XV

That journey he made with this ‘child of Nature’ among the dripping

trees and along soaked paths was one that Eliot never forgot. For him

its meaning was unmistakable. His early life again supplied a parallel.

He had once seen a wretched man marched out of camp with two days’

rations to shift for himself in the wilderness as best he might,--a

prisoner convicted of treachery, but whose life was spared on the

chance that he might redeem it, or die in the attempt. He had seen

it done by redskins, he had seen it done by white. And hanging had

been better. Yet the crime--stealing a horse, or sneaking another’s

‘grub-stakes’--was one that civilisation punishes with a paltry fine,

or condones daily as permissible ‘business acumen.’

In primitive conditions it was a crime against the higher law. It was

sinning against Nature. And Nature never is deceived.

Richard Eliot was now being drummed out of camp. And the child who led

him, mischief in her eyes and the joy of forbidden pleasure in her

heart, was all unconscious of the awful rôle she played. Yet it was she

who as well had pleaded for his life and saved him.

Nature turned him out; the Place rejected him; and Mánya saw him safely

to the confines of that wilderness of houses, ugliness, commercial

desolation where he must wander till he re-made his soul or lost it

altogether.

They cautiously opened the front door, and the damp air rushed to meet

them.

‘Hush!’ he repeated, closing it carefully behind him. But the child was

already upon the lawn. Beyond her, dark blots against the sky, rose

the massed outline of the little pointed hills. There were no stars

anywhere, though the clouds were breaking into thinning troops; but it

was not too dark to see, for a moon watched them somewhere from her

place of hiding. The air was warm and very sweet, left breathing by the

storm.

‘Hush, Mánya!’ he whispered again, ill at ease to see her go. She ran

back, her feet inaudible upon the thick, wet lawn, and took his hand.

‘We’ll go by the Piney Valley,’ she said, assuming leadership. And he

made no objection, though this was the direction of the sample pits. It

led also, he remembered, to the Mill--the spot where she who had left

him in charge had gone upon her long long journey.

They went forward side by side. The wind below them hummed gently in

the tree-tops, but it did not reach their faces. The whole wet world

lay breathing softly about them, exhausted by the tempest. It was very

still. It watched them pass. There was no effort to detain them. And in

Dick Eliot’s heart was a pain that searched him like a pain of death

itself.

But his companion, he now clearly realised, was merely the child

again--eerie, wonderful, eldritch, but still the little Mánya that

he knew so well. Mischief was in her heart, and the excitement of

unlawful adventure in her blood; but nothing more. The vast obsessing

Entity that had constituted her judge and executioner was now entirely

gone. He was spared the added shame of knowing that she realised what

she did.

Sometimes she left his side, to come back presently with a little

rush of pleasurable alarm. He was uncertain whether he liked best her

going from him or her sudden return. Their tread was now muffled by

the needles as they went slowly down the pathways of the Piney Valley.

The occasional snapping of small twigs alone betrayed their movements.

Heavy branches, soaked like sponges, splashed showers on the ground

when their shoulders brushed them in passing, and drops fell of their

own weight with mysterious little thuds like footsteps everywhere about

them in the woods.

Mánya dived away from his side. She came back sometimes in front of

him and sometimes behind. He never quite knew where she was. His mind,

indeed, neglected her, for his thoughts were concentrated within

himself. Her movements were the movements of a block of shadow,

shifting here and there like shadows of trees and clouds in faint

moonlight.

‘Uncle, tell me one thing,’ he heard with a start, as she suddenly

stood in front of him across the narrow pathway, and so close that he

nearly bumped against her. ‘Isn’t there something here that’s angry

with you? Something you’ve done wrong to?’

‘Hush, child! Don’t say such things!’ He felt the shiver run through

him. He pushed her forward with his hands.

‘But they’re being said--all round us. Uncle, don’t you hear them?’ she

insisted.

‘I’ve always loved the Place. We’ve always been happy here together.’

He whispered it, as though a terror was in him lest it should be

overheard and--contradicted.

Her answer flabbergasted him. Her intuitions were so uncannily direct

and piercing.

‘That’s what I meant. You’ve been unkind. You’ve hurt it.’

‘Mánya,’ he repeated severely, ‘you must not say such things. And you

must not think them.’

‘I’m so awfully sorry, Uncle Dick,’ she said softly in the dark, and

promptly kissed him. The kiss went like a stab into his heart.

