And did I flee Memory? When I re-entered the bungalow next day it was
my intention to leave it and Wales at once and for ever, and indeed
to leave England at once--perhaps for ever, in order to escape from
the unmanning effect of the sorrowful brooding which I knew had
become a habit. 'I will now,' I said, 'try the nepenthe that all my
friends in their letters are urging me to try--I will travel. Yes, I
will go to Japan. My late experiences should teach me that Ja'afar's
"Angel of Memory," who refashioned for him his dead wife out of his
own sorrow and tears, did him an ill service. He who would fain be
cured of the disease of a wasting sorrow should try to flee the
"Angel of Memory," and never look back.'
And so fixed was my mind upon travelling that I wrote to several of
my friends, and told them of my intention. But I need scarcely say
that as I urged them to keep the matter secret it was talked about
far and wide. Indeed, as I afterwards found to my cost, there were
paragraphs in the newspapers stating that the eccentric amateur
painter and heir of one branch of the Aylwins had at last gone to
Japan, and that as his deep interest in a certain charming beauty of
an un-English type was proverbial, it was expected that he would
return with a Japanese, or perhaps a Chinese wife.
But I did not go to Japan; and what prevented me?
My reason told me that what I had just seen near Beddgelert was an
optical illusion. I had become very learned on the subject of optical
illusions ever since I had known Sinfi Lovell, and especially since I
had seen that picture of Winnie in the water near Bettws y Coed,
which I have described in an earlier chapter. Every book I could get
upon optical illusions I had read, and I was astonished to find how
many instances are on record of illusions of a much more powerful
kind than mine.
And yet I could not leave Snowdon. The mountain's very breath grew
sweeter and sweeter of Winnie's lips. As I walked about the hills I
found myself repeating over and over again one of the verses which
Winnie used to sing to me as a child at Raxton.
Eryri fynyddig i mi,
Bro dawel y delyn yw,
Lle mae'r defaid a'r wyn,
Yn y mwswg a'r brwyn,
Am cân inau'n esgyn i fyny,
A'r gareg yn ateb i fyny, i fyny,
O'r lle bu'r eryrod yn byw. [Footnote]
[Footnote:
Mountain-wild Snowdon for me!
Sweet silence there for the harp,
Where loiter the ewes and the lambs,
In the moss and the rushes,
Where one's song goes sounding up
And the rocks re-echo it higher and higher
In the height where the eagles live.]
But then I felt that Sinfi was the mere instrument of the mysterious
magic of y Wyddfa, that magic which no other mountain in Europe
exercises. I knew that among all the Gypsies Sinfi was almost the
only one who possessed that power which belonged once to her race,
that power which is expressed in a Scottish word now universally
misused, 'glamour,' the power which Johnnie Faa and his people
brought into play when they abducted Lady Casilis.
Soon as they saw her well-faured face
They cast the glamour oure her.
'Yes,' I said, 'I am convinced that my illusion is the result of two
causes, my own brooding over Winnie's tragedy and the glamour that
Sinfi sheds around her, either consciously or unconsciously; that
imperious imagination of hers which projects her own visions upon the
senses of another person either with or without an exercise of her
own will. This is the explanation, I am convinced.'
Wheresoever I now went, Snowdon's message to my heart was, 'She
lives,' and my heart accepted the message. And then the new blessed
feeling that Winnie was not lying in a pauper grave had an effect
upon me that a few who read these pages will understand--only a few.
Perhaps, indeed, even those I am thinking of, those who, having lost
the one being they loved, feel that the earth has lost all its
beauty--perhaps even these may not be able to sympathise fully with
me in this matter, never having had an experience remotely comparable
with mine.
When I thought of Winifred lying at the bottom of some chasm in
Snowdon, my grief was very great, as these pages show. Yet it was not
intolerable; it did not threaten to unseat my reason, for even then,
when I knew so little of the magic of y Wyddfa, I felt how close was
the connection between my darling and the hills that knew her and
loved her. But during the time that her death, amidst surroundings
too appalling to contemplate, hung before my eyes in a dreadful
picture--during the time when it seemed certain that her death in a
garret, her burial in a pauper pit six coffins deep, was a hideous
truth and no fancy, all the beauty with which Nature seemed at one
time clothed was wiped away as by a sponge. The earth was nothing
more than a charnel-house, the skies above it were the roof of the
Palace of Nin-ki-gal. But now that Snowdon had spoken to me, the old
life which had formerly made the world so beautiful and so beloved
came back.
All nature seemed rich and glowing with the deep expectance of my
heart. The sunrise and the sunset seemed conscious of Winnie, and the
very birds seemed to be warbling at times 'She's alive.'
I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy
expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer,
Ferridoddin--
With love I burn: the centre is within me;
While in a circle everywhere around me
Its Wonder lies--
that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the
Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of
the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of
my life, _The Veiled Queen_.
The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:
'The omnipotence of love--its power of knitting together the entire
universe--is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind. Just
after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called "The
Bedouin Child," dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins
about girl children, and I translated it into Arabic. Among these
Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his
daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.
'Ilyàs the prophet, lingering 'neath the moon,
Heard from a tent a child's heart-withering wail,
Mixt with the message of the nightingale,
And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,
A little maiden dreaming there alone.
She babbled of her father sitting pale
'Neath wings of Death--'mid sights of sorrow and bale,
And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.
'"Poor child, plead on," the succouring prophet saith,
While she, with eager lips, like one who tries
To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries
To Heaven for help--"Plead on; such pure love-breath,
Beaching the Throne, might stay the wings of Death
That, in the Desert, fan thy father's eyes."
'The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;
Seven sons await the morning vultures' claws;
'Mid empty water-skins and camel maws
The father sits, the last of all the band.
He mutters, drowsing o'er the moonlit sand,
"Sleep fans my brow: sleep makes us all pashas;
Or, if the wings are Death's, why Azraeel draws
A childless father from an empty land."
'"Nay," saith a Voice, "the wind of Azraeel's wings
A child's sweet breath has stilled: so God decrees:"
A camel's bell comes tinkling on the breeze.
Filling the Bedouin's brain with bubble of springs
And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees,
Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.
'Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but "the superficial
film" of the immensity of God, and that which finds a mystic heart of
love and beauty beating within the bosom of Nature herself, I know no
real difference. Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly
be confined to Asia. The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic
element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards
sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such
as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than
Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune
of universal love and beauty.'
This was followed by a still more mystical poem called 'The Persian
Slave Girl's Progress to Paradise,' showing the Omnipotence of Love.
[Footnote]
[Footnote: This poem of Philip Aylwin's appears now in the present
writer's volume, _The Coming of Love_.]