Oh! Fairies, take me out of this dull world
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame!
_Land of Heart’s Desire._—YEATS.
Paul went early to bed that night. It was his first night in an English
country home for many years; strange forces were at work in him. His
introduction to the children, his meeting with Nixie especially, had let
loose powers in his soul that called for sober reflection; and he felt
the need of being alone.
Another thing, too, urged him to seek the solitude of his chamber, for
after dinner he had sat for a couple of hours with his sister, talking
over the events and changes of the long interval since they had met,—the
details that cannot be told in letters, the feelings that no one writes.
And he came upstairs with his first impression of her character slightly
modified. She had more in her than he first divined. Beneath that
shadowy and silken manner he had caught traces of distinct purpose. For
one thing she was determined to keep him in England.
He had told her frankly about his arrangement with the lumber Company,
explaining that he regarded his present visit in the light of a holiday.
‘I suppose that is—er—wise of you,’ she said, but she had not been able
to conceal her disappointment. She asked him presently if he really
wanted to live all his life in such a place, and what it was in English
life, or civilised, conventional life, that he so disliked, and Paul,
feeling distinctly uncomfortable—for he loathed giving pain—had answered
evasively, with more skill than he knew, ‘“Where your treasure is, there
shall your heart be also.” I suppose my treasure—the only kind I know—is
out there in the great woods, Margaret.’
‘Paul, are you married, then?’ she asked with a start; and when he
laughed and assured her most emphatically that he was not, she looked
exceedingly puzzled and a little shocked too. ‘Are you so very fond of
this—er—treasure, then?’ she asked point blank in her softest manner,
‘and is she so—I mean, can’t you bring her home and acknowledge her?’
And after his first surprise when he had gathered her meaning, it took
him a long time to explain that there was no woman concerned at all, and
that it was entirely a matter of his temperament.
‘Everybody makes his own world, remember,’ he laughed, ‘and its size
depends, I suppose, upon the power of the imagination.’
‘Then I fear one’s imagination is a very poor one,’ she said solemnly,
‘or else I have none at all. I cannot pretend to understand your tastes
for trees and woods and things; but you’re exactly like poor Dick in
that way, and I suppose one must be really clever to be like that.’
‘A year is a long time, Margaret,’ he said after a pause, to comfort
her. ‘Much may happen before it’s over.’
‘I hope so,’ she had answered, standing behind his chair and stroking
his head. ‘By that time you may have met some one who will reconcile you
to—to staying here—a little longer.’ She patted his head as though he
were a Newfoundland dog, he thought. It made him laugh.
‘Perhaps,’ he said.
And, now in his room, before the candles were lighted, he was standing
by the open window, thinking it all over. Of women, of course, he knew
little or nothing; to him they were all charming, some of them
wonderful; and he was not conscious that his point of view might be
considered by a man of the world—of the world that is little, sordid,
matter-of-fact—distinctly humorous. At forty-five he believed in women
just as he had believed in them at twenty, only more so, for nothing had
ever entered his experience to trouble an exquisite picture in his mind.
They stood nearer to God than men did, he felt, and the depravity of
really bad women he explained by the fact that when they did fall they
fell farther. The sex-fever, so far as he was concerned, had never
mounted to his brain to obscure his vision.
He only knew—and knew it with a sacred wonder that was akin to
worship—that women, like the angels, were beyond his reach and beyond
his understanding. Comely they all were to him. He looked up to them in
his thoughts, not for their reason or strength, but for the subtlety of
their intuition, their power of sacrifice, and last but not least, for
the beauty and grace of their mere presence in a world that was so often
ugly and unclean.
‘The flame—the lamp—the glory—whatever it may be called—keeps alight in
their faces,’ he loved to say to himself, ‘almost to the end. With men
it is gone at thirty—often at twenty.’
