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Title: The willow weaver, and seven other tales

Author: Michael Wood

Release date: November 27, 2023 [eBook #72241]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: E. P. Dutton & Co

Credits: Carol Brown, Aaron Adrignola, Gísli Valgeirsson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WILLOW WEAVER, AND SEVEN OTHER TALES ***



                           THE WILLOW WEAVER
                         AND SEVEN OTHER TALES




                        A LIST OF THE STORIES OF
                              MICHAEL WOOD


  THE HOUSE OF PEACE

  THE DOUBLE ROAD (_shortly_)
                          _Published by_ LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.

  THE SAINT AND THE OUTLAW
    1. THE SAINT AND THE OUTLAW
    2. THE PRINCE AND THE WATER GATES
    3. LOX
    4. THE DREAM GARDEN
    5. THE WAY OF THE HERB GATHERER
    6. THE LAND OF MARVELLOUS NIGHT
    7. THE FOOL AND THE FOLK OF PEACE
    8. THE SINNER’S REQUIEM
    9. THE PREACHER
   10. THE TELLER OF DROLLS
   11. THE TUMULTUOUS SHADOWS
   12. THE GUARDIAN OF THE CITY
   13. THE HOUSE OF HATE

  THE KING PREDESTINATE
    THE KING PREDESTINATE
    THE ALCHEMIST
    THE WORSHIPPER
    THE BUILDER
           _Published by_ THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING
                              SOCIETY.

  THE RIDDLE      _Published by_ REBMAN LTD.

  THE FIRE OF THE ROSE

  THE GARMENT OF GOD

  THE SECRET OF THE CHILD
             _Published by_ THE ST. MÂHEL WORKSHOP.




                                  THE
                             WILLOW WEAVER

                         AND SEVEN OTHER TALES

                                   BY

                              MICHAEL WOOD


                         [Illustration: colophon]


                                NEW YORK
                           E. P. DUTTON & CO.
                                 MCMXVI




                                PREFACE

  “Dost thou feel the soil of thy soul stirred by tender thoughts?
     Disturb it not with speech but let it work in quietness and
     secrecy.”


These few stories of Michael Wood are here reprinted with the consent
but not at the suggestion of the author. To those who understand, the
appeal is diverse but unmistakable; the delicate description of our
Mother Earth, the sense of the invisible, the value of the things that
count, the scorn of a good deal that is conventional, ordinary, and
admitted, are here writ plain for those, who, in the French phrase,
have the seeing ear and the hearing eye. At a time when much that is
ingrained in us is thrown into a crucible of fire, and elemental doubts
and certainties have taken its place, such attempts to pierce through
veils may be welcomed, and with a little book a little appeal is made.

If justification were further needed it is twofold. First, the stories
do not by any means stand alone; and half a dozen names might be quoted
of writers who, to-day, in the short story, persistently turn aside
to listen to the obstinate questionings which will not, for all our
din, be stilled; but secondly, the Editor, to whom the privilege of
collecting these stories has been entrusted, has had for some time the
rare experience of trying them with the living voice on audiences large
and small. The response has never in any case been doubtful, though
it might be difficult or impertinent to analyse such a lifting of
conventional veils. Partly in the hope of passing on an experience like
this, and partly with the wish that Michael Wood’s other published work
might be more widely known, the Editor commends to other story-tellers
these diamonds from a mystic mine.

Thanks are given to the Manager of the _Theosophical Review_ for
permission to reprint the stories in this volume.


  _September 1915._




                             CONTENTS

                                                  PAGE
           THE WILLOW WEAVER                         1

           THE BENDING OF THE TWIG                  25

           THE MYSTERY OF THE SON OF MAN            49

           THE EXCELLENT VERSATILITY OF THE MINOR
             POET                                   64

           “THE TREE OF BEAUTY”                     85

           FORTY-EIGHT HOURS                       102

           THE BREATH UPON THE SLAIN               121

           THE GLAMOUR-LAND                        129




                           THE WILLOW WEAVER


“I shall give you twenty-four hours to vanish in, Campion,” said the
elder and superior to the younger and inferior. “I can’t do more for
you than that. Let me tell you very few men in my position would do as
much.”

He held his finger up impressively.

“It is for the sake of your father that I do this. You ought to be
grateful. Twenty-four hours in which to vanish! Of course you must
carefully choose the method of vanishing. Under the circumstances I
know the way I should take were I in your shoes, but I hesitate to
advise you to take it.”

The last sentence was in the man’s mind, not on his tongue; it produced
the most effect because the whole gist of his speech was contained
in it, and it was the point about which he was (half unconsciously)
anxious. A respectable citizen can hardly suggest to a lad fifteen
years his junior that he shall take his own life; it would be
difficult, though rather easier, to say to a man of equal age, “Under
your circumstances I should blow my brains out”――and Campion was so
young. It might become known, too, that such advice had been given;
then people would question the adviser’s motives, and what would become
of that valuable business asset his respectability; he had foolishly
risked it a little already, but that was not known to people whose
opinion mattered. It would take wing with the soul of the young man,
and his income might even suffer in consequence. Besides he would not
like to remember he had advised suicide as a course of action; of
course it did not matter if he only thought how conveniently it might
smooth the state of affairs.

There were reasons why he did not want this young man, the only child
of a very poor and respectable widow, to stand in the dock and have
all the circumstances which led to his standing there sifted publicly
by a painstaking gentleman intent on obtaining for his client if not
acquittal at any rate as light a sentence as possible. The young
sinner’s immediate superior was not his own master; his employer
was uncompromising and old fashioned in his views. He was a man who
practised no form of dishonesty or immorality that might not be
decently practised by people of honest and moral repute. He would be
hard on Ralph Campion on general business principles, but he would be
much harder on one whose years and standing should be a guarantee for
his good behaviour and influence over others if the conduct of such
an one did not stand the test of public scrutiny. And the personal
element would come in, for this man was not only the employer of
Ralph Campion’s superior but also his father-in-law, and there was
his wife’s attitude to be remembered besides that of her father; all
this might affect his reputation, his business prospects, and his
domestic life very seriously. He felt kindly to Ralph Campion. There
was the whole point. The affair began with the kindly impulse of a
rather coarse man of the world who had “married well” from his point
of view and prospered socially and financially by so doing; prosperous
himself, he saw no prosperity of any type other than that which he
pursued and had pursued since he was Campion’s age. Therefore he was
kindly according to his own lights. His moral code had nothing to do
with his inner convictions; he had no convictions as to the nature of
righteousness. His morality was to “get on,” and it was a tremendous
bulwark against obvious criminality. His twelve-year-old son was
“backward and delicate,” to quote the scholastic advertisements; he
sent him to Ralph Campion’s father for tuition because the little
vicarage stood in a bracing air. He liked and vaguely honoured his
boy’s tutor――irrationally indeed, for he had certainly not “got on”
from the standpoint of the financier. When the man died he obtained for
his son, young Campion, that position of trust which he had betrayed.
The boy was then nineteen; it was three years ago. The patron did
more; still moved by kindliness he took a great deal of notice of
his young subordinate. He liked the lad; he confided in him to some
extent, increasingly so when he found him to be rather silent; he liked
his refinement, at which he laughed――liking it despite his laughter,
as coarse people sometimes do like a quality they do not possess. He
gave him worldly precepts whereby he might in the future prosper in
business. He chaffed him gaily concerning the young ladies of the
neighbourhood, pointing out matrimonial prizes which he might have
some chance of winning. He showed him a side of life he would probably
have passed by unheeded; in so doing (here was the crux) he showed
him a side of his own life that was not generally known. His protégé
became in some respects his tool, in some his victim. He found out that
betrayal of trust before others did so because he knew which man to
suspect, because he knew the circumstances that might cause him to be
specially tempted. The story was rather vulgar――sordid――common. From
coarse kindliness to selfishness, from selfishness by way of fear to
that which was in thought――murder. But yet he liked the boy, and he was
sorry for him.

“You mustn’t suppose I think you a blackguard, Ralph,” he said. “In my
private capacity, not as your business head, you know, we’re as good
friends as ever, my boy. _I_ know how things go, bless your life! I
know how one gets let in for what one never meant to do at the start.
That’s one pull a man has who isn’t always all that I suppose he ought
to be. He knows from his own experience that whatever he may do he has
really heaps of good points; and he applies that reasoning to other
people when they don’t go quite straight, you know. But if you’re here
when Mr. Warrener comes back I shall have you arrested. I must. I don’t
know this now, you understand.”

The young man drew lines in the ashes of the hearth with a small brass
poker. He did not look in the least the sort of person from whom one
would expect a criminal to be made; he had what some people would call
a “nice face”――comely to look upon, refined, rather sensitive, grave;
by no means weak nor yet unintellectual. He looked as though he could
think; he looked as though he could love; and he looked as though he
could be ashamed of himself and admit the fact both to himself and to
other people. These are good signs. He was as white as a sheet, and for
the moment he seemed to be stunned rather than repentant.

“If,” he said slowly, speaking quietly and unemotionally, “if I do not
vanish, but stay here and pay the penalty――I’ve behaved very badly, and
I’m willing to pay it――will you let bygones be bygones――afterwards?”

“Bless my soul, Ralph Campion, you must be a raving ass! It is the
‘penalty’ as you call it, that counts. It is not the thing in itself so
much. I don’t for a moment suppose you to be much worse than most other
young fellows. I should think you’re better than most.”

“I hoped when you’d paid a debt you were given a receipt, and there
was an end of the matter.”

“My good fellow! You’re old enough and you’ve seen enough to know that
things aren’t done that way in this world. I say I don’t think you in
the least a worse, or perhaps a more dishonest man than I am myself;
not the least! But――excuse my bluntness――it’s the prison that sticks,
it’s not the sin.”

The young man gave a little start and shiver; the other’s bluntness
had suddenly brought the whole position, and its future developments,
home to him. It was the difference between theoretic and practical
knowledge; his white face grew green-white, his hands became limp, and
he laid the poker down. These two people sat in the superior’s country
house on the outskirts of a big smoky town. Young Campion was asked
there as a guest in order that his host might tell him he knew him to
be a criminal. The boy――for he was little more than a boy――went there
suffering qualms of conscience bred of gratitude. He knew his host
had not quite the influence on his life that――let us say――Campion’s
father would have wished to have, but he did not think of excusing his
own behaviour on that account. He knew he had been, and was, doing
wrong; it worried him, and he was ashamed of accepting the kindness
which led his superior to ask him to stay with him from Saturday till
Sunday evening. “My wife’s away, staying with her mother,” he said to
Ralph Campion. “I’m alone. You’re looking out of sorts. You’d better
come down to me this afternoon; besides, I’ve something to say to you
quietly.”

So on Sunday afternoon when Campion was feeling particularly ashamed
of himself and very unhappy and perplexed, he said, quietly, what he
had to say, and thereby gave his unsuspecting guest a nervous shock
which some people may think to be accountable for what followed. That
is a matter of opinion, and “thought is free.” As aforesaid, there
were reasons, serious reasons more important than the life, death,
happiness, or pain of young Ralph Campion, why his ill-doing should not
be found out till he was dead and incapable of speech.

