THE GREEN GATES OF VISION:--I. DUSK
He went back into the house when the distance had snapped the last
vibrating link, but he did not stay there. The office was still under
the domination of the young man’s silent anger, the old man’s piteous
revolt. He felt troubled for both, seeing the situation as each saw it,
and was conscious of sharp impatience with the cause of the deadlock,
though in his own mind he was certain that her obstinacy would not
last. But the whole affair was an unnecessary worry with which he could
have dispensed very thankfully, and added heavily to his sense of weary
irritation.
He found both drawing-room and dining-room equally unbearable in
his present mood, for both were oppressively characteristic of
Helwise, curiously so, since her character seemed always a shifting
thing, sliding through your fingers and resting nowhere. He had lost
his mother early--before his teens--but the house, under the firm
conservatism of his father and an old servant, had kept her memory
and her tenets for long. Helwise, however, had banished them very
completely. With a long-nursed resentment he marked the disorder of
the dining-room, the drunken regiment of chairs, the holes in the lace
curtains, the cheap almanacs pinned haphazard between the good prints.
Helwise loved to surround herself with calendars. They gave her a sense
of keeping even with Time. He could not steal a march on her by a
single day, while some grocer’s tribute marked the black footsteps of
his pilgrimage. Yet she rarely availed herself of their services, left
them hanging for years--horrible traps to the unwary--her own hasty
references being invariably directed to the wrong month.
Lanty frowned distastefully at their almost ribald askewness, at the
torn places in the paper where the crooked pins had slipped, at the
untidy hearth and wild mass of correspondence on the open desk. It
should have been a handsome room, by rights, for it was bright and
well proportioned. The severe furniture that his father had bought had
mellowed with time, and the few bits of silver on the sideboard had
lost their parvenu air of recent presentation. He had chosen the carpet
himself, and its soft, dark tints still pleased him, in spite of the
tread worn white by the hurrying feet of his aunt. But there was no
ease or homeliness in the room, and it was certainly not handsome, save
as an elderly _roué_ of once better days is handsome, in a last drunken
effort after dignity and repose.
The drawing-room was worse. He had had no hand in the drawing-room,
so Helwise had let herself loose upon it, with results that made
him creep. He hated it, from the collection of smug pot dogs on the
mantelpiece to the bad Marcus Stone imitations on the cold blue of the
walls. He hated the cheap books lying about, the spindly furniture,
the innumerable chair-backs bristling so fiercely with pins that you
dared neither lay your head on them in front nor your hand on them
from behind. There was only one comfortable chair in the room, and
that was sacred to Helwise. Not that she ever actually claimed it as
hers, but if you sat down on it by accident, she wandered helplessly
over the wild-patterned carpet as if there wasn’t another seat within
reach, until you became gradually aware of criminal poaching, and arose
with shame. There were almanacs here, too, gaudy things evidently of
a higher grade, matching, with a pleasantly thoughtful touch, the
shrieking tiles of the modern grate. The wide fireplace of his youth
had been a sacred altar, lighting a torch to many dreams, lifting the
smoke of many prayers; but nobody but a Post-Impressionist could have
prayed to this grate, and its brazen canopy had never housed a single
vision.
With a half-sigh he wandered out again and into the garden, but even
here Helwise had successfully impressed herself. During one of his
very rare absences she had had the fine box-borders removed, and the
paths edged with glittering rockery-stones, intersected by scrubby and
unwilling little ferns. Lanty never quite forgot what he had felt at
sight of them. There was an old song he had been used to growl softly
as he walked between the box, a tender thing called “My Lady’s Garden,”
and sometimes, at dusk, after a hard day, he had vaguely thought to
find her there in the cool of the evening, even as himself and Another.
He had always missed her, but she had been there, he was sure of that.
But when the rockery-stones appeared, she came no more; and to all his
big wants and losses there was added the loss of a little dream.
