year. At dawn, she would wake, and find offerings of fruit and flowers
left at her door by her faithful worshiper; and often she would talk
with him on the beach, telling him of her own country, about which he
daily thirsted to hear more; for the more he learned, the more he seemed
to share her own exile. Music, too, they shared, that universal language
whose very spirituality is its chief peril; for it is emotion unattached
to facts, and it may mean different things to different people; so that
you may accompany the sacking of cities by the thunders of Wagner, or
dream that you see angels in an empty shrine. Sometimes, in the evening,
Rua would steal like a shadow from the shadows around her hut, where he
had been waiting to see her pass, and would beg her to play the music
of her own country. Then she would sing, and he would stand in the
doorway listening, with every pulse of his body beating time, and one
brown foot tapping in the dust.
One night, she had been wandering with Tinovao and Amaru by the lagoon,
in which the reflected stars burned so brightly that one might easily
believe the island hung in mid-heaven. She looked at them for a long
time; then, with her arms round the two girls, who understood her words
only vaguely, she murmured to herself: "What does it matter? What does
anything matter when one looks up there? And life is going ... life and
youth."
She said good-night to her friends, and laughingly plucked the red
hibiscus flower from behind the shell-like ear of Tinovao as they
parted. When she neared her door, a shadow stole out of the woods, and
stood before her on the threshold. His eyes were shining like dark
stars, the eyes of a fawn. "Music," he pleaded, "the music of your
country."
Then he saw the red flower that she wore behind her ear, exactly as
Tinovao had worn it. He stared at her, as Endymion must have stared at
Diana among the poppies of Latmos, half frightened, half amazed. He
dropped to his knees, as on that night when she had saved him. He
pressed his face against her bare feet. They were cold and salt from the
sea. But she stooped now, and raised him.
"In my country, in our country," she said, "love crowns a man. Happy is
the love that does not bring the woman to the dust."
* * * * *
There followed a time when she was happy, or thought herself happy. It
must have lasted for nearly seven years, the lifetime of that dancing
ray of sunlight, the small son, whom she buried with her own hands under
a palm-tree. Then Rua deserted her, almost as a child forsakes its
mother. He was so much younger than herself, and he took a younger wife
from among the islanders. When she first discovered his intention,
Rachel laughed mockingly at herself, and said--also to herself, for she
knew that she had somehow lost the power to make Rua understand
her,--"Have you, too, become an advanced thinker, Rua?"
But Rua understood that it was some kind of mockery; and, as her mockery
was keeping him away from his new fancy, and he was an undisciplined
child, he leapt at her in fury, seized her by the throat, and beat her
face against the ground. When she rose to her feet, with the blood
running from her mouth, he saw that he had broken out two of her teeth.
This effectively wrecked her beauty, and convinced him, as clearly as if
he had indeed been an advanced thinker, that love must be free to
develop its own life, and that, in the interests of his own soul, he
must get away as quickly as possible. Thereafter, he avoided her
carefully, and she led a life of complete solitude, spending all her
days by the little grave under the palm-tree.
She lost all count of time. She only knew that the colors were fading
from things, and that while she used to be able to watch the waves
breaking into distinct spray on the reef, she could only see now a blur
of white, from her place by the grave. She was growing old, she
supposed, and it was very much like going to sleep, after all. The slow
pulse of the sea, the voice of the eternal, was lulling her to rest.
* * * * *
When the schooner _Pearl_, with its party of irresponsible European
globe-trotters, dropped anchor off the island, it was the first ship
that had been seen there since the arrival of the _Seamew_, the first
that had ever been seen there by many of the young islanders.
The visitors came ashore, shouting and singing, the men in white duck
suits, with red and blue pareos fastened round their waists; the women
in long flowing lava-lavas of yellow and rose and green, which they had
bought in Tahiti, for they were going to do the thing properly. The lady
in yellow had already loosened her hair and crowned herself with
frangipanni blossoms. The islanders flocked around them, examining
everything they wore, and decorating them with garlands of flowers, just
as they had done with Rachel's party. The new arrivals feasted on the
white beach of the lagoon, in what they believed to be island fashion;
and when the stars came out, and the banjos were tired, they called on
the islanders for the songs and dances of the South Seas. The lady in
yellow tittered apprehensively, and remarked to her neighbor in green,
that she had heard dreadful things about some of those dances. But she
was disappointed on this occasion. The plaintive airs rose and fell
around them, like the very voice of the wind in the palm trees; and the
dancers moved as gracefully as the waves broke on the shore.
