year. You never had a better opportunity. If you don’t catch your
butterfly this time, you never will. This is your home, you know, and
you know too that I shall treat you with no ceremony. You can go about
your butterflies, and I shall go about my fairies, and if I seem to
neglect you, Mariana will make up for me.”
Mariana entered at that moment, and stood by her father. When Laleham
had last seen her hers were still those reluctant feet of maidenhood of
which the great poet has sung. Now she was a woman; a very young woman,
it is true, but a woman. That grave beauty of the melancholy fens, of
which I have spoken as having “passed into her face,” was there now in a
still more decided presence. Her hair was black as English hair seldom
is, her skin was an exquisite olive, and her eyes were like those
strange pools which flashed darkly in the evening light outside the
library window. Her black eyelashes were so thick that you could not
help thinking of them as rushes guarding the secrecies of the strange
mirrors inside. And, not externally only did she seem the very
embodiment of her surroundings, but her spirit seemed also to have
absorbed their passionate silence. Perhaps no landscape says so little,
and is yet so richly eloquent, as the elegiac landscape of a fen
country. How beyond all speech is its silence, how beyond the shallow
spectacular changes of showier natural effects is its solemn art of
imperturbability. Mariana was strangely silent--but indeed not
speechless. The lesson of the nature about her seemed to have entered
into her whole being, the lesson that such silence must only be broken
by very significant, very beautiful, words--as though silence were an
exquisite unsullied sky only now and again to be interrupted by stars.
Laleham had observed her but little on his former visits, for, as I have
said, she was hardly more than a child; and, besides, was it the cloud
of his butterflies, or was it some other unforgotten face that veiled
for him the faces of women, so that all these years he had passed
unscathed through all the battalions of beautiful faces. Be that as it
may, it was on the occasion of this visit that he saw the beauty of
Mariana Fanton for the first time, and, as the days went by, he found
that beauty making an even stronger appeal to his imagination, which, as
always is the case with such natures as his, lay very near to his heart.
As Sir Gilbert had ‘threatened,’ it was on Mariana that he had to rely
for companionship on those days when he was not out alone with his net
across the fens; for Sir Gilbert was so hard at work upon a paper for
the Folk-Lore Society on his recent discovery that he could only spare
his evenings for his friend. As his visit lengthened into weeks, the
days he spent alone grew less, and the days he spent with Mariana grew
more, and the butterfly remained uncaught. Sometimes Mariana would go
hunting it with him, but oftener they would go out on long aimless walks
together, saying little, but always coming nearer and nearer through
that language of expressive silence which both had been born to speak
and understand. When Mariana did speak, what a heavenly animation swept
its sunlight over her face; but her silence, as someone has said of her,
was like a sky full of stars.
Laleham’s stay at Noctorum was nearing its end. So far as his old friend
was concerned, he could, of course, have stayed there forever.
“If I were you,” said Sir Gilbert, “I would not leave this place till I
had caught it.”
“The continued presence of such a determined huntsman might frighten it
from the district altogether,” answered Laleham. “I will use stratagem,
let it rest in security a while, and come again.”
It was the hour after dinner when the friends usually smoked their pipes
together, and Sir Gilbert was genuinely sorry to lose his friend, but
the proofs of his pamphlet on Cupid and Psyche had just arrived by the
evening post, and his fingers were itching to open them. Besides,
Laleham was to be with them yet a day or two longer. Presently Sir
Gilbert’s proofs became irresistible, and turning to his friend he said:
“Do you mind, old man, but I am just dying to look at these silly proofs
of mine--pride of authorship, you know--suppose you look up Mariana--she
is out there, I see, on the veranda--and talk astronomy to her for a few
minutes. Then we can have a talk....”
“With all my heart,” said Laleham, laughing as he opened the door on to
the starlit veranda, and left the old man to himself.
As Laleham took a chair by Mariana’s side, her recognition of his
presence would have been imperceptible to anyone who did not understand
her language of silence. Her eyes remained fixed on the stars, and he
sat down near her without attempting even to join her reverie. He was
well content to look at her and know that she was near. Presently,
without turning her head, with her eyes still among the stars, she said
in her curious deep sudden voice:
“You have not found your butterfly?”
