DAY AND NIGHT STORIES
BY
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
Author _of_ "Ten Minute Stories," "Julius Le Vallon,"
"The Wave," etc.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & CO.
681 FIFTH AVENUE
COPYRIGHT, 1917,
BY E. P. DUTTON & CO.
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE TRYST 1
II. THE TOUCH OF PAN 16
III. THE WINGS OF HORUS 41
IV. INITIATION 66
V. A DESERT EPISODE 94
VI. THE OTHER WING 112
VII. THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM 134
VIII. CAIN'S ATONEMENT 145
IX. AN EGYPTIAN HORNET 154
X. BY WATER 162
XI. H. S. H. 171
XII. A BIT OF WOOD 187
XIII. A VICTIM OF HIGHER SPACE 192
XIV. TRANSITION 216
XV. THE TRADITION 223
DAY AND NIGHT STORIES
I
THE TRYST
"_Je suis la première au rendez-vous. Je vous attends._"
As he got out of the train at the little wayside station he remembered
the conversation as if it had been yesterday, instead of fifteen years
ago--and his heart went thumping against his ribs so violently that he
almost heard it. The original thrill came over him again with all its
infinite yearning. He felt it as he had felt it _then_--not with that
tragic lessening the interval had brought to each repetition of its
memory. Here, in the familiar scenery of its birth, he realised with
mingled pain and wonder that the subsequent years had not destroyed,
but only dimmed it. The forgotten rapture flamed back with all the
fierce beauty of its genesis, desire at white heat. And the shock of
the abrupt discovery shattered time. Fifteen years became a negligible
moment; the crowded experiences that had intervened seemed but a dream.
The farewell scene, the conversation on the steamer's deck, were
clear as of the day before. He saw the hand holding her big hat that
fluttered in the wind, saw the flowers on the dress where the long coat
was blown open a moment, recalled the face of a hurrying steward who
had jostled them; he even heard the voices--his own and hers:
"Yes," she said simply; "I promise you. You have my word. I'll wait----"
"Till I come back to find you," he interrupted.
Steadfastly she repeated his actual words, then added: "Here; at
home--that is."
"I'll come to the garden gate as usual," he told her, trying to smile.
"I'll knock. You'll open the gate--as usual--and come out to me."
These words, too, she attempted to repeat, but her voice failed, her
eyes filled suddenly with tears; she looked into his face and nodded.
It was just then that her little hand went up to hold the hat on--he
saw the very gesture still. He remembered that he was vehemently
tempted to tear his ticket up there and then, to go ashore with her,
to stay in England, to brave all opposition--when the siren roared its
third horrible warning ... and the ship put out to sea.
* * * * *
Fifteen years, thick with various incident, had passed between them
since that moment. His life had risen, fallen, crashed, then risen
again. He had come back at last, fortune won by a lucky coup--at
thirty-five; had come back to find her, come back, above all, to keep
his word. Once every three months they had exchanged the brief letter
agreed upon: "I am well; I am waiting; I am happy; I am unmarried.
Yours----." For his youthful wisdom had insisted that no "man" had the
right to keep "any woman" too long waiting; and she, thinking that
letter brave and splendid, had insisted likewise that he was free--if
freedom called him. They had laughed over this last phrase in their
agreement. They put five years as the possible limit of separation.
By then he would have won success, and obstinate parents would have
nothing more to say.
But when the five years ended he was "on his uppers" in a western
mining town, and with the end of ten in sight those uppers, though
changed, were little better, apparently, than patched and mended. And
it was just then, too, that the change which had been stealing over
him betrayed itself. He realised it abruptly, a sense of shame and
horror in him. The discovery was made unconsciously--it disclosed
itself. He was reading her letter as a labourer on a Californian fruit
farm: "Funny she doesn't marry--some one else!" he heard himself say.
The words were out before he knew it, and certainly before he could
suppress them. They just slipped out, startling him into the truth;
and he knew instantly that the thought was fathered in him by a hidden
wish.... He was older. He had lived. It was a memory he loved.
Despising himself in a contradictory fashion--both vaguely and
fiercely--he yet held true to his boyhood's promise. He did not
write and offer to release her, as he knew they did in stories. He
persuaded himself that he meant to keep his word. There was this fine,
stupid, selfish obstinacy in his character. In any case, she would
misunderstand and think he wanted to set free--himself. "Besides--I'm
still--awfully fond of her," he asserted. And it was true; only the
love, it seemed, had gone its way. Not that another woman took it; he
kept himself clean, held firm as steel. The love, apparently, just
faded of its own accord; her image dimmed, her letters ceased to
thrill, then ceased to interest him.
Subsequent reflection made him realise other details about himself.
In the interval he had suffered hardships, had learned the uncertainty
of life that depends for its continuance on a little food, but that
food often hard to come by, and had seen so many others go under that
he held it more cheaply than of old. The wandering instinct, too, had
caught him, slowly killing the domestic impulse; he lost his desire for
a settled place of abode, the desire for children of his own, lost the
desire to marry at all. Also--he reminded himself with a smile--he had
lost other things: the expression of youth _she_ was accustomed to and
held always in her thoughts of him, two fingers of one hand, his hair!
