I
A notable difference between the sexes is this: that a man will thrive
for years--that is, his better part--upon love denied, and woman upon
love fulfilled. So Senhouse, in his hopeless plight, starved and did
well; dreams nourished him in what passes in England for solitude.
From the grey of the mornings to the violet-lidded dusk his silence
was rarely broken; and yet the music in his heart was continuous; his
routine marched to a rhythm. The real presence of Sanchia was always
with him, to intensify, accentuate, and make reasonable the perceptions
of his quickened senses. Sense blended with sense--as when the sharp
fragrance of the thyme which his feet crushed gave him the vision of her
immortal beauty, or when, in the rustle of the wind-swept grasses, he
had a consciousness of her thrilled heart beating near by. All nature,
in fact, was vocal of Sanchia by day; and at night, presently, she
stole white-footed down the slant rays of the moon and fed his soul upon
exhalations of her own. Idle as he might have appeared to one who did
not know the man--for beyond the routine of his handiwork he did nothing
visible--he was really intensely busy. Out of the stores reaped and
garnered in those meditative years was to come the substance of his
after-life.
But no man in England may live three years in a grass valley unreported;
his fame will spread abroad, scattered as birds sow seeds. Discreetly
as he lived and little as he fared, he was at first a thing of doubt and
suspicion, and won respect by slow degrees. Was he a coiner, stirring
alloys over his night fires? Was he Antichrist, blaspheming the Trinity
at daybreak? He was talked of by gaitered farmers at sheep-fairs, by
teamsters at cross-roads, by maidens and their sweethearts on Sundays.
The shepherds, it was thought, might have told more than they did. It
was understood that they had caught him at his secrets times and again.
But the shepherds had little to say of him but that he was a mellow man,
knowing sheep and weather, and not imparting all that he knew. Similarly
the gypsies, who alone travel the Race-plain in these days, and mostly
by night, were believed to know him well; but they, too, kept their lore
within the limits of their own shifty realm.
Rarely, indeed, he was seen. Sunday lovers, strolling hand in hand up
the valley, came to a point where they went tiptoe and peered about for
him. He might be described motionless, folded in his white robe, midway
between ridge and hollow; or a gleam of him flashed between the trees
of the brake would perhaps be all that they would get for an hour of
watching. The hill brows would, on such days, be lined with patient
onlookers; all eyes would be up the narrow valley to its head under
Hirlebury, where, below the little wood, his grey hut could be seen,
deep-eaved, mysterious, blankly holding its secrets behind empty
windows. None ever ventured to explore at close quarters; and if the
tenant had appeared, a thousand to one they would all have looked the
other way. The Wiltshire peasant is a gentleman from the heart outwards.
So, too, carters, ploughmen, reapers in the vales would sometimes see
his gaunt figure monstrous on the sky-line, cowled and with uplifted
arms, adoring (it was supposed) the sun, or leaning on his staff,
motionless and rapt, meditating death and mutability. He lost nothing by
such change apparitions; on the contrary, he gained the name of a wise
man who had powers of divination and healing. In the cottage whither he
went once a week for bread, a child had been sick of a burning fever.
His hands, averred the mother, had cured it. Groping and making passes
over its stomach, rubbing in oils, relief had come, then quiet sleep and
a cool forehead. After this an old man, crippled with rheumatics, had
hobbled up to the very edge of his dominion, and had waited shaking
there upon his staff until he could get speech with the white stranger.
He, too, had had the reward of his relief. If he was not made sound
again, he was relieved and heartened. He had said that, if he was
spared, he was hopeful to stretch to his height again, which had been
six feet all but an inch. The stranger, said he, had put him in the
way of new life, and whatever he might mean--whether that he were a
Salvationist or a quack doctor--he would say no more. After that, a
young woman went to him to get him to name the father of her child, and
returned, and was modest for a month, and a good mother when the time
came. And true it was that her chap came forward and saw the vicar about
it, and that they were asked in church. Out of such things as these his
fame grew.
The hunt struck upon him now and again, when the hounds in full cry
streamed down his steep escarpments and threatened panic to his browsing
goats. At such times he would rise up, white-robed and calm, as stay
with a quiet gesture the scattering beasts. The whips would cap him, and
the Master with his field find themselves in company of an equal. For
his ease of manner never left him, nor that persuasive smile which
made you think that the sun was come out. He had none of the airs of
mystagogue, but talked to men, as he did to beasts, in the speech which
was habitual to them. The lagging fox understood him when, grinning his
fear and fatigue, he drew himself painfully through the furze. So did
the hounds, athirst for his blood. Buck-skinned gentlemen, no less,
found him affable and full of information--about anything and everything
in the world except the line of the hunted fox. “Oh, come,” he said
once, “don't ask me to give him away. You're fifty to one, to start
with; and the fact is I passed him my word that I wouldn't. I'll tell
you what though. You shall offer me a cigarette. I haven't smoked for
six days.” Which was done.
His powers with children, his charm for them, his influence and
fascination, which in course of time made him famous beyond these
shores, arose out of a chance encounter not far from his hut. Three
boys, breaking school in the nesting season, came suddenly upon him, and
paled, and stood rooted. “Come on,” he said, “I'll show you a thing or
two that you've never seen before.” He led them to places of marvel,
which his speech made to glimmer with the hues of romance: the fresh
grubbed earth where a badger had been routing, the quiet glade where,
that morning, a polecat had washed her face. He brought them up to a
vixen and her cubs, and got them all playing together. He let them hold
leverets in their arms, milk his goats, as the kids milk them for their
need; and showed them so much of the ways of birds that they forgot,
while they were under the spell of him, to take any of their eggs.
Crowning wonder of all--when a peewit, waiting on the down, dipped and
circled about his head for a while and finally perched on his shoulder
while he stood looking down upon her eggs in the bents! Such deeds as
these fly broadcast over the villages, and on Saturdays he would be
attended by a score of urchins, boys and girls. To a gamekeeper who
came out after his lad, sapling ash in hand, he had that to say which
convinced the man of his authority.
