particular capers I had cut. "I guess that's right." And then I added
something about the loneliness, and how deserted all this slope of
mountain was. And he explained that the peasants were afraid of it and
called it No Man's Land. From one year's end to another no human foot
went up or down it; the hay was never cut; no cattle grazed along the
splendid pastures; no chalet had even been built within a mile of the
wood we slowly made for. "They're superstitious," he told me. "It was
just the same a hundred years ago when _he_ discovered it--there was a
little natural cave on the edge of the forest where he used to sleep
sometimes--I'll show it to you presently--but for generations this
entire mountain-side has been undisturbed. You'll never meet a living
soul in any part of it." He stopped and pointed above us to where the
pine wood hung in mid-air, like a dim blue carpet. "It's just the place
for Them, you see."
And a thrill of power went smashing through me. I can't describe
it. It drenched me like a waterfall. I thought of Greece--Mount Ida
and a thousand songs! Something in me--it was like the click of a
shutter--announced that the "change" was suddenly complete. I was
another man; or rather a deeper part of me took command. My very
language showed it.
The calm of halcyon weather lay over all. Overhead the peaks rose clear
as crystal; below us the village lay in a bluish smudge of smoke and
haze, as though a great finger had rubbed them softly into the earth.
Absolute loneliness fell upon me like a clap. From the world of human
beings we seemed quite shut off. And there began to steal over me again
the strange elation of the night before.... We found ourselves almost
at once against the edge of the wood.
It rose in front of us, a big wall of splendid trees, motionless as if
cut out of dark green metal, the branches hanging stiff, and the crowd
of trunks lost in the blue dimness underneath. I shaded my eyes with
one hand, trying to peer into the solemn gloom. The contrast between
the brilliant sunshine on the pastures and this region of heavy shadows
blurred my sight.
"It's like the entrance to another world," I whispered.
"It is," said Arthur, watching me. "We will go in. You shall pluck
asphodel...."
And, before I knew it, he had me by the hand. We were advancing. We
left the light behind us. The cool air dropped upon me like a sheet.
There was a temple silence. The sun ran down behind the sky, leaving a
marvellous blue radiance everywhere. Nothing stirred. But through the
stillness there rose power, power that has no name, power that hides at
the foundations somewhere--foundations that are changeless, invisible,
everlasting. What do I mean? My mind grew to the dimensions of a
planet. We were among the roots of life--whence issues that _one thing_
in infinite guise that seeks so many temporary names from the protean
minds of men.
"You shall pluck asphodel in the meadows this side of Erebus," Arthur
was chanting. "Hermes himself, the Psychopomp, shall lead, and Malahide
shall welcome us."
Malahide...!
To hear him use that name, the name of our scholar-ancestor, now dead
and buried close upon a century--the way he half chanted it--gave me
the goose-flesh. I stopped against a tree-stem, thinking of escape. No
words came to me at the moment, for I didn't know what to say; but, on
turning to find the bright green slopes just left behind, I saw only
a crowd of trees and shadows hanging thick as a curtain--as though we
had walked a mile. And it was a shock. The way out was lost. The trees
closed up behind us like a tide.
"It's all right," said Arthur; "just keep an open mind and a heart
alive with love. It has a shattering effect at first, but that will
pass." He saw I was afraid, for I shrank visibly enough. He stood
beside me in his grey flannel suit, with his brilliant eyes and his
great shock of hair, looking more like a column of light than a human
being. "It's all quite right and natural," he repeated; "we have passed
the gateway, and Hecate, who presides over gateways, will let us out
again. Do not make discord by feeling fear. This is a pine wood, and
pines are the oldest, simplest trees; they are true primitives. They
are an open channel; and in a pine wood where no human life has ever
been you shall often find gateways where Hecate is kind to such as us."
