On the last Saturday of that month, the sun, waking Theresa to the great
emptiness of the world, robbed Alexander of the sleep which was his by
right of holiday and, a moment later, the clamour of an energetic and
triumphant hen dispersed his drowsiness.
As he lay and looked through the window and felt the wind on his face,
he heard a kind of music in the noise, for in its unconscious, harsh
insistence, there was a glorifying of life, joy in a creative gift, and
praise for the wise use of it. It held, moreover, a call for energy, and
Alexander, who had been born loving pre-eminence, could not consent to
lie in bed while a hen prated of accomplishment. Murmuring gentle
maledictions on the creature, he threw off his coverings and thrust his
head and shoulders through the window.
It was six o'clock, and the earth seemed to have dipped its face in its
own running water, and now, still glistening with drops, it was holding
up its head that the wind might dry it. It was a light and frolic wind,
taking pleasure in the vast spaces of the world and the youth of
morning, whirling about the hill-tops, daring the dark and dripping
gullies that rent the cliffs, yet not disdaining the rose-tree on the
house wall, nor the points of Alexander's flannel collar and the
roughness of his hair. Sharp at his throat it sent its cool, long
fingers, and after them came the sunshine with a warm caress.
The ceasing of the hen's exultation brought a startling quiet, and
through it there came softly a consciousness of water falling. From the
Steep Water and the Broad Beck it was heard, a sound half of melancholy
and half of joy, and sometimes it was loud, and again had a note so
fading that silence caught at it.
There was a cap of cloud on the Spiked Crags, but the Blue Hill stood
broad and clear, and when Alexander turned his head and looked seaward,
he saw that shining thread of water, and the lake, and the lower hills
lying under a pale and lofty sky.
Vague scents of flower and tree, of soil and wind, rose to his nostrils
or went past him: he thought he smelt the very essence of the earth, he
thought he felt God breathing on His world. Peace was spread on it like
a hand, and in that blessing Alexander shared.
A homely sound drew him from the heights to which contemplation had
carried him, and looking down, he saw a procession of brown and speckled
hens, who lifted their feet delicately from the dust of the road, but
did not refuse to peck in it. Dappling the little throng with white,
three solemn ducks waddled heavily, and, last of all, like marshalls of
the flock, the grey geese came, craning their necks and gobbling gently.
They paused at the gate that lead into the field, argued for a while,
and slipped, one by one, under the lowest bar.
Alexander followed them over the wet fields. He left his slippers at the
gate, and went barefooted, for he was in love with the morning, and
greedy of all it had to give: the damp earth was pressed into the arches
of his feet, and the long grasses shook down their hanging drops. A
blackbird sang to him as he swished by, and when he reached the pool
under the birches, he thought it waited for him like a mistress who had
no life but his. Not yet quite wakened from the night, it stirred
languorously and spread dark arms to hold him, while the thin birch
leaves fluttered on their stalks, quivering in a selfless joy.
He raised his eyebrows with a humorous, unequal lift, and looked deeply
into the water he thus appropriated. He was amused, a little dismayed by
a mood in which he tuned the world's music to his own key. His ambition
might have seen men and things alike conquerable by his mind, but his
vanity had never heard them as a refrain to the song of self, yet now a
sparkling morning, a whistling bird, and wet grasses brushing on his
feet, had made a coxcomb of him. That was the epithet he chose to use,
for his proud youth would not confess the power of a summer morning on
his austerity; yet, as he took the plunge into water which still held a
memory of the snows, he was grateful to a cold that vanquished
sentiment, and gave back freedom to the mountain stream. He felt he
ought to ask its pardon on his knees, but he did not pause in his
drying: the feeling, he thought characteristically, was enough, and,
lifting his brows again and twisting his lips in company, he decided to
keep the kneeling posture for the time when he should have learnt to
pray, and with the remembrance that he had been at worship, if not at
prayer, as he stood by his window and divined the immeasurable presence
of God, he walked home soberly, absorbed in the problems of his own
spirit, and heedless of the geese that cackled after him.
