that fairy-tales, rather stupidly, translate into princes and
princesses, ogres, giants, dragons. Mánya, having been denied the fairy
books, personified these impressions after her own fashion. What was
it after all but the primitive instinct of early races that turned the
moods of Nature into beings, calling them gods, or the instinct of a
later day that personified the Supreme, calling it God? He himself had
‘felt’ in very imaginative moments that bits of scenery, as with trees
and even the heavenly bodies, could actually express such differences
of temperament, seem positive or negative, almost male or female. And
perhaps, in her original, child’s fashion, she felt it too.
Then Mánya interrupted his reflections with a further observation that
scattered his philosophising like an explosion. Something, as he heard
it, came up close and brushed him. It made him start.
‘In some places, you see, Uncle, I feel shy all over. But here I could
run about naked. I could undress.’
He burst out laughing. Instinctively he felt this was the best thing he
could do. A sympathetic answer might have meant too much, yet silence
would have made her feel foolish. His laughter turned the idea in her
little mind all wholesome and natural.
‘Play here to your heart’s content, for there’s no one to disturb
you,’ he cried. ‘And when I’m too busy,’ he added, thinking it a happy
inspiration, ‘Mrs. Coove can----’
‘Oh,’ she interrupted like a flash, ‘but she’s too bulgey. She could
never jump like you, for one thing.’
‘True.’
‘Or play hide-and-seek. She couldn’t fit in anywhere. She’d never be
able to hide, you see.’
And so they reached the house, like two friends who had found suddenly
a new delight in life, and sat down to an enormous tea, with jam,
buttered muffins, and a stodgy indigestible cake straight from the
oven. His tea hitherto had consisted of one cup and two pieces of thin
bread and butter. But the appetite of twenty-five had come back again.
A new joy of life had come back with it. After so many years of
brooding, dreaming, solitary working, he had grown over solemn, the
sense of fun and humour atrophying. He had erected barriers between
himself and all his kind, hedged himself in too much. The arrival of
this child brought new impetus into the enclosure. Without destroying
what imagination had prized so long, she shifted the old values into
slightly different keys. Already he caught his thoughts running forward
to construct her future--what she might become, how he might help her
to develop spiritually and materially--yes, materially as well. His
thoughts had hitherto run chiefly backwards.
This need not, indeed could not, involve being unfaithful to the past.
But it did mean looking ahead instead of always looking back. It was
more wholesome.
Yet what dawned upon him--rather, what chiefly struck him out of his
singular observations perhaps, was this: not only that the Place had
whole-heartedly accepted her, but that she had instantly established
some definite relation with it that was different to his own. It was
even deeper, truer, more vital than his own; for it was somehow more
natural. It had been discovered, though already there; and it was not,
like his own, built up by imaginative emotion. Hence came his notion
that she disentangled something; hence the respect he felt for her from
the start; hence, too, the original, surprising things she sometimes
said.
VII
For several days he watched and studied her, while she turned the Place
into a private playground of her own with that air of sweet possession
that had charmed him from the first. Backward and undeveloped she
undeniably was, but, in view of her stupid, artificial bringing up,
he understood this easily. Of books and facts, of knowledge taught
in school, she was shockingly ignorant. The wrong part of her had
been ‘forced’ at the wrong time; the ‘play’ side had been denied
development, and, while gathering force underground, her little brain
had learned by heart, but without real comprehension, things that
belonged properly to a later stage. For if ever there was one, here was
an elemental being, free of the earth, native of open places, called
to the wisdom of the woods. It all had been suppressed in her. She now
broke out and loose, bewildered, and a little rampant, wild rather, and
over joyful. She revelled like an animal in new-found freedom.
In time she sobered. He led her wisely. Yet often she went too fast for
him to follow, and slipped beyond his understanding altogether. For
there were gaps in her nature, unfilled openings in her mind, loopholes
through which she seemed to escape too easily, perhaps too completely,
into her playground, certainly too rapidly for him to catch her up. It
was then she said these things that so astonished him, making him feel
she was somehow an eldritch soul that saw things, Nature especially,
from a point of view he had never reached. Her sight of everything was
original. A bird’s-eye view he could understand; most primitive folk
possessed it, and in his wife it had been vividly illuminating. But
Mánya had not got this bird’s-eye view, the sweeping vision that takes
in everything at a single glance from above. Her angle was another
one, peculiar to herself. Laughing, he thought of it rather as seeing
everything from below--a fish’s point of view!
Brightness described her best--eyes, skin, teeth, and lips all shone.
Yet her manner was subdued, not effervescent, and in it this evidence
of depth, a depth he could not always plumb. It was a nature that
sparkled, but the sparkle was suppressed; and he loved the sparkle,
while loving even more its suppression. It gathered till the point
of flame was reached, and it was the possible out-rushing of this
potential flame that won his deference, and sometimes stirred his awe.
His dread had been considerable, anticipation keen; and the relief was
in proportion. Here was a child he could both respect and love; and the
sense of responsibility for the little being entrusted to his charge
grew very strong indeed.
In due course he supplied a governess, Fräulein Bühlke. She came from
the neighbouring town, with her broad, flat German face, framed in
flaxen hair that was glossy but not oiled, and smoothed down close
to the skull across a shining parting. Mechanically devout, rather
fussy, literal in mind, exceedingly worthy and conscientious, her
formula was, ‘You think that would be wise? Then I try it.’ And the
‘trying,’ which the tone suggested would be delicate, was applied with
a blundering directness that defeated its own end. Her method was
thumping rather than insinuating, and her notion of delicacy was to
state her meaning heavily, add to it, ‘Try to believe that I know best,
dear child,’ and then conscientiously enforce it. Mánya she understood
as little as an okapi, but she was kind, affectionate, and patient; and
though Eliot always meant to change her, he never did, for the getting
of a suitable governess was more than he and Mrs. Coove could really
manage. ‘_Der liebe Gott weisst alles_,’ was the phrase with which she
ended all their interviews. And if Mánya’s obedience showed a slight
contempt, it was a contempt he did not think it wise entirely to check.
For he himself could never scold her. It was impossible. It felt as
though he stepped upon a baby. Their relations were those of equals
almost, each looking up to the other with respect and wonder. Her
schoolroom life became a thing apart. So did the hours in his study.
Her walks with the governess and his journeys to the British Museum
were mere extensions of the schoolroom and the study. It was when they
went out together, roaming about the Place at will, exploring, playing,
building fires, and the rest, that their true enjoyment came--enjoyment
all the keener because each stuck valiantly to duty first.
Her face, though not exactly pretty, had the charm of some wild
intelligence he had never seen before. The nose, slightly tilted,
wore a tiny platform at its tip. The mouth was firm, lips exquisitely
cut, but it was in the dark, shining eyes that the expression of the
soul ran into focus; though at times she knew long periods of silence
that seemed almost sullen, when her eyes turned dead and coaly, and
she seemed almost gone away from behind them. One day she was old as
himself, another a mere baby; something was always escaping the leash
and slipping off, then coming back with a rush of some astonishing
sentence it had gone to fetch. Her physical appearance sometimes was
elusive too, now tall, now short, her little body protean as her little
soul.
Like running water she was all over the house, not laughing much,
not exactly gay or cheerful either, but somehow charged to the brim
with a mysterious spirit of play--grave, earnest play, yet airy with
a consummate mischief sometimes that was the despair of Fräulein
Bühlke, who wore an expression then as though, after all, there were
things God did _not_ know. Yes, like running water through the rooms
and corridors, and tumbling down the stairs behind the kitten or
round the skirts of ‘bulgey’ Mother Coove. Swift and gentle always,
yet with force enough to hurt you if you got in her way; almost to
sting or slap. Soft, and very girlish to look at, she was really hard
as a boy, flexible too as a willow branch, and with a rod of steel
laced somewhere invisibly through her tenderness, unsuspected till
occasion--rarely--betrayed its presence. It shifted its position too;
one never knew where that firmness which is character would crop out
and refuse to bend. For then the childishness would vanish. She became
imperious as a little natural queen. The half-breed groom had a taste
of this latter quality more than once, and afterwards worshipped the
ground she walked on. To see them together, she in her dark-grey
riding-habit, holding a little whip, and he with his sinister, wild
face and half malignant manners, called up some picture of a child and
a savage animal she had tamed.
* * * * *
But the thing Mánya chiefly brought into his garden, and so also
into the garden of his thoughts, was this new element of Play. She
brought with her, not only the child’s make-believe, but the child’s
conviction, earnestness, and sense of reality.
‘Tell me _one_ thing,’ she had a way of saying, sure preface to
something of significant import that she had to ask, accompanied always
by a darker expression in the eyes, puzzled or searching and not on any
account to be evaded or lightly answered; ‘Tell me one thing, Uncle:
do these outside things come after us into the house as well?’ ‘Only
when we allow them, or invite them in,’ he replied, taking up her
mood as seriously as herself, yet knowing her question to be a feint.
She knew the true answer better than himself. She wished to see what
he would say. Her sly laughter of approval told him that. ‘They’re
already there, though, aren’t they?’ she whispered, and when he nodded
agreement, she added, ‘Of course; they’re everywhere really all the
time. They don’t move about as we do.’
But she had often this singular way of seeing things, and saying them,
from the original point of view whence she regarded them--from beneath,
as it were, topsy-turvy some might call it, almost a little mad, judged
by the sheep-like vision of the majority, yet for herself entirely
true, consistent, not imagined merely.
Her literal use of words, too, was sometimes vividly illuminating--as
though she saw language _directly_, and robbed of the cloak with which
familiar use has smothered it. She undressed phrases, making them
shine out alone.
‘Moping, child?’ he asked once, when one of her silent fits had been
somewhat prolonged. ‘Unhappy?’
‘No, Uncle. And I’m _not_ moping.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘Fräulein told me I was self-ish, rather.’
‘That’s all right,’ he said to comfort her. ‘Be yourself--self-ish--or
you’re nothing.’
She followed her own thought, perhaps not understanding him quite.
‘She said I must put my Self out more--for others. Mother used to say
it too.’
He turned and stared at her. The little face was very grave.
‘Eh?’ he asked. ‘Put your Self out?’
Mánya nodded, fixing her eyes, half dreamy, upon his own. She had been
far away. Now she was coming back.
‘So I’m learning,’ she said, her voice coming as from a distance. ‘It’s
_so_ funny. But it’s not really difficult--a bit. I could teach you, I
think, if you’d promise faithfully to practise regularly.’
There was a pause before he asked the next question.
‘How d’you do it, child?’ came a little gruffly, for he felt queer
emotion rising in him.
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘Oh, I couldn’t tell you _like that_. I could only show you.’
There was a touch of weirdness about the child. It stole into him--a
faint sense of eeriness, as though she were letting him see through
peepholes into that other world she knew so well.
‘Well,’ he asked, more gently, ‘what happens when you _have_ put your
Self--er--out? Other things come in, eh?’
‘How can I tell?’ she answered like a flash. ‘I’m out.’
He stared at her, waiting for more. But nothing followed, and a minute
later she was as usual, laughing, her brilliant eyes flashing with
mischief, and presently went upstairs to get tidy for their evening
meal that was something between an early dinner and high tea. Only at
the door she paused a second to fling him another of her characteristic
phrases:
‘I wonder, Uncle. Don’t you?’ For she certainly knew some natural way,
born in her, of moving her Self aside and letting the tide of ‘bigger
things’ sweep in and use her. It was her incommunicable secret.
And he did wonder a good deal. Wonder with him had never faded as
with most men. It had often puzzled him why this divine curiosity
about everything should disappear with the majority after twenty-five,
instead, rather, of steadily increasing the more one knows. Familiarity
with those few scattered details the world calls knowledge had never
dulled its golden edge for him. Only Mánya, and the things she asked
and said, gave it a violent new impetus that was like youth returned.
And her notion of putting one’s Self out in order to let other things
come in filled him with about as much wonder as he could comfortably
hold just then. He dozed over the fire, thinking deeply, wishing that
for a single moment he could stand where this child stood, see things
from her point of view, learn the geography of the world she lived in.
The source of her inspiration was Nature of course. Yet he too stood
close to Nature and was full of sympathetic understanding for her
mystery and beauty. Did Mánya then stand nearer than himself? Did she,
perhaps, dwell inside it, while he examined from the outside only, a
mere onlooker, though an appreciative and loving onlooker?
It came to him that things yielded up to her their essential meaning
because she saw them from another side, and he recalled an illuminating
line of Alice Meynell about a daisy, and how wonderful it must be to
see from ‘God’s side,’ even of such a simple thing.
Mánya, moreover, saw everything in some amazing fashion as One. The
facts of common knowledge men studied so laboriously in isolated groups
were but the jewelled facets that hung glittering upon the enormous
flanks of this One. The thought flashed through his mind. He remembered
another thing she said, and then another; they began to crowd his
brain. ‘I never dream because I know it all awake,’ she told him once;
and only that afternoon, when he asked her why she always stopped and
stood straight before him--a habit she had--when he spoke seriously
with her, she answered, ‘Because I want to see you properly. I must be
opposite for that! No one can see their own face, or what’s next to
them, can they?’
