The fog wrapped the river. The bridge showed now a few arches and now
none. Boats were moths in a moth dimness and silence. Saint Leofric’s
mount across the water could not be seen. The walls of the houses on
this side stood chill and grey, or faded away into a dream. The garden
below barely lived, a wistful, faded place, no colour even to dream of
colour.
Morgen Fay hated the day. “Miserable! I want to go live in the sun!”
“Will you have your book? Will you have your tapestry frame?”
“No!”
The large woman, Ailsa, shrugged and went to Tony in the warm kitchen.
They talked there. “Now she is nightingale or moon in the sky--and now
she is lion-woman or panther-woman--and now she is just a slut that I
could whip--!”
Up in the oak room Morgen Fay lay face down among the cushions of the
long window seat. Ennui was in the room like the fog. It was in her
veins, her mouth. “I am set face to a dead wall, and I shall be here
forever! Unless the wall is broken and my feet are let to move, I will
say that life is a naught, a nothing-wall restraining nothing from
nothing, a dead grin on a dead face!”
“Nothing--nothing--nothing!” ran through her head and sat in her heart.
“Nothing--grey nothing--black nothing. I am come to that. I stick in
that. I go not up nor down, nor to nor fro. Nothing--nothing--nothing!
Nothing that yet is wretched, being nothing!”
She lay with dark eyes hidden in bend of arm. “Oh,
something--something--something come to me!”
She lay in the grey room in the world of grey fog. A pebble wrapped in
a glove, thrown from without, struck the glass of the window above her.
She knew that kind of sound, that kind of knock. “Ho, you within!” At
first she meant not to look, not to answer. It was all grey nothing--no
sun out there to lift the cloud. Habit, old, dull and very strong, at
last haled her from her pillows and set her face against the pane. She
could not see. She pressed the catch that opened the small square in
the larger square. Now the fog poured in, and the sound of the river.
She made out the small boat below, one man standing in it.
He saw her face come out of the mist. Blue eyes looked into black eyes.
“Ah, so doleful is it in this fog!” cried young Thomas Bettany.
“Aye, and aye again. I yawn with death up here!”
“So grey it is none will see and steal my boat fastened here. Foot here
and foot there, and so I could climb--were the window opened more wide!”
She opened it. He did as he had pictured and entered the oak room. “I
have been,” she said, “in two minds whether to hang myself or drown
myself. I want no kisses. I like you because you have blue speedwell
eyes and are truly gay. If you can sit and talk and make me who sit
inside gay, do it! If you cannot--back to the river!”
“Your blue and red warm the grey cloud. Are you melancholy? Sometimes I
am so until I would give the world a buffet and depart.”
“You are nineteen and a young king and know naught about it!” said
Morgen Fay. She took her seat by the small fire on the hearth and he
sat opposite. He had no amorous passion for her and she knew it. Once
she would have set herself to making him find it. Now she did not care.
She had not cared once this year. She felt no amorous movement toward
him, but she liked him. She was thirty-two. Now, sitting there, she
could have said “Son--”
He nursed his knee, looking now at the blue and red flames and now at
Morgen Fay.
“To get back a gay heart why not go to Saint Leofric’s?”
“I don’t believe in miracles. If they are, they are for others, not for
me.”
“Why don’t you believe?”
“I don’t know. I know a deal of Morgen Fay and there’s a deal I do not
know. But neither what I know nor what I do not know creeps and prays
to a dead man’s bones. All that to me is a mockery! I laugh at it and
against it. Some are healed? Doubtless! Many! But believed they so of
it, a rose in my garden, so they smelled it, kissed it, believed it was
rooted in Paradise, would heal them! They heal themselves. Believing!
Believing! I would that I had it. So easy to cure one’s self! Oh, the
self is the wonder that is so dark and is so bright, so strong and so
feeble!”
She looked at him sombrely, hunger in her face.
“If you said all that outside--”
“Aye, indeed, if I said it! Morgen Fay that has ’scaped sheet and
candle all these years might have them now, but for a different reason!
I’ll not say it outside--nor inside on a different day. To-day I would
tell the truth, for there is no sparkle in lying!”
She brooded over the fire. “What is the truth? Now I believe what I
have said--and to-morrow I might go swimming toward a miracle! I have
swam so in the past--believed with the shoal there was food there. But
no! It shall not be again toward dead-white bone!”