When the islanders had ended their entertainment, amidst resounding
applause, one of the young native women called out a name that seemed to
amuse her companions. They instantly echoed it, and one of them snatched
a banjo from the hands of a white man. Then they all flew, like
chattering birds, towards a hut, which had kept its door closed
throughout the day.
They clamored round it, gleefully nudging each other, as if in
expectation of a huge joke. At last, the door opened, and a gray, bent
old woman appeared. She was of larger build than most of the islanders,
and there was something in her aspect that silenced the chatterers, even
though they still nudged each other slyly. The native with the banjo
offered it to her almost timidly, and said something, to which the old
woman shook her head.
"They say she is a witch," said the Captain of the _Pearl_, who had been
listening to the conversation of the group nearest to him. "They want
her to give us some of her music. She used to sing songs, apparently,
before her man drove her out of his house, in the old days, but she has
not sung them since. They think she might oblige our party, for some
strange reason. Evidently, they've got some little joke they want to
play on us. You know these Kanakas have a pretty keen sense of humor."
The visitors gathered round curiously. An island witch was certainly
something to record in their diaries. The old woman looked at them for a
moment, with eyes like burning coals through her shaggy elf-locks. They
seemed to remind her of something unpleasant. A savage sneer bared her
broken teeth. Then she took the banjo in her shaking hands. They were
queerly distorted by age or some disease and they looked like the claws
of a land-crab. She sat down on her own threshold, and touched the
strings absently with her misshapen fingers. The faint sound of it
seemed to rouse her, seemed to kindle some sleeping fire within her, and
she struck it twice, vigorously.
The banjo is not a subtle instrument, but the sound of those two chords
drew the crowd to attention, as a master holds his audience breathless
when he tests his violin before playing.
"Holy smoke!" muttered the owner of the banjo, "where did the old witch
learn to do that?"
Then the miracle began. The decrepit fingers drew half a dozen chords
that went like fire through the unexpectant veins of the Europeans, went
through them as a national march shivers through the soul of a people
when its armies return from war. The haggard burning eyes, between the
tattered elf-locks, moistened and softened like the eyes of a Madonna,
and the withered mouth, with its broken teeth, began to sing, very
softly and quaveringly, at first, but, gathering strength, note by note,
the words that told of the love of a soldier who fought in Flanders more
than a hundred years ago:
"_Maxwelton's braes are bonnie, where early fa's the dew,
And it's there that Annie Laurie gi'ed me her promise true._"
"But it's a white woman," said the lady in the yellow lava-lava, who had
expected only the islanders to shock her, "a white woman gone native!
How disgustin'!"
"Ssh!" said somebody else, "she's going to give us more."
The old witch hardly seemed conscious of their presence now. The
slumbering sea of music within her was breaking up the ice which had
sealed and silenced it for so long. She nodded at them, with shining
eyes, and muttered thickly, an almost childlike boast:
"Oh, but I could do better than that once. My fingers are stiff. Wait!"
She went into her hut, and returned with the violin. Tremblingly, she
opened a little packet of violin strings.
"It's my last," she said. "I've kept it very carefully; but it won't be
as good as it used to be."
The throng watched her breathlessly, as she made ready, and the
trade-wind hushed itself to sleep among the palms.
"When I was in Europe last," she said, "it seemed to me there was
darkness coming. People had forgotten the meaning of music like this.
They wanted discord and blood and wickedness. I didn't understand it.
But you could see it coming everywhere. Horrible pictures. Women like
snakes. Books like lumps of poison. Hatred everywhere. Even the
musicians hated each other; and if they thought any one had genius, O
ever so little of that--do you know--I think they wanted to kill. Of
course, I chose wrong. I ought to have stayed and fought them. It's too
late now. But you know the meaning of this? It's the cry over the lost
city, before the windows were darkened and the daughters of music
brought low."
