I trod close in Mrs Bowater's track as she convoyed me through a sea of
greenery breaking here and there to my waist and even above my hat.
Summer had been busy in Wanderslore. Honeysuckle and acid-sweet brier
were in bloom; sleeping bindweed and pimpernel. The air was liquidly
sweet with uncountable odours. And the fading skies dyed bright the
frowning front of the house, about which the new-come swifts shrieked in
their play over my wilderness. Mr Anon looked peculiar, standing alone
there.
Having bidden him a gracious good-evening, Mrs Bowater after a long,
ruminating glance at us, decided that she would "take a stroll through
the grounds." We watched her black figure trail slowly away up the
overgrown terraces towards the house. Then he turned. His clear,
dwelling eyes, with that darker line encircling the grey-black iris,
fixed themselves on me, his mouth tight-shut.
"Well," he said at last, almost wearily. "It has been a long waiting."
I was unprepared for this sighing. "It has indeed," I replied. "But it
is exceedingly pleasant to see Beechwood Hill again. I wrote; but you
did not answer my letter, at least not the last."
My voice dropped away; every one of the fine little speeches I had
thought to make, forgotten.
"And now you are here."
"Yes," I said quickly, a little timid of any silence between us, "and
that's pleasant too. You can have no notion what a stiff, glaring garden
it is up there--geraniums and gravel, you know, and windows, windows,
windows. They are wonderfully kind to me--but I don't much love it."
"Then why stay?" he smiled. "Still, you are, at least, safely out of
_her_ clutches."
"Clutches!" I hated the way we were talking. "Thank you very much. You
forget you are speaking of one of my friends. Besides, I can take care
of myself." He made no answer.
"You are so gloomy," I continued. "So--oh, I don't know--about
everything. It's because you are always cooped up in one place, I
suppose. One must take the world--a little--as it is, you know. Why
don't you go away; travel; _see_ things? Oh, if I were a man."
His eyes watched my lips. Everything seemed to have turned sour. To have
waited and dreamed; to have actually changed my clothes and come
scuttling out in a silly longing excitement--for this. Why, I felt more
lonely and helpless under Wanderslore's evening sky than ever I had been
in my cedar-wood privacy in No. 2.
"I mean it, I mean it," I broke out suddenly. "You domineer over me. You
pamper me up with silly stories--'trailing clouds of glory,' I suppose.
They are not true. It's every one for himself in this world, I can tell
you; and in future, please understand, I intend to be my own mistress.
Simply because in a little private difficulty I asked you to help
me----"
He turned irresolutely. "They have dipped you pretty deep in the
dye-pot."
"And what, may I ask, do you mean by that?"
"I mean," and he faced me, "that I am precisely what your friend, Miss
Bowater, called me. What more is there to say?"
"And pray, am I responsible for everything my friends say? And to have
dragged up _that_ wretched fiasco after we had talked it out to the very
dregs! Oh, how I have been longing and longing to come home. And this is
what you make of it."
He turned his face towards the west, and its vast light irradiated his
sharp-boned features, the sloping forehead beneath the straight, black
hair. Fume as I might, resentment fainted away in me.
"You don't seem to understand," I went on; "it's the waste--the waste of
it all. Why do you make it so that I can't talk naturally to you, as
friends talk? If I am alone in the world, so are you. Surely we can tell
the truth to one another. I am utterly wretched."
"There is only one truth that matters: you do not love me. Why should
you? But that's the barrier. And the charm of it is that not only the
Gods, but the miserable Humans, if only they knew it, would enjoy the
sport."
"Love! I detest the very sound of the word. What has it ever meant to
me, I should like to know, in this--this cage?"
"Scarcely a streak of gilding on the bars," he sneered miserably. "Still
we are sharing the same language now."
The same language. Self-pitying tears pricked into my eyes; I turned my
head away. And in the silence, stealthily, out of a dark woody hollow
nearer the house, as if at an incantation, broke a low, sinister,
protracted rattle, like the croaking of a toad. I knew that sound; it
came straight out of Lyndsey--called me back.
"S-sh!" I whispered, caught up with delight. "A nightjar! Listen. Let's
go and look."
I held out my hand. His sent a shiver down my spine. It was clammy cold,
as if he had just come out of the sea. Thrusting our way between the
denser clumps of weeds, we pushed on cautiously until we actually stood
under the creature's enormous oak. So elusive and deceitful was the
throbbing croon of sound that it was impossible to detect on which naked
branch in the black leafiness the bird sat churring. The wafted
fragrances, the placid dusky air, and far, far above, the delicate,
shallowing deepening of the faint-starred blue--how I longed to sip but
one drop of drowsy mandragora and forget this fretting, inconstant self.