It was a damp November day; the land was vivid brown and green――green
fields, wet brown earth, brown stubble, brown rushes by a little
bluish-brown canal, brown-green boughs with bright brown leaves
clinging to them here and there. There had been much rain, the earth
was sodden and reeking; there were black, purplish-grey clouds, shot
with dull green in the East, and a pale silver-yellow sky in the West.
It was early afternoon; the light was clear save where the smoke
wreaths of the town brooded in the distance; there was no sunshine.

Ralph Campion looked at the brown-green earth; he did not see it. For
the last few minutes his mind swung between two pictures; one of a
little wind-swept churchyard where was the grave of an upright man
whose name he bore; the other of a wee grey stone house very bleak
and trim, standing on a shelterless hillside; therein lived his thin
little, meek little old mother, dressed in a scanty black gown and a
widow’s cap, reading her Bible at night and praying to God for her only
son; she did not pray for her husband because he was dead, and she
disliked Popery. At last Ralph Campion’s eyes filled with tears, and he
felt it was time to go. Therefore he rose.

“Very well,” he said, “I don’t feel very grateful; but I should be
so if you could hush it up when I have vanished, so that my――mother
mightn’t know.”

“I shall hush it up if I can.” And no man knew better than he how
sincerely he spoke the truth, and how earnestly he regretted it
would be impossible to do so. There was no need to tell Ralph it was
impossible. “Even if the young idiot were dead it wouldn’t be safe not
to come out,” he thought. “But it would be much safer. If Carry and
her father got to know what had led up to his playing the fool like
this, and how far I’m responsible (though, of course, I’m not really
responsible) there’d be the devil to pay.”

Carry was his wife, who was staying with her mother. Aloud he said:

“I’ve ordered the dog-cart for you. The thing to do will be to say
good-bye cordially, you see. Then I shan’t know anything till this time
to-morrow, when Mr. Warrener comes back.”

“If you don’t mind shaking hands,” said Ralph Campion, listlessly, “of
course I don’t.”

So they shook hands, and the host shouted cheerful and jocular
good-speed after the parting guest. Campion left the cart half way to
the station; he told the groom to drive on and leave his portmanteau
in the cloak-room to be called for. He struck straight across the
sodden fields, and walked townwards. It was ten miles to the town; his
boots were clogged with dank clay when he reached the first houses on
the outskirts. They were hideous little brick boxes in an unmade road
leading nowhere.

Beyond them lay a patch of flat, foul, betrampled, houseless, roadless,
grassless ground. It was an expanse of thick sticky mud; on it stood
pools of dirty water, held by the clay from sinking into the earth;
old bricks (why are ancient broken bricks so peculiarly sordid and
depressing in appearance?) and bent rusty tin cans. Over the whole
brooded a raw, poisonous, yellow-black fog. Across the waste ground
crawled the canal that started in the clean green-brown country; here
it ran between a clammy grassless towing path and a brick wall. “Ran”
is too jocund a word to describe its action. It crept stickily along, a
slimy glaze coating its surface, whereon floated the hairless swollen
body of a drowned rat.

Ralph Campion stood at the side of the black canal, and looked at the
sheer drop of the brick work. This might be a place in which to vanish.
Very few of the words he heard that afternoon lingered with him; but
the thought fashioned by the reputable citizen who wished that he was
dead, pursued him during the ten mile walk, and was with him still. It
was the unspoken words which Campion remembered; he knew as well as
the other the way in which he must disappear. Oddly enough, it never
struck him he might have demanded protection as a price for silence;
he did not realise that family and business complications might be
the result of evidence elicited by cross-examination; simplicity and
generosity clave to him still; perhaps this was why the powers were
sorry for him and dealt with him mercifully. The place was lonely;
it was growing dusk, there were no barges about; the street was but
just finished, the houses were unlet. Only――he could swim. He did not
want to live to face public shame, and loneliness, and bitter remorse;
this was a man who wanted to live an honourable life, and leave an
honourable name. But though he wished to die his body would struggle
for life, and this conviction struck him with fear lest he was not this
body which willed otherwise than he; if so, perhaps he could not kill
himself. Well! if there was hell on the other side, at any rate there
was not prison, and his friends staring at and cutting him. There could
not be superior persons amongst lost souls. The thought was momentarily
cheering.

His body would struggle to live; perhaps poison would be the better
way; but drowning might mean accident or murder, whereas if he bought
poison――――. He took a silk scarf from his pocket and tried to tie his
wrists, but his hands were cold and he was clumsy. He flung his watch,
chain, and purse into the water――when his body was found their absence
would suggest robbery and murder; he kept a little silver loose in his
pocket lest poison should after all prove to be the better way.

Suddenly he noticed what, till now, he had not seen. There was a
tumble-down hut within a few paces of where he stood; coming towards
it was a woman with a huge bundle on her bowed shoulders. As she drew
near he saw she carried willow withies; she was a tall old woman, very
poorly clad; her feet were naked, and in spite of her burden she walked
with a stately step, as lightly as a girl.

This young man was poor, and a criminal to boot, but he was also a
gentleman; when he saw this woman, he, though he was thinking of
his sins, his despair, and his coming death, showed to her, half
mechanically, what all should show at all times, especially to a woman
very old and poor, namely, courtesy and helpfulness.

“Let me carry those to the hut,” he said. “They are surely much too
heavy for you.”

“Take them,” she said briefly. He took them; they were indeed very
heavy. He threw them on the ground by her door.

“You had better enter my hut,” she said gravely.

Now there was no reason why Ralph Campion should enter her hut; in
fact there was every reason why he should not do so. Nevertheless, he
went in. It was not very dark there; by no means so dark as the waning
light warranted it should be. There were willow withies on the floor;
the woman sat on the ground, leaned against the door-post, and began to
weave them.

“Do you weave baskets?” said Ralph Campion.

“I do,” she answered. “By some I am called the Willow-weaver.”

“You weave fast.”

“Naturally. I have had much practice.”

She twisted a bent twig as she spoke.

“That twig is crooked,” said Ralph. His behaviour was irrational, but a
sudden need of hearing human speech had come upon him; and, besides, he
liked her voice, which was soothing, soft and deep, like organ notes in
the distance.

“It is so,” she replied.

“Why don’t you throw it away?”

“I throw nothing away. I suffer no waste. I put all my willow twigs to
use――crooked or straight.”

“But the crooked ones spoil the shape of your basket.”

“It is true. They spoil the shape of the basket. I shall put a straight
one by the side of the crooked. That balances it a little.”

“Still the whole basket is awry.”

“It is so.”

“It is a pity.”

“It is a pity. But it cannot be helped. It will be so till I find
nothing and pluck nothing save straight fair-growing withies.”

“Where do you pick them?”

“From the floating island in the lake.”

“I don’t know it. Where is the lake?”

“There,” she answered. She waved her hand towards the waste ground with
its slimy clay and broken bricks.

“There! Where?”

“There――there――there――my child!” she answered, smiling gravely, and
waving her hand again at the immediate foreground. Campion saw she was
subject to hallucinations. She was probably much alone, and certainly
very poor. He felt impelled to do what was obviously the very last
thing he should have done. He drew out the silk scarf, and his loose
silver.

“I will give you these shillings,” he said, “if you will tie this
tightly round my wrists, and promise, whatever happens, never to tell a
soul you have done it. Indeed, it will probably be the worse for you if
you do tell.”

“I will not take your money,” she replied. “To tell you the truth I
have no use for it. But I will tie the knot you bid me tie. It is thus
with me; the knots with which men charge me to bind them, I can by no
means refuse to fasten, but I cannot undo them.”

“Tie this knot,” he said, with a faint piteous laugh. “And let it
remain tied till I ask you to undo it. But first, since you do not want
it――――”

He flung the silver into the canal.

“Now take my thanks for what you are going to do for me, since you’ll
take nothing else. Here’s the scarf.”

She took it. He crossed his wrists, and held them out. She tied the
scarf loosely, once.

“I am pleased to do you this service,” she said kindly, in her solemn
perfect speech, that seemed unsuited to her poverty and her humble
trade. “Chiefly I am pleased because of the honour which is mine, that
I should take the place of the dweller in that grey small house on the
hill yonder. For, I suppose, were she here, you would beg her, rather
than me, to tie this knot.”

His crossed wrists fell apart; the silk scarf fluttered to the ground.

“My God! No!” he said, shuddering. “What do you mean? Who are you?”

“The Willow-weaver.”

“Do you know her?”

“Of whom do you ask me, my child?”

“My――my mother,” he faltered; and now the tears were in his eyes, his
throat was choking, and he turned his face from her.

“Surely,” she made answer, “I know her well. And because such a mother
as this makes my weaving easier, I, the Willow-weaver, shall be mother
to her son to-night.”

“I do not deserve it,” he muttered.

She did not heed him; she wove apace, seated as before, leaning on the
door-post of the hut. He fell beside her kneeling, and holding out his
hands to her pleadingly:

“Willow-weaver,” he cried. “If you know about her, do you know about
me too? Or must I tell you?”

“Surely,” she said, “I know about you. Child of so many prayers, of
such vain hopes, of so many innocent womanly ambitions never now to be
fulfilled, is it not an evil thing that the loving unwise heart in that
hill cottage should break through you? Is it not an evil thing in the
eyes of a Willow-weaver that one crooked twig should make the whole
weaving awry? Yet these things are so, and may not now be changed.”

She spoke with sober and stern tenderness. He flung himself on the heap
of willow withies, and hid his face from her.

“I know it,” he sobbed. “Do you think you need to tell me that? I was
going to kill myself when you talked to me of my mother. And what more
can I do? What more can I do?”

“You can turn the tide by the waving of your hand,” said she. “You can
stay the flight of the earth through space; or you can kill yourself.
Behold! the one is as possible as either of the others. Will you mend
the broken heart in the hill cottage by the way of the black canal?
Will you wipe out the shame of a soul by the death of a body?”

He moaned, and thrust his fingers through his hair, clutching and
twisting it.

“Be wiser, child,” she said. “My words are harsh, my thought is
gentle towards you. I said I, the Willow-weaver, would be your mother
to-night. What do you see from my hut door, child?”

He raised himself obediently from the withies and told her what he saw.

“And yet there is more to be seen here,” she said. “Because there is
more I spoke to you harshly, pointing out the ill you had wrought.
For I knew that here, even here in this very spot, there is another
country whereof you are native born, and wherein you live. Therefore,
son of that good mother of whom you and I know, lie at peace upon these
withies, cut from the floating island in this lake whereon we look;
I shall sing you a cradle song that you may sleep. When you wake the
Child’s Song shall never wholly leave your ears on this side of that
death you sought but now, and you shall break your heart and brain with
longing after it in vain. This, for the sake of that good mother, is
the Willow-weaver’s mercy to you; and you shall find that men, too,
have mercy on those who hear in broken snatches the Child’s Song.”

The power of the woman was upon him; meek and dazed as a tired babe
he lay upon the twisted withies; he heard the sound of the twigs as
she twisted them in and out in her weaving. He could neither move
nor speak; he wondered dreamily whether he lay in a trance or swoon,
or whether this was death, and thus the problem of his vanishing was
solved without effort of his own. He felt either the light cold touch
of her finger tip or the touch of a willow withy between his brows.
Suddenly, how and when he did not know, he saw that other country of
which the Willow-weaver spake; he had not moved from the spot; he felt
sure his body lay on the willow withies in the hut by the canal. He
knew it lay there with a burden of sin and folly, of ignorance, shame,
and remorse; but they belonged to the place of their brooding, and he,
reaching forth in order that he might know, knew them as apart from
himself, like a school task learned well or ill, with praise or the rod
for its reward. He saw the other country, and this was the fashion of
that which he thought he saw. Whether he saw it as it was is another
matter.