He wore glasses, too. The gentlemen-adventurers of life get scarred
in those wild places where he lived. He saw himself a rather battered
specimen well on the way to middle age.
There was confusion in his mind, however, _and_ in his heart: a
struggling complex of emotions that made it difficult to know exactly
what he did feel. The dominant clue concealed itself. Feelings shifted.
A single, clear determinant did not offer. He was an honest fellow.
"I can't quite make it out," he said. "What is it I really feel? And
why?" His motive seemed confused. To keep the flame alight for ten long
buffeting years was no small achievement; better men had succumbed in
half the time. Yet something in him still held fast to the girl as with
a band of steel that _would_ not let her go entirely. Occasionally
there came strong reversions, when he ached with longing, yearning,
hope; when he loved her again; remembered passionately each detail of
the far-off courtship days in the forbidden rectory garden beyond the
small, white garden gate. Or was it merely the image and the memory he
loved "again"? He hardly knew himself. He could not tell. That "again"
puzzled him. It was the wrong word surely.... He still wrote the
promised letter, however; it was so easy; those short sentences could
not betray the dead or dying fires. One day, besides, he would return
and claim her. He meant to keep his word.
And he had kept it. Here he was, this calm September afternoon, within
three miles of the village where he first had kissed her, where the
marvel of first love had come to both; three short miles between him
and the little white garden gate of which at this very moment she was
intently thinking, and behind which some fifty minutes later she would
be standing, waiting for him....
He had purposely left the train at an earlier station; he would walk
over in the dusk, climb the familiar steps, knock at the white gate
in the wall as of old, utter the promised words, "I have come back to
find you," enter, and--keep his word. He had written from Mexico a week
before he sailed; he had made careful, even accurate calculations: "In
the dusk, on the sixteenth of September, I shall come and knock," he
added to the usual sentences. The knowledge of his coming, therefore,
had been in her possession seven days. Just before sailing, moreover,
he had heard from her--though not in answer, naturally. She was well;
she was happy; she was unmarried; she was waiting.
And now, as by some magical process of restoration--possible to deep
hearts only, perhaps, though even by them quite inexplicable--the state
of first love had blazed up again in him. In all its radiant beauty it
lit his heart, burned unextinguished in his soul, set body and mind
on fire. The years had merely veiled it. It burst upon him, captured,
overwhelmed him with the suddenness of a dream. He stepped from the
train. He met it in the face. It took him prisoner. The familiar trees
and hedges, the unchanged countryside, the "field-smells known in
infancy," all these, with something subtly added to them, rolled back
the passion of his youth upon him in a flood. No longer was he bound
upon what he deemed, perhaps, an act of honourable duty; it was love
that drove him, as it drove him fifteen years before. And it drove
him with the accumulated passion of desire long forcibly repressed;
almost as if, out of some fancied notion of fairness to the girl, he
had deliberately, yet still unconsciously, said "No" to it; that _she_
had not faded, but that he had decided, "_I_ must forget her." That
sentence: "Why doesn't she marry--some one else?" had not betrayed
change in himself. It surprised another motive: "It's not fair to--her!"
His mind worked with a curious rapidity, but worked within one circle
only. The stress of sudden emotion was extraordinary. He remembered a
thousand things--yet, chief among them, those occasional reversions
when he had felt he "loved her again." Had he not, after all, deceived
himself? Had she ever really "faded" at all? Had he not felt he ought
to let her fade--release her that way? And the change in himself?--that
sentence on the Californian fruit-farm--what did they mean? Which had
been true, the fading or the love?
The confusion in his mind was hopeless, but, as a matter of fact,
he did not think at all: he only _felt_. The momentum, besides, was
irresistible, and before the shattering onset of the sweet revival he
did not stop to analyse the strange result. He knew certain things, and
cared to know no others: that his heart was leaping, his blood running
with the heat of twenty, that joy recaptured him, that he must see,
hear, touch her, hold her in his arms--and marry her. For the fifteen
years had crumbled to a little thing, and at thirty-five he felt
himself but twenty, rapturously, deliciously in love.
He went quickly, eagerly down the little street to the inn, still
feeling only, not thinking anything. The vehement uprush of the old
emotion made reflection of any kind impossible. He gave no further
thought to those long years "out there," when her name, her letters,
the very image of her in his mind, had found him, if not cold, at
least without keen response. All that was forgotten as though it had
not been. The steadfast thing in him, this strong holding to a promise
which had never wilted, ousted the recollection of fading and decay
that, whatever caused them, certainly _had_ existed. And this steadfast
thing now took command. This enduring quality in his character led
him. It was only towards the end of the hurried tea he first received
the singular impression--vague, indeed, but undeniably persistent--the
strange impression that he was _being_ led.
Yet, though aware of this, he did not pause to argue or reflect.
The emotional displacement in him, of course, had been more than
considerable: there had been upheaval, a change whose abruptness was
even dislocating, fundamental in a sense he could not estimate--shock.
Yet he took no count of anything but the one mastering desire to get to
her as soon as possible, knock at the small, white garden gate, hear
her answering voice, see the low wooden door swing open--take her.