Truth, and a philosophical truth! Of no particular importance, maybe,
yet strange for a child to have discovered.
Even her ideas of space were singularly original, direct, unhampered by
the terms that smother meaning. ‘Up’ and ‘down’ perplexed her; ‘left’
and ‘right’ perpetually deceived her; even ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’
when she tried to express them, landed her in a chaos of confusion
that to most could have seemed only sheer stupidity. She stood, as it
were, in some attitude of naked knowledge behind thought, perception
unfettered, untaught, in which she knew that space was only a way of
talking about something that no one ever really understands. She saw
space, felt it rather, in some absolute sense, not yet ‘educated’ to
treat it relatively. She saw everything ‘round,’ as though her spatial
perceptions were all circles. And circles are infinite, eternal.
With Time, too, it was somewhat similar. ‘It’ll come round again,’
she said once, when he chided her for having left something undone
earlier in the day; or, ‘when I get back to it, Uncle,’ in reply to
his reminding her of a duty for the following day. To the end she was
‘stupid’ about telling the time, and until he cured her of it her
invariable answer to his question, ‘what o’clock it was,’ would be the
literal truth that it was ‘just now, Uncle,’ or simply ‘now,’ as though
she saw things from an absolute, and not a relative point of view. She
was always saying things to prove it in this curious manner. And, while
it made him sometimes feel uncomfortable in a way he could not quite
define, it also increased his attitude of respect towards the secret,
mysterious thing she hid so well, though without intending to hide it.
She seemed in touch with eternal things--more than other children--not
merely with a transient expression of them filtered down for normal
human comprehension. Some giant thing she certainly knew. She lived it.
Death, for instance, was a conception her mind failed to grasp. She
could not realise it. People had ‘left’ or ‘gone away,’ perhaps, but
somehow for her were always ‘_there_.’
Thus started, his thoughts often travelled far, but always came up with
a shock against that big black barrier--the army of the dead. The dead,
of course, were always somewhere--if there was survival. But, though
he had encountered strange phases of the spiritualistic movement in
America, he had known nothing to justify the theory of interference
from the other side of that black barrier. The deliverances of the
mediums brought no conviction. He sometimes wondered, that was all.
And in particular he wondered about that member of the great army who
had been for years his close and dear companion. This was natural
enough. Could it be that his thought, prolonged and concentrated,
formed a prison-house from which escape was difficult? And had his
own passionate thinking that ever associated her memory with the
Place, detained one soul from farther flight elsewhere? Was this an
explanation of that hint Mánya so often brought him--that her presence
helped to disentangle, liberate, unravel...? Was the Place haunted in
this literal sense?...
VIII
Yet, perhaps, after all, the chief change she introduced was this vital
resurrection of his sense of play. For Play is eternal, older than the
stars, older even than dreams. She taught him afresh things he had
already known, but long forgotten or laid aside. And all she knew came
first direct from Nature, large and undiluted.
He learned, for instance, the secret of that deep quiet she possessed
even in her wildest moments; and how it came from a practice in her
mother’s house, where all was rush and clamour about worldly ‘horrid
things’--her practice of lying out at night to watch the stars. But not
merely to watch them for a minute. She would watch for hours, following
the constellations from the moment they loomed above the horizon till
they set again at dawn. She saw them move slowly across the entire
sky. For ‘mother hurried and fussed’ her so, and by doing this she
instinctively drew into her curious wild heart the deep delight of
feeling that ‘there was lots of room really, and no particular hurry
about anything.’ Her inspiration was profound, from ancient sources,
natural.
And her ‘play,’ for the same reason, was never foolish. It was creative
play. It was the faculty by which the poets and dreamers re-create the
world, and thus rejuvenate it. Adam knew it when he named the beasts,
and Job, when he made rhymes about taking Leviathan with a hook, and
sang his little heart-sweet songs about the conies and the hopping
hills. In the wise it never dies, for it is most subtly allied to
wisdom, and only the dreamless can divorce it quite. It is the natural,
untaught poetry of the soul which laughs and weeps with Nature, knowing
itself akin, seeing itself in everything and everything in itself.
Mánya in some amazing fashion, not yet educated out of her, knew Nature
in herself.
She did naughty things too, as he learned from Mrs. Coove, when he
felt obliged to lecture her, but they were invariably typical and
explanatory of her close-to-Nature little being. And he understood what
she felt so well that his lectures ended in laughter, with her grave
defence ‘Uncle, you’d have done the same yourself.’ Once in particular,
after a fortnight of parching drought, when the gush of warm rain
came with its welcome, drenching soak, and the child ran out upon the
balcony in her nightgown to feel it on her body too--how could he prove
her wrong, having felt the same delight himself? ‘I was thirsty and dry
all over. I _had_ to do it,’ she explained, puzzled, adding that of
course she had changed afterwards and used the rough Turkey towel ‘just
as you do.’
But other things he did not understand so well; and one of these was
her singular habit of imitating the sounds of Nature, with an accuracy,
too, that often deceived even himself. The true sounds of Nature are
only two--water and wind, with their many variations. And Mánya, by
some trick of tone and breath, could reproduce them marvellously.
‘It’s the way to get close,’ she told him when he asked her why, ‘the
way to get inside. If you get the sound exact, you feel the same as
they do, and know their things.’ And the cryptic, yet deeply suggestive
explanation contained a significant truth that yet just evaded his
comprehension. They often played it together in the woods, though he
never approached her own astonishing excellence. This, again, stirred
something like awe in him; it was a little eerie, almost uncanny, to
hear her ‘doing trees,’ or ‘playing wind and water.’
But the strangest of all her odd, original tricks was one that he at
length dissuaded her from practising because he felt it stimulated her
imagination unwisely, and with too great conviction. It is not easy
to describe, and to convey the complete success of the achievement is
impossible without seeing the actual results. For she drew invisible
things. Her designs, so clumsily done with a butt of pencil, or even
the point of her stick in the sand, managed to suggest a meaning that
somehow just escaped grasping by the mind. They made him think of
puzzle-pictures that intentionally conceal a face or figure. Vague,
fluid shapes that never quite achieved an actual form ran through
these scattered tracings. She used points in the scenery to indicate
an outline of something other than themselves, yet something they
contained and clothed. His eye vainly tried to force into view the
picture that he felt lay there hiding within these points.
On a large sheet of paper she would draw roughly details of the
landscape--tops of trees, the Mill roof, a boulder or a stretch of the
stream, for instance--and persuade these points to gather the blank
space of paper between them into the semblance, the suggestion rather,
of some vague figure, always vast and always very much alive. They
marked, within their boundaries, an outline of some form that remained
continually elusive. Yet the outline thus framed, whichever way you
looked at it, even holding the paper upside down, still remained a
figure; a figure, moreover, that moved. For the child had a way of
turning the paper round so that the figure had an appearance of moving
independently upon itself. The reality of the whole business was more
than striking; and it was when she came to giving these figures names
that she decided to put a stop to it.
* * * * *
One day another curious thing had happened. He had often thought about
it since, and wondered whether its explanation lay in mere child’s
mischief, or in some power of discerning these invisible Presences that
she drew.
They were returning together from a scramble in the gravel-pit which
they pretended was a secret entrance to the centre of the world; and
they were tired. Mánya walked a little in front, as her habit was, so
that she could turn and see him ‘opposite’ at a moment’s notice when he
said an interesting thing. Her red tam-o’-shanter, with the top-knot
off, she carried in her hand, swinging it to and fro. From time to
time she flicked it out sideways, as though to keep flies away. But
there were no flies, for it was chilly and growing dark. The pines
were thickly planted here, with sudden open spaces. Their footsteps
fell soft and dead upon the needles. And sometimes she flung her arm
out with an imperious, sudden gesture of defiance that made him feel
suspicious and look over his shoulder. For it was like signing to some
one who came close, some one he could not see, but whose presence was
very real to her. The unwelcome conviction grew upon him. Some one,
in the world she knew apart from him, accompanied them. A few minutes
before she had been wild and romping, playing at ‘mushrooms’ with
laughter and excitement. She loved doing this--whirling round on her
toes till her skirts were horizontal, then sinking with them ballooning
round her to the ground, the tam-o’-shanter pulled down over her entire
face so that she looked like a giant toadstool with a crimson top. But
now she had turned suddenly grave and silent.
‘Uncle!’ she exclaimed abruptly, turning sharply to face him, and using
the hushed tone that was always prelude to some startling question,
‘tell me _one_ thing, please. What would _you_ do if----’
She broke off suddenly and sprang swiftly to one side.
‘Mánya! if what?’ He did not like the movement; it was so obviously
done to avoid something that stood in her way--between them--very
close. He almost jumped too. ‘I can’t tell you anything while you’re
darting about like a deer-fly. What d’you want to know?’ he added with
involuntary sharpness.
She stood facing him with her legs astride the path. She stared
straight into his eyes. The dusk played tricks with her height, always
delusive. It magnified her. She seemed to stand over him, towering up.
‘If some one kept walking close beside you under an umbrella,’ she
whispered earnestly, ‘so that the face was hidden and you could never
see it--what would _you_ do?’
‘Child! But what a question!’ The carelessness in his tone was not
quite natural. A shiver ran down his back.
She moved closer, so that he felt her breath and saw the gleam of her
big, wide-opened eyes.
‘Would you knock up the umbrella with a bang,’ she whispered, as
though afraid she might be overheard, ‘or just suddenly stoop and look
beneath--catching it that way?’
He stepped aside to pass her, but the child stepped with him, barring
his movement of escape. She meant to have her answer.
‘Take it by surprise like that, I mean. _Would_ you, Uncle?’
He stared blankly at her; the conviction in her voice and manner was
disquieting.
‘Depends what kind or thing,’ he said, seeing his mistake. He tried to
banter, and yet at the same time seem serious. But to joke with Mánya
in this mood was never very successful. She resented it. And above all
he did not want to lose her confidence.
‘Depends,’ he said slowly, ‘whether I felt it friendly or unfriendly;
but I _think_--er--I should prefer to knock the brolly up.’
For a moment she appeared to weigh the wisdom of his judgment, then
instantly rejecting it.
‘_I_ shouldn’t!’ she answered like a flash. ‘I should suddenly run up
and stoop to see. I should catch it that way!’
And, before he could add a word or make a movement to go on, she
darted from beside him with a leap like a deer, flew forwards several
yards among the trees, stooped suddenly down, then turned her head
and face up sideways as though to peer beneath something that spread
close to the ground. Her skirts ballooned about her like the mushroom,
one hand supporting her on the earth, while the other, holding the
tam-o’-shanter, shaded her eyes.
‘Oh! oh!’ she cried the next instant, standing bolt upright again,
‘it’s a whole lot! And they’ve all gone like lightning--gone off
there!’ She pointed all about her--into the sky, towards the moors,
back to the forest, even down into the earth--a curious sweeping
gesture; then hid her face behind both hands and came slowly to his
side again.
‘It wasn’t one, Uncle. It was a lot!’ she whispered through her
fingers. Then she dropped her hands as a new explanation flashed into
her. ‘But p’raps, after all, it was only one! Oh, Uncle, I do believe
it _was_ only one. Just fancy--how awfully splendid! I wonder!’
Neither the hour nor the place seemed to him suitable for such a
discussion. He put his arm round her and hurried out of the wood. He
put the woods behind them, like a protective barrier; for his sake as
well as hers; that much he clearly realised. He somehow made a shield
of them.
In the garden, with the stars peeping through thin clouds, and the
lights of the windows beckoning in front, he turned and said laughing,
quickening his pace at the same time:
‘Rabbits, Mánya, rabbits! All the rabbits here use brollies, and the
bunnies too.’ It was the best thing he could think of at the moment.
Rather neat he thought it. But her instant answer took the wind out of
his sham sails.
‘That’s just the name for them!’ she cried, clapping her hands softly
with delight. ‘Now they needn’t hide like that any more. We’ll just
pretend they’re bunnies, and they’ll feel disguised enough.’
They went into the house, and it was comforting to see the figure of
Mother Coove filling the entire hall. At least there was no disguising
her. But on the steps Mánya halted a moment and gazed up in his face.
She stood in front of him, deaf to Mrs. Coove’s statements from the
rear about wet boots. Her eyes, though shining with excitement, held a
puzzled, wild expression.
‘Uncle,’ she whispered, with sly laughter, standing on tiptoe to kiss
him, ‘I wonder----!’ then flew upstairs to change before he could find
a suitable reply.
But he wondered too, wondered what it was the child had seen. For
certainly she had seen something.
Yet the thought that finally stayed with him--as after all the other
queer adventures they had together--was this unpleasant one, that his
so willing acceptance of the little intruder involved the disapproval,
even the resentment, of--another. It haunted him. He never could get
quite free of it. Another watched, another listened, another--waited.
And Mánya knew.
IX
Autumn passed into winter, and spring at last came round. The
dream-estate was a garden of delight and loveliness, fresh green upon
the larches and heather all abloom. The routine of the little household
was established, and seemed as if it could never have been otherwise.
