.... It seems more like three weeks than three days since I wrote.
The time passes slowly in a sickhouse...! The doctors were here this
morning, they give her forty hours. Not a word of complaint has passed
her lips since she knew. To see her you would hardly think her ill; her
cheeks have not had time to waste or lose their colour. There is not
much pain, but a slow, creeping numbness.... It was John Ford's wish
that she should be told. She just turned her head to the wall and
sighed; then to poor old Mrs. Hopgood, who was crying her heart out:
“Don't cry, Mums, I don't care.”
When they had gone, she asked for her violin. She made them hold it for
her, and drew the bow across the strings; but the notes that came out
were so trembling and uncertain that she dropped the bow and broke into
a passion of sobbing. Since then, no complaint or moan of any kind....
But to go back. On Sunday, the day after I wrote, as I was coming from a
walk, I met a little boy making mournful sounds on a tin whistle.
“Coom ahn!” he said, “the Miss wahnts t' zee yu.”
I went to her room. In the morning she had seemed better, but now looked
utterly exhausted. She had a letter in her hand.
“It's this,” she said. “I don't seem to understand it. He wants me to
do something—but I can't think, and my eyes feel funny. Read it to me,
please.”
The letter was from Zachary. I read it to her in a low voice, for Mrs.
Hopgood was in the room, her eyes always fixed on Pasiance above her
knitting. When I'd finished, she made me read it again, and yet again.
At first she seemed pleased, almost excited, then came a weary, scornful
look, and before I'd finished the third time she was asleep. It was a
remarkable letter, that seemed to bring the man right before one's eyes.
I slipped it under her fingers on the bed-clothes, and went out. Fancy
took me to the cliff where she had fallen. I found the point of rock
where the cascade of ivy flows down the cliff; the ledge on which she
had climbed was a little to my right—a mad place. It showed plainly
what wild emotions must have been driving her! Behind was a half-cut
cornfield with a fringe of poppies, and swarms of harvest insects
creeping and flying; in the uncut corn a landrail kept up a continual
charring. The sky was blue to the very horizon, and the sea wonderful,
under that black wild cliff stained here and there with red. Over the
dips and hollows of the fields great white clouds hung low down above
the land. There are no brassy, east-coast skies here; but always
sleepy, soft-shaped clouds, full of subtle stir and change. Passages of
Zachary's Pearse's letter kept rising to my lips. After all he's the man
that his native place, and life, and blood have made him. It is useless
to expect idealists where the air is soft and things good to look on
(the idealist grows where he must create beauty or comfort for himself);
useless to expect a man of law and order, in one whose fathers have
stared at the sea day and night for a thousand years—the sea, full of
its promises of unknown things, never quite the same, a slave to its own
impulses. Man is an imitative animal....
“Life's hard enough,” he wrote, “without tying yourself down. Don't
think too hardly of me! Shall I make you happier by taking you into
danger? If I succeed you'll be a rich woman; but I shall fail if you're
with me. To look at you makes me soft. At sea a man dreams of all the
good things on land, he'll dream of the heather, and honey—you're
like that; and he'll dream of the apple-trees, and the grass of the
orchards—you're like that; sometimes he only lies on his back and
wishes—and you're like that, most of all like that....”
When I was reading those words I remember a strange, soft, half-scornful
look came over Pasiance's face; and once she said, “But that's all
nonsense, isn't it...?”
Then followed a long passage about what he would gain if he succeeded,
about all that he was risking, the impossibility of failure, if he kept
his wits about him. “It's only a matter of two months or so,” he went
on; “stay where you are, dear, or go to my Dad. He'll be glad to have
you. There's my mother's room. There's no one to say 'No' to your fiddle
there; you can play it by the sea; and on dark nights you'll have the
stars dancing to you over the water as thick as bees. I've looked at
them often, thinking of you....”
Pasiance had whispered to me, “Don't read that bit,” and afterwards
I left it out.... Then the sensuous side of him shows up: “When I've
brought this off, there's the whole world before us. There are places
I can take you to. There's one I know, not too warm and not too cold,
where you can sit all day in the shade and watch the creepers, and the
cocoa-palms, still as still; nothing to do or care about; all the fruits
you can think of; no noise but the parrots and the streams, and a splash
when a nigger dives into a water-hole. Pasiance, we'll go there! With
an eighty-ton craft there's no sea we couldn't know. The world's a fine
place for those who go out to take it; there's lots of unknown stuff'
in it yet. I'll fill your lap, my pretty, so full of treasures that you
shan't know yourself. A man wasn't meant to sit at home....”
Throughout this letter—for all its real passion—one could feel how
the man was holding to his purpose—the rather sordid purpose of this
venture. He's unconscious of it; for he is in love with her; but he must
be furthering his own ends. He is vital—horribly vital! I wonder less
now that she should have yielded.
What visions hasn't he dangled before her. There was physical
attraction, too—I haven't forgotten the look I saw on her face at Black
Mill. But when all's said and done, she married him, because she's
Pasiance Voisey, who does things and wants “to get back.” And she lies
there dying; not he nor any other man will ever take her away. It's
pitiful to think of him tingling with passion, writing that letter to
this doomed girl in that dark hole of a saloon. “I've wanted money,” he
wrote, “ever since I was a little chap sitting in the fields among the
cows.... I want it for you now, and I mean to have it. I've studied the
thing two years; I know what I know....
“The moment this is in the post I leave for London. There are a hundred
things to look after still; I can't trust myself within reach of you
again till the anchor's weighed. When I re-christened her the Pied
Witch, I thought of you—you witch to me....”
There followed a solemn entreaty to her to be on the path leading to the
cove at seven o'clock on Wednesday evening (that is, to-morrow) when
he would come ashore and bid her good-bye. It was signed, “Your loving
husband, Zachary Pearse....”
I lay at the edge of that cornfield a long time; it was very peaceful.
The church bells had begun to ring. The long shadows came stealing out
from the sheaves; woodpigeons rose one by one, and flapped off to roost;
the western sky was streaked with red, and all the downs and combe
bathed in the last sunlight. Perfect harvest weather; but oppressively
still, the stillness of suspense....
Life at the farm goes on as usual. We have morning and evening prayers.
John Ford reads them fiercely, as though he were on the eve of a revolt
against his God. Morning and evening he visits her, comes out wheezing
heavily, and goes to his own room; I believe, to pray. Since this
morning I haven't dared meet him. He is a strong old man—but this will
break him up....