That was hard to forgive Helwise, just as it was hard to forgive her
the scars on his precious lawn, where her heavy niblick had taken
greedy mouthfuls, and the insane bumble-puppy pole, rearing its
unsightly length in the middle of the soft, green stretch. She had a
summer-house, too, a Reckitt’s Blue wooden thing on wheels, with texts
all over it, like a Church Army Van. All the texts were about food,
strung together at random: “I washed my steps with butter.” “Is there
any taste in the white of an egg?” “There is nothing better for a man
than that he should eat and drink ... For who can eat, or who else
can hasten hereunto, more than I?” etc., etc. Lanty passed them with
averted eyes, for they reminded him that he had had no tea and only the
scrapings of his aunt’s lunch, and stopped for comfort before the one
spot in the garden left untroubled, a stone seat in the terrace wall,
with straggling letters running along its curve. “The whole earth is
at rest, and is quiet,” said the quiet seat in the wall, a soothing
rede for a tired heart, no matter how the truth might rage and storm
without. With its balm upon his lips he dropped into the road through
a little stile, and came before long, without pause or thought, to a
lane winding across country vaguely south. He looked about him before
turning into it. If there had been anybody in sight, he would have
taken another way, but there was not a soul even far distant, and he
stepped in quickly.
Once within its bounds, however, he slackened his pace to an almost
hushed saunter. You did not use this lane as a muscular training-ground
or a mere short cut; you crept into it on tiptoe, and caught it
unawares. It was a capricious lane, racing up and down tiny hills
between its high, warm, leaning hedges, spinning round sharp corners
out of sight, or running innocently to alluring gateways, only to leave
you stranded on arrival. It was full of surprises, full of secrets. As
you walked, you heard all sorts of bewitching sounds above and around
you, sounds you had known always and sounds you never heard anywhere
else. You knew, for instance, the slur of the plough, the whistle
of the blackbird, the whirr of the grass-cutter, the slash of the
bill-hook on a far fence, the gnawing of turnips, the wind-talk of dead
leaves. But there were others you never placed: elf-like twitterings
that never came from any bird’s throat, weird, hoarse grunts like
some guttural gnome-language that couldn’t possibly be just a sheep
coughing; and if you caught the right time on the right night, you
would hear a rustling along the lower fields as the Brush-Harrow Dobbie
went by, with never a horse before it nor a man behind. There was also
the famous Bluecaster Black-Dog Dobbie, which slunk stealthily at your
side, panting and padding ever so softly in the dusk, and disappearing
into the wraith of an old Tithe-Barn long since fallen away, that had
once marked the boundary of the estate.
Besides these attractions, Lanty had a ghost of his own, and half his
joy in the lane lay in wondering if he should find it. It was a very
deep lane. You had to look up and up before you saw the feathery tops
kissing the sky, and you walked between, very warm and safe and quiet,
listening with all your ears at once. And then, all of a sudden, there
would be a break on the lower side, and over a couple of moss-grown
bars, or an ancient gate thrust in at any and every beautiful angle,
you would see the lovely land sweeping down and out beneath you, and
rising slowly, slowly again to soft curves and blue vapours. They came
all along the lane, these flashing little peeps of a world shut out,
like cloister vignettes in some silent Abbey. Your heart went before
you hungrily to each, yet was loth to leave any for the next. And which
was more dear, the tender quiet or the land through its living frame,
it would have been hard to say. Lancaster called the peeps his Green
Gates of Vision.
He stopped at the first of all, and his Ghost was there to meet him,
a long, faint, knife-edged mountain, flung like a cloud against the
south-west sky. It was often missing, and at its clearest the mass of
it was no more than a blown web, yet the line of it had always the
quivering sharpness of steel. He had grown to believe that the sight of
it brought him luck, this Ghost-Mountain of his, so christened because
it never seemed but the ghost of a hill, edged with the spirit-fire
of something safe escaped from clogging matter. Its absence did not
depress him, but its presence, sprung suddenly upon his cloistered
walk, always made his heart leap, as at an unexpected promise of
goodwill. He welcomed it to-day when he was weary and out of tune,
and he leaned his arms on the weathered timber with a sense of rest,
drawing his gaze slowly back from the far symbol to the country close
at hand.
Four or five dropping fields away, Rakestraw stood in its sheath of
woods, the new hay thick in the grey Dutch barns. There were rooks’
nests in the trees overhanging the house; even at that distance he
could see them. That meant luck for Rakestraw, said the wise. He
had always told himself that he would live at Rakestraw when the
cease-fire sounded for the work he loved, farm it himself, lead his hay
and breed his stock, and perhaps the rooks would build for him, too,
as they had built for Dart Newby. He knew in his heart that he would
never do it, just because it seemed so essentially the beautiful and
right thing for him to do. Most of us have our dream-houses somewhere,
and plot and plan their future and ours together; and whether we ever
win to them or not with a signed conveyance, we have something of them
always that is never set down in any legal bond.