On every side lay the broad shining levels of a lake of silver, he
did not know whether it was water, or silver fire that had no heat,
but was still and cool as the hour before a summer sunrise. He saw no
shores nor any boundary set to it; as far as his eyes, or some other
sense than sight, would suffer him to perceive, the waters lay. From
the lake rose a many-petalled pink blossom; about each petal quivered a
delicate fringe of many-coloured flame, and at the heart of the fiery
flower that sprang from the water’s breast was music. As he saw these
things his life passed into them; or else they were the body of his
life. Thereupon a certain knowledge came to him, but it was knowledge
the man was never able to tell to any one, not even to himself. He
heard a high clear voice singing, so he afterwards remembered, but
whether it was the Cradle Song of the Willow-weaver, or the speech of
the wordless music at the blossom’s heart, he could not tell.

It is my belief (I who tell these things) that the words, and indeed
the whole matter, were by no manner of means such as are here recorded.
He told me the words he heard were something like to these, but he
admitted they were not really like them either in sound or sense. This
is what he crooned in the day that came after, when men said his
mother-wit had been stolen by the Folk of Peace:

    Thou mak’st thy cry to me, thou mak’st thy plea,
    I watch the waters of a changeless sea.
    Upon its breast I mark a shadow fall,
    Wherein a myriad shadows toss and crawl.
    Weep’st thou because their turmoil will not cease,
    O passing ripple on the Lake of Peace?
    I watch the toiling shadows fight and strive,
    I hear the murmur of a Dream-world hive.
    Why is their warfare more to thee than me,
    Thou wave that risest from a boundless sea?
    No shadow-battle stirs the silent breast
    Of the deep waters of the Lake of Rest.
    Where mourning shadows throng the dreary side
    Of the black river’s foul and sluggish tide,
    I see the shining of the Silver Peace,
    I hear its music bid their moaning cease.
    Thy fair is foul to me, thy foul is fair;
    Thy songs are cries, thy joys are pain-fraught care;
    Thy griefs are gladness, and thy woes are gain,
    Thy deaths are jewels in an age-long chain.
    Thy sins but shadows on the waters wide,
    Thy virtues gleams upon the silent tide.

When those twenty-four hours in which Ralph Campion was to vanish were
ended, he came wandering, hatless, over the green-brown fields in the
drenching rain; he was soaked to the skin, but he did not seem to know
this. He asked to see his superior and elder, who was even then in
serious consultation with his father-in-law and employer. When this
man, Mr. Warrener, heard Ralph Campion was there he was glad. He was
a plain dealing person, and he thought when people did wrong and were
found out it was good for them to be punished. His son-in-law on the
other hand was sorry and alarmed.

“Show Mr. Campion in,” said the older of the two men who were
discussing Ralph Campion’s sins. Mr. Campion came in, dripping. He
smiled, greeted his hosts, and tried to explain what had happened
and why he had not vanished. The two listeners looked at each other
silently; to do the younger of the twain justice he seemed to be
shocked and dismayed. There was a pause. The elder laid his hand on
Ralph Campion’s shoulder: “Sit down, Campion,” he said gently. “Sit
down and keep quiet. You’re dripping wet, you know; you’ll be ill, you
must see the doctor. I’ll send for him at once. There’s no need for you
to worry about anything.” Then he drew his son-in-law out of earshot.

“This must be hushed up,” he whispered. “You see what’s happened to
him. He’s off his head. Didn’t you see it yesterday? Where are his
people? They must be sent for, and the doctor too. I’ll telephone to
him at once. Whether this is a cause or an effect I don’t know. Be
charitable and assume the first. Anyway we will say nothing; he’s not
responsible for what he did.”

It was more of a truth than he knew. The other man, white as a sheet,
assented eagerly.

Certain superstitious folk of Celtic blood said that the son of the
sorrowful, patient little old widow who lived with his mother in the
small grey house on the windswept hill above the churchyard, had
wandered in the “gentle places” whence no man ever returns to the
human habitations; only the bodily seeming of such a man comes back;
he is away with the “good people”; at night he dances in their mystic
rings and makes merry with them in the heart of the hills. This, they
said, was the case with Ralph Campion, for he had the look of eternal
childhood on his face and the fairy fire was in his eyes. But they
were wrong; it was with him, as the Willow-weaver said; the Cradle
Song of the Children of the Lake of Peace would not wholly leave his
ears, and because he could not recall nor sing it perfectly he wandered
bewildered, trying vainly to interpret its broken snatches, with
labouring brain and longing, breaking heart.




                        THE BENDING OF THE TWIG


Early in the morning of the hot July day there had been a sea-mist,
and the fog lay on the horizon like a rolled banner gleaming with
ineffable tints of opalescent purple. The glassy sea was purest blue,
save where the shimmering paths of the currents shone silver-white or
where the lap and fret of waves at the cliff foot made the water pink
with Devon earth. The weed on the rocks glowed orange-brown in the
dazzling light, and the dark line of the low-flying shag gave the only
sombre touch to the brilliant hues of land, sea, and sky. The turf
sweet with the breath of wild thyme, and studded with pale yellow rock
rose, crept well-nigh to the water’s edge. Here a hundred years ago
the sea had claimed tribute of the earth, and a big landslip rent the
bosom of the patient mother. Half a mile of cliff had fallen, and in
the chasm thus made, now filled full with greenery and prodigal growth
of fern, bramble, and berry, a long white house stood sun-bathed and
creeper-clad.

A little spring sprang seawards from the cliff, tinkling in a baby
waterfall down grey rocks splashed with orange lichen, and forming in
a small crystal pool ere it ran on to lose itself in the greyish-white
sand of the shore.

By this little pool sat three children: two flaxen-haired girls and a
small dark-haired grey-eyed boy. The girls lay on the ground; their
chins resting on their clasped hands, their eyes round, blue, and
awestruck. The boy knelt stiffly on the verge of the pool, his eyes
looking straight out over the sea, his hands linked behind his head.
He was a slim little child with a small pale face, delicate irregular
features, and long-lashed grey eyes.

“They came up,” he was saying, “up the little path that comes from the
shore. They left their boats on the beach. They broke down our doors,
making a great noise. The doors fell down; I heard them fall; I could
hear the others shrieking as the men killed them. I was painting, you
know; I painted coloured letters round a face which was in the middle.
I drew the face myself; it was a white face with gold all round it. The
men broke into my room and killed an old man who was there with me. I
stood with my back against the wall. I put out my hands, so; I had no
sword, and――and――then they killed me....”

The child broke off abruptly; he gasped, threw himself face downwards
on the turf sobbing either with grief or excitement. The audience drew
a long breath. Never――never――never――in all the annals of the nursery
had even the most gifted grown-up person told them such tales as did
this, their small orphan cousin.

“What’s the matter now,” said a man’s voice. “Quarrelling? Dennis, why
are you crying?”

Three people had unheard approached the little group; a man, a young
girl, and a boy. The man and boy were sufficiently alike to be easily
recognisable as father and son. The boy was seventeen or eighteen years
old; handsome, vigorous, and graceful. He carried a gun; he had been
shooting rabbits on the cliffs, and two little helpless brown bodies
dangled from his left hand. The man was past middle age, but time alone
had not carved the straight, severe lines about his mouth, nor made
his eyes so cold. That was the work of temperament; the comely lad
beside him would never have such lips and eyes, though the tinting and
moulding of the two faces were very much the same.

The crying child scrambled to his feet blushing and half laughing;
his grief had not been very deeply rooted. The youngest girl clinging
to her father’s hand cried out eagerly in praise of the tale; “Dennis
tells us such lovely stories, daddy.”

The boy with the gun threw the rabbits on the grass. “Kitty’s quite
right,” he said. “They’re ripping. I can’t think how he gets hold of
them. He says they’re true.” “He says they happened to him,” broke in
the enthusiastic auditor. “And he tells us what he sees too. O Dennis,
tell them about the little men you saw in the mist this morning.”

The dark brows of the elder listener drew together.

“Look here, Dennis,” he said shortly, “if you prefer to tell stories to
the girls rather than go rabbiting with the boys”――there was a little
touch of contempt in the voice――“of course there’s no harm in that; but
you must not say what is untrue.”

“But it is true,” said the child eagerly. “It is true, Uncle Hugh. That
did happen to me; it did really. It was a grey house by the sea, and
they killed me in the room where I was painting.”

“Take care, Dennis. When did this happen, may I ask?”

“I――I don’t know, Uncle Hugh.”

“Nor any one else. Did you tell the girls it was true?”

“It is true,” said Dennis, beginning to pant and rock from heel to toe
and back again. “It is quite true.”

“It is, is it? And you see little men in the mist, eh?”

“I did this morning.”

“And he sees pictures in the water,” broke in one of the listening
children.

“Do you see pictures in the water, Dennis?”

“Yes, sometimes.”

“In that water for instance? Look and see.”

The child knelt down and stared into the pool.

“I don’t”――he began after a pause. “Yes. I do, yes I do, I see a little
house and a cornfield and a――O, there it’s gone!”

The man laid his finger-tips lightly on the child’s shoulder. “Get up
and listen to me,” he said gravely. Dennis rose; the touch had not been
at all rough; on the contrary it was very gentle, and the voice was
quiet, but there was a sense of danger in the air; an ominous thrill;
and the child’s eyes, why he knew not, grew slightly frightened.

“What you have just said is a lie,” said his elder very distinctly,
“and you know that just as well as I do; you are very young yet, and
I don’t want to be hard on you. If you confess that you told a lie, I
won’t say any more about it, unless you do it again. Come.”

“But――I can’t. It wasn’t a lie.”

“Take care now. Tell me you said what wasn’t true and are sorry; and
then run into tea and forget about it.”

The child began to tremble. “But I can’t――it wasn’t――indeed――it――O
dear, O dear!”

“I tell you I don’t want to be hard upon you. I mean to be, and I hope
I always am, perfectly just. I shall ask you three times whether your
stories are true. If you say no――well and good. If you persist in
saying yes, you’ll――take the consequences, that’s all. I shall ask you
this question every day till I make you speak the truth.”

Things were now looking very serious. The little girls were struck
with awe. The young girl and the lad exchanged glances and strove to
extenuate the crime of Dennis.

“O please, Mr. March,” said the girl softly, “he’s so very little and
he’s imaginative, you know.”

“He’s dotty, poor little chap,” said the boy cheerily. “He means no
harm, dad. He’ll be all right when he goes to school. Let him off this
once.”

“He has the matter in his own hands. Now then, Dennis, are these tales
of yours true?”

“Yes,” faltered the quivering lips.

“Once more, are they true?”

“They are true! they are true! What shall I do? If you kill me, they’re
true.”

“I’m not at all likely to kill you, but I mean to cure you of lying.
It’s obstinacy; for you must know you’ve told lies. Are these things
true?”

“Y――ye――I mean――I think so,” hedged poor Dennis desperately.

“Go into the house,” said the man with a push. “You’ve brought it on
yourself, and it serves you right.”

Consolatory reflection. The child slunk into the house crying bitterly.
The girl attempted further intercession.

