“V. LYDIAT”
“V. LYDIAT”
She sat and looked at the signature written under the name of the story
in readiness for typing.
“THE NINEFOLD FLOWER.”
It was a fine story, she knew, and the signature satisfied her also as
it always did. _V._ is the most beautiful letter in the alphabet to
write and look at, the ends curving over from the slender base like the
uprush of a fountain from its tense spring. When she “commenced author,”
as the eighteenth century puts it, she devoted days and days to the
consideration of that pen-name. For several reasons it must not reveal
identity. Most women prefer the highwayman’s mask when they ride abroad
to hold up the public. It gives a freedom impossible when one is
tethered to the responsibilities of name and family. One becomes a
foundling in the great city of Literature and the pebble-cold eye of
human relationship passes unaware over what would have stung it into
anger or jealousy if it had held the key of the mystery. That is, if the
secret is guarded as carefully as V. Lydiat’s.
But, for all I know, her strange reason for secrecy may never in this
world have swayed man or woman before.
In reality she was Beatrice Veronica Law Leslie.
A mouthful indeed! You can make as many combinations with that as with
the trick lock of a safe, and it will be as difficult to pick the
secret. She had a strong superstition about keeping to her own initials,
anagrammed or reversed and twisted. It seemed to her that this was part
of a bond of honour of which another held the pledge. With this pen-name
a most astonishing thing had befallen Beatrice Veronica Law Leslie, for
she won a literary success so sudden and singular that the very
management of it required a statesmanship she never before knew she
possessed.
A little must here be said of her life that this strange thing may be
understood. She was the only child of a well-known Oxford don and a
somewhat remarkable mystically-minded mother who died when the girl was
fourteen. Her father, after that loss, “tried life a little, liked it
not, and died” four years later, and Beatrice Veronica who was known in
her family as B. V. then betook herself to the guardianship of an aunt
in Montreal. Here, she also tried life a little, on the society side,
and certainly liked it not. There was an urge within her that cried
aloud for adventure, for the sight of the dissolving glories of the
Orient and contact with strange lives that called to her dumbly in
books. They peeped and mocked and vanished to their unknown countries
taking her longing with them, and life lay about her vapid, flat,
dominated by an Aunt of Fashion.
She floated on a duck pond and sighed for the ocean. What is a young
woman of spirit, not too beautiful to be dangerous, of small but
sufficient means, to do in such a case? Beatrice Veronica knew very
well.
She waited until she was twenty-one, meanwhile securing the allegiance
of a girl, Sidney Verrier, in like case, an enthusiast like herself, and
on a May morning of dreamy sweetness they got themselves into a C.P.R.
train for Victoria, B. C., leaving two ill-auguring aunts on the
platform, and away with them on a trip to the Orient _via_ Japan. They
were under bond to return in a year.
It was a wonderful, a heavenly experience—that wander-year of theirs.
The things they saw, the men and women they met, the marvels which
appealed to every sense! But I must not dwell on these for they are but
the pedestal to the story of V. Lydiat.
A year! Impossible. Four, six, eight years went by and still unheeded
aunts clamoured, and the pavements of Montreal lacked their footsteps.
And then, in Agra, Sidney Verrier married, and apologetically,
doubtfully, dissolved the fair companionship, and Beatrice Veronica was
left to solitude.
When the bridal car rolled off to the station and the honeymoon at
Mussoori, she sat down and considered. She had not realized it until
then. The ways of the world were open, for experience had made them
plain. She had acquaintances, go where she would. There was no material
reason why she should not continue this delightful nomad existence
delightfully. But she was lonely, and suddenly it became clear to her
that she wanted quiet, time, recollection. She had assisted at a great
feast of the senses and had eaten to satiety.
Now—imperatively—something in her heart cried “Enough.”
Afterwards she wondered if that had been the voice of V. Lydiat crying
in the wilderness. The note of preparation.
But where to go? Her aunt was still treading the daily round of bridge
and luncheon parties in Montreal and the soul of Beatrice Veronica
shuddered in the remembrance. No, no. The bird set free does not
re-enter its gilded cage, however temptingly the little dish of seed is
set forth. But she loved Canada for all that. She remembered, as she and
Sidney Verrier had passed through the glorious giant-land of the
Rockies, how broadly uplifted and vast had been the heights and spaces,
how enormous the glee of the rivers tumbling from hidden sources, and
they called her across far waters and beneath strange stars.
But could one live in such colossal companionship? Is it possible to
dine and sleep and yawn in the presence of Gods and Emperors? There was
the doubt. And then she remembered a shining city laving her feet in
shining seas, with quiet gardens where the roses blush and bloom in a
calm so deep that you may count the fall of every petal in the drowsy
summer afternoons. A city of pines and oaks, of happy homes great and
small,—a city above all, bearing the keys of the Orient at her golden
girdle,—for it is but to step aboard a boat, swift almost as the Magic
Carpet, and you wake one happy morning with all the dear remembered
scents and sights before you once more. And her heart said
“Victoria,”—where Westernmost West leans forward to kiss Easternmost
East across the Pacific.
So she went there—now a woman of twenty-nine, self-possessed, and
capable, and settled herself in a great hostelry to choose and build her
home. Her home, mark you!—not her prison. It was not to be so large as
to hamper flight when the inevitable call came—
Take down your golden wings now
From the hook behind the door,
The wind is calling from the East
And you must fly once more.
