I missed the train at Evian, and, after infinite trouble, discovered a
motor that would take me, ice-axe and all, to Geneva. By hurrying, the
connection might be just possible. I telegraphed to Haddon to meet me
at the station, and lay back comfortably, dreaming of the precipices of
Haute Savoie. We made good time; the roads were excellent, traffic of
the slightest, when--crash! There was an instant’s excruciating pain,
the sun went out like a snuffed candle, and I fell into something as
soft as a bed of flowers and as yielding to my weight as warm water....
It was _very_ warm. There was a perfume of flowers. My eyes opened,
focused vividly upon a detailed picture for a moment, then closed
again. There was no context--at least, none that I could recall--for
the scene, though familiar as home, brought nothing that I definitely
remembered. Broken away from any sequence, unattached to any past,
unaware even of my own identity, I simply saw this picture as a camera
snaps it off from the world, a scene apart, with meaning only for those
who knew the context:
The warm, soft thing I lay in was a bed--big, deep, comfortable; and
the perfume came from flowers that stood beside it on a little table.
It was in a stately, ancient chamber, with lofty ceiling and immense
open fireplace of stone; old-fashioned pictures--familiar portraits
and engravings I knew intimately--hung upon the walls; the floor was
bare, with dignified, carved furniture of oak and mahogany, huge chairs
and massive cupboards. And there were latticed windows set within deep
embrasures of grey stone, where clambering roses patterned the sunshine
that cast their moving shadows on the polished boards. With the perfume
of the flowers there mingled, too, that delicate, elusive odour of
age--of wood, of musty tapestries in spacious halls and corridors, and
of chambers long unopened to the sun and air.
By the door that stood ajar far away at the end of the room--very far
away it seemed--an old lady, wearing a little cap of silk embroidery,
was whispering to a man of stern, uncompromising figure, who, as he
listened, bent down to her with a grave and even solemn face. A wide
stone corridor was just visible through the crack of the open door
behind her.
The picture flashed, and vanished. The numerous details I took in
because they were well known to me already. That I could not supply the
context was merely a trick of the mind, the kind of trick that dreams
play. Darkness swamped vision again. I sank back into the warm, soft,
comfortable bed of delicious oblivion. There was not the slightest
desire to know; sleep and soft forgetfulness were all I craved.
But a little later--or was it a very great deal later?--when I opened
my eyes again, there was a thin trail of memory. I remembered my name
and age. I remembered vaguely, as though from some unpleasant dream,
that I was on the way to meet a climbing friend in the Alps of Haute
Savoie, and that there was need to hurry and be very active. Something
had gone wrong, it seemed. There had been a stupid, violent disaster,
pain in it somewhere, an accident. Where were my belongings? Where, for
instance, was my precious ice-axe--tried old instrument on which my
life and safety depended? A rush of jumbled questions poured across my
mind. The effort to sort them hurt atrociously....
A figure stood beside my bed. It was the same old lady I had seen a
moment ago--or was it a month ago, even last year perhaps? And this
time she was alone. Yet, though familiar to me as my own right hand, I
could not for the life of me attract her name. Searching for it brought
the pain again. Instead, I asked an easier question; it seemed the most
important somehow, though a feeling of shame came with it, as though I
knew I was talking nonsense:
‘My ice-axe--is it safe? It should have stood any ordinary strain. It’s
ash....’ My voice failed absurdly, caught away by a whisper half-way
down my throat. What _was_ I talking about? There was vile confusion
somewhere.
She smiled tenderly, sweetly, as she placed her small, cool hand
upon my forehead. Her touch calmed me as it always did, and the pain
retreated a little.
‘All your things are safe,’ she answered, in a voice so soft beneath
the distant ceiling it was like a bird’s note singing in the sky. ‘And
_you_ are also safe. There is no danger now. The bullet has been taken
out and all is going well. Only you must be patient, and lie very
still, and rest.’ And then she added the morsel of delicious comfort
she knew quite well I waited for: ‘Marion is near you all day long,
and most of the night besides. She rarely leaves you. She is in and out
all day.’
