VII
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 the had been successful and had
brought some long labor 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 odor 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 moldering 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, molding 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 labored 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 labor 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.
o
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 odor 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 labor 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 moldering 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.
AVE ATQUE VALE
The
old words sounded in his ears like the ending of a chant, and he heard the
music's close. Once only in his weary hapless life, once the world had passed
away, and he had known her, the dear, dear Annie, the symbol of all mystic
womanhood.
The
heaviness of languor still oppressed him, holding him back amongst these old
memories, so that he could not stir from his place. Oddly, there seemed
something unaccustomed about the darkness of the room, as if the shadows he had
summoned had changed the aspect of the walls. He was conscious that on this
night he was not altogether himself; fatigue, and the weariness of sleep, and the
waking vision had perplexed him. He remembered how once or twice when he was a
little boy startled by an uneasy dream, and had stared with a frightened gaze
into nothingness, not knowing where he was, all trembling, and breathing quick,
till he touched the rail of his bed, and the familiar outlines of the
looking-glass and the chiffonier began to glimmer out of the gloom. So now he
touched the pile of manuscript and the desk at which he had worked so many
hours, and felt reassured, though he smiled at himself, and he felt the old
childish dread, the longing to cry out for some one to bring a candle, and show
him that he really was in his own room. He glanced up for an instant, expecting
to see perhaps the glitter of the brass gas jet that was fixed on the wall,
just beside his bureau, but it was too dark, and he could not rouse himself and
make the effort that would drive the cloud and the muttering thoughts away.
He
leant back again, picturing the wet street without, the rain driving like
fountain spray about the gas lamp, the shrilling of the wind on those waste
places to the north. It was strange how in the brick and stucco desert where no
trees were, he all the time imagined the noise of tossing boughs, the grinding
of the boughs together. There was a great storm and tumult in this wilderness
of London, and for the sound of the rain and the wind he could not hear the hum
and jangle of the trams, and the jar and shriek of the garden gates as they
opened and shut. But he could imagine his street, the rain-swept desolate curve
of it, as it turned northward, and beyond the empty suburban roads, the
twinkling villa windows, the ruined field, the broken lane, and then yet
another suburb rising, a solitary gas-lamp glimmering at a corner, and the
plane tree lashing its boughs, and driving great showers against the glass.
It
was wonderful to think of. For when these remote roads were ended one dipped
down the hill into the open country, into the dim world beyond the glint of
friendly fires. Tonight, how waste they were, these wet roads, edged with the
red-brick houses, with shrubs whipped by the wind against one another, against
the paling and the wall. There the wind swayed the great elms scattered on the
sidewalk, the remnants of the old stately fields, and beneath each tree was a
pool of wet, and a torment of raindrops fell with every gust. And one passed
through the red avenues, perhaps by a little settlement of flickering shops,
and passed the last sentinel wavering lamp, and the road became a ragged lane, and
the storm screamed from hedge to hedge across the open fields. And then,
beyond, one touched again upon a still remoter avant-garde of London, an island
amidst the darkness, surrounded by its pale of twinkling, starry lights.
He
remembered his wanderings amongst these outposts of the town, and thought how
desolate all their ways must be tonight. They were solitary in wet and wind,
and only at long intervals some one pattered and hurried along them, bending
his eyes down to escape the drift of rain. Within the villas, behind the
close-drawn curtains, they drew about the fire, and wondered at the violence of
the storm, listening for each great gust as it gathered far away, and rocked
the trees, and at last rushed with a huge shock against their walls as if it
were the coming of the sea. He thought of himself walking, as he had often
walked, from lamp to lamp on such a night, treasuring his lonely thoughts, and
weighing the hard task awaiting him in his room. Often in the evening, after a
long day's labor, he had thrown down his pen in utter listlessness, feeling
that he could struggle no more with ideas and words, and he had gone out into
driving rain and darkness, seeking the word of the enigma as he tramped on and
on beneath these outer battlements of London.
Or
on some grey afternoon in March or November he had sickened of the dull
monotony and the stagnant life that he saw from his window, and had taken his
design with him to the lonely places, halting now and again by a gate, and
pausing in the shelter of a hedge through which the austere wind shivered,
while, perhaps, he dreamed of Sicily, or of sunlight on the Provençal olives.
Often as he strayed solitary from street to field, and passed the Syrian fig
tree imprisoned in Britain, nailed to an ungenial wall, the solution of the
puzzle became evident, and he laughed and hurried home eager to make the page
speak, to note the song he had heard on his way.