I wish I might write of the building of Beatrice Veronica’s home for it
developed into one of the immense joys of her life. But more important
things are ahead, so it must suffice to say that it was long, low and
brown with sunny verandas and windows avid of sunshine, and that all the
plunder of travel, and books, books, books found happy place in it and
grew there as inevitably as leaves on a tree.
But it was while all this was in embryo that the thought of writing
impressed itself on Beatrice Veronica. Partly because the house
adventure was expensive and she wanted a larger margin, partly because
she had seen with delighted interest and intelligence all the splendid
spectacle of men and cities. Her sound knowledge of history and
cultivated taste in literature should count for pebbles in the writer’s
sling who goes forth to conquer the great Goliath of the public. She
revolved this thought often as she walked by murmurous seas or nested in
a niche of rock to watch the mountains opposite reflecting every change
of sunlight as a soul in adoration reflects its deity. It really seemed
a waste not to turn all this to some sort of account. And success would
be sweet. But how to begin!
She bought an armful of the magazines which make gay the streets of
Victoria. “I ought to be able to do this kind of thing,” she reflected.
“I have a good vocabulary. Father always thought about eight thousand
words, and that should go a long way. Besides I’ve seen nearly all there
is to see. Let’s try.”
She did, and ended with more respect for the average author. The eight
thousand were as unmanageable as mutineers or idiots. They marched
doggedly in heavy columns, they right-about-faced and deployed; but
there was no life in them. The veriest man-handler of a grizzly or a
cow-boy could do better. Being a young person of quick insight and
decision she decided to waste no more time in that direction. She laid
away the magazines and decided to be a spectator with memory and hope
for companions. She burned her manuscripts and turned her attention to
planning her garden.
And it was then that V. Lydiat dawned on the horizon.
Dawned. That is the only word, for it came and the sun came after. It
happened in this way.
One night, in the usual way Beatrice Veronica fell asleep and dreamed,
but not in the usual way. She was standing by a temple she remembered
very well in Southern India, the Temple of Govindhar. It stood there,
under its palms wonderful as a giant rock of majolica, coloured lavishly
in the hard fierce sunshine, monstrously sculptured with gods and
goddesses, and mythical creatures of land and water in all the acts of
their supernal life, writhing and tapering upwards to the great
architectural crown supported by tigers and monkeys which finished the
building,—a crown gemmed with worshipping spirits for jewels, a
nightmare conception of violence in form and colour; the last barbaric
touch to the misbegotten splendour. Vaguely the whole thing reminded
Beatrice Veronica of her literary efforts and she stood among the palms
looking up to the blaze against the blue and smiling a little.
Suddenly she became aware that a man was standing near the great gate
which no unbeliever’s foot may pass, looking up also, shading his eyes
with his hand from the intolerable sunlight. His face was sensitive and
strong, an unusual blending, his eyes grey and noticeable. She liked his
figure in the light tropical clothing. He had the air of birth and
breeding. But he seemed wearied, as if the climate had been too much for
him, a look one knows very well where the Peninsula runs down to Cape
Cormorin, and the sun beats on the head like a mighty man of valour.
Then, as dream-people will, he came towards her as if they had known
each other all their lives, and said, slowly, meditatively:
“I have tried and tried. I can’t do it.”
With a sense that she knew what he meant though she could not drag it to
the surface, she found herself saying earnestly:
“But have you tried hard enough? _Really_ tried?”
He put his hands to his forehead with a tired gesture:
“I’m always trying. But _you_ could do it.”
She said, “Could I?” in great astonishment.
They stood a moment side by side, looking at each other and then as if
from a blurred distance she heard his voice again.
“It was said long ago that if any creatures united their psychic forces
they could conquer the world, though singly they could do nothing.”
Temple and palms dissolved into coloured mist; they swam away on another
wave of dream and vanished. She floated up to the surface of
consciousness again, awake, with the pale morning gold streaming in
through the east window.
She knew she had dreamed, for a sense of something lost haunted her all
day, yet could not remember anything, and things went on in their usual
course.
That evening sitting in a corner of the hotel lounge, with the babble of
music and talk about her, she had the irresistible impulse to write,—to
write something; she did not in the least know what. It was so urgent
that she walked quickly to the elevator and so to her sitting room, and
there she snatched pen and paper and wrote the beginning of a story of
modern life in India, but strangely influenced by and centring about the
Temple of Govindhar. As she wrote the name she remembered that she had
seen it among the palm trees in its hideous beauty, and now, like a
human personality, it forced itself upon her and compelled her to be its
mouthpiece.
How it happened she could not in the least tell. Certainly she had
travelled, kept her ears and eyes open and learned as much as any woman
can do who keeps on the beaten track in the Orient and consorts with her
own kind in preference to the natives. The two worlds are very far
apart—so far that nothing from below the surface can pass over the
well-defined limits. Moreover she was not a learned woman,—Indian
thought of the mystic order had never come her way, and Indian history
except at the point where it touches European was a closed book.