“No.”
“Do you still hope to find it?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever seen it?”
“Yes.”
“How often?”
“Twice.”
“Twice!” she exclaimed, at length turning and looking at him. “Twice!
and you lost it both times....”
Before he could answer, she raised her hand to the stars. “Look!” she
said. “I sometimes think that the soul is like a butterfly, and that it
goes from star to star, as a butterfly goes from flower to flower....”
then, with another of her sudden, and often disconcerting, transitions,
she turned again to Laleham:
“Will you tell me about those times you saw your butterfly?” she said.
“It is an odd story,” Laleham began, “and I am afraid you may think me
superstitious. But you mustn’t think that it accounts for my
butterflies, for I have loved them, for some unexplained reason, since I
was a boy....”
“Perhaps,” he added, “some tastes are prophetic;” and then he went on.
“The first time I saw it was one morning about eight years ago. I was
hunting it among country similar to this, and suddenly it rose out of a
bed of reeds. It was so near me that I made sure it was mine, so sure
that I was in no haste to strike with my net, but watched it and studied
it a while, was quite carelessly certain of it in fact ... and then, just
as I held my net ready to capture it, away it went on the wind, not
quite out of sight, but always keeping a coquettish distance, near
enough to lure me on, far enough away to escape....”
“It rather served you right for being so sure, didn’t it?” said
Mariana.
“You see I was only a young butterfly-hunter then,” said Laleham, “I
have learnt wisdom since.”
“Go on,” prompted Mariana.
“Well, it led me on in this way for quite two hours, till we came to the
end of the wild country, and suddenly dropped down into a small village.
You will laugh at what follows, though it had its sad side for me. We
had come on the village at the end where there stands the parish
church....”
“I know the village,” said Mariana, absently, as if she were saying
nothing. Laleham shot a troubled look at her, but continued.
“The churchyard was filled with a throng of people gaily dressed as for
a wedding. What should my butterfly do but dash amongst them, and I
after it, for it was too precious to lose. Soaring over the heads of the
crowd, it dashed for shelter into the church, and I again after it,
forgetting all but my butterfly--and there were two young people
kneeling at the altar. My abrupt entrance naturally made a sensation
which brought me to myself, and, dropping on my knees in a pew, I
watched my butterfly flicker up the aisle till it settled itself on the
clasped hands of the kneeling bride. In surprise, she turned her head,
and....”
“Well?”
“I saw her face.”
“And the butterfly?”
“Escaped by the belfry.”
“Quite a fairy tale,” said Mariana, after a pause. “Now tell me about
the second time you saw your butterfly.”
“I hardly care to speak of it, Mariana--unless you care very much to
hear.”
“Would you rather not speak of it?”
“I would speak of it to no one but you.”
“Do you wish to speak?”
“I do. Do you wish me to speak?”
“Yes, speak of it--to me,” said Mariana gently.
“It is a very short story, Mariana--almost the same, excepting the end;
for, three years afterwards, once more my butterfly rose out of the
reeds in almost exactly the same spot, and once more it coquetted with
me for miles, and once more it dashed into that little churchyard ... but
this time it did not vanish into the church, but went from grave to
grave, as you say the soul perhaps wanders from star to star, and
presently it stopped at one of the graves. I thought that now it was
surely mine, and raised my net to strike, but, as I did so, I read a
name upon a stone....”
In the darkness Mariana reached out her hand and took Laleham’s, and,
after a silence, she said:
“I know the grave,” and, after another silence, she said:
“I have heard that she was very beautiful.”
Then the two sat on, saying no more in the starlight, and all the while,
though neither knew of it till they returned to the library lamps, a
little blue butterfly had been hiding in Mariana’s hair.
MY CASTLE IN SPAIN
Perhaps the dream which a man gives up hardest is that of his ideal
home, the dream-house builded just as he and Love would build it to
dwell in together--had he and Love the money!--the dream-house which in
every sensitive particular would be the appropriate habitation of his
spirit; in short his castle-in-Spain. Castles in Spain are not
necessarily expensive. A cottage in Spain is just as good as a castle if
you think so; and if you know the secret you can make a castle in Spain
out of one-room-and-bath in a New York apartment house. I myself have
never done it. I have never been happy enough for that.
