IV

For a few days I paced with Sinfi over Wimbledon Common and Richmond

Park, The weather was now unusually brilliant for the time of year.

Sinfi would walk silently by my side.

But I could not rest with the Gypsies. I must be alone. Soon I left

the camp and returned to London, where I took a suite of rooms in a

house not far from Eaton Square--though to me London was a huge

meaningless maze of houses clustered around Primrose Court--that

horrid, fascinating, intolerable core of pain. Into my lungs poured

the hateful atmosphere of the city where Winifred had perished;

poured hot and stifling as sand-blasts of the desert. Impossible to

stay there!--for the pavement seemed actually to scorch my feet, like

the floor of a fiery furnace. To me the sun above was but the hideous

eye of Circumstance which had stared down pitilessly on that bare

head of hers, and blistered those feet.

The lamps at night seemed twinkling, blinking in a callous

consciousness of my tragedy--my monstrous tragedy of real life, the

like of which no poet dare imagine. But what aroused my wrath to an

unbearable pitch--what determined me to leave London at once--was the

sight of the unsympathetic faces in the streets. Though sympathy

could have given me no comfort, the myriad unsympathetic eyes of

London infuriated me.

'Died in beggar's rags--died in a hovel!' I muttered with rage as the

equipages and coarse splendours of the West End rolled insolently by.

'Died in a hovel!--and this London, this vast, ridiculous, swarming

human ant-hill, whose millions of paltry humdrum lives were not worth

one breath from those lips--this London spurned her, left her to

perish alone in her squalor and misery.'

Cyril and Wilderspin had returned to the Continent. D'Arcy was still

away.

I made application to the Home Secretary to have the pauper grave

opened. On the ground that I was 'not a relative of the deceased,'

the officials refused to institute even preliminary inquiries.

During this time no news of Mrs. Gudgeon had come to me through Polly

Onion, and I determined to go to Primrose Court and see what had

become of her.

When I reached Primrose Court I found that the shutters of the house

were up. Knocking and getting no response, I ascertained from a

pot-boy who was passing the corner of the court that Mrs. Gudgeon had

decamped. Neither the pot-boy nor any one in the court could tell me

whither she was gone.

'But where is Polly Onion?' I asked anxiously; for I was beginning to

blame myself bitterly for having neglected them.

'I can tell you where poor Polly is,' said the pot-boy. 'She's in the

New North Cemetery. She fell downstairs and broke her neck.'

'Why, she lived downstairs,' I said.

'That's true; you seem to be well up in the family, sir. But Poll

couldn't pay her rent, so old Meg took her in. And on the very

morning when Meg and Poll were a-startin' off together into the

country--it was quite early and dark--Poll stumbles over three young

flower-gals as 'ad crep' in the front door in the night time and was

makin' the stairs their bed. Gals as hadn't made enough to pay for

their night's lodgin' often used to sleep on Meg's stairs. Poll was

picked up as nigh dead as a toucher, and she died at the 'ospital.'

Toiling in the revolving cage of Circumstance, I strove in vain

against that most appalling form of envy--the envy of one's fellow

creatures that they should live and breathe while there is no breath

of life for the _one_.

My uncle Cecil's death had made me a rich man; but what was wealth to

me if it could not buy me respite from the vision haunting me day and

night--the vision of the attic, the mattress, and the woman?

And as I thought of the powerlessness of wealth to give me one crumb

of comfort, and remembered Winnie's sermon about wealth, I would look

at myself in the mirror above my mantelpiece and smile bitterly at

the sight of the hollow cheeks, furrowed brow, and melancholy eyes,

and recall her words about her hovering near me after she was dead.

The thought of my wealth and the squalor in which she had died was, I

think, the most maddening thought of all. I had now become the

possessor of Wilderspin's picture 'Faith and Love,' having bought it

of the Bond Street dealer to whom it belonged; and also of the

'Christabel' picture, and these I was constantly looking at as they

hung up on the walls of my room. After a while, however, I destroyed

the 'Christabel' picture, it was too painful. Though I would not see

such friends as I had, I read their letters; indeed, it was these

same letters which alone could draw from me a grim smile now and

then.

