unresented, at the last country station. His features were a little
obscure in the fading daylight that hung between our four narrow walls,
but apparently his eyes had been fixed on my face for some little time.
He narrowed his lids at this unexpected confrontation, jerked back
his head, and cast a glance out of his mirky glass at the bit of
greenish-bright moon that was struggling into its full brilliance above
the dun, swelling uplands.
"It's a queer experience, railway-travelling," he began abruptly, in
a low, almost deprecating voice, drawing his hand across his eyes.
"One is cast into a passing privacy with a fellow-stranger and then is
gone." It was as if he had been patiently awaiting the attention of a
chosen listener.
I nodded, looking at him. "_That_ privacy, too," he ejaculated, "all
that!" My eyes turned towards the window again: bare, thorned, black
January hedge, inhospitable salt coast, flat waste of northern water.
Our engine-driver promptly shut off his steam, and we slid almost
noiselessly out of sight of sky and sea into a cutting.
"It's a desolate country," I ventured to remark.
"Oh, yes, 'desolate'!" he echoed a little wearily. "But what always
frets me is the way we have of arrogating to ourselves the offices
of judge, jury, and counsel all in one. For my part, I never forget
it--the futility, the presumption. It _leads_ nowhere. We drive
in--into all this silence, this--this 'forsakenness,' this dream of
a world between her lights of day and night time. Consciousness!...
What itching monkeys men are!" He recovered himself, swallowed his
indignation with an obvious gulp. "As if," he continued in more
chastened tones--"as if that other gate were not for ever ajar, into
God knows what of peace and mystery." He stooped forward, lean,
darkened, objurgatory. "Don't we _make_ our world? Isn't _that_ our
blessed, our betrayed responsibility?"
I nodded, and ensconced myself, like a dog in straw, in that basest of
all responses to a rare, even if eccentric, candour--caution.
"Well," he continued, a little weariedly, "that's the indictment. Small
wonder if it will need a trumpet to blare us into that last 'Family
Prayers.' Then perhaps a few solitaries--just a few--will creep out of
their holes and fastnesses, and draw mercy from the merciful on the
cities of the plain. The buried talent will shine none the worse for
the long, long looming of its napery spun from dream and desire.
"Years ago--ten, fifteen, perhaps--I chanced on the queerest specimen
of this order of the 'talented.' Much the same country, too. This"--he
swept his glance out over a now invisible sea--"this is a kind of dwarf
replica of it. More naked, smoother, more sudden and precipitous,
more 'forsaken,' moody. Alone! The trees are shorn there, as if with
monstrous shears, by the winter gales. The air's salt. It is a country
of stones and emerald meadows, of green, meandering, aimless lanes, of
farms set in their clifts and valleys like rough time-bedimmed jewels,
as if by some angel of humanity, wandering between dark and daybreak.
"I was younger then--in body: the youth of the mind is for men of an
age--yours, maybe, and mine. Even then, even at that, I was sickened
of crowds, of that unimaginable London--swarming wilderness of mankind
in which a poor lost thirsty dog from Otherwhere tastes first the
full meaning of that idle word 'forsaken.' 'Forsaken by whom?' is the
question I ask myself now. Visitors to my particular paradise were few
then--as if, my dear sir, we were not all of us visitors, visitants,
revenants, on earth, panting for time in which to tell and share our
secrets, roving in search of the marks that shall prove our quest not
vain, not unprecedented, not a treachery. But let that be.
"I would start off morning after morning, bread and cheese in pocket,
from the bare old house I lodged in, bound for that unforeseen nowhere
for which the heart, the fantasy aches. Lingering hot noondays would
find me stretched in a state half-comatose, yet vigilant, on the
close-flowered turf of the fields or cliffs, on the sun-baked sands
and rocks, soaking in the scene and life around me like some pilgrim
chameleon. It was in hope to lose my way that I would set out. How
shall a man find his way unless he lose it? Now and then I succeeded.
That country is large, and its land and sea marks easily cheat the
stranger. I was still of an age, you see, when my 'small door' was
ajar, and I planted a solid foot to keep it from shutting. But how
could I know what I was after? One just shakes the tree of life, and
the rare fruits come tumbling down, to rot for the most part in the
lush grasses.