Sometimes
he had spent many hours treading this edge and brim of London, now lost amidst
the dun fields, watching the bushes shaken by the wind, and now looking down
from a height whence he could see the dim waves of the town, and a barbaric
water tower rising from a hill, and the snuff-colored cloud of smoke that
seemed blown up from the streets into the sky.
There
were certain ways and places that he had cherished; he loved a great old common
that stood on high ground, curtained about with ancient spacious houses of red
brick, and their cedarn gardens. And there was on the road that led to this
common a space of ragged uneven ground with a pool and a twisted oak, and here
he had often stayed in autumn and looked across the mist and the valley at the
great theatre of the sunset, where a red cloud like a charging knight shone and
conquered a purple dragon shape, and golden lances glittered in a field of
faerie green.
Or
sometimes, when the unending prospect of trim, monotonous, modern streets had
wearied him, he had found an immense refreshment in the discovery of a
forgotten hamlet, left in a hollow, while all new London pressed and surged on
every side, threatening the rest of the red roofs with its vulgar growth. These
little peaceful houses, huddled together beneath the shelter of trees, with
their bulging leaded windows and uneven roofs, somehow brought back to him the
sense of the country, and soothed him with the thought of the old farm-houses,
white or grey, the homes of quiet lives, harbors where, perhaps, no tormenting
thoughts ever broke in.
For
he had instinctively determined that there was neither rest nor health in all
the arid waste of streets about him. It seemed as if in those dull rows of
dwellings, in the prim new villas, red and white and staring, there must be a
leaven working which transformed all to base vulgarity. Beneath the dull sad slates,
behind the blistered doors, love turned to squalid intrigue, mirth to drunken
clamor, and the mystery of life became a common thing; religion was sought for
in the greasy piety and flatulent oratory of the Independent chapel, the
stuccoed nightmare of the Doric columns. Nothing fine, nothing rare, nothing
exquisite, it seemed, could exist in the weltering suburban sea, in the
habitations which had risen from the stench and slime of the brickfields. It
was as if the sickening fumes that steamed from the burning bricks had been
sublimed into the shape of houses, and those who lived in these grey places
could also claim kinship with the putrid mud.
Hence
he had delighted in the few remains of the past that he could find still
surviving on the suburb's edge, in the grave old houses that stood apart from
the road, in the moldering taverns of the eighteenth century, in the huddled
hamlets that had preserved only the glow and the sunlight of all the years that
had passed over them. It appeared to him that vulgarity, and greasiness and
squalor had come with a flood, that not only the good but also the evil in
man's heart had been made common and ugly, that a sordid scum was mingled with
all the springs, of death as of life. It would be alike futile to search amongst
these mean two-storied houses for a splendid sinner as for a splendid saint;
the very vices of these people smelt of cabbage water and a pothouse vomit.
And
so he had often fled away from the serried maze that encircled him, seeking for
the old and worn and significant as an antiquary looks for the fragments of the
Roman temple amidst the modern shops. In some way the gusts of wind and the
beating rain of the night reminded him of an old house that had often attracted
him with a strange indefinable curiosity. He had found it on a grim grey day in
March, when he had gone out under a leaden-molded sky, cowering from a dry
freezing wind that brought with it the gloom and the doom of far unhappy
Siberian plains. More than ever that day the suburb had oppressed him;
insignificant, detestable, repulsive to body and mind, it was the only hell
that a vulgar age could conceive or make, an inferno created not by Dante but
by the jerry-builder. He had gone out to the north, and when he lifted up his
eyes again he found that he had chanced to turn up by one of the little lanes
that still strayed across the broken fields. He had never chosen this path
before because the lane at its outlet was so wholly degraded and offensive,
littered with rusty tins and broken crockery, and hedged in with a paling
fashioned out of scraps of wire, rotting timber, and bending worn-out rails.
But on this day, by happy chance, he had fled from the high road by the first
opening that offered, and he no longer groped his way amongst obscene refuse,
sickened by the bloated bodies of dead dogs, and fetid odors from unclean
decay, but the malpassage had become a peaceful winding lane, with warm shelter
beneath its banks from the dismal wind. For a mile he had walked quietly, and
then a turn in the road showed him a little glen or hollow, watered by such a
tiny rushing brooklet as his own woods knew, and beyond, alas, the glaring
foreguard of a "new neighborhood"; raw red villas, semi-detached, and
then a row of lamentable shops.