“It’s no good, Kate,” said the man angrily. “I’m shocked at the
child’s obstinacy. He has told a gratuitous falsehood, and he must, as
I said, take the consequences.”

So Dennis took the consequences, and woke up at night shrieking with
nightmare as their direct result. Daily the same question was put to
him, and received the same answer which produced the same pains and
penalties, save that they grew a little more grievous daily because of
the increasing blackness of his sin. Dennis went about with a white
face and silent tongue; his eyes were red and swollen, and there were
purple rings under them. At last on the fifth day the child breaking
down confessed himself to be a wilful and egregious perverter of the
truth.

“Why couldn’t you have said that before?” said Hugh March. “Now speak
the truth in future, there’s a good boy.”

Dennis promised that he certainly would do so, and went away to cry
over his first lie. He knew that lying was a grievous sin; and the
preacher under whom the March family “sat” predicted a fiery doom for
sinners. Dennis cried over his probable damnation; but the undying
worm and quenchless fire of a vengeful God were far away, whereas Hugh
March’s birch was horribly near; so Dennis risked eternity for the
sake of comparative well-being in time.

It must not be supposed that March was the typical wicked uncle
of nursery tales; he was sincerely anxious to be kind to his dead
brother’s little boy. The “queerness” of Dennis was a source of
concerned perplexity to his guardian. Perry, his own son, whom he
idolised, was an athlete rather than a scholar, and March was glad of
the fact; nevertheless he would have been satisfied with his fragile
non-athletic nephew if he had shown signs of studiousness; but the
child was not clever; he was backward, lazy, and dreamy; his only
talents were a gift for drawing and an eye for colour effects, which
were “mere accomplishments” in the eyes of his uncle. Dennis had no
other gifts unless his stories presaged a future novelist.

Dennis, on his side, was stunned and terrified by his uncle’s treatment
of his powers of vision. His Irish mother, like her son, possessed “the
sight,” and she had treated his visions as simple facts, which were
by no means extraordinary; hence the child was not vain of the gift,
nor did he dream of boasting of or colouring his visions. When his
mother died and he came to live with his uncle and cousins, he came
simply and confidingly as to friends; unsuspicious of the possibility
of harshness, inexperienced in aught save tenderness. To be suddenly
denounced as an obstinate liar, to be flogged because he saw things
which his cousins did not see, not only terrified but stupefied him.
He relapsed into bewildered silence, and bent all his small powers of
deception to conceal his power of vision.

Hitherto “the sight” had been spasmodic; but either from some influence
of climate or because of his nervous tension it now became almost
unintermittent; he saw very often, and the strain of concealment
troubled him. The visions were in a measure consolatory; that which he
saw did not frighten him, and he lived in a world of sound, colour, and
light, which was unshared by his companions. The child was very lonely,
for he feared to talk much lest he should betray himself; nevertheless
he became gradually aware of the fact that he had one staunch and
kindly friend. This was his cousin Perry.

Perry was a good humoured, genial and sympathetic soul; his very
superabundant vigour and strength gave him a chivalrous sense of
pitiful protection towards the poor little frightened nervous child.

Once at a picnic on the Head, Dennis began to watch some little folk
who were unseen by the others. Suddenly he became aware that Perry was
watching him with puzzled eyes and knitted brows. Dennis started, his
vision vanished, and he lay quivering with fear lest Perry should ask
him what he had been looking at with such interest. But Perry did not
ask; he smiled at his little cousin, and turned his eyes away.

After the picnic that night a party sat on the verandah and told
ghost stories of a grisly nature. Dennis grew frightened, the “other
world” was real to him; this grim aspect of it was terrible. He did
not understand the things he saw, and the dread of seeing the horrors
described in the tales fell upon him. The nervous system of a sensitive
child is a delicate instrument, though it is sometimes the custom to
treat it as though it were constructed of equal parts of whalebone,
steel, and cast-iron. The stream of tales ran dry.

“What’s become of all your fine stories, Dennis?” said one of the
circle mockingly; one who knew of the little tragedy enacted a month
ago. “I’m afraid I’ve spoilt the flow of Dennis’s genius,” said March,
and the laugh rippled round the circle at the expense of the young
seer. Is this world so purely joyous that we should forget our heavenly
heritage if our brethren did not try now and then to give us a little
pain, even though it be a tongue stab to make us less contented with
our earthly bliss? It would seem that there be many who think so. Perry
put forth an arm in the darkness and laid it round the child’s neck.

“That’s a beastly shame,” he said to the first speaker.

They were only four homely schoolboy words; it was only the touch of a
strong kindly young arm, but they drew forth a disproportionate flood
of adoring gratitude from the child’s sensitive heart. Therefore when
he went to bed that night he ventured to ask a favour of Perry. In
Dennis’s room there was an unpleasant-looking green and yellow curtain,
which had a reprehensible habit of swaying when there was not any wind.
Ghost stories had made that curtain a thing of horror to Dennis; he
feared it would draw back very slowly one of these days, and he should
see some hideous object gibbering behind it――a class of vision of which
he had formerly never dreamed. He once asked whether the curtain might
be taken away: but as he could assign no reason for his request he was
told “not to be silly,” and the curtain, like the poor, remained with
him always. Alas! for the dumb terrors, the helpless inarticulateness
of the soul of a young misunderstood child.

To-night he took courage.

“Perry,” he said, “won’t you come and stay with me till I’m asleep?”

Since the five days’ holy war which March had waged with Dennis the
child had stammered slightly; it was a pathetic little falter of
the tongue and Perry felt vaguely touched by it. He looked at him
questioningly. At last he said:

“Why? Well, never mind. Right you are.”

He entered the room whistling, and by some instinct drew the green and
yellow curtain back. Dennis undressed and slipped into bed. Perry knelt
down, put his arm over the child and spoke kindly:

“You’re not very happy here, Den,” he said; “what’s the matter with
you?”

Dennis bit his lip and closed his eyes; at last by dint of coaxing
Perry arrived at the fact that Dennis was mourning over the sin of
deceit.

“That wasn’t much,” said Perry immorally but cheerfully.

He hesitated, then he said in a whisper:

“I say, Denny, which was the lie, eh?”

He felt the slender body beneath his arm start, quiver, and grow
unnaturally still.

“Was it a lie that you saw those things or that you didn’t see them,
which?”

“Th-that I saw th-them.”

There was a pause. Then Perry said gently:

“Poor little chap; it’s a shame. All right old man. Go to sleep; I’ll
stay with you.”

To himself he said: “Who’s to blame for that lie, Den or the dad?”

The holidays were nearly over; Perry was about to return for his last
term to Harrow and Dennis was going for his first term to a preparatory
school. Before his final departure Perry was going to walk fifteen
miles in order to stay for a couple of days with some friends. A week
before this visit there was a farewell picnic at the Head. It was
a lovely day and the sea was blue and calm. Perry was on the cliff
building the fire for the picnic tea; Dennis was on the rocks below.
Then he turned and ran; he rushed up the cliff path sobbing out that
there was a drowned man in the water below. Of course March, Perry,
and three or four young men ran to the shore only to see the water
rippling peacefully in and the brown weed swaying with the lazy tide.

March shouted to the child on the cliff:

“Come here.”

Dennis obeyed him shuddering still.

“There’s no drowned man here,” said March sternly. “Why did you say
there was?”

The child caught his breath with a jerk and his face grew white as
ashes. The thing he so dreaded had come; he had betrayed himself. He
glanced imploringly at his only hope――Perry, and his lip quivered.

“It was the weed he saw,” said Perry. “He’s always fanciful and nervous
you know.”

“Nonsense,” said March. “These are his old tricks. I thought I’d cured
you of this, Dennis.”

He left the shore with an angry glance at the child.

Dennis began to cry, and Perry laid a hand on his shoulder. Dennis
clutched his arm.

“O Perry,” he wailed, “do go to him. Do speak to him. Do tell him I’m
sorry. I’d n-never have said what I saw if I hadn’t thought everyb-body
could see it t-too.”

“I thought so,” said Perry under his breath; “you do see these things
and you pretend you don’t for fear of a licking.”

“Don’t tell. Please don’t tell; dear Perry, d-don’t tell.”

“All right, don’t cry. I’ll speak to the governor.”

But Perry spoke in vain. March was an obstinate thick-headed man, and
he was very angry indeed. The vials of his righteous wrath descended on
the luckless seer, who was utterly broken and unnerved in consequence.
Perry also was very angry though not with the helpless little victim
of March’s dull wits. When three days after the child’s punishment a
drowned sailor was actually washed up at the Head, Perry boldly avowed
his belief in the visions of Dennis. March was as angry with Perry as
it was possible for him to be with his idolised only son. He made many
acute and scathing remarks about ignorance, superstition, and naughty,
lying, hysterical children whose imagination and hysteria must be
crushed with the strong hand of authority.

Perry went away in a very bad temper, and Dennis remained behind in
such a state of abject terror that he hardly dared to grasp his coffee
cup when it was offered to him at the breakfast table lest it should
prove to be an elusive and unshared vision.

On the evening of Perry’s departure Dennis stood at the door of his
uncle’s study trying to make up his mind to go in. Like many men who
never read anything save the daily paper March had a “study.” At last
Dennis went in. March who was writing a letter looked up:

“Well, Dennis, what is it?”

“H-have you heard from Perry, Uncle?” stammered the child.

“Heard from Perry! The boy’s daft. He only left this morning.”

“O,” said Dennis nervously, “y-yes, so he did; I f-forgot.”

And he crept out again like a frightened mouse.

The next morning a telegram arrived for Perry which his father opened;
it was from the friends with whom he was supposed to be staying asking
the reason of his non-arrival; Perry was going over to play in a
cricket match; hence their agitation. March rode over to them at once.
Perry had not arrived; inquiries on the road gained no tidings of him.
Search was made for him throughout that day and through the night and
through the next day and still there was no news of Perry.

For the first time in his life March was shaken to the finest fibre
of his soul. His son was the apple of his eye, the best beloved of
all his children. He felt a tremor of the nerves which he would have
called weakness and affectation in another. When on the third night the
searchers returned with no tidings of the young man, March went to his
room with a grey-hued face and eyes that were glazed with agony and
suspense. He sat at his table and bowed his head upon it. He tried to
pray――March was a somewhat conventionally religious man――but he could
only groan. In the room above where was the green and yellow curtain
the child knelt by the side of the bed shaking from head to foot, the
drops of agony standing on his forehead. The soul which was so much
older than the little body was wrestling in the throes of a complex
passion of love and personal cowardly dread; the poor little ten-year
old body could scarcely support the strain.

In the afternoon, two hours after Perry had left, Dennis knelt by the
little pool and chanced to look therein. Before his eyes a picture
grew. It was Perry stunned and lifeless lying in a hollow, the mouth
of which was hidden by elder bushes with their luscious black berries.
It was a narrow rocky crevasse formed by the rending slipping land.
Everything about the picture was very clear; on the hill above the
hollow was an old pine tree twisted into a strange shape; there was a
bent bough on it on which a human form dangled――a dead man hanged by
the neck to the bent tree. This was the vision that had driven Dennis
to his uncle’s room; since then the picture appeared to him again and
yet again. Sometimes the hanged man was not there, but the scene was
always the same point for point. Even now as he knelt it formed itself
between him and the green and yellow curtain.

The child sobbed and twisted his fingers in his hair. In his ears rang
the stern words: “If I hear a whisper of this again I shall write very
strongly to Mr. Brownlow and warn him of your untruthfulness.”