"What was most haunting and provocative in that far-away country was
its fleeting resemblance to the country of dream. You stand, you sit,
or lie prone on its bud-starred heights, and look down; the green,
dispersed, treeless landscape spreads beneath you, with its hollows
and mounded slopes, clustering farmstead, and scatter of village, all
motionless under the vast wash of sun and blue, like the drop-scene
of some enchanted playhouse centuries old. So, too, the visionary
bird-haunted headlands, veiled faintly in a mist of unreality above
their broken stones and the enormous saucer of the sea.
"You cannot guess there what you may not chance upon, or whom. Bells
clash, boom, and quarrel hollowly on the edge of darkness in those
breakers. Voices waver across the fainter winds. The birds cry in
a tongue unknown yet not unfamiliar. The sky is the hawks' and the
stars'. _There_ one is on the edge of life, of the unforeseen, whereas
our cities--are not our desiccated jaded minds ever continually
pressing and edging further and further away from freedom, the vast
unknown, the infinite presence, picking a fool's journey from sensual
fact to fact at the tail of that he-ass called Reason? I suggest that
in that solitude the spirit within us realises that it treads the
outskirts of a region long since called the Imagination. I assert we
have strayed, and in our blindness abandoned----"
My stranger paused in his frenzy, glanced out at me from his obscure
corner as if he had intended to stun, astonish me with some violent
heresy. We puffed out slowly, laboriously, from a "Halt" at which
in the gathering dark and moonshine we had for some while been at a
standstill. Never was wedding-guest more desperately at the mercy of
ancient mariner.
"Well, one day," he went on, lifting his voice a little to master
the resounding heart-beats of our steam-engine--"one late afternoon,
in my goal-less wanderings, I had climbed to the summit of a steep
grass-grown cart-track, winding up dustily between dense, untended
hedges. Even then I might have missed the house to which it led, for,
hair-pin fashion, the track here abruptly turned back on itself, and
only a far fainter footpath led on over the hill-crest. I might, I
say, have missed the house and--and its inmates, if I had not heard
the musical sound of what seemed like the twangling of a harp. This
thin-drawn, sweet, tuneless warbling welled over the close green grass
of the height as if out of space. Truth cannot say whether it was of
that air or of my own fantasy. Nor did I ever discover what instrument,
whether of man or Ariel, had released a strain so pure and yet so
bodiless.
"I pushed on and found myself in command of a gorse-strewn height,
a stretch of country that lay a few hundred paces across the steep
and sudden valley in between. In a V-shaped entry to the left, and
sunwards, lay an azure and lazy tongue of the sea. And as my eye slid
softly thence and upwards and along the sharp, green horizon line
against the glass-clear turquoise of space, it caught the flinty
glitter of a square chimney. I pushed on, and presently found myself at
the gate of a farmyard.
"There was but one straw-mow upon its staddles. A few fowls were
sunning themselves in their dust-baths. White and pied doves preened
and cooed on the roof of an outbuilding as golden with its lichens as
if the western sun had scattered its dust for centuries upon the large
slate slabs. Just that life and the whispering of the wind, nothing
more. Yet even at one swift glimpse I seemed to have trespassed upon
a peace that had endured for ages; to have crossed the viewless border
that divides time from eternity. I leaned, resting, over the gate, and
could have remained there for hours, lapsing ever more profoundly into
the blessed quietude that had stolen over my thoughts.
"A bent-up woman appeared at the dark entry of a stone shed opposite
to me, and, shading her eyes, paused in prolonged scrutiny of the
stranger. At that I entered the gate and, explaining that I had lost
my way and was tired and thirsty, asked for some milk. She made no
reply, but after peering up at me, with something between suspicion and
apprehension on her weather-beaten old face, led me towards the house
which lay to the left on the slope of the valley, hidden from me till
then by plumy bushes of tamarisk.
"It was a low grave house, grey-chimneyed, its stone walls traversed by
a deep shadow cast by the declining sun, its dark windows rounded and
uncurtained, its door wide open to the porch. She entered the house,
and I paused upon the threshold. A deep unmoving quiet lay within,
like that of water in a cave renewed by the tide. Above a table hung a
wreath of wild flowers. To the right was a heavy oak settle upon the
flags. A beam of sunlight pierced the air of the staircase from an
upper window.