I stared, thirsting for more. Memory put certain pieces in their place
again. I heard them click together as they joined. But they only tried
to join. There were several pieces missing. They must have been lost in
the disaster. The pattern was too ridiculous.
‘I ought to tel--telegraph----’ I began, seizing at a fragment that
poked its end up, then plunged out of sight again before I could read
more of it. The pieces fell apart; they would not hold together without
these missing fragments. Anger flamed up in me.
‘They’re badly made,’ I said, with a petulance I was secretly ashamed
of; ‘you have chosen the wrong pieces! I’m not a child--to be
treated----’ A shock of heat tore through me, led by a point of iron,
with blasting pain.
‘Sleep, my poor dear Félix, sleep,’ she murmured soothingly, while her
tiny hand stroked my forehead, just in time to prevent that pointed,
hot thing entering my heart. ‘Sleep again now, and a little later you
shall tell me their names, and I will send on horseback quickly----’
‘Telegraph----’ I tried to say, but the word went lost before I could
pronounce it. It was a nonsense word, caught up from dreams. Thought
fluttered and went out.
‘I will send,’ she whispered, ‘in the quickest possible way. You shall
explain to Marion. Sleep first a little longer; promise me to lie quite
still and sleep. When you wake again, she will come to you at once.’
She sat down gently on the edge of the enormous bed, so that I saw her
outline against the window where the roses clambered to come in. She
bent over me--or was it a rose that bent in the wind across the stone
embrasure? I saw her clear blue eyes--or was it two raindrops upon a
withered rose-leaf that mirrored the summer sky?
‘Thank you,’ my voice murmured with intense relief, as everything sank
away and the old-world garden seemed to enter by the latticed windows.
For there was a power in her way that made obedience sweet, and her
little hand, besides, cushioned the attack of that cruel iron point so
that I hardly felt its entrance. Before the fierce heat could reach me,
darkness again put out the world....
Then, after a prodigious interval, my eyes once more opened to the
stately, old-world chamber that I knew so well; and this time I found
myself alone. In my brain was a stinging, splitting sensation, as
though Memory shook her pieces together with angry violence, pieces,
moreover, made of clashing metal. A degrading nausea almost vanquished
me. Against my feet was a heated metal body, too heavy for me to move,
and bandages were tight round my neck and the back of my head. Dimly,
it came back to me that hands had been about me hours ago, soft,
ministering hands that I loved. Their perfume lingered still. Faces
and names fled in swift procession past me, yet without my making any
attempt to bid them stay. I asked myself no questions. Effort of any
sort was utterly beyond me. I lay and watched and waited, helpless and
strangely weak.
One or two things alone were clear. They came, too, without the effort
to think them:
There had been a disaster; they had carried me into the nearest house;
and--the mountain heights, so keenly longed for, were suddenly denied
me. I was being cared for by kind people somewhere far from the world’s
high routes. They were familiar people, yet for the moment I had lost
the name. But it was the bitterness of losing my holiday climbing
that chiefly savaged me, so that strong desire returned upon itself
unfulfilled. And, knowing the danger of frustrated yearnings, and the
curious states of mind they may engender, my tumbling brain registered
a decision automatically:
‘Keep careful watch upon yourself,’ it whispered.
For I saw the peaks that towered above the world, and felt the wind
rise from the hidden valleys. The perfume of lonely ridges came to me,
and I saw the snow against the blue-black sky. Yet I could not reach
them. I lay, instead, broken and useless upon my back, in a soft,
deep, comfortable bed. And I loathed the thought. A dull and evil fury
rose within me. Where was Haddon? He would get me out of it if any one
could. And where was my dear, old trusted ice-axe? Above all, who were
these gentle, old-world people who cared for me?... And, with this last
thought, came some fairy touch of sweetness so delicious that I was
conscious of sudden resignation--more, even of delight and joy.
This joy and anger ran races for possession of my mind, and I knew not
which to follow: both seemed real, and both seemed true. The cruel
confusion was an added torture. Two sets of places and people seemed to
mingle.
‘Keep a careful watch upon yourself,’ repeated the automatic caution.
