[Illustration: THE HEATH FIRE]
The men at luncheon in Rennie’s Surrey cottage that September day were
discussing, of course, the heat. All agreed it had been exceptional.
But nothing unusual was said until O’Hara spoke of the heath fires.
They had been rather terrific, several in a single day, devouring trees
and bushes, endangering human life, and spreading with remarkable
rapidity. The flames, too, had been extraordinarily high and vehement
for heath fires. And O’Hara’s tone had introduced into the commonplace
talk something new--the element of mystery; it was nothing definite
he said, but manner, eyes, hushed voice and the rest conveyed it. And
it was genuine. What he _felt_ reached the others rather than what he
said. The atmosphere in the little room, with the honeysuckle trailing
sweetly across the open windows, changed; the talk became of a sudden
less casual, frank, familiar; and the men glanced at one another across
the table, laughing still, yet with an odd touch of constraint marking
little awkward, unfilled pauses. Being a group of normal Englishmen,
they disliked mystery; it made them feel uncomfortable; for the things
O’Hara hinted at had touched that kind of elemental terror that lurks
secretly in all human beings. Guarded by ‘culture,’ but never wholly
concealed, the unwelcome thing made its presence known--the hint of
primitive dread that, for instance, great thunder-storms, tidal waves,
or violent conflagrations rouse.
And instinctively they fell at once to discussing the obvious causes of
the fires. The stockbroker, scenting imagination, edged mentally away,
sniffing. But the journalist was full of brisk information, ‘simply
given.’
‘The sun starts them in Canada, using a dewdrop as a lens,’ he said,
‘and an engine’s spark, remember, carries an immense distance without
losing its heat.’
‘But hardly miles,’ said another, who had not been really listening.
‘It’s my belief,’ put in the critic keenly, ‘that a lot were done on
purpose. Bits of live coal wrapped in cloth were found, you know.’ He
was a little, weasel-faced iconoclast, dropping the acid of doubt and
disbelief wherever he went, but offering nothing in the place of what
he destroyed. His head was turret-shaped, lips tight and thin, nose
and chin running to points like gimlets, with which he bored into the
unremunerative clays of life.
‘The general unrest, yes,’ the journalist supported him, and tried to
draw the conversation on to labour questions. But their host preferred
the fire talk. ‘I must say,’ he put in gravely, ‘that some of the
blazes hereabouts were uncommonly--er--queer. They started, I mean, so
oddly. You remember, O’Hara, only last week that suspicious one over
Kettlebury way----?’
It seemed he wished to draw the artist out, and that the artist,
feeling the general opposition, declined.
‘Why seek an unusual explanation at all?’ the critic said at length,
impatiently. ‘It’s all natural enough, if you ask me.’
‘Natural! Oh yes!’ broke in O’Hara, with a sudden vehemence that
betrayed feeling none had as yet suspected; ‘provided you don’t
limit the word to mean only what we understand. There’s nothing
anywhere--unnatural.’
A laugh cut short the threatened tirade, and the journalist expressed
the general feeling with ‘Oh _you_, Jim! You’d see a devil in a
dust-storm, or a fairy in the tea-leaves of your cup!’
‘And why not, pray? Devils and fairies are every bit as true as
formulæ.’
Some one tactfully guided them away from a profitless discussion, and
they talked glibly of the damage done, the hideousness of the destroyed
moors, the gaunt, black, ugly slopes, fifty-foot flames, roaring
noises, and the splendour of the enormous smoke-clouds that had filled
the skies. And Rennie, still hoping to coax O’Hara, repeated tales
the beaters had brought in that crying, as though living things were
caught, had been heard in places, and that some had seen tall shapes of
fire passing headlong through the choking smoke. For the note O’Hara
had struck refused to be ignored. It went on sounding underneath the
commonest remark; and the atmosphere to the end retained that curious
tinge that he had given to it--of the strange, the ominous, the
mysterious and unexplained. Until, at last, the artist, having added
nothing further to the talk, got up with some abruptness and left the
room. He complained briefly that the fever he had suffered from still
bothered him and he would go and lie down a bit. The heat, he said,
oppressed him.