“'A says to me, 'There's a covey of ten in thicky holler,' where you
could see neither land nor bird. 'I allow 'tis ten,' he says, 'but we
won't be particular to a chick.' There was nine, if you credit me, that
rose out of a kind of a dimple in the down, that you couldn't see, and
no man could see. 'Lord love you,' I said, 'Mr. John, how ever did you
see 'em?' He looks at me, and he says, very quiet, 'I never saw the
birds, nor knew they was there. I saw the air. There's waves in this
air,' he says, 'wrinkled waves; and they birds stirred 'em, like stones
flung into a pond. Tom,' he says, to my Tom, 'if you look as close as I
do,' he says, 'you'll see what I see.' And young Tom looks up at him, as
a dog might, kind of faithful, and he says, 'I 'low I will, sir, please,
sir.' I says to him, 'Can a man be taught the like o' that?' 'No,' says
he, 'but a boy can.' 'What more could thicky boy learn?' I says, and he
says, 'To understand his betters, and get great words, and do without
a sight of things--for the more you do without,' he says, 'the more you
have to deal with.' 'Such things as what, now, would he do without?'
I wants to know. He looks at me. 'Food,' he says, kind of sharp; 'food
when he's hungry, and clothing, and a bed; and money, and the respect of
them that don't know anything, and other men's learning, and things he
don't make for himself.' Heard any man ever the like o' that? But just
you bide till I've done. 'Can a boy learn to do without drink?' I wants
to know--for beer's been my downfall. 'He can,' says thicky man. 'And
love?' I says; and 'No,' says he straight, 'he cannot. But he can learn
the way of it; and that 'ull teach him to do wi'out lust.' 'Tis a wise
thought, the like of that, I allow.”
The gamekeeper paused for the murmurs of his auditory to circle about
the tap-room, swell and subside, and then brought out his conclusion.
There was book-learning to be faced. “How about scholarship? 'I'd give
him none,' says the man. 'Swallerin' comes by nature, and through more
than the mouth. I'd open him his eyes and ears, his fingers and toes,
and the very hairs on the backs of his hands; and they'll all swaller
in time, like the parts of the beastes do.' Now, that's a learned man,
I allow. My boy must go to the Council School it does appear; but
thicky man will give him more teaching in a week than school-master in
a year--and there he goes o' Saturdays--and wants no driving, moreover.”
He returned to his beer, thoughtful-eyed.
The gamekeeper's son was twelve years old, and was the nucleus round
which grew the Senhusian school of a later day, where neither reading
nor writing could be had until the pupil was fifteen years old. But
this is anticipatory, for the school was a matter of long gestation and
tentative birth.
II
One September midnight, as he stirred a late supper over a small
wood-fire, he was hailed by a cry from above. “Ho, you! I ask shelter,”
he was adjured. The quarter moon showed him a slim figure dark against
the sky.
“Come down, and you shall have it,” he answered, and continued to skim
his broth.
The descent was painfully made, and it was long before the traveller
stood blinking by his fire--a gaunt and hollow-eyed lad. Senhouse took
him in at a glance, stained, out-at-elbows with the world, nursing a
grudge, footsore and heartsore. He had a gypsy look, and yet had not a
gypsy serenity. That is a race that is never angry at random; and never
bitter at large. A gypsy will want a man's life; but if the man is
not before him, will be content to wait until he is. But this wanderer
seemed to have a quarrel with time and place, that they held not his
enemy by the gullet.
“You travel late, my friend,” said Senhouse briskly.
“I travel by night,” said the stranger, “lest I should be seen by men or
the sun.”
Senhouse laughed. “_In girum imus noctu, non ut consumimur igni_.' They
used to say that of the devils once upon a time. Devilish bad Latin; but
it reads backwards as well as forwards, like the devil himself.”
“My devil rides on my back,” said the stranger, “and carries with him
the fire that roasts me.”
He was at once bitter and sententious. Senhouse put down his hurts to
bruises of the self-esteem.
“I hope that you dropped him up above,” he said cheerfully, “or that you
will let me exorcise him. I've tried my hand with most kinds of devil.
Are you a Roman?”
“Half,” he was told, and, guessing which half, asked no more questions.
“You are pretty well done, I can see,” he said. “You want more food. You
want warm water, and a bed, and a dressing for your feet. You've been on
the road too long.”
The stranger was huddled by the fire, probing his wounded feet. “I'm cut
to pieces,” he said. “I've been over stubbles and flint. This is a cruel
country.”
“It's the sweetest in the world,” Senhouse told him, “when you know your
way about it. When you have the hang of it you need not touch the roads.
You smell out the hedgerows, and every borstal leads you out on to the
grass. But I'll own that there are thistles. I wear sandals myself.
Now,” he continued, ladling out of his pot with a wooden spoon, “here's
your porridge, and there are bread and salt; and here water, and here
goat's milk. Afterwards you shall have a pipe of tobacco, and some tea.
Best begin while all's hot--and while you eat I'll look to your wounds.
Finally, you shall be washed and clothed.”
He went away, returning presently with water and a napkin. Kneeling, he
bathed his guest's feet, wiped them, anointed, then wrapped them up in
the napkin. The disconsolate one, mean-time, was supping like a wolf. He
gulped at his porridge with quick snaps, tore his bread with his teeth.
Senhouse gave him time, quietly eating his own supper, watching the red
gleam die down in the poor wretch's eyes. Being himself a spare feeder,
he was soon done, and at further business of hospitality. He set a great
pipkin of water to heat, brought out a clean robe of white wool, a jelab
like his own, and made some tea.
The stranger, then, being filled, cleansed and in warm raiment,
stretched himself before the fire, and broke silence. He was still
surly, but the grudge was not audible in his voice. “I took your fire
for a gypsy camp, and was glad enough of it. I've come by the hills from
Winterslow since dusk. You were right, though: I was done. I couldn't
have dragged another furlong.”
Senhouse nodded. “I thought not. Been long on the road?”