The relationship between the elderly uncle and his little charge was
perfect now, like that between a father and his only daughter, spoilt
daughter, perhaps a little, who, knowing her power, yet never took
advantage of it. He loved her as his own child; and that evasive
‘something’ in her which had won his respect from the first still
continued to elude him. He never caught it up. It had increased, too,
in the long, dark months. Now, with the lengthening days, it came still
more to the front, grown bolder, as though ‘spring’s sweet trouble in
the ground’ summoned it forth. This sympathy between her being and
the Place had strengthened underground. The disentangling had gone on
apace. With the first warm softness of the April days he woke abruptly
to the fact, and faced it. The older memories had been replaced. It
seemed to him almost as though his hold upon the Place had weakened.
He loved it still, but loved it in some new way. And his conscience
pricked him, for conscience had become identified with the trust of
guardianship thus self-imposed. He had let something in, and though
it was not the taint of outside country _she_ had said would ‘dirty’
it, it yet was alien. It was somehow hostile to the conditions of his
original Deed of Trust.
Then, into this little world, dropping like some stray bullet from a
distant battle, came with a bang the person of John C. Murdoch. He came
for a self-proposed visit of one day, being too ‘rushed’ to stay an
hour longer. Chance had put him ‘on the trail’ of his old-time ‘pard of
a hundred camps,’ and he couldn’t miss looking him up, not ‘for all the
money you could shake a stick at.’ More like a shell than mere bullet
he came--explosively and with a kind of tempestuous energy. For his
vitality and speed of action were terrific, and he was making money now
‘dead easy’--so easy, in fact, that it was ‘like picking it up in the
street.’
‘Then you’ve done well for yourself since those old days in Arizona,’
said Eliot, really pleased to see him, for a truer ‘partner’ in
difficult times he had never known; ‘and I’m glad to hear it.’
‘That’s so, Boss’--he had always called the ‘Englisher’ thus because
of his refined speech and manners--‘God ain’t forgot me, and I’ve got
grub-stakes now all over Yurrup. Just raking it in, and if you want
a bit, why, name the figger and it’s yours.’ He glanced round at the
modest old-fashioned establishment, judging it evidence of unsuccess.
‘What line?’ asked Eliot, dropping into the long-forgotten lingo.
‘Why, patents, bless your heart,’ was the reply. ‘They come to me as
easy as mother’s milk to baby, and if the heart don’t wither in me
first, I’ll patent everything in sight. I’ll patent the earth itself
before I’m done.’
And for a whole hour, smoking one strong green cigar upon another, he
gave brief and picturesque descriptions of his various enterprises,
with such energy and gusto, moreover, that there woke in Eliot
something of the lust of battle he had known in the wild, early days,
something of his zest for making a fortune, something too of the old
bitter grievance--in a word, the spirit of action, eager strife and
keen achievement, which never had quite gone to sleep....
‘And now,’ said Murdoch at length, ‘tell me about yerself. You look
fit and lively. You’ve had enough of my chin-music. Made yer pile and
retired too? Isn’t that it? Only you still like things kind o’ modest
and camp-like. Is that so?’
But Eliot found it difficult to tell. This side of him that life in
England had revived, to the almost complete burial of the other, was
one that Murdoch would not understand. For one thing, Murdoch had never
seen it in his friend; the Arizona days had kept it deeply hidden. He
listened with a kind of tolerant pity, while Eliot found himself giving
the desired information almost in a tone of apology.
‘Every man to his liking,’ the Westerner cut him short when he had
heard less than half of the stammering tale, ‘and your line ain’t
mine, I see. I’m no shadow-chaser--never was. You’ve changed a lot.
Why’--looking round at the little pine-clad valley--‘I should think
you’d rot to death in this place. There’s not room to pitch a camp or
feed a horse. I’d choke for want of air.’ And he lit another cigar and
spat neatly across ten feet of lawn.
John Casanova Murdoch--in the West he was called ‘John Cass,’ or just
‘John C.,’ but had resurrected the middle name for the benefit of
Yurrup--was a man of parts and character, tried courage, and unfailing
in his friendship. ‘Straight as you make ’em’ was the verdict of
the primitive country where a man’s essential qualities are soon
recognised, ‘and without no frills.’ And Eliot, whatever he may have
thought, felt no resentment. He remembered the rough man’s kindness
to him when he had been a tenderfoot in more than one awkward place.
John C. might ‘rot to death’ in this place, and might think the vulgar
country round it ‘great stuff,’ but for all that his host liked to see
and hear him. He remembered his skill as a mining prospector and an
engineer; he was not surprised that he had at last ‘struck oil.’
They talked of many things, but the visitor always brought the
conversations round to his two great healthy ambitions, now on the way
to full satisfaction: money and power. Upon some chance mention of
religion, he waved his hand impatiently with enough vigour to knock a
man down, and said, ‘Religion! Hell! I only discuss facts.’ And his
definition of a ‘fact’ would no doubt have been a dollar bill, a mining
‘proposition,’ or a food-problem--some scheme by which John C. could
make a bit. Yet though he placed religion among the fantasies, he lived
it in his way. He ranked the Pope with Barnum, each of them ‘biggest in
his own line of goods,’ and ‘Shakespeare was right enough, but might
have made it shorter.’
And Eliot, listening, felt the buried portion of his nature waken and
revive. It caused him acute discomfort.
‘Now show me round the little hole a bit,’ said Murdoch just before he
left. ‘I’d like to see the damage, just for old times’ sake. It won’t
take above ten minutes if we hustle along.’
They hustled along. Eliot led the way with a curious deep uneasiness
he could not quite explain. His heart sank within him. Gladly he
would have escaped the painful duty, but Murdoch’s vigorous energy
constrained him. The whole way he felt ashamed, yet would have felt
still more ashamed to have refused. He ‘faced the music’ as John
Casanova Murdoch phrased it, and while doing so, that other music of
his visitor’s villainous nasal twang cut across the deep-noted murmur
of the wind and water like a buzz-saw with a bit of wire trailing
against its teeth.
The entire journey occupied but half an hour, for Eliot made
short-cuts, instinctively avoiding certain places, and the whole time
Murdoch talked. His business, practical soul expanded with good nature.
‘The place ain’t so bad, if you worked it up a bit,’ he said, striking
a match on the wall of the mill, and spitting into the clear water,
‘but it’s not much bigger than a chicken-run at present. If I was
you, Boss, I’d have it cleaned up first.’ Again he offered a cheque,
thinking the unkempt appearance due to want of means. His uninvited
opinions were freely offered, as willingly as he would have given money
if his old ‘pard’ had needed it; given kindly too, without the least
desire to wound. He picked out the prettiest ‘building sites,’ and
explained where an artificial lake could be made ‘as easy as rolling
off a log.’ His patent wire would fence the gardens off ‘and no one
ever see it’; and his special concrete paving, from waste material
that yielded a hundred per cent profit, would make paths ‘so neat and
pretty you could dance to heaven on ’em.’ The place might be developed
so as to ‘knock the stuffing’ out of the country round about, and the
estate become a ‘puffect picture-book.’
‘You’ve got a gold mine here, and God never meant a gold mine to lie
unnoticed like a roadside ditch. Only you’ll need to gladden it up a
bit first. You could make it hum as a picnic or amusement resort for
the town people. Take it from me, Boss. It’s so.’
And the effect upon Eliot as he listened was curious; it was twofold.
For while at first the chatter wounded him like insults aimed directly
at the dead, at the same time, to his deep disgust, it stirred all his
former love of practical, energetic action. The old lust and fever to
be up and doing, helping the world go round, making money and worldly
position, woke more and more, as Murdoch’s vigorous, crude personality
stung his will, stung also desires he thought for ever dead. It made
him angry to find that they were not dead, and yet he felt that he was
feeble not to resent the gross invasion, even cowardly not to resist
the coarse attack and kick the vulgar intruder out. It was like a
breach of trust to take it all so meekly without protesting, or at
least without stating forcibly his position, as though he were not
sufficiently sure of himself to protect his memories and his dead. But
this was the truth: he was not sure of himself. The blinding light of
this simple fellow’s mind showed up the hidden inequalities to himself.
Another discovered his essential instability to himself. This other
side of him had existed all the time; and his attachment to the Place
was partly artificial, built up largely by the vigorous assertion of
the departed. His love had coloured it wonderfully all these years,
but--it was a love that had undergone a change. It had not faded, but
grown otherwise. Another kind of love had to some extent replaced and
weakened it. He felt mortified, ashamed, but more, he felt uneasy too.
The wrench was pain. ‘If only she were here and I could explain it to
her,’ ran his thought over and over again, followed by the feeling that
perhaps she _was_ there, listening to it all--and judging him.
Behind the trees, a little distance away, he saw the flitting figure
of Mánya, watching them as they passed noisily along the pathways of
her secret playground. Her attitude even at this distance expressed
resentment. He imagined her indignant eyes. But, closer than that,
another watched and followed, listened and disapproved--that other whom
she knew yet never spoke about, who was in league with her, and seemed
more and more to him, like a phantom risen from the dead.
With difficulty, and with an uneasiness growing every minute now,
he gave his attention to his talkative, well-meaning, though almost
offensive guest, at once insufferable yet welcome. One moment he saw
him in his camping-kit of twenty years ago, with big sombrero and
pistols in his belt, and the next as he was to-day, reeking of luxury
and money, in a London black tail-coat, white Homburg hat, diamonds
shining on his fingers and in his gaudy speckled tie, his pointed
patent-leather boots gleaming insolently through the bracken and
heather.
And through his silence crashed a noise of battle that he thought the
entire Place must hear. But clear issue to the battle there was none.
The opposing sides were matched with such deadly equality. Which was
his real self lay in the balance, until at the last John Casanova
unwittingly turned the scales.
It came about so quickly, with such calculated precision, as it were,
that Eliot almost felt it had all been prepared beforehand and Murdoch
had come down on purpose. It was like a sudden flank attack that swept
him from his last defences. Help that could not reach him in the form
of Mánya signalled from the distance with her shining eyes, her red
tam-o’-shanter the banner of reinforcements that arrived too late.
For John C. stood triumphantly before him, a conqueror in his last
dismantled fortress. His face alight with enthusiasm that was all
excitement, he held his hands out towards him, cup-wise.
‘See here,’ he said with excitement, but in a hard, dry tone that
reminded Eliot of prospecting days in Arizona, ‘Boss, will you take a
look at this, please?’
He had been rooting about in the heather by the edge of the sand-pits.
And he thrust his joined hands beneath the other’s nose. Something
the size of a hen’s egg, something that shone a dirty white, lay in
them against the thick gold rings. ‘Didn’t I tell you the place was
a gol-darned gold mine? But what’s the use o’ talking? Will you look
at this, now?’ He repeated it with the air of a man who has suddenly
discovered the secret of the world. The voice was quiet with intense
excitement kept hard under.
And Eliot obeyed and looked. He saw his visitor, his Bond Street
trousers turned up high enough to show the great muscles of his calves,
the Homburg hat tilted across one eye, coat-sleeves pulled up and
smeared with a whitish mud. There was perspiration on his forehead. It
only needed the sombrero and the pistols to complete the picture of
twenty years ago when Cass Murdoch, after weeks of heavy labour, found
the first gold-dust in his pan. For John C. _had_ found gold. It lay, a
dirty lump of white earth, in his large spread hands. Those hands were
the pan. The breeze that murmured through the pine trees came, sweet
and keen, from leagues of open plain and virgin mountains far away....
Eliot smelt the wood-fire smoke of camp ... heard the crack of the
rifle as some one killed the dinner....
‘Well, John C.,’ he gasped, as he dropped back likewise into the
vanished pocket of the years, ‘what’s your luck? Out with it, man, out
with it!’
‘A fortune,’ replied his visitor. ‘Put yer finger on it right now,
an’ don’t tell mother or burst out crying unless yer forced to!’ High
pleasure was in his voice.
He stepped closer, transferring the lump of dirt into the hand his host
unconsciously stretched open to receive it. It lay there a moment,
looking even dirtier than before against the more delicate skin. Eliot
felt it with finger and thumb. It was soft and sticky and a little
moist. It stained the flesh.
Then he looked up and stared into his companion’s eyes--blankly. A
horrible excitement worked underground in him. But he did not even yet
understand.
‘You’ve got it,’ observed John C, with dry finality.
‘Got what?’ asked Eliot.
‘Got it right there in yer westkit pocket,’ said the other, with an
air of supreme satisfaction. His cigar had gone out. He lit it again
in leisurely fashion, spat accurately at a distant frond of bracken,
eyed the lump of dirt again with inimitable pride, and added, ‘Got
it without asking; the working soft and easy too; water-power on the
spot, and the sea all close and handy for shipping it away.’ He made a
gesture to indicate the tumbling stream and the sea-coast a few miles
beyond.
Then, seeing that his host still stared with blank incomprehension,
holding the little lump at arm’s length as though it might bite or burn
him, he deigned to explain, but with a note of condescending pity in
his voice, as of a man explaining to a stupid child.