Then, with returning, blissful darkness, came another thing--a tiny
point of wonder, where light entered in. I thought of a woman....
It was a vehement, commanding thought; and though at first it was
very close and real--as much of To-day as Haddon and my precious
ice-axe--the next second it was leagues away in another world
somewhere. Yet, before the confusion twisted it all askew, I knew her;
I remembered clearly even where she lived; that I knew her husband,
too--had stayed with them in--in Scotland--yes, in Scotland. Yet no
word in this life had ever crossed my lips, for she was not free to
come. Neither of us, with eyes or lips or gesture, had ever betrayed
a hint to the other of our deeply hidden secret. And, although for me
she was _the_ woman, my great yearning--long, long ago it was, in early
youth--had been sternly put aside and buried with all the vigour nature
gave me. Her husband was my friend as well.
Only, now, the shock had somehow strained the prison bars, and the
yearning escaped for a moment full-fledged, and vehement with passion
long denied. The inhibition was destroyed. The knowledge swept
deliciously upon me that we had the right to be together, because we
always _were_ together. I had the right to ask for her.
My mind was certainly a mere field of confused, ungoverned images. No
thinking was possible, for it hurt too vilely. But this one memory
stood out with violence. I distinctly remember that I called to her
to come, and that she had the right to come because my need was so
peremptory. To the one most loved of all this life had brought me, yet
to whom I had never spoken because she was in another’s keeping, I
called for help, and called, I verily believe, aloud:
‘Please come!’ Then, close upon its heels, the automatic warning
again: ‘Keep close watch upon yourself...!’
It was as though one great yearning had loosed the other that was even
greater, and had set it free.
Disappearing consciousness then followed the cry for an incalculable
distance. Down into subterraneans within myself that were positively
frightening it plunged away. But the cry was real; the yearning appeal
held authority in it as of command. Love gave the right, supplied the
power as well. For it seemed to me a tiny answer came, but from so far
away that it was scarcely audible. And names were nowhere in it, either
in answer or appeal.
‘I am always here. I have never, never left you!’
* * * * *
The unconsciousness that followed was not complete, apparently.
There was a memory of effort in it, of struggle, and, as it were, of
searching. Some one was trying to get at me. I tossed in a troubled
sea upon a piece of wreckage that another swimmer also fought to
reach. Huge waves of transparent green now brought this figure nearer,
now concealed it, but it came steadily on, holding out a rope. My
exhaustion was too great for me to respond, yet this swimmer swept up
nearer, brought by enormous rollers that threatened to engulf us both.
The rope was for my safety, too. I saw hands outstretched. In the deep
water I saw the outline of the body, and once I even saw the face. But
for a second, merely. The wave that bore it crashed with a horrible
roar that smothered us both and swept me from my piece of wreckage. In
the violent flood of water the rope whipped against my feeble hands.
I grasped it. A sense of divine security at once came over me--an
intolerable sweetness of utter bliss and comfort, then blackness and
suffocation as of the grave. The white-hot point of iron struck me. It
beat audibly against my heart. I heard the knocking. The pain brought
me up to the surface, and the knocking of my dreams was in reality a
knocking on the door. Some one was gently tapping.
Such was the confusion of images in my pain-racked mind, that I
expected to see the old lady enter, bringing ropes and ice-axes, and
followed by Haddon, my mountaineering friend; for I thought that I had
fallen down a deep crevasse and had waited hours for help in the cold,
blue darkness of the ice. I was too weak to answer, and the knocking
for that matter was not repeated. I did not even hear the opening of
the door, so softly did she move into the room. I only knew that before
I actually saw her, this wave of intolerable sweetness drenched me once
again with bliss and peace and comfort, my pain retreated, and I closed
my eyes, knowing I should feel that cool and soothing hand upon my
forehead.
The same minute I did feel it. There was a perfume of old gardens in
the air. I opened my eyes to look the gratitude I could not utter, and
saw, close against me--not the old lady, but the young and lovely face
my worship had long made familiar. With lips that smiled their yearning
and eyes of brown that held tears of sympathy, she sat down beside me
on the bed. The warmth and fragrance of her atmosphere enveloped me. I
sank away into a garden where spring melts magically into summer. Her
arms were round my neck. Her face dropped down, so that I felt her hair
upon my cheek and eyes. And then, whispering my name twice over, she
kissed me on the lips.