To the left he could see the road twisting and dipping but yet steadily
rising towards Gilmichel, and another road far away on higher land,
with Topthorns set on its edge; then Dick Crag, like a soft, gray
bear raising itself on hind legs to look abroad, and, behind it, fold
on fold of neutral-tinted, blended fells. On the right the land rose
again, only more sharply, until the line of the hedges broke once more
into the sky, but over the hill he knew was Gilthrotin in the hollow,
with its one little, steep street, its old bridge and ancient church,
and its empty, eyeless manor-house topping the terrace over the river.
He would come to that presently, when, by slow and delicious chapters,
he had read his lane from start to finish.
Leaning there, his eyes resting on restful Rakestraw, he went back in
mind to his late interview and the task he had undertaken. It was only
one among many unconventional duties falling to him, he reflected, with
the same wry smile. As agent for the Bluecaster estate, free to use
his own discretion in almost every instance, yet often tied hand and
foot by old observance, he frequently found himself in situations for
the right conduct of which there could be no possible arbiter but his
own judgment. Old duties were his along with the outside management,
duties of house-steward and administrator, and even where his rule
ended, the claims on him went on. If a casual visitor at the “Feathers”
was lost out fishing, Lancaster was called to find him, as a matter of
course. If the draper wished to commit suicide, Lancaster was fetched
to command him to desist. If the doctor objected to the rates, or the
parson struck a bad rock in Local Government, Lancaster was signalled
for aid. Difficulties of all sorts came to him for settlement, from
disputes over neighbours’ hens and washing and fondness for the
American organ, to the moot point whether your money ought or ought not
to go to your wife’s relations.
At the age of twenty-four, when scarcely through his training, he had
been thrust into his father’s place by a blast of sudden death which
carried off master, heir, and steward in the same month. The new lord
was only just of age, and glad enough to have a Lancaster to lean on,
so that before the young agent had learned to stand alone, he had the
whole estate upon his shoulders. Thirteen years it was now since he
took hold. Thirteen years since Jeffrey Kennet Cospatrick, tenth Baron
Bluecaster, greeted his inheritance with a sigh. He was a kindly, shy
young man, one of those puzzling natures that swing from an almost
idiotic simple-mindedness to sudden touches of shrewdness; that take
everybody at face-value three-fourths of the time, and for the rest
can see through a stone wall. He had few near relations, and for the
most part spent his flying visits to Bluecaster alone, but he always
came when he was wanted, ready to face some traditional ordeal with
a shy effort. He was generous, too--to a fault--but even in his most
ultra-altruistic flights he could be made to listen to reason. Indeed,
his faith in his agent was almost irritatingly sublime; there were
times when the latter longed earnestly for a man who could see things
steadfastly through his own eyes, Bluecaster leaned so heavily. Yet he
knew himself wonderfully fortunate, and it was only when he was very
wearied or worried, as he had been of late, that he felt his shoulders
ache.
It was scarcely strange that he should feel old; he had had so little
time to be really young. There were drawbacks to being the son of a
fine man, he thought occasionally. People expected you to start where
your father left off, to keep up his standard of ripe experience where
any other beginner would be busy learning from his own mistakes. The
tenants had turned to him from the first with the personal confidence
and affection that they had given his predecessor, scarcely realising
that he had not yet grown to the full stature of control. He had gone
through hard years, often troubling himself unnecessarily, but in the
end he had won out. Before he was thirty he had come to father the
whole lot of them, Bluecaster included. The trust was his dearest
possession, but, serving it, he had missed his youth.
His work was the breath of his life; its varied interests kept him keen
and stimulated, but they increased continually, and every year new
legislation made things more difficult for those engaged with land.
The county, too, had claimed him, and he had yielded, inch by inch, to
the fascination making almost the sole reward of the Great Unpaid. He
had not had a holiday for years; he was too absorbed, too pressed, too
afraid of getting behind. Besides, no other place called him. The whole
of his heart was here.
Things might have run easier if Helwise had been--well, something
quite inconceivably different from what she was. Her descent upon his
desolate hearth from unrewarding efforts as companion to successive old
ladies, had been welcomed by him at the time, not knowing that it was
her special mission in life to make it more desolate still. He had been
too busy at first to notice the atmosphere with which she surrounded
him, attributing his dreariness of spirit to his father’s loss and his
over-heavy task; and by the time he had made himself and formed his
routine, it was too late to send her away. She was happy after her
own parasitical fashion, and to uproot her now would mean a gigantic
effort to which neither his will nor his heart felt equal. But of late
there had grown upon him a longing for a home of his own making, an
atmosphere with which Helwise should never have anything to do. He
murmured old Samuel Daniel’s words as he leaned against the gate.
