It was very dark in the room. He seemed by slow degrees to awake from a
long and heavy torpor, from an utter forgetfulness, and as he raised
his eyes he could scarcely discern the pale whiteness of the paper on
the desk before him. He remembered something of a gloomy winter
afternoon, of driving rain, of gusty wind: he had fallen asleep over
his work, no doubt, and the night had come down.
He lay back in his chair, wondering whether it were late; his eyes were
half closed, and he did not make the effort and rouse himself. He could
hear the stormy noise of the wind, and the sound reminded him of the
half-forgotten days. He thought of his boyhood, and the old rectory,
and the great elms that surrounded it. There was something pleasant in
the consciousness that he was still half dreaming; he knew he could
wake up whenever he pleased, but for the moment he amused himself by
the pretence that he was a little boy again, tired with his rambles and
the keen air of the hills. He remembered how he would sometimes wake up
in the dark at midnight, and listen sleepily for a moment to the rush
of the wind straining and crying amongst the trees, and hear it beat
upon the walls, and then he would fall to dreams again, happy in his
warm, snug bed.
The wind grew louder, and the windows rattled. He half opened his eyes
and shut them again, determined to cherish that sensation of long ago.
He felt tired and heavy with sleep; he imagined that he was exhausted
by some effort; he had, perhaps, been writing furiously without rest.
He could not recollect at the instant what the work had been; it would
be delightful to read the pages when he had made up his mind to bestir
himself.
Surely that was the noise of boughs, swaying and grinding in the wind.
He remembered one night at home when such a sound had roused him
suddenly from a deep sweet sleep. There was a rushing and beating as of
wings upon the air, and a heavy dreary noise, like thunder far away
upon the mountain. He had got out of bed and looked from behind the
blind to see what was abroad. He remembered the strange sight he had
seen, and he pretended it would be just the same if he cared to look
out now. There were clouds flying awfully from before the moon, and a
pale light that made the familiar land look strange and terrible. The
blast of wind came with a great shriek, and the trees tossed and bowed
and quivered; the wood was scourged and horrible, and the night air was
ghastly with a confused tumult, and voices as of a host. A huge black
cloud rolled across the heaven from the west and covered up the moon,
and there came a torrent of bitter hissing rain.
It was all a vivid picture to him as he sat in his chair, unwilling to
wake. Even as he let his mind stray back to that night of the past
years, the rain beat sharply on the window-panes, and though there were
no trees in the grey suburban street, he heard distinctly the crash of
boughs. He wandered vaguely from thought to thought, groping
indistinctly amongst memories, like a man trying to cross from door to
door in a darkened unfamiliar room. But, no doubt, if he were to look
out, by some magic the whole scene would be displayed before him. He
would not see the curve of monotonous two-storied houses, with here and
there a white blind, a patch of light, and shadows appearing and
vanishing, not the rain plashing in the muddy road, not the amber of
the gas-lamp opposite, but the wild moonlight poured on the dearly
loved country; far away the dim circle of the hills and woods, and
beneath him the tossing trees about the lawn, and the wood heaving
under the fury of the wind.
He smiled to himself, amidst his lazy meditations, to think how real it
seemed, and yet it was all far away, the scenery of an old play long
ended and forgotten. It was strange that after all these years of
trouble and work and change he should be in any sense the same person
as that little boy peeping out, half frightened, from the rectory
window. It was as if looking in the glass one should see a stranger,
and yet know that the image was a true reflection.
The memory of the old home recalled his father and mother to him, and
he wondered whether his mother would come if he were to cry out
suddenly. One night, on just such a night as this, when a great storm
blew from the mountain, a tree had fallen with a crash and a bough had
struck the roof, and he awoke in a fright, calling for his mother. She
had come and had comforted him, soothing him to sleep, and now he shut
his eyes, seeing her face shining in the uncertain flickering candle
light, as she bent over his bed. He could not think she had died; the
memory was but a part of the evil dreams that had come afterwards.
He said to himself that he had fallen asleep and dreamed sorrow and
agony, and he wished to forget all the things of trouble. He would
return to happy days, to the beloved land, to the dear and friendly
paths across the fields. There was the paper, white before him, and
when he chose to stir, he would have the pleasure of reading his work.
He could not quite recollect what he had been about, but he was somehow
conscious that he had been successful and had brought some long labour
to a worthy ending. Presently he would light the gas, and enjoy the
satisfaction that only the work could give him, but for the time he
preferred to linger in the darkness, and to think of himself as
straying from stile to stile through the scented meadows, and listening
to the bright brook that sang to the alders.
