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LORE OF PROSERPINE
BY
MAURICE HEWLETT
"Thus go the fairy kind,
Whither Fate driveth; not as we
Who fight with it, and deem us free
Therefore, and after pine, or strain
Against our prison bars in vain;
For to them Fate is Lord of Life
And Death, and idle is a strife
With such a master ..."
_Hypsipyle_.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK : : : : 1913
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
* * * * *
TO
DESPOINA
FROM WHOM, TO WHOM
ALL
* * * * *
PREFACE
I hope nobody will ask me whether the things in this book are true,
for it will then be my humiliating duty to reply that I don't know.
They seem to be so to me writing them; they seemed to be so when they
occurred, and one of them occurred only two or three years ago. That
sort of answer satisfies me, and is the only one I can make. As I grow
older it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish one kind of
appearance from another, and to say, that is real, and again, that is
illusion. Honestly, I meet in my daily walks innumerable beings, to
all sensible signs male and female. Some of them I can touch, some
smell, some speak with, some see, some discern otherwise than by
sight. But if you cannot trust your eyes, why should you trust your
nose or your fingers? There's my difficulty in talking about reality.
There's another way of getting at the truth after all. If a thing is
not sensibly true it may be morally so. If it is not phenomenally true
it may be so substantially. And it is possible that one may see
substance in the idiom, so to speak, of the senses. That, I take it,
is how the Greeks saw thunder-storms and other huge convulsions; that
is how they saw meadow, grove and stream--in terms of their own fair
humanity. They saw such natural phenomena as shadows of spiritual
conflict or of spiritual calm, and within the appearance apprehended
the truth. So it may be that I have done. Some such may be the
explanation of all fairy experience. Let it be so. It is a fact, I
believe, that there is nothing revealed in this book which will not
bear a spiritual, and a moral, interpretation; and I venture to say of
some of it that the moral implications involved are exceedingly
momentous, and timely too. I need not refer to such matters any
further. If they don't speak for themselves they will get no help from
a preface.
The book assumes up to a certain point an autobiographical cast. This
is not because I deem my actual life of any interest to any one but
myself, but because things do occur to one "in time," and the
chronological sequence is as good as another, and much the most easy
of any. I had intended, but my heart failed me, to pursue experience
to the end. There was to have been a section, to be called "Despoina,"
dealing with my later life. But my heart failed me. The time is not
yet, though it is coming. I don't deny that there are some things here
which I learned from the being called Despoina and could have learned
from nobody else. There are some such things, but there is not very
much, and won't be any more just yet. Some of it there will never be
for the sorry reason that our race won't bear to be told fundamental
facts about itself, still less about other orders of creation which
are sufficiently like our own to bring self-consciousness into play.
To write of the sexes in English you must either be sentimental or a
satirist. You must set the emotions to work; otherwise you must be
quiet. Now the emotions have no business with knowledge; and there's a
reason why we have no fairy lore, because we can't keep our feelings
in hand. The Greeks had a mythology, the highest form of Art, and we
have none. Why is that? Because we can neither expound without wishing
to convert the soul, nor understand without self-experiment. We don't
want to know things, we want to feel them--and are ashamed of our
need. Mythology, therefore, we English must make for ourselves as we
can; and if we are wise we shall keep it to ourselves. It is a pity,
because since we alone of created things are not self-sufficient,
anything that seems to break down the walls of being behind which we
agonise would be a comfort to us; but there's a worse thing than being
in prison, and that is quarrelling with our own nature.
I shall have explained myself very badly if my reader leaves me with
the impression that I have been writing down marvels. The fact that a
thing occurs in nature takes it out of the portentous. There's nothing
either good or bad but thinking makes it so. With that I end.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
PREFACE
THE WINDOWS
A BOY IN THE WOOD
HARKNESS'S FANCY
THE GODS IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE
THE SOUL AT THE WINDOW
QUIDNUNC
THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH
BECKWITH'S CASE
THE FAIRY WIFE
OREADS
A SUMMARY CHAPTER
* * * * *
LORE OF PROSERPINE
THE WINDOWS
You will remember that Socrates considers every soul of us to be at
least three persons. He says, in a fine figure, that we are two horses
and a charioteer. "The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made;
he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white and his
eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the
follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided
by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal,
put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and
of a dark colour, with grey eyes of blood-red complexion; the mate of
insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and
spur." I need not go on to examine with the philosopher the acts of
this pair under the whip and spur of love, because I am not going to
talk about love. For my present purpose I shall suggest another
dichotomy. I will liken the soul itself of man to a house, divided
according to the modern fashion into three flats or apartments. Of
these the second floor is occupied by the landlord, who wishes to be
quiet, and is not, it seems, afraid of fire; the ground-floor by a
business man who would like to marry, but doubts if he can afford it,
goes to the city every day, looks in at his club of an afternoon,
dines out a good deal, and spends at least a month of the year at
Dieppe, Harrogate, or one of the German spas. He is a pleasant-faced
man, as I see him, neatly dressed, brushed, anointed, polished at the
extremities--for his boots vie with his hair in this particular. If he
has a fault it is that of jingling half-crowns in his trouser-pocket;
but he works hard for them, pays his rent with them, and gives one
occasionally to a nephew. That youth, at any rate, likes the cheerful
sound. He is rather fond, too, of monopolising the front of the fire
in company, and thinks more of what he is going to eat, some time
before he eats it, than a man should. But really I can't accuse him of
anything worse than such little weaknesses. The first floor is
occupied by a person of whom very little is known, who goes out
chiefly at night and is hardly ever seen during the day. Tradesmen,
and the crossing-sweeper at the corner, have caught a glimpse on rare
occasions of a white face at the window, the startled face of a queer
creature, who blinks and wrings at his nails with his teeth; who
peers at you, jerks and grins; who seems uncertain what to do; who
sometimes shoots out his hands as if he would drive them through the
glass: altogether a mischancy, unaccountable apparition, probably mad.
