again before I left that afternoon. I think if I had, I should have told
you about all this, but it was still possible, you see, that what I had
seen was a real hearse, driven by a real driver, for all the ghastly
gaiety of the face that had looked up to mine, and the levity of his
pointing hand. I might possibly have fallen asleep soon after seeing
him, and slumbered through the removal of the body and the departure of
the hearse. So I did not speak of it to you.”
* * * * *
There was something wonderfully straightforward and prosaic in all this;
here were no Jacobean houses oak-panelled and surrounded by weeping
pine-trees, and somehow the very absence of suitable surroundings made
the story more impressive. But for a moment a doubt assailed me.
“Don’t tell me it was all a dream,” I said.
“I don’t know whether it was or not. I can only say that I believe
myself to have been wide awake. In any case the rest of the story
is--odd.”
“I went out of town again that afternoon,” he continued, “and I may say
that I don’t think that even for a moment did I get the haunting sense
of what I had seen or dreamed that night out of my mind. It was present
to me always as some vision unfulfilled. It was as if some clock had
struck the four quarters, and I was still waiting to hear what the hour
would be.
“Exactly a month afterwards I was in London again, but only for the day.
I arrived at Victoria about eleven, and took the underground to Sloane
Square in order to see if you were in town and would give me lunch. It
was a baking hot morning, and I intended to take a bus from the King’s
Road as far as Graeme Street. There was one standing at the corner just
as I came out of the station, but I saw that the top was full, and the
inside appeared to be full also. Just as I came up to it the conductor
who, I suppose, had been inside, collecting fares or what not, came out
on to the step within a few feet of me. He wore grey trousers, brown
boots, a black coat buttoned, a straw hat, and over his shoulder was a
strap on which hung his little machine for punching tickets. I saw his
face, too; it was the face of the driver of the hearse, with a mole on
the left cheek. Then he spoke to me, jerking his thumb over his
shoulder.
“‘Just room for one inside, sir,’ he said.
“At that a sort of panic-terror took possession of me, and I knew I
gesticulated wildly with my arms, and cried, ‘No, no!’ But at that
moment I was living not in the hour that was then passing, but in that
hour which had passed a month ago, when I leaned from the window of your
bedroom here just before the dawn broke. At this moment too I knew that
my spy-hole had been opposite the spy-hole into the spiritual world.
What I had seen there had some significance, now being fulfilled, beyond
the significance of the trivial happenings of to-day and to-morrow. The
Powers of which we know so little were visibly working before me. And I
stood there on the pavement shaking and trembling.
“I was opposite the post-office at the corner, and just as the bus
started my eye fell on the clock in the window there. I need not tell
you what the time was.
“Perhaps I need not tell you the rest, for you probably conjecture it,
since you will not have forgotten what happened at the corner of Sloane
Square at the end of July, the summer before last. The bus pulled out
from the pavement into the street in order to get round a van that was
standing in front of it. At the moment there came down the King’s Road a
big motor going at a hideously dangerous pace. It crashed full into the
bus, burrowing into it as a gimlet burrows into a board.”
He paused.
“And that’s my story,” he said.
THE MAN WHO WENT TOO FAR
The little village of St Faith’s nestles in a hollow of wooded hill up
on the north bank of the river Fawn in the county of Hampshire, huddling
close round its grey Norman church as if for spiritual protection
against the fays and fairies, the trolls and “little people,” who might
be supposed still to linger in the vast empty spaces of the New Forest,
and to come after dusk and do their doubtful businesses. Once outside
the hamlet you may walk in any direction (so long as you avoid the high
road which leads to Brockenhurst) for the length of a summer afternoon
without seeing sign of human habitation, or possibly even catching sight
of another human being. Shaggy wild ponies may stop their feeding for a
moment as you pass, the white scuts of rabbits will vanish into their
burrows, a brown viper perhaps will glide from your path into a clump of
heather, and unseen birds will chuckle in the bushes, but it may easily
happen that for a long day you will see nothing human. But you will not
feel in the least lonely; in summer, at any rate, the sunlight will be
gay with butterflies, and the air thick with all those woodland sounds
which like instruments in an orchestra combine to play the great
symphony of the yearly festival of June. Winds whisper in the birches,
and sigh among the firs; bees are busy with their redolent labour among
the heather, a myriad birds chirp in the green temples of the forest
trees, and the voice of the river prattling over stony places, bubbling
into pools, chuckling and gulping round corners, gives you the sense
that many presences and companions are near at hand.