But
as he was about to turn back, in the hope of finding some other outlet, his
attention was charmed by a small house that stood back a little from the road
on his right hand. There had been a white gate, but the paint had long faded to
grey and black, an the wood crumbled under the touch, and only moss marked out
the lines of the drive. The iron railing round the lawn had fallen, and the
poor flower-beds were choked with grass and a faded growth of weeds. But here
and there a rosebush lingered amidst suckers that had sprung grossly from the
root, and on each side of the hall door were box trees, untrimmed, ragged, but
still green. The slate roof was all stained and livid, blotched with the
drippings of a great elm that stood at one corner of the neglected lawn, and marks
of damp and decay were thick on the uneven walls, which had been washed yellow
many years before. There was a porch of trellis work before the door, and
Lucian had seen it rock in the wind, swaying as if every gust must drive it
down. There were two windows on the ground floor, one on each side of the door,
and two above, with a blind space where a central window had been blocked up.
This
poor and desolate house had fascinated him. Ancient and poor and fallen,
disfigured by the slate roof and the yellow wash that had replaced the old
mellow dipping tiles and the warm red walls, and disfigured again by spots and
patches of decay; it seemed as if its happy days were for ever ended. To Lucian
it appealed with a sense of doom and horror; the black streaks that crept upon
the walls, and the green drift upon the roof, appeared not so much the work of
foul weather and dripping boughs, as the outward signs of evil working and
creeping in the lives of those within.
The
stage seemed to him decked for doom, painted with the symbols of tragedy; and
he wondered as he looked whether any one were so unhappy as to live there
still. There were torn blinds in the windows, but he had asked himself who
could be so brave as to sit in that room, darkened by the dreary box, and
listen of winter nights to the rain upon the window, and the moaning of wind
amongst the tossing boughs that beat against the roof.
He
could not imagine that any chamber in such a house was habitable. Here the dead
had lain, through the white blind the thin light had filtered on the rigid
mouth, and still the floor must be wet with tears and still that great rocking
elm echoed the groaning and the sobs of those who watched. No doubt, the damp
was rising, and the odor of the earth filled the house, and made such as
entered draw back, foreseeing the hour of death.
Often
the thought of this strange old house had haunted him; he had imagined the
empty rooms where a heavy paper peeled from the walls and hung in dark strips;
and he could not believe that a light ever shone from those windows that stared
black and glittering on the neglected lawn. But tonight the wet and the storm
seemed curiously to bring the image of the place before him, and as the wind
sounded he thought how unhappy those must be, if any there were, who sat in the
musty chambers by a flickering light, and listened to the elm-tree moaning and
beating and weeping on the walls.
And
tonight was Saturday night; and there was about that phrase something that
muttered of the condemned cell, of the agony of a doomed man. Ghastly to his
eyes was the conception of any one sitting in that room to the right of the
door behind the larger box tree, where the wall was cracked above the window
and smeared with a black stain in an ugly shape.
He
knew how foolish it had been in the first place to trouble his mind with such
conceits of a dreary cottage on the outskirts of London. And it was more
foolish now to meditate these things, fantasies, feigned forms, the issue of a
sad mood and a bleak day of spring. For soon, in a few moments, he was to rise
to a new life. He was but reckoning up the account of his past, and when the
light came he was to think no more of sorrow and heaviness, of real or imagined
terrors. He had stayed too long in London, and the would once more taste the
breath of the hills, and see the river winding in the long lovely valley; ah!
he would go home.
Something
like a thrill, the thrill of fear, passed over him as he remembered that there
was no home. It was in the winter, a year and a half after his arrival in town,
that he had suffered the loss of his father. He lay for many days prostrate,
overwhelmed with sorrow and with the thought that now indeed he was utterly
alone in the world. Miss Deacon was to live with another cousin in Yorkshire;
the old home was at last ended and done. He felt sorry that he had not written
more frequently to his father: there were things in his cousin's letters that
had made his heart sore. "Your poor father was always looking for your
letters," she wrote, "they used to cheer him so much. He nearly broke
down when you sent him that money last Christmas; he got it into his head that
you were starving yourself to send it him. He was hoping so much that you would
have come down this Christmas, and kept asking me about the plum-puddings
months ago."
It
was not only his father that had died, but with him the last strong link was
broken, and the past life, the days of his boyhood, grew faint as a dream. With
his father his mother died again, and the long years died, the time of his
innocence, the memory of affection. He was sorry that his letters had gone home
so rarely; it hurt him to imagine his father looking out when the post came in
the morning, and forced to be sad because there was nothing. But he had never thought
that his father valued the few lines that he wrote, and indeed it was often
difficult to know what to say. It would have been useless to write of those
agonizing nights when the pen seemed an awkward and outlandish instrument, when
every effort ended in shameful defeat, or of the happier hours when at last
wonder appeared and the line glowed, crowned and exalted. To poor Mr. Taylor
such tales would have seemed but trivial histories of some Oriental game, like
an odd story from a land where men have time for the infinitely little, and can
seriously make a science of arranging blossoms in a jar, and discuss perfumes
instead of politics. It would have been useless to write to the rectory of his
only interest, and so he wrote seldom.