Therefore this story astonished her very much. She read it over
breathlessly when it was finished. If she had had that knowledge when
she was there how all the mysteries of the temple would have leaped to
light—what drama, what strange suspense would have lurked in its
monstrous form and colour! The critic in her brain who, standing aside,
watched the posturing and mouthing of the characters, told her austerely
that the work was good—excellent. But something behind her brain had
told her that already. She read it over ardently, lingeringly, with an
astonishing sense of ownership yet of doubt. _How_ had it come? And the
writing? No longer did the eight thousand of her vocabulary march in
dull squadrons, heavy-footed, languid. They sped, ran, flew, with
perfect grace, like the dancers of princes. They were beautiful
exceedingly. They bore the tale like a garland. She read it again and
again, with bewildered delight.
She tapped it out herself on the keys of her Corona and sent it to the
editor of a very famous magazine, with the signature of “V. Lydiat.” As
I have said, that matter took long thought, prompted from behind by
instincts.
It was done and V. Lydiat, a climbing star, shed a faint beam over the
world. For the editor wrote back eagerly. He knew he had found a new
flavour. “Your work impresses me as extremely original. I am anxious to
see more of it. I need hardly say I accept it for the magazine and I
shall hope to hear from you again before long.” A cheque followed.
No need to dwell on Beatrice Veronica’s feelings, mixed beyond
disentanglement. She was not astonished that the work should be
recognized as good, but—V. Lydiat! What had happened to her and how?
Strange tales are told to-day of sudden brain-stimulations and
complexes. Was she the happy victim of such an adventure, and if so,
would it be recurrent? How should she know? What should she do? She felt
herself moving in worlds not realized, and could not in the least decide
the simple question of whether it was honest to accept commendation for
a thing she felt in her very soul she had not done and could not do.
But then, who? What was V. Lydiat?
He, she, or it, came from starrier spheres than hers. Wings plumed its
shoulders, while hers were merely becomingly draped in seasonable
materials. She knew that the visitor was a subtler spirit, dwelling
beyond the mysteries, saturated with the colour and desire of dead ages
which can never die—an authentic voice, hailed at once by the few, to
be blown at last on the winds of the soul which, wandering the world,
let fall here and there the seeds of amaranth and asphodel.
Yes—V. Lydiat was entirely beyond her.
But you will understand that, though Beatrice Veronica could not enter
into the secret places, it was a most wonderful thing to be amanuensis
and business manager. To her fell the letters from editors and
publishers, the correspondence which rained in from the ends of the
earth, protesting gratitude, praise, entreaties for counsel in all
things from routes to religions. These latter were the most difficult,
for it would have taken V. Lydiat to answer them adequately. But
Beatrice Veronica did the best she could, and her life moved onward
aureoled and haloed.
She learned at last the rules of the game. V. Lydiat’s ethereal approach
could only be secured by the wand of a fountain pen. She must sit thus
armed with a fair sheet before her and wait, fixing her mind on some
idle point of light or persistent trembling of leaves, and suddenly the
world would pass miraculously from her and she would awake in
another—an amazing world, most beautiful, brimming with romance, lit by
suns of gallant men and moons of loveliest women. The great jewels of
the Orient shed starry splendours, and ghostly creeping figures pursued
them through jungles and mountain passes. Strange magics lurked in the
dark and drew the soul along the Way of Wonder.
The strangest experience. It began always in the same way. The blue
Canadian sky, the hyacinth gleam of the sea through oak and pine
dissolved in unrealities of mist, and sultry Oriental skies, yellow as a
lion’s eyes or the brazen boom of a gong, beat their fierce sunlight
downward as from an inverted bowl. And then—then, she knew V. Lydiat
was at hand. But never with companionship. It was a despot and entered
in, with flags flying, to the annihilation of Beatrice Veronica. She
wrote like a thing driven on a wind, and woke to find it done. The
possession obliterated her, and when she could collect her routed forces
it was gone.
So time went on and V. Lydiat’s fame was established and Beatrice
Veronica wore it as a woman too poor to appear at Court with fitting
magnificence shines in borrowed jewels and trembles to wear them.
One night in the moonlit warmth, with the vast Princesses of the Dark
hidden in the ambush of breathless trees, she sat in the high veranda of
her little house with the broad vista through pines to the sea.
It was a heavenly night; if the baby waves broke in the little bay they
must break in diamonds,—the wet stones must shine like crystals.
That day V. Lydiat had transported her to a great and silent jungle in
Cambodia and they went up together through the crowding whispering trees
to the ruined palaces where once great kings dwelt, and passed together
through sounding halls sculptured with dead myths to the chambers, once
secret, whence queens looked forth languidly from wildly-carved
casements into the wilderness of sweets in the gardens.
V. Lydiat had led her to a great tank of crystal water in the knotted
shade, paved with strange stones inlaid with human figures in wrought
metal,—a place where women with gold-embraced heads once idly bathed
their slender limbs in the warm lymph—a secret place then, but now open
to cruel sunlight and cold incurious stars.
So far she knew it all. She had photographed that tank with its stony
cobras while Sidney Verrier timed the exposure. But of the story told
to-day she knew nothing.
A wonderful story, old as time, new as to-morrow, for the figures in it
were of to-day, people who had gone there, as she herself had done, only
to see, and were captured, subjugated by the old alarming magic which
lurks in the jungle and behind the carven walls and eyeless windows. A
dangerous place, and she had not known it then—had thought of it only
as a sight to be seen, a memory to be treasured. But V. Lydiat knew
better—knew it was alive and terrible still.