Almost every letter ended by urging me, in order to flee from my

sorrows, to travel! With the typical John Bull travelling seems to be

always the panacea. In sorrow, John's herald of peace is Baedeker:

the dispenser of John's true nepenthe is Mr. Murray. Pity and love

for Winifred pursued me, tortured me nigh unto death, and therefore

did these friends of mine seem to suppose that I wanted to flee from

my pity and sorrow! Why, to flee from my sorrow, to get free of my

pity, to flee from the agonies that went nigh to tearing soul from

body, would have been to flee from all that I had left of

life--memory.

Did I want to flee from Winnie? Why, memory was Winnie now; and did

I want to flee from _her_? And yet it was memory that was goading me

on to the verge of madness. No doubt the reader thinks me a weak

creature for allowing the passion of pity to sap my manhood in this

fashion. But it was not so much her death as the manner of her death

that withered my heart and darkened my soul. The calamities which

fell upon her, grievous beyond measure, unparalleled, not to be

thought of save with a pallor of cheek and a shudder of the flesh,

were ever before me, mocking me--maddening me.

'Died in a hovel!' As I gave voice to this impeachment of Heaven,

night after night, wandering up and down the streets, my brain was

being scorched and withered by those same thoughts of anger against

destiny and most awful revolt which had appalled me when first I saw

how the curse of Heaven or the whim of Circumstance had been

fulfilled.

Then came that passionate yearning for death, which grief such as

mine must needs bring. But if what Materialism teaches were true,

suicide would rob me even of my memory of her. If, on the other hand,

what I had been taught by the supernaturalism of my ancestors were

true, to commit suicide might be but to play finally into the hands

of that same unknown pitiless power with whom my love had all along

been striving.

'Suicide might sever my soul from hers for ever.' I said, and then

the tragedy would seem too monstrously unjust to be true, and I said:

'It cannot be--such things cannot be: it is a hideous dream. She is

not dead! She is in Wales with friends at Carnarvon, and I shall

awake and laugh at all this imaginary woe!'

And what were now my feelings towards the memory of my father? Can

a man cherish in his heart at one and the same moment scorn of

another man for believing in the efficacy of a curse, and bitter

anger against him for having left a curse behind him? He can! On my

return to London after my illness I had sent back to Wilderspin the

copy of _The Veiled Queen_ he had lent me. But from the library of

Raxton Hall I brought my father's own copy, elaborately bound in the

tooled black calf my father affected. The very sight of that black

binding now irritated me; never did I pass it without experiencing a

sensation that seemed a blending of scorn and fear: scorn of the

ancestral superstitions the book gave voice to: fear of them.

One day I took the book from the shelves and then hurled it across

the room. Stumbling over it some days after this, a spasm of

ungovernable rage came upon me, for terribly was my blood struggling

with Fenella Stanley and Philip Aylwin, and thousands of ancestors,

Romany and Gorgio, who for ages upon ages had been shaping my

destiny. I began to tear out the leaves and throw them on the fire.

But suddenly I perceived the leaves to be covered with marginalia in

my father's manuscript, and with references to Fenella Stanley's

letters--letters which my father seemed to have studied as deeply as

though they were the writings of a great philosopher instead of the

scribblings of an ignorant Gypsy. My eye had caught certain written

words which caused me to clutch at the sheets still burning on the

fire. Too late!--I grasped nothing save a little paper-ash. Then I

turned to the pages still left in my hand, and read these words of my

father's:

'These marginalia are written for the eyes of my dear son, into whose

hands this copy of my book will come. Until he gave me his promise to

bury the amulet with me, I felt alone in the world. But even he

failed to understand what he called "my superstition." He did not

know that by perpetually feeling on my bosom the facets of the

beloved jewel which had long lain warm upon hers--the cross which had

received the last kiss from her lips--I had been able to focus all

the scattered rays of thought--I had been able to vitalise memory

till it became an actual presence. He did not know that out of my

sorrow had been born at last a strange kind of happiness--the

happiness that springs from loving a memory--living with a

memory--till it becomes a presence--an objective reality. He did not

know that, by holding her continually in my thoughts, by means of

the amulet, I achieved at last the miracle described by the Hindoo

poets--the miracle of reshaping from the undulations of "the three

regions of the universe the remembered object by the all-creative

magic of love!"'