And
then he had been sorry because he could never write again and never see his
home. He had wondered whether he would have gone down to the old place at
Christmas, if his father had lived. It was curious how common things evoked the
bitterest griefs, but his father's anxiety that the plum-pudding should be
good, and ready for him, had brought the tears into his eyes. He could hear him
saying in a nervous voice that attempted to be cheerful: "I suppose you
will be thinking of the Christmas puddings soon, Jane; you remember how fond
Lucian used to be of plum-pudding. I hope we shall see him this December."
No doubt poor Miss Deacon paled with rage at the suggestion that she should
make Christmas pudding in July; and returned a sharp answer; but it was
pathetic. The wind wailed, and the rain dashed and beat again and again upon
the window. He imagined that all his thoughts of home, of the old rectory
amongst the elms, had conjured into his mind the sound of the storm upon the
trees, for, tonight, very clearly he heard the creaking of the boughs, the
noise of boughs moaning and beating and weeping on the walls, and even a
pattering of wet, on wet earth, as if there were a shrub near the window that
shook off the raindrops, before the gust.
That
thrill, as it were a shudder of fear, passed over him again, and he knew not
what had made him afraid. There were some dark shadow on his mind that saddened
him; it seemed as if a vague memory of terrible days hung like a cloud over his
thought, but it was all indefinite, perhaps the last grim and ragged edge of
the melancholy wrack that had swelled over his life and the bygone years. He
shivered and tried to rouse himself and drive away the sense of dread and shame
that seemed so real and so awful, and yet he could not grasp it. But the torpor
of sleep, the burden of the work that he had ended a few hours before, still
weighed down his limb and bound his thoughts. He could scarcely believe that he
had been busy at his desk a little while ago, and that just before the winter
day closed it and the rain began to fall he had laid down the pen with a sigh
of relief, and had slept in his chair. It was rather as if he had slumbered
deeply through a long and weary night, as if an awful vision of flame and
darkness and the worm that dieth not had come to him sleeping. But he would
dwell no more on the darkness; he went back to the early days in London when he
had said farewell to the hills and to the waterpools, and had set to work in
this little room in the dingy street.
How
he had toiled and labored at the desk before him! He had put away the old wild
hopes of the masterpiece and executed in a fury of inspiration, wrought out in
one white heat of creative joy; it was enough if by dint of long perseverance
and singleness of desire he could at last, in pain and agony and despair, after
failure and disappointment and effort constantly renewed, fashion something of
which he need not be ashamed. He had put himself to school again, and had, with
what patience he could command, ground his teeth into the rudiments, resolved
that at last he would test out the heart of the mystery. They were good nights
to remember, these; he was glad to think of the little ugly room, with its
silly wall-paper and its "bird's-eye" furniture, lighted up, while he
sat at the bureau and wrote on into the cold stillness of the London morning,
when the flickering lamplight and the daystar shone together. It was an
interminable labor, and he had always known it to be as hopeless as alchemy.
The gold, the great and glowing masterpiece, would never shine amongst the dead
ashes and smoking efforts of the crucible, but in the course of the life, in
the interval between the failures, he might possibly discover curious things.
These
were the good nights that he could look back on without any fear or shame, when
he had been happy and content on a diet of bread and tea and tobacco, and could
hear of some imbecility passing into its hundredth thousand, and laugh
cheerfully - if only that last page had been imagined aright, if the phrases
noted in the still hours rang out their music when he read them in the morning.
He remembered the drolleries and fantasies that the worthy Miss Deacon used to
write to him, and how he had grinned at her words of reproof, admonition, and
advice. She had once instigated Dolly fils to pay him a visit, and that young
prop of respectability had talked about the extraordinary running of Bolter at
the Scurragh meeting in Ireland; and then, glancing at Lucian's books, had
inquired whether any of them had "warm bits." He had been kind though
patronizing, and seemed to have moved freely in the most brilliant society of
Stoke Newington. He had not been able to give any information as to the present
condition of Edgar Allan Poe's old school. It appeared eventually that his report
at home had not been a very favorable one, for no invitation to high tea had
followed, as Miss Deacon had hoped. The Dollys knew many nice people, who were
well off, and Lucian's cousin, as she afterwards said, had done her best to
introduce him to the beau monde of those northern suburbs.
