THE STORM BREAKS
“Do you know, you are a very odd person, Miss Jess,” John said
presently, with a little laugh. “I don’t think you can have a happy
mind.”
She looked up. “A happy mind?” she said. “Who _can_ have a happy mind?
Nobody who feels. Supposing,” she went on after a pause—“supposing one
puts oneself and one’s own little interests and joys and sorrows quite
away, how is it possible to be happy, when one feels the breath of
human misery beating on one’s face, and sees the tide of sorrow and
suffering creeping up to one’s feet? You may be on a rock yourself and
out of the path of it, till the spring floods or the hurricane wave
come to sweep you away, or you may be afloat upon it: whichever it is,
it is quite impossible, if you have any heart, to be indifferent.”
“Then only the indifferent are happy?”
“Yes, the indifferent and the selfish; but, after all, it is the same
thing: indifference is the perfection of selfishness.”
“I am afraid that there must be lots of selfishness in the world, for
certainly there is plenty of happiness, all evil things
notwithstanding. I should have said that happiness springs from
goodness and a sound digestion.”
Jess shook her head as she answered, “I may be wrong, but I don’t see
how anybody who feels can be quite happy in a world of sickness,
suffering, slaughter, and death. I saw a Kafir woman die yesterday, and
her children crying over her. She was a poor creature and had a rough
lot, but she loved her life, and her children loved her. Who can be
happy and thank God for His creation when he has just seen such a
thing? But there, Captain Niel, my ideas are very crude, and I dare say
very wrong, and everybody has thought them before: at any rate, I am
not going to inflict them on you. What is the use of it?” and she went
on with a laugh: “what is the use of anything? The same old thoughts
passing through the same human minds from year to year and century to
century, just as the same clouds float across the same blue sky. The
clouds are born in the sky, and the thoughts are born in the brain, and
they both end in tears and re-arise in blind, bewildering mist, and
this is the beginning and end of thoughts and clouds. They arise out of
the blue; they overshadow and break into storms and tears, then they
are drawn up into the blue again, and the story begins afresh.”
“So you don’t think that one can be happy in this world?” he asked.
“I did not say that—I never said that. I do think that happiness is
possible. It is possible if one can love somebody so hard that one can
quite forget oneself and everything else except that person, and it is
possible if one can sacrifice oneself for others. There is no true
happiness outside of love and self-sacrifice, or rather outside of
love, for it includes the other. This is gold, and all the rest is
gilt.”
“How do you know that?” he asked quickly. “You have never been in
love.”
“No,” she answered, “I have never been in love like that, but all the
happiness I have had in my life has come to me from loving. I believe
that love is the secret of the world: it is like the philosopher’s
stone they used to look for, and almost as hard to find, but if you
find it it turns everything to gold. Perhaps,” she went on with a
little laugh, “when the angels departed from the earth they left us
love behind, that by it and through it we may climb up to them again.
It is the one thing that lifts us above the brutes. Without love man is
a brute, and nothing but a brute; with love he draws near to God. When
everything else falls away the love will endure because it cannot die
while there is any life, if it is true love, for it is immortal. Only
it must be true—you see it must be true.”
He had penetrated her reserve now; the ice of her manner broke up
beneath the warmth of her words, and her face, usually impassive, had
caught life and light from the eyes above, and acquired a certain
beauty of its own. John looked at it, and understood something of the
untaught and ill-regulated intensity and depth of the nature of this
curious girl. He met her eyes and they moved him strangely, though he
was not an emotional man, and was too old to experience spasmodic
thrills at the chance glances of a pretty woman. He moved towards her,
looking at her curiously.
“It would be worth living to be loved like that,” he said, more to
himself than to her.
