Days, that in spite
Of darkness, by the light
Of a clear mind are day all night
NORTHWEST of London there are hills, where the air is eager and the
upper winds are caught in woods as they come cloud-bearing from the
wild sky. Often the winds fling clouds about the hills and leave them
entangled in the woods. Such a cloud they had left on the Saturday
morning when Lotta Cleethorpe brought René and Cathleen to her
retreat, an old white cottage on the border of a long common brown
with dead heather, orange with wet withered bracken, olive-green with
the gorse and the close-cropped grass under the gray mist. Out of
this, as they drove from the station, loomed trees and haystacks and
houses. A public-house and a church stood at the end of the common.
Soon they passed a blacksmith's shop with the bellows in full blast,
the sparks flying and the smith's huge arms and swart face lit up by
the red glow. There came out the merry clink of hammers on the anvil,
and then the hiss of the red-hot metal plunged into water.
René said:
"The beginning of it all."
"Of what?" asked Lotta.
"Modern life." And he found himself thinking of Kurt, who had just
added to his laurels the first prize in a race to Berlin.
They reached Lotta's cottage. Apple-trees stood by the gate, a clipped
box-tree by the door. A sheepdog came bounding along the road, cleared
the gate, and pawed frantically at Lotta until she crouched and he
could lay his forelegs on her shoulders and lick her face in a
frenzied greeting.
"He lives at the public-house when I am not here, but he refuses to
regard it as anything but lodgings. Down, Sammy! You know Cathleen.
Say How do to Mr. Fourmy."
Sammy cocked his head, looked the other way, and lifted his paw. René
shook it. The dog returned to his mistress, who said:
"I can't keep my hands off the garden. It has got into such a dreadful
state. You two had better go for a walk. You'll find toadstools in the
woods and there may be a few blackberries left."
She gave them a basket and sent them forth.
When they came to the woods, René said:
"It wants only the river and I could believe that we had never lost
each other for a single day. There were just such mists then: the same
drip in the trees, the same mysterious shrouding of the life of the
woods."
They wandered for miles, happy, hardly conscious of each other in the
joy they shared. The mist clung about their hair, their eyebrows, and
whipped up the color in their cheeks and made their eyes to shine.
Each new path they came to was a promise of adventure, and always in
color and mystery and the play of light the woods fulfilled that
promise. René jumped all the stiles and teased Cathleen because she
was only a woman and could not do the same, and she pointed out that
men needed to do extravagant things like jumping stiles or they became
flabby, whereas women had a more instinctive economy and were
physically more subtle.
"Women," said René, "are ridiculous."
"From a man's point of view. No more ridiculous than a man from a
woman's point of view. The absurdity disappears when they love each
other. Then male extravagance and feminine subtlety are only
incidentals----"
"Wise young woman."
"I'm a fraud really, René. It's pure Lotta. She was trained as a
doctor, you know, and really has watched people. I only guess."
"That's my trouble, too. I only feel quite sure when I reach a certain
stage of emotion."
"I never feel quite sure. Nor does Lotta. How can anyone? She says she
has observed certain things. She says men and women only make love to
each other as a rule because they love each other so little that they
have nothing else in common."
"And you and I----?"
"Have everything."
René laughed.
"Except the power to jump stiles."
"Oh! I love to see you do it."
"And I love to see your inability."
"We both get over it. That is all that matters."
"That's a hard, common-sensible woman."
They reached a place where the trees--beech, pine, and larch--came
marching up a steep hill, so steep that they could see over the tops
of the trees out to the plain beneath. The mists wreathed and broke. A
pale blue sky shone through them, and the sun cast pale yellow lights.
Cathleen began to sing as they plunged down the hill. René started to
run, could not stop himself, and went tearing down, shouting like mad
until he was brought up by a wide ditch. There he turned and watched
Cathleen threading her way through the trees, singing. The wind came
roaring, whispering and muttering through the leaves, and the trees
swayed and moaned. Cathleen came running the last few yards, and he
caught her. She held up her laughing face and they kissed, and the
wind seemed to sweep through them and set them swaying like the trees.
Their blood raced in their glee.
On the way back they gathered blackberries, and in a green clearing in
the woods they found mushrooms. Happy they were to take such treasure
back to Lotta, their friend, who had made such wonders possible for
them.
She had supper ready for them, the lamp and the fire lit, the curtains
drawn in the cozy kitchen. After they had eaten, they sat with
cigarettes and coffee and peppermints round the fire.
Lotta said:
"I knew you would find what you wanted here. I think all lovers should
bring their love to the earth and let the wind know that it is there.
How can you love in streets and houses? They drive the sweetness out
of it and keep it unnaturally excited. I have seen so much of that.
Women especially are so house-conscious. They hate everything in love
which threatens their pride of possession and position. They live so
jealously that they want jealousy even in their love----"
"Thank you," said René.
"For what?"