He took my hand--he must have felt mine trembling, but his own was
cool and strong and felt like silver--and led me forward into the
depths of a wood that seemed to me quite endless. It felt endless,
that is to say. I don't know what came over me. Fear slipped away, and
elation took its place.... As we advanced over ground that seemed
level, or slightly undulating, I saw bright pools of sunshine here
and there upon the forest floor. Great shafts of light dropped in
slantingly between the trunks. There was movement everywhere, though I
never could see what moved. A delicious, scented air stirred through
the lower branches. Running water sang not very far away. Figures
I did not actually see; yet there were limbs and flowing draperies
and flying hair from time to time, ever just beyond the pools of
sunlight.... Surprise went from me too. I was on air. The atmosphere
of dream came round me, but a dream of something just hovering outside
the world I knew--a dream wrought in gold and silver, with shining
eyes, with graceful beckoning hands, and with voices that rang like
bells of music.... And the pools of light grew larger, merging one
into another, until a delicate soft light shone equably throughout
the entire forest. Into this zone of light we passed together. Then
something fell abruptly at our feet, as though thrown down ... two
marvellous, shining sprays of blossom such as I had never seen in all
my days before!
"Asphodel!" cried my companion, stooping to pick them up and handing
one to me. I took it from him with a delight I could not understand.
"Keep it," he murmured; "it is the sign that we are welcome. For
Malahide has dropped these on our path."
And at the use of that ancestral name it seemed that a spirit passed
before my face and the hair of my head stood up. There was a sense
of violent, unhappy contrast. A composite picture presented itself,
then rushed away. What was it? My youth in England, music and poetry
at Cambridge and my passionate love of Greek that lasted two terms at
most, when Malahide's great books formed part of the curriculum. Over
against this, then, the drag and smother of solid worldly business,
the sordid weight of modern ugliness, the bitterness of an ambitious,
over-striving life. And abruptly--beyond both pictures--a shining,
marvellous Beauty that scattered stars beneath my feet and scarved
the universe with gold. All this flashed before me with the utterance
of that old family name. An alternative sprang up. There seemed some
radical, elemental choice presented to me--to what I used to call my
soul. My soul could take or leave it as it pleased....
I looked at Arthur moving beside me like a shaft of light. What had
come over me? How had our walk and talk and mood, our quite recent
everyday and ordinary view, our normal relationship with the things of
the world--how had it all slipped into this? So insensibly, so easily,
so naturally!
"Was it worth while?"
The question--_I_ didn't ask it--jumped up in me of its own accord.
Was "what" worth while? Why, my present life of commonplace and
grubbing toil, of course; my city existence, with its meagre,
unremunerative ambitions. Ah, it was this new Beauty calling me, this
shining dream that lay beyond the two pictures I have mentioned.... I
did not argue it, even to myself. But I understood. There was a radical
change in me. The buried poet, too long hidden, rushed into the air
like some great singing bird.
I glanced again at Arthur moving along lightly by my side, half
dancing almost in his brimming happiness. "Wait till you see Them,"
I heard him singing. "Wait till you hear the call of Artemis and the
footsteps of her flying nymphs. Wait till Orion thunders overhead and
Selene, crowned with the crescent moon, drives up the zenith in her
white-horsed chariot. The choice will be beyond all question then...!"
A great silent bird, with soft brown plumage, whirred across our path,
pausing an instant as though to peep, then disappearing with a muted
sound into an eddy of the wind it made. The big trees hid it. It was
an owl. The same moment I heard a rush of liquid song come pouring
through the forest with a gush of almost human notes, and a pair
of glossy wings flashed past us, swerving upwards to find the open
sky--blue-black, pointed wings.
"His favourites!" exclaimed my companion with clear joy in his voice.
"They all are here! Athene's bird, Procne and Philomela too! The
owl--the swallow--and the nightingale! Tereus and Itys are not far
away." And the entire forest, as he said it, stirred with movement,
as though that great bird's quiet wings had waked the sea of ancient
shadows. There were voices too--ringing, laughing voices, as though his
words woke echoes that had been listening for it. For I heard sweet
singing in the distance. The names he had used perplexed me. Yet even
I, stranger as I was to such refined delights, could not mistake the
passion of the nightingale and the dart of the eager swallow. That wild
burst of music, that curve of swift escape, were unmistakable.
And I struck a stalwart tree-stem with my open hand, feeling the need
of hearing, touching, sensing it. My link with known, remembered things
was breaking. I craved the satisfaction of the commonplace. I got that
satisfaction; but I got something more as well. For the trunk was
round and smooth and comely. It was no dead thing I struck. Somehow it
brushed me into intercourse with inanimate Nature. And next the desire
came to hear my voice--my own familiar, high-pitched voice with the
twang and accent the New World climate brings, so-called American:
"Exchange Place, Noo York City. I'm in that business, buying and
selling of exchange between the banks of two civilised countries, one
of them stoopid and old-fashioned, the other leading all creation...!"