There was joy and glory in his heart, and a yearning sweet delight. At
this very moment she was expecting him. And he--had come.
Behind these positive emotions, however, there lay concealed all
the time others that were of a negative character. Consciously, he
was not aware of them, but they were there; they revealed their
presence in various little ways that puzzled him. He recognised them
absentmindedly, as it were; did not analyse or investigate them.
For, through the confusion upon his faculties, rose also a certain
hint of insecurity that betrayed itself by a slight hesitancy or
miscalculation in one or two unimportant actions. There was a touch
of melancholy, too, a sense of something lost. It lay, perhaps, in
that tinge of sadness which accompanies the twilight of an autumn day,
when a gentler, mournful beauty veils a greater beauty that is past.
Some trick of memory connected it with a scene of early boyhood, when,
meaning to see the sunrise, he overslept, and, by a brief half-hour,
was just--too late. He noted it merely, then passed on; he did not
understand it; he hurried all the more, this hurry the only sign that
it _was_ noted. "I must be quick," flashed up across his strongly
positive emotions.
And, due to this hurry, possibly, were the slight miscalculations
that he made. They were very trivial. He rang for sugar, though the
bowl stood just before his eyes, yet when the girl came in he forgot
completely what he rang for--and inquired instead about the evening
trains to London. And, when the time-table was laid before him, he
examined it without intelligence, then looked up suddenly into the
maid's face with a question about flowers. Were there flowers to be had
in the village anywhere? What kind of flowers? "Oh, a bouquet or a"--he
hesitated, searching for a word that tried to present itself, yet was
not the word _he_ wanted to make use of--"or a wreath--of some sort?"
he finished. He took the very word he did not want to take. In several
things he did and said, this hesitancy and miscalculation betrayed
themselves--such trivial things, yet significant in an elusive way that
he disliked. There was sadness, insecurity somewhere in them. And he
resented them, aware of their existence only because they qualified
his joy. There was a whispered "No" floating somewhere in the dusk.
Almost--he felt disquiet. He hurried, more and more eager to be off
upon his journey--the final part of it.
Moreover, there were other signs of an odd miscalculation--dislocation,
perhaps, properly speaking--in him. Though the inn was familiar from
his boyhood days, kept by the same old couple, too, he volunteered
no information about himself, nor asked a single question about the
village he was bound for. He did not even inquire if the rector--her
father--still were living. And when he left he entirely neglected the
gilt-framed mirror above the mantelpiece of plush, dusty pampas-grass
in waterless vases on either side. It did not matter, apparently,
whether he looked well or ill, tidy or untidy. He forgot that when
his cap was off the absence of thick, accustomed hair must alter him
considerably, forgot also that two fingers were missing from one hand,
the right hand, the hand that she would presently clasp. Nor did it
occur to him that he wore glasses, which must change his expression
and add to the appearance of the years he bore. None of these obvious
and natural things seemed to come into his thoughts at all. He was
in a hurry to be off. He did not think. But, though his mind may not
have noted these slight betrayals with actual sentences, his attitude,
nevertheless, expressed them. This was, it seemed, the _feeling_ in
him: "What could such details matter to her _now_? Why, indeed, should
he give to them a single thought? It was himself she loved and waited
for, not separate items of his external, physical image." As well think
of the fact that she, too, must have altered--outwardly. It never once
occurred to him. Such details were of To-day.... He was only impatient
to come to her quickly, very quickly, instantly, if possible. He
hurried.
There was a flood of boyhood's joy in him. He paid for his tea, giving
a tip that was twice the price of the meal, and set out gaily and
impetuously along the winding lane. Charged to the brim with a sweet
picture of a small, white garden gate, the loved face close behind it,
he went forward at a headlong pace, singing "Nancy Lee" as he used to
sing it fifteen years before.
With action, then, the negative sensations hid themselves, obliterated
by the positive ones that took command. The former, however, merely lay
concealed; they waited. Thus, perhaps, does vital emotion, overlong
restrained, denied, indeed, of its blossoming altogether, take revenge.
Repressed elements in his psychic life asserted themselves, selecting,
as though naturally, a dramatic form.
The dusk fell rapidly, mist rose in floating strips along the meadows
by the stream; the old, familiar details beckoned him forwards, then
drove him from behind as he went swiftly past them. He recognised
others rising through the thickening air beyond; they nodded, peered,
and whispered; sometimes they almost sang. And each added to his inner
happiness; each brought its sweet and precious contribution, and built
it into the reconstructed picture of the earlier, long-forgotten
rapture. It was an enticing and enchanted journey that he made,
something impossibly blissful in it, something, too, that seemed
curiously--inevitable.
For the scenery had not altered all these years, the details of the
country were unchanged, everything he saw was rich with dear and
precious association, increasing the momentum of the tide that carried
him along. Yonder was the stile over whose broken step he had helped
her yesterday, and there the slippery plank across the stream where
she looked above her shoulder to ask for his support; he saw the
very bramble bushes where she scratched her hand, a-blackberrying,
the day before ... and, finally, the weather-stained signpost, "To
the Rectory." It pointed to the path through the dangerous field
where Farmer Sparrow's bull provided such a sweet excuse for holding,
leading--protecting her. From the entire landscape rose a steam of
recent memory, each incident alive, each little detail brimmed with its
cargo of fond association.
