IDYLLIC PLEASURES
Mortimer Romer could not be called a many-sided man. His dominant lust
for power filled his life so completely that he had little room for
excursions into the worlds of art or literature. He was, however, by no
means narrow or stupid in these matters. He had at least the shrewdness
to recognize the depth of their influence over other people. Indeed,
as he was so constantly occupied with this very question of influence,
with the problem of what precise motives and impulses did actually stir
and drive the average mass of humanity, it was natural that he should,
sooner or later, have to assume some kind of definite attitude towards
these things. The attitude he finally hit upon, as most harmonious
with his temperament, was that of active and genial patronage combined
with a modest denial of the possession of any personal knowledge or
taste. He recognized that an occasion might easily arise, when some
association with the æsthetic world, even of this modest and external
kind, might prove extremely useful to him. He might find it advisable
to make use of these alien forces, just as Napoleon found it necessary
to make use of religion. The fact that he himself was devoid of ideal
emotions, whether religious or æsthetic, mattered nothing. Only fools
confined their psychological interest within the narrow limits of
their subjective tastes. Humanity was influenced by these things,
and Romer was concerned with influencing humanity. Not that these
deviations into artistic by-paths carried him very far. He would invite
“cultivated” people to stay with him in his noble House--at least they
would appreciate that!--and then hand them over to the care of his
charming daughter, a method of hospitality which, it must be confessed,
seemed to meet with complete approval on the part of those concerned.
Thus the name of the owner of Leo’s Hill came to be associated, in
many artistic and literary circles, with the names of such admirable
and friendly patrons of these pursuits, as could be counted upon for
practical and efficient, if not for intellectual aid, in the contest
with an unsympathetic and materialistic world. It was not perhaps
the more struggling and less prosperous artists who found him their
friend. To most of these his attitude, though kind and attentive, was
hardly cordial. He knew too little of the questions at issue, to risk
giving his support to the Pariahs and Anarchists of Art. It was among
the well-known and the successful that Mr. Romer’s patronage was most
evident. Success was a quality he admired in every field; and while, as
has been hinted, his personal taste remained quite untouched, he was
clever enough to pick up the more fashionable catch-words of current
criticism, and to use them, when occasion served, with effective
naturalness and apparent conviction.
Among other celebrities or semi-celebrities, across whose track he
came, while on his periodic visits to London, was a certain Ralph
Dangelis, an American artist, whose masterly and audacious work
was just then coming into vogue. True to his imperial instinct of
surrounding himself with brilliant and prosperous clients, if such they
could be called, he promptly invited the famous Westerner to come down
and stay with him in Nevilton.
The American, who knew nothing of English country life, and was an
impassioned and desperate pursuer of all new experiences, accepted
this invitation, and appeared, among the quiet Somersetshire orchards,
like a bolt from the blue; falling into the very centre of the small
quaintly involved drama, whose acts and scenes we are now recording.
Thus plunged into a completely new circle the distinguished adventurer
very soon made himself most felicitously at home. He was of a frank and
friendly disposition; at heart an obdurate and impenetrable egoist,
but on the surface affable and kind to a quite exceptional degree. He
had spent several years in both Paris and Rome, and hence it was in
his power to adapt himself easily and naturally to European, if not to
English ways. One result of his protracted visits to foreign cities was
the faculty of casting off at pleasure his native accent--the accent
of a citizen of Toledo, Ohio. He did not always do this. Sometimes it
was his humour, especially in intercourse with ladies, to revert to
most free and fearless provincialisms, and a certain boyish gaiety in
him made him mischievously addicted to use such expressions when they
seemed least of all acceptable, but under normal conditions it would
have been difficult to gather from the tone of his language that he
was anything but an extremely well-travelled gentleman of Anglo-Saxon
birth. He speedily made a fast friend of Gladys, who found his airy
persiflage and elaborate courtesy eminently to her liking; and as the
long summer days succeeded one another and brought the visitor into
more and more familiar relation with Nevilton ways and customs, it
seemed as though his sojourn in that peaceful retreat was likely to
be indefinitely prolonged. It may be well believed that their guest’s
attraction to Gladys did not escape the notice of the girl’s parents.