Nobody knows how long he has been here; for the landlord found him in
possession when he bought the lease, and the ground-floor, who was
here also, fancies that they came together, but can't be sure. There
he is, anyhow, and without an open scandal one doesn't like to give
him notice. A curious thing about the man is that neither landlord nor
ground-floor will admit acquaintance with him to each other, although,
if the truth were known, each of them knows something--for each of
them has been through his door; and I will answer for one of them, at
least, that he has accompanied the Undesirable upon more than one
midnight excursion, and has enjoyed himself enormously. If you could
get either of these two alone in a confidential mood you might learn
some curious particulars of their coy neighbour; and not the least
curious would be the effect of his changing the glass of the first
floor windows. It seems that he had that done directly he got into his
rooms, saying that it was impossible to see out of such windows, and
that a man must have light. Where he got his glass from, by whom it
was fitted, I can't tell you, but the effect of it is most
extraordinary. The only summary account I feel able to give of it at
the moment is that it transforms the world upon which it opens. You
look out upon a new earth, literally that. The trees are not trees at
all, but slim grey persons, young men, young women, who stand there
quivering with life, like a row of Caryatides--on duty, but tiptoe for
a flight, as Keats says. You see life, as it were, rippling up their
limbs; for though they appear to be clothed, their clothing is of so
thin a texture, and clings so closely that they might as well not be
clothed at all. They are eyed, they see intensely; they look at each
other so closely that you know what they would be doing. You can see
them love each other as you watch. As for the people in the street,
the real men and real women, as we say, I hardly know how to tell you
what they look like through the first floor's windows. They are
changed of everything but one thing. They occupy the places, fill the
standing-room of our neighbours and friends; there is a something
about them all by which you recognise them--a trick of the hand, a
motion of the body, a set of the head (God knows what it is, how
little and how much); but for all that--a new creature! A thing like
nothing that lives by bread! Now just look at that policeman at the
corner, for instance; not only is he stark naked--everybody is like
that--but he's perfectly different from the sturdy, good-humoured,
red-faced, puzzled man you and I know. He is thin, woefully thin, and
his ears are long and perpetually twitching. He pricks them up at the
least thing; or lays them suddenly back, and we see them trembling.
His eyes look all ways and sometimes nothing but the white is to be
seen. He has a tail, too, long and leathery, which is always curling
about to get hold of something. Now it will be the lamp-post, now the
square railings, now one of those breathing trees; but mostly it is
one of his own legs. Yet if you consider him carefully you will agree
with me that his tail is a more expressive remnant of the man you have
always seen there than any other part of him. You may say, and truly,
that it is the only recognisable thing left. What do you think of his
feet and hands? They startled me at first; they are so long and
narrow, so bony and pointed, covered with fine short hair which shines
like satin. That way he has of arching his feet and driving his toes
into the pavement delights me. And see, too, that his hands are
undistinguishable from feet: they are just as long and satiny. He is
fond of smoothing his face with them; he brings them both up to his
ears and works them forward like slow fans. Transformation indeed. I
defy you to recognise him for the same man--except for a faint
reminiscence about his tail.
But all's of a piece. The crossing-sweeper now has shaggy legs which
end in hoofs. His way of looking at young people is very
unpleasant;--and one had always thought him such a kindly old man. The
butcher's boy--what a torso!--is walking with his arm round the waist
of the young lady in Number seven. These are lovers, you see; but it's
mostly on her side. He tilts up her chin and gives her a kiss before
he goes; and she stands looking after him with shining eyes, hoping
that he will turn round before he gets to the corner. But he doesn't.
Wait, now, wait, wait--who is this lovely, straining, beating creature
darting here and there about the square, bruising herself, poor
beautiful thing, against the railings? A sylph, a caught fairy?