‘Marion,’ I murmured.
‘Hush! Mother sends you this,’ she answered softly. ‘You are to take it
all; she made it with her own hands. But _I_ bring it to you. You must
be quite obedient, please.’
She tried to rise, but I held her against my breast.
‘Kiss me again and I’ll promise obedience always,’ I strove to say.
But my voice refused so long a sentence, and anyhow her lips were on
my own before I could have finished it. Slowly, very carefully, she
disentangled herself, and my arms sank back upon the coverlet. I sighed
in happiness. A moment longer she stood beside my bed, gazing down with
love and deep anxiety into my face.
‘And when all is eaten, all, mind, _all_,’ she smiled, ‘you are to
sleep until the doctor comes this afternoon. You are much better. Soon
you shall get up. Only, remember,’ shaking her finger with a sweet
pretence of looking stern, ‘I shall exact complete obedience. You must
yield your will utterly to mine. You are in my heart, and my heart must
be kept very warm and happy.’
Her eyes were tender as her mother’s, and I loved the authority and
strength that were so real in her. I remembered how it was this
strength that had sealed the contract her beauty first drew up for me
to sign. She bent down once more to arrange my pillows.
‘What happened to--to the motor?’ I asked hesitatingly, for my thoughts
_would_ not regulate themselves. The mind presented such incongruous
fragments.
‘The--what?’ she asked, evidently puzzled. The word seemed strange to
her. ‘What is that?’ she repeated, anxiety in her eyes.
I made an effort to tell her, but I could not. Explanation was
suddenly impossible. The whole idea dived away out of sight. It utterly
evaded me. I had again invented a word that was without meaning. I was
talking nonsense. In its place my dream came up. I tried to tell her
how I had dreamed of climbing dangerous heights with a stranger, and
had spoken another language with him than my own--English, was it?--at
any rate, not my native French.
‘Darling,’ she whispered close into my ear, ‘the bad dreams will not
come back. You are safe here, quite safe.’ She put her little hand like
a flower on my forehead and drew it softly down the cheek. ‘Your wound
is already healing. They took the bullet out four days ago. I have
got it,’ she added with a touch of shy embarrassment, and kissed me
tenderly upon my eyes.
‘How long have you been away from me?’ I asked, feeling exhaustion
coming back.
‘Never once for more than ten minutes,’ was the reply. ‘I watched with
you all night. Only this morning, while mother took my place, I slept a
little. But, hush!’ she said, with dear authority again; ‘you are not
to talk so much. You must eat what I have brought, then sleep again.
You must rest and sleep. Good-bye, good-bye, my love. I shall come back
in an hour, and I shall always be within reach of your dear voice.’
Her tall, slim figure, dressed in the grey I loved, crossed silently to
the door. She gave me one more look--there was all the tenderness of
passionate love in it--and then was gone.
I followed instructions meekly, and when a delicious sleep stole over
me soon afterwards, I had forgotten utterly the ugly dream that I
was climbing dangerous heights with another man, forgotten as well
everything else, except that it seemed so many days since my love had
come to me, and that my bullet wound would after all be healed in time
for our wedding on the day so long, so eagerly waited for.
And when, several hours later, her mother came in with the doctor--his
face less grave and solemn this time--the news that I might get up next
day and lie a little in the garden, did more to heal me than a thousand
bandages or twice that quantity of medical instructions.
I watched them as they stood a moment by the open door. They went out
very slowly together, speaking in whispers. But the only thing I caught
was the mother’s voice, talking brokenly of the great wars. Napoleon,
the doctor was saying in a low, hushed tone, was in full retreat from
Moscow, though the news had only just come through. They passed into
the corridor then, and there was a sound of weeping as the old lady
murmured something about her son and the cruelty of Heaven. ‘Both will
be taken from me,’ she was sobbing softly, while he stooped to comfort
her; ‘one in marriage, and the other in death.’ They closed the door
then, and I heard no more.