No, I am afraid I should need money for my castle-in Spain. It would
cost a fortune to build and many fortunes to run. For it would be a real
castle, and real castles have always been expensive, even in feudal
days when labour was somewhat cheaper than it is now. I want no
cloud-castle built of moonbeams and rainbows for me and Love to dwell
in, but a real earth-castle like that of an old French troubadour, with
walls 34 feet thick--to keep Love safe from other troubadours--a donjon
190 feet high and 100 feet in diameter, and other massive visible
particulars. I see no reason why it should not be literally situated in
Spain somewhere at the eastern end of the Pyrenees, but I confess a
softness for Provence, perhaps on account of the name. A situation
almost equally Spanish might be found for it there on a toppling crag,
somewhere up among those strange rock villages of the Maritime Alps,
filled with Moorish ghosts, in the nearness all chasms and parched
shadows and the thirsty sun, in the distance forests of cork-oak,
silhouettes of eucalyptus and cypress. Then olives and olives and the
Mediterranean Sea.
I choose Provence because the situation of one’s castle-in-Spain is
almost more important than the castle itself. Environment and
association count for so much in the matter of one’s dream-house. You
may build the most wonderful castle-in-Spain, but it will go for
nothing, seem indeed almost ridiculous, a parody, if you build it in
some absurdly wrong place. No offence to Omaha, no offence to Liverpool,
no offence to Glasgow--but the most beautiful castle-in-Spain would be
wasted in any one of those animated capitals of industry. As the setting
of a jewel is hardly less important than the jewel itself, so is the
situation of one’s castle-in-Spain. Stonehenge or Westminster Abbey
would be as much at home transported, numbered stone by stone, to Herald
Square or Michigan Avenue--and American capital has dreamed some such
dream--as one’s castle-in-Spain built in any one of those, or such,
cities as I have mentioned.
As Keats has written:
“.... the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple’s self.”
One indeed might add that without the trees there is no temple. I use
trees here as symbolic of environment, but, literally speaking, it is
impossible to exaggerate the importance of trees to one’s
castle-in-Spain. Ancient trees have always brought distinction to their
possessors. It is the old park and the avenues--the setting--that give
many an English house its imposing significance. To cut down the trees
would be like shaving the head of a beautiful woman.
So my castle-in-Spain must be almost lost amid miles of mysterious
trees, surrounded on every side by haunted forests, the home of
wood-demons and the wild boar and the hunting horn and the bearded
robber and the maiden in distress; and, like lanes of silver trumpets,
six avenues of lime-trees shall sweep up to its six drawbridges in the
air.
Of course my castle would be fortified against a world which would
naturally wish to rob me of my happiness. It would be armed to the teeth
with quick-firing guns of the latest pattern, and these would be manned
by Japanese gunners of the quaintest size and shape. I may say--in
parenthesis--that my valets would not be Japanese, but English. Each
nation has its own special gift to give us, and England still remains
famous for its valets. I should need volumes in folio adequately to
describe my castle-in-Spain, and at least three of them would be needed
to tell about my garden. Ah, what a garden there would be in my
castle-in-Spain! Perhaps, aside from other fancies which I should expect
to indulge, there would only be three on which I would really set my
heart:
(1) A garden.
(2) A library.
(3) A private chapel.
I should not hope, nor even could I wish, to be original in my garden;
for man’s early desire of gardens had developed into a learned
convoluted art even before Solomon wrote:
“A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a
fountain sealed. My plants are an orchard of pomegranate, with
pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard, spikenard with saffron;
calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and
aloes, with all the chief spices: A fountain of gardens, a well of
living waters, and streams from Lebanon. Awake, O north wind; and
come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may
flow out.”