Surely, surely, I know somebody--is it?--It can't be. That careworn
lady? God in Heaven, is it she? Enough! Show me no more. I will show
you no more, my dear sir, if it agitates you; but I confess that I
have come to regard it as one of the most interesting spectacles in
London. The mere information--to say nothing of the amusement--which I
have derived from it would fill a volume; but if it did, I may add, I
myself should undoubtedly fill a cell in Holloway. I will therefore
spare you what I know about the Doctor's wife, and what happens to
Lieutenant-Colonel Storter when I see him through these windows--I
could never have believed it unless I had seen it. These things are
not done, I know; but observed in this medium they seem quite
ordinary. Lastly--for I can't go through the catalogue--I will speak
of the air as I see it from here. My dear sir, the air is alive,
thronged with life. Spirits, forms, lovely immaterial diaphanous
shapes, are weaving endless patterns over the face of the day. They
shine like salmon at a weir, or they darken the sky as redwings in the
autumn fields; they circle, shrieking as they flash, like swallows at
evening; they battle and wrangle together; or they join hands and
whirl about the square in an endless chain. Of their beauty, their
grace of form and movement, of the shifting filmy colour, hue blending
in hue, of their swiftness, their glancing eyes, their exuberant joy
or grief I cannot now speak. Beside them one man may well seem rat,
and another goat. Beside them, indeed, you look for nothing else. And
if I go on to hint that the owner of these windows is of them, though
imprisoned in my house; that he does at times join them in their
streaming flights beyond the housetops, and does at times carry with
him his half-bewildered, half-shocked and wholly delighted fellow
lodgers, I have come to the end of my tether and your credulity, and,
for the time at least, have flowered myself to death. The figure is as
good as Plato's though my Pegasus will never stable in his stall.
* * * * *
We may believe ourselves to be two persons, at least, in one, and I
fancy that one at least of them is a constant. So far as my own pair
is concerned, either one of them has never grown up at all, or he was
born whole and in a flash, as the fairies are. Such as he was, at any
rate, when I was ten years old, such he is now when I am heavily more
than ten; and the other of us, very conscious of the flight of time
and of other things with it, is free to confess that he has little
more hold of his fellow with all this authority behind him than he had
when we commenced partnership. He has some, and thinks himself lucky,
since the bond between the pair is of such a nature as to involve a
real partnership--a partnership full of perplexity to the working
member of it, the ordinary forensic creature of senses, passions,
ambitions, and self-indulgences, the eating, sleeping, vainglorious,
assertive male of common experience--and it is not to be denied that
it has been fruitful, nor again that by some freak of fate or fortune
the house has kept a decent front to the world at large. It is still
solvent, still favourably regarded by the police. It is not, it never
will be, a mere cage of demons; its walls have not been fretted to
transparency; no passing eye can detect revelry behind its decent
stucco; no passing ear thrill to cries out of the dark. No, no.
Troubles we may have; but we keep up appearances. The heart knoweth
its own bitterness, and if it be a wise one, keepeth it to itself. I
am not going to be so foolish as to deny divergences of opinion, even
of practice, between the pair in me; but I flatter myself that I have
not allowed them to become a common nuisance, a cause of scandal, a
stumbling-block, a rock of offence, or anything of that kind. Uneasy
tenant, wayward partner as my recondite may be, he has had a
relationship with my forensic which at times has touched cordiality.
Influential he has not been, for his colleague has always had the
upper hand and been in the public eye. He may have instigated to
mischief, but has not often been allowed to complete his purpose. If I
am a respectable person it is not his fault. He seeks no man's
respect. If he has occasionally lent himself to moral ends, it has
been without enthusiasm, for he has no morals of his own, and never
did have any. On the other hand, he is by nature too indifferent to
temporal circumstances to go about to corrupt his partner. His main
desire has ever been to be let alone. Anything which tended to tighten
the bonds which held him to his co-tenant would have been a thing to
avoid. He desires liberty, and nothing less will content him. This he
will only have by inaction, by mewing his sempiternal youth in his
cage and on his perch.
But the tie uniting the pair of us is of such a nature that neither
can be uninfluenced by the other. It is just that you should hear both
sides of the case. My forensic, eating and arguing self has bullied my
other into hypocrisy over and over again. He has starved him, deprived
him of his holidays, ignored him, ridiculed him, snubbed him
mercilessly. This is severe treatment, you'll allow, and it's worse
even than it seems. For the unconscionable fellow, owing to this
coheirship which he pretends to disesteem, has been made privy to
experiences which must not only have been extraordinary to so plain
and humdrum a person, but which have been, as I happen to know, of
great importance to him, and which--to put the thing at its
highest--have lifted him, dull dog as he is, into regions where the
very dogs have wings. Out upon it! But he has been in and out with his
victim over leagues of space where not one man in ten thousand has
been privileged to fare. He has been familiar all his life with
scenes, with folk, with deeds undreamed of by thirty-nine and
three-quarters out of forty millions of people, and by that
quarter-million only known as nursery tales. Not only so, but he has
been awakened to the significance of common things, having at hand an
interpreter, and been enabled to be precise where Wordsworth was
vague. He has known Zeus in the thunder, in the lightning beheld the
shaking of the dread AEgis. In the river source he has seen the
breasted nymph; he has seen the Oreads stream over the bare hillside.