A silence followed his departure. The broker drew a sigh as though
the market had gone up. But Rennie, old, comprehending friend, looked
anxious. ‘Excitement,’ he said, ‘not oppression, is the word he meant.
He’s always a bit strung up when that Black Sea fever gets him. He
brought it with him from Batoum.’ And another brief silence followed.
‘Been with you most of the summer, hasn’t he?’ enquired the journalist,
on the trail of a ‘par,’ ‘painting those wild things of his that
no one understands.’ And their host, weighing a moment how much he
might in fairness tell, replied--among friends it was--‘Yes; and this
summer they have been more--er--wild and wonderful than usual--an
extraordinary rush of colour--splendid schemes, “conceptions,” I
believe you critics call ’em, of fire, as though, in a way, the unusual
heat had possessed him for interpretation.’
The group expressed its desultory interest by uninspired interjections.
‘That was what he meant just now when he said the fires had been
mysterious, required explanation, or something--the way they started,
rather,’ concluded Rennie.
Then he hesitated. He laughed a moment, and it was an uneasy,
apologetic little laugh. How to continue he hardly knew. Also,
he wished to protect his friend from the cheap jeering of
miscomprehension. ‘He is very imaginative, you know,’ he went on,
quietly, as no one spoke. ‘You remember that glorious mad thing he
did of the Fallen Lucifer--driving a star across the heavens till the
heat of the descent set a light to half the planets, scorched the old
moon to the white cinder that she now is, and passed close enough
to earth to send our oceans up in a single jet of steam? Well, this
time--he’s been at something every bit as wild, only truer--finer.
And what is it? Briefly, then, he’s got the idea, it seems, that the
unusual heat from the sun this year has penetrated deep enough--in
places--especially on these unprotected heaths that retain their
heat so cleverly--to reach another kindred expression--to waken a
response--in sympathy, you see--from the central fires of the earth.’
He paused again a moment awkwardly, conscious how clumsily he expressed
it. ‘The parent getting into touch again with its lost child, eh? See
the idea? Return of the Fire Prodigal, as it were?’
His listeners stared in silence, the broker looking his obvious relief
that O’Hara was not on ‘Change, the critic’s eyes glancing sharply down
that pointed, boring nose of his.
‘And the central fires have felt it and risen in response,’ continued
Rennie in a lower voice. ‘You see the idea? It’s big, to say the least.
The volcanoes have answered too--there’s old Etna, the giant of ’em
all, breaking out in fifty new mouths of flame. Heat is latent in
everything, only waiting to be called out. That match you’re striking,
this coffee-pot, the warmth in our bodies, and so on--their heat comes
first from the sun, and is therefore an actual part of the sun, the
origin of all heat and life. And so O’Hara, you know, who sees the
universe as a single homogeneous _One_ and--and--well, I give it up.
Can’t explain it, you see. You must get him to do that. But somehow
this year--cloudless--the protecting armour of water all gone too--the
sun’s rays managed to sink in and reach their kind buried deep below.
Perhaps, later, we may get him to show us the studies that he’s
made--whew!--the most--er--amazing things you ever saw!’
The ‘superiority’ of unimaginative minds was inevitable, making Rennie
regret that he had told so much. It was almost as if he had been untrue
to his friend. But at length the group broke up for the afternoon. They
left messages for O’Hara. Two motored, and the journalist took the
train. The critic followed his sharp nose to London, where he might
ferret out the failures that his mind delighted in. And when they were
gone the host slipped quickly upstairs to find his friend. The heat was
unbearable to suffocation, the little bedroom like an oven. But Jim
O’Hara was not in it.
* * * * *
For, instead of lying down as he had said, a fierce revolt, stirred by
the talk of those unvisioned minds below, had wakened, and the deep,
sensitive, poet’s soul in him had leaped suddenly to the acceptance of
an impossible thing. He had escaped, driven forth by the secret call of
wonder. He made full speed for the destroyed moors. Fever or no fever,
he must see for himself. Did no one understand? Was he the only one?...
