Nobody sympathised with Mary Jane.
‘So unfortunate for Mr. Millings,’ every one said; ‘such a promising
young man.’
Mary Jane was sent away to a great manufacturing city of the Midlands,
where work had been found for her in a cloth factory. And there
was nothing in that town that was good for a soul to see. For it
did not know that beauty was to be desired; so it made many things
by machinery, and became hurried in all its ways, and boasted its
superiority over other cities and became richer and richer, and there
was none to pity it.
In this city Mary Jane had had lodgings found for her near the factory.
At six o’clock on those November mornings, about the time that, far
away from the city, the wildfowl rose up out of the calm marshes and
passed to the troubled spaces of the sea, at six o’clock the factory
uttered a prolonged howl and gathered the workers together, and there
they worked, saving two hours for food, the whole of the daylit hours
and into the dark till the bells tolled six again.
There Mary Jane worked with other girls in a long dreary room, where
giants sat pounding wool into a long thread-like strip with iron,
rasping hands. And all day long they roared as they sat at their
soulless work. But the work of Mary Jane was not with these, only their
roar was ever in her ears as their clattering iron limbs went to and
fro.
Her work was to tend a creature smaller, but infinitely more cunning.
It took the strip of wool that the giants had threshed, and whirled it
round and round until it had twisted it into hard thin thread. Then it
would make a clutch with fingers of steel at the thread that it had
gathered, and waddle away about five yards and come back with more.
It had mastered all the subtlety of skilled workers, and had gradually
displaced them; one thing only it could not do, it was unable to pick
up the ends if a piece of the thread broke, in order to tie them
together again. For this a human soul was required, and it was Mary
Jane’s business to pick up broken ends; and the moment she placed them
together the busy soulless creature tied them for itself.
All here was ugly; even the green wool as it whirled round and round
was neither the green of the grass nor yet the green of the rushes, but
a sorry muddy green that befitted a sullen city under a murky sky.
When she looked out over the roofs of the town, there too was ugliness;
and well the houses knew it, for with hideous stucco they aped in
grotesque mimicry the pillars and temples of old Greece, pretending to
one another to be that which they were not. And emerging from these
houses and going in, and seeing the pretence of paint and stucco year
after year until it all peeled away, the souls of the poor owners of
those houses sought to be other souls until they grew weary of it.
At evening Mary Jane went back to her lodgings. Only then, after the
dark had fallen, could the soul of Mary Jane perceive any beauty in
that city, when the lamps were lit and here and there a star shone
through the smoke. Then she would have gone abroad and beheld the
night, but this the old woman to whom she was confided would not let
her do. And the days multiplied themselves by seven and became weeks,
and the weeks passed by, and all days were the same. And all the while
the soul of Mary Jane was crying for beautiful things, and found not
one, saving on Sundays, when she went to church, and left it to find
the city greyer than before.
One day she decided that it was better to be a wild thing in the lovely
marshes, than to have a soul that cried for beautiful things and found
not one. From that day she determined to be rid of her soul, so she
told her story to one of the factory girls, and said to her:
‘The other girls are poorly clad and they do soulless work; surely some
of them have no souls and would take mine.’
But the factory girl said to her: ‘All the poor have souls. It is all
they have.’
Then Mary Jane watched the rich whenever she saw them, and vainly
sought for some one without a soul.
One day at the hour when the machines rested and the human beings
that tended them rested too, the wind being at that time from the
direction of the marshlands, the soul of Mary Jane lamented bitterly.
Then, as she stood outside the factory gates, the soul irresistibly
compelled her to sing, and a wild song came from her lips, hymning the
marshlands. And into her song came crying her yearning for home, and
for the sound of the shout of the North Wind, masterful and proud,
with his lovely lady the Snow; and she sang of tales that the rushes
murmured to one another, tales that the teal knew and the watchful
heron. And over the crowded streets her song went crying away, the song
of waste places and of wild free lands, full of wonder and magic, for
she had in her elf-made soul the song of the birds and the roar of the
organ in the marshes.
At this moment Signor Thompsoni, the well-known English tenor, happened
to go by with a friend. They stopped and listened; everyone stopped and
listened.
‘There has been nothing like this in Europe in my time,’ said Signor
Thompsoni.
So a change came into the life of Mary Jane.
People were written to, and finally it was arranged that she should
take a leading part in the Covent Garden Opera in a few weeks.
So she went to London to learn.
London and singing lessons were better than the City of the Midlands
and those terrible machines. Yet still Mary Jane was not free to go
and live as she liked by the edge of the marshlands, and she was still
determined to be rid of her soul, but could find no one that had not a
soul of their own.
One day she was told that the English people would not listen to her as
Miss Rush, and was asked what more suitable name she would like to be
called by.
‘I would like to be called Terrible North Wind,’ said Mary Jane, ‘or
Song of the Rushes.’