"Presently a dark long-faced gaunt man appeared from within,
contemplating me, as he advanced, out of eyes that seemed not so much
to fix the intruder as to encircle his image, as the sea contains the
distant speck of a ship on its wide blue bosom of water. They might
have been the eyes of the blind; the windows of a house in dream to
which the inmate must make something of a pilgrimage to look out upon
actuality. Then he smiled, and the long, dark features, melancholy yet
serene, took light upon them, as might a bluff of rock beneath a thin
passing wash of sunshine. With a gesture he welcomed me into the large,
dark-flagged kitchen, cool as a cellar, airy as a belfry, its sweet air
traversed by a long oblong of light out of the west.
"The wide shelves of the painted dresser were laden with crockery. A
wreath of freshly-gathered flowers hung over the chimney-piece. As we
entered, a twittering cloud of small birds, robins, hedge-sparrows,
chaffinches fluttered up a few inches from floor and sill and
window-seat, and once more, with tiny starry-dark eyes observing me,
soundlessly alighted.
"I could hear the infinitesimal _tic-tac_ of their tiny claws upon the
slate. My gaze drifted out of the window into the garden beyond, a
cavern of clearer crystal and colour than that which astounded the eyes
of young Aladdin. Apart from the twisted garland of wild flowers, the
shining metal of range and copper candlestick, and the bright-scoured
crockery, there was no adornment in the room except a rough frame,
hanging from a nail in the wall, and enclosing what appeared to be a
faint patterned fragment of blue silk or fine linen. The chairs and
table were old and heavy. A low light warbling, an occasional _skirr_
of wing, a haze-like drone of bee and fly--these were the only
sounds that edged a quiet intensified in its profundity by the remote
stirrings of the sea.
"The house was stilled as by a charm, yet thought within me asked no
questions; speculation was asleep in its kennel. I sat down to the
milk and bread, the honey and fruit which the old woman laid out upon
the table, and her master seated himself opposite to me, now in a low
sibilant whisper--a tongue which they seemed to understand--addressing
himself to the birds, and now, as if with an effort, raising those
strange grey-green eyes of his to bestow a quiet remark upon me.
He asked, rather in courtesy than with any active interest, a few
questions, referring to the world, its business and transports--_our_
beautiful world--as an astronomer in the small hours might murmur a
few words to the chance-sent guest of his solitude concerning the
secrets of Uranus or Saturn. There is another, an inexplorable side
to the moon. Yet he said enough for me to gather that he, too, was
of that small tribe of the aloof and wild to which our cracked old
word 'forsaken' might be applied, hermits, clay-matted fakirs, and
such-like, the snowy birds that play and cry amid mid-oceanic surges,
the living of an oasis of the wilderness, which share a reality only
distantly dreamed of by the time-driven, thought-corroded congregations
of man.
"Yet so narrow and hazardous I somehow realised was the brink of
fellow-being (shall I call it?) which we shared, he and I, that again
and again fantasy within me seemed to hover over that precipice
Night knows as fear. It was he, it seemed, with that still embracive
contemplation of his, with that far-away yet reassuring smile, that
kept my poise, my balance. 'No,' some voice within him seemed to utter,
'you are safe; the bounds are fixed; though hallucination chaunt its
decoy, you shall not irretrievably pass over. Eat and drink, and
presently return to "life."' And I listened, and, like that of a drowsy
child in its cradle, my consciousness sank deeper and deeper, stilled,
pacified, into the dream amid which, as it seemed, this soundless house
of stone now reared its walls.
"I had all but finished my meal when I heard footsteps approaching on
the flags without. The murmur of other voices, distinguishably shrill
yet guttural, even at a distance, and in spite of the dense stones and
beams of the house which had blunted their timbre, had already reached
me. Now the feet halted. I turned my head--cautiously, even perhaps
apprehensively--and confronted two figures in the doorway.