‘Clay,’ he said calmly, ‘and good stuff at that.’
‘Clay,’ repeated Eliot, still a little dazed, though light was breaking
on him. ‘Bricks...?’ he asked, with a dull sinking of the heart.
‘Bricks, nothing!’ snapped the other with impatient scorn, as though
his friend were still a tenderfoot in Arizona. ‘Good, white pottery
clay, and soft as a baby’s tongue. The best God ever laid down for man.
Worth twice its weight in dust. And all to be had for the trouble of
shovelling it out. Old pard, you’ve struck it good and hot this time;
and here’s my blessing on yer both.’
Eliot dropped the lump his fingers held so long and took half-heartedly
the giant hand that squeezed his own. Across his brain ran visions of
slender vases, exquisite white cups and bowls and pitchers, plates
and sweet-rimmed basins, all fashioned in delicate-toned shades of
glaze--beautifully finished pottery--‘worth twice their weight in dust.’
X
And half an hour later, when John Casanova Murdoch had boomed away in
his luxurious motor-car like a departing thunderstorm, Eliot, coming
back by the pinewood that led from the high road, heard a step behind
him, and turned to find Mánya’s face looking over his very shoulder.
‘Uncle, who was that?’ There was a touch of indignation in her voice
that was almost contempt.
‘Man I knew in America--years ago,’ he said shortly. He still felt
dazed, bewildered. But shame and uneasiness came creeping up as well.
‘He won’t come again, will he?’
‘Not again, Mánya.’
The child took his arm, apparently only half relieved.
‘He was like a bit of the dirty country,’ she said, and when he
interrupted with ‘Not quite so bad as that, Mánya,’ she asked abruptly
with her usual intuition, ‘Did he want to buy, or build, or something
horrid like that?’
‘We haven’t met for twenty years,’ he said evasively. ‘Used to hunt
and camp together in America. He went to the goldfields with me.’ He
was debating all the while whether he should tell her all. He hardly
knew what he thought. Like a powerful undertow there drove through the
storm of strange emotions the tide of a decision he had already come
to. It swept him from all his moorings, though as yet he would not
acknowledge it even to himself.
‘Uncle,’ she cried suddenly, stepping across the path, and looking
anxiously into his face, ‘tell me one thing: will anything be
different?’
And the simple question, or perhaps the eager, wistful expression in
her voice and eyes, showed him the truth that there was no evading. He
must tell her sometime. Why not now?
He decided to make a clean sweep of it.
‘Mánya,’ he began gently, ‘this Place one day--when I am gone, you
know--will be your own. But there’ll be no money with it. You’ll have
very little to live on.’
She said nothing, just listening with a little air of boredom, as
though she knew this already, yet felt no special interest in it. It
belonged to the world of things she could not realise much. She nodded.
They still stood there, face to face.
‘I’ve been anxious, child, for a long time about your future,’ he went
on, meeting her dark eyes with a distinct effort, for they seemed to
read the shame he felt rising in his heart; ‘and wondering what I could
do to make you safe----’
‘I’m safe enough,’ she interrupted, tossing her hair back and raising
her chin a little.
‘But when I’m gone,’ he said gravely, ‘and Mrs. Coove has gone, and
there’s no one to look after you. Money’s your only friend then.’
She seemed to reflect. She moved aside, and they walked on slowly
towards the house.
‘That’s a long way off, Uncle. I’m not afraid.’
‘But it’s my duty to provide for you as well as possible,’ he said
firmly.
And then he told her bluntly and in as few words as possible of the
discovery of the clay.
The excitement at first in the child was so great that nothing would
satisfy her but that they should at once turn back and see the place
together. They did so, while he explained how ‘Mr. Murdoch,’ who was
learned in strata, their depth and dip and outcrop, had declared that
this deposit of fine white clay was very large. Its spread below the
heather-roots might be tremendous. ‘My aunt,’ he said, ‘your great-aunt
Julia, lived all her life upon a gold mine here without knowing it,
poor as a church mouse.’
This particularly thrilled her. ‘How funny that she never _felt_ it!’
was her curious verdict. ‘Was she _very_ deaf?’
‘Stone deaf, yes,’ he replied, laughing, ‘and short-sighted too.’
‘Ah!’ said the child, as though things were thus explained. ‘But she
might have digged!’
She ran among the heather when he showed her the place, found lumps of
clay, played ball with them and was wildly delighted. She treated the
great discovery as a game; then as a splendid secret ‘just between us
two.’ Mr. Murdoch wouldn’t tell, would he? That seemed the only danger
that she saw--at first.
But her uncle knew quite well that this excitement was all false; and
far from reassuring him, it merely delayed the deeper verdict that
was bound to come with full comprehension. All the discovery involved
had not reached her brain. As yet she realised only the novelty, the
mystery, the wonder. The spot, moreover, where the great deposit
showed its lip was beside the loveliest part of all the wood, and just
where the child most loved to play.
At last, then, as her body grew tired and the excitement brought the
natural physical reaction, he saw the change begin. She paused and
looked about her half suspiciously, like an animal that suspects a
trap. Her glance ran questioningly to where her uncle leaned, watching
her, against a tree. She eyed him. He thought she suddenly looked
different, though wherein the difference lay escaped him. He felt as
if he were watching a wild animal, only half tamed, that distrusts its
owner, and would next deny his mastership and wait its opportunity to
spring. The simile, he knew, was exaggerated, but the picture rose
within him none the less. Misgiving and uneasiness grew apace.
Abruptly Mánya stopped her wild playing and with the movement of a
little panther ran towards him. She took up a position, as usual,
directly opposite. With the strange air of dignity that sometimes
clothed her, the figure of the child stood there among the darkening
trees and asked him questions, keen, searching questions. He was
grateful for the shadows, though he felt they did not screen his face
from her piercing sight; but it was her imperious manner above all
that made his defence seem so clumsily insincere, and the questions a
veritable inquisition.
Before the flood of them, as before their pitiless scrutiny, he
certainly quailed. Their keen directness convicted him almost of
treachery, and he was hard put to it to persuade her and himself that
it really _was_ a sense of duty he obeyed in this decision to work
the clay. ‘I’m doing it all for her,’ he repeated again and again to
himself, and loathed, with a dash of terror, that curious sudden drive,
as of a blow from outside, that sent his tongue into his cheek. But the
terror, he dimly divined, was due to another feeling as well, equally
vague yet equally persistent. For it seemed that while she listened to
his explanations, another listened in the darkness too. Her resentment
and distress he realised vividly; but he felt also the resentment and
distress--of another. And more than once, during this strange dialogue
in the darkening wood, he knew the horrible sensation that this ‘other’
had come very close, so close as to slip between himself and the child.
Almost--that the child was being used as the instrument to express the
vehement protest...!
But he faced the music, to use the lingo of John C., and spared himself
nothing. He told Mánya, though briefly, that workmen must swarm all
through her secret playground, that machinery must grind and boom
across the haunted valleys, that the water of her little stream must
yield the power to turn great ugly wheels, and that perhaps even a
little railway might be built to convey the loads of precious clay down
to the sea where steamers would call for them. Acres of trees, too,
would be swept away, and heather-land marred and scarred with pits and
ditches and quarries. But the benefits in time would all be hers. He
put it purposely at its worst, while emphasising as best he could the
interest and excitement that must accompany the developments. The dream
of many years was nevertheless shattered into bits in half an hour.
The child listened and understood. He was relieved, if puzzled at
the same time, that she betrayed no emotion of disappointment or
indignation. What she felt she dealt with in her own way--inside. At
the stream, however, on her way home, she paused a moment, watching it
slip through the darkness underneath the old mill-wheel.
‘It won’t run any more--for itself,’ she said in a low, trembling
little voice, that was infinitely pathetic.
‘No; but it will run for you, Mánya,’ he answered, though the words had
not been addressed really to him; ‘working away busily for your future.’
And then she burst into tears and hid her face against his coat. He
found no further thing to say. He walked beside her, feeling like a
criminal found out.
But at the end, as they neared the house side by side, she suddenly
turned and asked another question that caused him a thrill of vivid
surprise and discomfort--so vivid, in fact, that it was fear.
They were standing just beneath _her_ bedroom window then. Memory
rushed back upon him with overwhelming force, and he glanced up
instinctively at the empty panes of glass. It was almost as though he
expected to see a face looking reproachfully down upon him. Through
him like spears of ice, as he heard the words, there shot again the
atrocious sensation that it was not Mánya, the child, who asked the
question, but that Other who had recently moved so close. For behind
the tone, with no great effort to conceal it either, trailed a new
accent that Mánya never used. Greater than resentment, it was anger,
and within the anger lay the touch of a yet stronger note--the note of
judgment.
‘But, tell me one thing, Uncle,’ she asked in a whispering voice: ‘will
the Place let you?’
XI
Motive, especially in complex natures, is often beyond reach of
accurate discovery, and a mixed motive may prove quite impossible of
complete disentanglement. But for the sense of shame that Eliot felt,
he might never have discerned that with his genuine desire to provide
for Mánya’s future there was also involved a secret satisfaction that
he himself would profit too. The sight of gold demolishes pretence
and artifice; and deep within he felt the old lust of possession
and acquisition assert itself. All these years it had been buried,
not destroyed. His love of the Place, his worship of Memory, his
guardianship of the little dream-estate, compared to the prize of
worldly treasure, were on the surface. They were artificial.
This little thing had proved it. The child’s tears, her significant
question above all, had shown him to himself. If not, whence came this
sense of ignominy before her own purer passion, the loss of confidence,
this inner quailing before Another who gazed reprovingly, resentfully,
upon him from the shadows of the past? That note of menace in Mánya’s
suggestive question was surely not her own. It haunted him. Day and
night he heard it ringing in his brain. This new distrust of himself
that he recognised read into it something almost vindictive and
revengeful.
But Eliot, for all that, was not the man to give in easily. He
resolutely dismissed this birth of morbid fancy. Clinging to the
thought that his duty to his niece came first, he resisted the
suggestion that imputed a grosser selfishness. Cass Murdoch, too,
unwittingly helped; for the side of his character John C.’s visit had
revived--the love of fight and energetic action--came valiantly to
the rescue. To a great extent he persuaded himself that his motive
was--almost entirely--a pure one. Preparations for developing the clay
went forward steadily.
Mánya too appeared to help him. She said no more distressing things;
she showed keen interest in the coming and going of surveyors,
architects, soil experts, and the like. And Murdoch’s discovery was no
false alarm; the bed of clay was deep and extensive as he prophesied,
its quality very fine. Men came with pick and shovel; sample pits were
dug; the stuff was tested and judged excellent; and the verdict of the
manufacturers, to whom ‘lots’ were forwarded on approval, pronounced
it admirable for a large and ready market. There was money in it, and
the supply would last for years. The papers heralded the fortunate
discoverer, and a moderate fortune undeniably was in sight.
The preparations, however, took time, and the finding of the initial
capital, which Murdoch readily supplied, also took time, and spring
meanwhile slipped into summer before the enterprise was fairly on its
feet. Soft winds sighed lazily among the larches, and the scent of
flowers pervaded every valley; the pine-trees basked in the sunshine,
the pearly water laughed and sang; and at night the moon shot every
glade with magic that was like the wings of moths whose flitting
scattered everywhere the fine dust of a thousand silvery dreams. The
beauty of the little haunted estate leaped into a rich maturity that
was utterly enchanting, like wild flowers that are sweetest just before
they die.
And over Mánya, too, there passed slowly a mysterious change, for it
seemed as if for a time she had been standing still, and now with a
sudden leap of beauty passed into the glory of young womanhood. With
her short skirts and tumbled hair, her grave and wistful face, swinging
idly that red tam-o’-shanter from which she was inseparable, he saw
her one evening on the lawn outside his study window, and the change
flashed into him across the moonlight with a positive shock. The child
had suddenly grown up. A barrier stood between them.
But the barrier was not so sudden as it seemed, for, on looking back,
he realised the daily, almost imperceptible manner of its growth. Its
complete erection he realised now, but he had been aware of it for a
long time--ever since his decision to work the clay, in fact. Here was
the proof her deceptive silence had concealed. She had felt it too
deeply for words, for arguing, for disappointment volubly expressed;
but it had struck into the roots of her little being and had changed
her from within outwards. It had aged her. Reality had broken in upon
her world of play and dream. He had destroyed her childhood at a single
blow. She questioned, doubted, and grew old.
But though every one grows older in identically this way, by sudden
leaps, as it were, due to the forcing impulse of some strong emotion,
with Mánya it brought no radical alteration. She deepened rather than
definitely changed. The sense of wonder did not fade, but ripened. The
crude facts of life could never satisfy a nature such as hers, and
though she realised them now for the first time, they could not enter
to destroy. They drove her more deeply into herself. That is, she dealt
with them.
And the change, though he devoted hours of pondering reflection over
it, may be summed up briefly enough in so far as it affected himself.