It was an effort; but I made it firmly. It sounded odd, remote, unreal.
"Sunlit woods and a wind among the branches", followed close and sweet
upon my words. But who, in the name of Wall Street, said it?
"England's buying gold," I tried again. "We've had a private wire. Cut
in quick. First National is selling!"
Great-faced Hephæstus, how ridiculous! It was like saying, "I'll take
your scalp unless you give me meat." It was barbaric, savage, centuries
ago. Again there came another voice that caught up my own and turned it
into common syntax. Some heady beauty of the Earth rose about me like a
cloud.
"Hark! Night comes, with the dusk upon her eyelids. She brings those
dreams that every dew-drop holds at dawn. Daughter of Thanatos and
Hypnos...!"
But again--who said the words? It surely was not Arthur, my nephew
Arthur, of To-day, learning French in a Swiss mountain village! I
felt--well, what did I feel? In the name of the Stock Exchange and Wall
Street, what was the cash surrender of amazing feelings?
3
And, turning to look at him, I made a discovery. I don't know how to
tell it quite; such shadowy marvels have never been my line of goods.
He looked several things at once--taller, slighter, sweeter, but
chiefly--it sounds so crazy when I write it down--grander is the word,
I think. And all spread out with some power that flowed like Spring
when it pours upon a landscape. Eternally young and glorious--young,
I mean, in the sense of a field of flowers in the Spring looks young;
and glorious in the sense the sky looks glorious at dawn or sunset.
Something big shone through him like a storm, something that would
go on for ever just as the Earth goes on, always renewing itself,
something of gigantic life that in the human sense could never age at
all--something the old gods had. But the figure, so far as there was
any figure at all, was that old family picture come to life. Our great
ancestor and Arthur were one being, and that one being was vaster than
a million people. Yet it was Malahide I saw....
"They laid me in the earth I loved," he said in a strange, thrilling
voice like running wind and water, "and I found eternal life. I live
now for ever in Their divine existence. I share the life that changes
yet can never pass away."
I felt myself rising like a cloud as he said it. A roaring beauty
captured me completely. If I could tell it in honest newspaper
language--the common language used in flats and offices--why, I
guess I could patent a new meaning in ordinary words, a new power of
expression, the thing that all the churches and poets and thinkers have
been trying to say since the world began. I caught on to a fact so fine
and simple that it knocked me silly to think I'd never realised it
before. I had read it, yes; but now I _knew_ it. The Earth, the whole
bustling universe, was nothing after all but a visible production of
eternal, living Powers--spiritual powers, mind you--that just happened
to include the particular little type of strutting creature we called
mankind. And these Powers, as seen in Nature, were the gods. It was our
refusal of their grand appeal, so wild and sweet and beautiful, that
caused "evil." It was this barrier between ourselves and the rest of ...
My thoughts and feelings swept away upon the rising flood as the
"figure" came upon me like a shaft of moonlight, melting the last
remnant of opposition that was in me. I took my brain, my reason,
chucking them aside for the futile little mechanism I suddenly saw
them to be. In place of them came--oh, God, I hate to say it, for
only nursery talk can get within a mile of it, and yet what I need is
something simpler even than the words that children use. Under one arm
I carried a whole forest breathing in the wind, and beneath the other
a hundred meadows full of singing streams with golden marigolds and
blue forget-me-nots along their banks. Upon my back and shoulders lay
the clouded hills with dew and moonlight in their brimmed, capacious
hollows. Thick in my hair hung the unaging powers that are stars and
sunlight; though the sun was far away, it sweetened the currents of
my blood with liquid gold. Breast and throat and face, as I advanced,
met all the rivers of the world and all the winds of heaven, their
strength and swiftness melting into me as light melts into everything
it touches. And into my eyes passed all the radiant colours that weave
the cloth of Nature as she takes the sun.
And this "figure," pouring upon me like a burst of moonlight, spoke:
"They all are in you--air, and fire, and water...."
