Harvey rose up early; as he walked to and fro in the white dawn,
he found the answers to every question in his mind: they rose up
with a sweet and joyful spontaneity. Life became filled with
happiest meaning: a light from behind the veil fell upon the things
he had before disliked, and in this new light, pain, sorrow, and
the old moralities were invested with a significance undreamt of
before. In admitting into his own mind Olive Rayne's ideas, he
removed something of their austerity: what he himself rejected,
seen in her, added another and peculiar interest to the saintly
ideal of her which he had formed. She had once said, peace and
rest were inconceivable while there existed strife and suffering
in nature. Nowhere could there be found refuge; drawing near unto
the divine, this pain only became wider, more intense, almost
insufferable, feeling and assimilating the vastness of divine sorrow
brooding over the unreclaimed deep. This pity, this consciousness
of pain, not her own, filling her own, filling her life, marked
her out from everyone he knew. She seemed to him as one consecrated.
Then this lover in his mystic passion passed in the contemplation
of his well-beloved from the earthly to the invisible soul. He
saw behind and around her a form unseen by others; a form, spiritual,
pathetic, of unimaginable beauty, on which the eternal powers kept
watch, which they nourished with their own life, and on which they
inflicted their own pain. This form was crowned, but with a keen-
pointed radiance from which there fell a shadowy dropping. As he
walked to and fro in the white dawn he made for her a song, and
inscribed it.
To One Consecrated
Your paths were all unknown to us:
We were so far away from you,
We mixed in thought your spirit thus--
With whiteness, stars of gold, and dew.
The mighty mother nourished you:
Her breath blew from her mystic bowers:
Their elfin glimmer floated through
The pureness of your shadowy hours.
The mighty mother made you wise;
Gave love that clears the hidden ways:
Her glooms were glory to your eyes;
Her darkness but the Fount of Days.
She made all gentleness in you,
And beauty radiant as the morn's:
She made our joy in yours, then threw
Upon your head a crown of thorns.
Your eyes are filled with tender light,
For those whose eyes are dim with tears;
They see your brow is crowned and bright,
But not its ring of wounding spears.
We can imagine no discomfiture while the heavenly light shines
through us. Harvey, though he thought with humility of his past
as impotent and ignoble in respect of action, felt with his rich
vivid consciousness that he was capable of entering into her subtlest
emotions. He could not think of the future without her; he could
not give up the hope of drawing nigh with her to those mysteries
of life which haunted them both. His thought, companioned by her,
went ranging down many a mystic year. He began to see strange
possibilities, flashes as of old power, divine magic to which all
the world responded, and so on till the thought trembled in vistas
ending in a haze of flame. Meanwhile, around him was summer:
gladness and youth were in his heart, and so he went on dreaming--
forecasting for the earth and its people a future which belongs
only to the spiritual soul--dreaming of happy years even as a
child dreams.
Later on that evening, while Olive was sitting in her garden, Dr.
Rayne came out and handed her a bundle of magazines.
"There are some things in these which may interest you, Olive," he
said: "Young Harvey writes for them, I understand. I looked over
one or two. They are too mystical for me. You will hardly find them
mystical enough."
She took the papers from him without much interest, and laid them
beside her on the seat. After a time she took them up. As she
read her brows began to knit, and her face grew cold. These verses
were full of that mystical voluptuousness which I said characterised
Harvey's earlier productions; all his rich imagination was employed
to centre interest upon moments of half-sensual sensations; the
imagery was used in such a way that nature seemed to aid and abet
the emotion; out of the heart of things, out of wild enchantment
and eternal revelry shot forth into the lives of men the fires of
passion. Nothing could be more unlike the Christ-soul which she
worshiped as underlying the universe and on which she had reliance.
"He does not feel pity; he does not understand love," she murmured.