Mr. Romer took the trouble to make sundry investigations as to the
status of Mr. Dangelis in his native Ohio; and it was with unmixed
satisfaction that both he and his wife received the intelligence that
he was the son and the only son of one of Toledo’s most “prominent”
citizens, a gentleman actively and effectively engaged in furthering
the progress of civilization by the manufacturing of automobiles.
Dangelis was, indeed, a prospective, if not an actual, millionaire,
and, from all that could be learned, it appeared that the prominent
citizen of Toledo handed over to his son an annual allowance equal to
the income of many crowned heads.
The Pariah of Nevilton House--the luckless child of the
Apennines--found little to admire in this energetic wanderer. His
oratorical manner, his abrupt, aggressive courtesies, his exuberant
high spirits, the sweep and swing of his vigorous personality, the
extraordinary mixture in him of pedantry and gaiety, jarred upon her
sensitive over-strung nerves. In his boyish desire to please her,
hearing that she came from Italy, the good-natured artist would
frequently turn the conversation round to the beauty and romance of
that “garden of the world,” as he was pleased to style her home; but
the tone of these discourses increased rather than diminished Lacrima’s
obstinate reserve. He had a habit of referring to her country as if
it were a place whose inhabitants only existed, by a considerate
dispensation of Providence, to furnish a charming background for
certain invaluable relics of antiquity. These precious fragments,
according to this easy view of things, appeared to survive, together
with their appropriate guardians, solely with the object of enlarging
and inspiring the voracious “mentality” of wayfarers from London and
New York. Grateful as Lacrima was for the respite the artist brought
her from the despotism of her cousin, she could not bring herself to
regard him, so far as she herself was concerned, with anything but
extreme reserve and caution.
One peculiarity he displayed, filled her with shy dismay. Dangelis
had a trick of staring at the people with whom he associated, as if
with a kind of quizzical analysis. He threw her into a turmoil of
wretched embarrassment by some of his glances. She was troubled and
frightened, without being able to get at the secret of her agitation.
Sometimes she fancied that he was wondering what he could make of her
as a model. The idea that anything of this kind should be expected of
her filled her with nervous dread. At other times the wild idea passed
through her brain that he was making covert overtures to her, of an
amorous character. She thought she intercepted once or twice a look
upon his face of the particular kind which always filled her with
shrinking apprehension. This illusion--if it were an illusion--was far
more alarming than any tendency he might display to pounce on her for
æsthetic purposes; for the Pariah’s association with the inhabitants
of Nevilton House had not given her a pleasing impression of human
amorousness.
Shortly after Dangelis’ arrival, Mr. Romer found it necessary to visit
London again for a few days; and the artist was rather relieved than
otherwise by his departure. He felt freer, and more at liberty to
express his ideas, when left alone with the three women. For himself,
however varied their attitude to him might be, he found them all, in
their different ways, full of stimulating interest. With Mrs. Romer
he soon became perfectly at home; and discovered a mischievous and
profane pleasure in the process of exciting and encouraging all her
least lady-like characteristics. He would follow her into the spacious
Nevilton kitchens, where the good lady was much more at home than in
her stately drawing room; and watch with unconventional interest her
rambling domestic colloquies with Mrs. Murphy the housekeeper, Jane the
cook, and Lily the house-maid.
The men-servants, of whom Mr. Romer kept two, always avoided, with
scrupulous refinement, these unusual gatherings. They discoursed, in
the pantry, upon their mistress’ dubious behavior, and came to the
conclusion that she was no more of a “real lady” than her visitor from
America was a “real gentleman.”
Dangelis made some new and amazing discovery in Susan Romer’s character
every day. In all his experiences from San Francisco to New York, and
from Paris to Vienna, he had never encountered anything in the least
resembling her.
He could never make out how deep her apparent simplicity went, nor how
ingrained and innate was her lethargic submission to circumstances.
Nothing in the woman shocked him; neither her vulgarity nor her
grossness. And as for her sly, sleepy, feline malice, he loved to
excite and provoke it, as he would have loved to have excited a
slumbering animal in a cage. He delighted in the way she wrinkled up
her eyes. He delighted in the way she smacked her lips over her food.