“Two months.”
“From the North, I think? From Yorkshire?”
The stranger grunted his replies. His host judged that he had reasons
for his reticence. There was a pause.
“You sup late,” was then observed.
Senhouse replied, “I generally do. I take two meals a day--the first at
noon, the second at midnight; but I believe that I could do without one
of them. I never was much of an eater--and I need very little sleep.
Somehow, although I am out at sunrise most mornings, I rarely sleep till
two or thereabouts. Four hours are enough for me--and in the summer much
less. Sometimes, when the fit is on me, I roam all night long, and come
back and do my routine--and then sleep where I am, or may be. Precisians
would grow mad at such a life--and yet I'm awfully healthy.”
The stranger watched him. “You live here, then--and so?”
“I have lived here,” said Senhouse, “for three years or more; but I've
lived so for over twenty. I've wandered for most of that time, and know
England from end to end; but now I seem to have got into a backwater,
and I find that I travel farther, and see more, than I did when I was
hardly for a week together in the same place. But that's reason-able
enough, if you think of it. If you can do with-out time, space goes with
it. If it don't matter _when_ you are, it don't matter _where_.”
The stranger lent this reasoning his gloomy meditation, which turned
it inwards to himself and his rueful history. “I don't follow you, I
believe,” he said, “for very good reason. I hope you will never learn as
I have that it does matter where you are.” He stopped, then added, as if
the admission was wrung out of him, “I've been in prison.”
“So have I,” said Senhouse, “and in Siberia at that. I was there for
more than a year, though not all that time within walls. They let me
loose when they found that I could be trusted, and I learned botany, and
caught a marsh fever which nearly finished me. They wouldn't have me
in after that, being quite content that I should rot in the open. I was
succoured by a woman, one of those noble creatures who are made to give
themselves. She gave me what blood she had left. God bless her: she
blessed me.”
“It was a woman,” said the stranger, “that sent me to prison.”
Senhouse, after looking him over, calmly replied, “I don't believe you.
You mean, I think, that there was a woman, and you went to prison. You
confuse her and your feelings about her. It is natural, but not very
fine-mannered. No woman would have put the thing as you have put it to
me.”
The stranger shifted two or three times under his host's quiet regard:
presently he said, “This is the tale in a nutshell. She was beautiful
and kind to me; she was in a hateful place, and I loved her--and she
knew it. There was a man with claims--rights he had none--preposterous
claims, made infamous by his acts. The position was impossible,
intolerable. She knew it, but did nothing. Women are like
that--endlessly enduring; but men are not. I dragged him off a horse and
thrashed him. He had me to gaol, and she went her ways, leaving a note
for me, hoping I should do well. Do well! Much she cares what I do.
Much care I.” He ended with a sob which was like the cough of a wolf at
night, and then turned his face away.
“Why should she care,” asked Senhouse, “what becomes of you? By your act
you dropped yourself out of her sphere. If she was to be degraded, as
you call it, by whom was she degraded? But you talk there a language
which I don't understand. You say that she was beautiful, and I suppose
you know what you mean by the word. How then is a beautiful person to
be degraded by anything the likes of you, or your fellow-dog, do to
her? The thing's absurd. You can't claw her soul or blacken the edges of
that. You can't sell that into prostitution or worse. That is her own,
and it's that which makes her beautiful,--in spite of the precious pair
of you, bickering and mauling each other to possess her. Possess her,
poor fool! Can you possess moonlight? If you have degraded anything, you
have degraded yourself. She remains where she is, entirely out of your
reach.”
The young man now turned his trapped and wretched face to the speaker.
“You little know--” he began, then for weakness stopped. “I can't
quarrel with you; wait till I've had a night's rest.”
“You shall have it, and welcome,” said Senhouse. “But you'll never
quarrel with me. I believe I've got beyond that way of enforcing
arguments which I fear may be unsound. I doubt if I have quarrelled with
anybody for twenty years.”
“There are some things which no man can stand,” said the other, “and
that was one. Your talk of the soul is very fine; but do you say that
you don't love a woman's body as well as her soul?”
Senhouse was silent for a while; then he said, “No,--I can't say that.
You have me there. I ought to, but I can't. And I think I owe you an
apology for my heat, for the fact is that I've been in much of your
position myself. There was a man once upon a time that I felt like
thrashing--for much of your reason. But I didn't do it--for what
seemed to me unanswerable reason. I did precisely the opposite--I did
everything I could to ensure a miserable marriage for the being I loved
best in all the world. I loathed the man, I loathed the bondage; but
that's what I did. Now mark what follows. I didn't--I couldn't--degrade
her; but I saw myself dragging like a worm in the mud while she soared
out of my reach. And there I've been--of the slime slimy ever since.
Where she is now I don't know, but I think in heaven. Heaven lay in her
eyes--and whenever I look at the sky at night I see her there.”
“You are talking above my head,” said the stranger, “or above your own.
Either I am a fool, or you a madman. You love a woman, and give her to
another man? You love her, and secure her in slavery? You love her, and
don't want her?”
“It is I that am the fool, not you,” said Senhouse. “I do want her. I
want nothing else in earth or heaven. And yet I know that I have her for
ever. Our souls have touched each other. She is mine and I am hers. And
yet I want her.”
“Won't you get her? Don't you believe that you will?”
“God knows! God knows!”
“She was beautiful?”
“The dawn,” said Senhouse, “was not more purely lovely than she. The
dawn was in her face--the awfulness of it as well as its breathless
beauty.”
“My mistress,” said the young man, “had the gait of a goddess in the
corn. One thought of Demeter in the wheat. She was like ivory under the
moon. She laughed rarely, but her voice was low and thrilled.”
“Her breath,” Senhouse continued, “was like the scent of bean-flowers.
She sweetened the earth. It is true that she laughed seldom, but when
she did the sun shone from behind a cloud. When she was silent you
could hear her heart beat. She was deliberate, measured in all that she
did--yet her spirit was as swift as the south-west wind. She did nothing
that was not lovely, and never faltered in what she purposed. When first
I came to know her and see the workings of her noble mind, I was so
happy in the mere thought of her that I sang all day as I worked or
walked. It never entered me for one minute that I could desire anything
but the knowledge of her.”