He found his mother kindling the kitchen fire and he watched her as he
sat on the table and dried his hair. He had, for everything concerning
her, an eye as keen as that of a woman or a lover: he took pleasure in
the sure quickness of her hands, and the clear skin on the cheek she
turned to him, yet his gaze had that parental quality which, still
unsuspected, had influenced his dealings with her from boyhood. He saw
how the brave back defied the grey that crept unwillingly through her
hair, and he knew that neither age nor sorrow would ever daunt her,
because love had given her an invincible supremacy. Years ago, with the
wisdom of the threatened, her heart had challenged her mind to combat,
and had beaten it, and thereafter she had made of it an ally, so that
her defences were unassailable and her fears at rest. He understood. Had
he not watched it all? At first he had seen her little shifts with
scorn, he had felt pity for her determined blindness, and then his own
sight had been cleared, and he looked straight into a maternal heart
that awed him, though it pulsed so eagerly for the father that there was
hardly room for the son. His training had been a hard and useful one,
and his passions were well chained: he was rarely resentful: what was
noble in him was truly glad of her captured happiness, and he had learnt
to use towards her the indulgent tenderness which she kept for his
father.
He laid aside his towel and stood up. "Let me do that for you."
She gave the laugh, not to be silenced by experience or proof, of the
capable woman who hears man offering to do her work.
"No, it's alight at last. The sticks were damp. You forgot to bring them
in last night."
"I'm sorry."
"I'll see to them in future."
"Oh, isn't that just you! I forget, once in three months, perhaps, and
you talk as though it were only that once that I'd remembered."
She sat on her heels and smiled at him. "Nonsense! I'm juster than you,
my son! And I like doing my own work."
"But this is mine. I gathered kindling wood for you as soon as I could
walk, and I used the chopper before most children are allowed a
table-knife. The smell of the woodshed and the fear I had of it at
night! The door has the same creak yet, when there's a strong wind from
the sea. I've suffered torments, crossing the yard in the dark, and I
have my reward in remembering them. I'm going to get the wood for you
till the end of time. It's bound up with the thought of the geese, and
the smell of earth, and the sound of bees in the heather, and the wonder
if I'll see my father striding out into the black when I'm coming in
with my arms full. And it's queer how you end by loving the bad
memories best. I think it will be because we're all proud to look back
on trouble."
She heard disloyalty in his words. "Trouble! How much of it have you
had? You've had your way in everything, you've never been thwarted." Her
voice dared him to speak his thoughts. He was silent, but he had a
vision of a small and solitary boy's figure moving always under a cloud
that might open to let out thunderbolts. How he had feared, hated, and
at last, when it failed to do more than darken his days, how he had
despised it!
He looked in a kind of wonder at his mother. Her hands were folded in
her lap in a pretence of calm, but he knew she held them tightly, that
her heart went a little faster in her anger. Had she been unaware of his
sufferings, or had she chosen to ignore them? Now, it did not matter.
The horror was over: it had helped to make him what he was, and, were
that good or bad, he answered truthfully when she turned to him with a
sharp: "Well, why don't you speak?"
He was smiling faintly. The lips which had been petulant in boyhood had
taken on firmer, straighter lines that refused the indignity of easy
rage. "I'd not change a day of my life for that of any other man," he
said cheerfully.
She was a little suspicious of his meaning, but she had to take it at
its best. She rose and put a hand on his arm.
"Out of my way, Alexander, if you want breakfast. Why did you get up so
early on a Saturday?"
"Ask the sun."
"Shall I give you a dark curtain?"
"No; I'll go without sleep rather than have my window blinded. What
would I do when I waked in the night if I couldn't see my hills?"
"Sleep again the sooner, perhaps. No wonder I can't make my candles
last. Alec, you're not to touch a book to-day."
"Come for a walk with me, then."
"Get Janet."
"No, she can't walk like you. Come."