He read the rough black lettering on the crooked arm--it was rather
faded, but he knew it too well to miss a single letter--and hurried
forward along the muddy track; he looked about him for a sign of Farmer
Sparrow's bull; he even felt in the misty air for the little hand that
he might take and lead her into safety. The thought of her drew him on
with such irresistible anticipation that it seemed as if the cumulative
drive of vanished and unsated years evoked the tangible phantom almost.
He actually felt it, soft and warm and clinging in his own, that was no
longer incomplete and mutilated.
Yet it was not he who led and guided now, but, more and more, he who
was being led. The hint had first betrayed its presence at the inn;
it now openly declared itself. It had crossed the frontier into a
positive sensation. Its growth, swiftly increasing all this time, had
accomplished itself; he had ignored, somehow, both its genesis and
quick development; the result he plainly recognised. She was expecting
him, indeed, but it was more than expectation; there was calling in
it--she summoned him. Her thought and longing reached him along that
old, invisible track love builds so easily between true, faithful
hearts. All the forces of her being, her very voice, came towards him
through the deepening autumn twilight. He had not noticed the curious
physical restoration in his hand, but he was vividly aware of this more
magical alteration--that _she_ led and guided him, drawing him ever
more swiftly towards the little, white garden gate where she stood at
this very moment, waiting. Her sweet strength compelled him; there was
this new touch of something irresistible about the familiar journey,
where formerly had been delicious yielding only, shy, tentative
advance. He realised it--inevitable.
His footsteps hurried, faster and ever faster; so deep was the
allurement in his blood, he almost ran. He reached the narrow, winding
lane, and raced along it. He knew each bend, each angle of the holly
hedge, each separate incident of ditch and stone. He could have plunged
blindfold down it at top speed. The familiar perfumes rushed at
him--dead leaves and mossy earth and ferns and dock leaves, bringing
the bewildering currents of strong emotion in him all together as in
a rising wave. He saw, then, the crumbling wall, the cedars topping
it with spreading branches, the chimneys of the rectory. On his right
bulked the outline of the old, grey church; the twisted, ancient yews,
the company of gravestones, upright and leaning, dotting the ground
like listening figures. But he looked at none of these. For, on his
left, he already saw the five rough steps of stone that led from the
lane towards a small, white garden gate. That gate at last shone before
him, rising through the misty air. He reached it.
He stopped dead a moment. His heart, it seemed, stopped too, then took
to violent hammering in his brain. There was a roaring in his mind, and
yet a marvellous silence--just behind it. Then the roar of emotion died
away. There was utter stillness. This stillness, silence, was all about
him. The world seemed preternaturally quiet.
But the pause was too brief to measure. For the tide of emotion had
receded only to come on again with redoubled power. He turned, leaped
forward, clambered impetuously up the rough stone steps, and flung
himself, breathless and exhausted, against the trivial barrier that
stood between his eyes and--hers. In his wild, half violent impatience,
however, he stumbled. That roaring, too, confused him. He fell forward,
it seemed, for twilight had merged in darkness, and he misjudged the
steps, the distances he yet knew so well. For a moment, certainly, he
lay at full length upon the uneven ground against the wall; the steps
had tripped him. And then he raised himself and knocked. His right hand
struck upon the small, white garden gate. Upon the two lost fingers he
felt the impact. "I am here," he cried, with a deep sound in his throat
as though utterance was choked and difficult. "I have come back--to
find you."
For a fraction of a second he waited, while the world stood still and
waited with him. But there was no delay. Her answer came at once: "I am
well.... I am happy.... I am waiting."
And the voice was dear and marvellous as of old. Though the words
were strange, reminding him of something dreamed, forgotten, lost,
it seemed, he did not take special note of them. He only wondered
that she did not open instantly that he might see her. Speech could
follow, but sight came surely first! There was this lightning-flash
of disappointment in him. Ah, she was lengthening out the marvellous
moment, as often and often she had done before. It was to tease him
that she made him wait. He knocked again; he pushed against the
unyielding surface. For he noticed that it was unyielding; and there
was a depth in the tender voice that he could not understand.
"Open!" he cried again, but louder than before. "I have come back to
find you!" And as he said it the mist struck cold and thick against his
face.
But her answer froze his blood.
"I cannot open."
And a sudden anguish of despair rose over him; the sound of her voice
was strange; in it was faintness, distance--as well as depth. It seemed
to echo. Something frantic seized him then--the panic sense.
"Open, open! Come out to me!" he tried to shout. His voice failed
oddly; there was no power in it. Something appalling struck him between
the eyes. "For God's sake, open. I'm waiting here! Open, and come out
to me!"
The reply was muffled by distance that already seemed increasing; he
was conscious of freezing cold about him--in his heart.
"I cannot open. You must come in to me. I'm here and--waiting--always."