We stood, listening; and an old story I had read somewhere floated back
into memory. "Once, did you ever hear it?" I whispered close to him,
"there was a ghost came to a house near Cirencester. I read of it in a
book. And when it was asked, 'Are you a good spirit or a bad?' it made
no answer, but vanished, the book said--I remember the very words--'with
a curious perfume and most melodious twang.' With a curious perfume," I
repeated, "and most melodious twang. There now, would you like _me_ to
go like that? Oh, if I were a moth, I would flit in there and ask that
old Death-thing to catch me. Even if _I_ cannot love you, you are part
of all this. You feed my very self. Mayn't that be enough?"
His grip tightened round my fingers; the entrancing, toneless dulcimer
thrummed on.
I leaned nearer, as if to raise the shadowed lids above the brooding
eyes. "What can I give you--only to be your peace? I do assure you it is
yours. But I haven't the secret of knowing what half the world means.
Look at me. Is it not _all_ a mystery? Oh, I know it, even though they
jeer and laugh at me. I beseech you be merciful, and keep me what I am."
So I pleaded and argued, scarcely heeding the words I said. Yet I
realize now that it was only my mind that wrestled with him there. It
was what came after that took the heart out of me. There came a clap of
wings, and the bird swooped out of its secrecy into the air above us, a
moment showed his white-splashed, cinder-coloured feathers in the dusk,
seemed to tumble as if broken-winged upon the air, squawked, and was
gone. The interruption only hastened me on.
"Still, still listen," I implored: "if Time would but cease a while and
let me breathe."
"There, there," he muttered. "I was unkind. A filthy jealousy."
"But think! There may never come another hour like this. Know, know now,
that you have made me happy. I can never be so alone again. I share my
secretest thoughts--my imagination, with you; isn't that a kind of love?
I assure you that it is. Once I heard my mother talking, and sometimes I
have wondered myself, if I am quite like--oh, you know what they say: a
freak of Nature. Tell me; if by some enchantment I were really and
indeed come from those snow mountains of yours, and that sea, would you
recognize me? Would you? No, no; it's only a story--why, even all this
green and loveliness is only skin deep. If the Old World were just to
shrug its shoulders, Mr Anon, we should all, big and little, be clean
gone."
My words seemed merely to be like drops of water dripping upon a sponge.
"Wake!" I tugged at his hand. "Look!" Kneeling down sidelong, I stooped
my cheek up at him from a cool, green mat of grass, amid which a
glow-worm burned: "Is this a--a _Stranger's_ face?"
He came no nearer; surveyed me with a long, quiet smile of infinitely
sorrowful indulgence. "A Stranger's? How else could it be, if I love
you?"
Intoxicated in that earthy fragrance, washed about with the colours of
the motionless flowers, it seemed I was merely talking to some one who
could assure me that I was still in life, still myself. A strand of my
hair had fallen loose, and smiling, its gold pin between my lips, I
looped it back. "Oh, but you see--haven't I told you?--I can't love you.
Perhaps; I don't know.... What shall I do? What shall I say? Now
suppose," I went on, "I like myself _that_ much," and I held my thumb
and finger just ajar, "then I like _you_, think of you, hope for you,
why, that!"--and I swept my hand clean across the empty zenith. "_Now_
do you understand?"
"Oh, my dear, my dear," he said, and smiled into my eyes.
I laughed out in triumph at the success of my device. And he laughed
too, as if in a conspiracy with me--and with Misery, I could see,
sitting like an old hag at the door from which the sound came. And out
of the distance the nightjar set again to its churring.
"Then I have made you a little--a little less unhappy?" I asked him, and
hid my face in my hands in a desolate peace and solitude.
He knelt beside me, held out his hand as if to touch me, withdrew it
again. All presence of him distanced and vanished away in that small
darkness. I prayed not to think any more, not to be exiled again
into--how can I explain my meaning except by saying--Myself? Would some
further world have withdrawn its veils and have let me in then and for
ever if that lightless quiet could have continued a little longer? Is it
the experience of every human being seemingly to trespass at times so
close upon the confines of existence as that?
It was his own harsh voice that broke the spell.
"Wake, wake!" it called in my ear. "The woman is looking for you. We
must go."
My hands slipped from my face. A slow, sobbing breath drew itself into
my body. And there beneath evening's vacancy of twilight showed the
transfigured scene of the garden, and, near me, the anxious, suffering
face of this stranger, faintly greened by the light of the worm.
"Wake!" he bade me, rapping softly with his bony finger on my hand. I
stared at him out of a dream.