But
after the visit of the young Dolly, with what joy he had returned to the
treasures which he had concealed from profane eyes. He had looked out and seen
his visitor on board the tram at the street corner, and he laughed out loud,
and locked his door. There had been moments when he was lonely, and wished to
hear again the sound of friendly speech, but, after such an irruption of
suburban futility, it was a keen delight, to feel that he was secure on his
tower, that he could absorb himself in his wonderful task as safe and silent as
if he were in mid-desert.
But
there was one period that he dared not revive; he could no bear to think of
those weeks of desolation and terror in the winter after his coming to London.
His mind was sluggish, and he could not quite remember how many years had
passed since that dismal experience; it sounded all an old story, but yet it
was still vivid, a flaming scroll of terror from which he turned his eyes away.
One awful scene glowed into his memory, and he could not shut out the sight of
an orgy, of dusky figures whirling in a ring, of lurid naphtha flares blazing
in the darkness, of great glittering lamps, like infernal thuribles, very
slowly swaying in a violent blast of air. And there was something else,
something which he could not remember, but it filled him with terror, but it
slunk in the dark places of his soul, as a wild beast crouches in the depths of
a cave.
Again,
and without reason, he began to image to himself that old moldering house in
the field. With what a loud incessant noise the wind must be clamoring about on
this fearful night, how the great elm swayed and cried in the storm, and the
rain dashed and pattered on the windows, and dripped on the sodden earth from
the shaking shrubs beside the door. He moved uneasily on his chair, and
struggled to put the picture out of his thoughts; but in spite of himself he
saw the stained uneven walls, that ugly blot of mildew above the window, and
perhaps a feeble gleam of light filtered through the blind, and some one,
unhappy above all and for ever lost, sat within the dismal room. Or rather,
every window was black, without a glimmer of hope, and he who was shut in thick
darkness heard the wind and the rain, and the noise of the elm-tree moaning and
beating and weeping on the walls.
For
all his effort the impression would not leave him, and as he sat before his
desk looking into the vague darkness he could almost see that chamber which he
had so often imagined; the low whitewashed ceiling held up by a heavy beam, the
smears of smoke and long usage, the cracks and fissures of the plaster. Old
furniture, shabby, deplorable, battered, stood about the room; there was a
horsehair sofa worn and tottering, and a dismal paper, patterned in a livid
red, blackened and moldered near the floor, and peeled off and hung in strips
from the dank walls. And there was that odor of decay, of the rank soil
steaming, of rotting wood, a vapor that choked the breath and made the heart
full of fear and heaviness.
Lucian
again shivered with a thrill of dread; he was afraid that he had overworked
himself and that he was suffering from the first symptoms of grave illness. His
mind dwelt on confused and terrible recollections, and with a mad ingenuity
gave form and substance to phantoms; and even now he drew a long breath, almost
imagining that the air in his room was heavy and noisome, that it entered his
nostrils with some taint of the crypt. And his body was still languid, and
though he made a half motion to rise he could not find enough energy for the
effort, and he sank again into the chair. At all events, he would think no more
of that sad house in the field; he would return to those long struggles with
letters, to the happy nights when he had gained victories.
He
remembered something of his escape from the desolation and the worse than
desolation that had obsessed him during that first winter in London. He had
gone free one bleak morning in February, and after those dreary terrible weeks
the desk and the heap and litter of papers had once more engulfed and absorbed
him. And in the succeeding summer, of a night when he lay awake and listened to
the birds, shining images came wantonly to him. For an hour, while the dawn
brightened, he had felt the presence of an age, the resurrection of the life
that the green fields had hidden, and his heart stirred for joy when he knew
that the held and possessed all the loveliness that had so long moldered. He
could scarcely fall asleep for eager and leaping thoughts, and as soon as his
breakfast was over he went out and bought paper and pens of a certain celestial
stationer in Notting Hill. The street was not changed as he passed to and fro
on his errand. The rattling wagons jostled by at intervals, a rare hansom came
spinning down from London, there sounded the same hum and jangle of the gliding
trams. The languid life of the pavement was unaltered; a few people,
un-classed, without salience or possible description, lounged and walked from
east to west, and from west to east, or slowly dropped into the byways to
wander in the black waste to the north, or perhaps go astray in the systems
that stretched towards the river. He glanced down these by-roads as he passed,
and was astonished, as always, at their mysterious and desert aspect. Some were
utterly empty; lines of neat, appalling residences, trim and garnished as if
for occupation, edging the white glaring road; and not a soul was abroad, and
not a sound broke their stillness. It was a picture of the desolation of
midnight lighted up, but empty and waste as the most profound and solemn hours
before the day. Other of these by-roads, of older settlement, were furnished