And his sister, for all her light hold on life, and the strain in her
that in his simplicity he regarded as rather ‘worldly,’ was no exception
to the rule. He thought her entirely good and wonderful, and, perhaps,
so far as she went, he was not too egregiously mistaken. He looked for
the best in everybody, and so, of course, found it.
‘Only she will never make much of me, or I of her, I’m afraid,’ he
thought as he leaned out of the window, watching the scented darkness.
‘We shall get along best by leaving each other alone and being
affectionate, so to speak, from a distance.’
And, indeed, so far he had escaped the manifold seductions by which
Nature seeks to attain her great object of perpetuating the race. As a
potential father of many sons he was of course an object of legitimate
prey; but his forest life had obviated all that; his whole forces had
turned inwards for the creation of the poet’s visions, and Nature in
this respect, he believed, had passed him by. So far as he was aware
there was no desire in him to come forth and perform a belated duty to
the world by increasing its population. It was the first time any one
had even suggested to him that he should consider such a matter, and the
mere idea made him smile.
Gradually, however, these thoughts cleared away, and he turned to other
things he deemed more important.
The night was still as imaginable; odours of earth and woods were wafted
into the room with the scent of roses. Overhead, as he leaned on his
elbow and gazed, the stars shone thickly, like points of gold pricked in
a velvet curtain. A lost wind stirred the branches; he could distinguish
their solemn dance against the constellations. Orion, slanting and
immense, tilted across the sky, the two stars at the base resting upon
the shoulder of the hill, and far off, in the deeps of the night, the
murmur of the pines sounded like the breaking of invisible surf.
Something indescribably fresh and wild in the taste of the air carried
him back again across the ocean. The ancient woods he knew so well rose
before the horizon’s rim, swimming with purple shadows and alive with a
continuous great murmur that stretched for a hundred leagues. The
picture of those desolate places, lying in lonely grandeur beneath the
glitter of the Northern Lights, with a thousand lakes echoing the
laughter of the loons, came seductively before his inner eye. The
thought of it all stirred emotions profound and primitive, emotions too
closely married to instincts, perhaps, to be analysed; something in him
that was ancestral, possibly pre-natal. There was nothing in this little
England that could move him so in the same fashion. His thoughts carried
him far, far away....
The faint sound of a church clock striking the hour—a sound utterly
alien to the trend of his thoughts—brought him back again to the
present. He heard it across many fields, fields that had been tilled for
centuries, and there could have been no more vivid or eloquent reminder
that he was no longer in a land where hedges, church bells,
notice-boards, and so forth were not. He came back with a start, and a
sensation almost akin to pain. He felt cramped, caught, caged. The
tinkling church bells annoyed him.
His thoughts turned, with a sudden jerk, as it were, to the undeniable
fact that he had been trying to go about in a disguise, with a clumsy
mask over his face, so that he might appear decently grown up in his new
surroundings.
A pair of owls began to hoot softly in the woods, answering one another
like voices in a dream, and just then the lost wind left the pine
branches and died away into the sky with a swift rush as of many small
wings. In the sudden pool of silence that followed, he fancied he could
hear across the dark miles of heathland the continuous low murmur of the
sea.
The beauty of night, as ever, entered his soul, but with a joy that was
too solemn, too moving, to be felt as pleasure. It touched something in
him beyond the tears of either pain or delight: something that held in
it a mysterious wonder so searching, so poignant, as to be almost
terrible.
He caught his breath and waited.... The great woods of the world,
mountains, the sea, stars, and the crying winds were always for him
symbols of the gateways into a mightier and ideal region, a Beyond-world
where he found rest for his yearnings and a strange peace. They were his
means of losing himself in a temporary heaven.
And to-night it was the beauty of an English scene that carried him
away; and this in spite of his having summoned the wilder vision from
across the seas. Already the forces of his own country were insensibly
at work upon an impressionable mind and temperament. The very air, so
sweetly scented as he drew it in between his lips, was charged with the
subtly-working influences of the ‘Old Country.’ A new web, soft but
mighty, was being woven about his spirit. Even now his heart was
conscious of its gossamer touch, as his dreams yielded imperceptibly to
a new colour.