Walking quickly, he passed the Frensham Ponds, came through that spot
of loneliness and beauty, the Lion’s Mouth, noting that even there
the pool of water had dried up and the rushes waved in the hot air
over a bed of hard, caked mud, and so reached within the hour the wide
expanse of Thursley Common. On every side the world stretched dark and
burnt, a cemetery of cinders. Great thrills rushed through his heart;
and with the power of a tide that yet came at flashing speed the truth
rose up in him.... Half running now, he plunged forward another mile
or two, and found himself, the only living thing, amid the great waste
of heather-land. The blazing sunlight drenched it. It lay, a sheet of
weird dark beauty, spreading like a black, enormous garden as far as
the eye could reach.
Then, breathless, he paused and looked about him. Within his heart
something, long smouldering, ran into sudden flame. Light blazed
upon his inner world. For as the scorch of vehement passion may
quicken tracts of human consciousness that lie ordinarily inert and
unproductive, so here the surface of the earth had turned alive. He
knew; he saw; he understood.
Here, in these open sun-traps that gathered and retained the heat, the
fire of the Universe had dropped and lain, increasing week by week.
These parched, dry months, the soil, free from rejecting and protective
moisture, had let it all accumulate till at length it had sunk
downwards, inwards, and the sister fires below, responding to the touch
of their ancient parent source, too long unfelt, had answered with a
swift uprising roar. They had come up with answering joy, and here and
there had actually reached the surface, and had leaped out with dancing
cry, wild to escape from an age-long prison back to their huge, eternal
origin.
This sunshine, ah! what was it? These farthing dips of heat men
complained about in their tiny, cage-like houses! It scorched the grass
and fields, yes; but the surface never held it long enough to let it
sink to union with its kindred of the darker fires beneath! These
cried for it, but union was ever denied and stifled by the weight of
cooled and cooling rock. And the ages of separation had almost cooled
remembrance too--fire--the kiss and strength of fire--the flaming
embrace and burning lips of the father sun himself.... He could have
cried with the fierce delight of it all, and the picture he would
paint rose there before him, burnt gloriously into the canvas of the
entire heavens. Was not his own heat and life also from the sun?...
He stared about him in the deep silence of the afternoon. The world was
still. It basked in the windless heat. No living thing stirred, for
the common forms of life had fled away. Earth waited. He, too, waited.
And then some touch of intuition, blown to white heat, supplied the
link the pedestrian intellect missed, and he knew that what he waited
for was on the way. For he would _see_. The message he should paint
would come before his outer eye as well, though not, as he had first
stupidly expected, on some grand, enormous scale. Rather would it be
the equivalent of that still, small voice that once had inspired an
entire nation....
The wind passed very softly across the unburnt patch of heather where
he lay; he heard it rustling in the skeletons of scorched birch trees,
and in the gorse and furze bushes that the flame had left so ghostly
pale. Farther off it sang in the isolated pines, dying away like surf
upon some far-off reef. He smelt the bitter perfume of burnt soil, the
pungent, acrid odour of beaten ashes. The purple-black of the moors
yawned like openings in the side of the earth. In all directions for
miles stretched the deep emptiness of the heather-lands, an immense,
dark, magic garden, still black with the feet of wonder that had
flown across it and left it so beautifully scarred. The shadow of the
terrible embrace still trailed and lingered as though Midnight had
screened a time of passion with this curtain of her softest plumes.
And _they_ had called it ugly, had spoken of its marred beauty, its
hideousness! He laughed exultantly as he drank it in, for the weird
and savage splendour everywhere broke loose and spread, passing from
the earth into the receptive substance of his own mind. Even the roots
of gorse and heather, like petrified, shadow-eating snakes, charged
with the mystery of that eternal underworld whence they had risen, lay
waiting for the return of the night of sleep whence Fire had wakened
them. Lost ghosts of a salamander army that the flame had swept above
the ground, they lay anguished and frightened in the glare of the
unaccustomed sun....
And waiting, he stared about him in the deep silence of the afternoon.