She leaned her arms on the sill and looked out to the sea that led
towards the hidden Orient and in her heart she spoke to the strange
visitor.
“I wish I knew you,” she whispered. “You come and go and I can’t touch
you even while you are within and about me. You interpret. You make life
wonderful, but perhaps you are more wonderful still. If I could only lay
hold of you, touch you, have one glimpse of you! _What_ are you? Where
do you come from? Where do you go? I hear. O, let me see!”
It was like a prayer, and the more intense because the dead stillness of
the night presented it as its own cry and entreaty.
Dead silence. Not even the voice of the sea.
She laid her head on her folded arms.
“I’ve been obedient. I’ve laid myself down on the threshold that you
might walk over me and take possession. Have you no reward for me? Are
you just some strange cell of my own brain suddenly awake and working,
or are you some other—what?—but nearer to me than breathing, as near
as my own soul?”
The longing grew inarticulate and stronger, like the dumb yearning
instincts which move the world of unspeaking creatures. It seemed to her
that she sent her soul through the night pleading, pleading. Then very
slowly she relaxed into sleep as she lay in the moonlight—deep,
soul-satisfying sleep. And so dreamed.
She stood in the Shalimar Garden of the dead Mogul Empresses in Kashmir.
How well she knew it, how passionately she loved it! She and Sidney
Verrier had moored their houseboat on the Dal Lake not far away one
happy summer and had wandered almost daily to the Shalimar, glorying in
the beauty of its fountains and rushing cascades, and the roses—roses
everywhere in a most bewildering sweetness. How often she had gone up
the long garden ways to the foot of the hills that rise into mountains
and catch the snows and stars upon their heights. It was no wonder she
should dream of it. So in her dream she walked up to the great pavilion
supported on noble pillars of black marble from Pampoor, and the moon
swam in a wavering circle in the water before it, and she held back a
moment to see it break into a thousand reflections, and then became
aware of a man leaning with folded arms by the steps: his face clear in
the moonlight.
Instantly she knew him, as he did her—the man of her dream of the
Temple of Govindhar.
As before he turned and came toward her.
“I have waited for you by the temple and here and in many other places.
I wait every night. How is it you come so seldom?” he said. His voice
was stronger, his bearing more alert and eager than at Govindhar. He
spoke with a kind of assurance of welcome which she responded to
instantly.
“I would have come. I didn’t know. How can I tell?”
He looked at her smiling.
“There is only one way. Why didn’t you learn it in India? It was all
round you and you didn’t even notice. You don’t know your powers.
Listen.”
Beatrice Veronica drew towards him, eyes rapt on his face, scarcely
breathing. Yes—in India she had felt there were mighty stirrings about
her, thrills of an unknown spiritual life, crisping the surface like a
breeze, and passing—passing before ever you could say it was there. But
it did not touch her with so much as an outermost ripple. She was too
ignorant. Now—she could learn.
“You see—this is the way of it,” he said, leaning against the black
pillar. “The soul is sheer thought and knowledge, but, prisoned in the
body, it is the slave of the senses and all its powers are limited by
these. And they lead it into acts which in their consequences are
fetters of iron. Still, at a certain point of attainment one can be
freer than most men believe possible. When this is so, you use the Eight
Means of Mental Concentration and are free. You step into a new
dimension.”
“Is this true? Do you know it?” she said earnestly. “Because, if there
is any way which can be taken, I have a quest—something—someone——”
She stammered, and could not finish.
“I know. Someone you want to find in the dark. Well, it can be done. You
would not believe the possibilities of that freed state of
consciousness. Here, in the Shalimar you think you see nothing but
moonlight and water—nothing in fact but what your senses tell you. But
that is nonsense. Your eyes are shut. You are asleep in Canada and yet
you see them by the inner light of memory even now and the help I am
giving you! Well—use the Eight Means, and you will see them waking and
as clearly as you do in sleep. But I, who am instructed, see more. This
garden to me is peopled with those who made it—the dead kings and
queens who rejoiced in its beauty. See—” he laid his hand on hers and
suddenly she saw. Amazing—amazing! They were alone no longer.
Sitting on the floor of the pavilion, looking down into the
moon-mirroring water was a woman in the ancient dress of Persia, golden
and jewelled,—she flung her head up magnificently as if at the words,
and looked at them, the moon full in her eyes. The garden was peopled
now not only with roses but white blossoms sending out fierce hot shafts
of perfume. They struck Beatrice Veronica like something tangible, and
half dazed her as she stared at the startling beauty of the unveiled
woman revealed like a flaming jewel in the black and white glory of the
night.
With his hand on hers, she knew without words. Nourmahal the Empress,
ruler of the Emperor who made the Shalimar for her pleasure, who put
India with all its glories at her feet. Who else should be the soul of
the garden?
It seemed to Beatrice Veronica that she had never beheld beauty before.
It was beyond all pictures, all images in its sultry passionate
loveliness,—it was——
But as she watched spellbound, the man lifted his hand from hers and the
garden was empty of all but moonlight and roses once more, and he and
she alone. She could have wept for utter loss.
“Was it a ghost?” she asked trembling.
“No, no,—an essential something that remains in certain places, not a
ghost. There is nothing of what you mean by that word. Don’t be
frightened! You’ll often see them.”