There are men who see these things and don't believe them, others who
believe but don't see. He has both seen and believed. The painted,
figured universe has for him a new shape; whispering winds and falling
rain speak plainly to his understanding. He has seen trees as men
walking. His helot has unlocked the world behind appearance and made
him free of the Spirits of Natural Fact who abide there. If he is not
the debtor of his comrade--and he protests the debt--he should be. But
the rascal laps it all up, as a cat porridge, without so much as a wag
of the tail for Thank-you. Such are the exorbitant overlords in mortal
men, who pass for reputable persons, with a chief seat at feasts.
Such things, you may say, read incredibly, but, _mutatis mutandis_, I
believe them to be common, though unrecorded, experience. I deprecate
in advance questions designed to test the accuracy of my eyesight or
the ingenuous habit of my pen. I have already declared that the
windows of my first-floor lodger are of such properties that they
show you, in Xenophon's phrase, [Greek: ta onta te os onta, kai ta me
onta os ouk onta]. Now consider it from his side. If I were to tell
the owner of those windows that I saw the policeman at the corner, a
helmeted, blue-tunicked, chin-scratching, ponderous man, some six foot
in his boots, how would he take it? Would he not mock me? What, that
rat? Ridiculous! And what on earth could I reply? I tell you, the
whole affair is one of windows, or, sometimes, of personally-conducted
travel; and who is Guide and who Guided, is one of those nice
questions in psychology which perhaps we are not yet ready to handle.
Of the many speculations as to the nature of the subliminal Self I
have never found one to be that he may be a fairy prisoner,
occasionally on parole. But I think that not at all unlikely. May not
metempsychosis be a scourge of two worlds? If the soul of my grandam
might fitly inhabit a bird, might not a Fairy ruefully inhabit the
person of my grandam? If Fairy Godmothers, perchance, were Fairy
Grandmothers! I have some evidence to place before the reader which
may induce him to consider this hypothesis. Who can doubt, at least,
that Shelley's was not a case where the not-human was a prisoner in
the human? Who can doubt that of Blake's? And what was the result,
forensically? Shelley was treated as a scoundrel and Blake as a
madman. Shelley, it was said, broke the moral law, and Blake
transcended common sense; but the first, I reply, was in the guidance
of a being to whom the laws of this world and the accidents of it
meant nothing at all; and to the second a wisdom stood revealed which
to human eyes was foolishness. Windows! In either case there was a
martyrdom, and human exasperation appeased by much broken glass. Let
us not, however, condemn the wreckers of windows. Who is to judge even
them? Who is to say even of their harsh and cruel reprisals that they
were not excusable? May not they too have been ridden by some wild
spirit within them, which goaded them to their beastly work? But if
the acceptance of the doctrine of multiple personality is going to
involve me in the reconsideration of criminal jurisprudence, I must
close this essay.
I will close it with the sentence of another philosopher who has
considered deeply of these questions. "It is to be observed," he says,
"that the laws of human conduct are precisely made for the conduct of
this world of Men, in which we live, breed, and pay rent. They do not
affect the Kingdom of the Dogs, nor that of the Fishes; by a parity of
reasoning they need not be supposed to obtain in the Kingdom of
Heaven, in which the schoolmen discovered the citizens dwelling in
nine spheres, apart from the blessed immigrants, whose privileges did
not extend so near to the Heart of the Presence. How many realms there
may be between mankind's and that ultimate object of pure desire
cannot at present be known, but it may be affirmed with confidence
that any denizen of any one of them, brought into relation with human
beings, would act, and reasonably act, in ways which to men might seem
harsh and unconscionable, without sanction or convenience. Such a
being might murder one of the ratepayers of London, compound a felony,
or enter into a conspiracy to depose the King himself, and, being
detected, very properly be put under restraint, or visited with
chastisement, either deterrent or vindictive, or both. But the true
inference from the premises would be that although duress or
banishment from the kingdom might be essential, yet punishment,
so-called, ought not to be visited upon the offender. For he or she
could not be _nostri juris_, and that which were abominable to us
might well be reasonable to him or her, and indeed a fulfilment of the
law of his being. Punishment, therefore, could not be exemplary, since
the person punished exemplified nothing to Mankind; and if vindictive,
then would be shocking, since that which is vindicated, in the mind
of the victim either did not exist, or ought not. The Ancient Greek
who withheld from the sacrifice to Showery Zeus because a thunder-bolt
destroyed his hayrick, or the Egyptian who manumitted his slaves
because a God took the life of his eldest son, was neither a pious,
nor a reasonable person."
There is much debatable matter in this considered opinion.
A BOY IN THE WOOD
I had many bad qualities as a child, of which I need mention only
three. I was moody, irresolute, and hatefully reserved. Fate had
already placed me the eldest by three years of a large family. Add to
the eminence thus attained intentions which varied from hour to hour,
a will so little in accordance with desire that I had rather give up a
cherished plan than fight for it, and a secretive faculty equalled
only by the magpie, and you will not wonder when I affirm that I lived
alone in a household of a dozen friendly persons. As a set-off and
consolation to myself I had very strongly the power of impersonation.