He knew not exactly then what happened, for the cold grew deeper and
the icy mist was in his throat. No words would come. He rose to his
knees, and from his knees to his feet. He stooped. With all his force
he knocked again; in a blind frenzy of despair he hammered and beat
against the unyielding barrier of the small, white garden gate. He
battered it till the skin of his knuckles was torn and bleeding--the
first two fingers of a hand already mutilated. He remembers the torn
and broken skin, for he noticed in the gloom that stains upon the
gate bore witness to his violence; it was not till afterwards that
he remembered the other fact--that the hand had already suffered
mutilation, long, long years ago. The power of sound was feebly in
him; he called aloud; there was no answer. He tried to scream, but the
scream was muffled in his throat before it issued properly; it was a
nightmare scream. As a last resort he flung himself bodily upon the
unyielding gate, with such precipitate violence, moreover, that his
face struck against its surface.
From the friction, then, along the whole length of his cheek he knew
that the surface was not smooth. Cold and rough that surface was; but
also--it was not of wood. Moreover, there was writing on it he had not
seen before. How he deciphered it in the gloom, he never knew. The
lettering was deeply cut. Perhaps he traced it with his fingers; his
right hand certainly lay stretched upon it. He made out a name, a date,
a broken verse from the Bible, and the words, "died peacefully." The
lettering was sharply cut with edges that were new. For the date was of
a week ago; the broken verse ran, "When the shadows flee away ..." and
the small, white garden gate was unyielding because it was of--stone.
* * * * *
At the inn he found himself staring at a table from which the tea
things had not been cleared away. There was a railway time-table in
his hands, and his head was bent forwards over it, trying to decipher
the lettering in the growing twilight. Beside him, still fingering a
shilling, stood the serving-girl; her other hand held a brown tray
with a running dog painted upon its dented surface. It swung to and
fro a little as she spoke, evidently continuing a conversation her
customer had begun. For she was giving information--in the colourless,
disinterested voice such persons use:
"We all went to the funeral, sir, all the country people went. The
grave was her father's--the family grave...." Then, seeing that her
customer was too absorbed in the time-table to listen further, she said
no more but began to pile the tea things on to the tray with noisy
clatter.
Ten minutes later, in the road, he stood hesitating. The signal at
the station just opposite was already down. The autumn mist was rising.
He looked along the winding road that melted away into the distance,
then slowly turned and reached the platform just as the London train
came in. He felt very old--too old to walk six miles....
II
THE TOUCH OF PAN
1
An idiot, Heber understood, was a person in whom intelligence had been
arrested--instinct acted, but not reason. A lunatic, on the other hand,
was some one whose reason had gone awry--the mechanism of the brain
was injured. The lunatic was out of relation with his environment; the
idiot had merely been delayed _en route_.
Be that as it might, he knew at any rate that a lunatic was not to
be listened to, whereas an idiot--well, the one he fell in love with
certainly had the secret of some instinctual knowledge that was not
only joy, but a kind of sheer natural joy. Probably it was that sheer
natural joy of living that reason argues to be untaught, degraded.
In any case--at thirty--he married her instead of the daughter of
a duchess he was engaged to. They lead to-day that happy, natural,
vagabond life called idiotic, unmindful of that world the majority of
reasonable people live only to remember.
Though born into an artificial social clique that made it difficult,
Heber had always loved the simple things. Nature, especially, meant
much to him. He would rather see a woodland misty with bluebells than
all the châteaux on the Loire; the thought of a mountain valley in the
dawn made his feet lonely in the grandest houses. Yet in these very
houses was his home established. Not that he under-estimated worldly
things--their value was too obvious--but that it was another thing he
wanted. Only he did not know precisely _what_ he wanted until this
particular idiot made it plain.
Her case was a mild one, possibly; the title bestowed by implication
rather than by specific mention. Her family did not say that she was
imbecile or half-witted, but that she "was not all there" they probably
did say. Perhaps she saw men as trees walking, perhaps she saw through
a glass darkly. Heber, who had met her once or twice, though never
yet to speak to, did not analyse her degree of sight, for in him,
personally, she woke a secret joy and wonder that almost involved a
touch of awe. The part of her that was not "all there" dwelt in an
"elsewhere" that he longed to know about. He wanted to share it with
her. She seemed aware of certain happy and desirable things that reason
and too much thinking hide.
He just felt this instinctively without analysis. The values they set
upon the prizes of life were similar. Money to her was just stamped
metal, fame a loud noise of sorts, position nothing. Of people she was
aware as a dog or bird might be aware--they were kind or unkind. Her
parents, having collected much metal and achieved position, proceeded
to make a loud noise of sorts with some success; and since she did
not contribute, either by her appearance or her tastes, to their
ambitions, they neglected her and made excuses. They were ashamed of
her existence. Her father in particular justified Nietzsche's shrewd
remark that no one with a loud voice can listen to subtle thoughts.
She was, perhaps, sixteen--for, though she looked it, eighteen or
nineteen was probably more in accord with her birth certificate. Her
mother was content, however, that she should dress the lesser age,
preferring to tell strangers that she was childish, rather than admit
that she was backward.