She stared at him perplexed, and he added:
“You see? One has only to put oneself in the receptive state and time is
no more. One sees—one hears. You are only a beginner so I cannot show
you much. But you _are_ a beginner or you would not be here in the
Shalimar with me now. There is a bond between us which goes back—” He
paused, looking keenly at her, and said quickly “Centuries, and
further.”
She was stunned, dazed by the revelations. They meant so much more that
it is possible to record. Also the sensation was beginning in her which
we all know before waking. The dream wavers on its foundation, loosens,
becomes misty, makes ready to disappear. It would be gone—gone before
she could know. She caught his hand as if to steady it.
“Are you V. Lydiat?” she cried.—“You must be. You are. You come to me
every day—a voice. O let me come to you like this, and teach me, teach
me, that I may know and see. I am a blind creature in a universe of
wonders. Let me come every night.”
His face was receding, palpitating, collapsing, but his voice came as if
from something beyond it.
“That is what you call me. Names are nothing. Yes, come every night.”
It was gone. She was in the Shalimar alone, and somewhere in the
distance she heard Sidney Verrier’s voice calling clear as a bird.
Beatrice Veronica woke that morning with the sun glorying through the
eastern arch of her veranda. She was still dressed. She had slept there
all night. Of the dream she remembered snatches, hints, which left new
hopes and impulses germinating in her soul. The unknown flowers were
sown in spring. They would blossom in summer in unimaginable beauty.
That was the beginning of a time of strange and enchanting happiness.
Thus one may imagine the joy of a man born blind who by some miraculous
means is made to see, and wakes in a world of wonders. It is impossible
that anyone should know greater bliss. The very weight of it made her
methodical and practical lest a grain of heavenly gold should escape her
in its transmutation to earthly terms.
The morning was V. Lydiat’s. At ten o’clock she betook herself to her
high veranda, and folding her hands and composing her mind looked out to
sea through the wide way of pines which terminated in its azure beauty.
Then, as has been told before, it would blow softly away on a
dream-wind, and the story begin.
And at night there was now invariably the meeting. At first that was
always in some place she knew—somewhere she recognized from memory,
haunts of her own with Sidney Verrier. But one night a new thing
happened—she woke into dream by the Ganges at Cawnpore, at the terrible
Massacre Ghaut, a place she had always avoided because of the horrible
memories of the Indian mutiny which sicken the soul of every European
who stands there.
Now she stood at the top of the beautiful broken steps under the dense
shade of the very trees where the mutineers ambushed, and he was below,
beckoning her.
“Well done, well done!” he said, as she came slowly down to where holy
Ganges lips the lowest step. “This was a great experiment. You could
never have come here alone,—I could not have brought you until now, and
I had to fight the repugnance in you, but here you are. You see? We have
been putting stepping-stones, you and I, each from our own side, and now
the bridge is made and we hold hands in the middle. You can come
anywhere now. And listen—I too am learning to go where I have never
been. The world will be open to us soon.”
He looked at her with glowing eyes—the eyes of the explorer, the
discoverer, on the edge of triumph.
“But why here—in this horrible place?” She shrank a little even from
him as she looked about her. He laughed:
“That is no more now than a last year’s winter storm. They know. They
were not afraid even then. They laugh now as they go on their way. Be
happy, beloved. They are beyond the mysteries.”
Of that dream, she carried back to earth the word “beloved.” Who had
said it, she could not tell, but in the dark—the warm friendly
dark—there was someone who loved her, whom she loved with a perfect
union. Was it—could it be V. Lydiat? She did not know. Also she
remembered that she had dreamed the Massacre Ghaut at Cawnpore, and took
pains to search for pictures and stories of the place to verify her
dream. Yes—it was true. Things were becoming clearer.
Also, her power in writing increased very noticeably about this time. V.
Lydiat was recognized as holding a unique place amongst writers of the
Orient. On the one side were the scholars, the learned men who wrote in
terms of ancient Oriental thought, terms no ordinary reader could
understand, and on the other, the writers of the many-faceted surface,
the adventurers, toying with the titillating life of zenana and veiled
dangerous love-affairs,—a tissue of coloured crime. V. Lydiat recorded
all, and with a method of his own which approached perfect loveliness in
word and phrase. The faiths of the East were his,—in India and China
alike his soul sheltered under the Divine Wings, at home in strange
heavens, and hells which one day would blossom into heavens. As he and
Beatrice Veronica had posed stepping-stones until they met in the
middle, so he built a splendid bridge across the wide seas of
misunderstanding between east and west, and many souls passed across it
going and coming and were glad.
“I’m only a pioneer,” he said to Beatrice Veronica one day (she could
dream the day as well as the night) sitting in the gardens of the Taj.
“You too. It will be done much better soon. See how we are out-growing
our limitations and feeling out after the wonders of the sub-conscious
self, the essential that hands on the torch when we die. Die? No, I hate
that word. Let’s say, climb a step higher on the ladder of existence.
Every inch gives us a wider view of the country. You see?”
She liked that “You see?” which came so often. It was so eager—so
fraternal in a way. Yes, they were good comrades, she and V. Lydiat.
“Do you know I write for you?” she ventured to ask. “I have often
wondered if you speak as unconsciously as I write.”
