Close, over the bridge, below which the big trout lie, and into the path
through the water-meadows, the two tawny streaks cutting figures like a
swallow’s flight up and down the road, running at top speed just for the
joy of the life that was in them. And once clear of the town, she looked
furtively round, saw only one wayfarer a hundred yards behind, and ran
too. The wayfarer quickened his pace, ready to drop into a sedate walk
if she looked round. Then on the edge of the water she found a stick,
and, whistling to the dogs, threw it clean across the river, and a
double plunge and splash of flying spray followed it. Then the streaks
swam back, each holding an end of the beloved stick, dropped it at her
feet, and, one on each side of her, shook themselves, so that she was
between the waters, and I heard a faint scream of dismay and then a
laugh. My house stands in the road close beyond the end of the meadows,
but she went on, and still I followed, past the group of labourers’
cottages, where lights were already springing up beneath the dark
thatch, and out on to the main-road. And at that moment I guessed where
she would go. Yes, to that house--no other--the house where Margery
lived, the house which was the scene of my dark dreams in August last.
The collies rudely pushed their way in before her, after the manner of
their impulsive kind, and the door was shut.
I was dining that evening with some people in the town, and met there an
old friend of mine who lives a mile or two from here, who has usually
some fault to find with me. She had this evening.
‘You are a perfect disgrace,’ she said. ‘We consider you an old
inhabitant of the town, and yet when new and charming people come you
cannot find the civility even to leave a card.’
‘I am sorry,’ said I penitently. ‘Who are they? You know, I have been
away.’
‘Well, they are coming here to-night,’ she said.
‘My dear lady, _who_ are coming here to-night?’
Then the door opened, and they came, father and daughter.
This afternoon I went up the dark road of my dreams to call. She had
said they would not be in till nearly six, and it was already deep dusk
when I reached the house, which stood a black blot against the gray sky.
But the window over the porch was lit and open, and the blind drawn
down over it, and from inside came a voice singing. I was admitted, but
the hall was dark, and as the servant was feeling for the button of the
electric light, a step passed along the passage at the head of the
stairs and began to descend, and it was a step that caught my ear with a
strangely familiar sound. Then halfway down, even at the moment the
light was turned up, it paused, and a voice said, ‘Oh! is there
somebody?’ and in the sudden blaze I saw her, and the passages were dark
no longer.
‘Ah, it’s you,’ she said; ‘how nice of you to come! Oh, I’ve left the
dogs shut up. Please go into the drawing-room; I’ll be there in a
moment.’
So I turned up the hall, to the right, and through the little
sitting-room into the drawing-room beyond. She came in a moment
afterwards.
‘How did you know where the drawing-room was?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it the
most inconveniently built house you ever saw?’
‘The most,’ said I; ‘but I know it well. There was a great friend of
mine who used to live here----’
She looked up suddenly.
‘Dick, do you mean,’ she asked, ‘who was killed in South Africa? He was
a distant cousin of mine.’
‘Then his wife was, too?’ said I.
‘Yes, I believe so. Why?’
‘It partly accounts for it.’
‘Accounts for what?’ she said.
‘That you are absolutely the living image of her.’
She laughed again.
‘Oh dear! it is a terrible responsibility to be like an old acquaintance
of somebody’s. I shall have to live up to her. I do hope she wasn’t very
nice. It will be so difficult for me if she was.’
‘She and Dick were the greatest friends I ever had,’ said I.
Those beautiful gray eyes grew serious.
‘Ah, how dreadful for you!’ she said. ‘It was all very sudden, was it
not? The child, too!’
‘Yes, very sudden. I had been dining with her here, and she had gone
upstairs when the telegram came. She heard the ring, and leaned over
the banisters above the hall, and knew. Then the child was born. She
died just at day-break next morning. She asked me, I remember, to pull
up the blind, and said, “Let in the morning.” That was all.’
‘Ah, poor thing--poor thing!’ she said. Then she looked up at me: ‘Poor
thing!’ she repeated.
The tea was brought in, and before many minutes her father came in also.
They are coming to lunch to-morrow.