Yet, oddly enough, though one would have thought that these benign and
cheerful influences of wholesome air and spaciousness of forest were
very healthful comrades for a man, in so far as nature can really
influence this wonderful human genus which has in these centuries
learned to defy her most violent storms in its well-established houses,
to bridle her torrents and make them light its streets, to tunnel her
mountains and plough her seas, the inhabitants of St Faith’s will not
willingly venture into the forest after dark. For in spite of the
silence and loneliness of the hooded night it seems that a man is not
sure in what company he may suddenly find himself, and though it is
difficult to get from these villagers any very clear story of occult
appearances, the feeling is widespread. One story indeed I have heard
with some definiteness, the tale of a monstrous goat that has been seen
to skip with hellish glee about the woods and shady places, and this
perhaps is connected with the story which I have here attempted to
piece together. It too is well-known to them; for all remember the young
artist who died here not long ago, a young man, or so he struck the
beholder, of great personal beauty, with something about him that made
men’s faces to smile and brighten when they looked on him. His ghost
they will tell you “walks” constantly by the stream and through the
woods which he loved so, and in especial it haunts a certain house, the
last of the village, where he lived, and its garden in which he was done
to death. For my part I am inclined to think that the terror of the
Forest dates chiefly from that day. So, such as the story is, I have set
it forth in connected form. It is based partly on the accounts of the
villagers, but mainly on that of Darcy, a friend of mine and a friend of
the man with whom these events were chiefly concerned.
* * * * *
The day had been one of untarnished midsummer splendour, and as the sun
drew near to its setting, the glory of the evening grew every moment
more crystalline, more miraculous. Westward from St Faith’s the
beechwood which stretched for some miles toward the heathery upland
beyond already cast its veil of clear shadow over the red roofs of the
village, but the spire of the grey church, overtopping all, still
pointed a flaming orange finger into the sky. The river Fawn, which runs
below, lay in sheets of sky-reflected blue, and wound its dreamy
devious course round the edge of this wood, where a rough two-planked
bridge crossed from the bottom of the garden of the last house in the
village, and communicated by means of a little wicker gate with the wood
itself. Then once out of the shadow of the wood the stream lay in
flaming pools of the molten crimson of the sunset, and lost itself in
the haze of woodland distances.
This house at the end of the village stood outside the shadow, and the
lawn which sloped down to the river was still flecked with sunlight.
Garden-beds of dazzling colour lined its gravel walks, and down the
middle of it ran a brick pergola, half-hidden in clusters of
rambler-rose and purple with starry clematis. At the bottom end of it,
between two of its pillars, was slung a hammock containing a
shirt-sleeved figure.
The house itself lay somewhat remote from the rest of the village, and a
footpath leading across two fields, now tall and fragrant with hay, was
its only communication with the high road. It was low-built, only two
stories in height, and like the garden, its walls were a mass of
flowering roses. A narrow stone terrace ran along the garden front, over
which was stretched an awning, and on the terrace a young silent-footed
man-servant was busied with the laying of the table for dinner. He was
neat-handed and quick with his job, and having finished it he went back
into the house, and reappeared again with a large rough bath-towel on
his arm. With this he went to the hammock in the pergola.
“Nearly eight, sir,” he said.
“Has Mr Darcy come yet?” asked a voice from the hammock.
“No, sir.”
“If I’m not back when he comes, tell him that I’m just having a bathe
before dinner.”
The servant went back to the house, and after a moment or two Frank
Halton struggled to a sitting posture, and slipped out on to the grass.
He was of medium height and rather slender in build, but the supple ease
and grace of his movements gave the impression of great physical
strength: even his descent from the hammock was not an awkward
performance. His face and hands were of very dark complexion, either
from constant exposure to wind and sun, or, as his black hair and dark
eyes tended to show, from some strain of southern blood. His head was
small, his face of an exquisite beauty of modelling, while the
smoothness of its contour would have led you to believe that he was a
beardless lad still in his teens. But something, some look which living
and experience alone can give, seemed to contradict that, and finding
yourself completely puzzled as to his age, you would next moment
probably cease to think about that, and only look at this glorious
specimen of young manhood with wondering satisfaction.
