July drew on to a sultry end. In the little gardens of Hammerton the
thin lawns grew yellow and bare: and there, by the river-wall, the
people of The Chase took their teas and their suppers, and rested
gratefully in the evening cool. One week after the dance the Byrnes were
to go away into the country, and Margery had looked forward eagerly to
the 27th of July. But Stephen said on the 25th that he could not come:
he had nearly finished the poem "Chivalry," and he wanted to finish it
before he went away; and he had much business to settle with publishers
and so on: he was publishing a volume of _Collected Poems_, and there
were questions of type and paper and cover to be determined; and he had
a long article for _The Epoch_ to do. All these things might take a week
or they might take a fortnight; but he would follow Margery as soon as
he might--she could feel sure of that.
Against this portentous aggregate of excuses Margery argued gently and
sorrowfully but vainly. And sorrowfully she went away with Nurse and
Joan and Michael Hilary. She went away to Hampshire, to the house of an
old friend--a lovely place on the shore of the Solent. You drove there
from Brockenhurst through the fringes of the New Forest, through
marvellous regiments of ancient trees, and wild stretches of heathery
waste, and startling patches of hedge and pasture, where villages with
splendid names lurked slyly in unexpected hollows, and cows stood
sleepily by the rich banks of little brooks. And when you came to the
house, you saw suddenly the deep blue band of the Solent, coloured like
the Dardanelles, and quiet like a lake. Beyond it rose the green
foothills of the Island, patched with the brown of ploughlands and
landslides by the sea, and far-off the faint outline of Mottistone Down
and Brightstone Down, little heights that had the colour and dignity of
great mountains when the light caught them in the early morning or in
the evening or after the rain. On the water small white boats with red
sails and green sails shot about like butterflies, and small black
fishing-craft prowled methodically near the shore. And sometimes in the
evening a great liner stole out of Southampton Water and crept
enormously along the farther shore, her hull a beautiful grey, her
funnel an indescribable tint, that was neither pink nor scarlet nor red,
but fitted perfectly in the bright picture of the land and the sea. And
all day there were ships passing, battleships and aged tramps and
dredgers and destroyers, and sometimes a tall sailing-ship that looked
like an old engraving, and big yachts with sails like snow, and little
yachts with sails like cinnamon or the skin of an Arab boy. At low tide
there were long stretches of mudflats and irregular pools, before the
house and far away to the west; and these at sunset were places of great
beauty. For the sunset colours of the tumbled clouds, and the subtle
green of the lower sky and the bold blue of the cloudless spaces above
were in these pools and in the near shallows of the sea perfectly
recaptured. In this delicate mosaic of golden pools and rose pools and
nameless lights herons moved with a majestic stealth or stood like ebony
images watching for fish; and little companies of swans swam up and down
with the arrogant beauty of all swans and the unique beauty of swans in
sea water: and all the sea-birds of England circled and swooped against
the sun or clustered chattering on the purple mud and saffron patches of
sand, with a strange quietness, as if they, too, must do their reverence
to the stillness and the splendour of that hour.
The sun went down and all those colours departed, but for a sad glow
over Dorsetshire and the deep green of the Needles Light that shot along
the still surface almost to your feet as you stood in the thick grass
above the shore.
Then you went with the sensation of awe into the house; and the house
was old and comforting and spacious, with a mellow roof of gentle red;
and it was rich with the timber of Hampshire trees. There was a lawn in
front of it and a tangled screen of low shrubs and sallow trees; and
when Margery stood in the wide window of her room there was nothing but
these between herself and the sea; and there was no building to be seen
nor the work of any man, only the friendly ships and their lights, and
the far smoke of a farm upon the Island, and at night the blinking lamp
of a buoy-light in the Channel. To Margery it would have been the
perfect haven of contentment and rest--if Stephen had come with her. But
he had not come. At night the curlews flew past the windows with the
long and sweet and musical cry which no other bird can utter and no man
imitate, nor even interpret--for who can say from the sound of it if it
be a cry of melancholy or a song of hope or rejoicing or love? But to
Margery in those weeks it was a song of absolute sadness, of lost
possibilities and shattered dreams, and it was the very voice of her
disappointment, her protest against the exquisite tantalization of her
coming to this exquisite retreat--and coming alone.
And Stephen in London worked on at "Chivalry." He was beginning to be
tired of it now as the end of it came in sight, and it was true that he
wanted to be able to leave the whole burden of it behind him when he
went away. But that was not the whole reason of his staying at home, and
what the whole reason was he had not consciously determined; but faintly
he knew that Muriel Tarrant was part of it.
He was tired of the poem now, and was eager to be done--eager to be done
with the long labour of execution of an idea no longer fresh with the
first fury of inspiration. And now that so much was achieved he was
urgent to finish it quickly and give it to the world, lest some other be
before him. For poets and all authors suffer something of the terrors of
inventors and scientific creators, toiling feverishly at the latest
child of their imagination, while who knows what other man may not
already have stolen their darling, may not this very hour be hurrying to
the Patent Office, filching rights and the patronage of rich men,
ruining perhaps for ever by their folly or avarice or imperfection the
whole glory of the conception.