"And I--my feet stand--on the _Earth_," my own voice interrupted, deep
power lifting through the sound of it.
"The Earth!" He laughed gigantically. He spread. He seemed everywhere
about me. He seemed a race of men. My life swam forth in waves of some
immense sensation that issued from the mountain and the forest, then
returned to them again. I reeled. I clutched at something in me that
was slipping beyond control, slipping down a bank towards a deep, dark
river flowing at my feet. A shadowy boat appeared, a still more shadowy
outline at the helm. I was in the act of stepping into it. For the tree
I caught at was only air. I couldn't stop myself. I tried to scream.
"You have plucked asphodel," sang the voice beside me, "and you shall
pluck more...."
I slipped and slipped, the speed increasing horribly. Then something
caught, as though a cog held fast and stopped me. I remembered my
business in New York City.
"Arthur!" I yelled. "Arthur!" I shouted again as hard as I could shout.
There was frantic terror in me. I felt as though I should never get
back to myself again. Death!
The answer came in his normal voice: "Keep close to me. I know the
way...."
The scenery dwindled suddenly; the trees came back. I was walking in
the forest beside my nephew, and the moonlight lay in patches and
little shafts of silver. The crests of the pines just murmured in a
wind that scarcely stirred, and through an opening on our right I saw
the deep valley clasped about the twinkling village lights. Towering
in splendour the spectral snowfields hung upon the sky, huge summits
guarding them. And Arthur took my arm--oh, solidly enough this time.
Thank heaven, he asked no questions of me.
"There's a smell of myrrh," he whispered, "and we are very near the
undying, ancient things."
I said something about the resin from the trees, but he took no notice.
"It enclosed its body in an egg of myrrh," he went on, smiling down
at me; "then, setting it on fire, rose from the ashes with its life
renewed. Once every five hundred years, you see----"
"What did?" I cried, feeling that loss of self stealing over me again.
And his answer came like a blow between the eyes:
"The Phoenix. They called it a bird, but, of course, the true ..."
"But my life's insured in that," I cried, for he had named the company
that took large yearly premiums from me; "and I pay ..."
"Your life's insured in _this_," he said quietly, waving his arms to
indicate the Earth. "Your love of Nature and your sympathy with it make
you safe." He gazed at me. There was a marvellous expression in his
eyes. I understood why poets talked of stars and flowers in a human
face. But behind the face crept back another look as well. There grew
about his figure an indeterminate extension. The outline of Malahide
again stirred through his own. A pale, delicate hand reached out to
take my own. And something broke in me.
I was conscious of two things--a burst of joy that meant losing myself
entirely, and a rush of terror that meant staying as I was, a small,
painful, struggling item of individual life. Another spray of that
awful asphodel fell fluttering through the air in front of my face. It
rested on the earth against my feet. And Arthur--this weirdly changing
Arthur--stooped to pick it for me. I kicked it with my foot beyond his
reach ... then turned and ran as though the Furies of that ancient
world were after me. I ran for my very life. How I escaped from that
thick wood without banging my body to bits against the trees I can't
explain. I ran from something I desired and yet feared. I leaped along
in a succession of flying bounds. Each tree I passed turned of its
own accord and flung after me until the entire forest followed. But
I got out. I reached the open. Upon the sloping field in the full,
clear light of the moon I collapsed in a panting heap. The Earth drew
back with a great shuddering sigh behind me. There was this strange,
tumultuous sound upon the night. I lay beneath the open heavens that
were full of moonlight. I was myself--but there were tears in me.
Beauty too high for understanding had slipped between my fingers. I had
lost Malahide. I had lost the gods of Earth.... Yet I had seen ... and
felt. I had not lost all. Something remained that I could never lose
again....
I don't know how it happened exactly, but presently I heard Arthur
saying: "You'll catch your death of cold if you lie on that soaking
grass," and felt his hand seize mine to pull me to my feet.
"I feel safer on earth," I believe I answered. And then he said: "Yes,
but it's such a stupid way to die--a chill!"
4
I got up then, and we went downhill together towards the village
lights. I danced--oh, I admit it--I sang as well. There was a flood
of joy and power about me that beat anything I'd ever felt before. I
didn't think or hesitate; there was no self-consciousness; I just let
it rip for all there was, and if there had been ten thousand people
there in front of me, I could have made them feel it too. That was the
kind of feeling--power and confidence and a sort of raging happiness.