Mr. Brownlow was Dennis’s future schoolmaster and poor Dennis pictured
himself as being pilloried and held up for execration before a whole
community of youthful devotees of truth. But then there was Perry.
Perry had been kind to him; Perry had banished the terrors of the
green and yellow curtain; had tried to screen him from wrath. If
only some one else could see! His Highland nurse had told him “the
sight” was God’s gift. If only He would give that gift to some one
else; to some one who would not be punished and scolded because of
his possession. Dennis had prayed on this subject with a child’s
unreasoning and sometimes unreasonable faith, and now he once more
extended his clasped hands and sobbed into the darkness:

“O do-do-do make some one else see instead of me.”

But no one else saw, and the burden, responsibility, and terror of a
gift, whatsoever be its nature, lay heavily on the slender shoulders
of Dennis. Therefore the end was inevitable. All strong powers lie
upon the men who possess them like mighty compelling forces unless
the man be stronger than the gift. To Dennis and to no other was the
vision; as he closed his streaming eyes it slowly formed itself once
more. He staggered to his feet and made for the room below; the force
was stronger than he, or else he was stronger than his weak nerves
and trembling body. Though March should beat him within an inch of
his fragile life he must tell that which he saw. He did not hesitate
now; he opened the door and went straight in. March raised his head,
started, and stood up.

“Dennis! Bless my soul, child, what are you doing at this hour? Not
undressed. Are you ill.”

“Uncle Hugh,” said Dennis, steadying himself by the table edge, “I――I
know where Perry is. At least I think so.”

“You know where Perry is. What do you mean?”

The child began to describe the place of his vision and March listened
with growing interest and excitement; when Dennis spoke of the pine and
the dangling figure he sprang up:

“It’s the highwayman’s pine,” he almost shouted; “they say a man was
hanged there a hundred years ago. But I’ll take my oath you’ve never
been there. How do you know the place?”

“I s-saw it,” faltered Dennis, and having thus betrayed his evil-doing
he swung forward and fainted. When he recovered he was lying on a sofa
and March was pouring water on his face.

“Lie still,” he said kindly. “Don’t be frightened. You must have been
dreaming, you know. I――I think I’ll go to this place you dreamed of. It
is superstition, of course, but er――er――――”

March called a maid to tend the child; then he summoned the men who had
been searching through the day and led them on another quest. This time
they found the missing lad. He was insensible and his leg was broken.

The next day the doctor spoke gravely of the condition of his patient.
“I am very much afraid his condition is serious,” he said. “If he had
been cared for at once recovery would have been quite certain; but he
has been lying there half-stunned and without food, drink, or care four
days and nights.”

March did not speak; possessed by a sudden thought he sought his nephew.

“Dennis, child,” he said, “when did you first see the place where we
found Perry?”

“The day he left.”

“Why didn’t you tell me at once what you saw? Perry’s very ill from
lying there four days.”

“I’m sorry,” murmured Dennis, “I――I thought you’d, you’d――――”

“You thought I should be angry?”

“Y-yes, I was afraid.”

He did not know how innocently he avenged himself and paid off old
scores. March was silent for a minute, then he said in a low voice:
“It’s just. It’s my own fault.”

He stooped and took the child’s face gently between his hands, kissed
his forehead and went out alone to wrestle with his pain and anxiety.

       *       *       *       *       *

As this tale began so it ends at the pool in the landslip. Perry lay
beside the stream apparently none the worse for his fall of the year
before. Dennis sitting cross-legged beside the little rock basin
watched the water. March was talking with his son; following the
direction of Perry’s smiling eyes he saw Dennis. Dennis’s pictures were
less frequent now and his “stories” were less marvellous. The press of
outer interest which crowded in was doing its work. March looked at the
boy as he rose and stood beside him and laid his hand on his head:

“Seeing pictures?” he asked with a half-mocking laugh. March’s position
was a very illogical one and he was semi-conscious of the fact. The
child looked up and nodded.

“What nonsense,” said March, “it’s all fancy. If there was anything to
see why shouldn’t I see it?”

“Come, father,” said Perry laughing, “why can’t I tell ‘Rule Britannia’
from ‘God save the King?’”

“Nonsense! I tell you it’s a rampant medieval superstition that’s got
hold of you. As for Denny he’s a little donkey.”

But he laughed and pulled the boy’s hair with a gentle hand; which
seems to prove that one is not necessarily incapable of learning even
after one has “come to forty years.”


_Note._――This story is founded on fact. That is to say, although it is
mine as regards characters and incidents, the _motif_, the clairvoyance
of the child, is true. The drastic methods which were employed for the
repression of the gifts of the luckless little seer are also facts, and
that is the reason I wrote the story.




                         THE MYSTERY OF THE SON
                                 OF MAN

    Lord God of Glory, Pow’r of Perfect Light,
    Look on Thy little children of the wild,
    In whose frail souls the Son of Man is born
    Thine is the pow’r of pain and anguish, Lord,
    Thine is the chrysm of the agony,
    The bitter wisdom born within the soul
    That knows the sorrow of sin’s piteous load.
    Father in Heaven, blessed be the hour
    When in the beast-soul rises the sad voice
    Of human shame, crying: “I will arise,
    And seek my Father’s feet, and mourn my sin.”
    Blessed the hour when the dread scourge of pain
    Is gladly borne by some poor tortur’d soul,
    Because it sees its foulness before Thee
    By the white light of Christ, Who dwells within
    The outrag’d temple of humanity.


There was wrath and distress in the House of the Cold Strand by reason
of the sin of Brother Gorlois. He was the child of the Holy House,
taken into the pious nurture of the brethren, from the dead breast of
his murdered mother, a heathen woman, found by Brother Pacificus lying
dead in the undergrowth of the great forest nigh the House of the Cold
Strand. The pious company of Christian monks, who had built their
house of prayer in that land, baptised the babe, and reared him by
the precepts of Solomon, by the rule of their House, and by the wisdom
which flowed from their hearts. And when the Brother Gorlois was twelve
years old he entered his noviciate, and when he was fifteen he took
upon him the vows of a monk, namely, the vows of poverty, chastity, and
obedience. He had little wit, and was not studious; nor was he called
to the way of contemplation, but he was strong, and waxed mighty of
muscle. As he grew to manhood the good gift of comeliness was bestowed
upon him by the Hand of God, and the thick crisp waves of his curly
yellow hair rose up like billows around his head.

He liked to trap and fish for the Holy House, but when the glee of
sport was passed he was lazy and loved to sleep. He gave the first
occasion for scandal during a fast of twice forty days, wherein the
brethren ate no flesh. This Brother Gorlois, stealing forth on the
eighth day, slew a coney, and was taken in the wood, having built a
fire in order that he might cook and devour it to the gratification of
his body, and the peril of his soul; moreover, he lied concerning his
sin, scandalously, and indeed foolishly, for it was manifest to the
simplest, and denial was vain.

The second scandal was when the Brother Gorlois was found in the
refectory drunk with wine; for this offence he did penance, being
scourged, and sorely rebuked by the brethren. But the third and
most grievous scandal was when he was taken in the forest with the
swineherd’s daughter; whereupon the brethren placed him in ward, whilst
they debated whether or no a monk who had broken his vows to the shame
of his House, should not lie within a narrow cell, the entrance whereof
should be securely barred by mortised stones, that soul and body might
part slowly in the terrors of a death by hunger and by thirst. Such was
the fate adjudged to Brother Gorlois, who was then but a young man of
twenty years, and he was brought forth, bound, to hear the same.

The Brother Gorlois was, as aforesaid, young and lusty, comely and
of great stature; he looked sullen, but he was less fearful and less
ashamed than might have been expected. God had granted to him vigorous
youth, health, and a person as goodly to behold as those He had given
to the great stags on the moor, and the mighty milk-white bulls which
crashed through the forest, leading a drove of their kind; but He in
His Wisdom had not yet given to Brother Gorlois the blessing (or
curse) of a lively power of imagery, and a sensitive memory.

Still he had been taken, as he knew, in what the brethren denounced as
sin, and he knew they were so made that they visited sin by fasting,
and by the scourge, to the Brother Gorlois’ great dis-ease; for he
loved food, and he esteemed the scourge to be a needless discomfort.
Therefore he looked very sulky, and stood gazing upon his feet, and
wishing vaguely that his arms were free.

Then he who was Head of the lonely little House of the Cold Strand
rose to pronounce the doom of Brother Gorlois, when the aged Brother
Pacificus uplifted his voice. It was the Brother Pacificus who had
found Brother Gorlois a young babe upon the dead breast of the
half-savage heathen woman, his mother.

Brother Pacificus was very old, and a reputed seer; esteemed as a saint
was he; twenty years had he travelled over Europe carrying the Gospel
of the Christ among heathen people; founding many a Holy House, but
never taking the Headship of any; thirty years lived he as a hermit,
supplicating God for the world; ten years he had dwelt at the House
of the Cold Strand, speaking little and praying much; but during the
last year he spoke more frequently and more freely, and the Head of the
House of the Cold Strand consulted him reverently as his soul-friend,
what though in that House he was his superior in religion.

“It is in my mind, holy father,” said Brother Pacificus, “that we have
sinned greatly against our Brother Gorlois, and owe him amends.”

“Speak thy mind, my brother, therefore,” said he who was the Head of
the House. “Make plain to us wherein we have sinned, and he shall live.”

“My father,” said the Brother Pacificus, “this, our young brother, so
lusty in his youth, is not bound by his vows, seeing that in truth he
took them not upon him.”

“Who then took them, venerable brother?”

“Verily, that did we,” said Brother Pacificus; “for we knew their
meaning, our Brother Gorlois did not so. He, obeying babe-like those
who nurtured him, uttered words of which his heart knew not the
meaning. For it is written that once a man of God made a religious
house in the wilderness and bound by vows Brother Fox, binding him to
a religious life, and to eat no flesh; the which vow he broke, adding
to this offence the sin of theft, for so mightily desired he to eat
flesh that he ate the leathern shoe-straps of his superior in religion,
namely, the holy saint; whereupon the holy man rebuked him for conduct
unbefitting a monk, when it was revealed to him that no vow can make
a religious of a beast of the field; the blame is his who bindeth a
little brother by a harsh rule against which the nature which God hath
given constraineth him. Wherefore let our Brother Gorlois abide with
us in peace, doing such tasks as his youth and great thews and sinews
make very fitting for him; but do not bind him to eat no flesh, nor
drink wine, nor even forbid him to seek the love of a maid, for to
these things the youth’s nature mightily constraineth him; nor doth
he perceive in any measure the beauty of holiness, nor desireth he to
enter into the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven. Behold! he is no monk;
though his lips spake vow on vow, God would not register them in Heaven
as we foolish men do on earth; this Brother Gorlois is but a lad, and
in his heart a heathen, like the woman who bore him. Nevertheless he is
the child of our House. His hour is not yet. Spare him, my father, and
let us not――we who follow Him who bade the woman go unhurt and sin no
more――give our child to a cruel death. For we took him in God’s name,
and in the Power of that Name shall he dwell amongst us unhurt and
forgiven.”