"Crazy as a loon!" whispered the lady in the yellow lava-lava.
The old woman stood upright in the shadow of a tall palm-tree, a shadow
that spread round her on the milk-white beach like a purple star. Then
her violin began to speak, began to cry, through the great simple melody
of the _Largo_ of Handel, like the soul of an outcast angel.
At the climax of its infinite compassion, two strings snapped in quick
succession, and she sank to the ground with a sob, hugging the violin to
her breast, as if it were a child.
"That was the last," she said.
They saw her head fall over on her shoulder, as she lay back against the
stem of the palm, an old, old woman asleep in the deep heart of its
purple star of shadow; and they knew, instinctively, even before the
Captain of the _Pearl_ advanced to make quite sure, that it was indeed
the last.
X
THE GARDEN ON THE CLIFF
"I don't know about three acres and a cow, but every man ought to have
his garden. That's the way I look at it," said the old fisherman,
picking up another yard of the brown net that lay across his knees.
"There's gardens that you see, and gardens that you don't see. There's
gardens all shut in with hedges, prickly hedges that 'ull tear your hand
if you try to make a spy-hole in them; and some that you wouldn't know
was there at all--invisible gardens, like the ones that Cap'n Ellis used
to talk about.
"I never followed him rightly; for I supposed he meant the garden of the
heart, the same as the sentimental song; but he hadn't any use for that
song, so he told me. My wife sent it to him for a Christmas present,
thinking it would please him; and he used it for pipe-lights. The words
was very pretty, I thought, and very appropriate to his feelings:
_'Ef I should plant a little seed of love,
In the garden of your heart._
That's how it went. But he didn't like it.
"Then there's other gardens that every one can see, both market-gardens
and flower-gardens. Cap'n Ellis told me he knew a man once that wore a
cauliflower in his buttonhole, whenever he went to chapel, and thought
it was a rose. Leastways, he thought that every one else thought it was
a rose. Kind of an orstrich he must have been. But that wasn't the way
with Cap'n Ellis. Every one could see _his_ garden, though he had a nice
big hedge round three sides of it, and it wasn't more than
three-quarters of an acre. Right on the edge of the white chalk coast it
was; and his little six-room cottage looked like a piece of the white
chalk itself.
"But he was a queer old chap, and he always would have it that nobody
could really see his garden. I used to take him a few mackerel
occasionally--he liked 'em for his supper--and he'd walk in his garden
with me for half an hour at a time. Then, just as I'd be going he'd give
a little smile and say, 'Well, you haven't seen my garden yet! You must
come again.'
"'Haven't seen your garden,' I'd say. 'I've been looking at it this half
hour an' more!'
"'Once upon a time, there was a man that couldn't see a joke,' he'd say.
Then he'd go off chuckling, and swinging his mackerel against the
hollyhocks.
"Funny little old chap he was, with a pinched white face, and a long
nose, and big gray eyes, and fluffy white hair for all the world like
swans' down. But he'd been a good seaman in his day.
"He'd sit there, in his porch, with his spyglass to his eye, looking out
over his garden at the ships as they went up and down the Channel. Then
he'd lower his glass a little to look at the butterflies, fluttering
like little white sails over the clumps of thrift at the edge of the
cliff, and settling on the little pink flowers. Very pretty they was
too. He planted them there at the end of his garden, which ran straight
down from his cottage to the edge of the cliff. He said his wife liked
to see them nodding their pink heads against the blue sea, in the old
days, when she was waiting for him to come home from one of his voyages.
'Pink and blue,' he says, 'is a very pretty combination.' They matched
her eyes and cheeks, too, as I've been told. But she's been dead now
for twenty-five years or more.
"He had just one little winding path through the garden to the edge of
the cliff; an' all the rest, at the right time of the year, was flowers.
He'd planted a little copse of fir trees to the west of it, so as to
shelter the flowers; and every one laughed at him for doing it. The sea
encroaches a good many yards along this coast every year, and the cliffs
were crumbling away with every tide. The neighbors told him that, if he
wanted a flower-garden, he'd better move inland.