There was a difference in their relationship. He stood away from her;
while she, on her side, drew nearer to something else that was not
himself. With this elusive and mysterious Thing she lived daily. She
took sides with it and with the Place, against himself. It went on
largely, he felt, behind his back. She grew more and more identified
with some active influence that had always been at work in all the
wild gardened loveliness of the property, but was now more active
than before. Stirred up and roused it was; he could almost imagine
it--aggressive. And Mánya, always knowing it at closer quarters than
himself, was now in definite league with it. There was opposition in
it, though an opposition as yet inactive.
And in the silent watches of the night sometimes, when imagination wove
her pictures all unchecked, he again knew the haunting thought close
beside his bed: that the mind and hand of the dead were here at work,
using the delicate instrument of this rare, sensitive child to convey
protest, resentment, warning. Over the little vales, from all the depth
of forest, and above the spread of moorland just beyond, there breathed
this atmosphere of disapproval.
Mánya, never telling him much, now told him less than before; for he
had forfeited the right to know.
If it made him smile a little to notice that she had made Mother Coove
lengthen her dresses, it did not make him smile to learn that she still
wore her old shorter ones once the darkness fell, or that she now
went out to play in her wild corners of the woods chiefly after dusk.
For he saw the significance of this simple manœuvre, and divined its
meaning. She felt shy now in the daylight. This new thing in the spirit
of the Place had changed it all. She could not be abandoned as before,
go naked and undressed as once she graphically put it. The vulgar
influence from outside had come in. It stared offensively. It asked
questions, leered, turned everything common and unclean.
And she changed from time to time her playground as the workmen drove
her out. She moved from place to place, seeking new corners and going
farther into the moors and open spots. She followed the stream, for
instance, nearer to its source where its waters still ran unstained.
And from the neighbourhood of the sample pits that gaped like open
sores amid the beauty, she withheld herself completely. Nothing could
persuade her to come near them.
Towards himself especially, her attitude was pregnant with suggestion,
and though he made full allowance for the phantoms conscience raises,
there always remained the certainty that the child, and another with
her, watched him sharply from a distance. She was still affectionate
and simple, even with a new touch of resigned docility that was very
sweet, as though resolved to respect his older worldly wisdom, yet
with an air of pity for his great mistake that was half contempt,
half condescension. Her silence about the progress of the work made
him feel small. It so mercilessly judged him. And, while the dignity
he had always recognised in her increased, it seemed now partly
borrowed--his imagination leaned more and more towards this unwelcome
explanation--from this invisible Companion who overshadowed her.
He felt as though this silence temporarily blocked channels along
which something would presently break out with violence and scorn to
overwhelm him; till at last he came to regard her as a prisoner regards
the foreman of the jury who has formed his verdict and is merely
waiting to pronounce it--Guilty. Behind her, as behind the foreman,
gathered the composite decision of more than one, and the decision was
hostile. It urged her on against him. Opposition accumulated towards
positive attack. He dreaded some revelation through the child; and
piling guess on guess he felt certain who was this active Influence
that sought to use her as its instrument. The dead now, day and night,
stood very close beside him.
And meanwhile, things ran far from smoothly with the work itself.
Unforeseen difficulties everywhere arose to baffle him. Even Murdoch
made oppressive, troublesome conditions about the money that seemed
unnecessary, insisting upon details of management with a touch
of domineering interference that exasperated. Obstacles rose up
automatically, involving, as it were, the very processes of Nature
itself. There was a strike that delayed the railway builders for a
month, and when they returned the heavy summer rains had washed yards
of embankment down again. Soon afterwards a falling tree killed a
workman, and there ensued compensation worries that threatened a
law-suit. The clay itself, too, played them sudden tricks, proving
faulty the maps the surveyors had drawn; its depths and direction were
not as supposed, its angle to the lie of the slope deceptive, so that
an extra branch of single line for the trucks became essential. And the
money was insufficient; further advances became imperative, and, though
readily forthcoming, involved more delay. The spirit of lonely peace
and beauty departed from the Place, hiding its injured face among the
moorland reaches further up. Obstruction, with turmoil and confusion at
its back, rose up on every side to baffle him.
Though the advance was steady enough on the whole, and the difficulties
were only such as most similar enterprises encounter, Eliot was
conscious more and more of this sense of obstacles deliberately
interposed. It all seemed so nicely calculated to cause the maximum
of trouble and delay. The interference was so cunningly manœuvred. He
brought all his old energy and force to meet them, but there was ever
this curious sense of advised and determined opposition that began to
sap his confidence.
‘More trouble, sir,’ the foreman said one morning, when Eliot went down
to view the work, unaccompanied as usual by Mánya. ‘There seems no end
to it.’
‘What is it this time?’ He abhorred these conversations now. It always
seemed that Another stood behind his shoulder, listening.
‘The clay has gone,’ was the curious answer. He said it as though it
had gone purposely to spite them like a living thing.
‘Gone!’ he exclaimed incredulously.
‘Sunk away, gone deeper than we expected,’ was the answer. The man
shrugged his shoulders as though something puzzled him. ‘A kind of
subsidence come in the night,’ he added gloomily.
They stared at one another for a full minute with eyes that screened
other meanings. Eliot felt a sort of fury rise within him. Somehow the
idea of foul play crossed his mind, though instantly rejected as absurd.
‘With this loose sandy bottom, and a steep slope that ain’t drained
properly, you’re never very sure of where you are,’ said the man at
length, feeling his position made some explanation necessary. He seemed
to regard the Clay as something ever on the move.
‘I see,’ said Eliot, grateful for a solution that he could apparently
accept. They talked of ways and means to circumvent it.
‘Queerest job I ever come across, sir,’ the foreman muttered, as at
length Eliot turned away, pretending not to hear it.
And scenes like this were frequent. Another time it was the white
weed--with the pretty little flower Mánya loved to twine about her
tam-o’-shanter--that had gathered so thickly on the artificial ponds
where the water was stored, that it clogged the machinery till the
wheels refused to turn; and next, a group of men that quit working
without any reasonable excuse--open symptom of a hidden dissatisfaction
that had been running underground for weeks. There was something
about the job they didn’t like. Rumours for a long time had been
current--queer, unsubstantiated rumours that those in authority
chose to disregard. Superstition hereabouts was rife enough without
encouraging it.
Taken altogether, as products of a single hostile influence at
work, these difficulties easily assumed in his imaginative mind the
importance of a consciously directed opposition. He remembered often
now those words of Mánya, the last time she had opened her lips upon
the subject. For she had credited the Place with the power of resisting
him; only by ‘the Place’ she now meant this mysterious personal
influence that she knew behind it.
Yet he persisted in his consciousness of doing right. His duty to the
child was clear; her future was in his charge; and the fact that he
meant to leave her everything proved that his motive, or part of it at
least, was above suspicion. From John C. he also gathered comfort and
support. He had only to imagine him standing by his side, repeating
that remark about religion, to feel strong again in his determination.
Cass Murdoch recognised no mystery or subtlety anywhere. He discussed
only facts.
The consciousness that he was partly traitor none the less remained,
and with it the feeling that the very Tradition he had nursed and
worshipped all these years was up in arms against him. Mánya, standing
closer to Nature than himself, had divined this Tradition and, in some
fashion curiously her own, had personified it. And this personification
linked on with the dead. His love of the Beauty, and his love of a
particular memory he had read into the Place, she had most marvellously
disentangled. Both were genuine in him; yet he had suffered them in
combination to produce a false and artificial Image existing only in
his own imagination. There was conflict in his being. His motive was
impure.
Behind them stood the giant, naked thing the child divined that
was--Reality. She knew it face to face. What was it? The mere definite
question which he permitted himself made him sometimes hesitate and
wait, not unwilling to call a halt. He was aware that the child stood
ever in the background, waiting her time with that sly laughter of
superior knowledge. These obstacles and difficulties were sent as
warnings; and while he disregarded them of set purpose, something deep
within him paused to question--and while it questioned, trembled. For
protest, he seemed to discern, had become resentment, resentment grown
into resistance; resistance into hostile opposition, and opposition
now, with something horribly like anger at its back, was hinting
already at a blank refusal that involved almost--revenge.
Hitherto he had been hindered, impeded, thwarted merely; soon he could
be deliberately overruled and stopped. Nature, ever defeating an impure
motive, would rise up against him and cry finally No.
‘But, Uncle, tell me one thing: will the Place let you?’ rang now often
through his daily thoughts. He heard it more especially at night. At
night, too, when sleep refused him, he surprised himself more than once
framing sentences of explanation and defence. They rose automatically.
They followed him even into his dreams. ‘My duty to the child is plain.
How can I help it? If you were here beside me now, would you not also
approve?’
For the idea that _she_ was beside him grew curiously persuasive, so
that he almost expected to see her in the corridors or on the stairs,
standing among the trees or waiting for him by the Mill itself where
last she drew the breath of life.
And by way of a climax came then Mánya’s request to change her room,
and his own decision to move himself into the one she vacated. The
reason she gave was that the ‘trees made such a noise at night’ she
could not sleep, and since it had three windows, two of which were
almost brushed by pine branches, the excuse, though discovered late,
seemed natural enough. At any rate he did not press her further. She
occupied a room now at the back where a single window gave a view far
up into the moors. And, turning out the unnecessary furniture to suit
his taste, he moved into the one she had vacated--his wife’s.
XII
Summer passed in the leisurely, gorgeous way that sometimes marks its
passage into autumn, and the work ploughed forward through the sea of
difficulties. The conspiracy of obstacles continued. There was progress
on the whole, but a progress that seemed to bring success no nearer.
The beds of clay, however, were definitely determined now, and their
extent and depth fulfilled the most sanguine expectations. The troubles
lay with the railway, the men, water, weather, and a dozen things no
one could have foreseen. These seemed far-fetched, and yet were natural
enough. And they continued--until Eliot, never a man who yielded
easily, began to feel he had undertaken more than he could manage. He
weakened. The idea came to him that he would sell his interest and
leave the development to others.
To retire from the fight and acknowledge himself defeated was a step
he could not lightly take. There was a bitterness in the thought that
stung his pride and vanity. There was also the fact that if he held
on and first established a paying business, he could obtain far more
money--for Mánya. Yet he felt somehow that it was from Mánya herself
that the suggestion first had come. For the child gave hints in a
hundred different ways that he could not possibly misunderstand. They
were indirect, unconsciously given, and they followed invariably upon
curious little personal accidents that about this time seemed almost a
daily occurrence.
And these little accidents, though perfectly natural taken one by
one as they occurred, when regarded all together seemed to compose
a formidable whole. They pointed an attack almost. The menace he
had imagined was becoming aggressive. Some one who knew his habits
was playing him tricks. Some one with intimate knowledge of the way
he walked and ran and moved laid traps for him. And at each little
‘accident’ Mánya laughed her strange, sly laughter--precisely as a
child who says ‘I told you so! You brought it on yourself!’ She had
expected it, perhaps had seen it coming. And now, to avoid more grave
disasters, she wanted him--elsewhere. Her deep affection for him,
sinner though he was in her eyes, sought to coax him out of the danger
zone.
When he slipped in jumping the stream--he, who was sure-footed as
a mountain goat!--and turned his ankle; and when the heavy earth,
loosened by the rains, rolled down upon him as he climbed the
embankment, or when the splinter that entered his hand as he vaulted
the fencing near the wharf, led to festering that made him carry his
arm in a sling for days--in every case it was the same: the child
looked up at him and smiled her curious little smile of one who knew.
She was in safety, but he stood in the line of fire. She knew who
it was that laid the traps. She saw them being laid. It was always
wood, earth, water thus that hurt him and never once an artificial
contrivance of man.
‘Uncle, it wouldn’t happen if you stayed away,’ was what she said each
time, though never phrased the same. And the obvious statement only
just covered another meaning that her words contained. She knew worse
things would come, and feared for him. ‘There’s no good hiding, Uncle
Dick, because it’s in the house as well.’
He grew to feel unwelcome in his own woods and garden, an intruder in
his own moors and valleys, an element the Place rejected and wished
elsewhere. The Place had begun to turn him out. And Mánya, this queer
mysterious child, in league with the secret Influence at work against
him, was being used to point the warnings and convey the messages. Her
silent attitude, more even than her actual words, was the messenger.
The hints thus brought, moreover, now troubled themselves less and less
with disguise. He realised them at last for what they were: and they
were beyond equivocation--threatening.
And it was at this point that Eliot made the journey up to London to
see Cass Murdoch, and feel his way towards escape. Retirement was the
word he used, and the sentence John C. heard in the bar of the big
hotel as they discussed clay and cocktails was ‘sell my interest to
more competent hands who will get quicker and bigger results than I
can. The work and worry affect my health.’
The interview may be easily imagined, for John Casanova Murdoch was
more than willing to buy him out, though the conditions, with one
exception, have no special interest in this queer history: Eliot was to
lease the Place for a period of years. And this meant leaving it.