I
Convalescence seemed to follow very quickly then, for I was utterly
obedient as I had promised, and never spoke of what could excite me
to my own detriment--the wars and my own unfortunate part in them. We
talked instead of our love, our already too-long engagement, and of the
sweet dream of happiness that life held waiting for us in the future.
And, indeed, I was sufficiently weary of the world to prefer repose to
much activity, for my body was almost incessantly in pain, and this old
garden where we lay between high walls of stone, aloof from the busy
world and very peaceful, was far more to my taste just then than wars
and fighting.
The orchards were in blossom, and the winds of spring showered their
rain of petals upon the long, new grass. We lay, half in sunshine, half
in shade, beneath the poplars that lined the avenue towards the lake,
and behind us rose the ancient grey stone towers where the jackdaws
nested in the ivy and the pigeons cooed and fluttered from the woods
beyond.
There was loveliness everywhere, but there was sadness too, for though
we both knew that the wars had taken her brother whence there is no
return, and that only her aged, failing mother’s life stood between
ourselves and the stately property, there hid a sadness yet deeper
than either of these thoughts in both our hearts. And it was, I think,
the sadness that comes with spring. For spring, with her lavish,
short-lived promises of eternal beauty, is ever a symbol of passing
human happiness, incomplete and always unfulfilled. Promises made on
earth are playthings, after all, for children. Even while we make them
so solemnly, we seem to know they are not meant to hold. They are made,
as spring is made, with a glory of soft, radiant blossoms that pass
away before there is time to realise them. And yet they come again with
the return of spring, as unashamed and glorious as if Time had utterly
forgotten.
And this sadness was in her too. I mean it was part of her and she was
part of it. Not that our love could change to pass or die, but that
its sweet, so-long-desired accomplishment must hold away, and, like the
spring, must melt and vanish before it had been fully known. I did not
speak of it. I well understood that the depression of a broken body can
influence the spirit with its poisonous melancholy, but it must have
betrayed itself in my words and gestures, even in my manner too. At any
rate, she was aware of it. I think, if truth be told, she felt it too.
It seemed so painfully inevitable.
My recovery, meanwhile, was rapid, and from spending an hour or two in
the garden, I soon came to spend the entire day. For the spring came on
with a rush, and the warmth increased deliciously. While the cuckoos
called to one another in the great beech-woods behind the château,
we sat and talked and sometimes had our simple meals or coffee there
together, and I particularly recall the occasion when solid food was
first permitted me and she gave me a delicate young _bondelle_, fresh
caught that very morning in the lake. There were leaves of sweet, crisp
lettuce with it, and she picked the bones out for me with her own white
hands.
The day was radiant, with a sky of cloudless blue, soft airs stirred
the poplar crests; the little waves fell on the pebbly beach not fifty
metres away, and the orchard floor was carpeted with flowers that
seemed to have caught from heaven’s stars the patterns of their yellow
blossoms. The bees droned peacefully among the fruit trees; the air was
full of musical deep hummings. My former vigour stirred delightfully
in my blood, and I knew no pain, beyond occasional dull twinges in the
head that came with a rush of temporary darkness over my mind. The
scar was healed, however, and the hair had grown over it again. This
temporary darkness alarmed her more than it alarmed me. There were
grave complications, apparently, that I did not know of.
But the deep-lying sadness in me seemed independent of the glorious
weather, due to causes so intangible, so far off that I never could
dispel them by arguing them away. For I could not discover what they
actually were. There was a vague, distressing sense of restlessness
that I ought to have been elsewhere and otherwise, that we were
together for a few days only, and that these few days I had snatched
unlawfully from stern, imperative duties. These duties were immediate,
but neglected. In a sense I had no right to this springtide of bliss
her presence brought me. I was playing truant somehow, somewhere. It
was _not_ my absence from the regiment; that I know. It was infinitely
deeper, set to some enormous scale that vaguely frightened me, while it
deepened the sweetness of the stolen joy.