He loved watching her settling herself to sleep in her high-backed
Sheraton chair in the kitchen, or in her more modern lounge in the
great entrance hall. He never grew tired of asking her questions about
the various personages of Nevilton, their relation to Mr. Romer, and
Mr. Romer’s relation to them. He used to watch her sometimes, as in
drowsy sensual enjoyment she would bask in the hot sunshine on the
terrace, or drift in her slow stealthy manner about the garden-paths,
as if she were a great fascinating tame puma. He made endless sketches
of her, in his little note-books, some of them of the most fantastic,
and even Rabelaisean character. He had certainly never anticipated
just this, when he accepted the shrewd financier’s invitation to his
Elizabethan home. And if Susan Romer delighted him, Gladys Romer
absolutely bewitched him. He treated her as if she were no grown-up
young lady, but a romping and quite unscrupulous child; and the wily
Gladys, quickly perceiving how greatly he was pleased by any naive
display of youthful malice, or greed, or sensuality, or vanity,
took good care to put no rein upon herself in the expression of her
primitive emotions.
It was with Lacrima that Ralph Dangelis found himself on ground
that was less secure, but in the genial aplomb of his all-embracing
good-fellowships, it was only by degrees that he became conscious even
of this. He found the place not only extraordinarily harmonious to his
general temper, but extremely inspiring to his imaginative work. It
only needed the securing of a few mechanical contrivances, a studio,
for instance, with a north-light, to have made his sojourn at Nevilton
one of the most prolific summers, in regard to his art, that he had
experienced since his student days in Rome. He began vaguely to wish
in the depths of his mind that it were possible for these good Romers
to bestow upon him in perpetuity some pleasant airy chamber in their
great house, so that he might not have to lose, for many summers to
come, these agreeable and scandalous gossippings with the mother and
these still more agreeable flirtations with the delicious daughter.
This bold and fantastic idea was less a fabric of airy speculation
than might have been supposed; for if the American was enchanted with
his entertainers, his entertainers, at any rate the mother and the
daughter, were extremely well pleased with him. The free sweep of his
capacious sympathy, the absence in him of any punctilious gentility,
the large and benignant atmosphere he diffused round him, and the
mixture of cynical realism with considerate chivalry, were things so
different from anything they had been accustomed to, that they both of
them would willingly have offered him a suite of apartments in the
house, if he could have accepted such an offer.
Dangelis was particularly lucky in arriving at Nevilton at this
especial moment. An abnormally retarded spring had led to the most
delicious overlapping in the varied flora of the place. Though June had
begun, there were still many flowers lingering in the shadier spots of
the woods and ditches, which properly belonged not only to May, but to
very early May. Certain, even, of April’s progeny had not completely
faded from the late-flowering lanes.
The artist found himself surrounded by a riotous revel of leafy
exuberance. The year’s “primal burst” had occurred, not in reluctant
spasmodic fits and starts, as is usual in our intermittent fine
weather, but in a grand universal outpouring of the earth’s sap. His
imagination answered spontaneously to this appeal, and his note-books
were speedily filled with hurried passionate sketches, made at all
hours of the long bright days, and full of suggestive charm. One
particularly lovely afternoon the American found himself wandering
slowly up the hill from the little Nevilton station, after a brief
excursion to Yeoborough in search of pigments and canvas. He was hoping
to take advantage of this auspicious stirring of his imaginative
senses, by entering upon some more important and more continuous work.
The Nevilton ladies had assured him that it would be quite impossible
to find in the little town the kind of materials he needed; and he
was returning in high spirits to assure them that he had completely
falsified their prediction. He suspected Gladys of having invented
this difficulty with a view to confining his labours to such easily
shared sketching-trips as she might accompany him upon, but though the
fascination of the romping and toying girl still retained, and had
even increased, its power over him; he was, in this case, impelled
and driven by a force stronger and more dominant than any sensual
attraction. He was in a better mood for painting than he had ever been
in his life, and nothing could interfere with his resolution to exploit
this mood to its utmost limit. With the most precious of his newly
purchased materials under his arm and the more bulky ones promised him
that same evening, Dangelis, as he drifted slowly up the sunny road
chatting amicably with such rural marketers as overtook him, felt in a
peculiarly harmonious temper.