Jess did not answer, but she let her eyes rest on his. Indeed, she did
more, for she put her soul into them and gazed and gazed till John Niel
felt as though he were mesmerised. And as she gazed there rose up in
her breast a knowledge that if she willed it she could gain this man’s
heart and hold it against all the world, for her nature was stronger
than his nature, and her mind, untrained though it be, encompassed his
mind and could pass over it and beat it down as the wind beats down the
tossing seas. All this she learnt in a moment, in the twinkling of an
eye: she could not tell how she knew it, but she did know it as surely
as she knew that the blue sky stretched overhead, and, what is more—for
the moment, at any rate—he knew it too. This strange strong certainty
came on her as a shock and a revelation, like the tidings of some great
joy or grief, and for a moment left her heart empty of all things else.
Jess dropped her eyes suddenly.
“I think,” she said quietly, “that we have been talking a great deal of
nonsense, and that I want to finish my sketch.”
He rose and left her, for he was wanted at home, saying as he went that
he thought there was a storm coming up; the air was so quiet, and the
wind had fallen as it does before an African tempest. Presently on
looking round she saw him slowly climbing the precipitous ascent to the
table-land above the gulf.
It was one of those glorious afternoons that sometimes come in the
African spring, although it was so intensely still. Everywhere appeared
the proofs of evidences of life. The winter was over, and now, from the
sadness and sterility of its withered age, sprang youth and lovely
summer clad in sunshine, bediamonded with dew, and fragrant with the
breath of flowers. Jess lay back and looked up into the infinite depths
above. How blue they were, and how measureless! She could not see the
angry clouds that lay like visible omens on the horizon. Look, there,
miles above her, was one tiny circling speck. It was a vulture,
watching her from his airy heights and descending a little to see if
she were dead, or only sleeping.
Involuntarily she shuddered. The bird of death reminded her of Death
himself also hanging high up yonder in the blue and waiting his
opportunity to fall upon the sleeper. Then her eyes fell upon a bough
of the glorious flowering bush under which she rested. It was not more
than four feet above her head, but she lay so still and motionless that
a jewelled honeysucker came and hovered over the flowers, darting from
one to another like a many-coloured flash. Thence her glance travelled
to the great column of boulders that towered above her, and that seemed
to say, “I am very old. I have seen many springs and many winters, and
have looked down on many sleeping maids, and where are they now? All
dead—all dead,” and an old baboon in the rocks with startling
suddenness barked out “_all dead_” in answer.
Around her were the blooming lilies and the lustiness of springing
life; the heavy air was sweet with the odour of ferns and the mimosa
flowers. The running water splashed and musically fell; the sunlight
shot in golden bars athwart the shade, like the memory of happy days in
the grey vista of a life; away in the cliffs yonder, the rock-doves
were preparing to nest by hundreds, and waking the silence with their
cooing and the flutter of their wings. Even the grim old eagle perched
on the pinnacle of the peak was pruning himself, contentedly happy in
the knowledge that his mate had laid an egg in that dark corner of the
cliff. All things rejoiced and cried aloud that summer was at hand and
that it was time to bloom and love and nest. Soon it would be winter
again, when things died, and next summer other things would live under
the sun, and these perchance would be forgotten. That was what they
seemed to say.
And as Jess lay and heard, her youthful blood, drawn by Nature’s
magnetic force, as the moon draws the tides, rose in her veins like the
sap in the budding trees, and stirred her virginal serenity. All the
bodily natural part of her caught the tones of Nature’s happy voice
that bade her break her bonds, live and love, and be a woman. And lo!
the spirit within her answered to it, flinging wide her bosom’s doors,
and of a sudden, as it were, something quickened and lived in her heart
that was of her and yet had its own life—a life apart; something that
sprang from her and another, which would always be with her now and
could never die. She rose pale and trembling, as a woman trembles at
the first stirring of the child that she shall bear, and clung to the
flowery bough of the beautiful bush above, then sank down again,
feeling that the spirit of her girlhood had departed from her, and
another angel had entered there; knowing that she loved with heart and
soul and body, and was a very woman.
She had called to Love as the wretched call to Death, and Love had come
in his strength and possessed her utterly; and now for a little while
she was afraid to pass into the shadow of his wings, as the wretched
who call to Death fear him when they feel his icy fingers. But the fear
passed, and the great joy and the new consciousness of power and of
identity that the inspiration of a true passion gives to some strong
deep natures remained, and after a while Jess prepared to make her way
home across the mountain-top, feeling as though she were another being.