“I wanted my mistress altogether,” the other broke in, “from the first
moment to the last--fool, and wicked fool, as you may think me. I could
see her bosom stir her gown--I could see the lines of her as she walked.
She was kind to me, I tell you, and there were times when--alone
with her--in her melting mood--in the wildness of my passion--but
no! something held me: I never dared touch her.... And then he--the
other--came back; he, with his 'claims' and 'rights'; and the thought of
him, and what he could do--and did do--made me blind. You tell me that I
sinned against her--”
“I don't,” said Senhouse. “I tell you that you sinned against love. You
don't know what love is.”
“You say so. Maybe you know nothing about it. If you have reduced
yourself to be contented with the soul of a woman, I have not. What have
I to do with the soul?”
“Evidently nothing,” said Senhouse. “How, pray, do you undertake to
apprehend body's beauty unless you discern the soul in it--on which it
shapes its beauty?”
“I know,” the other replied, “that she has a lovely body, and gracious,
free-moving ways; and I could have inferred her soul from them. I'll
engage that you did the same thing. How are you to judge of the soul but
by the hints which the body affords you?”
Senhouse made no answer, but remained musing. When he spoke it was as if
he was resuming a tale half-told....
“She was in white--white as a cloud--and in a wood. Her hair reflected
gold of the sun. She pinned her skirts about her waist, and put her bare
foot into a pool of black water. She sank in it to the knee. She did not
falter: her eyes were steady upon what she did.”
The stranger took him up where he stopped, and continued the tale. “She
could never falter in her purpose. She bared herself to the thighs. She
went into the pool thigh-deep. Whiter than the lilies which she went to
save, she raked the weed from them--you helping her.”
“She did,” said Senhouse, his eyes searching the fire. “And when,
afterwards, she did what her heart bade her, she never faltered either,
though she steeped her pure soul in foulness compared to which the black
water was sweet. But do you suppose that any evil handling would stain
her? You fool! You are incapable of seeing a good woman. In the same
breath with which I spurned myself for having a moment's fear for her, I
thanked God for having let me witness her action.”
The rebuke was accepted, not because it was felt to be justified; but
rather, it passed unheeded. The stranger had questions to ply.
“Knowing her, loving her--loveworthy as she was--how could you leave
her?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Senhouse, “I have never left her.” But in the
next breath he had to qualify his paradox.
He spoke vehemently. “I had of her all that I dared have. That has never
left me. I had all that she could give me--she that was self-sufficing,
not to be imparted. She did not love me, as you could understand love:
I don't think she could love anybody. But I only could read her thoughts
and grasp her troubles for her. She was at ease with me, let me write
to her, was glad to see me when I came, but perfectly able to do without
me. She was, of course, not human; she inhabited elsewhere. Her 'soul
was like a star and dwelt apart.' She remembered things as they had
been, yet not as affecting her to pleasure or pain; she remembered them
as a tale that is told, as things witnessed. So she remembered me--and
so she still does. If I was there, with her, she was glad; if I was
not there, she wasn't sorry. I was nothing to her but a momentary
solace--and I knew it and taught myself to be contented. I believe that
she was the spirit of immortal youth fleeting over the world. I called
her Hymnia. What Beatrice was to Dante, the visible incarnation of
his dream of holiness, such was she to me. I picture her and Beatrice
together in heaven.
'In the clear spaces of heaven,
As sisters and lovers, sit
Beatrice and Thou embraced--
Hand and hand, waist and waist,
And smile at the worship given
By Earth, and the men in it
To whom you were manifest.'
I quote my own poetry, because, oddly enough, nobody else has remarked
upon the fact.”
He continued: “When she did what it pleased her to do, it was said by
fools that I had inspired her. Fool among fools, I thought so myself at
the time, and moved Earth and Heaven, and Hell and Ingram, to save her
from an act of magnanimity the like of which I have never heard of.
Bless you! if I had never lived, she would have acted as she did,
because she was incapable of seeing evil, incapable of acting against
her heart. Well! and the thing was done--and I had to face it. I had it
all out with myself, and decided that no harm could come to her. From
that hour I have never seen her with my waking eyes. Yet she is here.
She is always here....
“My answer to you is simple. I have all of her of which I am capable. I
have never left her because she has never left me....
“I wrote out my heart in my first years of knowing her; but since then I
have gone under the harrow of this world, where there can be no singing.
Now that I am at peace my voice has come back. I listen to what she
tells me, and note it. Like Dante, _vo significando:_ I am a drain-pipe
for her spirit. She was Hymnia to me once, and I sang of Open Country;
now she is Despoina, Mistress of the Night. Words come thronging to
me, phrases, rhythms; but not Form. I shall get out a poem one of these
days--when the harrow rests. And that will be its name: Rest Harrow.”
He broke out after a pause-“Her beauty! What is it to the purpose to put
its semblance into words? Its significance is the heart of the matter.
We see the earth as hill and valley, pasture and cloud, sky and sea.
Really it is nothing of the kind, but infinitely more. It is tireless
energy, yearning, force, profusion, terror, immutability in variety.
What are words to such a power? It is to _that_ I stretch out my arms.
I must lie folded in that immensity, drown and sink in it, till it and
I are one. I must be resumed into the divine energy whose appearance is
but a broken hint of it. So it is with Her: not what she appears, but
what she stands for is the miracle. Her beauty is not in dimple and
curve, though her breasts are softer than the snowy hills, and the
liquor of her mouth sweeter than honey of limes. If I lay on the floor
of the Aegean and looked up to the sun I should not see such blue as
glimmers in her eyes. But these are figures, halting symbols. Her form,
her glow, her eager, lovely breath are her soul put into speech for us
to read. You might say that her nobility was that of the Jungfrau on a
night of stars. So her body's beauty is but a poem written by God about
her soul.”