Like a child, I sought to pin the sunny hours against the sky and
make them stay. They passed with such a mocking swiftness, snatched
momentarily from some big oblivion. The twilights swallowed our days
together before they had been properly tasted, and on looking back,
each afternoon of happiness seemed to have been a mere moment in a
flying dream. And I must have somehow betrayed the aching mood, for
Marion turned of a sudden and gazed into my face with yearning and
anxiety in the sweet brown eyes.
‘What is it, dearest?’ I asked, ‘and why do your eyes bring questions?’
‘You sighed,’ she answered, smiling a little sadly; ‘and sighed so
deeply. You are in pain again. The darkness, perhaps, is over you?’
And her hand stole out to meet my own. ‘You are in pain?’
‘Not physical pain,’ I said, ‘and not _the_ darkness either. I see
_you_ clearly,’ and would have told her more, as I carried her soft
fingers to my lips, had I not divined from the expression in her eyes
that she read my heart and knew all my strange, mysterious forebodings
in herself.
‘I know,’ she whispered before I could find speech, ‘for I feel it too.
It is the shadow of separation that oppresses you--yet of no common,
measurable separation you can understand. Is it not that?’
Leaning over then, I took her close into my arms, since words in that
moment were mere foolishness. I held her so that she could not get
away; but even while I did so it was like trying to hold the spring, or
fasten the flying hour with a fierce desire. All slipped from me, and
my arms caught at the sunshine and the wind.
‘We have both felt it all these weeks,’ she said bravely, as soon as
I had released her, ‘and we both have struggled to conceal it. But
now----’ she hesitated for a second, and with so exquisite a tenderness
that I would have caught her to me again but for my anxiety to hear her
further words--‘now that you are well, we may speak plainly to each
other, and so lessen our pain by sharing it.’ And then she added, still
more softly: ‘You feel there is “something” that shall take you from
me--yet what it is you cannot discover nor divine. Tell me, Félix--all
your thought, that I in turn may tell you mine.’
Her voice floated about me in the sunny air. I stared at her, striving
to focus the dear face more clearly for my sight. A shower of apple
blossoms fell about us, and her words seemed floating past me like
those passing petals of white. They drifted away. I followed them
with difficulty and confusion. With the wind, I fancied, a veil of
indefinable change slipped across her face and eyes.
‘Yet nothing that could alter feeling,’ I answered; for she had
expressed my own thought completely. ‘Nor anything that either of us
can control. Only--perhaps, that everything must fade and pass away,
just as this glory of the spring must fade and pass away----’
‘Yet leaving its sweetness in us,’ she caught me up passionately, ‘and
to come again, my beloved, to come again in every subsequent life,
each time with an added sweetness in it too!’ Her little face showed
suddenly the courage of a lion in its eyes. Her heart was ever braver
than my own, a vigorous, fighting soul. She spoke of lives, I prattled
of days and hours merely.
A touch of shame stole over me. But that delicate, swift change in her
spread too. With a thrill of ominous warning I noticed how it rose and
grew about her. From within, outwards, it seemed to pass--like a shadow
of great blue distance. Shadow was somewhere in it, so that she dimmed
a little before my very eyes. The dreadful yearning searched and shook
me, for I could not understand it, try as I would. She seemed going
from me--drifting like her words and like the apple blossoms.
‘But when we shall no longer be here to know it,’ I made answer
quickly, yet as calmly as I could, ‘and when we shall have passed to
some other place--to other conditions--where we shall not recognise the
joy and wonder. When barriers of mist shall have rolled between us--our
love and passion so made-over that we shall not know each other’--the
words rushed out feverishly, half beyond control--‘and perhaps shall
not even dare to speak to each other of our deep desire----’
I broke off abruptly, conscious that I was speaking out of some
unfamiliar place where I floundered, helpless among strange conditions.
I was saying things I hardly understood myself. Her bigger, deeper mood
spoke through me, perhaps.
Her darling face came back again; she moved close within reach once
more.
‘Hush, hush!’ she whispered, terror and love both battling in her
eyes. ‘It is the truth, perhaps, but you must not say such things. To
speak them brings them closer. A chain is about our hearts, a chain
of fashioning lives without number, but do not seek to draw upon
it with anxiety or fear. To do so can only cause the pain of wrong
entanglement, and interrupt the natural running of the iron links.’ And
she placed her hand swiftly upon my mouth, as though divining that the
bleak attack of anguish was again upon me with its throbbing rush of
darkness.