"'It was a quarter of a mile inland,' he says, 'when Polly and me first
came to live here; and it hasn't touched my garden yet. It never will
touch it,' he says, 'not while I'm alive. There are good break-waters
down below, and it will last me my time. Perhaps the trees won't grow to
their full height, but I shan't be here to see,' he says, 'and it's not
the trees I'm thinking about. It's the garden. They don't have to be
very tall to shelter my garden. As for the sea,' he says, 'it's my
window, my _bay_-window, and I hope you see the joke. If I was inland,
with four hedges around my garden, instead of three,' he says, 'it would
be like living in a house without a window. Three hedges and a big blue
bay-window, that's the garden for me,' he says.
"And so he planted it full of every kind of flowers that he could grow.
He had sweet Williams, and larkspurs, and old man's beard, and lavender,
and gilly-flowers, and a lot of them old-fashioned sweet-smelling
flowers, with names that he used to say were like church-bells at
evening, in the old villages, out of reach of the railway-lines.
"And they all had a meaning to him which others didn't know. You might
walk with him for a whole summer's afternoon in his garden, but it
seemed as if his flowers kept the sweetest part of their scents for old
Cap'n Ellis. He'd pick one of them aromatic leaves, and roll it in his
fingers, and put it to his nose and say 'Ah,' like as if he was talking
to his dead sweetheart.
"'It's a strange thing,' he'd say, 'but when she was alive, I was away
at sea for fully three parts of the year. We always talked of the time
when I'd retire from the sea. We thought we'd settle down together in
our garden and watch the ships. But, when that time came, it was her
turn to go away, and it's my turn to wait. But there's a garden where
we meet,' he'd say, 'and that's the garden you've never seen.'
"There was one little patch, on the warmest and most sheltered side that
he called his wife's garden; and it was this that I thought he meant. It
was just about as big as her grave, and he had little clusters of her
favorite flowers there--rosemary, and pansies and Canterbury bells, and
her name _Ruth_, done very neat and pretty in Sussex violets. It came up
every year in April, like as if the garden was remembering.
"Parson considered that Cap'n Ellis was a very interesting man.
"'He's quite a philosopher,' he said to me one day; and I suppose that
was why the old chap talked so queer at times.
"One morning, after the war broke out, I'd taken some mackerel up to
Cap'n Ellis.
"'Are you quite sure they're fresh,' he said, the same as he always did,
though they were always a free gift to him. But he meant no offense.
"'Fresh as your own lavender,' I says, and then we laughs as usual, and
sat down to look at the ships, wondering whether they were transports,
or Red Cross, or men-of-war, as they lay along the horizon. Sometimes
we'd see an air-plane. They used to buzz up and down that coast all day;
and Cap'n Ellis would begin comparing it through his glass with the
dragon flies that flickered over his gilly-flowers. There was a
southwest wind blowing in from the sea over his garden, and it brought
us big puffs of scent from the flowers.
"'Hour after hour,' he says, 'day after day, sometimes for weeks I've
known the southwest wind to blow like that. It's the wind that wrecked
the Armada,' he says, 'and, though it comes gently to my garden, you'd
think it would blow all the scents out of the flowers in a few minutes.
But it don't,' he says. 'The more the wind blows, the more sweetness
they give out,' he says. 'Have you ever considered,' he says, 'how one
little clump of wild thyme will go on pouring its heart out on the wind?
Where does it all come from?'
"I was always a bit awkward when questions like that were put to me;
so--just to turn him off like--I says 'Consider the lilies of the
field.'
"'Ah,' he says, turning to me with his eyes shining. 'That's the way to
look at it.' I heard him murmuring another text under his breath, 'Come,
thou south, and blow upon my garden.' And he shook hands with me when I
said good-bye, as if I'd shown him my feelings, which made me feel I
wasn't treating him right, for I'd only said the first thing that came
into my mind, owing to my awkwardness at such times.
"Well, it was always disturbing me to think what might happen to Cap'n
Ellis, if one day he should find his garden slipping away to the beach.
It overhung quite a little already; and there had been one or two big
falls of chalk a few hundred yards away. Some said that the guns at sea
were shaking down the loose boulders.