Glyde sat up and looked at him across the fire. “I know you. There
is but one man who has loved her as you do. You are her poet. You are
Senhouse.”
Senhouse nodded. “That is my name. You know her, then?” His face glowed
darkly. “You have known her--you!”
“I saw her four months ago. I was in servitude in a house where she too
was made a servant. For her sake, I tell you again, I downed Ingram.”
Senhouse said sharply, “It was for your own. You aren't fit to talk to
her. You have unclean lips. You don't hurt her, for you cannot. You hurt
yourself infinitely. Why, a dog would do as you did, and possibly be
right; but you, not being a dog, have broken your own rules. You have
trodden on your own honour, and, like the dull fool that you are, come
out wrapped in your silly self-esteem as if it was a flag. I wish that
you could see yourself as I see you--or rather I hope you never may;
for if you did you would see no reason to live.” The words, frozen with
scorn, cut like hailstones. The guest cowered, with the whip about his
face. Senhouse rose.
“Follow me,” he said.
Glyde also rose to his feet, and, as if he was giddy, looked blankly
about him. “O God, what have I done? O God, what am I?” He dashed his
hand over his eyes. “I can't see. I suppose I never could.” He turned
upon Senhouse. “You! Why do you harbour such a rat as I?”
Senhouse gave him pitiful eyes. “If you think yourself a rat, you are in
the way to be more. Come, we will be friends yet. You're near the end of
your tether, I think. Let me tuck you into a blanket.”
III
In the morning Glyde, in a humble mood, drank quantities of small beer.
In other words, he told his story of Sanchia, of Ingram, and of Mrs.
Wilmot. He was so steered by questions from Senhouse that he came,
towards the end, to see that if any one had driven his mistress into a
life of bondage to Ingram it was himself and his presumptuous arm.
“You must have offended her beyond expression,” he was told. “First,
her fine esteem in her own spotless robe, which you have smeared with
beastly blood and heat; next, her sense of reason clear as day; next,
and worst, her logical faculty by which she sees it to be a law of the
earth that nothing can be bought without a price. Oh, you precious young
donkey! And who the mischief are you, pray, to meddle in the affairs of
high ladies--you who can't manage your own better than to do with your
foolish muscles what is the work of a man's heart? Love! You don't know
how to spell the word. But I am getting angry again, and I don't want to
do that. I'll tell you what I shall do with you. You shall stay with
me here till you are well, and then you shall go to London and find
Despoina--”
“Do you mean Sanchia?” Glyde was still unregenerate at heart.
“I mean whom I say, your mistress and mine. You are not fit to name her
by any other name.”
“No, no--I know it,” said the youth; “but her name is so beautiful.”
“Everything about her is beautiful,” said Senhouse, “therefore see that
you go to her cleansed and sweetened. Now, when you have found her you
shall beg her pardon on your knees--”
“Never!” said Glyde, grittily in his teeth.
“On your heart's knees, you fool,” cried Senhouse, with a roar which
rolled about the hills. “On the knees of your rat's heart. You shall
beg her pardon on your knees for your beastly interference, presumption,
mulishness, and graceless manhood; and then you shall leave her
immediately, and thank God for the breath of her forgiveness. This also
is important. You are not to name me who have sent you.” His eyes shone
with the gleam of tears. “Never name me to her, young Glyde, for I'll
tell you now that for every stripe I've dusted your jacket with you owe
me forty--and you can lay on when you please.”
“For I,” he continued, after a pause for breath, while Glyde stared
fearfully upon him, “for I, too, have betrayed her.”
They said no more at that time, but all day Glyde followed Senhouse
about like a dog.
In the evening of what to the undrilled youth was a hard-spent day,
Senhouse unfolded his heart and talked long and eloquently of love and
other mysteries of our immortal life.
“The attainment of our desires,” he said, “appears to every one of us to
be a Law of Nature, and so, no doubt, it is. But that is equally valid
which says, 'To every man that which he is fit to enjoy.' The task of
men is to reconcile the two. That once done you are whole--nay, you are
holy.”
“I believe that I am in the way of that salvation, look you, for I
know now that there is hardly a thing upon the earth which I cannot do
without. That being so, and all things of equal value, or of no value,
_I have them all_. They are at the disposal of that part of myself which
enters no markets and cannot be chaffered away. Wind, rain, and sun
have bleached me; dinners of herbs have reduced my flesh to obedience;
incessant toil, with meditation under the stars, have driven my thoughts
along channels graved deep by patient plodding of the field. I am become
one with Nature. I have watched the wheeling of the seasons until, to
escape vertigo, I picture myself as a fixed point, and see the spheres
in their courses revolve about me.”
Mystic sayings, aphorisms oozed from him like resin from a pine.
“It is error to suppose that discomfort is holy. Holiness is harmony.
Men have lost sight of the sanctity of the body. Rightly considered,
indigestion is a great sin.”
“Passion, which is a state of becoming, is not holy, for holiness is
a state of being. But it is noble, because it is a straining after
appeasement, which is a harmony.
“Man is an ape, or a god, but certainly a god in this, that he can
make himself either. It is by no means certain, however, that this
potentiality is not also possessed by the ape.
“Appeasement of passion is fulfilment of our being, which out of ferment
makes wine, though riot seeks rest.”
He was not always so transcendental. Here we have him closer to the
matter.
“A woman when she loves is a seraph winged. When she does not she is a
chrysalis, a husk, or a shell. In love she follows the man, but appears
to fly him, as a shepherd goes before the sheep he is really driving.
Out of it she is an empty vase, to be revered by us for the sacred wine
which she may hold, as a priest handles fearfully the chalice.
“She has but one law, the law of her love, which says to her, 'Give,
give, give.' See here how she differs from the man, to whom love is
but one of many healthy appetites--not a divine mission. Love, hunger,
hunting, or a taste for picture-dealing, say to him, 'Take, take.'
“Yet it is no wonder that the sexes go in fear of each other, each a
mystery to each. For my part, I have never been close to a woman without
a desire to cover my eyes.”