He had recently, in the western cities of the States, won a certain
fiercely contested notoriety in the art of portrait-painting, an art
which he had come more and more to practise according to the very
latest of those daring modern theories, which are summed up sometimes
under the not very illuminative title of Post-impressionism, and he
had, during the last few days, indulged in a natural and irresistible
wish to associate this new departure with his personal experiences at
Nevilton.
Gossiping nonchalantly with the village-wives, as he ascended the
dusty road, by the vicarage wall, his thoughts ran swiftly over the
motley-coloured map of his past life, and the deviating track across
the world which he had been led to follow. He congratulated himself in
his heart, as he indulged in easy persiflage with his fellow-wayfarers,
upon his consistent freedom from everything that might choke or
restrain the freedom of his will.
How fortunate, how incredibly fortunate, that he should, in weather
like this, and in so abounding a mood of creative energy, be completely
his own master, except for the need of propitiating two naive and
amusing women! He entertained himself by the thought of how little they
really knew him,--these friendly Romers--how little they sounded his
real purposes, his essential feelings! To them no doubt, he was no more
than he was to these excellent villagers,--a tall, fair, slouching,
bony figure, with a face,--if they went as far as his face,--massively
heavy and irregular, with dreamy humorous eyes and a mouth addicted to
nervous twitching.
A clump of dandelions, obtruding their golden indifference to human
drama, into the dust of the road at his feet, mixed oddly, at that
moment, in these obscure workings of his brain, with a sort of savage
caress of self-complacent congratulation which he suddenly bestowed
on his interior self; as, beneath his pleasant chatter with his
rural companions, he thought how imperturbable, how ferocious, his
secret egoism was, and how well he concealed it under his indolent
good-nature! He had passed now the entrance to the vicarage garden, and
in the adjoining field he observed with a curious thrill of psychic
sympathy the tenacious grip with which a viciously-knotted ash-tree
held to the earth with its sturdy roots. Out-walked at last by all
the other returned travellers, Dangelis glanced without pausing down
the long Italianated avenue, at the end of which shone red, in the
afternoon sun, the mullioned windows of the great house. He preferred
to prolong his stroll, by taking the circuitous way, round by the
village. He knew the expression of that famous west front too well now,
to linger in admiration over its picturesque repose in the afternoon
sunshine. As a matter of fact a slight chill of curious antipathy
crossed his consciousness as he quickened his steps.
Happily situated though he was, in his pleasant lodging beneath that
capacious roof, the famous edifice itself had not altogether won his
affection. The thing suggested to his wayward and prairie-nurtured
soul, a stately product rather of convention than of life. He felt
oddly conscious of it as something symbolic of what would be always
intrinsically opposed to him, of what would willingly, if it were able,
suppress him and render him helpless.
Dangelis belonged to quite a different type of trans-Atlantic visitor,
from the kind that hover with exuberant delight over everything that
is “old” or “English” or “European.” He was essentially rather an
artist than an antiquary, rather an energetic workman than an epicurean
sentimentalist. Once out of sight of the Elizabethan pile, the curious
chill passed from his mind, and as he approached the first cottages of
the village he looked round for more reassuring tokens. Such tokens
were not lacking. They crowded in upon him, indeed, from every side.
Stopping for a moment, ere the houses actually blocked his view, and
leaning over a gate which faced westward, Dangelis looked out across
the great Somersetshire plain, to which Leo’s Hill and Nevilton
Mount serve the office of watchful sentinels. Tall, closely-clipped
elm-trees, bordering every field, gave the country on this side of
the horizon, a queer artificial look, as if it had been one huge
landscape-garden, arranged according to the arbitrary pleasure of
some fantastic artist, whose perversion it was to reduce every natural
extravagance to the meticulous rhythm of his own formal taste.
This impression, the impression of something willed and intentional in
the very formation of Nature, gave our eccentric onlooker a caressing
and delicate pleasure, a sense as of a thing peculiarly harmonious to
his own spirit. The formality of Nevilton House depressed and chilled
him, but the formality of age-trimmed trees and hedges liberated his
imagination, as some perverse work of a Picasso or a Matisse might
have done. He wondered vaguely to himself what was the precise cause
of the psychic antipathy which rendered him so cold to the grandeur
of Elizabethan architecture, while the other features of his present
dwelling remained so attractive, and he came to the temporary solution,
as he took his arms from the top of the gate, that it was because
that particular kind of magnificence expressed the pride of a class,
rather than of an individual, whereas he himself was all for individual
self-assertion in everything--in everything! The problem was still
teasing him, when, a few minutes later, he passed the graceful tower of
St. Catharine’s church.