He was dressed as became the season and the heat, and wore only a shirt
open at the neck, and a pair of flannel trousers. His head, covered very
thickly with a somewhat rebellious crop of short curly hair, was bare as
he strolled across the lawn to the bathing-place that lay below. Then
for a moment there was silence, then the sound of splashed and divided
waters, and presently after, a great shout of ecstatic joy, as he swam
up-stream with the foamed water standing in a frill round his neck. Then
after some five minutes of limb-stretching struggle with the flood, he
turned over on his back, and with arms thrown wide, floated down-stream,
ripple-cradled and inert. His eyes were shut, and between half-parted
lips he talked gently to himself.
“I am one with it,” he said to himself, “the river and I, I and the
river. The coolness and splash of it is I, and the water-herbs that wave
in it are I also. And my strength and my limbs are not mine but the
river’s. It is all one, all one, dear Fawn.”
* * * * *
A quarter of an hour later he appeared again at the bottom of the lawn,
dressed as before, his wet hair already drying into its crisp short
curls again. There he paused a moment, looking back at the stream with
the smile with which men look on the face of a friend, then turned
towards the house. Simultaneously his servant came to the door leading
on to the terrace, followed by a man who appeared to be some half-way
through the fourth decade of his years. Frank and he saw each other
across the bushes and garden-beds, and each quickening his step, they
met suddenly face to face round an angle of the garden walk, in the
fragrance of syringa.
“My dear Darcy,” cried Frank, “I am charmed to see you.”
But the other stared at him in amazement.
“Frank!” he exclaimed.
“Yes, that is my name,” he said laughing, “what is the matter?”
Darcy took his hand.
“What have you done to yourself?” he asked. “You are a boy again.”
“Ah, I have a lot to tell you,” said Frank. “Lots that you will hardly
believe, but I shall convince you----”
He broke off suddenly, and held up his hand.
“Hush, there is my nightingale,” he said.
The smile of recognition and welcome with which he had greeted his
friend faded from his face, and a look of rapt wonder took its place, as
of a lover listening to the voice of his beloved. His mouth parted
slightly, showing the white line of teeth, and his eyes looked out and
out till they seemed to Darcy to be focussed on things beyond the vision
of man. Then something perhaps startled the bird, for the song ceased.
“Yes, lots to tell you,” he said. “Really I am delighted to see you.
But you look rather white and pulled down; no wonder after that fever.
And there is to be no nonsense about this visit. It is June now, you
stop here till you are fit to begin work again. Two months at least.”
“Ah, I can’t trespass quite to that extent.”
Frank took his arm and walked him down the grass.
“Trespass? Who talks of trespass? I shall tell you quite openly when I
am tired of you, but you know when we had the studio together, we used
not to bore each other. However, it is ill talking of going away on the
moment of your arrival. Just a stroll to the river, and then it will be
dinner-time.”
Darcy took out his cigarette case, and offered it to the other.
Frank laughed.
“No, not for me. Dear me, I suppose I used to smoke once. How very odd!”
“Given it up?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I must have. Anyhow I don’t do it now. I would
as soon think of eating meat.”
“Another victim on the smoking altar of vegetarianism?”
“Victim?” asked Frank. “Do I strike you as such?”
He paused on the margin of the stream and whistled softly. Next moment a
moor-hen made its splashing flight across the river, and ran up the
bank. Frank took it very gently in his hands and stroked its head, as
the creature lay against his shirt.
“And is the house among the reeds still secure?” he half-crooned to it.
“And is the missus quite well, and are the neighbours flourishing?
There, dear, home with you,” and he flung it into the air.
“That bird’s very tame,” said Darcy, slightly bewildered.
“It is rather,” said Frank, following its flight.
* * * * *
During dinner Frank chiefly occupied himself in bringing himself
up-to-date in the movements and achievements of this old friend whom he
had not seen for six years. Those six years, it now appeared, had been
full of incident and success for Darcy; he had made a name for himself
as a portrait painter which bade fair to outlast the vogue of a couple
of seasons, and his leisure time had been brief. Then some four months
previously he had been through a severe attack of typhoid, the result of
which as concerns this story was that he had come down to this
sequestered place to recruit.