Still she did not go, but lay there with closed eyes and drank of this
new intoxicating wine. So absorbed was she that she did not notice that
the doves had ceased to call, and that the eagle had fled away for
shelter. She was not aware of the great and solemn hush which had taken
the place of the merry voice of beast and bird and preceded the
breaking of the gathered storm.
At last as she rose to go Jess opened her dark eyes, which, for the
most part, had been shut while this great change was passing over her,
and with a natural impulse turned to look once more on the place where
her happiness had found her, then sank down again with a little
exclamation. Where was the light and the glory and all the happiness of
the life that moved and grew around her? Gone, and in its place
darkness and rising mist and deep and ominous shadows. While she lay
and thought, the sun had sunk behind the hill and left the great gulf
nearly dark, and, as is common in South Africa, the heavy storm-cloud
had crept across the blue sky and sealed the light from above. A drear
wind came moaning up the gorge from the plains beyond; the heavy
rain-drops began to fall one by one; the lightning flickered fitfully
in the belly of the advancing cloud. The storm that John had feared was
upon her.
Then came a dreadful hush. Jess had recovered herself by now, and,
knowing what to expect, she snatched up her sketching-block and hurried
into the shelter of a little cave hollowed by water in the side of the
cliff. And now with a rush of ice-cold air the tempest burst. Down came
the rain in a sheet; then flash upon flash gleaming fiercely through
the vapour-laden air; and roar upon roar echoing along the rocky
cavities in volumes of fearful sound. Then another pause and space of
utter silence, followed by a blaze of light that dazed and blinded her,
and suddenly one of the piled-up columns to her left swayed to and fro
like a poplar in a breeze, to fall headlong with a crash which almost
mastered the awful crackling of the thunder overhead and the shrieking
of the baboons scared from their crannies in the cliff. Down it rushed
beneath the stroke of that fiery sword, the brave old pillar that had
lasted out so many centuries, sending clouds of dust and fragments high
up into the blinding rain, and carrying awe and wonder to the heart of
the girl who watched its fall. Away rolled the storm as quickly as it
had come, with a sound like the passing of the artillery of an
embattled host; then a grey rain set in, blotting the outlines of
everything, like an endless absorbing grief, dulling the edge and
temper of a life. Through it Jess, scared and wet to the skin, managed
to climb up the natural steps, now made almost impassable by the
prevailing gloom and the rush of water from the table-top of the
mountain, and on across the sodden plain, down the rocky path on the
farther side, past the little walled-in cemetery with the four red gums
planted at its corners, in which a stranger who had died at Mooifontein
lay buried, and so, just as the darkness of the wet night came down
like a cloud, home at last. At the back-door stood her old uncle with a
lantern.
“Is that you, Jess?” he called out in his stentorian tones. “Lord! what
a sight!” as she emerged, her sodden dress clinging to her slight form,
her hands torn with clambering over the rocks, her curling hair which
had broken loose hanging down her back and half covering her face.
“Lord! what a sight!” he ejaculated again. “Why, Jess, where have you
been? Captain Niel has gone out to look for you with the Kafirs.”
“I have been sketching in Leeuwen Kloof, and got caught in the storm.
There, uncle, let me pass, I want to take these wet things off. It is a
bitter night,” and she ran to her room, leaving a long trail of water
behind her as she passed. The old man entered the house, shut the door,
and blew out the lantern.
“Now, what is it she reminds me of?” he said aloud as he groped his way
down the passage to the sitting-room. “Ah, I know, that night when she
first came here out of the rain leading Bessie by the hand. What can
the girl have been thinking of, not to see the thunder coming up? She
ought to know the signs of the weather here by now. Dreaming, I
suppose, dreaming. She’s an odd woman, Jess, very.” Perhaps he did not
quite know how accurate his guess was, and how true the conclusion he
drew from it. Certainly she had been dreaming, and she was an odd
woman.