That night I was out to dinner, but came home early and sat for a long
time in front of the fire, with work calling on me to do it, but simply
incapable. What a strange, inexplicable coincidence it all is! How I
long for, and dread, and love, and fear, the thought of these days that
are coming! Surely this is meant to mean something! Think of the
millions of little events and decisions which have gone to make up this
particular conjuncture. Is it possible that they were all done in
haphazard? Or is it another teasing problem that has been set me on the
curious chequer-board of life, ending in my checkmate? just a piece of
ingenious manœuvring of the pieces, all leading to nothing? I cannot
believe that. Yet if it is not that, if love is the answer to it all....
I love to be with her, and since that afternoon in the cathedral I have
thought of nothing but her. But love her? I know it is not that--yet. It
is, that, by this curious trick which Nature has played, I feel--I am
cheated into feeling--that Margery is here with me again. It is as if
there had been made an image of Margery, like in every respect, not only
in externals, in voice, appearance, gesture, but in the deeper things as
well--in her gaiety, her tenderness, and in that quick sympathy which
sprang into being at the moment the call was made. Yet God never makes
facsimiles; she, too, is a living soul, of her own identity, and none
other’s. Or--the wildest impossibilities riot in my brain to-night--is
this some wraith of my Margery--Dick’s Margery--sent, God knows from
where, to comfort me or to drive me insane? Was there in my love for
Margery, after she was Dick’s wife, something which was evil, which kept
suggesting, ‘If this had been otherwise--if Dick died?’... Yes, there
was that. Day after day there was that. I tried to fight it--indeed I
tried. But I did not conquer it for a whole year. But in June, on the
last evening of all, when she spoke to me in the garden of the dear
event that was coming, it dropped dead, or so I hoped and believed. Yet
for a whole year I let it live: is God going to punish me for that by
these cruel means? To make me love again, and again go hungry?
It cannot be; again and again I tell myself it cannot be. But so I told
myself when the telegram of Dick’s death came, and in spite of all my
telling it was true, and the tears of the whole world could not wash out
a word of it. But if once more I am to go unrequited, I do not see how I
can bear it. It would be wiser to see no more of this incarnation of
Margery. At present I love seeing her, because--because that pressed and
withered flower I always carry with me has, so to speak, blushed again
with the hues of life, and a living fragrance breathes from it. But
Helen--I think I have not mentioned her name before--this incarnation of
Margery, is also a living woman, with an identity of her own. How if
from loving her of whom she so sweetly and poignantly reminds me I pass
to loving the woman herself? And if she does not care?
No, I will see her no more. My life is my own, and I will not risk that
great stake again. I know the unutterable sweetness of loving. I know,
too, the unutterable emptiness of love unrequited, even though from her
who loved me not I had such a wealth of tender and womanly affection. I
know also how good the world is, how full and brimming with things that
are lovely and of good report. For two years, in spite of what went
before, God knows how much happiness I have been allowed to enjoy, how
rich I have been, levying my tax of joy on all created things, finding
music in all the strings of human emotions except one only--love,
definite love for one woman. It is strange if I cannot be content
without it. True, often and often I have felt, and shall feel again,
that this would crown all the rest; but if I again do my part in it, let
myself love this girl, and nothing comes of it, how well I know with
what a sense of dejection and impotence I shall have to begin again from
the beginning, picking up the scattered pieces of the structure known as
‘I,’ fitting them together till some sort of coherent entity, a person
of some kind, again pursues some sort of reasonable way through the
world! And I distrust my own power of picking myself up again; I am
afraid that this time I should let the pieces lie about, shrug shoulders
at them, and drift, fossilize, vegetate, what you will.
Bitterness as black as sin and salt as the Dead Sea rises in my throat.
What would I not give to see a mother with her child--my child--at her
breast? How unspeakably I long for that! Was it my fault that Margery
loved Dick, not me? Very good, it was my fault. I have borne the
punishment, and I bear it now, and I shall always bear it; and I will
try to avoid the possibility of being punished for another such fault.