I could be within my own little entity a dozen different people in a
day, and live a life thronged with these companions or rivals; and yet
this set me more solitary than ever, for I could never appear in any
one of my characters to anybody else. But alone and apart, what worlds
I inhabited! Worlds of fact and worlds of fiction. At nine years old I
knew Nelson's ardour and Wellesley's phlegm; I had Napoleon's egotism,
Galahad's purity, Lancelot's passion, Tristram's melancholy. I
reasoned like Socrates and made Phaedo weep; I persuaded like Saint
Paul and saw the throng on Mars' Hill sway to my words. I was by turns
Don Juan and Don Quixote, Tom Jones and Mr. Allworthy, Hamlet and his
uncle, young Shandy and his. You will gather that I was a reader. I
was, and the people of my books stepped out of their pages and
inhabited me. Or, to change the figure, I found in every book an open
door, and went in and dwelt in its world. Thus I lived a thronged and
busy life, a secret life, full of terror, triumph, wonder, frantic
enterprise, a noble and gallant figure among my peers, while to my
parents, brothers and sisters I was an incalculable, fitful creature,
often lethargic and often in the sulks. They saw me mooning in
idleness and were revolted; or I walked dully the way I was bid and
they despaired of my parts. I could not explain myself to them, still
less justify, having that miserable veil of reserve close over my
mouth, like a yashmak. To my father I could not speak, to my mother I
did not; the others, being my juniors all, hardly existed. Who is to
declare the motives of a child's mind? What was the nature of this
reticence? Was it that my real habit was reverie? Was it, as I
suspect, that constitutional timidity made me diffident? I was a
coward, I am very sure, for I was always highly imaginative. Was it,
finally, that I was dimly conscious of matters which I despaired of
putting clearly? Who can say? And who can tell me now whether I was
cursed or blessed? Certainly, if it had been possible to any person my
senior to share with me my daily adventures, I might have conquered
the cowardice from which I suffered such terrible reverses. But it was
not. I was the eldest of a large family, and apparently the easiest to
deal with of any of it. I was what they call a tractable child, being,
in fact, too little interested in the world as it was to resent any
duties cast upon me. It was not so with the others. They were
high-spirited little creatures, as often in mischief as not, and
demanded much more pains then I ever did. What they demanded they got,
what I did not demand I got not: "Lo, here is alle! What shold I more
seye?"
How it was that, taking no interest in my actual surroundings, I
became aware of unusual things behind them I cannot understand. It is
very difficult to differentiate between what I imagined and what I
actually perceived. It was a favourite string of my poor father's
plaintive lyre that I had no eyes. He was a great walker, a poet, and
a student of nature. Every Sunday of his life he took me and my
brother for a long tramp over the country, the intense spiritual
fatigue of which exercise I should never be able to describe. I have a
sinking of the heart, even now, when I recall our setting out.
Intolerable labour! I saw nothing and said nothing. I did nothing but
plug one dull foot after the other. I felt like some chained slave
going to the hulks, and can well imagine that my companions must have
been very much aware of it. My brother, whose nature was much happier
than mine, who dreamed much less and observed much more, was the life
of these woeful excursions. Without him I don't think that my father
could have endured them. At any rate, he never did. I amazed,
irritated, and confounded him at most times, but in nothing more than
my apathy to what enchanted him.[1] The birds, the flowers, the trees,
the waters did not exist for me in my youth. The world for me was
uninhabited, a great empty cage. People passed us, or stood at their
doorways watching us, but I never saw them. If by chance I descried
somebody coming whom it would be necessary to salute, or to whom I
might have to speak, I turned aside to avoid them. I was not only shy
to a fault, as a diffident child must be, but the world of sense
either did not exist for me or was thrust upon me to my discomfort.
And yet all the while, as I moved or sat, I was surrounded by a stream
of being, of infinite constituents, aware of them to this extent that
I could converse with them without sight or speech. I knew they were
there, I knew them singing, whispering, screaming. They filled my
understanding not my senses. I did not see them but I felt them. I
knew not what they said or sang, but had always the general sense of
their thronging neighbourhood.
[Footnote 1: And me also when I was enabled at a later day to perceive
them. I am thankful to remember and record for my own comfort that
that day came not too late for my enchantment to overtake his and
proceed in company.]
I enlarge upon this because I think it justifies me in adding that,
observing so little, what I did observe with my bodily eyes must
almost certainly have been observable. But now let the reader judge.
The first time I ever saw a creature which was really outside ordinary
experience was in the late autumn of my twelfth year. My brother, next
in age to me, was nine, my eldest sister eight. We three had been out
walking with our mother, and were now returning at dusk to our tea
through a wood which covered the top of a chalk down. I remember
vividly the scene. The carpet of drenched leaves under bare branches,
the thin spear-like shafts of the underwood, the grey lights between,
the pale frosty sky overhead with the sickle moon low down in it. I
remember, too, various sensations, such as the sudden chill which
affected me as the crimson globe of the sun disappeared; and again
how, when we emerged from the wood, I was enheartened by the sight of
the village shrouded under chimney smoke and by the one or two
twinkling lights dotted here and there about the dim wolds.