"I cannot now guess the age of my entertainer. These children--for
children they were in face and gesture and effect, though as to form
and stature apparently in their last teens--these children were far
more problematical. I say 'form and stature,' yet obviously they were
dwarfish. Their heads were sunken between their shoulders, their hair
thick, their eyes disconcertingly deep-set. They were ungainly, their
features peculiarly irregular, as if two races from the ends of the
earth had in them intermingled their blood and strangeness, as if
rather animal and angel had connived in their creation.
"But if some inward light lay on the still eyes, on the gaunt,
sorrowful, quixotic countenance that now was fully and intensely bent
on mine, emphatically that light was theirs also. He spoke to them,
they answered--in English, my own language, without a doubt: but an
English slurred, broken, and unintelligible to me, yet clear as bell,
haunting, penetrating, pining as voice of nix or siren. My ears drank
in the sound as an Arab parched with desert sand falls on his dried
belly and gulps in mouthfuls of crystal water. The birds hopped nearer,
as if beneath the rod of an enchanter. A sweet continuous clamour arose
from their small throats. The exquisite colours of plume and bosom
burned, greened, melted in the level sun-ray, in the darker air beyond.
"A kind of mournful gaiety, a lamentable felicity, such as rings in the
cadences of an old folk-song, welled into my heart. I was come back to
the borders of Eden, bowed and outwearied, gazing out of dream into
dream, homesick, 'forsaken.'
"Well, years have gone by," muttered my fellow-traveller deprecatingly,
"but I have not forgotten that Eden's primeval trees and shade.
"They led me out, these bizarre companions, a he and a she, if I
may put it as crudely as my apprehension of them put it to me then.
Through a broad door they conducted me--if one who leads may be said
to be conducted--into their garden. Garden! A full mile long, between
undiscerned walls, it sloped and narrowed towards a sea at whose
dark unfoamed blue, even at this distance, my eyes dazzled. Yet how
can one call that a garden which reveals no ghost of a sign of human
arrangement, of human slavery, of spade or hoe?
"Great boulders shouldered up, tessellated, embossed, powdered with a
thousand various mosses and lichens, between a flowering greenery of
weeds. Wind-stunted, clear-emerald, lichen-tufted trees smoothed and
crisped the inflowing airs of the ocean with their leaves and spines,
sibilating a thin scarce-audible music. Scanty, rank, and uncultivated
fruits hung close their vivid-coloured cheeks to the gnarled branches.
It was the harbourage of birds, the small embowering parlour of their
house of life, under an evening sky, pure and lustrous as a water-drop.
It cried 'Hospital' to the wanderers of the universe.
"As I look back in ever-thinning, nebulous remembrance, on my two
companions, hear their voices gutturally sweet and shrill, catch
again their being, so to speak, I realise that there was a kind of
Orientalism in their effect. Their instant courtesy was not Western,
the smiles that greeted me, whenever I turned my head to look back at
them, were infinitely friendly, yet infinitely remote. So ungainly,
so far from our notions of beauty and symmetry were their bodies and
faces, those heads thrust heavily between their shoulders, their
disproportioned yet graceful arms and hands, that the children in some
of our English villages might be moved to stone them, while their
elders looked on and laughed.
"Dusk was drawing near; soon night would come. The colours of the
sunset, sucking its extremest dye from every leaf and blade and petal,
touched my consciousness even then with a vague fleeting alarm.
"I remember I asked these strange and happy beings, repeating my
question twice or thrice, as we neared the surfy entry of the valley
upon whose sands a tiny stream emptied its fresh waters--I asked
them if it was they who had planted this multitude of flowers, many
of a kind utterly unknown to me and alien to a country inexhaustibly
rich. 'We wait; we wait!' I think they cried. And it was as if their
cry woke echo from the green-walled valleys of the mind into which I
had strayed. Shall I confess that tears came into my eyes as I gazed
hungrily around me on the harvest of their patience?
"Never was actuality so close to dream. It was not only an unknown
country, slipped in between these placid hills, upon which I had
chanced in my ramblings. I had entered for a few brief moments a
strange region of consciousness. I was treading, thus accompanied, amid
a world of welcoming and fearless life--oh, friendly to me!--the paths
of man's imagination, the kingdom from which thought and curiosity,
vexed scrutiny and lust--a lust it may be for nothing more impious
than the actual--had prehistorically proved the insensate means of his
banishment. 'Reality,' 'Consciousness': had he for 'the time being'
unwittingly, unhappily missed his way? Would he be led back at length
to that garden wherein cockatrice and basilisk bask, harmlessly, at
peace?