In the train on his way back his emotions fought one another in
a regular pitched battle. He stood in front of himself suddenly
revealed--a traitor. It seemed as if for a moment he saw things a
little from his niece’s inverted point of view, standing outside of
Self and looking up. It provided him with unwelcome sensations that
escaped analysis. Love and hate are one and the same force, according
to the point in the current where one stands; repulsion becomes, from
the opposite end, attraction; and a great love may be reversed into
a great hate. There is no exact dividing line between heat and cold,
no neat frontier where pleasure becomes pain, just as there is really
no such absolute thing as left and right, uphill and downhill, above
and below. Mánya stood outside these relative distinctions men have
invented for the common purposes of description. He understood at last
that the power which had drawn his life into the Place as by a kind of
absorption, was now inverted into a process of turning him out again as
by a kind of determined elimination.
It was being accomplished, moreover, as he felt and phrased it to
himself, from outside; by which perhaps he meant from beyond that fence
which men presumptuously assume to contain all the life there is. But
the dead stand also beyond that fence. And Mánya, being so obviously
in league with this hostile, eliminating Influence stood hand in hand,
therefore, with--the dead.
But for him The Dead meant only one.
XIII
He walked home from the station, which he reached at nine o’clock.
Crossing the zone of the ‘dirty’ country, now successful invader of
the dream-estate, he entered his property at length by the upper end
of the Piney Valley. A passionate wind was searching the trees for
music, and handfuls of rain were flung against the trunks like stones;
but, on leaving the road the tempest seemed to pass out towards the
sea, leaving an unexpected, sudden hush about his footsteps. The moon
peered down through high, scudding clouds. It was partly that the storm
was breaking up, and partly that the valley provided shelter; but it
gave him the feeling that he had entered a little world prepared for
his reception. He was expected, the principal figure in it. Attention
everywhere focussed on himself. He felt like a prisoner who comes out
of streets indifferent to his presence and enters a Court of Law. This
ominous silence preceded the arrival of the Judge.
The path at once dipped downwards into a world of shadows where the
splashes of moonlight peered up at him like faces on the ground. He
heard the water murmuring out of sight; and it came about his ears like
whispering from the body of the Court. There reigned, indeed, the same
gentle peace and stillness he had known for years, but somewhere in it
a brooding unaccustomed element that was certainly neither peace nor
stillness. Something unwonted stirred slowly, very grandly, through the
darkness.
He paused a moment to listen; he looked about him; he pushed aside
the bracken with his stick, and his eyes glanced up among the lower
branches of the trees. And everywhere, it seemed, he encountered other
eyes--eyes usually veiled, but now with lifted lids. Then he went on
again, faster a little than before. A touch of childhood’s terror
chilled his blood. And it took at first a childhood’s form. He thought
of some big, savage animal that lurked in hiding, its presence turning
the once friendly wood all otherwise and dreadful. A giant paw filled
the little valley to the brim. The stir of the wind was the opening and
shutting of its claws. The lips were drawn back to show the gums and
teeth. Something opened; there came a rush of air. The awful spring
would follow in a moment....
Another hood of memory lifted then and showed him Mánya, as she played
about the sand-pits--then paused when the full discovery dawned upon
her mind. She had eyed him. She had given him this similar impression
of an animal waiting its opportunity to spring. But now it was the
Place that waited to spring....
He banished the bizarre, exaggerated picture his imagination conjured
up, but could not banish the emotion that produced it. The Place _was_
different. Change spread all over it. Potential attack hummed through
the very air. Thus might a man feel walking through a hostile crowd.
But thus also might he feel in the presence of a friend to whom in a
time of confidence he had betrayed himself too lavishly--a friend now
turned against him with this added power of knowing all his secrets.
His own imagination leaped upon him, calling him coward, traitor,
unfaithful steward. Fear made him bitterly regret the familiarity
that years of unguarded dreaming had established between himself
and--and----His mind hesitated horribly between the choice of pronouns;
and when he finally chose the neuter, it seemed that a curious running
laughter passed within the sounds of wind and water. It almost was like
the mockery of Mánya’s laughter taken over by the dying storm.
While he evaded the direct attack, his mind, however, continued
searching for the word that should describe accurately, and so limit
all this vague, distressing feeling of hostility. But for long he
could not find it. The new element that breathed through the sombre
intricacies of the glen played with him as it pleased until he could
catch it in the proper word, and so imprison it. Branches seemed no
longer soft and feathery: they bristled, pointed, stood rigid for
a blow. The stream no longer murmured: it laughed and cried aloud.
The shadows did not cover smoothly: they concealed; and the whole
atmosphere of the Place, instead of welcoming, repelled.
And then, quite suddenly, the word emerged and stood before his face:
Disturbance.
Less than disorder, yet more than mere disquietude, this word described
the attitude he was conscious of. In its aggressive, threatening,
sinister meaning, he accepted it as true.
There was Disturbance. Somewhere in those chains of iron that bind the
operations of Nature within invariable, unyielding laws, a link had
weakened. Disturbance was the result--but a disturbance that somehow
let in purpose. Urging everywhere through the manifestations of Nature
in his dream-estate was the drive and stress of purposiveness.
The discovery of the word, moreover, announced the approach, though not
yet the actual entrance, of the Judge. There were steps, and the steps
were in himself. Some one walked upon his life.
* * * * *
He quickened his pace like a terrified child. With genuine relief at
last he reached the house. But even in the friendly building he was
aware of this keen discomfort at his heels. It penetrated easily.
The Disturbance came in after him into the house itself. Hanging up
coat and hat, he then passed into the Study, and the prosaic business
of drinking milk and munching water-biscuits scattered the strange
illusion for a time. It weakened, at any rate, for it never wholly
disappeared. It waited.
The house was silent, every one in bed. He locked the front
door carefully, stared at his face a moment in the hat-stand
mirror--wondering at a certain change in the expression of the
features, though he could not name it--and with his lighted candle
went on tiptoe up to bed. But the instant he entered the room he was
aware that the feeling of distress had already preceded him. He was
forestalled. There was this dark disquiet in the very atmosphere of his
bedroom. The Disturbance had established itself in these most private,
intimate quarters that once had been his wife’s. It was strongest here.
Dismissing a sharp desire to sleep in another room--anywhere but in the
place made sacred by long-worshipped memories--he began to undress. He
said to himself with a certain vehemence, ‘I’ll ignore the thing.’
But it was fear that said it. A frightened child without a light might
as well determine to ignore the darkness. For this thing was urgent
everywhere about him, inside and outside, like the air he breathed. And
the next minute, instead of ignoring it, he made an attempt to face it.
He would drag the secret out. The fact was, both will and emotions were
already in disorder. He knew not how or where to take the thing.
The attempt then showed him another thing. It was no secret. The terror
in his heart and conscience made pretence of screening something that
he really knew quite well. This aggressive, hostile Presence was a
Presence that he recognised, and had recognised all along.
And instinctively he turned to this side and to that, examining the
room; for space in this room, he realised, was no longer quite as
usual: there was a change in its conditions. Everything contained
within it--the very objects between the four walls--were affected. He
felt them altered; they had become otherwise. He himself was changed
as well, become otherwise. And if anything alive--another person or an
animal even--came in, they also, in some undetermined, startling way,
would look otherwise than usual. They would look different.
Hurriedly he sought a concrete simile to steady his shaking mind
on, and his mind provided this: That, if the temperature were
suddenly lowered, the invisible moisture would at once appear,
otherwise--frost-crystals on the window-panes, snow, and so forth.
The change would not be untrue or even distorted, no falseness in it
anywhere, nor exaggeration--only otherwise. And if the presence of the
dead, whom he felt so close now in this room, turned visible owing to
the changed conditions of the space about him, he would see--but the
thought remained unfinished in his mind....
He thrust the terror down into the depths. Yet the idea must have
been very insistent in him, for he crossed the floor on tiptoe to
lock the door securely, and stood already within easy reach of it,
one hand actually stretched out, when there came a faint knocking on
the panelling within a few inches of his very face. He saw the handle
turn. With suggestive, dreadful stealthiness the door then opened,
the merest crack at first, then gradually wider and wider. And the
slowness was exasperating. The seconds dragged like hours. Had he not
been spellbound he would have violently slammed it to again or torn it
instead wide open.
There was just time in his bewildered mind to wonder what form this
Presence from the dead would take, when he realised that the figure
stood already by his side. She had crossed the threshold. With
amazement he saw that it was Mánya.
She came in swiftly. She was on the carpet close against him before
he could speak a word or move. And she looked, as he had expected,
otherwise: she looked extraordinary. The word came to him in the
way she might herself have used it, getting its first meaning
out--extra-ordinary.
And her appearance was--might well have been, at least--ludicrous. For
she was dressed to go out, but in a fashion that at any other time must
have been cause for laughter. Now it stood at the very opposite pole,
however. It was superb. Her red tam-o’-shanter was perched carelessly,
almost gaily, on her hair, which was already fashioned into plaits
for the night, and underneath the garden jacket that he knew so well,
he saw white drapery that plainly was her little nightgown. She had
pulled her stockings on, but had not fastened them. They hung down,
partly showing her skin below the knee. The boots flapped open, with
no attempt to button them. Her hurry had been evidently great, and she
looked at the first glance like some one surprised by a midnight call
of fire.
Yet these details, which he took in at a single glance, stirred no
faintest touch of amusement in him, for about her whole presentment was
this other nameless quality that showed her to him--utterly otherwise
than usual. It made him wince and shudder, yet pause in a wondering
amazement too--amazement that barely held back awe. He stared like a
man struck suddenly dumb. The phrase the child so often used came back
upon him with the force of a shock. The girl had put her Self out.
This being that stood just opposite to his face was not Mánya. It was
another. It was _the_ other!
And both doubt and knowledge dropped down upon him in that fearful
moment: knowledge, that it was the Influence she had been so long in
league with, and that sought to use her as its instrument of protest;
and doubt, as to exactly what--or who--this Influence really was.
For it came to him as being so enormously bigger and vaster than
anything his mind could label ‘the dead.’ He felt in the presence of
a multitude. He had once felt thus when seeing a single Redskin steal
like a shadow round the camp, knowing that the night concealed a host
of others. About her actual form and body, too, this sense of multitude
also spread and trembled, only just concealed: and indescribable
utterly. For the edges of the child were ill-defined and misty, so that
he could not see exactly where her outline ceased. The candle-light
played round and over her as though she filled the room. She might have
been all through the air above him, behind as well as opposite, close
in front as well. In a sense he felt that she had come to him through
the open windows and from the night itself, and not merely along the
passage and through the narrow door. She came from the entire Place.
He made a feverish struggling effort to concentrate his mind upon
common words. He wanted to move backwards, but his feet refused to
stir. The familiar sound of her name he uttered close into her face:--
‘Mánya! And at this hour of the night!’ he stammered.
His voice was thick and without resonance in his mouth, smothered like
a sound in a closed box. And as he heard the name a kind of silent
laughter reached him--inaudible really, as though inside him--sly
laughter like her own. For the name had lost its known familiarity. It,
too, was different and otherwise, though for the life of him he could
not seize at first wherein the alteration lay.
She smiled, and her eyes, wide opened, were like stars. The breath
came soft and windily between her lips, but no words with it. It
was regular, deep, unhurried. There was something in her face that
petrified him--something, as it were, non-human. He began to forget who
and where he was. Identity slipped from him like a dream.
With another effort, this time a more violent one, he strove to fasten
upon things that were close and real in life. He felt the buttons down
his coat, fingering them desperately till they hurt his hands and
escaped from his slippery moist skin.
‘Mánya!’ he repeated in a louder voice, while his mind plunged out to
seek the child he had always known behind the familiar name.
And this time she answered; but to his horror, the whole room, and even
space beyond the actual room, seemed to answer with her. The name was
repeated by her lips, yet came from the night beyond the open window
too. He had made a question of it. The answer, repeating it, was assent.
‘M á n y-a ...’ he heard all round him, while the head bent gently down
and forward.
The shock of it restored to him some power of movement, and he stumbled
back a step or two further from her side. It might well have been
whimsical and cheap, this artificial play upon a name, but instead of
either it was abominably significant. This motionless figure, so close
that he could feel her breath upon his face, was positively in some
astonishing way more than one. She _was_ many. The laughter that lay
behind the trivial little thing was a laughter both grand and terrible.
It was the laughter of the sea, of the woods, of sand--a host that no
man counteth--the laughter of a multitude.
And he thrust out both his hands automatically lest she should touch
him. He shook from head to toe. Contact with her person would break
up his being into millions. The sensation of terror was both immense
and acute, sweeping him beyond himself. Like her, he was becoming
many--becoming hundreds and thousands--sand that none can number.
‘Child!’ he heard his voice repeating faintly, yet with an emphasis
that spaced the words apart with slow distinctness, ‘what does this
mean?’ In vain he tried to smother the beseeching note in it that was
like a cry for help.
He stepped back another pace. She did not move. Composure then began
to come back slowly to him, a little and a little. He remembered who
he was, and where he was. He said to himself the commonplace thing:
‘This is Mánya, my little niece, and she ought to be asleep in bed.’ It
sounded ridiculous even in his mind, but he tried deliberately to think
of ordinary things.