"I mustn't." His flattery loosened her tongue. "He wouldn't like it. Go
and get dressed, my son. I'll have your porridge heated in ten minutes."
So after breakfast he set off alone, with a packet of sandwiches in one
pocket and the forbidden book in the other. He followed the little track
amidst the bracken, and, having mounted, looked down on the watered
valley and across it at the opposing hills, and his love and need of the
place leaped in him like a thing alive, and mingled with the steady
happiness of doing his chosen work.
He remembered the summer evening of the year before, when he had come
home from Oxford for the last time. He returned, having done the thing
he meant to do, and his degree was not a disappointment even to himself,
but neither was it a surprise; and if it was possible to have a deeper
satisfaction than that of holding the thing for which he had reached
out, it was in the sure knowledge of the use to which that thing must be
put. An earlier generation might have made a preacher of him, his own
pointed to the school and not the church. He believed he had been born
to teach; he found his most potent temptation in his lust for giving
knowledge, and though not the least worthy of desires, it was none the
less a self-indulgence. But its gratification was not always pleasant,
and after suffering some of the sharp pangs that youth knows how to
inflict on youth, he learnt to hold his tongue among his peers. He had
that cruel lesson in his first year, and for the other three he
contented himself with listening. The power of observation taught by
loneliness was turned on the men who seemed so light-heartedly young to
him. He liked them, he had a kind of envy of them, and watched the
gambols of their minds and bodies with the melancholy pleasure of an old
sheep looking on the lambs of spring. He had the good sense not to try
imitation, but he spent on them the study which he was incapable of
withholding from anything that fronted him, and if he saw little of
women during those years, he had, at the end of them, as good an
understanding of men as his youth could compass, and one that steadied
his belief that there was no higher calling than the one he meant to
follow. The contest in his mind, as he walked homeward that night, a
year ago, had been between ambition and a duty whose existence he did
not disclaim. Here was his mother and her need of a sane being in her
house, and beyond there was a large world with a place in it for his
ability. With all the garnered control of his strength he wanted to find
that place and fill it, yet it seemed the gods willed otherwise, for in
his pocket there lay a letter offering him a mastership at his old
Grammar School, and it was pressing against his side with the urgency of
a command, pricking him with a pointed question. Was it the personal
ambition or the impersonal ideal on which his eyes were set? It was easy
to entangle the two so that the answer fitted with his will, and he
walked bewildered. He found there were many sides to duty, that
inclination is not perforce opposed to it, and he was still struggling
for clearness when he turned the corner of the road and saw the hills.
Their calm mocked his restlessness, and their splendour made a little
thing of him. He stood and fed on them.
Against the tender colour of the sky they held the darkness of the
coming night, and soon their arms would open to let forth a dusky
coverlet for the world. Proud of that burden, they lifted serene heads
above it and waited for the stars, and after them the day, and then the
night once more, and all the buffetings that time, and wind and rain
might bring them. Their beauty and strength and patience were holy to
Alexander, and at the sight of them he was ready for any sacrifice of
his ambition, while his mind was confused with longing to express his
gratitude and praise. This was more than the appeal of the ├Žsthetic:
through nature he was half consciously trying to find God, and his
troubles left him and went like winged things to the heights.
He walked on: he had a conviction that his way would be made clear. This
was strange to a mind that only came to its conclusions after fierce
wrestling; but he did not question it, and, rejoicing in this new
submission and in the clang of his boots on the hard road, he marched on
until the hills drew more closely round him and the lake narrowed to
receive its feeding streams. Green rushes grew in the shallows and were
stirred by the water's gentle surge, and among them, unseen, Alexander
thought the reedy pipe was played. The music woke such echoes in his
heart that his stern self-control tried to refuse it hearing; but the
hour was victor and the hills were its allies. In the perfection of
impulse they swept upwards from the valley, and it was amazing that the
dark and stunted yews round the little church, the scattered houses and
the grazing cattle should have been allowed to keep the places men had
given them, for the curves of the mountain's mysterious sides had the
fatality of a wave. But they had the placidity of their own strength:
themselves the victims of Nature's ruthlessness, they had learnt
ruthlessness from her, yet remained benign, and in the face of their
serenity the man was willing to distrust the efforts of his own mind.