Then she was gone again, and he caught her light footstep several yards

in front, as though a shower of drops had fallen on the needles.

‘Uncle,’ came her voice again close beside him. She stood on tiptoe

and pulled his ear down to the level of her lips. ‘Hold my hand tight.

We’re coming near now.’ She was curiously excited.

‘To the Mill?’ he asked, knowing quite well she meant another thing.

‘No, to the pits the men dug,’ she answered, nestling in against him,

while his own voice echoed faintly, ‘Yes, the sample pits.’ He felt

like passing the hostile outposts of the Camp who would shoot him but

for the presence of the appointed escort.

A sigh of lonely wind went past them with its shower of drops. And

these little hands of wind with their fingers of sweet rain helped

forward his expulsion. The empty wilderness beyond lay waiting for his

soul. It heard him coming.

And a curious, deep revelation of the child’s state of mind then rushed

suddenly upon him. He knew that she expected something. And her answer

to the question he put explained his own thought to himself.

‘What is it you expect, Mánya?’ he had asked unwisely.

‘Not _expect_ exactly, Uncle, for that would be the wrong way. But I

_know_.’

And several kinds of fear shot through him as he heard it, for the

words lifted a veil and let him see into her mind a moment. She

had said another of her profoundly mystical truths. Expectation,

anticipation, he divined, would provide a mould for what was coming,

would give it shape, but yet not quite its natural shape. To anticipate

keenly meant to attract too quickly: to force. The expectant desire

would coax what was coming into an unnatural form that might be

dreadful because not quite true. Let the thing approach in its own way,

uninvited by imaginative dread. Let it come upon them as it would,

deciding its own shape of arrival. To expect was to invite distortion.

This flashed across him behind her simple words.

‘You fearful child!’ he whispered, forcing an unnatural little laugh.

‘The soft, wet, sticky things, half yellow and half white,’ she began,

resenting his laughter, ‘always moving, and never looking twice the

same----’

Then, before he could stop her, she stopped of her own accord.

She clutched his arm. He understood that it was the closeness of

the thing that had inspired the atrocious words. She held his arm

so tightly that it hurt. They stood in the presence of others than

themselves.

Yet these Others had not _come_ to them. The movement of approach was

not really movement at all. It was a condition in himself had altered

so that he knew. Out here the veil had thinned a little, as it had

thinned in the room an hour ago. And he saw space otherwise. This Power

that in humanity lies normally inarticulate was breaking through. In

the room its language had been a stammer; it was a stammer now. Or,

in the terms of sight, it was a little fragment utterly inexplicable

by itself, since the entire universe is necessary for its complete

expression.

Yet Eliot did perceive the enormous thing behind--the thing to which he

had been unfaithful by prostituting his first original love. And the

fact that it was interwoven with his ordinary little human feelings at

the same time only added to the bewilderment of its stupendous reality.

He saw for a fleeting moment just as Mánya saw--from her immediate

point of view.

‘It’s here,’ she whispered, in a voice that sounded most oddly

everywhere; ‘it’s here, the angry thing you’ve hurt.’

On either side of the path, where the heather-land came close, he saw

the openings the men had dug--pale, luminous patches of whitish yellow.

Between the bushy tufts they shone faintly gleaming against the night.

Perspective, in that instant, became the merest trick of sight, a

trivial mental jugglery. That slope of coal-black moor actually was

extraordinarily near. The tree-tops were just as well beneath his feet,

or he stood among their roots. Either was true. There was neither up

nor down. The sky was in his hands, a little thing; or the stars and

moon hid washed within the current of his blood. Size was illusion, as

relative as time. No object in itself had any ‘size’ at all. He saw her

universe, all true, as ever, but from another point of view. And the

entire Place ran down here to a concentrated point. The sample pits

pressed close against his face.

‘The pits,’ she whispered, with a sound of wind and water in her breath.

So, for a moment, he saw from the point of view whence Mánya always

saw. He and the child and the Spirit of the Place stood side by

side on that narrow shelf of darkness, sharing a joint and absolute

comprehension. Her elemental aspect became his own, for his inner

eye was against the peephole through which her Behind-the-Scenes was

visible. He realised a new thing, grand as a field of stars.

For the Place here focussed almost into sentiency. Those slow moving

forces that stir to growth in crystals, waken and breathe in plants,

and first in the animal world know consciousness, here moved vast and

inchoate, through the structure of the dream-estate he owned. Yet moved

not blind and inarticulate. For the stress of some impulse, normally

undivined by men, urged them towards articulate expression. Here was

reaction approximate to those reactions of the nervous cells which

in their ultimate result men call emotions. And this irresistible

correspondence between the two appalled him.