"For being so frank. I never was in a house before where there was no
oppression in the atmosphere."
"The house is so much happier since I came to it. It was occupied
before by an old woman who never set foot outside the door for thirty
years. We talk abusively about life in London, but life in villages is
even more sordid. Country people live even more meanly and graspingly
than townsfolk. There is more stagnation. They are all inbred. The
people here are all married to cousins, and they are queer in the head
and abnormal. Personally, I think the great towns grew out of the
necessity for breaking all that up. English life was far too like a
novel by Emily Brontë. It had to be broken up and readjusted. It was
much more that than the desire for money. You are both such children
that you have hardly had time to realize the kind of life in which you
were brought up. You have both shaken free of it with the violence
that makes one so hopeful of the younger generation. When you are as
old as I am, you will be able to realize far more than I have done.
The readjustment will be more nearly completed. The reaction from the
evils of industrial life will be even more violent than the reaction
from those of agrarian life. You will know how rare love is, and you
will rejoice that it was given to you to feel it, even though, as it
must not, it were to end to-night." She turned to René and smiled at
him with her soft eyes. "Cathleen has told me."
"Yes," he said. "I seem to have floundered into being forced to live
my own life in my own way."
"Cathleen too. You can only do it together. Neither of you could put
up with a mate who desired less and regarded every emotion as a bond
instead of a liberation. Love is the release of the spirit or it is
not love."
"And if others are to be unhappy?"
"That is their affair. You don't seem to have let that worry you much
until now."
"I never saw things so clearly before. There came a crisis, and I just
plunged blindly. I have a horror of doing that again."
"But I don't think you'll ever mind making a fool of yourself, René.
You never did," said Cathleen.
"Perhaps not, my dear, but I should hate to make a fool of you."
"Everyone," said Lotta, "makes mistakes. It isn't everyone who will
admit them. Once they are admitted they often turn out extremely
profitable. Really I don't see that you two need have any but
financial anxiety, and that is easily surmounted. Marriage? Neither of
you has a scrap of conventional religion. You can't possibly be
worried by scruples. Really the marriage laws of this country are in
such a mess that it has become almost a duty for decent people to
transgress them. They won't be altered in our time, so there is
nothing for it but to disregard them. You have quite enough real
difficulties to face without troubling yourselves about artificial
ones. A few virtuous people won't know you? What are they to you or
you to them?"
"It all comes back," said Cathleen, "to that girl."
"She took her risks. She knew that. They have courage, some of those
girls."
"Is courage," asked René, "all that is necessary?"
"I think so. It is only lack of courage that has made rules of conduct
and religious maxims and precepts--crutches and props. We're all very
stupid at conduct, but if we live by rule and habit there is no hope
of our getting any better."
"But you have rules for your hostel."
"I always allow them to be broken when there is anything to be gained
by it. I love defiance, but I hate slyness. Rules must be broken, they
must not be evaded. But we are beginning to talk for the sake of
talking, and Cathleen is nearly asleep. I'm glad you have had a good
day."
"Such a day," he said, "as I never had. I seem to have found that for
which I have always been searching, and it has made everything
valuable, even those things that I have most hated."
"I hope," said Lotta, "that you don't think you have arrived at any
conclusion. It is impossible to decide anything about life. It is
possible only to live--sometimes."
They went to bed very early. The wind had risen to. a gale and
screamed in the chimneys and the eaves.
Hardly had René sunk into sleep, the quick easy slumber of health and
peace, than he was roused by a fearful din. Leaping out of bed, he ran
to the window and opened it. The wind came rushing in upon his bare
chest and made him gasp for breath. Out on the road was a crowd of men
armed with rattles, tin cans, kettles, baths, which they banged and
whirled in the air as they marched solemnly up the road to the next
cottage. There they moved slowly up and down, making a terrible noise
and chanting:
There's evil enough between wind and water
Without your tumbling of the farmer's daughter.
Do you hear Billy Bows behind the door?
There's no honest girl shall be a whore,
With a billy, billy, billy,
Billy blow.
They kept this up for a couple of hours in the wind and the rain,
until at last with three groans and hoots they broke up and trailed
off into the darkness.
René asked Lotta next morning what they might be doing, and she told
him that the man in the cottage was an unpopular character who had
been annoying and molesting a girl in the village.
"That is public opinion. They wouldn't have minded if he had been a
popular man, or a rich man. They would have blamed the girl in that
case."
Lotta was staying on for a day or two. René took Cathleen back to
London. He told her he was going to his work and Mitcham Mews and Ann.
"You heard what Lotta said?"
"About the noise last night and the girl?"
"Yes. I think it's true. Ann will be blamed by her own class."
"Would you like me to go and see her?"
"I don't know. I'll tell you that when I have got things straight with
her--if I ever do."
"I can wait, René," she said. "Time doesn't seem to matter now. Isn't
Lotta splendid?"
"Splendid!"
They shook hands as they parted, and each promised to write.