Now no other voice in the Holy House would have been heard on behalf
of Brother Gorlois save only that of Brother Pacificus. But to his
voice the brethren listened with heed, and now his counsel prevailed,
and they spared the Brother Gorlois, and absolved him from his vows,
bidding him remain in the House of the Cold Strand, doing such work
as his youth and strength rendered fitting for him. Thus then Brother
Gorlois was pardoned by the holy father who ruled the brethren. This
holy father was a man of great zeal, and jealous for the fair repute of
the House, and often he mourned to Brother Pacificus because the soul
of the House was barren, and he knew not by what means the brethren
could make thereof a mightier power in the Hand of the Lord. But
Brother Pacificus said:

“The soul of a Holy House, my father, is like unto the Kingdom of God;
it cometh not with observation. It is from the beginning, and to hold
this diligently in our minds in all that is possible for us to do in
this matter. Let us then act as our nature constraineth us, under the
guidance of the Lord, remembering all natures are rooted in Him, and
it may ofttimes be our duty to suffer gladly, as His servant, one who
sorely opposes us; now this is hard for the natural man, but the Lord
from Heaven useth the one and the other for His service according to
the measure of their gifts, asking not wit from him who lacketh, nor
clerkly lore from the simple, nor the power of the spirit from him who
is yet a babe in Christ. Nor can we expect to know the subtle workings
of our brethren’s souls, and though it be our duty to dwell in sympathy
with them when we may, yet ofttimes it is our duty sweetly to resign
ourselves to dwell in ignorance of them. But the soul of a House of
Prayer is born from above, not from below, and this, meseemeth, is the
meaning of that Scripture which saith a man by taking thought can add
not a cubit to his stature.”

It was summer time when the sin of Brother Gorlois was judged by the
brethren; the following winter was very cold, and the Brother Pacificus
grew feebler. When the spring came he was very infirm; he slept little,
and it grew a custom that a brother should watch beside him to
minister to him in the night. On a moonlit night of May Brother Gorlois
was bidden to keep vigil by the old man’s side. Brother Pacificus slept
lightly during the first watch of the night. Brother Gorlois rose up
gently and looked from the little unglazed casement upon the forest.
It was a warm night, the glamour of the moon lay on the great silent
glades. Brother Gorlois felt restless, and upon him was a desire to
rove the forest. The oaks were in leaf, the smell of bluebells filled
the air, the fierce life of night and springtide was pulsing apace
through the dim sweet land; it was a night when all the beasts of the
forest did roam, seeking their bread from God.

Brother Gorlois leaned out, and smelled the night air and the earth;
then he drew back and sat by the old monk.

Something flew through the casement and hit Brother Gorlois on his
broad chest; it was a bunch of bluebells. Brother Gorlois looked out
once more. Below the window was the swineherd’s daughter; the night
was sultry, and her smock was open by reason of the heat; her skirt
was made of the stitched skins of beasts; about her neck was a garland
of blue flowers of the wood, swaying rope-like about her throat. When
she saw Brother Gorlois she laughed loudly and fled, but as she fled
she looked back. Then Brother Gorlois leaped from the window. When she
heard the beat of his feet behind her she ran faster; nevertheless, as
she ran she dragged the bluebells from about her throat and flung them
earth-wards to mark the way by which she went. Soon the thicket hid
her, and Brother Gorlois, flying in pursuit, was hidden too.

A little while after the flight of Brother Gorlois, the Brother
Pacificus stirred.

“My son,” he said faintly, “give me to drink, I pray thee.”

No one answered, and the old man murmured:

“He is young, he sleeps.”

He sighed, for his mouth was very parched and dry. After a while he
said again:

“My son, sleepest thou? Wake, I pray thee.”

But no one answered, and he said:

“My voice is weak, and the sleep of youth is heavy. O Lord, Thy chosen
slept in the hour of Thy agony; how didst Thou thirst, O Master, and
there was none to succour Thee, save with the bitter vinegar and gall!”

After a while the old monk’s thirst grew grievous, and he strove,
slowly and tremulously, to raise his aged limbs.

“It is but a little way to yonder jug,” he murmured, “I am a selfish
old man; the lad is tired with toil. I will seek the water for myself.”

He rose slowly, groped a pace or two, stumbled, and fell to the
floor of his cell. He lay there, moaning a little now and then, and
shivering. Thus did he lie during two hours of the night; and thus
Brother Gorlois found him when he slunk back, just as day broke. In
great terror he called the brethren, praying God that the old man
had not known his absence, or at least would be speechless till the
end. But Brother Pacificus, though all might see his death was near,
recovered speech and clearness of mind, and received the last rites of
the Church. Then said he:

“My brethren, ye are weary. Leave me to await the coming of my Lord and
Master. I shall die this night when midnight strikes. Wherefore at that
hour go ye to the chapel, and speed my soul with songs of holy joy; and
leave with me, I pray you, Brother Gorlois.”

Then they obeyed, weeping; but the Head said:

“Dare we trust thee, beloved brother, with this youth?” and sternly he
said to Brother Gorlois:

“Slept ye not, nor had left our holy brother when this sickness
increased upon him?”

Then Brother Gorlois lied; and Brother Pacificus smiled very tenderly
upon him and said:

“Nay, ye shall leave me, my father, with the babe I found.”

When the brethren were gone, Brother Pacificus said:

“Come near to me, my child, and lift me in thy arms, for I breathe
hardly.”

Brother Gorlois obeyed, and Brother Pacificus said:

“Wherefore left ye me, my son and little brother? The pain was sore as
I lay yonder; and that ye might have spared me. But in truth I sinned
in lack of patience; nevertheless, the thirst which was upon me was
great when I strove to fetch the water, that I might drink a little to
cool my tongue.”

The old man spoke very feebly, a word or two and then a long pause;
but when he had spoken Brother Gorlois knew Brother Pacificus had
perceived his absence. He said no word, but hung his head. He
perceived there was no fear that Brother Pacificus would betray him.
And yet he hung his head; there grew up about his heart a feeling new
and strange, and he felt very wroth with the swineherd’s brown daughter.

“See thy penance, child,” said Brother Pacificus. “Hold me in thy arms;
thus I breathe more freely.”

Brother Gorlois said nothing, not even when the cramp in his arms grew
great.

The old man fell into a stupor; but sometimes he wandered a little. He
would moan and say:

“My son――Gorlois――my son――where are thou?”

Sometimes he would say:

“I thirst――alone――Thou, Lord, wast left――――”

And Brother Gorlois, albeit dull of wit, saw he was living through the
pain and loneliness of the past night. Brother Gorlois did not ask the
old monk’s pardon; he did not know he wanted him to forgive; he knew
his heart felt heavy; he began to wish the Head might find out what he
had done, and have him flogged; and he felt more and more wroth with
the swineherd’s daughter, who was the cause of his discomfort.

In the chapel the brethren began to sing, Brother Pacificus could not
hear them. The hour of midnight was near.

    Dies iræ, dies illa,
    Solvet sæclum in favilla,
    Teste David cum Sybilla.

Brother Pacificus waxed heavier in the strong arms of his “little
brother;” his breathing grew slower, and more slow.

    Rex tremendæ majestatis,
    Qui salvandos salvas gratis,
    Salva me, fons pietatis.

Brother Pacificus shuddered once with a great shudder, and his
breathing ceased; then he breathed once more, opened his eyes, and
smiled.

“Jhesu!” he said, “Jhesu! Jhesu! Jhesu!” Then he laughed softly and
gladly, as a lover at the sight of his beloved, or as an exile when he
sees again the land he loves.

The hour was midnight; a light like moonlight flickering upon blue
steel flashed through the room, and Brother Pacificus died.

Then as Brother Gorlois laid him down, and slowly rubbed his cramped
arms, there flew through the casement a bunch of blue flowers; they
smote him on the chest, and dropped upon the dead man’s breast.

Brother Gorlois gave a cry that was like unto a human sob of pain, but
liker still to the cry of an angry beast that has been hurt. He leaped
through the unglazed casement; in the silent wood below there was the
shriek of a woman in a swiftly stilled anguish of bodily fear.

From the chapel, when the day broke, the weeping brethren came. They
found Brother Pacificus dead, and on his breast a bunch of blue
sweet-smelling flowers; under the window on the dew-drenched forest
turf, there lay a half-clad girl; a bunch of blossoms like those on the
dead saint’s breast was in her stiffened hand; there was a wound in her
throat that an arm nerved by savage rage had given; in the tangle of
her rough hair was the knife that had killed her. It was the Brother
Gorlois’ hunting knife; but he had fled, and the House of the Cold
Strand knew him no more from the hour when the Son of Man was born in
him, in the throes of a first “conviction of sin,” the passing anguish
of a first remorse.




                       THE EXCELLENT VERSATILITY
                           OF THE MINOR POET


Petals of wild cherry blossom were flying on a soft rush of wind that
swept through the beech wood. Little bright sheathlets lay, brown and
shining, at the feet of the smooth silver-green boles of the trees.
The leaves, not yet rid of the silky soft fringes of their babyhood,
fluttered like little flags, and glowed like green flame; they were
not yet thick enough to hide the misty blue sky, laced with feathery
cloudlets. Light seemed to flow from the little leaves――the light of
life, the life of spring-time. The “Fire of God” was aflame in the
wood world; a green mist of colour was aglow in the very air that
pulsed between the beech-tree boles. In every dell the bracken sprang
up straightly, uncurling its brown heads to spread abroad the branches
of its later summer greenery. The first blue-bells were there too,
covering the ground with tender blue mist, and filling the air with an
ecstasy of perfume that smote the senses with the pain that attends the
inexpressible and almost intangible; for the soul of all joy, of all
sweetness, whether of perfume, sight, or sound, is ever hidden away in
the heart of things, whereof all that can be smelt, or seen, or heard,
does but torment us with a deeper, eternally elusive longing.

On a bough a blue tit hung head downwards, and beneath the bough, half
hidden in a crisp bed of last year’s leaves, lay a child who watched
the tit with half-shut eyes, and shook with a delight he did not
understand, which was akin to pain. A queer, lonely, shy child, lying
in a wood, trembling with a force which was trying to express itself
through him. He was the motherless son of an old country vicar, who
took scarcely any notice of him until the boy was old enough to read
the books his father loved, who let the child “run wild” from sunrise
to sunset, and after.

Those who commented on the matter said it was very bad for a boy to
have no young companions, and to dream alone in a wood all day. This
was true, but circumstances alter cases. The training, or rather the
lack of any training from the world of men, happened to be just what
this particular child needed; this was probably the reason he was
placed where he was, to struggle through a short life alone. People
were as shadows to the boy――shadows whom he greeted kindly, to whom he
meekly submitted himself in much, for he was docile in most matters,
partly because there were so few things of the outer world for which
this queer child really cared. When the outer things were forced upon
his notice, he observed all manner of traits in people which others did
not see. But for the most part he did not live in the world of men at
all, but in the life of the beech wood, and in the life of that which
the wood partly expressed――a life after which he reached continually
without knowing or finding it.

He lay in the withered leaves and quivered with the thoughts and dim
sensations that came about him like living presences; a power, not his
own, seemed to press upon the child, till the wood vanished from his
eyes; it was as though the wide sky had suddenly stooped to the boy and
engulfed him in a flood of quivering, living light.

Vague longings, longings to express somewhat that lurked within and
ever eluded him, compassed the child about; until at last the knowledge
stole upon him that he could put a shadow of his thought into rhythmic
words; words with a cadence that should tell of brooks and whispering
leaves, and the songs and rustling of the birds in the beech wood.