It was winter now, for he heard the rain and the wind, and the swaying
of the trees, but in those old days how sweet the summer had been. The
great hawthorn bush in blossom, like a white cloud upon the earth, had
appeared to him in twilight, he had lingered in the enclosed valley to
hear the nightingale, a voice swelling out from the rich gloom, from
the trees that grew around the well. The scent of the meadowsweet was
blown to him across the bridge of years, and with it came the dream and
the hope and the longing, and the afterglow red in the sky, and the
marvel of the earth. There was a quiet walk that he knew so well; one
went up from a little green byroad, following an unnamed brooklet
scarce a foot wide, but yet wandering like a river, gurgling over its
pebbles, with its dwarf bushes shading the pouring water. One went
through the meadow grass, and came to the larch wood that grew from
hill to hill across the stream, and shone a brilliant tender green, and
sent vague sweet spires to the flushing sky. Through the wood the path
wound, turning and dipping, and beneath, the brown fallen needles of
last year were soft and thick, and the resinous cones gave out their
odour as the warm night advanced, and the shadows darkened. It was
quite still; but he stayed, and the faint song of the brooklet sounded
like the echo of a river beyond the mountains. How strange it was to
look into the wood, to see the tall straight stems rising, pillar-like,
and then the dusk, uncertain, and then the blackness. So he came out
from the larch wood, from the green cloud and the vague shadow, into
the dearest of all hollows, shut in on one side by the larches and
before him by high violent walls of turf, like the slopes of a fort,
with a clear line dark against the twilight sky, and a weird thorn bush
that grew large, mysterious, on the summit, beneath the gleam of the
evening star.
And he retraced his wanderings in those deep old lanes that began from
the common road and went away towards the unknown, climbing steep
hills, and piercing the woods of shadows, and dipping down into valleys
that seemed virgin, unexplored, secret for the foot of man. He entered
such a lane not knowing where it might bring him, hoping he had found
the way to fairyland, to the woods beyond the world, to that vague
territory that haunts all the dreams of a boy. He could not tell where
he might be, for the high banks rose steep, and the great hedges made a
green vault above. Marvelous ferns grew rich and thick in the dark red
earth, fastening their roots about the roots of hazel and beech and
maple, clustering like the carven capitals of a cathedral pillar. Down,
like a dark shaft, the lane dipped to the well of the hills, and came
amongst the limestone rocks. He climbed the bank at last, and looked
out into a country that seemed for a moment the land he sought, a
mysterious realm with unfamiliar hills and valleys and fair plains all
golden, and white houses radiant in the sunset light.
And he thought of the steep hillsides where the bracken was like a
wood, and of bare places where the west wind sang over the golden
gorse, of still circles in mid-lake, of the poisonous yew-tree in the
middle of the wood, shedding its crimson cups on the dank earth. How he
lingered by certain black waterpools hedged on every side by drooping
wych-elms and black-stemmed alders, watching the faint waves widening
to the banks as a leaf or a twig dropped from the trees.
And the whole air and wonder of the ancient forest came back to him. He
had found his way to the river valley, to the long lovely hollow
between the hills, and went up and up beneath the leaves in the warm
hush of midsummer, glancing back now and again through the green
alleys, to the river winding in mystic esses beneath, passing hidden
glens receiving the streams that rushed down the hillside, ice-cold
from the rock, passing the immemorial tumulus, the graves where the
legionaries waited for the trumpet, the grey farmhouses sending the
blue wreaths of wood smoke into the still air. He went higher and
higher, till at last he entered the long passage of the Roman road, and
from this, the ridge and summit of the wood, he saw the waves of green
swell and dip and sink towards the marshy level and the gleaming yellow
sea. He looked on the surging forest, and thought of the strange
deserted city mouldering into a petty village on its verge, of its
encircling walls melting into the turf, of vestiges of an older temple
which the earth had buried utterly.
It was winter now, for he heard the wail of the wind, and a sudden gust
drove the rain against the panes, but he thought of the bee’s song in
the clover, of the foxgloves in full blossom, of the wild roses,
delicate, enchanting, swaying on a long stem above the hedge. He had
been in strange places, he had known sorrow and desolation, and had
grown grey and weary in the work of letters, but he lived again in the
sweetness, in the clear bright air of early morning, when the sky was
blue in June, and the mist rolled like a white sea in the valley. He
laughed when he recollected that he had sometimes fancied himself
unhappy in those days; in those days when he could be glad because the
sun shone, because the wind blew fresh on the mountain. On those bright
days he had been glad, looking at the fleeting and passing of the
clouds upon the hills, and had gone up higher to the broad dome of the
mountain, feeling that joy went up before him.