He began, blue-eyed, young and keen, to talk of travel that he wanted
so badly! He was talking as youth might talk to motherhood, who always
listened. Cathay and Ind by the western way! They hung over the fire,
the fog came about the house; they were far, far, far away!
When it was growing dusk, before Ailsa brought the candles, he went
through the window and down as he had come to his boat,--and so off
like a moth.
If he had not left Morgen Fay gay of heart, yet listening and speaking,
and never a caress between, liking this boy and travelling a bit
with him, her mood was less ashen, or began to glow amid its ashes.
She bent herself over the fire, she put her locked hands over her
forehead, she rocked herself; desire and mind went wandering together.
“Forest--forest deep and still. Landless sea, salt and clean. Solitude,
solitude--and out of it the Miracle rising--and Morgen Fay dead at its
feet--but I safe forever, healed forever! But it will not come, my
Miracle, it will not come, it will not come!”
The dark increased. Ailsa brought the candles.
The next eve brought Somerville,--alone, in mood of return but not
otherwise in good mood. A man of many levels, something had crossed
him and he perched to-day upon one of the lower levels of himself.
Morgen Fay’s mood to-night was soulless, hard and reckless. She was not
nightingale, nor moon in the sky, nor lion-woman nor panther-woman; she
was nearer the slut that Ailsa would have under her fingers. She drank
much wine with Somerville.
When he was at this ebb and scurf of himself he liked so to loosen
her tongue, for she could then flay for him--skilfully as ever Apollo
flayed Marsyas--that breadth of living, that cluster of folk or that
individual that he chose to lead to her. Perhaps she knew them, or
perhaps she took them and their acts from his lips. Either way, with a
vigour of disdain, a vigour of hate, of anger against an universe that
was increasingly giving her now ennui and now whips of scorpions, she
drew from them and held aloft a skin of attributes and motives that
made dreadful laughter for the onlookers. She and Somerville were the
onlookers.
In these moods he was her demon and she was his. They sat cheek by
jowl, in the lowest strata of themselves, drinking each the worst
of the other, poisoning and poisoned. When they came to embraces,
to a pitiful, animal revivification--thinking so to get light and
solace--that was the lesser harm.
Somerville brought into their talk Brother Richard Englefield. “There
is a monk at Silver Cross. Watch for appearances and miracles there
also!”
“What can church say to us? Where’s honesty? Here, Rob, here!”
“He is a tall, brown-gold man that was a goldsmith once. He can still
make you lovely things in silver and gold.”
“So he becomes cheating alchemist and all his gold is lead and brass!”
“Much like thine own!” said a loud voice within Morgen Fay. She struck
at it, would not have it, poured to-night, being to-night a slut, muck
and mire upon it.
“Let him cheat--and Silver Cross cheat, and Saint Leofric’s, and Prior
Hugh and Abbot Mark! I would have them cheat, bringing their inward
outward! It is there. Let the horn blow for the toad to come forth!”
“I wish to see,” said Somerville, “the play they make! It will be
players and masquers worth the fee! There will be Saint Willebrod, or
who else they can impress, and Brother Richard, and a new Somewhat or
That Which that works miracles--or an old That Which working with youth
come again!”
“We are fallen on evil times! No miracles save those we work ourselves!
And we are so clumsy!”
“Abbot Mark may be clumsy. I hold that the Prior of Westforest will
marshal the play.”
“And they are more safe than coiners in some forest cavern!”
“That, sweetheart, is because we are so hungry for miracles. See how we
beg Saint Leofric for more! We are so lantern-jawed that we will take
marsh grain, so it be baked in a loaf!”
She laughed. “All gaunt with hunger--getting wolf-toothed. I, too, have
whined and will whine again, for a miracle!”
He poured her more wine. “It’s a wicked old world! The only way is to
grin and shove it along.”
“Unless you stop it with a rope. If I were sure I _could_ stop it.”
“Drink your wine. Here’s to Brother Richard--dog-monk noseing out the
unearthly!”
She drank. “Here’s to Prior Matthew the marshal! If it’s to be a good
play, I would be a playgoer!”
“Here’s to the rotten time--the hungry people!”
“Here’s to the rotten time--the hungry people.” She drank, then set
slowly down the cup and put her crossed arms upon the table and bowed
her head upon them. She and Somerville were down, down, far down in
themselves.