And then he said it aloud: ‘Do you realise where you are and what you
are doing, child?’ And then he added, gaining courage, a question of
authority: ‘Do you realize what time it is?’
Her answer came again without hesitation, as from a long way off. A
smile lit up the entire face, gleaming from her skin like moonlight.
There were tears, he saw, upon the cheeks. But the face itself was
radiant, wonderful.
‘The time,’ she said, peering very softly into his eyes, ‘is _now_.’
And she took a slow-gliding step towards him, with a movement that
frightened him beyond belief.
But by this time he had himself better in hand. He understood that
the child was walking in her sleep. It was her little frame that was
being worked and driven by--Another. She was possessed. Something was
speaking through the entranced physical body. Her answer regarding
time was the answer absolute, not relative, the only true answer that
could be given. Other answers would be similar. He understood that here
was the long expected revelation, and that he must question her if he
wished to hear it. He resolved to do so, but with a cold awe in his
heart as though he were about to question--Death.
They both retained their first positions, three feet apart, standing.
The candle behind him on the table shed its flickering light across her
altered features. Outside he heard the trees shaking and tossing in the
gusts of rainy wind.
‘Who are you then?’ he asked hesitatingly, in a low tone.
There was no reply. But effort, showing that she heard and tried to
answer, traced a little frown above the eyebrows; and the eyes looked
puzzled for a moment.
‘You mean,’ he whispered, ‘you cannot tell me?’
The head bowed slowly once by way of assent.
‘You cannot find the word, the language?’ he helped her. ‘Is that it?’
He still whispered, afraid of his own voice.
‘Yes,’ was the answer, spoken below the breath. Then instantly
afterwards, straightening herself up with a vigorous movement that
startled him horribly, she made a curious, rushing gesture of the whole
body, spreading her arms out through the air about her. ‘I am--_like
that_!’ the voice sprang out loud and clear.
She seemed by the gesture to gather space and the night into her wide
embrace. She repeated it. The face smiled marvellously. Through this
slim body, he realised, there rolled something ancient as the stars. It
poured through space against him like a sea. It turned his little ideas
of space all--otherwise.
‘Tell me where you come from,’ he asked quickly, eager yet dreading to
hear.
‘From everywhere,’ came the answer like a wind.
He paused, breathless with astonishment. He felt himself dwindling.
Here was a vaster thing than he had contemplated. It was surely no
single discarnate influence that possessed the child!
‘And--for whom?’ It was whispered as before.
The figure stepped with a single gliding stride towards him, coming so
close that he held his ground only by a tremendous effort of the will.
‘For you!’ The voice came like a clap of wind again, at once soft yet
thundering, filling the entire room.
‘For me,’ he faltered. ‘Your message is for me?’
He felt the assault of strange, violent sensations he had never known
before and could not name. A boyhood’s dream rushed back upon him for
an instant. He recalled his misery and awe when he stood before the
Judgment Throne for some unforgivable breach of trust which he could
not explain because the dream concealed its nature. Only this was ten
times greater, and his guilt beyond redemption.
‘And I,’ he stammered, ‘who am I?’
Her eyes looked him all over like a stare of the big moon.
‘_You_,’ she answered, without pause or hesitation.
‘You do not know my name?’ he insisted, still clinging to the clue that
her he spoke with must be from the dead.
The little frown came back between the eyes. She nodded darkly.
‘_You_,’ she repeated, giving the answer absolute again, the only
really true one.
The girl stood like a statue, serene and solemn. She stared through and
beyond him, motionless but for a scarcely perceptible swaying, and calm
as a meadow in the dawn. Enormous meanings passed from her eyes across
the air, and sank down into him like meanings from a forest or a sea.
From these, he realised, came her stupendous inspiration, and, so
realising, he knew at last his deep mistake. For not so do the Dead
return. They never, indeed, return, because from the heart that
loved them they have never gone away, but only changed their magic
intercourse in kind. And, had _she_ known, she would have approved
the wisdom of his great decision, while clearing his motive of all
insincerity at the same time.
It was not _she_ who brought the protest and the menace. It was
something bigger by far, something awful and untamed. It was the
Place itself. And behind the Place stood Nature. It was Nature that
possessed the child and used her little lips and hands and body for its
thundering message of disapproval.
Mánya was possessed by Nature.
* * * * *
And the shock of the discovery first turned him into stone. His
body did not stir the fraction of an inch. In that moment of vivid
realisation these two little human figures stood facing one another,
motionless as columns; and, while so standing, the One who brought the
Message for himself drew closer.
For several minutes he saw absolutely nothing. The approach was too big
for any sensory perceptions he could recognise. And then, mercilessly,
pitilessly, the power of sight returned.
He knew the touch of a giant, earthy hand was upon his arm. Beside
him, in the flickering candle light, stood Nature. He looked into a
host of mighty eyes that yet his imagination translated into merely
two--eyes set wide apart beneath enormous brows. He met the gaze of
the Gigantic, the Patient, the Inexorable that saw him as he was, and
judged him where he stood. And a melting ran through his body, as
though the bones slipped from their accustomed places, leaving him
utterly without support. He swayed, but did not fall. His physical
frame stood upright to receive like a blow the revelation that was
coming.
And then, with a curious, deep sense of shame, he realised abruptly
that his position in regard to her was inappropriate. He, at any rate,
had no right to stand. His proper attitude must be a very different one.
He took her by the hand and, bending his head with an air of humble
worship, led her slowly across the room. The touch of her was
wonderful--like touching wind--all over him. With a reverence he guided
her, all unresisting, to a high-backed chair beside the open window.
She lowered herself upon it, and sat upright. She stared fixedly before
her into space. No clothing in the world could have stolen from her
childish face and figure the nameless air of grandeur that she wore.
She was august.
And he knelt before her. He raised his folded hands. A moment his eyes
rested on the dispassionate little face, then looked beyond her into
the night of wind and rain. His gaze returning then sought the eyes
again.
And the child, sweet little human interpreter of so vast a Mystery,
bent her head downwards and looked into his heart. Wind stirred the
hair upon her neck. He saw the bosom gently rise and fall.
‘What is it that you have to say to me?’ he whispered, like a prayer
for mercy. ‘What is the message that you bring?’
Her lips moved very slightly. The smile broke out again like moonlight
across the lowered face. The words dropped through the sky. Very
slowly, very distinctly, they fell into his open heart: simple as wind
or rain.
‘Leave--me--as--I--am--and--as--you--found--me.
Leave--us--together--as--we--are--and--as--we--were.’
XIV
There came then a sudden blast that swept with a shout across the
night; and through his mind passed also a tumult like a roaring wind.
Both winds, it seemed to him, were in the room at once. He had the
sensation of being lifted from the earth. The candle was extinguished.
And then the sound and terror dipped away again into silence and into
distance whence it came....
* * * * *
He found himself standing stiffly upright, though he had no
recollection of rising from his knees. With an abruptness utterly
disconcerting he was himself again. No item of memory had faded; he
remembered the entire series of events. Only, he was in possession
of his normal mind and powers, fear, awe, and wonder all departed.
Mánya, who had been walking in her sleep, was sitting close before
him in the darkness. He could just distinguish her outline against
the open window. But he was master of himself again. Even the wild
improbability, the extravagance of his own actions, the very lunacy of
the picture that the night now smothered, left him unbewildered. And
the calmness that thus followed the complete transition proved to him
that all he had witnessed, all that had happened, had been--true. In no
single detail was there falseness or distortion due to the excitement
of a hysterical mood. It had been right and inevitable.
He lit the candle again quietly, with a hand that did not tremble. He
saw Mánya sitting on the high-backed chair with her head sunk forward
on her breast. Gently he raised the face. The eyes were now closed, and
the regular, deep breathing showed that the girl was sound asleep--but
with the normal sleep of tired childhood. The Immensity to which he had
knelt and prayed in her was gone, gone from the room, gone out into the
open darkness of the Place. It had visited her, it had used her, it had
left her. But at the same time he understood, as by some infallible
intuition, that the warning to depart she brought him was not yet
complete. It had reached his mind, but not as yet his soul. In its
fulness the Notice to Quit could not be delivered between close, narrow
walls. Its delivery must be outside.
He looked at the sleeping child in silence for several minutes. She sat
there in a semi-collapsed position and in momentary danger of falling
from her chair. The lips were parted, the eyes tight shut, the red
tam-o’-shanter dropping over one side of the face. Both hands were
folded in her lap. By the light of two candles now he watched her,
while the perspiration he had not been as yet aware of, dried upon his
skin and made him shiver with the cold. And, after long hesitation, he
woke her.
With difficulty the girl came to, stared up into his face with a blank
expression, rubbed her eyes, and then, with returning consciousness of
who and where she was, looked mightily astonished.
‘Mánya, child,’ he began gently, ‘don’t be frightened.’
‘I’m not,’ she said at once. ‘But where am I? Is that you, Uncle?’
‘Been walking in your sleep. It’s all right. Nothing’s happened. Come,
I’ll see you back to bed again.’ And he made a gesture as though to
take her hand.
But she avoided him. Still looking bewildered and perplexed, she said:
‘Oh--I remember now--I wanted to go out and see things. I want to go
out still.’ Then she added quickly as the thought struck her, ‘But does
Fräulein know? You haven’t told Fräulein, Uncle, have you? I mean, you
won’t?’
He shook his head. This was no time for chiding.
‘I often go out like this--at night, when you’re all asleep. It’s the
only time now, since----’
He stopped her instantly at that. ‘You fell asleep while dreaming! Was
that it?’ He tried to laugh a little, but the laughter would not come.
‘I suppose so.’ She glanced down at her extraordinary garments. But no
smile came to the eyes or lips. Then she looked round her, and gazed
for a minute through the open window. The rain had ceased, the wind
had died away. Moist, fragrant air stole in with many perfumes. ‘I
don’t remember quite. I was in bed. I had been asleep already, I think.
Then--something woke me.’ She paused. ‘There was something crying in
the night.’
‘Something crying in the night?’ he repeated quickly, half to himself.
She nodded. ‘Crying for me,’ she explained in a tone that sent a
shudder all through him before he could prevent it. ‘So I thought I’d
go out and see. Uncle, I _had_ to go out,’ she added earnestly, still
whispering, ‘because they were crying--to get at you. And unless _I_
brought them--unless they came through me,’ she stopped abruptly, her
eyes grew moist, she was on the verge of tears--‘it would have been so
terrible for you, I mean----’
He stiffened as he heard it. He made a violent effort at control,
stopping her further explanation.
‘And you weren’t afraid--to go out like this into the dark?’ he asked,
more to cover retreat than because he wanted to hear the reply.
‘I put myself out for you,’ she answered simply. ‘I let them come in.
That way you couldn’t get hurt. In me they had to come gently. They
were an army. Only, nothing out of me could hurt you, Uncle.’ She
suddenly put her arms about his neck and kissed him. ‘Oh, Uncle Dick,
it _was_ lucky I was there and ready, wasn’t it?’
And Eliot, remembering that great Disturbance in the woods, pressed the
child tenderly to himself, praying that she might not understand his
heart too well, nor feel the cold that made his entire body tremble
like a leaf. He had thought of an angry animal Presence lurking in
the darkness. It had been bigger than that, and a thousand times more
dangerous!
‘You see,’ she added with a little gasp for breath when he released
her, ‘they waked me up on purpose. I dressed at an awful rate. I got to
the door--I remember that perfectly well--and then----’ An expression
of bewilderment came into her face again.
‘Yes,’ he helped her, ‘and then--what?’
‘Well, I forget exactly; but something stopped me. Something came all
round me and took me in their arms. It was like arms of wind. I was
lifted up and carried in the air. And after that I forget the rest,
forget everything--till now.’
She stopped. She took off her tam-o’-shanter and smoothed her untidy
hair back from the forehead. And as he looked a moment at her--this
little human organism still vibrating with the passage of a universal
Power that had obsessed her, making her far more than merely child,
yet still leaving in her the sweetness of her simple love--he came to
a sudden, bold decision. He would face the thing complete. He would go
outside.
‘Mánya,’ he whispered, looking hard at her, ‘would you like to go
out--now--with me? Come, child! Suppose we go together!’
She stared at him, then darted about the room with little springs of
excitement. She clapped her hands softly, her eyes alight and shining.
‘Uncle Dick! You really mean it? Wouldn’t it be grand!’
‘Of course, I mean it. See! I’m dressed and ready!’ And he pointed to
his boots and clothes.
‘It’s the very best thing we can do, really,’ she said, trying to
speak gravely, but the mischievous element uppermost at the idea of
the secret nocturnal journey. ‘They’ll see that you’re not afraid, and
you’ll be safe then for ever and ever and ever! Hooray!’
She twirled the tam-o’-shanter in the air above her head, skipping in
her childish joy.
‘And we’ll go past Fräulein’s door,’ she insisted mischievously, as
he took her outstretched hand and led the way on tiptoe down the dark
front stairs.
‘Hush!’ he whispered gruffly. ‘Don’t talk so loud.’