with more important houses, standing far back from the pavement, each in a
little wood of greenery, and thus one might look down as through a forest
vista, and see a way smooth and guarded with low walls and yet untrodden, and
all a leafy silence. Here and there in some of these echoing roads a figure
seemed laxily advancing in the distance, hesitating and delaying, as if lost in
the labyrinth. It was difficult to say which were the more dismal, these
deserted streets that wandered away to right and left, or the great main
thoroughfare with its narcotic and shadowy life. For the latter appeared vast,
interminable, grey, and those who traveled by it were scarcely real, the bodies
of the living, but rather the uncertain and misty shapes that come and go
across the desert in an Eastern tale, when men look up from the sand and see a
caravan pass them, all in silence, without a cry or a greeting. So they passed
and repassed each other on those pavements, appearing and vanishing, each
intent on his own secret, and wrapped in obscurity. One might have sworn that
not a man saw his neighbor who met him or jostled him, that here every one was
a phantom for the other, though the lines of their paths crossed and recrossed,
and their eyes stared like the eyes of live men. When two went by together,
they mumbled and cast distrustful glances behind them as though afraid all the
world was an enemy, and the pattering of feet was like the noise of a shower of
rain. Curious appearances and simulations of life gathered at points in the
road, for at intervals the villas ended and shops began in a dismal row, and
looked so hopeless that one wondered who could buy. There were women fluttering
uneasily about the greengrocers, and shabby things in rusty black touched and
retouched the red lumps that an unshaven butcher offered, and already in the
corner public there was a confused noise, with a tossing of voices that rose
and fell like a Jewish chant, with the senseless stir of marionettes jerked
into an imitation of gaiety. Then, in crossing a side street that seemed like
grey mid-winter in stone, he trespassed from one world to another, for an old
decayed house amidst its garden held the opposite corner. The laurels had grown
into black skeletons, patched with green drift, the ilex gloomed over the
porch, the deodar had blighted the flower-beds. Dark ivies swarmed over an
elm-tree, and a brown clustering fungus sprang in gross masses on the lawn,
showing where the roots of dead trees moldered. The blue verandah, the blue
balcony over the door, had faced to grey, and the stucco was blotched with ugly
marks of weather, and a dank smell of decay, that vapor of black rotten earth
in old town gardens, hung heavy about the gates. And then a row of musty villas
had pushed out in shops to the pavement, and the things in faded black buzzed
and stirred about the limp cabbages, and the red lumps of meat.
It
was the same terrible street, whose pavements he had trodden so often, where
sunshine seemed but a gaudy light, where the fume of burning bricks always
drifted. On black winter nights he had seen the sparse lights glimmering
through the rain and drawing close together, as the dreary road vanished in
long perspective. Perhaps this was its most appropriate moment, when nothing of
its smug villas and skeleton shops remained but the bright patches of their
windows, when the old house amongst its moldering shrubs was but a dark cloud,
and the streets to the north and south seemed like starry wastes, beyond them
the blackness of infinity. Always in the daylight it had been to him abhorred
and abominable, and its grey houses and purlieus had been fungus-like sproutings,
an efflorescence of horrible decay.
But
on that bright morning neither the dreadful street nor those who moved about it
appalled him. He returned joyously to his den, and reverently laid out the
paper on his desk. The world about him was but a grey shadow hovering on a
shining wall; its noises were faint as the rustling of trees in a distant wood.
The lovely and exquisite forms of those who served the Amber Venus were his
distinct, clear, and manifest visions, and for one amongst them who came to him
in a fire of bronze hair his heart stirred with the adoration of love. She it
was who stood forth from all the rest and fell down prostrate before the
radiant form in amber, drawing out her pins in curious gold, her glowing
brooches of enamel, and pouring from a silver box all her treasures of jewels
and precious stones, chrysoberyl and sardonyx, opal and diamond, topaz and
pearl. And then she stripped from her body her precious robes and stood before
the goddess in the glowing mist of her hair, praying that to her who had given
all and came naked to the shrine, love might be given, and the grace of Venus.
And when at last, after strange adventures, her prayer was granted, then when
the sweet light came from the sea, and her lover turned at dawn to that bronze
glory, he saw beside him a little statuette of amber. And in the shrine, far in
Britain where the black rains stained the marble, they found the splendid and
sumptuous statue of the Golden Venus, the last fine robe of silk that the lady
had dedicated falling from her fingers, and the jewels lying at her feet. And
her face was like the lady's face when the sun had brightened it on that day of
her devotion.
The
bronze mist glimmered before Lucian's eyes; he felt as though the soft floating
hair touched his forehead and his lips and his hands. The fume of burning
bricks, the reek of cabbage water, never reached his nostrils that were filled
with the perfume of rare unguents, with the breath of the violet sea in Italy.