“Yes, you’ve got on,” said Frank at the end. “I always knew you would.
A.R.A. with more in prospect. Money? You roll in it, I suppose, and, O
Darcy, how much happiness have you had all these years? That is the only
imperishable possession. And how much have you learned? Oh, I don’t mean
in Art. Even I could have done well in that.”
Darcy laughed.
“Done well? My dear fellow, all I have learned in these six years you
knew, so to speak, in your cradle. Your old pictures fetch huge prices.
Do you never paint now?”
Frank shook his head.
“No, I’m too busy,” he said.
“Doing what? Please tell me. That is what everyone is for ever asking
me.”
“Doing? I suppose you would say I do nothing.”
Darcy glanced up at the brilliant young face opposite him.
“It seems to suit you, that way of being busy,” he said. “Now, it’s your
turn. Do you read? Do you study? I remember you saying that it would do
us all--all us artists, I mean--a great deal of good if we would study
any one human face carefully for a year, without recording a line. Have
you been doing that?”
Frank shook his head again.
“I mean exactly what I say,” he said, “I have been _doing_ nothing. And
I have never been so occupied. Look at me; have I not done something to
myself to begin with?”
“You are two years younger than I,” said Darcy, “at least you used to
be. You therefore are thirty-five. But had I never seen you before I
should say you were just twenty. But was it worth while to spend six
years of greatly-occupied life in order to look twenty? Seems rather
like a woman of fashion.”
Frank laughed boisterously.
“First time I’ve ever been compared to that particular bird of prey,” he
said. “No, that has not been my occupation--in fact I am only very
rarely conscious that one effect of my occupation has been that. Of
course, it must have been if one comes to think of it. It is not very
important. Quite true my body has become young. But that is very little;
I have become young.”
Darcy pushed back his chair and sat sideways to the table looking at the
other.
“Has that been your occupation then?” he asked.
“Yes, that anyhow is one aspect of it. Think what youth means! It is the
capacity for growth, mind, body, spirit, all grow, all get stronger, all
have a fuller, firmer life every day. That is something, considering
that every day that passes after the ordinary man reaches the full-blown
flower of his strength, weakens his hold on life. A man reaches his
prime, and remains, we say, in his prime, for ten years, or perhaps
twenty. But after his primest prime is reached, he slowly, insensibly
weakens. These are the signs of age in you, in your body, in your art
probably, in your mind. You are less electric than you were. But I, when
I reach my prime--I am nearing it--ah, you shall see.”
The stars had begun to appear in the blue velvet of the sky, and to the
east the horizon seen above the black silhouette of the village was
growing dove-coloured with the approach of moon-rise. White moths
hovered dimly over the garden-beds, and the footsteps of night tip-toed
through the bushes. Suddenly Frank rose.
“Ah, it is the supreme moment,” he said softly. “Now more than at any
other time the current of life, the eternal imperishable current runs so
close to me that I am almost enveloped in it. Be silent a minute.”
He advanced to the edge of the terrace and looked out standing stretched
with arms outspread. Darcy heard him draw a long breath into his lungs,
and after many seconds expel it again. Six or eight times he did this,
then turned back into the lamplight.
“It will sound to you quite mad, I expect,” he said, “but if you want to
hear the soberest truth I have ever spoken and shall ever speak, I will
tell you about myself. But come into the garden if it is not too damp
for you. I have never told anyone yet, but I shall like to tell you. It
is long, in fact, since I have even tried to classify what I have
learned.”
They wandered into the fragrant dimness of the pergola, and sat down.
Then Frank began:
“Years ago, do you remember,” he said, “we used often to talk about the
decay of joy in the world. Many impulses, we settled, had contributed
to this decay, some of which were good in themselves, others that were
quite completely bad. Among the good things, I put what we may call
certain Christian virtues, renunciation, resignation, sympathy with
suffering, and the desire to relieve sufferers. But out of those things
spring very bad ones, useless renunciations, asceticism for its own
sake, mortification of the flesh with nothing to follow, no
corresponding gain that is, and that awful and terrible disease which
devastated England some centuries ago, and from which by heredity of
spirit we suffer now, Puritanism. That was a dreadful plague, the brutes
held and taught that joy and laughter and merriment were evil: it was a
doctrine the most profane and wicked. Why, what is the commonest crime
one sees? A sullen face. That is the truth of the matter.