She fastened up her garments, and they moved like shadows through the
sleeping house.
XV
That journey he made with this ‘child of Nature’ among the dripping
trees and along soaked paths was one that Eliot never forgot. For him
its meaning was unmistakable. His early life again supplied a parallel.
He had once seen a wretched man marched out of camp with two days’
rations to shift for himself in the wilderness as best he might,--a
prisoner convicted of treachery, but whose life was spared on the
chance that he might redeem it, or die in the attempt. He had seen
it done by redskins, he had seen it done by white. And hanging had
been better. Yet the crime--stealing a horse, or sneaking another’s
‘grub-stakes’--was one that civilisation punishes with a paltry fine,
or condones daily as permissible ‘business acumen.’
In primitive conditions it was a crime against the higher law. It was
sinning against Nature. And Nature never is deceived.
Richard Eliot was now being drummed out of camp. And the child who led
him, mischief in her eyes and the joy of forbidden pleasure in her
heart, was all unconscious of the awful rôle she played. Yet it was she
who as well had pleaded for his life and saved him.
Nature turned him out; the Place rejected him; and Mánya saw him safely
to the confines of that wilderness of houses, ugliness, commercial
desolation where he must wander till he re-made his soul or lost it
altogether.
They cautiously opened the front door, and the damp air rushed to meet
them.
‘Hush!’ he repeated, closing it carefully behind him. But the child was
already upon the lawn. Beyond her, dark blots against the sky, rose
the massed outline of the little pointed hills. There were no stars
anywhere, though the clouds were breaking into thinning troops; but it
was not too dark to see, for a moon watched them somewhere from her
place of hiding. The air was warm and very sweet, left breathing by the
storm.
‘Hush, Mánya!’ he whispered again, ill at ease to see her go. She ran
back, her feet inaudible upon the thick, wet lawn, and took his hand.
‘We’ll go by the Piney Valley,’ she said, assuming leadership. And he
made no objection, though this was the direction of the sample pits. It
led also, he remembered, to the Mill--the spot where she who had left
him in charge had gone upon her long long journey.
They went forward side by side. The wind below them hummed gently in
the tree-tops, but it did not reach their faces. The whole wet world
lay breathing softly about them, exhausted by the tempest. It was very
still. It watched them pass. There was no effort to detain them. And in
Dick Eliot’s heart was a pain that searched him like a pain of death
itself.
But his companion, he now clearly realised, was merely the child
again--eerie, wonderful, eldritch, but still the little Mánya that
he knew so well. Mischief was in her heart, and the excitement of
unlawful adventure in her blood; but nothing more. The vast obsessing
Entity that had constituted her judge and executioner was now entirely
gone. He was spared the added shame of knowing that she realised what
she did.
Sometimes she left his side, to come back presently with a little
rush of pleasurable alarm. He was uncertain whether he liked best her
going from him or her sudden return. Their tread was now muffled by
the needles as they went slowly down the pathways of the Piney Valley.
The occasional snapping of small twigs alone betrayed their movements.
Heavy branches, soaked like sponges, splashed showers on the ground
when their shoulders brushed them in passing, and drops fell of their
own weight with mysterious little thuds like footsteps everywhere about
them in the woods.
Mánya dived away from his side. She came back sometimes in front of
him and sometimes behind. He never quite knew where she was. His mind,
indeed, neglected her, for his thoughts were concentrated within
himself. Her movements were the movements of a block of shadow,
shifting here and there like shadows of trees and clouds in faint
moonlight.
‘Uncle, tell me one thing,’ he heard with a start, as she suddenly
stood in front of him across the narrow pathway, and so close that he
nearly bumped against her. ‘Isn’t there something here that’s angry
with you? Something you’ve done wrong to?’
‘Hush, child! Don’t say such things!’ He felt the shiver run through
him. He pushed her forward with his hands.
‘But they’re being said--all round us. Uncle, don’t you hear them?’ she
insisted.
‘I’ve always loved the Place. We’ve always been happy here together.’
He whispered it, as though a terror was in him lest it should be
overheard and--contradicted.
Her answer flabbergasted him. Her intuitions were so uncannily direct
and piercing.
‘That’s what I meant. You’ve been unkind. You’ve hurt it.’
‘Mánya,’ he repeated severely, ‘you must not say such things. And you
must not think them.’
‘I’m so awfully sorry, Uncle Dick,’ she said softly in the dark, and
promptly kissed him. The kiss went like a stab into his heart.
Then she was gone again, and he caught her light footstep several yards
in front, as though a shower of drops had fallen on the needles.
‘Uncle,’ came her voice again close beside him. She stood on tiptoe
and pulled his ear down to the level of her lips. ‘Hold my hand tight.
We’re coming near now.’ She was curiously excited.
‘To the Mill?’ he asked, knowing quite well she meant another thing.
‘No, to the pits the men dug,’ she answered, nestling in against him,
while his own voice echoed faintly, ‘Yes, the sample pits.’ He felt
like passing the hostile outposts of the Camp who would shoot him but
for the presence of the appointed escort.
A sigh of lonely wind went past them with its shower of drops. And
these little hands of wind with their fingers of sweet rain helped
forward his expulsion. The empty wilderness beyond lay waiting for his
soul. It heard him coming.
And a curious, deep revelation of the child’s state of mind then rushed
suddenly upon him. He knew that she expected something. And her answer
to the question he put explained his own thought to himself.
‘What is it you expect, Mánya?’ he had asked unwisely.
‘Not _expect_ exactly, Uncle, for that would be the wrong way. But I
_know_.’
And several kinds of fear shot through him as he heard it, for the
words lifted a veil and let him see into her mind a moment. She
had said another of her profoundly mystical truths. Expectation,
anticipation, he divined, would provide a mould for what was coming,
would give it shape, but yet not quite its natural shape. To anticipate
keenly meant to attract too quickly: to force. The expectant desire
would coax what was coming into an unnatural form that might be
dreadful because not quite true. Let the thing approach in its own way,
uninvited by imaginative dread. Let it come upon them as it would,
deciding its own shape of arrival. To expect was to invite distortion.
This flashed across him behind her simple words.
‘You fearful child!’ he whispered, forcing an unnatural little laugh.
‘The soft, wet, sticky things, half yellow and half white,’ she began,
resenting his laughter, ‘always moving, and never looking twice the
same----’
Then, before he could stop her, she stopped of her own accord.
She clutched his arm. He understood that it was the closeness of
the thing that had inspired the atrocious words. She held his arm
so tightly that it hurt. They stood in the presence of others than
themselves.
Yet these Others had not _come_ to them. The movement of approach was
not really movement at all. It was a condition in himself had altered
so that he knew. Out here the veil had thinned a little, as it had
thinned in the room an hour ago. And he saw space otherwise. This Power
that in humanity lies normally inarticulate was breaking through. In
the room its language had been a stammer; it was a stammer now. Or,
in the terms of sight, it was a little fragment utterly inexplicable
by itself, since the entire universe is necessary for its complete
expression.
Yet Eliot did perceive the enormous thing behind--the thing to which he
had been unfaithful by prostituting his first original love. And the
fact that it was interwoven with his ordinary little human feelings at
the same time only added to the bewilderment of its stupendous reality.
He saw for a fleeting moment just as Mánya saw--from her immediate
point of view.
‘It’s here,’ she whispered, in a voice that sounded most oddly
everywhere; ‘it’s here, the angry thing you’ve hurt.’
On either side of the path, where the heather-land came close, he saw
the openings the men had dug--pale, luminous patches of whitish yellow.
Between the bushy tufts they shone faintly gleaming against the night.
Perspective, in that instant, became the merest trick of sight, a
trivial mental jugglery. That slope of coal-black moor actually was
extraordinarily near. The tree-tops were just as well beneath his feet,
or he stood among their roots. Either was true. There was neither up
nor down. The sky was in his hands, a little thing; or the stars and
moon hid washed within the current of his blood. Size was illusion, as
relative as time. No object in itself had any ‘size’ at all. He saw her
universe, all true, as ever, but from another point of view. And the
entire Place ran down here to a concentrated point. The sample pits
pressed close against his face.
‘The pits,’ she whispered, with a sound of wind and water in her breath.
So, for a moment, he saw from the point of view whence Mánya always
saw. He and the child and the Spirit of the Place stood side by
side on that narrow shelf of darkness, sharing a joint and absolute
comprehension. Her elemental aspect became his own, for his inner
eye was against the peephole through which her Behind-the-Scenes was
visible. He realised a new thing, grand as a field of stars.
For the Place here focussed almost into sentiency. Those slow moving
forces that stir to growth in crystals, waken and breathe in plants,
and first in the animal world know consciousness, here moved vast and
inchoate, through the structure of the dream-estate he owned. Yet moved
not blind and inarticulate. For the stress of some impulse, normally
undivined by men, urged them towards articulate expression. Here was
reaction approximate to those reactions of the nervous cells which
in their ultimate result men call emotions. And this irresistible
correspondence between the two appalled him.
The raw material of definite sensation here poured loose and terrible
about him from the ground. In them, moreover, was anger, protest,
warning, and a menacing resentment--all directed against his mean,
insignificant being. From these sample pits issued the menace and the
warning, just as literally as there issued from them also the soft,
white clay that would degrade the immemorial beauty he had once thought
he loved with a clean, pure love. The pits were wounds. They drew
all the feelings of the injured Place into the tenderness of sentient
organs.
But behind the threatening anger he recognised a softer passion too.
There was a sadness, a deep yearning, and a searching melancholy as
well, that seemed to bear witness to his rejection with a sighing as of
the sea and wood and hills.
And here, doubtless, came in the interweaving of his own little human
emotions. For an overpowering sorrow soaked his heart and mind. The
judgment that found him wanting woke all his stores of infinite regret.
It would have been better for him had he found that millstone which can
save the soul, because it removes temptation.
‘It is too late,’ breathed round him in three weeping voices that
passed out between his lips as a single cry together. ‘It is too late.’
Yet nothing happened; that is, he saw nothing--nothing translatable by
any words that he could find. Time dwindled and expanded curiously.
The past ran on before him, and the future grouped itself behind his
back. The seconds and minutes which men tick off from the apparent
movement of the sun gave place to some condition within himself where
they lay gathered for ever into the circle of the Present. He remembers
no actual sequence of acts or movements. Duration drew its horns back
into a single point.... It is sure, however, that these two human
beings marched presently on. They steadily became disentangled from
the spot, and somehow or other moved away from the staring pits. For
Eliot, looking back, recalls that it felt like walking past the mouths
of loaded cannon; also that the pits watched them out of sight as
portraits follow a moving figure with their expressionless stare. He
thinks that he looked straight before him as he went. He is sure no
single word was spoken--until they left the trees behind and emerged
into the open. The Mill, the old, familiar building, was the thing
that first restored him to a normal world again. He saw its outline,
humped and black, shouldering its way against the sky. He heard the
water running under the wheel. But even the Mill, like a hooded figure,
turned its face away. It expressed the melancholy of a multitude. And
the woods were everywhere full of tears.
Mánya, he realised then beside him, was making the humming sound of the
water that flowed beneath that motionless wheel. Her voice became the
voice of the Place--the undifferentiated sound of Nature. It was the
voice of dismissal and farewell. Here was the Gateway through which his
soul passed out into the Wilderness.
He involuntarily stooped down to feel her, and she lifted her face up
in the darkness and kissed him. But it was across a barrier that she
kissed him. He already stood outside.
* * * * *
And half an hour later they were indoors again and the house was still.
Mánya slept as soundly as the placid Fräulein Bühlke or the motherly
Mrs. Coove doubtless also slept.
But he lay battling with strange thoughts for hours. Night and the
wind were oddly mingled with them; water, hills, and masses of strong
landscape too. They rose before his mind’s eye in a giant panorama,
endlessly moving past beneath huge skies, and visible against a pale
background of luminous, yellowish white. It had strange movements of
its own, this yellowish background, like the swaying of a curtain
on the stage; and sometimes it surged forwards with a smothering
sweep that enveloped everything of beauty he had ever known. It then
obliterated the world. Stars were extinguished; scenery turned to soil.
The Spectre of the Clay he had invoked possessed the Place.
He lay there frightened in his sleepless bed and saw the dawn--a
helpless little mortal, destroyed by his faithlessness and breach
of trust. And all night long there lay outside, yet watching him,
something else that equally never slept--agile, alert, unconquerable.
Only it was no longer _disturbed_. For its purpose was accomplished. It
had turned him out.
And it is not necessary to tell how John Casanova Murdoch soon
thereafter took the work in hand and developed the Place, as he
expressed it, ‘without a hitch.’ For John C. had made no promises of
love; nor had he pretended to establish with Nature that intimate
relationship of trust and worship which invokes the spiritual laws.
Nature took no note of him, for he worked frankly with her, and his
motive, if not exalted, was at least a pure one. And the Clay, as he
phrased it a little later in his expressive Western lingo, soon was
‘paying hand over fist. The money was pouring in--more money than you
could shake a stick at!’
SUSSEX.
[Illustration]
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