And here he got level with her, and showed her radiant beside him.
“A young woman with shining eyes, blown-back hair and face on fire,
holding out her heart from the threshold, stretching it out at arms'
length, crying, 'Who will take this? To whom may I give it?' A vision
here of Heaven's core of light. I have seen it. I, Senhouse, have seen
the Holy Grail.
“She stood with me upon the threshold of the world, just so, with
blown-back hair and shining eyes. Blessed one, blessed prodigal! She
poured out her heart like water-for a dog to lap. He was dog-headed,
full in the eye, a rich feeder. She decked him with the fair garlands of
her thoughts, she made him glisten with her holy oils. She crowned him
with starry beams from her eyes, she sweetened him with the breath of
her pure prayers. She robed him in white and scarlet, for he was wrapped
in her soul and sprinkled with her passion. And she said, 'I love a
divine person. I am ready to die for him. Make haste. Pile the fire,
sharpen the knife; bind me with cords, and drive deep. I die that he may
live.' O Gods, and Sanchia gave herself for Nevile Ingram!”
He was never alone, it appeared, for she was with him constantly,
a vivifying principle. He had ensphered her in light; she was
unassailable--his fly in amber. Ingram, Chevenix, all Wanless,
might have daily converse with her, and one might grudge her her
self-sufficiency, and another see her a pretty girl in a mess. To him
she was a fairy in harness, “a lovely lady garmented in light,” to whom
the rubs of the world could do no harm. She wore crystal armour. They
did not know her, could not see her, those who used her for their
elemental needs. “Her soul was like a star and dwelt apart.”
He told young Glyde that he had reached this transcendental eyrie of
his by painful degrees. No person of Sanchia's acquaintance had suffered
more than he by her desperate affair. He had been her first lover, and
her only confidant, for she had been what one calls a “difficult” girl,
who gave out nothing and had no friends. Her sisters knew very little
about her, her mother nothing. It had been Senhouse who had called up
the spirit that was in her--that extraordinary candour of vision
which shrank from the judgment of nothing in heaven or earth “upon the
merits.” He had himself been at first amazed by her quality; but before
he had discovered it he had adored her; so it had seemed all of a piece
with her exquisite perfection. That first sight he had had of her, in
the sun-dappled woodland glade, with her gown above her knees, setting
her foot in the unknown depths of a black pool--that she might
rescue lilies from suffocation--was surely typical of that which
followed--when, barely twenty-one, she trod deliberately, in her world's
shocked face, a road which leads without return to a point at which
the world says, “I cannot see you, you are dead.” But she had never
faltered, had seen no shame, and felt none. Nevile was unhappy, and
needed her. If there was no other way of serving him, she must take that
way. So she told him, Senhouse, her only friend; and he cried aloud in
his agony, “God save her,” while his soul was saying, “Beatrice never
shrank from hell, nor ever looked back. No more, God be thanked, does
Sanchia.” When the thing was done, and she had gone with unbowed head
into the deeps, he had known his hours of desolation; but from that hour
she had stood for him “a thing enskied and sainted.” He felt that he was
set apart for her worship, and only regretted that Beatrice had had a
better poet for the business than Sanchia could ever hope for.
For a year after her flight he continued a correspondence with her which
had begun with their first acquaintance; and then he had stopped it,
not she. His reason shall be admitted, to his credit or not. It appeared
that she read his letters, as they came, to Nevile Ingram--she told him
so--and, further, that Ingram was bored. Sanchia did not tell him that,
but he gathered it; and whether he felt that the intimacy was fatally
invaded, or whether he was piqued--he stopped. Within two years or so
from that he wrote once more to tell her that he was about to “join
fortunes” with Mary Germain, a young widow.
She knew what he meant by that; he was too much of a poet to be anything
but shocked at the marriage-bond. She hoped the best for him, but his
letter did not encourage her.
He wrote, “She is good, sweet and wholesome. I have taught her what she
knows--I mean by that that I have helped her to pick up a clue here and
there to take her by some means to the heart of our mystery. She has
had a dreadful mauling by the world; but her brain is sound. I intend
to make her happy, but not here. We go to Baden a-painting. She vows she
will keep the door of my tent like a Bedouin's wife. It's a great test.
If she comes through it--with her upbringing--she will show mettle.
Farewell, Queen Mab. One does what one must, being man. Pray for us
both.”
She answered him frankly and kindly. Ingram was away on one of his long
absences, and she felt acold. “I shall always wish for your happiness.
How could I ever forget what you did to give me mine?” He read that as
meaning that she had found and had it still, so wrote no more--not even
when his venture, not too hopefully begun, had ended. His head was low
in the dust, his zest was gone. It needed his austerities and solitude
to restore his tone.
But now, in his hidden valley, she never left him, though she was always
veiled. He could not call up her blue eyes' magic, nor her slow smile,
nor the touch of her thin fingers. She had no bodily semblance; she
was a principle. In his exalted mood, being tiptoe for Mystery, he
identified her with the Spirit of all Life. For life to him was a
straining at the leash, a reaching for the unattainable, a preparation
to soar. He saw all things flowing towards heaven, which to him was
Harmony, Rest, what he called Appeasement. And all this straining
and yearning in infinite variety was figured to him in Sanchia, as he
discerned, but could not perceive, her presence. He made her out in
elemental images, into the contours of the hills read her bountiful
shape, into the onslaught of the wind her dauntless ardour. In fire
leaped her pride, in the mantling snow her chastity was proclaimed. The
rain was her largess, her treasure poured to enrich mankind. All flowers
were sacred to her--frail beauty salient from the earth. He never looked
on one but he blessed her name.