But only for this moment was he the yielding child of these numerous and
mighty parents, ready to let his future be what they decreed: and only
because he was aware of his waiting will, did he find this happiness in
obedience to the evening and the hills.
With the fluty song beguiling him, he left the road and walked by the
banks of the Broad Beck, until his bathing pool shone out among the
birches. He saw himself mirrored dimly in the water, and the blurred
image appeared to him as the true presentment of the thing he was, vague
and incomplete, the rough shape his soul must perfect. The trees, in
their drooping, veiled the fading light and curtained Alexander from the
rest of the world, but he felt the Blue Hill behind him and fancied he
could hear its breathing.
He had meant to take the bath that was always like a new baptism into
the life of the hills, but the shadowy form prayed him not to shatter
it, and the hanging stillness of the wood forbade disturbance, so he
shouldered the knapsack he had laid aside, and treading softly, struck
across the fields for home.
He found Janet sitting on the horse-block.
"You're here!" she said. "What way did you come?"
"By the beck. The water drew me."
"And I've been listening for the sound of your feet on the road. More
than an hour I've been here."
"Where's my mother?"
"Over the hills, somewhere, after that man of hers. He's like a bad
child: runs for the pleasure he gets in seeing her follow, I believe."
"Was he drunk?" he asked, and looking round, he saw a tragedy in every
shadow.
"He'd been drinking. She sent for me."
His look sharpened. "For the first time?"
"The third," she owned.
"It's like that?"
"You see, there've been long years of it."
"I know! Do I not know!"
"He slept till morning, but when the light came he went, and she after
him. It's oftenest at night he goes, and then she cannot always follow.
It's bad, Alexander. You'll not be leaving her again? Or will you?"
He crossed the rutted lane and leaned on the wall. Here was the solving
of his problem ready to his hand as he had foretold, but now he was
rebellious. He stared across the field to where the birches stood about
his pool, and he saw the brilliance of his future sadden and fade as
though a star had drowned itself there, in the water among the trees. He
made a movement as if to follow and bring it back, yet he stayed by the
wall: his hands gripped the stones, but his heart had gone after the
glowing treasure, lost and sunken, and as yet he had no wish to kindle
the little rushlight of his faith, blown out by his own gasping breath.
He faced the blackness and turned to Janet. "I'm staying," he said. He
had made his decision, but, as though he looked at himself from afar
off, he saw all the pitiful struggling of his youth and felt its
loneliness, and his mind swung forward to the years when he should have
ceased to suffer from the unbearable throb of his own being. And though
he was no easy smiler, his mouth widened. Life and his conception of it
were things too mysterious for anger, or sorrow, or speculation, and for
an instant he was glad to think himself splendidly delivered from free
will. But that thought passed swiftly, and he became proud in the
possession of those qualities that make life difficult.
"Janet," he said, and the smile lingered, "you've played me false. Here
I've been thinking you'd save us from the toils; I've been thinking you
were a witch, and I find you're nothing but a common woman after all!"
She had no merriment to give back.
"I've been delivered out of temptation, so far," she said, "but I may
fall yet. How often do you think I've said the Lord's Prayer when I've
known that poor soul was bleating all over the mountains like a lost
sheep, and your mother after him with the lantern in her hand? 'Deliver
us from temptation, deliver me from temptation,' I've said over and
over, to keep back the thoughts. I could say charms over him. I brought
him to my door once--only once--when I knew the drink was crying out in
him; but not again. It wasn't a face that I was meant to see, the one he
showed me that night, so now I say my prayers. I'll do no more,
Alexander."
He drew near. "Ah, but if I wanted you to, Janet? If I needed help?"
"Ah, then." She brushed a hand across her face. "Pray that the day won't
come," she said.