It was about this time that the father saw that his child was not as
other children; when he saw it he gave the boy no less liberty, but
he bestowed upon him freely such knowledge as was his, and let him
learn from the poets of past and present the power that lies in deftly
wielded words.

So this boy, Fletewode Garth, lived in the quiet old vicarage house,
surrounded by the beech woods and the meadows, and dreamed, and wrote,
and read such books as his father possessed, which were less numerous
than well chosen. His father, the gentlest, simplest, most unworldly of
men, never speculated as to his boy’s future. Nor did the lad himself
dream, as yet, of giving his thoughts to the world; of fame to be or
money making he never thought at all.

The day came (it was when Fletewode was twenty years old) that the
mild old vicar, having finished his appointed course as pastor of
Beechenfield, sat down peacefully to smoke and doze under the shade of
a trellised Crimson Rambler in the vicarage garden, and there he fell
asleep and never woke up again. Then it was found that save for the
sum of £100 in the Bank, his son was left penniless; very well read
in English literature, with much delicacy of taste in art and poetry,
with such classical attainments as the old vicar had himself possessed,
and with no other qualifications for making his way in the world――save
genius. So that it is obvious he ran a very good chance of starving.

His father’s cousin, a prosperous man of business, desired to do well
by him. He offered to obtain for him a clerkship in the city. Fletewode
thanked him; then he pointed out that he was very unbusinesslike, that
arithmetic was not his strong point, in fact he was in the habit, when
necessity arose, of adding up on his fingers; also that he wrote a very
unclerkly hand. Moreover, he said: “I want to write about the things
of which I think, and I believe that is the only thing I can really do
well.”

His relative regarded him as a fool, and did not take the trouble to
hide the fact. Fletewode was quite unruffled by this, which annoyed his
kinsman still more. There is nothing to be done with a person who does
not mind what you think of, or say to, him, and it makes you appear as
though you were of little account in his eyes. Fletewode’s relative was
unpleasantly conscious of this, nevertheless he tried again to rouse
the impracticable youth to a sense of realities; he asked him how he
proposed to live. Fletewode replied that he possessed £100; he supposed
he could live on that for some time; perhaps he should earn money by
the things he wrote; he had not considered the matter deeply, and,
after all, money was of secondary importance. To speak disrespectfully
of other people’s Gods is unjustifiable; Fletewode’s relative, very
properly, cursed him in the names of Worldly Wisdom, and Business and
Commonsense; also he said he washed his hands of him, when he was
starving in the gutter he would come to his senses. Fletewode smiled
like one who is occupied with more important questions, but lends a
kindly ear to childlike babblings; then he went out to sit under the
Crimson Rambler, where his father died. The crimson petals lay thickly
on the walk, and in a crook of the thorny boughs a flycatcher was
feeding a youthful family.

A week later Fletewode left the vicarage, and the roses, the beech wood
and the birds, and went to London with a sheaf of manuscripts and a
few books. At the end of a year he had written a great deal, but no
one heeded him. Who was to be expected to turn aside from the press of
life to see whether this shabbily dressed young man, who couched all
manner of wild, mystical thoughts of God and humanity and nature in
melodious verse, that made one think of the murmur of the wind through
a perfumed wood on a June night――who was to take much trouble, I say,
to see whether there was any truth in the words, or genius in the soul,
of such a country lad as this?

At the end of a year the £100 was nearly gone; not that Fletewode had
recklessly spent the whole of this enormous sum on himself, but he
found (it is not an unusual experience) many people in the not too
magnificent street where he rented a room who were poorer than he;
these people looked upon him as a man of fortune, and they explained to
him the duty of the rich towards the poor.

On a day in spring Fletewode Garth sat in his room and shivered with
nervousness and hunger, while he faced the fact that he had but three
shillings left.

Soon he would not be able to buy ink and paper; his work was beginning
to suffer a little by reason of lack of food, and anxiety. It was for
that reason the sheet of paper on the table before him was angrily
torn across, and stained, moreover, with tears. He could not think;
the halting of his brain, the blunting of his perceptions were the
keenest tortures life could bring a soul like Fletewode Garth. He
had altered during his year of town life; the child-look, which had
lingered in his eyes despite his twenty years, was gone. He was no
longer semi-unconscious of his surroundings and steeped in dreams of
the things beyond. He was nervously, irritably, bitterly conscious of
his world. Life――the seamy side of it――had made him look on the things
men call the realities of existence; the ugliest, most sordid, most
evil side of life. He had looked to some purpose, looked till his heart
was sickened, till his heart was weary with pain and hopelessness.
Looked till the pressure of the sordid-seeming struggle without, and
the strong constraining power of that mystic something within, a power
which was laid on him despite himself, sometimes strained his nerves to
breaking point.

Now, too, a dread seized him. The sight of the world’s sorrow had made
him tremblingly anxious that his human comrades should hear him speak
of the fairer things; of that which he felt to be true, which once
had been the whole of life for him. For the first time he desired to
comfort and to succour, and though he knew it not, this longing gave to
his work the last touch it needed――the human touch, the power of speech
from heart to heart.

Suppose, he thought, he died of poverty, and all he had written was
swept away unread. Fletewode actually believed that it is possible to
sweep out of existence, irrevocably and for all time, a thing which the
world needs, or will need. Therefore he grieved; he had no personal
ambitions, he did not mind obscurity or death, nor did he greatly mind
suffering; but now, at last, he wished people to have the happiness
that had vanished from his own life.

He got up with a sigh, took his hat, and went out. He was going to seek
a possible patron. John Chalmers, a man whom he once helped with some
of the vanished £100, told him “to go and see Scottie; Scottie might
put something in his way.”

John Chalmers was a clever man, who would have been a successful
artist, save for drink. He drew rather coarse cartoons for inferior
comic papers.

“Scottie,” on the other hand, was a prosperous person. He had a talent
for inventing jingling refrains which “caught on” with the public; his
comic songs, “patriotic” songs, and dance music were whistled by every
street boy, and ground out by every piano organ in London.

Fletewode Garth reached the house of this prosperous man; it was a
little house in the suburbs, with a lilac tree bursting into bloom in
the small front garden. Mr. Scottie had lunched an hour before his
visitor’s arrival; but, being conscienceless in such matters, he lied
and said he was famished, and luncheon was late. This he did because
he knew Fletewode Garth was hungry; for, before he and the public had
discovered his gift for tunes, he was a struggling provincial actor,
stranded in South Wales by a decamping manager; wherefore he had
tramped to the nearest large town, went forty-eight hours without food,
and slept under a hayrick in a pelting thunderstorm; this invaluable
experience caused him to feel for Fletewode, and also caused him to
perceive the signs of famine, and shape his lie in accordance with his
observations. Now if some persons had refrained from that lie, it would
have indicated in them a high regard for truth; but if Mr. Scottie had
refrained from it, it would have argued lack of sympathy rather than
morality; for he lied fairly often, and believed it to be necessary;
therefore his untruthfulness to Fletewode was an act of unmixed virtue.

After luncheon he told his guest he wanted verses――up-to-date
verses――to which he could attach tunes; his old friend Farquharson, who
used to write them for him, was dead; would Fletewode try to fill his
place. It was pure philanthropy on the part of this patron of poetry;
he could get countless jingles of the kind he needed; but he was sorry
for the lad, whose white face, hollow eyes, and air of nervous strain,
had touched him.

Fletewode said he would try. He went home, and thought for a few
minutes. Then he drew from his memory a quaint country tale from his
old home; he cast it into the form of a ballad. It was stirring enough;
a story of love and heroism, of those elemental passions of the race
which are always young, always able to grip the imagination. The next
day he took it to his patron, who shook his head.

“My dear chap,” said he amiably, “_this_ won’t do. I want something
which will go down at the _Rag Bag_. Never been to the _Rag Bag_?
Great Scott! How on earth can you write unless you know the world? I’ll
give you a pass. You go and see for yourself the kind of thing I want.”

Fletewode went to the _Rag Bag_; at first the foolish vulgarity of the
songs, the dull, sordid atmosphere of the place, wearied him. Then his
mind, an ever-plastic machine, adapted itself a little; he began to
take a sort of amused pleasure in learning the “trick of the thing.”
His cleverness began to prompt him; to show him how easily he could
write rhymes much more pointed, much more witty, and considerably more
harmful, than the majority of these coarse, imbecile jingles; his
genius, which was the power beyond, held his mind back, and said: “Keep
these powers holy for me.”

Next day he went to see Scottie, and told him he did not care to do it.

“Why not?” said his patron, a little piqued.

“I don’t care to wade in the gutter mud,” said Fletewode irritably,
and indeed, very rudely and ungratefully; but he was over-strung and
tormented by various sections of his mental and emotional make-up
pulling at him at once, and each in a different direction.

“What bosh,” said the other. “Gutter mud! Gutter mud be hanged! The
people _want_ it. Old Farquharson was as decent a fellow as ever
breathed. You think the poor old chap has gone below, I suppose,
because he wrote these things to keep his missus and kids out of the
workhouse? Well! Of all the beastly _cant_――――”

“No, no, I don’t mean that. It was all right for him.”

“If you think you’re a better fellow than old Farquharson was, my
young friend, you’re jolly well mistaken,” said the other, strumming
excruciatingly on the piano, for he was growing annoyed.

“I never said I was better. I never think, or care either, whether I am
good, bad, or indifferent. Can’t you see how hideously ugly these songs
are? Jingling tunes and Bank Holiday verses! They’re like the smell of
withered cabbages and naphtha lamps.”

This was not very courteous to the kindly composer of the said tunes.

“Oh, well,” said he, rather sharply, “as you please. Er――I’m rather
busy, Mr. Garth.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said Fletewode, starting and colouring. “I’m
afraid I’ve been very rude. I’m sorry. Good morning, and――thank you.”

That evening he sat alone as usual, and tried to write his thoughts.
He was cold and tired and half-starved. There was only a shilling
left. He had written a sonnet, perhaps one of the most difficult forms
of poetry, needing the greatest perfection of execution. He read it,
sitting near the window, where a streak of the dying sunlight could
fall on his numbed frame. The lines halted, they did not even scan;
the thoughts were feeble, confused. His work was bad; it was fatally,
irredeemably bad. He crushed the paper in his hands, fell on his knees
on the floor, and rested his head on the seat of his one wooden chair.
There are some agonies of the soul into which it is sacrilege to pry;
this was one of them; we will not try to gauge it.

At last Fletewode stood up, went out, spent his last shilling on a
meal, and came back penniless. That was no matter, to-morrow Scottie
would give him five, perhaps ten shillings.

He sat at the table and wrote; as he wrote he became absorbed in his
work, he found himself laughing over it. When it was finished he read
it through, he dropped it on the table, rested his head upon it and
cried like a child. He had sold his birthright for a mess of pottage,
and his life died within him for very shame. The dawn found him asleep
in his chair, his head still resting upon the paper.

The next day he sought his patron, apologised for his folly, was easily
forgiven by the most placable and kindly of slip-knot-principled men,
and tendered his verses. The amiable Scottie took them, read, and
chuckled over them appreciatively.

“You jolly humbug!” he said with genuine admiration. “And you got a
pass for the _Rag Bag_ out of me to give you a tip!”

“Will they do――these verses?”