On a later day he read a poem to his guest--which he called the Song of
Mab. By this name, it seems, he also figured Sanchia, whose synonyms,
threatened to be as many as those of Artemis or the Virgin Mary. From
poring for signs of her in the face of earth he was come to see little
else. If the west wind was her breath and the hills were her breasts, it
needed a mystic to see them so; and he was become a mystic. A glorified
and non-natural Sanchia pervaded the poem, which, for the form, was a
barbaric, rough-hewn chant, stuffed with words and great phrases which
had the effect rather of making music in the hearer than of containing
it in themselves. It was poetry by hints, perpetually moving,
initiating, lyrical phrases, then breaking off and leaving you with a
melody in your ears which your brain could not render. Either the poet
was inchoate or the subtlest musician of our day. He said of himself
that he was a drain-pipe for the spirit--a dark saying to Glyde, who was
himself, we have heard, something of a poet, of the Byronic tradition.
The youth was extremely interested, though seldom moved by this chaotic
piece. He was for ever on the point to drink, and had the cup snatched
away. Senhouse tormented you with possibilities of bliss--where sight
merges in sound and both lift together into a triumphant sweep of
motion--whirled you, as it were, to the gates of dawn, showed you the
amber glories of preparation, thrilled you with the throb of suspense;
then, behold! coursing vapours and gathering clouds blot out the
miracle--and you end in the clash of thunderstorms and dissonances.
Something of this the listener had to urge. Senhouse admitted it, but
he said, “You know that the splendour is enacting behind. You guess the
opening of the rose. One stalks this earth agog for miracles. It is full
of hints--you catch a moment--for flashed instants you are God. Then the
mist wraps you, and you blunder forward, two-legged man swaying for a
balance. Translate the oracle as you will--with your paint-pans, with
your words--we get broken lights, half-phrases. But we guess the rest,
and so we strain and grow. Who are you or I, that we should know her!”
He stuffed the pages into the breast of his jelab, and sat brooding over
the paling fire for a while; then, by an abrupt transition, he said--“A
fatal inclination for instructing the young was, perhaps, my undoing.
I believe that I am a prig to the very fibres of me. If I had kept my
didactics for my own sex, all might have gone well: I have never doubted
but that I had things to teach my generation which it would be the
happier of knowing. But it's a dangerous power to put into a man's hands
that he shall instruct his betters. I was tempted by that deadliest
flattery of all, and I fell. Despoina heard me, smiled at me, and went
her way regardlessly; but my poor Mary was a victim. She heard me, and
took it seriously. She thought me a man of God. I failed absolutely, and
so badly that by rights I ought never to have held up my head again. But
she is happy, dear little soul, after her own peculiar fashion,--which
she never could have been with me. She writes to me now and then. The
man, her husband, is her master, but not a bad one. She knows it, and
glories in him. Isn't that extraordinary?”
“Not at all,” Glyde said, who knew nothing of Mary. “It's a law of
Nature. The woman follows the man. I suppose you treated her as an
equal?”
“No, as a superior, which she plainly was,” said Senhouse.
“Then,” Glyde said, looking at him, “then you made her so. If you fly
against Nature, you must get the worst of it.” He waited, then asked,
“It's against your principles to marry a woman, no doubt.”
“Quite,” Senhouse said. “It seems to me an insult to propose it to her.”
“Your Mary didn't think so.”
“She did at first; but she couldn't get used to it.”
“She felt naked without the ring? And ashamed?”
“God help me,” said Senhouse, “that's true. The moment I realised what
had happened, I gave in.”
“And then she refused?”
“She neither accepted nor refused. She lived apart. We were in
Germany at the time. I was naturalising plants for the Grand Duke of
Baden--filling the rocks and glades in the Black Forest. She went into
an hotel in Donaueschingen, and I went to see her every day. We were
friends. Then we went to England, to London. She held to that way of
life, and I did the best I could for myself. At any moment I would have
taken her. I considered myself bound in every way. I could have been
happy with her. She had great charm for me--great physical charm, I
mean--and sweet, affectionate ways. I could have made her a wife and a
mother.
“I intended her the highest honour I could show to a woman. To make her
your property by legal process and the sanction of custom seems to me
like sacrilege. But, however--One day she told me that a former lover of
hers wanted to marry her, and left it for me to judge. She wouldn't say
whether she wished it herself or not; but I knew that she did, for when
I advised her to accept him she got up and put her arms round my neck
and kissed both my cheeks. I was her elder brother, I perceived, and
said so. She laughed, and owned to it. And yet she had loved me, you
know. She had refused that same man for me. She was afraid of him, and
gave me her hand before his face.”
“That to me,” Glyde said, “is proof positive that she loved him. Of
course she feared him. It is obvious. My poor master!”
Senhouse serenely replied, “She's happy, and I've done her no harm at
all. But it's impossible for me to treat any living creature otherwise
than as my better.”
“I believe you,” said Glyde, “and so it may be in a rarer world than
this. In this world, however, a man is the most cunning animal, and in
that both are flesh he is the stronger of the sexes. In this world the
law is that the woman follows the man.” He thought before he spoke, then
added, “That applies all this world over. You will marry Sanchia.”
Senhouse would not look up. He sat, nursing one leg. He bent his brows,
and a hot flush made his skin shine in the firelight.
IV
The poet and his disciple continued their partnership through the
sogging rains of Christmas, well into the chill opening of the new year.
Then came the snow to fill up the valley in which stood the hut, and
blur the outlines of the folded hills. Poetry and Sanchia drew together
a pair who could have little in common.
But Glyde became the slave of the strange man who blended austerity with
charitable judgment, and appeased his passion by blood from his heart.
He was not himself a mystic, but a sensitive youth whom the world's rubs
had taught the uses of a thick hide. Either you have that by nature, or
you earn it by practice. Glyde had found out that the less you say
to your maltreaters the less, in time, you have to say about it
to yourself. He was conscious of his parts and all too ready to be
arrogant. Senhouse's goddess had been kind to him, and he had presumed
upon that. Senhouse's own method was to alternate extreme friendliness
with torrential contempt. He knocked Glyde down and picked him up again
with the same hand. He treated him as his equal whenever he was not
considering him a worm. There is no better way of gaining the confidence
of a youth of his sort. At the end of a fortnight there was nothing
Glyde would not have told him; at the end of six months he would have
crossed Europe barefoot to serve him.