This strangely organic, this curiously anonymous Gothic art--was not
this also, the suppression of the individual, in the presence of
something larger and deeper, of something that demanded the sacrifice
of mere transient personality, as the very condition of its appearance?
At all events it was less humiliating, less of an insult, to the claims
of the individual will, when the thing was done in the interest of
religion, than when it was done in the interests of a class. The
impersonality of the former, resembled the impersonality of rocks and
flowers; that of the latter, the impersonality of fashions in dress.
“But away with them both!” muttered Dangelis to himself, as he strode
viciously down the central street of Nevilton. The American was in very
truth, and he felt he was, for all his artistic receptivity, an alien
and a foreigner in the midst of these time-worn traditions. In spite of
their beauty he knew himself profoundly opposed to them. They excited
fibres of opposition and rebellion in him, that went down to the very
depths of his nature. If, allowing full scope to our speculative
fancy--and who knows upon what occult truths these wandering thoughts
sometimes stumble?--we image the opposing “streams of tendency,”
in Nevilton village, as focussed and summed up, in the form of the
Gothic church, guarded by the consecrated Mount, and the form of the
Elizabethan house, owned by the owner of Leo’s Hill, it is clear
that this wanderer, from the shores of the Great Lakes, was equally
antagonistic to both of them. He brought into the place a certain
large and elemental indifference. To the child of the winds and storms
of the Great Lakes, as, so one might think, to the high fixed stars
themselves, this local strife of opposed mythologies must needs appear
a matter of but trifling importance.
The American was not permitted, on this occasion, to pursue his
meditations uninterrupted to the end of his walk. Half-way down the
south drive he was overtaken by Gladys, returning from the village
post-office. “Hullo! How have you got on?” she cried. “I suppose
you’ll believe me another time? You know now, I expect, how impossible
the Yeoborough shops are!”
“On the contrary,” said the artist smiling, “I have found them
extremely good. Perhaps I am less exacting,” he added, “than some
artists.”
“I am exacting in everything,” said Gladys, “especially in people. That
is why I get on so well with you. You are a new experience to me.”
Dangelis made no reply to this and they paced in silence under the tall
exotic cedars until they reached the house.
“There’s mother!” cried the girl, pushing open the door that led into
the kitchen premises, and pulling the American unceremoniously in
after her. They found Mrs. Romer before a large oak table, set in the
mullioned window of the housekeeper’s little room. She was arranging
flowers for the evening’s dinner-table. The plump lady welcomed
Dangelis effusively and made him sit down upon a Queen Anne settle of
polished mahogany which stood in the corner of the fire-place. Gladys
remained standing, a tall softly-moulded figure, appealingly girlish in
her light muslin frock. She swayed slightly, backwards and forwards,
pouting capriciously at her mother’s naive discourse, and loosening her
belt with both her hands.
“Why should you ever go back to America?” Mrs. Romer was saying.
“Don’t go, dear Mr. Dangelis. Stay with us here till the end of the
summer. The Red room in the south passage was getting quite damp before
you came. Please, don’t go! Gladys and I are getting so fond of you, so
used to your ways and all that. Aren’t we Gladys? Why should you go?
There are plenty of lovely bits of scenery about here. And you can have
a studio built! Yes! Why not? Couldn’t he, Gladys? The lumber-room in
the south passage--opposite where Lily sleeps--would make a splendid
place for painting in hot weather. I suppose a north light, though,
would be impossible. But some kind of glass arrangement might be made.
I must talk to Mortimer about it. I suppose you rich Americans think
nothing of calling in builders and putting up studios. I suppose you
do it everywhere. America must be full of north light. But perhaps
something of the kind could be done. I really don’t understand
architecture, but Mortimer does. Mortimer understands everything. I
daresay it wouldn’t be very expensive. It would only mean buying the
glass.”
The admirable woman, whose large fair face and double chin had grown
quite creased and shiny with excitement, turned at last to her daughter
who had been coquettishly and dreamily staring at the smiling artist.