“No, no. I know. I always know. Longer ago than you would believe you
used to work for me. We are in the same whirl-pool, you and I. Our atoms
must always be whirled together again. You can’t escape me, Beatrice
Veronica.”
“Do you think I want to?” she asked.
But in daily life she clung to her secret like grim death. She would not
have been burdened with V. Lydiat’s laurels for the world. The
dishonesty of it! And yet one could never explain. Hopeless! Who would
believe? And apart from that, she had a kind of growing certainty that
V. Lydiat would enter upon his own one day. Not that she remembered him
as any more than a vague dream influence; she did not, but yet the
realization of a Presence was growing, and she herself developing daily.
There is not much space here to tell the wondrous sights she saw with V.
Lydiat, and holding by his hand. That would be a book in itself—and a
beautiful one. And though she could only remember them in drifts like a
waft of far-off music on a breeze, it was incomparable food for the
sub-conscious self, and strengthened every latent faculty of memory and
experience. Beatrice Veronica promised to be a very remarkable woman if
some day the inner and outer faculties should unite.
But what was to be the solvent? That, this story can only indicate
faintly for the end is not yet.
She went out a little less into her small world of daily life—not
shunning it certainly, but her inner life was so crowded, so blissful
that the outer seemed insipid enough. Why figure at teas and bridge
parties, and struggle with the boredom of mah jong when the veranda was
waiting with the green way before it that led to the silence of the sea,
and the lover beyond? For it had come to that—the lover. All joy summed
up in that word, joy unmeasurable as the oceans of sunlight—a perfect
union. She walked as one carefully bearing a brimmed cup,—not a drop,
not a drop must spill,—so she carried herself a little stiffly as it
might seem to the outer world which could not guess the reason.
People liked her—but she moved on her own orbit, and it only
intersected theirs at certain well-defined points. Her soft abstracted
air won but eluded;—it put an atmosphere of strangeness about her, of
thoughts she could not share with anyone.
“She must have rather a lonely life of it!” they said. But she never
had.
One day came a letter from Sidney Verrier, now Sidney Mourilyan, from
her husband’s coffee plantation in the Shevaroy Hills in southern India.
She wrote from the settlement of Yercaud— “Not a town,” she wrote, “but
dear little scattered houses in the trees. We have even a club, think of
it!—after the wilds where you and I have been!—and there are pleasant
people, and Tony expects to do well with coffee here. I wish half the
day that you could come. You would like it, B. V.— You would like it!
And you would like my boy—two years old now, and a sheer delight. Not
to mention my garden. The growth here! The heliotropes are almost trees.
The jasmines have giant stars. The house is stormed with flowers—almost
too sweet. Couldn’t you come? Don’t you hear the east calling? At all
events you hear me calling, for I want you. And you must be having very
idle lazy days, for I remember I never could imagine what you would find
to do if you stopped travelling. Your whole soul was in that. It’s a
cold country you’re in—frigid pines, and stark mountains and icy seas.
Do come out into the sunshine again.”
She laid down the letter there and looked at the beloved pines almost
glittering in the sunshine as it slid off their smooth needles. And
idle?—her life, her wonderful secret life! Little indeed did Sidney
know if she could write like that. She took up the letter again,
smiling.
“And listen, B. V.—there’s a man going round by Japan to Canada, a man
called Martin Welland. I should like you to know him for two reasons.
First, he can tell you all about this place. Second, I think he is
interesting. If you don’t find him so, shunt him. My love, my dear B.
V., and do come. Think of all you might do with this as a starting
point.”
There was more, but that is the essential. You may think at this point
that you know exactly how this story must inevitably end. But no.
It was about four months after this that Beatrice Veronica was rung up
on the telephone in her veranda as she sat reading. The imperative
interruption annoyed her;—she put down her book. A man’s voice.
“Miss Leslie? I think your friend Mrs. Mourilyan told you I was coming
to Victoria. My name is Welland.”
Polite assurances from the veranda.
“Yes, I am staying at the Empress. May I come out and see you this
afternoon? I have a small parcel for you from Mrs. Mourilyan.”
So it was settled, and with her Chinese servant she made the little
black oak table beautiful with silver and long-stemmed flowers in
beautiful old English glass bowls. If he went back to Yercaud he should
at least tell Sidney that her home in “that cold country” was desirable.
He came at four and she could hear his voice in the little hall as Wing
admitted him.
She liked it. The words were clear, well-cut, neither blurred nor
bungled. Then he came in. A tall man, broad-shouldered, with grey eyes
and hair that sprang strongly from a broad forehead, clean-shaven, a
sensitive mouth, possibly thirty-eight, or so. All these things flashed
together in an impression of something to be liked and trusted. On his
side he saw a young woman in a blue-grey gown with hazel eyes and hair
to match—a harmony of delicate browns enhancing an almond-pale face
with faintly coloured lips and a look of fragility which belied the
nervous strength beneath.
The parcel was given and received; a chain of Indian moonstones in
silver, very lovely in its shifting lights, and then came news, much
news, of the home at Yercaud.
“I heard of you so much there that you are no stranger to me,” he said,
watching with curious interest while she filled the Chinese cups of pink
and jade porcelain with jasmine tea from a hidden valley in Anhui. It
fascinated him—the white hands flitting like little quick birds on
their quick errands, the girl, so calm and self-possessed, mistress of
herself and her house. Many years of wandering had opened his heart to
the feminine charm of it all, the quiet, the rose-leaf scent in the air,
the things which group by instinct about a refined woman.