In the wood it was already twilight and very damp. Perhaps I had been
tired, more likely bored--as I always was when I was not being
somebody else. I remember that I had found the path interminable. I
had been silent, as I mostly was, while the other two had chattered
and played about our mother; and when presently I stayed behind for a
purpose I remember that I made no effort to catch them up. I knew the
way perfectly, of course, and had no fear of the dark. Oddly enough I
had no fear of that. I was far less imaginative in the night than in
the day. Besides that, by the time I was ready to go after them I had
much else to think of.
I must have been looking at him for some time before I made out that
he was there. So you may peer into a thicket a hundred times and see
nothing, and then a trick of the light or a flutter of the mood and
you see creatures where you had been sure was nothing. As children
will, I had stayed longer than I need, looking and wondering into the
wood, not observing but yet absorbing the effects of the lights and
shades. The trees were sapling chestnuts if I am not mistaken, Spanish
chestnuts, and used for hop-poles in those parts. Their leaves decay
gradually, the fleshy part, so to speak, dropping away from the
articulation till at last bleached skeleton leaves remain and flicker
at every sigh of the wind. The ground was densely carpeted with other
leaves in the same state, or about to become so. The silver grey was
cross-hatched by the purple lines of the serried stems, and as the
view receded this dipped into blue and there lost itself. It was very
quiet--a windless fall of the light. To-day I should find it most
beautiful; and even then, I suspect, I felt its beauty without knowing
it to be so. Looking into it all without realising it, I presently and
gradually did realise something else: a shape, a creature, a thing of
form and pressure--not a wraith, not, I am quite certain, a trick of
the senses.
It was under a clump of the chestnut stems, kneeling and sitting on
its heels, and it was watching me with the bright, quick eyes of a
mouse. If I were to say that my first thought was of some peering and
waiting animal, I should go on to qualify the thought by reference to
the creature's eyes. They were eyes which, like all animals', could
only express one thing at a time. They expressed now attention, the
closest: not fear, not surprise, not apprehension of anything that I
might be meditating against their peace, but simply minute attention.
The absence of fear, no doubt, marked their owner off from the animals
of common acquaintance; but the fact that they did not at the same
time express the being itself showed him to be different from our
human breed. For whatever else the human pair of eyes may reveal, it
reveals the looker.
The eyes of this creature revealed nothing of itself except that it
was watching me narrowly. I could not even be sure of its sex, though
I believe it to have been a male, and shall hereafter treat of it as
such. I could see that he was young; I thought about my own age. He
was very pale, without being at all sickly--indeed, health and vigour
and extreme vivacity were implicit in every line and expressed in
every act; he was clear-skinned, but almost colourless. The shadow
under his chin, I remember, was bluish. His eyes were round, when not
narrowed by that closeness of his scrutiny of me, and though probably
brown, showed to be all black, with pupil indistinguishable from iris.
The effect upon me was of black, vivid black, unintelligent
eyes--which see intensely but cannot translate. His hair was dense and
rather long. It covered his ears and touched his shoulders. It was
pushed from his forehead sideways in a thick, in a solid fold, as if
it had been the corner of a frieze cape thrown back. It was dark hair,
but not black; his neck was very thin. I don't know how he was
dressed--I never noticed such things; but in colour he must have been
inconspicuous, since I had been looking at him for a good time without
seeing him at all. A sleeveless tunic, I think, which may have been
brown, or grey, or silver-white. I don't know. But his knees were
bare--that I remember; and his arms were bare from the shoulder.
I standing, he squatting on his heels, the pair of us looked full at
one another. I was not frightened, no more was he. I was excited, and
full of interest; so, I think, was he. My heart beat double time. Then
I saw, with a curious excitement, that between his knees he held a
rabbit, and that with his left hand he had it by the throat. Now, what
is extraordinary to me about this discovery is that there was nothing
shocking in it.
I saw the rabbit's wild and panic-blown eye, I saw the bright white
rim of it, and recognised its little added terror of me even in the
midst of its anguish. That must have been the conventional fright of a
beast of chase, an instinct to fear rather than an emotion; for of
emotions the poor thing must have been having its fill. It was not
till I saw its mouth horribly open, its lips curled back to show its
shelving teeth that I could have guessed at what it was suffering. But
gradually I apprehended what was being done. Its captor was squeezing
its throat. I saw what I had never seen before, and have never seen
since, I saw its tongue like a pale pink petal of a flower dart out as
the pressure drove it. Revolting sight as that would have been to me,
witnessed in the world, here, in this dark wood, in this outland
presence, it was nothing but curious. Now, as I watched and wondered,
the being, following my eyes' direction, looked down at the huddled
thing between his thighs, and just as children squeeze a snap-dragon
flower to make it open and shut its mouth, so precisely did he,
pressing or releasing the windpipe, cause that poor beast to throw
back its lips and dart its dry tongue. He did this many times while he
watched it; and when he looked up at me again, and while he continued
to look at me, I saw that his cruel fingers, as by habit, continued
the torture, and that in some way he derived pleasure from the
performance--as if it gratified him to be sure that effect was
following on cause inevitably.