I think I know what it was too. I say this soberly, with reverence ...
all wool and no fading. There was a bit of God in me, God's power that
drives the Earth and pours through Nature--the imperishable Beauty
expressed in those old-world nature-deities!
And the fear I'd felt was nothing but the little tickling point
of losing my ordinary two-cent self, the dread of letting go, the
shrinking before the plunge--what a fellow feels when he's falling in
love, and hesitates, and tries to think it out and hold back, and is
afraid to let the enormous tide flow in and drown him.
Oh, yes, I began to think it over a bit as we raced down the
mountain-side that glorious night. I've read some in my day; my brain's
all right; I've heard of dual personality and subliminal uprush and
conversion--no new line of goods, all that. But somehow these stunts
of the psychologists and philosophers didn't cut any ice with me just
then, because I'd _experienced_ what they merely _explained_. And
explanation was just a bargain sale. The best things can't be explained
at all. There's no real value in a bargain sale.
Arthur had trouble to keep up with me. We were running due east, and
the Earth was turning, therefore, with us. We all three ran together
at _her_ pace--terrific! The moonlight danced along the summits, and
the snow-fields flew like spreading robes, and the forests everywhere,
far and near, hung watching us and booming like a thousand organs.
There were uncaged winds about; you could hear them whistling among the
precipices. But the great thing that I knew was--Beauty, a beauty of
the common old familiar Earth, and a beauty that's stayed with me ever
since, and given me joy and strength and a source of power and delight
I'd never guessed existed before.
* * * * *
As we dropped lower into the thicker air of the valley I sobered down.
Gradually the ecstasy passed from me. We slowed up a bit. The lights
and the houses and the sight of the hotel where people were dancing in
a stuffy ballroom, all this put blotting-paper on something that had
been flowing.
Now you'll think this an odd thing too--but when we reached the village
street, I just took Arthur's hand and shook it and said good-night and
went up to bed and slept like a two-year-old till morning. And from
that day to this I've never set eyes on the boy again.
Perhaps it's difficult to explain, and perhaps it isn't. I can explain
it to myself in two lines--I was afraid to see him. I was afraid he
might "explain." I was afraid he might explain "away." I just left a
note--he never replied to it--and went off by a morning train. Can
you understand that? Because if you can't you haven't understood
this account I've tried to give of the experience Arthur gave me.
Well--anyway--I'll just let it go at that.
Arthur's a director now in his father's wholesale chemical business,
and I--well, I'm doing better than ever in the buying and selling of
exchange between banks in New York City as before.
But when I said I was still drawing dividends on my Swiss investment,
I meant it. And it's not "scenery." Everybody gets a thrill from
"scenery." It's a darned sight more than that. It's those little
wayward patches of blue on a cloudy day; those blue pools in the sky
just above Trinity Church steeple when I pass out of Wall Street into
Lower Broadway; it's the rustle of the sea-wind among the Battery
trees; the wash of the waves when the Ferry's starting for Staten
Island, and the glint of the sun far down the Bay, or dropping a bit of
pearl into the old East River. And sometimes it's the strip of cloud
in the west above the Jersey shore of the Hudson, the first star, the
sickle of the new moon behind the masts and shipping. But usually it's
something nearer, bigger, simpler than all or any of these. It's just
the certainty that, when I hurry along the hard stone pavements from
bank to bank, I'm walking on the--Earth. It's just that--_the Earth_!
V
A DESERT EPISODE
1
"Better put wraps on now. The sun's getting low," a girl said.
It was the end of a day's expedition in the Arabian Desert, and they
were having tea. A few yards away the donkeys munched their _barsim_;
beside them in the sand the boys lay finishing bread and jam. Immense,
with gliding tread, the sun's rays slid from crest to crest of the
limestone ridges that broke the huge expanse towards the Red Sea. By
the time the tea-things were packed the sun hovered, a giant ball of
red, above the Pyramids. It stood in the western sky a moment, looking
out of its majestic hood across the sand. With a movement almost
visible it leaped, paused, then leaped again. It seemed to bound
towards the horizon; then, suddenly, was gone.