Hazy with distance he saw the peak of Crooksbury, dim in its sheet of
pines, waving a blue-plumed crest into the sky for signal; and close
about him rose the more sombre glory of the lesser knolls and boulders,
still cloaked in the swarthy magic of the smoke. Amid pools of ashes in
the nearer hollows he saw the blue beauty of the fire-weed that rushes
instantly into life behind all conflagrations. It was blowing softly
in the wind. And here and there, set like emeralds upon some dusky
bosom, lay the brilliant spires of young bracken that rose to clap a
thousand tiny hands in the heart of exquisite desolation. In a cloud of
green they rustled in the wind above the sea of black.... And so within
himself O’Hara realised the huge excitement of the flame this fragment
of the earth had felt. For Fire, mysterious symbol of universal life,
spirit that prodigally gives itself without itself diminishing, had
passed in power across this ancient heather-land, leaving the soul of
it all naked and unashamed. The sun had loved it. The fires below had
risen up and answered. They had known that union with their source
which some call death....
And the fires were rising still. The poet’s heart in him became
suddenly and awfully aware. Ye stars of fire! This patch of unburnt
heather where he lay had been untouched as yet, but now the flame in
his soul had brought the little needed link and he would _see_. The
thing of wonder that the Universe should teach him how to paint was
already on the way. Called by the sun, tremendous, splendid parent, the
central fires were still rising.
And he turned, weakness and exultation racing for possession of him.
The wind passed softly over his face, and with it came a faint, dry
sound. It was distant and yet close beside him. At the stir of it there
rose also in himself a strange vast thing that was bigger than the
bulk of the moon and wide as the extension of swept forests, yet small
and gentle as a blade of grass that pricks the lawn in spring. And he
realised then that ‘within’ and ‘without’ had turned one, and that
over the entire moorland arrived this thing that was happening too in
a white-hot point of his own heart. He was linked with the sun and the
farthest star, and in his little finger glowed the heat and fire of the
universe itself. In sympathy _his own fires were rising too_.
The sound was born--a faint, light noise of crackling in the heather
at his feet. He bent his head and searched, and among the obscure and
tiny underways of the roots he saw a tip of curling smoke rise slowly
upwards. It moved in a thin, blue spiral past his face. Then terror
took him that was like a terror of the mountains, yet with it at the
same time a realisation of beauty that made the heart leap within him
into dazzling radiance. For the incense of this fairy column of thin
smoke drew his soul out with it--upwards towards its source. He rose to
his feet, trembling....
He watched the line rise slowly to the sky and vanish into blue. The
whole expanse of blackened heather-land watched too. Wind sank away;
the sunshine dropped to meet it. A sense of deep expectancy, profound
and reverent, lay over all that sun-baked moor; and the entire sweep of
burnt world about him knew with joy that what was taking place in that
wee, isolated patch of Surrey heather was the thing the Hebrew mystic
knew when the Soul of the Universe became manifest in the bush that
burned, yet never was consumed. In that faint sound of crackling, as he
stood aside to listen and to watch, O’Hara knew a form of the eternal
Voice of Ages. There was no flame, but it seemed to him that all his
inner being passed in fiery heat outwards towards its source.... He saw
the little patch of dried-up heather sink to the level of the black
surface all about it--a sifted pile of delicate, pale-blue ashes. The
tiny spiral vanished; he watched it disappear, winding upwards out of
sight in a little ghostly trail of beauty. So small and soft and simple
was this wonder of the world. It was gone. And something in himself had
broken, dropped in ashes, and passed also outwards like a tiny mounting
flame.
* * * * *
But the picture O’Hara had thought himself designed to paint was never
done. It was not even begun. The great canvas of ‘The Fire Worshipper’
stood empty on the easel, for the artist had not strength to lift
a brush. Within two days the final breath passed slowly from his
lips. The strange fever that so perplexed the doctor by its rapid
development and its fury took him so easily. His temperature was
extraordinary. The heat, as of an internal fire, fairly devoured him,
and the smile upon his face at the last--so Rennie declared--was the
most perplexingly wonderful thing he had ever seen. ‘It was like a
great, white flame,’ he said.