“Now all my life I have believed that we are intended to be happy, that
joy is of all gifts the most divine. And when I left London, abandoned
my career, such as it was, I did so because I intended to devote my life
to the cultivation of joy, and, by continuous and unsparing effort, to
be happy. Among people, and in constant intercourse with others, I did
not find it possible; there were too many distractions in towns and
work-rooms, and also too much suffering. So I took one step backwards or
forwards, as you may choose to put it, and went straight to Nature, to
trees, birds, animals, to all those things which quite clearly pursue
one aim only, which blindly follow the great native instinct to be happy
without any care at all for morality, or human law or divine law. I
wanted, you understand, to get all joy first-hand and unadulterated, and
I think it scarcely exists among men; it is obsolete.”
Darcy turned in his chair.
“Ah, but what makes birds and animals happy?” he asked. “Food, food and
mating.”
Frank laughed gently in the stillness.
“Do not think I became a sensualist,” he said. “I did not make that
mistake. For the sensualist carries his miseries pick-a-back, and round
his feet is wound the shroud that shall soon enwrap him. I may be mad,
it is true, but I am not so stupid anyhow as to have tried that. No,
what is it that makes puppies play with their own tails, that sends cats
on their prowling ecstatic errands at night?”
He paused a moment.
“So I went to Nature,” he said. “I sat down here in this New Forest, sat
down fair and square, and looked. That was my first difficulty, to sit
here quiet without being bored, to wait without being impatient, to be
receptive and very alert, though for a long time nothing particular
happened. The change in fact was slow in those early stages.”
“Nothing happened?” asked Darcy rather impatiently, with the sturdy
revolt against any new idea which to the English mind is synonymous
with nonsense. “Why, what in the world _should_ happen?”
Now Frank as he had known him was the most generous but most
quick-tempered of mortal men; in other words his anger would flare to a
prodigious beacon, under almost no provocation, only to be quenched
again under a gust of no less impulsive kindliness. Thus the moment
Darcy had spoken, an apology for his hasty question was half-way up his
tongue. But there was no need for it to have travelled even so far, for
Frank laughed again with kindly, genuine mirth.
“Oh, how I should have resented that a few years ago,” he said. “Thank
goodness that resentment is one of the things I have got rid of. I
certainly wish that you should believe my story--in fact, you are going
to--but that you at this moment should imply that you do not, does not
concern me.”
“Ah, your solitary sojournings have made you inhuman,” said Darcy, still
very English.
“No, human,” said Frank. “Rather more human, at least rather less of an
ape.”
“Well, that was my first quest,” he continued, after a moment, “the
deliberate and unswerving pursuit of joy, and my method, the eager
contemplation of Nature. As far as motive went, I daresay it was purely
selfish, but as far as effect goes, it seems to me about the best thing
one can do for one’s fellow-creatures, for happiness is more infectious
than small-pox. So, as I said, I sat down and waited; I looked at happy
things, zealously avoided the sight of anything unhappy, and by degrees
a little trickle of the happiness of this blissful world began to filter
into me. The trickle grew more abundant, and now, my dear fellow, if I
could for a moment divert from me into you one half of the torrent of
joy that pours through me day and night, you would throw the world, art,
everything aside, and just live, exist. When a man’s body dies, it
passes into trees and flowers. Well, that is what I have been trying to
do with my soul before death.”
The servant had brought into the pergola a table with syphons and
spirits, and had set a lamp upon it. As Frank spoke he leaned forward
towards the other, and Darcy for all his matter-of-fact common-sense
could have sworn that his companion’s face shone, was luminous in
itself. His dark brown eyes glowed from within, the unconscious smile of
a child irradiated and transformed his face. Darcy felt suddenly
excited, exhilarated.
“Go on,” he said. “Go on. I can feel you are somehow telling me sober
truth. I daresay you are mad; but I don’t see that matters.”
Frank laughed again.