She felt a cold anger arise; she who had pity for most things felt
that a lie had been uttered defiling the most sacred things in the
Holy of Holies, the things upon which her life depended. She could
never understand Harvey, although he had been included in the general
kindliness with which she treated all who came near her; but here
he seemed revealed, almost vaunting an inspiration from the
passionate powers who carry on their ancient war against the Most High.
The lights were now beginning to fade about her in the quiet garden
when the gate opened, and someone came down the path. It was Harvey.
In the gloom he did not notice that her usual smile was lacking,
and besides he was too rapt in his own purpose. He hesitated for
a moment, then spoke.
"Olive," he said tremulously, "as I came down the lanes to say good-bye
to you my heart rebelled. I could not bear the thought: Olive, I
have learned so many things from you; your words have meant so much
to me that I have taken them as the words of God. Before I knew
you I shrank from pain; I wandered in search of a false beauty.
I see now the purpose of life--to carry on the old heroic battle
for the true; to give the consolation of beauty to suffering;
to become so pure that through us may pass that divine pity which
I never knew until you spoke, and I then saw it was the root of
all life, and there was nothing behind it--such magic your words
have. My heart was glad this morning for you at this truth, and
I saw in it the power which would transfigure the earth. Yet all
this hope has come to me through you; I half hold it still through
you. To part from you now--it seems to me would be like turning
away from the guardian of the heavenly gateway. I know I have but
little to bring you. I must make all my plea how much you are to
me when I ask can you love me."
She had hardly heard a word of all he said. She was only conscious
that he was speaking of love. What love? Had he not written of it?
It would have emptied Heaven into the pit. She turned and faced him,
speaking coldly and deliberately:
"You could speak of love to me, and write and think of it like this!"
She placed her hand on the unfortunate magazines. Harvey followed
the movement of her arm. He took the papers up, then suddenly saw
all as she turned and walked away,--what the passion of these poems
must have seemed to her. What had he been in her presence that
could teach her otherwise? Only a doubter and questioner. In a
dreadful moment his past rose up before him, dreamy, weak, sensual.
His conscience smote him through and through. He could find no
word to say. Self-condemned, he moved blindly to the gate and went
out. He hardly knew what he was doing. Before him the pale dry
road wound its way into the twilight amid the hedges and cottages.
Phantasmal children came and went. There seemed some madness in
all they were doing. Why did he not hear their voices? They ran
round and round; there should have been cries or laughter or some
such thing. Then suddenly something seemed to push him forward,
and he went on blankly and walked down the lane. In that tragic
moment his soul seemed to have deserted him, leaving only a half-
animal consciousness. With dull attention he wondered at the muffled
sound of his feet upon the dusty road, and the little puffs of smoke
that shot out before them. Every now and then something would throb
fiercely for an instant and be subdued. He went on and on. His
path lay across some fields. He stopped by force of habit and
turned aside from the road. Again the same fierce throb. In a
wild instant he struggled for recollection and self-mastery, and
then the smothered soul rushed out of the clouds that oppressed it.
Memories of hope and shame: the morning gladness of his heart:
the brilliant and spiritual imaginations that inspired him: their
sudden ending: the degradation and drudgery of the life he was
to return to on the morrow: all rose up in tumultuous conflict.
A feeling of anguish that was elemental and not of the moment
filled him. Drifting and vacillating nature--he saw himself as
in a boat borne along by currents that carried him, now near isles
of beauty, and then whirled him away from their vanishing glory
into gloomy gulfs and cataracts that went down into blackness.
He was master neither of joy nor sorrow. Without will: unpractical;
with sensitiveness which made joy a delirium and gloom a very hell;
the days he went forward to stretched out iron hands to bind him
to the deadly dull and commonplace. These vistas, intolerable and
hopeless, overcame him. He threw himself down in his despair.
Around his head pressed the cool grasses wet with dew. Strange
and narrow, the boundary between heaven and hell! All around him
primeval life innocent and unconscious was at play. All around him,
stricken with the fever of life, that Power which made both light
and darkness, inscrutable in its workings, was singing silently
the lovely carol of the flowers.