“Why don’t you say something, Gladys? You don’t want Mr. Dangelis to
go, any more than I do, do you?”
The girl moved to the table and picking up a large peony stuck it
wantonly and capriciously into her dress. “I have my confirmation
lesson tonight,” she said. “I must be at Mr. Clavering’s by six. What’s
the time now?” She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. “Why, it’s
nearly half-past four! I wonder where Lacrima is. Never mind! We must
have tea without her. I’m sure Mr. Dangelis is dying for tea. Let’s
have it out on the terrace.”
“At six?” repeated Mrs. Romer. “I thought the class was always at
seven. It was given out to be seven. I heard the notice on Sunday.”
Gladys looked smilingly at the American as she answered her mother.
“Don’t be silly, dear. You know Mr. Clavering takes me separately from
the others. The others are all village people.”
Mrs. Romer rose from her seat with something between a sigh and a
chuckle. “I hadn’t the least idea,” she said, “that he took you
separately. You’ve been going to these classes for three weeks and
you’ve never mentioned such a thing until this moment. Well--never
mind! I expect Mr. Dangelis will not object to strolling down the drive
with you. You’d better both get ready for tea now. I’ll go and tell
somebody we want it.”
She had no sooner departed than Gladys began flicking the American,
in playful childish sport, with a spray of early roses. He entered
willingly into the game, and a pleasant tussle ensued between them as
he sought to snatch the flowers out of her hands. She resisted but he
pushed her backwards, and held her imprisoned against the edge of the
table, teasing her as if she were a romping child of twelve.
“So you are going to these classes alone, are you?” he said. “I see
that your English clergymen are allowed extraordinary privileges. I
expect you cause him a good deal of agitation, poor dear man, if you
flirt with him as shamelessly as you do with me. Well, go ahead! I’m
not responsible for you. In fact I’m all for spurring you on. It’ll
amuse me to see what happens. But no doubt all sorts of things have
happened already! I suppose you’ve made Mr. Clavering desperately in
love with you. I expect you persecute him unmercifully. I know you. I
know your ways.” He playfully pinched her arm. “But go on. It’ll be an
amusement to me to watch the result of all this. I like being a sort of
sympathetic onlooker, in these things. I like the idea of hiding behind
the scenes, and watching the tricks of a naughty little flirt like you,
set upon troubling the mind of a poor harmless minister.”
The reply made by the daughter of the House to this challenge was a
simple but effective one. Like a mischievous infant caught in some
unpardonable act, she flagrantly and shamelessly put out her tongue at
him. Long afterwards, with curious feelings, Dangelis recalled this
gesture. He associated it to the end of his life with the indefinable
smell of cut flowers, with their stalks in water, and the pungency of
peony-petals.
Tea, when it reached our friends upon the stately east terrace, proved
a gay and festive meal. The absence of the reserved and nervous
Italian, and also of the master of Nevilton, rendered all three persons
more completely and freely at their ease, than they had ever been since
the American’s first appearance. The grass was being cut at that corner
of the park, and the fresh delicious smell, full of the very sap of the
earth, poured in upon them across the sunny flower beds. The chattering
of young starlings, the cawing of young rooks, blended pleasantly with
the swish of the scythes and the laughter of the hay-makers; and from
the distant village floated softly to their ears all those vague and
characteristic sounds which accompany the close of a hot day, and the
release from labour of men and beasts. As they devoured their bread
and butter with that naive greediness which is part of the natural
atmosphere of this privileged hour in an English home, the three
friends indicated by their playful temper and gay discourse that they
each had secret reasons for self-congratulation.
Dangelis felt an exquisite sense of new possibilities in his art, drawn
from the seduction of these surroundings and the frank animalism of
his cheerful companions. He sat between them, watching their looks and
ways, very much as Rubens or Franz Hals might have watched the rounded
bosoms and spacious gestures of two admirable burgess-women in some
country house of Holland.
Mrs. Romer, below her garrulous chatter, nourished fantastic and
rose-colored dreams, in which inestimable piles of dollars, and
limitless rows of golden haired grand-children, played the predominant
part. Gladys, flushed and excited, gave herself up to the imagined
exercise of every sort of wanton and wilful power, with the desire for
which the flowing sap of the year’s exuberance filled her responsive
veins.