My garden would, first of all, be made of dew; next of grass, and then
of very old trees. Oak-trees, poplars and beeches, would dominate my
garden; and, as for the other trees, they would all be trees of
veritably _living_ green--chestnuts and sycamores and willows. There
would be no so-called _ever_-greens in my garden, trees that are
ever-green because they are never-green--except one: the only ever-green
tree in my garden would be the laurel. Nothing but freshness and sap and
leafage of transparent emerald would be trees in my garden; and the
flowers of my garden would be all spring and summer: snowdrop, crocus
and daffodil; violet, rose and honeysuckle. There would be no autumn in
my garden. September with its paper flowers, chrysanthemum and dahlia,
and all its knife-scented funereal blooms, must not walk in my garden;
nor shall the white feet of winter tread down my shining lawns.
Here are but, so to say, the first principles of my garden. As I said,
it would take volumes in folio adequately to tell about my garden. But
this much further I may say: that among the many divisions and
sub-divisions of my garden, there would be three. First there would be
my star-garden. In this would be planted flowers that bloom only under
the influence of the stars; flowers that open at the setting of the
moon, and close with the rising of the morning star. For these flowers I
should build a high hanging garden, dizzily thrust up into the morning
sky, on the summit of some cloud-encircled turret of my castle. The
flowers in this garden would be whiter than snow and purer than my first
love.
Then there would be my sun-garden. In this would be planted the
warm-breathed, earth-coloured flowers, the yellow and scarlet flowers,
the purple and saffron, the orange and crimson, all the hot and savage
flowers of the sun.
And, again, there would be my moon-garden, a subterranean realm of pale
leaves and ghostly flowers, a dim garden of excavated terraces
descending beneath the dungeoned foundations of my castle, irrigated
from its green-mantled moat, and fed through slanting shafts of hollowed
stone--with the surreptitious light of the moon.
I should allow but few birds in my garden. The eagle should nest, if it
would, on some crag-like corner of my battlements, and the hawk would be
welcome to soar and swoop about my towers. But I would have no
nightingales in my gardens, those birds of make-believe melodious song,
those posturing troubadours of the air. Only the simple sincere-throated
birds should sing in my garden: the thrush and the black-bird and the
robin; the starling with his simple-minded whistle, the curlew with his
lost broken-hearted call; and, at twilight, the nightjar should make his
rugged music amid the fern. And the swallow and the sparrow should be
made welcome in every corner of my dominions. Generally, I should
encourage the quiet birds, the working, building, fighting birds, the
birds that sing no more than is necessary, or natural.
Everywhere in my garden shall be heard the sound of running water,
brooks making their way unseen under secret boughs, and fountains
whispering to themselves on solitary lawns. There shall be such a rustle
of fresh boughs in my garden, and such a ripple of streams, that you
shall hardly be able to tell whether the leaves or the brooks are
talking. Also there shall be pools hidden away in sanctuaries of the
garden, pools sacred with water-lilies, and visited only of the
dragon-fly and the lonely bee.
And there shall be other ponds in my garden, green mossy ponds as old as
the foundations of my castle, fish-ponds, the ancestral home of monastic
carp, strange ancient fish with wise ugly faces, and gold collars round
their necks, telling how some old king caught them and threw them back
again into the pond two hundred years ago.
My library would, first of all, be vast and multitudinous, a mysterious
collection of books without beginning and without end, a romantic
infinitude of learning and fragrance of old leather. It should go
uncatalogued as the wilderness. No human index in the form of a
librarian should tame it into prim classification. It should grow wild
as the virgin forest, and unlooked-for adventures of the soul should lie
in ambush in every alcove and lonely backwater of its haunted shelves.
No less than a thousand rooms, big and little, winding in and out,
wandering here and there, would be needed to contain it. There are many
book-lovers who will hardly understand this Gargantuan passion for a
huge library. A small and sensitively chosen collection of books is
their ideal. For me, however, a few books are no more a library than a
few trees are a forest, or a few gallons of water an ocean. A library is
the firmament of the soul, and each particular star gains in
significance from being a shining unit in all that celestial mystery.