"You'll never marry at all, child, much less marry as you might," she
said, "if you go about with that rabbit expression on your face. That's
not the way to catch a nice young man of the sort we get down to stay
with us now. Many a chorus-girl with less than you've got has caught
them easily enough. Your sister's done well. Why not do the same?
There's nothing to be shy or frightened about."
"But I'm not shy or frightened, mother. I'm bored. I mean _they_ bore
me."
It made no difference to the girl; she was herself. The bored
expression in the eyes--the rabbit, not-all-there expression--gave
place sometimes to another look. Yet not often, nor with anybody. It
was this other look that stirred the strange joy in the man who fell in
love with her. It is not to be easily described. It was very wonderful.
Whether sixteen or nineteen, she then looked--a thousand.
* * * * *
The house-party was of that up-to-date kind prevalent in Heber's
world. Husbands and wives were not asked together. There was a cynical
disregard of the decent (not the stupid) conventions that savoured
of abandon, perhaps of decadence. He only went himself in the hope
of seeing the backward daughter once again. Her millionaire parents
afflicted him, the smart folk tired him. Their peculiar affectation of
a special language, their strange belief that they were of importance,
their treatment of the servants, their calculated self-indulgence, all
jarred upon him more than usual. At bottom he heartily despised the
whole vapid set. He felt uncomfortable and out of place. Though not a
prig, he abhorred the way these folk believed themselves the climax of
fine living. Their open immorality disgusted him, their indiscriminate
love-making was merely rather nasty; he watched the very girl he was at
last to settle down with behaving as the tone of the clique expected
over her final fling--and, bored by the strain of so much "modernity,"
he tried to get away. Tea was long over, the sunset interval invited,
he felt hungry for trees and fields that were not self-conscious--and
he escaped. The flaming June day was turning chill. Dusk hovered over
the ancient house, veiling the pretentious new wing that had been
added. And he came across the idiot girl at the bend of the drive,
where the birch trees shivered in the evening wind. His heart gave a
leap.
She was leaning against one of the dreadful statues--it was a
satyr--that sprinkled the lawn. Her back was to him; she gazed at a
group of broken pine trees in the park beyond. He paused an instant,
then went on quickly, while his mind scurried to recall her name. They
were within easy speaking range.
"Miss Elizabeth!" he cried, yet not too loudly lest she might vanish
as suddenly as she had appeared. She turned at once. Her eyes and lips
were smiling welcome at him without pretence. She showed no surprise.
"You're the first one of the lot who's said it properly," she
exclaimed, as he came up. "Everybody calls me Elizabeth instead of
Elspeth. It's idiotic. They don't even take the trouble to get a name
right."
"It is," he agreed. "Quite idiotic." He did not correct her. Possibly
he had said Elspeth after all--the names were similar. Her perfectly
natural voice was grateful to his ear, and soothing. He looked at
her all over with an open admiration that she noticed and, without
concealment, liked. She was very untidy, the grey stockings on her
vigorous legs were torn, her short skirt was spattered with mud.
Her nut-brown hair, glossy and plentiful, flew loose about neck
and shoulders. In place of the usual belt she had tied a coloured
handkerchief round her waist. She wore no hat. What she had been doing
to get in such a state, while her parents entertained a "distinguished"
party, he did not know, but it was not difficult to guess. Climbing
trees or riding bareback and astride was probably the truth. Yet
her dishevelled state became her well, and the welcome in her face
delighted him. She remembered him, she was glad. He, too, was glad,
and a sense both happy and reckless stirred in his heart. "Like a wild
animal," he said, "you come out in the dusk----"
"To play with my kind," she answered in a flash, throwing him a glance
of invitation that made his blood go dancing.
He leaned against the statue a moment, asking himself why this young
Cinderella of a parvenu family delighted him when all the London
beauties left him cold. There was a lift through his whole being as
he watched her, slim and supple, grace shining through the untidy
modern garb--almost as though she wore no clothes. He thought of a
panther standing upright. Her poise was so alert--one arm upon the
marble ledge, one leg bent across the other, the hip-line showing like
a bird's curved wing. Wild animal or bird, flashed across his mind:
something untamed and natural. Another second, and she might leap
away--or spring into his arms.
It was a deep, stirring sensation in him that produced the mental
picture. "Pure and natural," a voice whispered with it in his heart,
"as surely as _they_ are just the other thing!" And the thrill struck
with unerring aim at the very root of that unrest he had always known
in the state of life to which he was called. She made it natural,
clean, and pure. This girl and himself were somehow kin. The primitive
thing broke loose in him.
In two seconds, while he stood with her beside the vulgar statue,
these thoughts passed through his mind. But he did not at first give
utterance to any of them. He spoke more formally, although laughter,
due to his happiness, lay behind:
"They haven't asked you to the party, then? Or you don't care about it?
Which is it?"
"Both," she said, looking fearlessly into his face. "But I've been here
ten minutes already. Why were you so long?"