Meanwhile Jess was rapidly changing her clothes and removing the traces
of her struggle with the elements. But of that other struggle she had
gone through she could not remove the traces. They and the love that
arose out of it would endure as long as she endured. It was her former
self that had been cast off in it and which now lay behind her, an
empty and unmeaning thing like the shapeless heap of garments. It was
all very strange. So John had gone to look for her and had not found
her. She was glad that he had gone. It made her happy to think of him
searching and calling in the wet and the night. She was only a woman,
and it was natural that she should feel thus. By-and-by he would come
back and find her clothed and in her right mind and ready to greet him.
She was glad that he had not seen her wet and dishevelled. A girl looks
so unpleasant like that. It might have set him against her. Men like
women to look nice and clean and pretty. That gave her an idea. She
turned to her glass and, holding the light above her head, studied her
own face attentively. She was a woman with as little vanity in her
composition as it is possible for a woman to have, and till now she had
not given her personal looks much consideration. They had not been of
great importance to her in the Wakkerstroom district of the Transvaal.
But to-night all of a sudden they became very important; and so she
stood and looked at her own wonderful eyes, at the masses of curling
brown hair still damp and shining from the rain, at the curious pallid
face and clear-cut determined mouth.
“If it were not for my eyes and hair, I should be very ugly,” she said
to herself aloud. “If only I were beautiful like Bessie, now.” The
thought of her sister gave her another idea. What if John were to
prefer Bessie? Now she remembered that he had been very attentive to
Bessie. A feeling of dreadful doubt and jealousy passed through her,
for women like Jess know what jealousy is in its bitterness. Supposing
that it was in vain, supposing that what she had given to-day—given
utterly once and for all, so that she could not take it back—had been
given to a man who loved another woman, and that woman her own dear
sister! Supposing that the fate of her love was to be like water
falling unalteringly on the hard rock that heeds it not and retains it
not! True, the water wears the rock away; but could she be satisfied
with that? She could master him, she knew; even if things were so, she
could win him to herself, she had read it in his eyes that afternoon;
but could she, who had promised to her dead mother to cherish and
protect her sister, whom till this day she had loved better than
anything in the world, and whom she still loved more dearly than her
life—could she, if it should happen to be thus, rob that sister of her
lover? And if it should be so, what would her life be like? It would be
like the great pillar after the lightning had smitten it, a pile of
shattered smoking fragments, a very heaped-up debris of a life. She
could feel it even now. No wonder, then, that Jess sat there upon the
little white bed holding her hand against her heart and feeling
terribly afraid.
Just then she heard John’s footsteps in the hall.
“I can’t find her,” he said in an anxious tone to some one as she rose,
taking her candle with her, and left the room. The light of it fell
full upon his face and dripping clothes. It was white and anxious, and
she was glad to see the anxiety.
“Oh, thank God! here you are!” he said, catching her hand. “I began to
think you were quite lost. I have been right down the Kloof after you,
and got a nasty fall over it.”
“It is very good of you,” she said in a low voice, and again their eyes
met, and again her glance thrilled him. There was such a wonderful
light in Jess’s eyes that night.
Half an hour afterwards they sat down as usual to supper. Bessie did
not put in an appearance till it was a quarter over, and then sat very
silent through it. Jess narrated her adventure in the Kloof, and
everybody listened, but nobody said much. There seemed to be a shadow
over the house that evening, or perhaps it was that each party was
thinking of his own affairs. After supper old Silas Croft began talking
about the political state of the country, which gave him uneasiness. He
said that he believed the Boers really meant to rebel against the
Government this time. Frank Muller had told him so, and he always knew
what was going on. This announcement did not tend to raise anybody’s
spirits, and the evening passed as silently as the meal had done. At
last Bessie got up, stretched her rounded arms, and said that she was
tired and going to bed.
“Come into my room,” she whispered to her sister as she passed. “I want
to speak to you.”