He followed vaguely, curiously, the leadings of delicate emotions that
had been stirred in him by the events of the day. Symbols,
fast-shifting, protean, passed in suggestive procession before his
mind’s eye, in the way that symbols ever will—in a poet’s heart. He
thought of children, of _the_ children, and of the extraordinarily fresh
appeal they had made to him. Children: how near they, too, stood to the
great things of life, and all the nearer, perhaps, for not being aware
of it. How their farseeing eyes and their simple, unlined souls pointed
the way, like Nature, to the ideal region of which he was always
dreaming: to Reality, to God.
All real children knew and understood; were ready to offer their timid
yet unhesitating guidance, and without question or explanation.
Had, then, Nixie and her troupe already taken him prisoner? And were the
soft chains already twined about his neck?...
Paul hardly acknowledged the question definitely to himself. He was
merely dreaming, and his dreams, rising and falling like the tides of a
sea, bore him to and fro among the shoals and inlands of the day’s
events. The spell of the English June night was very strong upon him, no
doubt, for presently a door opened somewhere behind him, and the very
children he was thinking about danced softly into the room. Nixie came
up close and gazed into his very eyes, and again there began that odd
singing in his heart that he had twice noticed during the day. An
atmosphere of magic, shot with gold and silver, came with the child into
the room.
For the fact was—though he realised it only dimly—the Fates were now
making him a deliberate offer. Had he not been so absorbed, he would
have perceived and appreciated the delicacy of their action. As a rule
they command, whereas now they were only suggesting.
It was really his own heart asking. Here, in this rambling country house
under the hills, was an opportunity of entering the region to which all
that was best and truest in him naturally belonged. The experience might
prove a stepping-stone to a final readjustment of his peculiar being
with the normal busy world of common things. Here was a safety-valve, as
he called it, a channel through which he might express much, if not all,
of his accumulated stores. The guides, now fast asleep in their beds,
had sent out their little dream-bodies to bring the invitation; they
were ready and waiting.
And he, thinking there under the stars his queer, long thoughts, bred in
years of solitude, dallied with the invitation, and—hesitated. The
inevitable pain frightened him—the pain of being young when the world
cries that you are old; the pang of the eternal contrast when the world
would laugh at what seemed to it a foolish fantasy of youth—a pose, a
dream that must bring a bitter awakening! He heard the voices but too
plainly, and shrank quickly from the sound.
But Nixie, standing there beside him with such gentle persistence,
certainly made him waver.... The temptation to yield was strong and
seductive.... Yet, when the faint splendour of the summer moonrise
dimmed the stars near the horizon, and the pines shone tipped with
silver, he found himself borne down by the sense of caution that urged
no revolutionary change, and advised him to keep his armour tightly
buckled on in the disguise he had adopted.
He would wait and see—a little longer, at any rate; and meanwhile he
must be firm and stern and dull; master of himself, and apparently
normal.
He walked to the dressing-table and lit his candles, and, as he did so,
caught a picture of himself in the glass. There was a gleam of subdued
fire in his eyes, he thought, that was not naturally there. Something
about him looked a little wild; it made him laugh.
He laughed to think how utterly absurd it was that a man of his size and
age, and—But the idea refused to frame himself in language—He did not
know exactly why he laughed, for at the same time he felt sad. With him,
as with all other children, tears and laughter are never far apart. It
would have been just as intelligible if he had cried.
But when the candles were out and he was in bed, and the stars were
peeping into the darkened room, the memory of his laughter seemed
unreal, and the sound of it oddly remote.
For, after all, that laughter was rather mysterious. It was not the
Outer Paul laughing at the Inner Paul. It was the Inner Paul laughing
with himself.