“You have a delightful home!” he said at last, rather abruptly.
“Yes— When you return do try to convince Mrs. Mourilyan that I don’t
live in a hut on an iceberg. You agree with me, I am sure, that only
Kashmir and perhaps one or two other places can be more beautiful than
this.”
“Yes. I fully agree. Yet it misses something which permeates India in
places far less beautiful. It lacks atmosphere. Just as the fallen
leaves of a forest make up a rich soil in which all growth is luxuriant,
so the dead ancientry of India makes earth and air rich with memory and
tradition—and more. You can’t get it in these new countries.”
“I know,” she said eagerly. “Here it’s just a beautiful child with all
her complexities before her. It rests one, you know. I felt it an
amazing rest when I came here.”
“I can understand that. And they tell me the climate is delightful. I
wish I could stay here. I may come back some day. But I must return to
India in four months.”
“You have work?”
“Yes and no. I have collected an immense quantity of notes for several
books, but—now you will laugh!—I shall never write them.”
“But why—why? I know there’s an immense opening for true books about
the Orient.”
“I think so too. But you allow it’s a drawback that I am entirely devoid
of the writing gift. I have my knowledge. I have the thing flame-clear
in my mind. But let me put it on paper and it evaporates. Dull as
ditchwater! You see?”
That last little phrase sent a blush flying up her cheek. It recalled
many things.
“Yes, I see. But couldn’t you put it in skilful hands?”
He laid down his cup and turned suddenly on her.
“Could _you_ do it?”
“I? I wish I could, but I am doing work at present——”
“Literary?”
“Of a sort. Secretarial. I write from dictation.”
“May I ask what sort of things?”
With a curious reluctance she answered.
“Indian,” and said no more.
He seemed to meditate a moment on that; then said slowly:
“It appears you have experience of the very things that interest me.
Tell me—for I have been so long in the wilds— Is there any writer
nowadays taking the place with regard to things Indian that Lafcadio
Hearn did with things Japanese? A man who gets at the soul of it as well
as the beautiful surface?”
With her eyes on the ground and a sense of something startling in the
air, she answered with a question.
“Have you ever heard of V. Lydiat’s books?”
There was a puzzled furrow between his eyebrows.
“Not that I know of. Up in Kulu and beyond, the new books don’t
penetrate. A man or a woman?”
“People are not certain. The initial might mean either. But the critics
all say a man. The last is called the ‘The Unstruck Music,’ the one
before ‘The Dream of Stars.’ The first, ‘The Ninefold Flower.’”
“Beautiful names,” he said. “Can I get them here?”
“I can lend them to you.”
They talked long after that, in a curiously intimate way that gave her
secret but intense happiness. It was almost in fear that she asked when
he was going on and where.
When he went off he carried the three books under his arm.
“I shall read ‘The Ninefold Flower,’ first. It interests me to see how a
writer’s mind develops.”
That night she had no dream and next day she tried even more eagerly
than usual to get in touch with V. Lydiat, but in vain. The oracle was
dumb. It frightened her, for the whole thing was so strange that she had
never felt sure it might not vanish as suddenly as it came. She sat
patiently all that morning, hoping and sorely disturbed, but the Pacific
hung a relentless azure curtain before her fairyland and the pines
dreamed their own sunshine-fragrance and made no way for palms.
At one o’clock the telephone rang sharply,
“Welland speaking. May I come and see you this afternoon?”
It was impossible for she had an engagement, but she named the evening
at eight. He caught at it—his voice was evidence of that eagerness.
He came a minute or two before the time, and a book was in his hand. She
knew the cover with a drift of stars across it before he spoke.
It broke out the moment he was in the room.
“A most amazing thing. I hardly know how to tell you. You’ll think I’m
mad. It’s my book—_mine_, yet I never wrote it.”
They stared at each other in a kind of consternation and the little
colour in her face fell away and left her lily-pale. She could feel but
not control the trembling of her hands.
“You mean——”
“I mean—there are my notes one after another, but expressed in a way I
never could hope for, exquisitely expressed. But it’s mine all the same.
A cruel, enchanting robbery! You don’t believe me. How could you? But I
can prove it. See here.”
With passionate haste he pulled a roll of paper from his pocket, and
pushed the typed sheets before her. The first story in “The Ninefold
Flower,” was called “The Lady of Beauty.” The notes began, “The Queen of
Beauty,” and went on _seriatim_ with the scaffolding of the story.
“The way it’s done here, in this book, is the very way I used to see it
in my dreams, but it was utterly beyond me. For God’s sake, tell me what
you think.”
She laid it down.
“Of course it’s yours. No doubt of that. But his too. You blocked out
the marble. He made the statue. The very judgment of Solomon could not
decide between you.”
“That’s true,” he said hopelessly. “But the mystery of it. The appalling
hopeless mystery. No eye but mine has ever seen that paper till now.”
Silence. A grey moth flew in from the garden and circled about the lamp.
The little flutter of its wings was the only sound. Then in a shaken
voice very unlike its usual sedate sweetness, she asked.
“Mr. Welland, do you ever dream?”
“Awake? Constantly.”
“Asleep?”