"Of course, he was an old man now, three score years and ten, at least;
and my own belief was that if his garden went, he would go with it. The
parish council was very anxious to save a long strip of the cliff
adjoining his garden, because it was their property; and they'd been
building a stone wall along the beach below to protect it from the high
tide. But they were going to stop short of Cap'n Ellis's property,
because of the expense, and he couldn't afford to do it himself. A few
of us got together in the _Plough_ and tried to work out a plan of
carrying on the wall, by mistake, about fifteen feet further, which was
all it needed. We'd got the foreman on our side, and it looked as if we
should get it done at the council's expense after all, which was hardly
honest, no doubt, in a manner of speaking, though Cap'n Ellis knew
nothing about it.
"But the end came in a way that no wall could have prevented, though it
proved we were right about the old man having set his heart in that
garden. David Copper, the shepherd, saw the whole thing. It happened
about seven o'clock of a fine summer morning, when the downs were all
laid out in little square patches, here a patch of red clover, and there
a patch of yellow mustard, for all the world like a crazy quilt, only
made of flowers, and smelling like Eden garden itself for the dew upon
them.
"It was all still and blue in the sky, and the larks going up around the
dew-ponds and bursting their pretty little hearts for joy that they was
alive, when, just as if the shadow of a hawk had touched them, they all
wheeled off and dropped silent.
"Pretty soon, there was a whirring along the coast, and one of them
air-planes came up, shining like silver in the morning sun. Copper
didn't pay much attention to it at first, for it looked just as
peaceable as any of our own, which he thought it was. Then he sees a
flash, in the middle of Cap'n Ellis's garden, and the overhung piece,
where the little clumps of thrift were, goes rumbling down to the beach,
like as if a big bag of flour had been emptied over the side. The
air-plane circled overhead, and Copper thinks it was trying to hit the
coast-guard station, which was only a few score yards away, though
nobody was there that morning but the coast-guard's wife, and the old
black figurehead in front of it, and there never was any guns there at
any time.
"The next thing Copper saw was Cap'n Ellis running out into what was
left of his garden, with his night-shirt flapping around him, for all
the world like a little white sea-swallow. He runs down with his arms
out, as if he was trying to catch hold of his garden an' save it. Copper
says he never knew whether the old man would have gone over the edge of
the cliff or not. He thinks he would, for he was running wildly. But
before he reached the edge there was another flash and, when the smoke
had cleared, there was no garden or cottage or Cap'n Ellis at all, but
just another big bite taken out of the white chalk coast.
"We found him under about fifteen ton of it down on the beach. The
curious thing was that he was all swathed and shrouded from head to foot
in the flowers of his garden. They'd been twisted all around him,
lavender, and gilly-flowers, and hollyhocks, so that you'd think they
were trying to shield him from harm. P'raps they've all gone with him to
one of them invisible gardens he used to talk about, where he was going
to meet his dead sweetheart.
"They buried him on the sunny side of the churchyard. You can see a bit
of blue sea between the yew trees from where he lies, so he's got his
window still; and there's a very appropriate inscription on his
tombstone:
"_Awake, O north wind, and come, thou south: Blow upon my garden, that
the spices thereof may flow forth._"
XI
THE HAND OF THE MASTER
It was on Christmas Day, 1914, that I received one of the strangest
documents I had ever read. It was in the form of a letter from Jonathan
Martin, who had made himself a torch of ambition and fear to many moths
in London by painting portraits that were certain to be the pictures of
the year, but also certain to reveal all the idiosyncrasies, good and
bad, of their subjects. It was the fashion to call him cynical. In fact,
he was an artist, and a great one.
His unusual power of eliciting unexpected meanings from apparently
meaningless incidents and objects was not confined to his art. In
private conversation, he would often startle you with a sentence that
was like the striking of a match in a dark room. You didn't know that
the room was dark until he spoke; and then, in a flash, mysterious
relationships at which you had never guessed, were established. You
caught a glimpse of an order and a meaning that you had not discerned
before. The aimless thing over which you had barked your shin became a
coal scuttle; the serried row of dark objects that irritated your left
elbow became the works of Shakespeare; and, if you were lucky, you
perhaps discovered the button by which you could switch on the electric
light, and then sit down by the hearth and read of "beauty, making
beautiful old rhyme."