* * * * *
So I fall back again on my life of little things. I will read the whole
of Shakespeare through by next March; I will know a little more about
gardening by next spring; I will try to keep my temper; I will try to do
a little honest work at a book I am engaged on; I will try, dancing here
with the rest of the human race, like a swarm of flies in the sunlight,
or, if you will, like worms in the dust, not to sting and wriggle; and I
will try not to behave again as I behaved this morning, in this manner,
to wit:
A small boy ‘does’ the shoes, boots, and knives of this establishment.
He is blessed with sky-scraping spirits and a piercing whistle. He likes
taking the boots up to my bedroom, because he slides down the banisters
afterwards. I have frequently told him not to. This morning he whistled
so loudly and continuously that I told myself it disturbed me, though,
as a matter of fact, it did not, and I knew it. But without effort
almost I worked myself into a fume of nagging ill-temper over it.
Shortly after I heard him taking the boots up to my bedroom, and
deliberately, like a spy, went to the door of the room where I was
working, and held it ajar so that I might catch him sliding down the
banisters. I was gorgeously successful, stood before him as he landed at
the bottom with a face of April, and looked at him with an odious and
baleful countenance till April fled. I wrung from him the admission that
he had often been told not to do this, and assured him that if he could
not remember it was perfectly easy for me to find someone who could.
Then I went back to work again with a sort of fiendish pleasure at
having spoiled somebody’s happiness, though it was only a boot-boy’s.
There was no more whistling from downstairs, and I congratulated myself
on having secured tranquillity also at one fell swoop.
But after awhile the fiend within me, satiated, I suppose, by its
brilliant achievement, dozed a little, and I felt simply sick at heart.
Here was the worm in the dust stinging in its tiny, infinitesimal way,
but with what infinity of malice! I would have given a great deal to
have heard that shrill, unmelodious whistle strike up again, but it did
not. Dead silence all morning. Then at lunch--coals of fire on my
head--the knives winked with resplendence and cut like razors. Yet by
the silly nature of things I cannot go into the boot-place and say I am
sorry. I had told him again and again not to slide down the banisters--I
had indeed. But if he does not whistle to-morrow morning I shall have to
raise his wages.
That is another thing, then, I propose to cease doing by next
March--that is to say, to cease transgressing against the supreme and
perfect law of kindness and gentleness. I do not mean that I will have
any sliding down the banisters, for I will not; but, on the other hand,
I will not have myself, especially in little things, behaving like a
cross-grained fiend. I could have stopped the banisters business without
that, while, on the other hand, it would have been infinitely better all
round that he should have continued to slide down the banister from morn
till eve, than that I should have wished and intended (and succeeded
therein) to spoil a child’s happiness, if only for a morning, though it
was in consequence of a direct act of disobedience, which I am perfectly
right in resenting. And this is the supreme and perfect law of kindness.
* * * * *
It seems as if these golden days of sparkling sunshine and nights of
clear frost will never end, but rise and still rise as out of some great
well of light. Never do I remember such a November--windless, exquisite,
so that the glory of scarlet leaf, usually so swiftly gone and
evanescent, scattered into ruin by an hour’s wind, still flames in this
long-drawn sunset of the year. Prey as I always am to the exaltations
and depressions of the weather, it seems to me that I am living in some
fairy story, as if the wicked witch who squirts the fogs and damps over
the world was dead, and the good fairy of clear skies, though she cannot
put the clock of the months back to summer, had allowed the seasons to
stand still at this beautiful moment, to make up to us a little for all
that we have suffered at the hands of the wicked witch. Everything has
paused, and in those affairs which chiefly concern me there is a pause
too--exquisite, golden. How the pause will end I cannot tell--in
sounding ruin of rain, or the bursting of spring instead of the clasp of
winter. All I know is that before long I shall find that the pause is
over, and on that day I shall be sitting in fallen darkness, idly
fingering in the palpable dusk the broken fragments of myself that lie
round me; or even in this November I shall go out into the fields and
find that, instead of the icy hand of winter gripping them, it will be
spring instead. For the winter will be passed, and the flowers appear on
the earth; the time of singing birds is come. Arise, my love, my fair
one, and come away.