Tea over, Dangelis suggested that he should accompany the girl to Mr.
Clavering’s door.
“You needn’t be there for three quarters of an hour,” he said, “let’s
go across to the mill copse first, and see if there are any blue-bells
left.”
Gladys willingly consented, and Susan Romer, remaining pensive in her
low cane chair, watched their youthful figures retreating across the
sunlit park with a sigh of profound thankfulness addressed vaguely and
obscurely to Omnipotence. This was indeed the sort of son-in-law she
craved. How much more desirable than that reserved and haughty young
Ilminster! Gladys would be, three times over, a fool if she let him
escape.
A few minutes later the artist and his girl-friend reached the mill
spinney. He helped her over the stream and the black thorn hedge
without too much damage to her frock and he was rewarded for his
efforts by the thrill of vibrating pleasure with which she plunged her
hands among the oozy stalks of those ineffable blue flowers.
“No wonder young Hyacinth was too beautiful to live,” he remarked.
“Shut up,” was the young woman’s reply, as she breathlessly stretched
herself along the length of a fallen branch, and endeavoured to reach
the damp moist stalks and cool leaves with her forehead and lips.
“How silly it is, having one’s hair done up,” she cried presently,
raising herself on her hands from her prone position, and kicking the
branch viciously with her foot.
“You’d have liked me with my hair down, Mr. Dangelis,” she continued.
“Lying like this,” and she once more embraced the fallen bough, “it
would have got mixed up with all those blue-bells and then you _would_
have had something to paint!”
“Bad girl!” cried the artist playfully, switching her lightly with a
willow wand from which he had been stripping the bark. “I would have
made you do your hair up, tight round your head, years and years ago.”
He offered her his hand and lifted her up. Once in possession of those
ardent youthful fingers, he seemed to consider himself justified in
retaining them and, as the girl made no sign of dissent, they advanced
hand in hand through the thick undergrowth.
The place was indeed a little epitome of the season’s prolific growth.
Above and about them, elder-bushes and hazels met in entangled
profusion; while at their feet the marshy soil was covered with a mass
of moss and cool-rooted leafy plants. Golden-green burdocks grew there,
and dark dog-mercury; while mixed with aromatic water-mint and ground
ivy, crowds of sturdy red campions lifted up their rose-coloured heads.
The undergrowth was so thick, and the roots of the willows and alders
so betraying, that over and over again he had to make a path for her,
and hold back with his hand some threatening withy-switch or prickly
thorn branch, that appeared likely to invade her face or body.
The indescribable charm of the hour, as the broken sunlight, almost
horizontal now, threw red patches, like the blood of wounded satyrs,
upon tree-trunks and mossy stumps, and made the little marsh-pools
gleam as if filled with fairy wine, found its completest expression
in the long-drawn flute-music, at the same time frivolously gay and
exquisitely sad, of the blackbird’s song. An angry cuckoo, crying its
familiar cry as it flew, flapped away from some hidden perch, just
above their heads.
Not many more blackbird’s notes and not many more cuckoo’s cries
would that diminutive jungle hear, before the great midsummer silence
descended upon it, to be broken only by the less magical sounds of
the later season. Nothing but the auspicious accident of the extreme
lateness of the spring had given to the visitor from Ohio these
revelations of enchantment. It was one of those unequalled moments when
the earth seems to breathe out from its most secret heart perfumes and
scents that seem to belong to a more felicitous planet than our planet,
murmurs and voices adapted to more responsive ears than our ears.
It was doubtless, so Dangelis thought, on such an evening as this, that
the first notion of the presence in such places of beings of a finer
and yet a grosser texture than man’s, first entered the imagination of
humanity. In such a spot were the earth-gods born.
Many feathered things, besides blackbirds and cuckoos abounded in the
mill spinney.
They had scarcely reached the opposite end of the little wood, when
with a sudden cry of excitement and a quick sinking on her knees, the
girl turned to him with a young thrush in her hand. It was big enough
to be capable of flying and, as she held it in her soft white fingers,
it struggled desperately and uttered little cries. She held it tightly
in one hand, and with the other caressed its ruffled feathers, looking
sideways at her companion, as she did so, with dreamy, half-shut,
voluptuous eyes.