He remembered how, a boy, he had dreamed of love, of an adorable and
ineffable mystery which transcended all longing and desire. The time
had come when all the wonder of the earth seemed to prefigure this
alone, when he found the symbol of the Beloved in hill and wood and
stream, and every flower and every dark pool discoursed a pure ecstasy.
It was the longing for longing, the love of love, that had come to him
when he awoke one morning just before the dawn, and for the first time
felt the sharp thrill of passion.
He tried in vain to express to himself the exquisite joys of innocent
desire. Even now, after troubled years, in spite of some dark cloud
that overshadowed the background of his thought, the sweetness of the
boy’s imagined pleasure came like a perfume into his reverie. It was no
love of a woman but the desire of womanhood, the Eros of the unknown,
that made the heart tremble. He hardly dreamed that such a love could
ever be satisfied, that the thirst of beauty could be slaked. He shrank
from all contact of actuality, not venturing so much as to imagine the
inner place and sanctuary of the mysteries. It was enough for him to
adore in the outer court, to know that within, in the sweet gloom, were
the vision and the rapture, the altar and the sacrifice.
He remembered, dimly, the passage of many heavy years since that time
of hope and passion, but, perhaps, the vague shadow would pass away,
and he could renew the boy’s thoughts, the unformed fancies that were
part of the bright day, of the wild roses in the hedgerow. All other
things should be laid aside, he would let them trouble him no more
after this winter night. He saw now that from the first he had allowed
his imagination to bewilder him, to create a fantastic world in which
he suffered, moulding innocent forms into terror and dismay. Vividly,
he saw again the black circle of oaks, growing in a haggard ring upon
the bastions of the Roman fort. The noise of the storm without grew
louder, and he thought how the wind had come up the valley with the
sound of a scream, how a great tree had ground its boughs together,
shuddering before the violent blast. Clear and distinct, as if he were
standing now in the lane, he saw the steep slopes surging from the
valley, and the black crown of the oaks set against the flaming sky,
against a blaze and glow of light as if great furnace doors were
opened. He saw the fire, as it were, smitten about the bastions, about
the heaped mounds that guarded the fort, and the crooked evil boughs
seemed to writhe in the blast of flame that beat from heaven. Strangely
with the sight of the burning fort mingled the impression of a dim
white shape floating up the dusk of the lane towards him, and he saw
across the valley of years a girl’s face, a momentary apparition that
shone and vanished away.
Then there was a memory of another day, of violent summer, of white
farmhouse walls blazing in the sun, and a far call from the reapers in
the cornfields. He had climbed the steep slope and penetrated the
matted thicket and lay in the heat, alone on the soft short grass that
grew within the fort. There was a cloud of madness, and confusion of
broken dreams that had no meaning or clue but only an indefinable
horror and defilement. He had fallen asleep as he gazed at the knotted
fantastic boughs of the stunted brake about him, and when he woke he
was ashamed, and fled away fearing that “they” would pursue him. He did
not know who “they” were, but it seemed as if a woman’s face watched
him from between the matted boughs, and that she summoned to her side
awful companions who had never grown old through all the ages.
He looked up, it seemed, at a smiling face that bent over him, as he
sat in the cool dark kitchen of the old farmhouse, and wondered why the
sweetness of those red lips and the kindness of the eyes mingled with
the nightmare in the fort, with the horrible Sabbath he had imagined as
he lay sleeping on the hot soft turf. He had allowed these disturbed
fancies, all this mad wreck of terror and shame that he had gathered in
his mind, to trouble him for too long a time; presently he would light
up the room, and leave all the old darkness of his life behind him, and
from henceforth he would walk in the day.
He could still distinguish, though very vaguely, the pile of papers
beside him, and he remembered, now, that he had finished a long task
that afternoon, before he fell asleep. He could not trouble himself to
recollect the exact nature of the work, but he was sure that he had
done well; in a few minutes, perhaps, he would strike a match, and read
the title, and amuse himself with his own forgetfulness. But the sight
of the papers lying there in order made him think of his beginnings, of
those first unhappy efforts which were so impossible and so hopeless.