This outspoken honesty was hardly what he expected, yet in another
sense he was not surprised. Her eyes were very penetrating, very
innocent, very frank. He felt her as clean and sweet as some young
fawn that asks plainly to be stroked and fondled. He told the truth:
"I couldn't get away before. I had to play about and----" when she
interrupted with impatience:
"_They_ don't really want you," she exclaimed scornfully. "I do."
And, before he could choose one out of the several answers that rushed
into his mind, she nudged him with her foot, holding it out a little so
that he saw the shoelace was unfastened. She nodded her head towards
it, and pulled her skirt up half an inch as he at once stooped down.
"And, anyhow," she went on as he fumbled with the lace, touching her
ankle with his hand, "you're going to marry one of them. I read it in
the paper. It's idiotic. You'll be miserable."
The blood rushed to his head, but whether owing to his stooping or to
something else, he could not say.
"I only came--I only accepted," he said quickly, "because I wanted to
see _you_ again."
"Of course. I made mother ask you."
He did an impulsive thing. Kneeling as he was, he bent his head a
little lower and suddenly kissed the soft grey stocking--then stood
up and looked her in the face. She was laughing happily, no sign of
embarrassment in her anywhere, no trace of outraged modesty. She just
looked very pleased.
"I've tied a knot that won't come undone in a hurry----" he began,
then stopped dead. For as he said it, gazing into her smiling face,
another expression looked forth at him from the two big eyes of
hazel. Something rushed from his heart to meet it. It may have been
that playful kiss, it may have been the way she took it; but, at any
rate, there was a strength in the new emotion that made him unsure of
who he was and of whom he looked at. He forgot the place, the time,
his own identity and hers. The lawn swept from beneath his feet, the
English sunset with it. He forgot his host and hostess, his fellow
guests, even his father's name and his own into the bargain. He was
carried away upon a great tide, the girl always beside him. He left the
shore-line in the distance, already half forgotten, the shore-line of
his education, learning, manners, social point of view--everything to
which his father had most carefully brought him up as the scion of an
old-established English family. This girl had torn up the anchor. Only
the anchor had previously been loosened a little by his own unconscious
and restless efforts....
Where was she taking him to? Upon what island would they land?
"I'm younger than you--a good deal," she broke in upon his rushing
mood. "But that doesn't matter a bit, does it? We're about the same age
really."
With the happy sound of her voice the extraordinary sensation
passed--or, rather, it became normal. But that it had lasted an
appreciable time was proved by the fact that they had left the statue
on the lawn, the house was no longer visible behind them, and they were
walking side by side between the massive rhododendron clumps. They
brought up against a five-barred gate into the park. They leaned upon
the topmost bar, and he felt her shoulder touching his--edging into
it--as they looked across to the grove of pines.
"I feel absurdly young," he said without a sign of affectation, "and
yet I've been looking for you a thousand years and more."
The afterglow lit up her face; it fell on her loose hair and tumbled
blouse, turning them amber red. She looked not only soft and comely,
but extraordinarily beautiful. The strange expression haunted the deep
eyes again, the lips were a little parted, the young breast heaving
slightly, joy and excitement in her whole presentment. And as he
watched her he knew that all he had just felt was due to her close
presence, to her atmosphere, her perfume, her physical warmth and
vigour. It had emanated directly from her being.
"Of course," she said, and laughed so that he felt her breath upon his
face. He bent lower to bring his own on a level, gazing straight into
her eyes that were fixed upon the field beyond. They were clear and
luminous as pools of water, and in their centre, sharp as a photograph,
he saw the reflection of the pine grove, perhaps a hundred yards
away. With detailed accuracy he saw it, empty and motionless in the
glimmering June dusk.
Then something caught his eye. He examined the picture more closely.
He drew slightly nearer. He almost touched her face with his own,
forgetting for a moment whose were the eyes that served him for a
mirror. For, looking intently thus, it seemed to him that there was
a movement, a passing to and fro, a stirring as of figures among the
trees.... Then suddenly the entire picture was obliterated. She had
dropped her lids. He heard her speaking--the warm breath was again upon
his face:
"In the heart of that wood dwell I."
His heart gave another leap--more violent than the first--for the
wonder and beauty of the sentence caught him like a spell. There was
a lilt and rhythm in the words that made it poetry. She laid emphasis
upon the pronoun and the nouns. It seemed the last line of some
delicious runic verse:
"In the _heart_ of the _wood_--dwell _I_...."
And it flashed across him: That living, moving, inhabited pine wood
was her thought. It was thus she saw it. Her nature flung back to a
life she understood, a life that needed, claimed her. The ostentatious
and artificial values that surrounded her, she denied, even as the
distinguished house-party of her ambitious, masquerading family
neglected her. Of course she was unnoticed by them, just as a swallow
or a wild-rose were unnoticed.
He knew her secret then, for she had told it to him. It was his own
secret too. They were akin, as the birds and animals were akin. They
belonged together in some free and open life, natural, wild, untamed.
That unhampered life was flowing about them now, rising, beating with
delicious tumult in her veins and his, yet innocent as the sunlight and
the wind--because it was as freely recognised.
"Elspeth!" he cried, "come, take me with you! We'll go at once.
Come--hurry--before we forget to be happy, or remember to be wise
again----!"