While I should aim to have a library coextensive with the mental history
of humanity, from the clay books of Babylon to the latest French novel,
the learned rooms I should oftenest loiter in would be those rainbowed
with the gold and purple of monkish manuscripts, the rooms mysterious
with grimoires and herbals and ancient treatises on the occult sciences,
the rooms of black-letter and the types of Aldus and those other first
printers through whose magic Virgil and Catullus and Horace rose again
from the grave. And I would have my library built with innumerable
secret chambers and sliding panels and hidden passages--so that,
whenever it was my desire, I could shut myself up with a favourite
author for a week at a time, and domestic search for me be quite in
vain.
My chapel will need few words. It would be merely a crucifix, silence,
and sunlight.
I said that there would be no librarian in my library, similarly there
would be no gardener in my garden, no priest in my chapel. The places
of the soul need no custodians. The worshippers are the priests.
Of course, I should expect to indulge many an idle fancy and picturesque
whim in my castle-in-Spain but they would take too long to tell of. Here
I have but set down what I conceive to be the reasonable necessities of
a dream. I have said nothing, for example, of my treasure-caves beneath
the castle, vaults lit by enormous carbuncles, and filled with countless
coffers of bronze, overflowing with ancient coins and precious stones.
Nor have I spoken of my paradise of butterflies, a great enclosed garden
where I would rear all the flower-winged things that, like illuminated
letters or the painted souls of Japanese girls, flit and flicker through
the sunlit world. Nor have I told of my palace of serpents, where python
and cobra and all the ringed, gliding, spangled creatures that hiss and
sting should coil about tropical trees, and sleep their mysterious
sleep, or fall down like lightning on their paralysed prey. Then, too, I
might tell of my great aquarium where, at ease in my luxurious
diving-bell, I would lie all day watching iridescent fishes all flounced
and frilled with rainbows, and slow-moving elemental shapes that brood
eternally at the bottom of the sea.
A hundred other such fancies I shall hope to indulge in my
castle-in-Spain, and one more I must not forget, for no castle would be
complete without it--the oubliette. Into that I would fling all my
sorrows and cares, and all--unwelcome visitors.
ONCE-UPON-A-TIME
When I was a child there grew at the back of my father’s house a deep
wood. It may not have been so vast in extent as it seemed to me; but to
my childish imagination it seemed boundless, endless, dark and dense,
and infinitely mysterious. It frightened me, yet the fear was full of
fascination. Delicious was the thrill with which sometimes in my lonely
rambles I would venture a few steps further within its haunted recesses
than I was wont to have courage for. As a rule, I restricted my
explorations to its sunlit margins, and, so soon as I found myself among
the shadows, would fly back with a beating heart into the sun.
Never, said I to my childish heart, had the foot of man penetrated into
these solitudes, on which lay so deep a spell of beautiful terror; and,
so far back as I can remember, this wood was the wonderland which I
peopled with all the fancies of a child’s imagination. All the heroes
and heroines of my nursery-books lived somewhere in my wood. It was the
scene of all their adventures, and, like a stage, was capable of
supplying an ever-varying _mise-en-scéne_. Sometimes when the moon was
up I thought of it as peopled by fairies, and was certain that, if only
the hardihood were mine to dare its fantastic shadows, I should surely
come upon a fairy revel in full swing. When in the daytime I came upon
rings of toadstools with their quaint kobold hats, I knew that they were
trolls who took that form during the day, and that if only I were to
hide behind a tree and wait for night, I would see them suddenly, at the
first touch of the wand of the moon, waken up as if nothing had
happened, and once more set their merry wheels a-spinning. But then
there was the old witch with the red hood to fear, and the ogre with the
six heads, not to speak of the wolves and bears and various other wild
beasts that roamed the woods after dark. Not only wolves--but
were-wolves too!
As I grew older, I grew braver, and, persuading myself that I was one of
those who bore a charmed life, I found courage to push my explorations
further and further into the interior. Thus I became the discoverer of
glades and dingles exquisitely lonely with sunshine and haunted flowers,
brooding solitudes of silent fern, hidden springs brimming up through
the hushed moss, and little rivers dripping from rock to rock in the
stillness, like the sound of falling pearls.