His pleasure was an inebriation, an ecstasy of joy that destroyed all the vile
Hottentot kraals and mud avenues as with one white lightning flash, and through
the hours of that day he sat enthralled, not contriving a story with patient
art, but rapt into another time, and entranced by the urgent gleam in the
lady's eyes.
The
little tale of The Amber Statuette had at last issued from a humble office in
the spring after his father's death. The author was utterly unknown; the
author's Murray was a wholesale stationer and printer in process of development,
so that Lucian was astonished when the book became a moderate success. The
reviewers had been sadly irritated, and even now he recollected with
cheerfulness an article in an influential daily paper, an article pleasantly
headed: "Where are the disinfectants?"
And
then - but all the months afterwards seemed doubtful, there were only broken
revelations of the laborious hours renewed, and the white nights when he had
seen the moonlight fade and the gaslight grow wan at the approach of dawn.
He
listened. Surely that was the sound of rain falling on sodden ground, the heavy
sound of great swollen drops driven down from wet leaves by the gust of wind,
and then again the strain of boughs sang above the tumult of the air; there was
a doleful noise as if the storm shook the masts of a ship. He had only to get
up and look out of the window and he would see the treeless empty street, and
the rain starring the puddles under the gas-lamp, but he would wait a little
while.
He
tried to think why, in spite of all his resolutions, a dark horror seemed to
brood more and more over all his mind. How often he had sat and worked on just
such nights as this, contented if the words were in accord though the wind
might wail, though the air were black with rain. Even about the little book
that he had made there seemed some taint, some shuddering memory that came to
him across the gulf of forgetfulness. Somehow the remembrance of the offering
to Venus, of the phrases that he had so lovingly invented, brought back again
the dusky figures that danced in the orgy, beneath the brassy glittering lamps;
and again the naphtha flares showed the way to the sad house in the fields, and
the red glare lit up the mildewed walls and the black hopeless windows. He
gasped for breath, he seemed to inhale a heavy air that reeked of decay and
rottenness, and the odor of the clay was in his nostrils.
That
unknown cloud that had darkened his thoughts grew blacker and engulfed him,
despair was heavy upon him, his heart fainted with a horrible dread. In a
moment, it seemed, a veil would be drawn away and certain awful things would
appear.
He
strove to rise from his chair, to cry out, but he could not. Deep, deep the
darkness closed upon him, and the storm sounded far away. The Roman fort surged
up, terrific, and he saw the writhing boughs in a ring, and behind them a glow
and heat of fire. There were hideous shapes that swarmed in the thicket of the
oaks; they called and beckoned to him, and rose into the air, into the flame
that was smitten from heaven about the walls. And amongst them was the form of
the beloved, but jets of flame issued from her breasts, and beside her was a
horrible old woman, naked; and they, too, summoned him to mount the hill.
He
heard Dr. Burrows whispering of the strange things that had been found in old
Mrs. Gibbon's cottage, obscene figures, and unknown contrivances. She was a
witch, he said, and the mistress of witches.
He
fought against the nightmare, against the illusion that bewildered him. All his
life, he thought, had been an evil dream, and for the common world he had
fashioned an unreal red garment, that burned in his eyes. Truth and the dream
were so mingled that now he could not divide one from the other. He had let
Annie drink his soul beneath the hill, on the night when the moonfire shone,
but he had not surely seen her exalted in the flame, the Queen of the Sabbath.
Dimly he remembered Dr. Burrows coming to see him in London, but had he not
imagined all the rest?
Again
he found himself in the dusky lane, and Annie floated down to him from the moon
above the hill. His head sank upon her breast again, but, alas, it was aflame.
And he looked down, and he saw that his own flesh was aflame, and he knew that
the fire could never be quenched.
There
was a heavyweight upon his head, his feet were nailed to the floor, and his
arms bound tight beside him. He seemed to himself to rage and struggle with the
strength of a madman; but his hand only stirred and quivered a little as it lay
upon the desk.
Again
he was astray in the mist; wandering through the waste avenues of a city that
had been ruined from ages. It had been splendid as Rome, terrible as Babylon,
and for ever the darkness had covered it, and it lay desolate for ever in the
accursed plain. And far and far the grey passages stretched into the night,
into the icy fields, into the place of eternal gloom.
Ring
within ring the awful temple closed around him; unending circles of vast
stones, circle within circle, and every circle less throughout all ages. In the
center was the sanctuary of the infernal rite, and he was borne thither as in
the eddies of a whirlpool, to consummate his ruin, to celebrate the wedding of
the Sabbath. He flung up his arms and beat the air, resisting with all his
strength, with muscles that could throw down mountains; and this time his
little finger stirred for an instant, and his foot twitched upon the floor.