Yes, it is even so, and I, who, a few nights ago only, determined to
keep aloof from all possibility of this, preferring to stifle and drown
the best of one’s nature, for fear of being thrown out of gear as
regards the second best, am led captive, glorying in the chain which,
please God, I shall never be able to break. How witless and impotent is
man, how futile and unreasonable all his reasonings, when love, like
dawn, lights with rosy feet on his dark horizons, and the morning mists
of all the schemes he has made, all rules and designs of life, vanish
and have never been.
For what was I trying to do? To turn this garden of the Lord into a
desert, to withdraw light from the day, love from life; when, had I
known, it is love which turns the desert into the garden, into the home
of one’s soul.
‘And thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness,
The wilderness were Paradise enow.’
How did it happen? How did it happen? Ah, it is because we do not know
that it is so exquisite.
But the manner of it was this:
They came, as you know, to lunch some three days ago, and I dined there
next day, though I had made up my mind, as you also know, not to see her
again. That was my plan, and the sweet rain of blows battered it down
and crushed it with supreme and certain suddenness. One moment--it was
after dinner, I remember, and we were playing cards--I was looking at
her, seeing in every line of her face that friend whom I had lost, and
the next she looked up, and in her eye there sat, not Margery nor
another, but Helen, wraith no longer, but herself. And as at that
moment, now three years ago, when Margery, with the sun kindling her
hair, said, ‘It’s going in; what a darling!’ even so now I surrendered;
I gave up all I had or was. The moment was to me so tremendous that I
felt as if the whole world must know it. But even she did not know it,
for she smiled and said, ‘I think there must be another in,’ and played
the thirteenth card, losing the game for herself and me.
Is it not prosaic that I remember that? Yes, if you wish, but it is just
that prosaicness which makes the romance of life, the intertwining of
the common little everyday affairs with the great lords of romance, Love
and Death, who by their presence lift life entire into their domain, so
that nothing is common or commonplace.
That night, as I walked home, it seemed to me that never before had
Margery been so close to me. Do you know how sometimes you can almost
_hear_ a voice you are familiar with, so that it seems as if the person
to whom it belongs had just spoken? It was so with me. Each moment it
seemed as if she had just said something to me, and I waited and waited
for what she should say next. Each moment I expected to see her walking
by me, her arm in mine, as we had walked together in the garden the
evening before she died. She knew, I must believe, what had happened,
and, like the dear friend she always was, she came to tell me, as far as
the laws of her world permitted, that she was glad. Yet some immense
but subtle change had come over our relations; less dear she could not
be, but I no longer ached for her. And that, too, I think she knew, and
at that also she was glad.
Again that night I sat long by the fire, where those visions and inhuman
schemes of self-isolation and petty mediocrity had beset me a few
evenings ago. How infinitesimal had been their scope, and, thank God,
how futile they proved! Like some timid child, my soul had sat shivering
on the brink of the great ocean of human life, not daring to put out,
distrusting the frail vessel which should carry it towards the golden
island which no man can reach unless he adventures. Even then the golden
gleam shone on me; I saw the bright shining of those shores, and turned
my face earthwards, saying that it was good to play with the shells and
seaweed on the beach. Every day those waters which divide us from the
golden island are thick with sails; every day hundreds of happy
adventurers land on its shores; every day, too, hundreds are
shipwrecked. But for me the wind beckons, my vessel flaps its sail, and
though I do not cast away the shells and seaweeds I have gathered, I put
them in my locker and think no more of them just now. The tide favours:
my vessel tugs its chain, and I put out.
DECEMBER
Snow over all, and it is summer. Frost binds the icy fields, and in my
heart every nightingale in the world makes melody. The bare trees are
hung with icicles, and a shrill wind whistles through them; yet to me
they are the green habitations of mating birds, and in the hedgerows,
with their mask of snow where the wind has drifted it, are the nests of
the hedge-sparrows with the blue eggs that reflect the skies of April.
December! Was there ever such a December? All the honey of the summer,
all the warmth of the long days, all the mellow autumn, all the promise
of spring, is gathered here into one sheaf--the sheaf that we put in the
chancel at the harvest festival, symbol of offering, symbol of the
fruitful, kindly earth offering in kind to the Lord of the harvest.