I have never, I believe, been cruel to an animal in my life. I hated
cruelty then as I hate it now. I have always shirked the sight of
anything in pain from my childhood onwards. Yet the fact is that not
only did I nothing to interfere in what I saw going on, but that I
was deeply interested and absorbed in it. I can only explain that to
myself now, by supposing that I knew then, that the creature in front
of me was not of my own kind, and was not, in fact, outraging any law
of its own being. Is not that possible? May I not have collected
unawares so much out of created nature? I am unable to say: all I am
clear about is that here was a thing in the semblance of a boy doing
what I had never observed a boy do, and what if I ever had observed a
boy do, would have flung me into a transport of rage and grief. Here,
therefore, was a thing in the semblance of a boy who was no boy at
all. So much must have been as certain to me then as it is
indisputable now.
One doesn't, at that age, reason things out; one knows them, and is
dumb, though unconvinced, before powerful syllogisms to the contrary.
All children are so, confronted by strange phenomena. And yet I had
facts to go upon if, child as I was, I had been capable of inference.
I need only mention one. If this creature had been human, upon seeing
that I was conscious of its behaviour to the rabbit, it would either
have stopped the moment it perceived that I did not approve or was not
amused, or it would have continued deliberately out of bravado. But it
neither stopped nor hardily continued. It watched its experiment with
interest for a little, then, finding me more interesting, did not
discontinue it, but ceased to watch it. He went on with it
mechanically, dreamingly, as if to the excitation of some other sense
than sight, that of feeling, for instance. He went on lasciviously,
for the sake of the pleasure so to be had. In other words, being
without self-consciousness and ignorant of shame, he must have been
non-human.
After all, too, it must be owned that I cannot have been confronted by
the appearance for more than a few minutes. Allow me three to have been
spent before I was aware of him, three more will be the outside I can
have passed gazing at him. But I speak of "minutes," of course,
referring to my ostensible self, that inert, apathetic child who
followed its mother, that purblind creature through whose muddy lenses
the pent immortal had been forced to see his familiar in the wood, and
perchance to dress in form and body what, for him, needed neither to be
visible. It was this outward self which was now driven by circumstances
to resume command--the command which for "three minutes" by his
reckoning he had relinquished. Both of us, no doubt, had been much
longer there had we not been interrupted. A woodman, homing from his
work, came heavily up the path, and like a guilty detected rogue I
turned to run and took my incorruptible with me. Not until I had passed
the man did I think to look back. The partner of my secret was not then
to be seen. Out of sight out of mind is the way of children. Out of
mind, then, withdrew my incorruptible. I hurried on, ran, and overtook
my party half-way down the bare hillside. I still remember the feeling
of relief with which I swept into the light, felt the cold air on my
cheeks, and saw the intimacy of the village open out below me. I am
almost sure that my eyes held tears at the assurance of the sweet,
familiar things which I knew and could love. There, literally, were my
own people: that which I had left behind must be unlawful because it was
so strange. In the warmth and plenty of the lighted house, by the
schoolroom table, before the cosily covered teapot, amid the high talk,
the hot toast and the jam, my experience in the dusky wood seemed
unreal, lawless, almost too terrible to be remembered--never, never to
be named. It haunted me for many days, and gave rise to curious
wonderings now and then. As I passed the patient, humble beasts of
common experience--a carter's team nodding, jingling its brasses, a
donkey, patient, humble, hobbled in a paddock, dogs sniffing each other,
a cat tucked into a cottage window, I mused doubtfully and often whether
we had touched the threshold of the heart of their mystery. But for the
most part, being constitutionally timid, I was resolute to put the
experience out of mind. When next I chanced to go through the wood there
is no doubt I peered askance to right and left among the trees; but I
took good care not to desert my companions. That which I had seen was
unaccountable, therefore out of bounds. But though I never saw him there
again I have never forgotten him.