"I speculate now. In that queer, yes, and possibly sinister, company,
sinister only because it was alien to me, I did not speculate. In their
garden, the familiar was become the strange--'the strange' that lurks
in the inmost heart, unburdens its riches in trance, flings its light
and gilding upon love, gives heavenly savour to the intemperate bowl
of passion, and is the secret of our incommunicable pity. What is yet
queerer, these beings were evidently glad of my company. They stumped
after me (as might yellow men after some Occidental quadruped never
before seen) in merry collusion of nods and wreathed smiles at this
perhaps unprecedented intrusion.
"I stood for a moment looking out over the placid surface of the sea.
A ship in sail hung phantom-like on the horizon. I pined to call my
discovery to its seamen. The tide gushed, broke, spent itself on the
bare boulders. I was suddenly cold and alone, and gladly turned back
into the garden, my companions instinctively separating to let me pass
between them. I breathed in the rare, almost exotic heat, the tenuous,
honeyed, almond-laden air of its flowers and birds--gull, mandrake,
plover, wagtail, finch, robin, which as I half-angrily, half-sadly
realised fluttered up in momentary dismay only at _my_ presence, the
embodied spectre of their enemy, man. Man? Then who were these?...
"I lost again a way lost early that morning, as I trudged inland at
night. The dark came, warm and starry. I was tired, dejected, exhausted
beyond words. That night I slept in a barn and was awakened soon after
daybreak by the crowing of cocks. I went out, dazed and blinking into
the sunlight, bathed face and hands in a brook near by, and came to a
village before a soul was stirring. So I sat under a thrift-cushioned,
thorn-crowned wall in a meadow, and once more drowsed off and fell
asleep. When again I awoke, it was ten o'clock. The church clock in its
tower knelled out its strokes, and I went into an inn for food.
"A corpulent, blonde woman, kindly and hospitable, with a face
comfortably resembling her own sow's, that yuffed and nosed in at
the open door as I sat on my stool, served me with what I called
for. I described--not without some vanishing shame, as if it were a
treachery--my farm, its whereabouts.
"Her small blue eyes 'pigged' at me with a fleeting expression which I
failed to translate. The name of the farm, it appeared, was Trevarras.
'And did you see any of the Creatures?' she asked me in a voice not
entirely her own. 'The Creatures'! I sat back for an instant and stared
at her; then realised that Creature was the name of my host, and Maria
and Christus (though here her dialect may have deceived me) the names
of my two gardeners. She spun an absurd story, so far as I could tack
it together and make it coherent. Superstitious stuff about this man
who had wandered in upon the shocked and curious inhabitants of the
district and made his home at Trevarras--a stranger and pilgrim,
a 'foreigner,' it seemed, of few words, dubious manners, and both
uninformative.
"Then there was something (she placed her two fat hands, one of them
wedding-ringed, on the zinc of the bar-counter, and peered over at me,
as if I were a delectable 'wash'), then there was something about a
woman 'from the sea.' In a 'blue gown,' and either dumb, inarticulate,
or mistress of only a foreign tongue. She must have lived in sin,
moreover, those pig's eyes seemed to yearn, since the children were
'simple,' 'naturals'--as God intends in such matters. It was useless.
One's stomach may sometimes reject the cold sanative aerated water of
'the next morning,' and my ridiculous intoxication had left me dry but
not yet quite sober.
"Anyhow, this she told me, that my blue woman, as fair as flax, had
died and was buried in the neighbouring churchyard (the nearest to,
though miles distant from, Trevarras). She repeatedly assured me, as if
I might otherwise doubt so sophisticated a fact, that I should find her
grave there, her 'stone.'
"So indeed I did--far away from the elect, and in a shade-ridden
northwest corner of the sleepy, cropless acre: a slab, scarcely
rounded, of granite, with but a name bitten out of the dark rough
surface, '_Femina Creature_.'"
ON BLAKE AS A PROPHET
By A. CLUTTON-BROCK