Did you see the sun to-day about eleven in the morning come suddenly out
through parted clouds and shine on the great fields of virgin snow? He
came on purpose to see me. Did you see the maddened whirl of the
snow-flakes in the afternoon flying in eddies through the air? They were
dancing together at my party. I engaged them to dance. They did it well,
did they not? Did you hear the cathedral bells ringing this afternoon,
sounding dim and deep through the snow? They were also my guests.
Everything in the world to-day was my guest, and stars were ranged on my
ceiling, and the Pleiades lay in my hand, and close by my heart there
lay the moon, and it was not cold, as it looks, but warm.
Day after day and all day, night after night and all night, I have
dreamed of the moon, loving it, desiring it. And last night I dreamed
that I cast a slender silver thread into the sky, which caught the moon,
and I drew it closer and closer to myself, till it rested on my heart.
And it was not the moon at all, but the heart of a woman, beating full
and strong. And the wonder of it is that the moon is mine. You shall see
it sometimes, you other people on the earth, but all the time it is
mine. I know, too, the other side of it, when we are alone together.
You cannot see that, and you will never see it. The moon says it is all
for me.
To-day the moon had to be away all day, but the silver thread was
between us (it leads to the other side of the moon), so I scarcely
envied the folks in London, who would see her face merely. Yet all day I
fevered for evening, and as evening approached my fever abated not. But
you came back, my moon, and we were together again. Other people were
there, and for them, as for me, melody after melody flowed from the
sweet stress of your fingers. They heard only, but I knew, and to me the
sound revealed not the poor clay that wrote those exquisite notes, but
you who played them. Your soul it was, not Schubert’s, that shone in the
symphony that shall never be finished; your soul, not Beethoven’s, was
passion and pathos--you, not he, turned night into a flame, and in that
flame I burned and was consumed, happy as the gods are happy, and
happier because I was not content. I shall never be content.
Oh, my own who did this, thanks is no word between you and me. Do we
thank the star that shines in the dark-blue velvet of the skies? We gaze
only, and are drawn thither. For we thank a giver for a human gift; it
is in silence that we give thanks for the things that are divine. Oh, I
try to speak of what cannot be spoken! Who shall set words to your
music?
Let me picture you again, with face half turned from where I sat, tuning
the keys which I thought so rebellious into a rain of enchanted harmony.
Rebellious, too, was your hair, rising upward in waves of smouldering
gold from your face. And through Schubert you spoke to me, he but the
medium or the alphabet of your thought, and I was almost jealous of the
dead because he touched the tips of your fingers. Then from the trim
garden at Leipsic spoke that sweet formal soul, a message of
congratulation to me, or so I took it, and Beethoven with fuller voice
said the same, and from frozen Poland and from wind-beaten Majorca came
another smile. And when those sweet words were done, came other sweet
words without interpreter; and the room was emptied and the larger
lights were quenched, and only on the walls leaped the shadows and the
shine of the flames that plunged on the hearth. Once by night the Temple
was bright to the prophet with the glory of the Lord, and the hot coal
from the altar opened and inspired his lips. With what new vision and
eyes enlightened must he have looked on the world after that night when
God revealed Himself. And by this revelation which has come to me all
things are made new, winter is turned to spring, the lonely places are
desert no more, and the whole world is in flower with the royal purple
of the blossoms of Love.
And now that I know it was inevitable from the first, I can hardly
believe that it was I who only a few weeks ago made plans to force
myself from the possibility. It was ordained from the beginning, and the
patient march of the centuries, every step, every year, was bringing us
together; myriads of subtle influences conspired to work it, and how
excellent is the miracle they have made! Sunlight and wind, and the love
and sorrow and joy of a thousand generations, have made the body and
soul of this girl; for me was she predestined, and for me has the whole
creation laboured. Blindly but inevitably it wrought, even as the shell
deep in some blue cave of the ocean thinks only that some piece of grit
has got between its iridescent valves, yet all the time it is busy
making the pearl that shall lie on the neck of some queen yet unborn.