Then
suddenly a flaring street shone before him. There was darkness round about him,
but it flamed with hissing jets of light and naphtha fires, and great
glittering lamps swayed very slowly in a violent blast of air. A horrible
music, and the exultation of discordant voices, swelled in his ears, and he saw
an uncertain tossing crowd of dusky figures that circled and leapt before him.
Thee was a noise like the chant of the lost, and then there appeared in the
midst of the orgy, beneath a red flame, the figure of a woman. Her bronze hair
and flushed cheeks were illuminate, and an argent light shone from her eyes,
and with a smile that froze his heart her lips opened to speak to him. The
tossing crowd faded away, falling into a gulf of darkness, and then she drew
out from her hair pins of curious gold, and glowing brooches in enamel, and
poured out jewels before him from a silver box, and then she stripped form her
body her precious robes, and stood in the glowing mist of her hair, and held
out her arms to him. But he raised his eyes and saw the mould and decay gaining
on the walls of a dismal room, and a gloomy paper was dropping to the rotting
floor. A vapor of the grave entered his nostrils, and he cried out with a loud
scream; but there was only an indistinct guttural murmur in his throat.
And
presently the woman fled away from him, and he pursued her. She fled away
before him through midnight country, and he followed after her, chasing her
from thicket to thicket, from valley to valley. And at last he captured her and
won her with horrible caresses, and they went up to celebrate and make the
marriage of the Sabbath. They were within the matted thicket, and they writhed
in the flames, insatiable, for ever. They were tortured, and tortured one
another, in the sight of thousands who gathered thick about them; and their
desire rose up like a black smoke.
Without,
the storm swelled to the roaring of an awful sea, the wind grew to a shrill
long scream, the elm-tree was riven and split with the crash of a thunderclap.
To Lucian the tumult and the shock came as a gentle murmur, as if a brake
stirred before a sudden breeze in summer. And then a vast silence overwhelmed
him.
A
few minutes later there was a shuffling of feet in the passage, and the door
was softly opened. A woman came in, holding a light, and she peered curiously
at the figure sitting quite still in the chair before the desk. The woman was
half dressed, and she had let her splendid bronze hair flow down, her cheeks
were flushed, and as she advanced into the shabby room, the lamp she carried
cast quaking shadows on the moldering paper, patched with marks of rising damp,
and hanging in strips from the wet, dripping wall. The blind had not been
drawn, but no light or glimmer of light filtered through the window, for a
great straggling box tree that beat the rain upon the panes shut out even the
night. The woman came softly, and as she bent down over Lucian an argent gleam
shone from her brown eyes, and the little curls upon her neck were like golden
work upon marble. She put her hand to his heart, and looked up, and beckoned to
some one who was waiting by the door.
"Come
in, Joe," she said. "It's just as I thought it would be: 'Death by
misadventure'"; and she held up a little empty bottle of dark blue glass
that was standing on the desk. "He would take it, and I always knew he
would take a drop too much one of these days."
"What's
all those papers that he's got there?"
"Didn't
I tell you? It was crool to see him. He got it into 'is 'ead he could write a
book; he's been at it for the last six months. Look 'ere."
She
spread the neat pile of manuscript broadcast over the desk, and took a sheet at
haphazard. It was all covered with illegible hopeless scribblings; only here
and there it was possible to recognize a word.
"Why,
nobody could read it, if they wanted to."
"It's
all like that. He thought it was beautiful. I used to 'ear him jabbering to
himself about it, dreadful nonsense it was he used to talk. I did my best to
tongue him out of it, but it wasn't any good."
"He must
have been a bit dotty. He's left you everything."
"Yes."
"You'll
have to see about the funeral."
"There'll
be the inquest and all that first."
"You've
got evidence to show he took the stuff."
"Yes,
to be sure I have. The doctor told him he would be certain to do for himself,
and he was found two or three times quite silly in the streets. They had to
drag him away from a house in Halden Road. He was carrying on dreadful, shaking
at the gaite, and calling out it was 'is 'ome and they wouldn't let him in. I
heard Dr. Manning myself tell 'im in this very room that he'd kill 'imself one
of these days. Joe! Aren't you ashamed of yourself. I declare you're quite
rude, and it's almost Sunday too. Bring the light over here, can't you?"
The
man took up the blazing paraffin lamp, and set it on the desk, beside the
scattered heap of that terrible manuscript. The flaring light shone through the
dead eyes into the dying brain, and there was a glow within, as if great
furnace doors were opened.
THE END