“To have some silly home I do desire,
Loth still to warm me by another’s fire.”
He had a home, certainly, and one silly enough, too, in its
mismanagement and lack of all peace; but it was another silliness for
which he yearned, the silliness of little, common home-interests and
home-jokes, of crossed glances and talk without words, of parting
kisses and meeting hands. He had a fire, of course, as well; that is to
say, he paid for it; but in every other sense it was “another’s.” He
thought of the drawing-room grate and renounced it violently.
Dusk was drawing down, now, though the Mountain still stayed with
him, faintly limned as a dried tear. Milking was over at Rakestraw.
He watched the cattle coming out from the shippons to a quiet night
in the cool fields. Near at hand a sleepy twittering told him where a
late-nested bird was hidden close. The clipped sheep and the sturdy
lambs still called to each other, as if the tender time of mother-love
was not yet over; and far down on the road he could hear children
pattering home from their summer treat. There came into his head a song
he had heard at a musical festival.
“What can lambkins do,
All the keen night through?
Nestle by their woolly mother,
The careful ewe.
“What can nestlings do
In the nightly dew?
Sleep beneath their mother’s wing
Till dawn breaks anew.
“If in field or tree
There might only be
Such a warm, soft sleeping-place
Found for me!”
Well, his hour of comfort and sanctity was nearly over. His soothed
nerves gave him courage to laugh at his own longings. He must get
back to Helwise and other duties, think out some plan of campaign
with regard to Dockeray’s recalcitrant daughter. He raised himself
reluctantly, wondering, at the last moment, what encouragement his
Ghost was about to send him, when he was brought round sharply by
sounds of frivolous song pouring down the lane. The shuttered quiet
passed. The sheep, newly snuggled under the hedge, scattered in
bleating alarm; fresh twitterings broke from the late nest, and every
shy-peeping fairy-thing became instantly dumb and dead.
With the song came a shuffling as of dancing, and panting requests
to the singer to “bang a bit more on the brass!” and as Lancaster,
standing in the rutted road, looked up to the first frolicking bend,
two figures whirled into sight through the thin veil of eve. Behind,
their obedient accompanist let out his fine voice a little further.
With the singer was a girl.
The dancers, closely clasped in each other’s arms, executed a series
of intricate steps from hedge to hedge with the unanimity and gravity
of extremely superior marionettes. They wore dinner-coats and evening
pumps; their heads were bare, and now and then Lancaster caught the
gleam of shirt-fronts as he watched them swing down through the dusk.
He did not know them, he felt certain of that, and wondered in widening
circles until he remembered that the eyeless house over the hill had
been sold recently, and that these must be some of its new occupants.
Watters was Gilthrotin property, and therefore not in his hands, and
though he had been present at the sale, he had forgotten the buyer,
though he had marked the Lancashire name as one with plenty of money
behind it. That accounted for the strangers. It did not account though,
he thought, ruffled and jarred, for their bad taste in thrusting
noisily into his lane just at fairy-time. With the dogged resentment of
the conscientious objector who stands stolidly in front of a motor-car,
he remained in the middle of the road until the dancers ran into him.
They spun in opposite directions, clutching at nothing, and the singer
broke on a high note. Lancaster went on standing still.
The girl stepped forward, her whitely gray gown showing moth-like in
the shadows. The disgruntled performers were busy picking themselves
out of the hedge, breathing somewhat offhand apology.
“I hope they didn’t hurt you?” she began anxiously. “It’s the Tango.
They don’t seem able to stop doing it, and of course they are only boys
and very foolish. I do hope you’re not hurt!”
Lancaster assured her, smiling a little grimly, that he was perfectly
whole. If anybody was hurt, it was much more likely to be the Tangoists
in the hedge. These now came up, still panting.
“Licks creation! Stuns the stars! Bangs Banagher! I say, beastly sorry
we barged into you like that. Took you for a turnip, honest injun we
did! We’re shooting over to Bluecaster after a smoke-shop, and we
thought it just as easy to tango there. And I say, look here! You’ll
know what time they close, I expect. I suppose we can do it all right?”