He was nothing of a mystic, and therefore had his own ideas of what
seemed to afford his master so much satisfaction; he was enough of a
poet to be sure that Senhouse's romantic raptures were only a makeshift
at best. To his mind here was a man aching for a woman. He thought that
the poet sang to ease his bleeding heart. He came to picture the mating
of these two--Sanchia the salient, beautiful woman, and his master
of the clear, long-enduring, searching eyes, and that strange look of
second-sight upon him which those only have who live apart from men,
under the sky. It is a look you can never mistake. Sailors have it, and
shepherds, and dwellers in the desert. The eye sees through you--into
you, and beyond you. It is almost impossible for any person to be either
so arresting in himself or possessed of such utterance as will cause the
weathered eye to check its scanning of distance and concentrate upon an
immediate presence. To such an eye, communing with infinite and eternal
things, no creature of time and space can interpose solidly. Each must
be vain and clear as bubbles of air. Behind it float spirits invisible
to other men--essential forms, of whose company the seer into distance
really is. He will neither heed you nor hear you; his conversation is
other-where. And what then would Senhouse do confronted with Sanchia?
Would he look beyond her, towards some horizon where she could never
stand? Or would he not see in her blue eyes the goal of all his
searching--the content of his own? What would he say but “You!” and take
her? What she but sigh her content to be taken? Appeasement is holiness,
says Senhouse. And what of their holy life thereafter, breast to breast,
fronting the dawn? Glyde's heart, purged of his dishonesty, beat at the
thought. He turned all his erotic over to the more generous emotion, and
faced with glowing blood the picture of the woman he had coveted in the
arms of the master he avowed.
When February began to show a hint of spring, in pairing plovers and
breaking eglantine, Senhouse, in a temporary dejection, ceased work upon
his poem, and Glyde said that he must know the news. All through the
winter they had had little communication with the world beyond their
gates. A shepherd homing from the folds, a sodden tinker and his drab,
whom he touchingly cherished, a party of rabbit-shooters beating the
furze bushes, had been all their hold upon a life where men meet and
hoodwink each other. Once in a week one of them ploughed through the
drifts to the cottage at the foot of the third valley, and got as he
needed flour and candles, soap or matches. It had not yet occurred to
either of them--to Senhouse it never did occur--to beg the sight of a
newspaper. But Saint Valentine's call stirred the deeps of Glyde, who
now said that he must have news. He departed for Sarum, and stayed away
until March was in.
He returned with certain information, absorbed by Senhouse with
far-sighted patient eyes and in silence. The only indication he afforded
was inscrutable. His cheek-bones twitched flickeringly, like summer
lightning about the hills.
Sanchia, Glyde said, was well and in London. She was living in a street
off Berkeley Square, with an old lady who wore side-curls and shawls,
and drove out every afternoon in a barouche with two stout horses and
two lean men-servants. Sanchia sometimes accompanied her, stiff and
pliant at once, bright-eyed and faintly coloured. She was taken about to
parties also, and to the opera--and very often there were parties at the
old lady's house--carriage-company, and gentleman in furred coats, who
came in hansom cabs. He thought that she had suitors. There was a
tall, thin man who came very often in the afternoons. He was sallow and
melancholy, and wore a silk muffler day and night. Glyde thought that he
was a foreigner, perhaps a Hungarian or Pole.
He had seen Sanchia often, but she could not have caught a glimpse of
him. He admitted that he had haunted the house, had seen her come out
and go in, knew when she dressed for dinner and when she went to bed.
Long practice had acquainted him with the significance of light and
darkness seen through chinks in shutters. “I know her room,” he said,
“and the times of her lights. She looks out over the streets towards the
Park twice every night--once when she is dressed, and once before she
goes to bed. It is as if she is saying her prayers. She looks long to
the west, very seriously. I think her lips move. I believe that she
always does it.” Senhouse, who may have been listening, bowed his head
to his knees, below his clasped hands.
“Twice she looked full at me without knowing me. Why should she know me
now? Her pale and serious face, master, was as beautiful as the winter
moon, as remote from us and our little affairs. No words of mine can
express to you the outward splendour of her neck and bosom. She was
uncovered for a party at the house. In the morning she came out to walk.
You know her way, how she glides rather than seems to move her feet--the
soaring, even motion of a sea-bird. She walked across the Park, and I
followed, praising God, whose image she is. On the further side the Pole
met her in his furs, and she walked with him for an hour in the sun.
She had no wrappage to hide her blissful shape. Close-fitted, erect,
free-moving, gracious as a young birch-tree. Master, she is the Holy
One.”
“You played Peeping Tom, my ingenuous young friend,” said Senhouse, who
was fastidious in such matters.
But Clyde cried out, “God forbid! Are you prying when you look at the
sun! Master, you need not grudge the Pole. He is nothing.”
“I grudge no man anything he can get of her,” said Senhouse. “He will
get precisely what lies within his scope.”
“He has the eyes of a rat,” Glyde said.
Senhouse answered, “Rats and men alike seek their meat of the earth. And
the rats get rat-food, and the men man's food. Despoina's breasts are
very large.” He turned to his poem, folded his jelab about his middle,
and went out over the downs. Glyde saw him no more that day, nor,
indeed, till the next morning, when he found him squatted over a pipkin
simmering on the fire.
The year went on its course, and windy March broke into a wet, warm
April. Glyde sat at the knees of his master, and imbibed learning and
fundamental morality. But now and then he absented himself for a day at
a time, and was understood to get news from Salisbury market. He came
back one day with a newspaper. Senhouse read without falter or comment:
“A marriage is arranged, and will take place in July, between Nevile
Ingram of Wanless Hall, Felsboro', Yorks, and Sanchia-Josepha, youngest
daughter of Thomas Welbore Percival of--Great Cumberland Place, W., and
The Poultry, E.G.”
In that night, or very early in the morning, Glyde disappeared without
word or sign left behind him.