Then followed some translations from the Kumara-sambhava and other

Sanscrit poems, and then the well-known passage in Lucretius about

dreams, and then a pathetic account of the visions called up within

him by the sensation caused by the lacerations of the facets of the

cherished amulet upon his bosom--visions something akin, as I

imagine, to those experienced by _convulsionnaires_. And then after

all this learning came references to poor ignorant Fenella Stanley's

letters and extracts from them.

In one of these extracts I was startled to come upon the now familiar

word 'crwth.'

'De Welch fok ses as de livin mullos only follow the crwth on Snowdon

wen it is playde by a Welch Chavi, but dat is all a lie. Dey follows

the crwth when a Romany Chi plays it as I nows very wel, but de

chavi wot play on the crwth, shee must love the living mullo she want

for to come, and de living mullo must love her.'

And then followed my father's comments on the extract.

'_N.B._--To see and hear a crwth, if possible, and ascertain the true

nature of the vibrations. But there are said to be only a few crwths

in existence; and very likely there is no musician who could play

upon them.'

Then followed a few sentences written at a later date.

'The crwth is now becoming obsolete; on inquiry I learn that it is a

stringed instrument played with a bow like a violin; but as one of

the feet of the bridge passes through one of the sound-holes and

rests on the inside of the back, the vibrations must be quite unique,

if we remember how important a part is played by the back in all

instruments of the violin kind. It must be far more subtle than the

vibrations of the Welsh harp, and even more subtle (if also more

nasal) than those of the violin.

'The reason why music has in all ages been called in to aid in

evoking the spirits, the reason why it is as potent now as ever it

was in aiding the spirits to manifest themselves, is simple enough:

the rhythmic vibrations of music set in active motion the magnetic

waves through whose means alone the two worlds, spiritual and

material, can hold communication. The quality and the value of these

vibrations depend mainly, no doubt, upon the magnetic power,

conscious or other, of the musician, but partly also upon the kind of

instrument used. The vibrations awakened by stringed instruments have

been long known to be more subtle than any others: instruments of the

violin kind are of course the most subtle of all. Doubtless this is

why among the Welsh hills the old saying used to be "The spirits

follow the crwth."'

'Which folly is the more besotted,' I said, as I read and re-read the

marginalia--'that of the scholar with his scientific nonsense about

vibrations, or that of the ignorant Gypsy with her living mullos

drawn through the air by music and love?'

But now my eyes fell upon a very different kind of marginal note

which ran thus:--

'The one important fact of the twentieth century will be the growth

and development of that great Renascence of Wonder which set in in

Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of

the nineteenth.

'The warring of the two impulses governing man (and probably not man

only, but the entire world of conscious life)--the impulse of

acceptance, the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the

phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse to confront

these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder--will occupy all the

energies of the next century.

'The old impulse of wonder which came to the human race in its

infancy has to come back--has to triumph--before the morning of the

final emancipation of man can dawn.

'But the wonder will be exercised in very different fields from those

in which it was exercised in the past. The materialism which at this

moment seems to most thinkers inseparable from the idea of evolution

will go. Against their own intentions certain scientists are showing

that the spiritual force called life is the maker and not the

creature of organism--is a something outside the material world, a

something which uses the material world as a means of phenomenal

expression.

'The materialist, with his primitive and confiding belief in the

testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the cold,

when men like Sir W. R. Grove turn round on him and tell him that

"the principle of all certitude" is not and cannot be the testimony

of his own senses; that these senses, indeed, are no absolute tests

of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can

neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding the

excellence of his own eyes, ears, and nose, the universe the

materialist is mapping out so deftly is, and must be, monophysical,

lightless, colourless, soundless--a phantasmagoric show--a deceptive

series of undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not,

according to the organism upon which they fall.'

These words were followed by a sequence of mystical sonnets about

"the Omnipotence of Love," which showed, beyond doubt, that if my

father was not a scientific thinker, he was, at least, a very

original poet. And this made me perplexed as to what could have drawn

Wilderspin, who scorned the art of poetry, into the meshes of _The

Veiled Queen_. Perhaps, however, it was because Wilderspin's ancestry

was, notwithstanding his English name, largely, if not wholly, Welsh,

as I learnt from Cyril. Welshmen, whether sensitive or not to the

rhythmic expression of the English language, are almost all, I

believe, of the poetic temperament.

But from this moment my mind began to run upon the picture of Fenella

Stanley, surrounded by those Snowdonian spirits which her music was

supposed to have evoked from the mountain air of the morning.