The raw material of definite sensation here poured loose and terrible

about him from the ground. In them, moreover, was anger, protest,

warning, and a menacing resentment--all directed against his mean,

insignificant being. From these sample pits issued the menace and the

warning, just as literally as there issued from them also the soft,

white clay that would degrade the immemorial beauty he had once thought

he loved with a clean, pure love. The pits were wounds. They drew

all the feelings of the injured Place into the tenderness of sentient

organs.

But behind the threatening anger he recognised a softer passion too.

There was a sadness, a deep yearning, and a searching melancholy as

well, that seemed to bear witness to his rejection with a sighing as of

the sea and wood and hills.

And here, doubtless, came in the interweaving of his own little human

emotions. For an overpowering sorrow soaked his heart and mind. The

judgment that found him wanting woke all his stores of infinite regret.

It would have been better for him had he found that millstone which can

save the soul, because it removes temptation.

‘It is too late,’ breathed round him in three weeping voices that

passed out between his lips as a single cry together. ‘It is too late.’

Yet nothing happened; that is, he saw nothing--nothing translatable by

any words that he could find. Time dwindled and expanded curiously.

The past ran on before him, and the future grouped itself behind his

back. The seconds and minutes which men tick off from the apparent

movement of the sun gave place to some condition within himself where

they lay gathered for ever into the circle of the Present. He remembers

no actual sequence of acts or movements. Duration drew its horns back

into a single point.... It is sure, however, that these two human

beings marched presently on. They steadily became disentangled from

the spot, and somehow or other moved away from the staring pits. For

Eliot, looking back, recalls that it felt like walking past the mouths

of loaded cannon; also that the pits watched them out of sight as

portraits follow a moving figure with their expressionless stare. He

thinks that he looked straight before him as he went. He is sure no

single word was spoken--until they left the trees behind and emerged

into the open. The Mill, the old, familiar building, was the thing

that first restored him to a normal world again. He saw its outline,

humped and black, shouldering its way against the sky. He heard the

water running under the wheel. But even the Mill, like a hooded figure,

turned its face away. It expressed the melancholy of a multitude. And

the woods were everywhere full of tears.

Mánya, he realised then beside him, was making the humming sound of the

water that flowed beneath that motionless wheel. Her voice became the

voice of the Place--the undifferentiated sound of Nature. It was the

voice of dismissal and farewell. Here was the Gateway through which his

soul passed out into the Wilderness.

He involuntarily stooped down to feel her, and she lifted her face up

in the darkness and kissed him. But it was across a barrier that she

kissed him. He already stood outside.

* * * * *

And half an hour later they were indoors again and the house was still.

Mánya slept as soundly as the placid Fräulein Bühlke or the motherly

Mrs. Coove doubtless also slept.

But he lay battling with strange thoughts for hours. Night and the

wind were oddly mingled with them; water, hills, and masses of strong

landscape too. They rose before his mind’s eye in a giant panorama,

endlessly moving past beneath huge skies, and visible against a pale

background of luminous, yellowish white. It had strange movements of

its own, this yellowish background, like the swaying of a curtain

on the stage; and sometimes it surged forwards with a smothering

sweep that enveloped everything of beauty he had ever known. It then

obliterated the world. Stars were extinguished; scenery turned to soil.

The Spectre of the Clay he had invoked possessed the Place.

He lay there frightened in his sleepless bed and saw the dawn--a

helpless little mortal, destroyed by his faithlessness and breach

of trust. And all night long there lay outside, yet watching him,

something else that equally never slept--agile, alert, unconquerable.

Only it was no longer _disturbed_. For its purpose was accomplished. It

had turned him out.

And it is not necessary to tell how John Casanova Murdoch soon

thereafter took the work in hand and developed the Place, as he

expressed it, ‘without a hitch.’ For John C. had made no promises of

love; nor had he pretended to establish with Nature that intimate

relationship of trust and worship which invokes the spiritual laws.

Nature took no note of him, for he worked frankly with her, and his

motive, if not exalted, was at least a pure one. And the Clay, as he

phrased it a little later in his expressive Western lingo, soon was

‘paying hand over fist. The money was pouring in--more money than you

could shake a stick at!’