When she was told that this was impossible and Signorina Maria Russiano
was suggested, she acquiesced at once, as she had acquiesced when they
took her away from her curate; she knew nothing of the ways of humans.
At last the day of the Opera came round, and it was a cold day of the
winter.
And Signorina Russiano appeared on the stage before a crowded house.
And Signorina Russiano sang.
And into the song went all the longing of her soul, the soul that could
not go to Paradise, but could only worship God and know the meaning
of music, and the longing pervaded that Italian song as the infinite
mystery of the hills is borne along the sound of distant sheep-bells.
Then in the souls that were in that crowded house arose little memories
of a great while since that were quite quite dead, and lived awhile
again during that marvellous song.
And a strange chill went into the blood of all that listened, as though
they stood on the border of bleak marshes and the North Wind blew.
And some it moved to sorrow and some to regret, and some to an
unearthly joy,——then suddenly the song went wailing away like the winds
of the winter from the marshlands when Spring appears from the South.
So it ended. And a great silence fell fog-like over all that house,
breaking in upon the end of a chatty conversation that Cecilia,
Countess of Birmingham, was enjoying with a friend.
In the dead hush Signorina Russiano rushed from the stage; she appeared
again running among the audience, and dashed up to Lady Birmingham.
‘Take my soul,’ she said; ‘it is a beautiful soul. It can worship God,
and knows the meaning of music and can imagine Paradise. And if you go
to the marshlands with it you will see beautiful things; there is an
old town there built of lovely timbers, with ghosts in its streets.’
Lady Birmingham stared. Everyone was standing up. ‘See,’ said Signorina
Russiano, ‘it is a beautiful soul.’
And she clutched at her left breast a little above the heart, and there
was the soul shining in her hand, with the green and blue lights going
round and round and the purple flare in the midst.
‘Take it,’ she said, ‘and you will love all that is beautiful, and
know the four winds, each one by his name, and the songs of the birds
at dawn. I do not want it, because I am not free. Put it to your left
breast a little above the heart.’
Still everybody was standing up, and Lady Birmingham felt uncomfortable.
‘Please offer it to some one else,’ she said.
‘But they all have souls already,’ said Signorina Russiano.
And everybody went on standing up. And Lady Birmingham took the soul in
her hand.
‘Perhaps it is lucky,’ she said.
She felt that she wanted to pray.
She half-closed her eyes, and said ‘_Unberufen_’. Then she put the soul
to her left breast a little above the heart, and hoped that the people
would sit down and the singer go away.
Instantly a heap of clothes collapsed before her. For a moment, in the
shadow among the seats, those who were born in the dusk hour might have
seen a little brown thing leaping free from the clothes, then it sprang
into the bright light of the hall, and became invisible to any human
eye.
It dashed about for a little, then found the door, and presently was in
the lamplit streets.
To those that were born in the dusk hour it might have been seen
leaping rapidly wherever the streets ran northwards and eastwards,
disappearing from human sight as it passed under the lamps and
appearing again beyond them with a marsh-light over its head.
Once a dog perceived it and gave chase, and was left far behind.
The cats of London, who are all born in the dusk hour, howled fearfully
as it went by.
Presently it came to the meaner streets, where the houses are smaller.
Then it went due north-eastwards, leaping from roof to roof. And so in
a few minutes it came to more open spaces, and then to the desolate
lands, where market gardens grow, which are neither town nor country.
Till at last the good black trees came into view, with their demoniac
shapes in the night, and the grass was cold and wet, and the night-mist
floated over it. And a great white owl came by, going up and down
in the dark. And at all these things the little Wild Thing rejoiced
elvishly.
And it left London far behind it, reddening the sky, and could
distinguish no longer its unlovely roar, but heard again the noises of
the night.
And now it would come through a hamlet glowing and comfortable in the
night; and now to the dark, wet, open fields again; and many an owl it
overtook as they drifted through the night, a people friendly to the
Elf-folk. Sometimes it crossed wide rivers, leaping from star to star;
and, choosing its way as it went, to avoid the hard rough roads, came
before midnight to the East Anglian lands.
And it heard there the shout of the North Wind, who was dominant and
angry, as he drove southwards his adventurous geese; while the rushes
bent before him chaunting plaintively and low, like enslaved rowers of
some fabulous trireme, bending and swinging under blows of the lash,
and singing all the while a doleful song.
And it felt the good dank air that clothes by night the broad East
Anglian lands, and came again to some old perilous pool where the
soft green mosses grew, and there plunged downward and downward into
the dear dark water till it felt the homely ooze once more coming up
between its toes. Thence, out of the lovely chill that is in the heart
of the ooze, it arose renewed and rejoicing to dance upon the image of
the stars.
I chanced to stand that night by the marsh’s edge, forgetting in my
mind the affairs of men; and I saw the marsh-fires come leaping up from
all the perilous places. And they came up by flocks the whole night
long to the number of a great multitude, and danced away together over
the marshes.
And I believe that there was a great rejoicing all that night among the
kith of the Elf-folk.