HARKNESS'S FANCY
I may have been a precocious child, but I cannot tell within a year or
two how soon it was that I attained manhood. There must have been a
moment of time when I clothed myself in skins, like Adam; when I knew
what this world calls good and evil--by which this world means nothing
more nor less than men and women, and chiefly women, I think. Savage
peoples initiate their young and teach them the taboos of society by
stripes. We allow our issue to gash themselves. By stripes, then, upon
my young flesh, I scored up this lesson for myself. Certain things were
never to be spoken of, certain things never to be looked at in certain
ways, certain things never to be done consciously, or for the pleasure
to be got out of them. One stepped out of childish conventions into
mannish conventions, and did so, certainly, without any instruction from
outside. I remember, for instance, that, as children, it was a rigid
part of our belief that our father was the handsomest man in the
world--handsome was the word. In the same way our mother was by
prerogative the most beautiful woman. If some hero flashed upon our
scene--Garibaldi, Lancelot of the Lake, or another--the greatest praise
we could possibly have given him for beauty, excellence, courage, or
manly worth would have put him second to our father. So also Helen of
Sparta and Beatrice of Florence gave way. That was the law of the
nursery, rigid and never to be questioned until unconsciously I grew out
of it, and becoming a man, put upon me the panoply of manly eyes. I now
accepted it that to kiss my sister was nothing, but that to kiss her
friend would be very wicked. I discovered that there were two ways of
looking at a young woman, and two ways of thinking about her. I
discovered that it was lawful to have some kinds of appetite, and to
take pleasure in food, exercise, sleep, warmth, cold water, hot water,
the smell of flowers, and quite unlawful so much as to think of, or to
admit to myself the existence of other kinds of appetite. I discovered,
in fact, that love was a shameful thing, that if one was in love one
concealed it from the world, and, above all the world, from the object
of one's love. The conviction was probably instinctive, for one is not
the descendant of puritans for nothing; but the discovery of it is
another matter. Attendance at school and the continuous reading of
romance were partly responsible for that; physical development clinched
the affair, I was in all respects mature at thirteen, though my courage
(to use the word in Chaucer's sense) was not equal to my ability. I had
more than usual diffidence against me, more than usual reserve; and
self-consciousness, from which I have only lately escaped, grew upon me
hand in hand with experience.
But being now become a day-scholar at the Grammar School, and thrown
whether I would or not among other boys of my own age, I sank my
recondite self deeply under the folds of my quickened senses. I became
aware of a world which was not his world at all. I watched, I heard, I
judged, I studied intently my comrades; and while in secret I shared
their own hardy lives, I was more than content to appear a cipher
among them. I had no friends and made none. All my comradeship with my
school-mates took place in my head, for however salient in mood or
inclination I may have been I was a laggard in action. In company I
was lower than the least of them; in my solitude, at their head I
captured the universe. Daily, to and fro, for two or three years I
journeyed between my home and this school, with a couple of two-mile
walks and a couple of train journeys to be got through in all weathers
and all conditions of light. I saw little or nothing of my
school-fellows out of hours, and lived all my play-time, if you can so
call it, intensely alone with the people of my imagination--to whose
number I could now add gleanings from the Grammar School.
I don't claim objective reality for any of these; I am sure that they
were of my own making. Though unseen beings throng round us all,
though as a child I had been conscious of them, though I had actually
seen one, in these first school years of mine the machinery I had for
seeing the usually unseen was eclipsed; my recondite self was fast in
his _cachot_--and I didn't know that he was there! But one may imagine
fairies enough out of one's reading, and going beyond that, using it
as a spring-board, advance in the work of creation from realising to
begetting. So it was with me. The _Faerie Queen_ was as familiar as
the Latin Primer ought to have been. I had much of Mallory by heart--a
book full of magic. Forth of his pages stepped men-at-arms and damsels
the moment I was alone, and held me company for as long as I would.
The persons of Homer's music came next to them. I was Hector and held
Andromache to my heart. I kissed her farewell when I went forth to
school, and hurried home at night from the station, impatient for her
arms. I was never Paris, and had only awe of Helen. Even then I dimly
guessed her divinity, that godhead which the supremest beauty really
is. But I was often Odysseus the much-enduring, and very well
acquainted with the wiles of Calypso. Next in power of enchantment
came certainly Don Quixote, in whose lank bones I was often encased.
Dulcinea's charm was very real to me. I revelled in her honeyed name.
I was Don Juan too, and I was Tom Jones; but my most natural
impersonation in those years was Tristram. The luxury of that
champion's sorrows had a swooning sweetness of their own of which I
never tired. Iseult meant nothing. I cared nothing for her. I was
enamoured of the hero, and saw myself drenched in his passion. Like
Narcissus in the fable, I loved myself, and saw myself, in Tristram's
form, the most beautiful and the most beloved of beings.
Chivalry and Romance chained me at that time and not the supernatural.
The fairy adventures of the heroes of my love swept by me untouched.
Morgan le Fay, Britomart, Vivien, Nimue, Merlin did not convince me;
they were picturesque conventions whose decorative quality I felt,
while so far as I was concerned they were garniture or apparatus. And
yet the fruitful meadows through which I took my daily way were as
forests to me; the grass-stems spired up to my fired fancy like great
trees. Among them I used to minish myself to the size of an ant and
become a pioneer hewing out a pathway through virgin thickets. I had
my ears alert for the sound of a horn, of a galloping horse, of the
Questing Beast and hounds in full cry. But I never looked to encounter
a fairy in these most fairy solitudes. Beleaguered ladies,
knights-errant, dwarfs, churls, fiends of hell, leaping like flames
out of pits in the ground: all these, but no fairies. It's very odd
that having seen the reality and devoured the fictitious, I should
have had zest for neither, but so it is.