“Little darling,” she whispered. And then, with a breathless gasp
in her voice,--“Kiss its head, Mr. Dangelis. It can’t get away.” He
stooped over her as she held the bird up to him, and if in obeying her
he brushed with his lips fingers as well as feathers, the accident was
not one he could bring himself to regret.
“It can’t get away,” she repeated, in a low soft murmur.
The bird did, however, get away, a moment afterwards, and went
fluttering off through the brushwood, with that delicious, awkward
violence, which young thrushes share with so many other youthful things.
In the deep ditch which they now had to cross, the artist caught sight
of a solitary half-faded primrose, the very last, perhaps, of its
delicate tribe. He showed it to Gladys, gently smoothing away, as he
did so, the heavy leaves which seemed to be overshadowing its last days
of life.
The girl pushed him aside impetuously, and plucking the faded flower
deliberately thrust it into her mouth.
“I love eating them,” she cried, “I used to do it when I was ever so
little and I do it still when I am alone. You’ve no idea how nice they
taste!”
At that moment they heard the sound of the church clock striking six.
“Quick!” cried Gladys. “Mr. Clavering will be waiting. He’ll be cross
if I’m too dreadfully late.”
They emerged from the wood and followed the grass-grown lane, round
by the small mill-pond. Crossing the park once more, they entered the
village by the Yeoborough road.
“What a girl!” said Dangelis to himself, in a voice of unmitigated
admiration, as he held open for her, at last, the little gate of the
old vicarage garden, and waved his good-bye.
“What a girl! Heaven help that unfortunate Mr. Clavering! If he’s as
susceptible as most of these young Englishmen, she’ll make havoc of his
poor heart. Will he read the ‘Imitation’ with her, I wonder?”
He strolled slowly back, the way they had come, the personality of
the insidious Gladys pressing less and less heavily upon him as his
thought reverted to his painting. He resolved that he would throw all
these recent impressions together in some large and sumptuous picture,
that should give to these modern human figures something of the ample
suggestion and noble aplomb, the secret of which seemed to have been
lost to the world with the old Flemish and Venetian masters.
What in his soul he vaguely imaged as his task, was an attempt to
eliminate all mystic and symbolic attitudes from his works, and to
catch, in their place, if the inspiration came to him, something of the
lavish prodigality, superbly material, and yet possessed of ineffable
vistas, of the large careless evocations of nature herself.
His imaginative purpose, as it defined itself more and more clearly
in his mind, during his solitary return through the evening light,
seemed to imply an attempted reproduction of those aspects of the human
drama, in such a place as this, which carried upon their surface the
air of things that could not happen otherwise, and which, in their
large inevitableness, over-brimmed and over-flowed all traditional
distinctions. He would have liked to have given, in this way, to the
figures of Gladys and her mother, something of the superb non-moral
“insouciance,” springing, like the movements of animals and the
fragrance of plants, out of the bosom of an earth innocent of both
introspection and renunciation, which one observes in the forms of
Attic sculpture, or in the creations of Venetian colourists. Below the
high ornamental wall of Nevilton garden he paused a moment before
entering the little postern-gate, to admire the indescribable greenness
and luxuriousness of the heavy grass devoted in this place, not to
hay-makers but to cattle. There was a sort of poetry, he humorously
told himself, even about the great black heaps of cow-dung which
alternated here with the golden clumps of drowsy buttercups. They
also,--why not?--might be brought into the kind of picture he visioned,
just as Veronese brought his mongrels and curs to the very feet of the
Saviour!
Dangelis lifted his eyes, to where, through a gap in the leafy uplands,
the more distant hills were visible. He could make out clearly, in
the rich purple light, the long curving lines of the Corton downs, as
they melted, little by little, in a floating lake of aerial blue-grey
vapour, the exhalation of the great valley’s day-long breathing.
He could even mark, at the end of the Corton range--and the sight of
it gave him a thrilling sense of the invincible continuity of life in
these regions--the famous tree-crested circle of Cadbury Camp, the
authentic site of the Arthurian Camelot.
What a lodging this Nevilton was, to pass one’s days in, to work in,
and to love and dream! What enchantments were all around him! What
memories! What dumb voices!