He saw himself bending over the table in the old familiar room,
desperately scribbling, and then laying down his pen dismayed at the
sad results on the page. It was late at night, his father had been long
in bed, and the house was still. The fire was almost out, with only a
dim glow here and there amongst the cinders, and the room was growing
chilly. He rose at last from his work and looked out on a dim earth and
a dark and cloudy sky.
Night after night he had laboured on, persevering in his effort, even
through the cold sickness of despair, when every line was doomed as it
was made. Now, with the consciousness that he knew at least the
conditions of literature, and that many years of thought and practice
had given him some sense of language, he found these early struggles
both pathetic and astonishing. He could not understand how he had
persevered so stubbornly, how he had had the heart to begin a fresh
page when so many folios of blotted, painful effort lay torn, derided,
impossible in their utter failure. It seemed to him that it must have
been a miracle or an infernal possession, a species of madness, that
had driven him on, every day disappointed, and every day hopeful.
And yet there was a joyous side to the illusion. In these dry days that
he lived in, when he had bought, by a long experience and by countless
hours of misery, a knowledge of his limitations, of the vast gulf that
yawned between the conception and the work, it was pleasant to think of
a time when all things were possible, when the most splendid design
seemed an affair of a few weeks. Now he had come to a frank
acknowledgment; so far as he was concerned, he judged every book wholly
impossible till the last line of it was written, and he had learnt
patience, the art of sighing and putting the fine scheme away in the
pigeon-hole of what could never be. But to think of those days! Then
one could plot out a book that should be more curious than Rabelais,
and jot down the outlines of a romance to surpass Cervantes, and design
renaissance tragedies and volumes of _contes_, and comedies of the
Restoration; everything was to be done, and the masterpiece was always
the rainbow cup, a little way before him.
He touched the manuscript on the desk, and the feeling of the pages
seemed to restore all the papers that had been torn so long ago. It was
the atmosphere of the silent room that returned, the light of the
shaded candle falling on the abandoned leaves. This had been painfully
excogitated while the snowstorm whirled about the lawn and filled the
lanes, this was of the summer night, this of the harvest moon rising
like a fire from the tithebarn on the hill. How well he remembered
those half-dozen pages of which he had once been so proud; he had
thought out the sentences one evening, while he leaned on the
foot-bridge and watched the brook swim across the road. Every word
smelt of the meadowsweet that grew thick upon the banks; now, as he
recalled the cadence and the phrase that had seemed so charming, he saw
again the ferns beneath the vaulted roots of the beech, and the green
light of the glowworm in the hedge.
And in the west the mountains swelled to a great dome, and on the dome
was a mound, the memorial of some forgotten race, that grew dark and
large against the red sky, when the sun set. He had lingered below it
in the solitude, amongst the winds, at evening, far away from home; and
oh, the labour and the vain efforts to make the form of it and the awe
of it in prose, to write the hush of the vast hill, and the sadness of
the world below sinking into the night, and the mystery, the suggestion
of the rounded hillock, huge against the magic sky.
He had tried to sing in words the music that the brook sang, and the
sound of the October wind rustling through the brown bracken on the
hill. How many pages he had covered in the effort to show a white
winter world, a sun without warmth in a grey-blue sky, all the fields,
all the land white and shining, and one high summit where the dark
pines towered, still in the still afternoon, in the pale violet air.
To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of
summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the
odour of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line; this
was the tale of the long evenings, of the candle flame white upon the
paper and the eager pen.
He remembered that in some fantastic book he had seen a bar or two of
music, and, beneath, the inscription that here was the musical
expression of Westminster Abbey. His boyish effort seemed hardly less
ambitious, and he no longer believed that language could present the
melody and the awe and the loveliness of the earth. He had long known
that he, at all events, would have to be content with a far approach,
with a few broken notes that might suggest, perhaps, the magistral
everlasting song of the hill and the streams.
But in those far days the impossible was but a part of wonderland that
lay before him, of the world beyond the wood and the mountain. All was
to be conquered, all was to be achieved; he had but to make the journey
and he would find the golden world and the golden word, and hear those
songs that the sirens sang. He touched the manuscript; whatever it was,
it was the result of painful labour and disappointment, not of the old
flush of hope, but it came of weary days, of correction and
re-correction. It might be good in its measure; but afterwards he would
write no more for a time. He would go back again to the happy world of
masterpieces, to the dreams of great and perfect books, written in an
ecstasy.