But for once I was disobedient and resisted. The physical pain, I
realised vividly, was linked closely with this spiritual torture.
One caused the other somehow. The disordered brain received, though
brokenly, some hints of darker and unusual knowledge. It had stammered
forth in me, but through her it flowed easily and clear. I saw the
change move more swiftly then across her face. Some ancient look passed
into both her eyes.
And it was inevitable; I must speak out, regardless of mere bodily
well-being.
‘We shall have to face them some day,’ I cried, although the effort
hurt abominably, ‘then why not now?’ And I drew her hand down and
kissed it passionately over and over again. ‘We are not children, to
hide our faces among shadows and pretend we are invisible. At least
we have the Present--the Moment that is here and now. We stand side
by side in the heart of this deep spring day. This sunshine and these
flowers, this wind across the lake, this sky of blue and this singing
of the birds--all, all are ours _now_. Let us use the moment that Time
gives, and so strengthen the chain you speak of that shall bring us
again together times without number. We shall then, perhaps, remember.
Oh, my heart, think what that would mean--to remember!’
Exhaustion caught me, and I sank back among my cushions. But Marion
rose up suddenly and stood beside me. And as she did so, another Sky
dropped softly down upon us both, and I smelt again the incense of old,
old gardens that brought long-forgotten perfumes, incredibly sweet, but
with it an ache of far-off, passionate remembrance that was pain. This
great ache of distance swept over me like a wave.
I know not what grand change then was wrought upon her beauty, so that
I saw her defiant and erect, commanding Fate because she understood
it. She towered over me, but it was her soul that towered. The rush of
internal darkness in me blotted out all else. The familiar, present sky
grew dim, the sunshine faded, the lake and flowers and poplars dipped
away. Conditions a thousand times more vivid took their place. She
stood out, clear and shining in the glory of an undressed soul, brave
and confident with an eternal love that separation strengthened but
could never, never change. The deep sadness I abruptly realised, was
very little removed from joy--because, somehow, it was the condition of
joy. I could not explain it more than that.
And her voice, when she spoke, was firm with a note of steel in it;
intense, yet devoid of the wasting anger that passion brings. She was
determined beyond Death itself, upon a foundation sure and lasting
as the stars. The heart in her was calm, because she _knew_. She was
magnificent.
‘We are together--always,’ she said, her voice rich with the knowledge
of some unfathomable experience, ‘for separation is temporary merely,
forging new links in the ancient chain of lives that binds our hearts
eternally together.’ She looked like one who has conquered the
adversity Time brings, by accepting it. ‘You speak of the Present as
though our souls were already fitted now to bid it stay, needing no
further fashioning. Looking only to the Future, you forget our ample
Past that has made us what we are. Yet our Past is here and now, beside
us at this very moment. Into the hollow cups of weeks and months, of
years and centuries, Time pours its flood beneath our eyes. Time is
our schoolroom.... Are you so soon afraid? Does not separation achieve
that which companionship never could accomplish? And how shall we dare
eternity together if we cannot be strong in separation first?’
I listened while a flood of memories broke up through film upon film
and layer upon layer that had long covered them.
‘This Present that we seem to hold between our hands,’ she went on in
that earnest, distant voice, ‘_is_ our moment of sweet remembrance that
you speak of, of renewal, perhaps, too, of reconciliation--a fleeting
instant when we may kiss again and say good-bye, but with strengthened
hope and courage revived. But we may not stay together finally--we
_cannot_--until long discipline and pain shall have perfected sympathy
and schooled our love by searching, difficult tests, that it may last
for ever.’
I stretched my arms out dumbly to take her in. Her face shone down upon
me, bathed in an older, fiercer sunlight. The change in her seemed
in an instant then complete. Some big, soft wind blew both of us ten
thousand miles away. The centuries gathered us back together.