She saw caution steal into his frank eyes and drop a curtain before
them.
“Why do you ask? Everyone dreams.”
She gathered up all her courage for the next question.
“Were you ever in the Shalimar?”
“Certainly. Does anyone ever go to Kashmir and miss it?”
He was fencing, that was palpable. It gave her hope for a golden gleam
through her fear. She clasped her shaking hands tightly in each other.
“I have the strangest dreams. I can only bring back snatches. Yet I know
there is a wonderful connected story behind them. I dreamt the Shalimar
not long ago,—I brought back one image. A woman in an old Persian dress
sitting by the black Pampoor pillars and looking down into the water
where the moon dipped and swam all gold.”
“Yes, yes, go on!” he breathed.
“There were flowers—white flowers. I never saw them there in the
daylight.”
“Unbearably sweet,” he interjected. “The scent is like the thrust of a
lance. I know, I know. But there was another woman. I can’t remember her
face.”
“How did she stand?” asked Beatrice Veronica.
“Near me—but she could see nothing. The day still blinded her,
until——”
“Until you laid your hand on hers. Then she saw.”
Another long silence. Only the beating of the moth’s wings. He leaned
forward from his chair and laid his hands on the clasp of hers. Their
eyes met, absorbing each other; the way for the electric current was
clear.
“I remember now,” he said, very softly. “It was you. It was you at the
Temple of Govindhar. At the Massacre Ghaut of Cawnpore. Ah, I dragged
you there against your will to show I was the stronger. It is
you—always you.”
What was she to say? With his hands on hers it was a union of strength
which put the past before both like an open book. She remembered all the
dreams now. Impossible to tell them here—they were so many, like and
unlike, shaken shifting jewels in a kaleidoscope held in some unseen
hand. But jewels. They sat a long time in this way, rapt in wordless
memories, their eyes absorbing each other—the strangest reunion. When
speech came it brought rapture which needed little explanation. They
bathed in wonder as in clear water, they flung the sparkle of it over
their heads and glittered to each other in its radiance. When had such a
miracle been wrought for any two people in all the world? The dreams of
the visionary were actual for them and heaven and earth instinct with
miracle.
“When we are married—when we pass our lives utterly together the bond
will be stronger,” he said, kissing her hand passionately two hours
later. “We shall be awake with reason and intellect as well as vision to
help our work, we shall do such things as the world has never dreamed,
prove that miracle is the daily bread of those who know. Two halves of a
perfect whole made one forever and ever. You see?”
He looked at her a moment with shining eyes and added, “The wise will
come to us for wisdom, the poets for beauty, and we shall make our
meeting-places the shrines of a new worship.”
Beatrice Veronica agreed with every pulse of her blood. The Great
Adventure, and together!—what bliss could equal that marvel?
They were together perpetually, and surely human happiness was never
greater than that of these two adventurers with the blue capes of
Wonderland in sight at last over leagues of perilous seas. In another
image, their caravan halted outside the gates of Paradise, and in a
short few weeks those gates would swing open for them and, closing, shut
out Fate.
But she did not dream of Martin Welland now, nor he of her. The
discovery and all it involved was so thrilling that it brought every
emotion to the surface as blood flushes the face when the heart beats
violently. The inner centres were depleted.
They were married and Paradise was at hand, but for a while the happy
business of settling their life engrossed them. It would be better to
live in Canada and make long delightful visits to the Orient to refill
the cisterns of marvel, they thought. A room for mutual work must be
plotted in the bungalow; then there was the anxious question of a
southern aspect. Then it was built, and it became a debatable decision
whether some of the pines must fall to enlarge the vista to the sea.
Friends rallied about her on the news of the marriage, and rejoiced to
see the irradiation of Beatrice Veronica’s pale face. Then they must be
entertained.
Then the endless joyful discussions as to whether the author should
still be V. Lydiat or whether collaboration should be admitted. These
things and many more filled the happy world they dwelt in.
Can the end be foreseen? They never foresaw it.
The hungry claim of human bliss fixed its roots in the inner soil where
the Rosa Mystica had blossomed, and exhausted it for all else. That, at
least, is the way in which one endeavours to state the mysterious
enervation of the sub-conscious self which had built the stepping-stones
between them to the meeting-point.
She went hopefully to her table when they had settled down, and he sat
beside her doing his utmost to force the impulse across inches which had
made nothing of oceans. It was dead. He could think of nothing but the
sweet mist of brown tendrils in the nape of her neck, the pure line from
ear to chin, the delights of the day to be. She sat with the poor
remnant of his notes before her—for nearly all had been exhausted in
the three books—and tried to shape them into V. Lydiat’s clear and
sensitive beauty of words. It could not be done. Her eight thousand
words marched and deployed heavy-footed as before. They were as
unmanageable as mutineers or idiots. There was no life in them.
So it all descended to calmer levels. They slept in each other’s arms,
but they never dreamed of each other now. They had really been nearer in
their ghostly meeting by the Taj Mahal or in the evil splendours of
Govindhar—far nearer, when she wrote and could not cease for joy, than
when Martin Welland sat beside her and struggled to find what had
flashed like light in the old days. They had to face it at last—V.
Lydiat was dead.
It troubled them much for a while, but troubled the world more. The
publishers were besieged with questions and entreaties. Finally those
also slackened and died off.