Stephen had this sort of secret fear. They seemed so obvious now, his
idea and his scheme of execution, though at their birth they had seemed
so strange and bold and original. Surely some other man had long since
thought of writing a poem like his, was even now correcting his proofs,
some mean and barren artist who could never do justice to the theme,
but would make it for ever a stale and tawdry thing. Or maybe in the
winter there would be a paper shortage or a printers' strike or a
revolution, and if his masterpiece had not seen the light by then it
would never see the light at all; or at best there would be long months
of intolerable waiting, and it would be given to the world at the wrong
season, when the world was no longer inspired with the sense of
chivalry, when the critics were bored with chivalry, at Christmas time
when men looked for lighter fare, or in the spring, when men wanted
nothing but the spring.
So all that August he worked, thinking little of Margery, thinking
little of any one. But though there was this fever of purpose and
anxiety driving him on, day by day the labour grew more wearisome and
difficult. Men who go out to offices or factories to do their work think
enviously sometimes of the gentler lot of the author, bound by no
regulations or hours or personal entanglements, but able to sit down at
his own time at his own desk and put down without physical labour or
nervous strain the easy promptings of his brain. They do not know with
how much terror and distaste he may have to drag himself to that desk,
with what agony of mind he sits there. The nervous weariness of writing,
the physical weariness of writing, the mental incubus of a great
conception that must be carried unformed in the heavy mind month after
weary month, for ever growing and swelling and bursting to be born, yet
not able to be born, because this labour of writing is so long, the
hideous labour of writing and rewriting and correcting, of futile
erasions and vacillations and doubt, of endless worryings over little
words and tragic sacrifices and fresh starts and rearrangements--these
are terrible things. An author is to his work as a rejected lover his
love, for ever drawn yet for ever repelled. Stephen sometimes in the
morning would almost long to be transformed into a clerk, or a railway
porter, some one who need ask little of himself since little is asked of
him but the simple observance of a routine; he would have to force
himself to sit on at his work, as a man forces himself to face danger or
bear pain; he would even welcome interruptions, yet bitterly resent
them; for when the words would not come or would not arrange themselves,
when nothing went absolutely right, any distraction was sweet which
legitimately for a single hour released him from the drudgery of
thought; and yet it was hateful, for it postponed yet another hour the
end of that drudgery, and in that precious hour--who knows?--the divine
ease and assurance might have returned, the maddening difficulties
melted away, so strange and fitful are the springs of inspiration.
So all these weeks he worked and saw nobody; he did not see Muriel,
though the Tarrants were still at home, and he did not see John, who had
gone away to Devonshire with a fellow Civil Servant. But at last in the
third week the labour was finished. It was finished at sunset on a
breathless evening; he finished it with a glowing sense of contentment
with good work done. Then he read it over, from beginning to end. And as
he read the glow faded, the contentment departed. The mournful
disillusion of achievement began. Here and there were phrases which
stirred, passages which satisfied; but for the most part he read his
work with a sort of sick shame and disappointment. Who in the wide world
could read these stale and wearisome lines? Each of them at one time had
seemed the fresh and perfect expression of a fine thought; each of them
was the final choice of numberless alternatives; but so often he had
read them, so often written them, so often in his head endlessly recited
them, in the streets and on the river or in the dark night, that they
were all old now, old and dull.
He had learned by long experience to discount a little this gloomy and
inevitable reaction, and now as he turned over the final page of spidery
manuscript, he tried hard to restore his faith, reminding himself that
the world would see his work as he saw it first himself, and not as he
saw it now. Anyhow, it was done, and could not be mended any more.
Perhaps it would be better when it was typed. But then the drudgery
would begin again--the reading and re-reading and alteration and doubt,
the weary numbering of pages, the weary correction of typist's lunacies.
And after that there would be proofs and the correcting of proofs; then
new doubts would discover themselves, and the old doubts would live
again; and he would hate it. Yet it would be better then--it would be
better in print. Now he was tired of it and would forget it. He felt the
impulse to relaxation and indulgence and rest which drives athletes to
excesses when their race is run, their long discipline over. He went out
into the garden and into the boat, and paddled gently upstream with the
tide, under the bank. It was nearly ten and the sun was long down. There
was no moon and it was dark on the river with the brilliant darkness of
a starry night. He paddled gently past John's house, scarcely moving the
oars; past Mr. Farraday's and the two moored barges at the Bakery wharf.
He drifted under the fig-tree by the Whittakers', and came near to the
house of the Tarrants. The Tarrants' house, like his own, was on the
river side of the road, and their garden ran down to a low wall over the
water. As he came out from under the fig-tree he looked up over his
shoulder at the house; and Muriel Tarrant was in his mind. There was a
figure in a white dress leaning motionless over the wall, and as he
looked up the figure stirred sharply. Then he began to tremble with a
curious excitement, for he saw that it was Muriel herself. He dipped the
oars in the water and stopped the boat under the wall.