Like a dark cloud from the sea came the memory of the attempt he had
made, of the poor piteous history that had once embittered his life. He
sighed and said alas, thinking of his folly, of the hours when he was
shaken with futile, miserable rage. Some silly person in London had
made his manuscript more saleable and had sold it without rendering an
account of the profits, and for that he had been ready to curse
humanity. Black, horrible, as the memory of a stormy day, the rage of
his heart returned to his mind, and he covered his eyes, endeavoring to
darken the picture of terror and hate that shone before him. He tried
to drive it all out of his thought, it vexed him to remember these
foolish trifles; the trick of a publisher, the small pomposities and
malignancies of the country folk, the cruelty of a village boy, had
inflamed him almost to the pitch of madness. His heart had burnt with
fury, and when he looked up the sky was blotched, and scarlet as if it
rained blood.
Indeed he had almost believed that blood had rained upon him, and cold
blood from a sacrifice in heaven; his face was wet and chill and
dripping, and he had passed his hand across his forehead and looked at
it. A red cloud had seemed to swell over the hill, and grow great, and
come near to him; he was but an ace removed from raging madness.
It had almost come to that; the drift and the breath of the scarlet
cloud had well-nigh touched him. It was strange that he had been so
deeply troubled by such little things, and strange how after all the
years he could still recall the anguish and rage and hate that shook
his soul as with a spiritual tempest.
The memory of all that evening was wild and troubled; he resolved that
it should vex him no more, that now, for the last time, he would let
himself be tormented by the past. In a few minutes he would rise to a
new life, and forget all the storms that had gone over him.
Curiously, every detail was distinct and clear in his brain. The figure
of the doctor driving home, and the sound of the few words he had
spoken came to him in the darkness, through the noise of the storm and
the pattering of the rain. Then he stood upon the ridge of the hill and
saw the smoke drifting up from the ragged roofs of Caermaen, in the
evening calm; he listened to the voices mounting thin and clear, in a
weird tone, as if some outland folk were speaking in an unknown tongue
of awful things.
He saw the gathering darkness, the mystery of twilight changing the
huddled squalid village into an unearthly city, into some dreadful
Atlantis, inhabited by a ruined race. The mist falling fast, the gloom
that seemed to issue from the black depths of the forest, to advance
palpably towards the walls, were shaped before him; and beneath, the
river wound, snake-like, about the town, swimming to the flood and
glowing in its still pools like molten brass. And as the water mirrored
the afterglow and sent ripples and gouts of blood against the
shuddering reeds, there came suddenly the piercing trumpet-call, the
loud reiterated summons that rose and fell, that called and recalled,
echoing through all the valley, crying to the dead as the last note
rang. It summoned the legion from the river and the graves and the
battlefield, the host floated up from the sea, the centuries swarmed
about the eagles, the array was set for the last great battle, behind
the leaguer of the mist.
He could imagine himself still wandering through the dim unknown,
terrible country, gazing affrighted at the hills and woods that seemed
to have put on an unearthly shape, stumbling amongst the briars that
caught his feet. He lost his way in a wild country, and the red light
that blazed up from the furnace on the mountains only showed him a
mysterious land, in which he strayed aghast, with the sense of doom
weighing upon him. The dry mutter of the trees, the sound of an unseen
brook, made him afraid as if the earth spoke of his sin, and presently
he was fleeing through a desolate shadowy wood, where a pale light
flowed from the mouldering stumps, a dream of light that shed a ghostly
radiance.
And then again the dark summit of the Roman fort, the black sheer
height rising above the valley, and the moonfire streaming around the
ring of oaks, glowing about the green bastions that guarded the thicket
and the inner place.
The room in which he sat appeared the vision, the trouble of the wind
and rain without was but illusion, the noise of the waves in the
seashell. Passion and tears and adoration and the glories of the summer
night returned, and the calm sweet face of the woman appeared, and he
thrilled at the soft touch of her hand on his flesh.
She shone as if she had floated down into the lane from the moon that
swam between films of cloud above the black circle of the oaks. She led
him away from all terror and despair and hate, and gave herself to him
with rapture, showing him love, kissing his tears away, pillowing his
cheek upon her breast.
His lips dwelt on her lips, his mouth upon the breath of her mouth, her
arms were strained about him, and oh! she charmed him with her voice,
with sweet kind words, as she offered her sacrifice. How her scented
hair fell down, and floated over his eyes, and there was a marvelous
fire called the moon, and her lips were aflame, and her eyes shone like
a light on the hills.
All beautiful womanhood had come to him in the lane. Love had touched
him in the dusk and had flown away, but he had seen the splendor and
the glory, and his eyes had seen the enchanted light.