His words stopped half-way towards completion, for a perfume floated
past him, born of the summer dusk, perhaps, yet sweet with a
penetrating magic that made his senses reel with some remembered joy.
No flower, no scented garden bush delivered it. It was the perfume of
young, spendthrift life, sweet with the purity that reason had not yet
stained. The girl moved closer. Gathering her loose hair between her
fingers, she brushed his cheeks and eyes with it, her slim, warm body
pressing against him as she leaned over laughingly.
"In the darkness," she whispered in his ear; "when the moon puts the
house upon the statue!"
And he understood. Her world lay behind the vulgar, staring day. He
turned. He heard the flutter of skirts--just caught the grey stockings,
swift and light, as they flew behind the rhododendron masses. And she
was gone.
He stood a long time, leaning upon that five-barred gate.... It
was the dressing-gong that recalled him at length to what seemed the
present. By the conservatory door, as he went slowly in, he met his
distinguished cousin--who was helping the girl he himself was to marry
to enjoy her "final fling." He looked at his cousin. He realised
suddenly that he was merely vicious. There was no sun and wind, no
flowers--there was depravity only, lust instead of laughter, excitement
in place of happiness. It was calculated, not spontaneous. His mind was
in it. Without joy it was. He was not natural.
"Not a girl in the whole lot fit to look at," he exclaimed with peevish
boredom, excusing himself stupidly for his illicit conduct. "I'm
off in the morning." He shrugged his blue-blooded shoulders. "These
millionaires! Their shooting's all right, but their mixum-gatherum
week-ends--bah!" His gesture completed all he had to say about this one
in particular. He glanced sharply, nastily, at his companion. "_You_
look as if you'd found something!" he added, with a suggestive grin.
"Or have you seen the ghost that was paid for with the house?" And he
guffawed and let his eyeglass drop. "Lady Hermione will be asking for
an explanation--eh?"
"Idiot!" replied Heber, and ran upstairs to dress for dinner.
But the word was wrong, he remembered, as he closed his door. It was
lunatic he had meant to say, yet something more as well. He saw the
smart, modern philanderer somehow as a beast.
2
It was nearly midnight when he went up to bed, after an evening of
intolerable amusement. The abandoned moral attitude, the common
rudeness, the contempt of all others but themselves, the ugly jests,
the horseplay of tasteless minds that passed for gaiety, above all the
shamelessness of the women that behind the cover of fine breeding aped
emancipation, afflicted him to a boredom that touched desperation.
He understood now with a clarity unknown before. As with his cousin,
so with these. They took life, he saw, with a brazen effrontery they
thought was freedom, while yet it was life that they denied. He felt
vampired and degraded; spontaneity went out of him. The fact that
the geography of bedrooms was studied openly seemed an affirmation
of vice that sickened him. Their ways were nauseous merely. He
escaped--unnoticed.
He locked his door, went to the open window, and looked out into the
night--then started. For silver dressed the lawn and park, the shadow
of the building lay dark across the elaborate garden, and the moon, he
noticed, was just high enough to put the house upon the statue. The
chimney-stacks edged the pedestal precisely.
"Odd!" he exclaimed. "Odd that I should come at the very moment----!"
then smiled as he realised how his proposed adventure would be
misinterpreted, its natural innocence and spirit ruined--if he were
seen. "And some one would be sure to see me on a night like this. There
are couples still hanging about in the garden." And he glanced at the
shrubberies and secret paths that seemed to float upon the warm June
air like islands.
He stood for a moment framed in the glare of the electric light, then
turned back into the room; and at that instant a low sound like a
bird-call rose from the lawn below. It was soft and flutey, as though
some one played two notes upon a reed, a piping sound. He had been
seen, and she was waiting for him. Before he knew it, he had made an
answering call, of oddly similar kind, then switched the light out.
Three minutes later, dressed in simpler clothes, with a cap pulled over
his eyes, he reached the back lawn by means of the conservatory and the
billiard-room. He paused a moment to look about him. There was no one,
although the lights were still ablaze. "I am an idiot," he chuckled to
himself. "I'm acting on instinct!" He ran.
The sweet night air bathed him from head to foot; there was strength
and cleansing in it. The lawn shone wet with dew. He could almost smell
the perfume of the stars. The fumes of wine, cigars and artificial
scent were left behind, the atmosphere exhaled by civilisation, by
heavy thoughts, by bodies overdressed, unwisely stimulated--all, all
forgotten. He passed into a world of magical enchantment. The hush of
the open sky came down. In black and white the garden lay, brimmed full
with beauty, shot by the ancient silver of the moon, spangled with the
stars' old-gold. And the night wind rustled in the rhododendron masses
as he flew between them.
In a moment he was beside the statue, engulfed now by the shadow of
the building, and the girl detached herself silently from the blur of
darkness. Two arms were flung about his neck, a shower of soft hair
fell on his cheek with a heady scent of earth and leaves and grass, and
the same instant they were away together at full speed--towards the
pine wood. Their feet were soundless on the soaking grass. They went
so swiftly that they made a whir of following wind that blew her hair
across his eyes.