“It’s six furlongs, and you’ve just ten minutes,” Lancaster answered
severely. “You may do it, with luck. But if you beat Banagher down the
hill in that costume, you’ll probably find yourself in jail in less
time still.”
“Right-o, old cock! What’s a furlong, anyway? Anybody seen a furlong?
As to the togs, why, it’s the country, the dear, silly old simple-life
country! You can do anything you like in the country, or else what’s
the good of it? Come on, you fellows, we’ve got to get that smoke!”
They flew together again in a furious embrace, and spun away out of
sight, whistling like flying engines at a crossing. The girl and the
singer stayed behind, still apologetic.
“You’d have gone quicker by the main road,” Lancaster said stiffly,
still resentful. “But of course you probably know that already.”
She nodded.
“Yes. But the boys wanted to come by the lane. They love the lane. When
they don’t tango, they bring the car and squeeze her along as fast as
they can. The hedges are too high, though; you daren’t risk the turns.
If they were only clipped so that you could see over, it would make a
fine test for steering!”
The singer in the background began an appeasing little chant, as if he
knew that Lancaster writhed.
“Perhaps some of us prefer it as it is,” he answered coldly. “Hadn’t
you better be looking after your--your brothers? There’s rather a smart
police-sergeant in Bluecaster.”
“They’re not my brothers. They’re just stopping with us, that’s all.
Are we trespassing?” She lifted an anxious face. “I didn’t know the
lane was yours. I’m ever so sorry! We’d better go on, hadn’t we, after
the boys? but we’ll come back the other way.”
Lanty reddened, ashamed. The singer gave him a friendly smile over the
girl’s head.
“It isn’t my lane--of course not. There’s no reason you shouldn’t motor
down it if you happen to know a collapsible method of passing carts.
It’s a favourite walk of mine, that’s all. And everything was just
about asleep.”
She looked a little puzzled and still troubled.
“I expect you _do_ feel it’s your own lane, really! I’ve only been here
since March--we’re at Watters in Gilthrotin--but I’ve noticed people
seem to think that lots of things belong to them just because they’ve
had them somewhere round all their lives--hills and footpaths and
favourite views--things like that. The man in the cottage behind us was
dreadfully vexed because we cut down a half-dead sycamore by the river.
He said he was used to seeing it from his bedroom window--wasn’t it
funny of him? That’s what you feel about the lane, though, isn’t it? I
wish I’d known! Any other lane would have done for us.”
Lancaster choked his feelings with an effort.
“Please do not bother about me,” he said curtly, raising his cap. “You
have every right to the lane. And I don’t think it was funny at all.
Good-night.”
She responded reluctantly, feeling that she had somehow failed to put
things right. She wanted to placate this cross, solitary-minded person
who had already turned his thin, serious face back to the break in the
hedge. Perhaps he was not really cross. He might be suffering from
nerves. They ought not to have worried him, poor thing!
A young moon came up over the hill. For a moment they looked together
through the green arch.
“It must be fearfully quiet, down there!” she said, nodding towards the
buildings hugging the land close as if they loved it and were loved in
return. “I’m not sure I shall like living in the country. Everything
seems to be listening for something that never gets itself said. And
why don’t they put the poor animals under cover? I should hate to spend
the night out of doors, myself!”
He had been watching the moon and his wraith of a Mountain, and at her
words he winced again. She was shattering his magic with both hands.
She had no thought for the summer dew or the nestled lambs, the grey
robe of the night or the gentle miracle of dawn. It meant nothing to
her, this creeping mystery of eve.
“Thought I heard a policeman’s whistle a minute ago,” he observed
casually. “I met the constable following up tramps when I came out.
Perhaps your folks have run into him.”
With a sense of relief he found himself alone again at last, but
the charm had temporarily vanished, the fairy-things remained away.
He wished she had not looked through his Green Gate with her alien
eyes; he was afraid of seeing things as she saw them. She had thought
it nicer for the stock to be indoors, just as she doubtless thought
it better for him to be under his own roof instead of mooning about
a ridiculous lane. He loathed the thought of his own house at that
moment. He disliked the girl who had broken the happy spell. He leaned
over the gate in the gloaming, watching the quietened sheep, and trying
to call the magic back.
“If in field or tree
There might only be
Such a warm, soft sleeping-place
Found for me!”