‘Look, rather, to the Past,’ she whispered grandly, ‘where first we
knew the sweet opening of our love. Remember, if you can, how the pain
and separation have made it so worth while to continue. And be braver
thence.’
She turned her eyes more fully upon my own, so that their light
persuaded me utterly away with her. An immense new happiness broke
over me. I listened, and with the stirrings of an ampler courage. It
seemed I followed her down an interminable vista of remembrance till
I was happy with her among the flowers and fields of our earliest
pre-existence.
Her voice came to me with the singing of birds and the hum of summer
insects.
‘Have you so soon forgotten,’ she sighed, ‘when we knew together the
perfume of the hanging Babylonian Gardens, or when the Hesperides were
so soft to us in the dawn of the world? And do you not remember,’
with a little rise of passion in her voice, ‘the sweet plantations of
Chaldea, and how we tasted the odour of many a drooping flower in the
gardens of Alcinous and Adonis, when the bees of olden time picked
out the honey for our eating? It is the fragrance of those first hours
we knew together that still lies in our hearts to-day, sweetening our
love to this apparent suddenness. Hence comes the full, deep happiness
we gather so easily To-day.... The breast of every ancient forest is
torn with storms and lightning ... that’s why it is so soft and full of
little gardens. You have forgotten too easily the glades of Lebanon,
where we whispered our earliest secrets while the big winds drove their
chariots down those earlier skies....’
There rose an indescribable tempest of remembrance in my heart as I
strove to bring the pictures into focus; but words failed me, and the
hand I eagerly stretched out to touch her own, met only sunshine and
the rain of apple blossoms.
‘The myrrh and frankincense,’ she continued in a sighing voice that
seemed to come with the wind from invisible caverns in the sky, ‘the
grapes and pomegranates--have they all passed from you, with the train
of apes and peacocks, the tigers and the ibis, and the hordes of
dark-faced slaves? And this little sun that plays so lightly here upon
our woods of beech and pine--does it bring back nothing of the old-time
scorching when the olive slopes, the figs and ripening cornfields
heard our vows and watched our love mature?... Our spread encampment
in the Desert--do not these sands upon our little beach revive its
lonely majesty for you, and have you forgotten the gleaming towers of
Semiramis ... or, in Sardis, those strange lilies that first tempted
our souls to their divine disclosure...?’
Conscious of a violent struggle between pain and joy, both too deep for
me to understand, I rose to seize her in my arms. But the effort dimmed
the flying pictures. The wind that bore her voice down the stupendous
vista fled back into the caverns whence it came. And the pain caught
me in a vice of agony so searching that I could not move a muscle.
My tongue lay dry against my lips. I could not frame a word of any
sentence....
Her voice presently came back to me, but fainter, like a whisper from
the stars. The light dimmed everywhere; I saw no more the vivid,
shining scenery she had summoned. A mournful dusk instead crept down
upon the world she had momentarily revived.
‘... we may not stay together,’ I heard her little whisper, ‘until long
discipline shall have perfected sympathy, and schooled our love to
last. For this love of ours _is_ for ever, and the pain that tries it
is the furnace that fashions precious stones....’
Again I stretched my arms out. Her face shone a moment longer in that
forgotten fiercer sunlight, then faded very swiftly. The change, like a
veil, passed over it. From the place of prodigious distance where she
had been, she swept down towards me with such dizzy speed. As she was
To-day I saw her again, more and more.
‘Pain and separation, then, are welcome,’ I tried to stammer, ‘and we
will desire them’--but my thought got no further into expression than
the first two words. Aching blotted out coherent utterance.
She bent down very close against my face. Her fragrance was about
my lips. But her voice ran off like a faint thrill of music, far,
far away. I caught the final words, dying away as wind dies in high
branches of a wood. And they reached me this time through the droning
of bees and of waves that murmured close at hand upon the shore.
‘... for our love is of the soul, and our souls are moulded in
Eternity. It is not yet, it is not now, our perfect consummation. Nor
shall our next time of meeting know it. We shall not even speak.... For
I shall not be free....’ was what I heard. She paused.
‘You mean we shall not know each other?’ I cried, in an anguish of
spirit that mastered the lesser physical pain.