“Rather,” still chuckling. “I’ll give you ten shillings for
them――yes――I don’t mind giving you ten shillings. They’re very smart.
_This_ is your real line, you see; you’ll get on now like a house on
fire.”

“Give them to me. I’ll polish them. They’re in the rough. I wrote them
quickly.”

“They’ll do.”

“Give them back, I tell you,” said Fletewode irritably. “They might
have been raked out of the Thames mud; but, even so, I won’t let them
go like that. I’ll polish them. You shall have them to-morrow.”

Scottie handed him the verses and a ten-shilling piece. Fletewode went
home to “polish” his production.

He spread the verses out before him. From his window he could see
stacks of chimney pots, their crudeness of colour mellowed by the
picturesqueness of dirt lit by the benign influence of May sunshine.
Through the open window floated the fluty call of a caged thrush,
whose cage hung over a great heap of wallflowers on the stall of a
greengrocer’s shop.

Fletewode listened awhile, picked up the verses, dropped them, half
raised his hands to his head, let them fall, and sat still. His limbs
grew numb and heavy, then they vanished from his consciousness; all his
life seemed to be focussed to one point, with a great eagerness and
yearning, for what he knew not.

The room faded from his sight. Petals of wild cherry blossom, like
faery cups fashioned from snowflakes, were flying through the air; the
green of the beeches was like living flame; the wood was full of keen
strong life. The birds were building; a wren flew by with thistledown
in her beak; down by the little stream where marsh marigolds and water
forget-me-nots grew, a kingfisher was flashing by; a blackbird was
splashing and bathing in the shallows; over the cowslip-spangled meadow
beyond, the rooks were flying, and the sheep bells’ clang blended with
their sober calling.

But there was a keener, swifter life in the wood than that of opening
leaf and building bird. He had always felt its throbbing, but now it
waxed perceptible to sight; it flowed like living light through the
boles of the trees; they seemed to grow translucent; it thrilled in
the air; through the shining vistas of the beechen woods, the gods
and dryads of old legends came trooping; and the elfin peoples of the
flowers and air, of the water and the moss-decked rock, made good sport
in the flitting lights and shadows.

He cast himself, so it seemed, in the old hollow filled with the dead
crisp beech leaves; their faint pungent smell and the delicate odour
of the opening leaves were all about him in this strange old-new
world. About him a presence wove itself; an unreal, most-real,
compelling power, without him and within. He felt the pulsing of a
stronger life smite upon his. And then, even as when he was a child,
the inner and the outer world alike flowed away from him, the great
sky seemed to stoop to him in a blinding flood of living light and
wrap him round, and “there was neither speech nor language,” only
light――light――light――and again more light and keener life.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next day Mr. Scottie received a note which was left at his door.
Out of it dropped a ten-shilling piece. On a sheet of paper was written:

“I can’t do it, I’ve torn them up. To every man his work and his line,
this isn’t mine. I must do the work they mean me to do. If you say:
‘Who are they?’ I do not know. If through some fault of mine, or of the
world’s, I fail to do as I am meant to do, then let me go. There’s no
point in a man’s keeping his body alive by making his brain grind out
work for which it wasn’t built. Better work with one’s hands than that,
till the hour strikes. That is what I shall try now, and wait results.”

Mr. Scottie was greatly concerned, because his _protégé_ had, as he
phrased it, “gone dotty,” and, being as kindly a creature as ever
pursued the tasks appointed for him by his past, he took pains to find
Fletewode. But Fletewode and his MSS. were gone.

A week later the gardener of a well-to-do literary man, a minor poet,
received a shock. Within his master’s grounds was a little clump of
beech trees; they grew far away from Fletewode’s old home, but they
were fine trees, all bravely decked in their spring green, and at
their feet grew bluebells. The gardener found a dead man lying face
downwards in a bluebell patch, and beside him was a great bundle of
papers tied up in a scarlet and white handkerchief. The gardener gave
the alarm; he carried the bundle to his master, and the dead man was
laid in the harness room in the stables. There was no clue at all as
to the identity of the man; the doctor discovered he had died of heart
failure. The minor poet looked through the papers; he said at the
inquest there was no clue in the bundle as to who the man was, there
were only a few unimportant documents; he would pay the expenses of the
poor young fellow’s funeral.

Now the minor poet was an ambitious man, well known in the literary
world. His ambitions were larger than his power of performance. He
was well known among men of letters as a very good critic of other
people’s work. The day of the funeral he sat alone and trembled in
the throes of temptation. He did not understand the subtle mystic
thought of the poems in the bundle, but he saw their marvellous beauty
of expression. He appreciated keenly the lovely lilt and melody of
the lines which seemed to ring out from the heart of a fairy haunted
wood. The minor poet was not a very righteous man. Three beautiful
little books emanated from his pen point, they were finally bound in
white vellum and tied chastely with blue ribbons. Those books were
widely read. The critics greatly praised the versatility of the minor
poet, who had never written anything of that kind before; also they
warned him――friendly-wise――against a tendency to mysticism, which
ever saps the judgment and emasculates the intellect. The minor poet
said he would never fall again into that snare, and indeed he never
did so. The thoughts enshrined within those poems struck strongly on
the consciousness of four readers only. One was a foreign writer of
romance, the second was a great preacher, the third a musician, and
the fourth a man of science to whom the world harkened when he spake.
And the thought of these four men, and through them the thought of
the world, was coloured for all time to come by the work of the
minor poet; men who had not heeded that of Fletewode Garth, heard his
voice gladly. Thus the wheel that none can stay rolled on, and the
world, through the heart failure of Fletewode, and the ambition of an
unrighteous man, received the message which it would not receive by
other means. For the hour had struck upon the clock of time when it was
fit that it should hear, therefore its ears were opened.

But the problem for the wise is this: When sheaves are garnered what
shall be the minor poet’s share in the reaping?




                          “THE TREE OF BEAUTY”


“That,” said the playwright, “is a beautiful story. I suppose every one
who reads it will think so; but I am not sure that more than one in a
million will guess a tithe of what it means. Frankly, I know I don’t. I
daresay even the writer himself didn’t know all that it suggests.”

The book was _The Light Invisible_, and the story was “Consolatrix
Afflictorum.”

“Do you agree with me?” said the playwright after a pause, in which
the only sound heard was the wind and the drumming of the waves on the
rocks. Since he received no answer he looked at his companion, a man
whom he believed he knew very well; when he looked at him he knew his
own folly, and was silent.

Presently the man said:

“Do you like stories? Shall I tell you one?”

“Is it true?”

“Naturally. How could it be otherwise? Do you think I can create out of
nothingness? The story in itself must be true, if I could understand
it. But I shall have to grope after it, and translate it for you; and I
shall do it badly, no doubt. Still――shall I tell it?”

“Do,” said the playwright. Whereupon the man began as follows:

     “Years ago, perhaps a couple of centuries or so, there was
     a village in the north of England, which remains little
     altered to this day. It has never been touched by that
     change in the method of viewing truth which some call the
     Reformation, and others name after a different fashion.
     This was partly because it is an isolated moorland village;
     partly because it was, and is, owned by a family whose
     representative at that time was not only a very rich and
     influential man, but also of the type with whom other men,
     and even Church and State, do not very readily interfere.
     He was grave and discreet, sober of speech and very devout,
     and he ruled his village with a most benevolent despotism.
     He was especially filled with devotion for the Virgin
     Mother, “the blossoming Tree, the Mother of Christ,” in
     whose honour he had built a small but most beautiful chapel
     in his grounds; here the rites celebrated were of the
     highest perfection of reverent elaboration, and here the
     devout builder retired daily for prayer and meditation.

     “One day as he came from prayer his servants brought him
     a vagabond gipsy lad who had been selling songs in the
     village or offering them in exchange for food. This outcast
     was very little past his boyhood; his garments were worn,
     and faded with sun and rain, his feet were bare, and in his
     cap was fastened a bough stolen from a blossoming fruit
     tree.

     “At that time the once persecuted had become the
     persecutors; coarse, bitter, and profane songs were
     written, and sold to be sung in taverns and at country
     fairs, which mocked at things which were by many people
     justly held sacred. Among this stroller’s songs were two
     which spoke profanely of Her whom the king of the little
     moorland village reverenced. When therefore he read them
     he became very angry; he bade that the songs――one and
     all――should be destroyed; he told his servants that the
     gipsy should be whipped, set in the stocks, and finally
     pelted from the place after being ducked in the pond
     which was on the village green. Then the lad begged for
     mercy; he pleaded that he could not read, that he knew no
     difference between faith and faith, but only the crafts of
     the wood and the lore of his people. He bought and sold in
     ignorance, partly because he must eat, but chiefly because
     he wished to buy a string of red beads for his sweetheart,
     which he had promised her, because she desired to hang them
     round her throat.

     “But the devout man, being wounded by the insults to his
     faith, for the verses were both coarse and flippant, would
     not listen. The lad was punished; his songs were destroyed;
     and at the time of sunset he fled, followed by the hoots
     of the villagers, bruised, bleeding, breathless, and half
     drowned.

     “Now a year later his judge was riding, at nightfall,
     through a strange district of the south, whither he had
     come on business. He met a sober man in the dress of a
     preacher, and rode with him because the hour was late and
     the roads dangerous because of highwaymen. After a while
     they began to talk of grave matters touching their faith,
     and the salvation of their souls. Thus it happened that
     very soon they quarrelled, and well nigh came to reviling
     each other, in speech as well as in thought, the one for
     a blasphemous idolater, the other for a vile heretical
     outcast from the faith. At last they found that, in the
     heat of argument, they had missed the way, and were on a
     swampy bridle path in the depths of a misty oak wood.

     “Then they called a truce, and reflected what they should
     do; as they considered thus they heard one coming through
     the wood who whistled. Soon he drew near; it was a young
     man, little more than a boy; as he came nearer he began
     to hoot like an owl, and the owls in the wood called back
     to him. When he was quite near and saw the faces of the
     riders he seemed as though he would fly; then he pulled his
     cap from his head, and came towards them, pleading that
     he was doing no ill. The ruler of the northern village
     saw he was the lad whom he had caused to be punished. He
     saw, moreover, that the gipsy knew him; therefore he told
     him very sternly that if, in revenge for a well-merited
     punishment, he played them evil tricks and directed them
     wrongly he should most bitterly repent it. But when the
     gipsy raised his eyes to his and asked simply:

     “‘Why should I lie to you, sir, about the way?’ he felt
     ashamed and was silent. Then the preacher asked if there
     was any house at hand where they might purchase food and
     lodging. The gipsy answered:

     “‘Good gentlemen, there is a farm a mile hence where this
     morning the farmer set his dog at me, thinking I would
     rob his hen-roost; when the dog did not bite me he kicked
     him. But he will gladly receive two worthy gentlemen with
     purses. Shall I guide you?’

     “‘Guide us,’ said the preacher, ‘and we will pay you.’ So
     the boy went before them whistling. He was a wonderful
     whistler, and he seemed to have bat’s eyes that could see
     in the dark.

     “Presently the man who had so severely condemned him called
     to him.

     “‘Come here,’ he said, ‘and walk at my horse’s head.’

     “The boy came obediently; at first he was afraid and loth
     to speak, but he seemed to be shy rather than sullen,
     and after a while he talked fearlessly and simply of
     such things as he knew; of the lore of his race, and of
     the customs of the peoples of the wood, sometimes called
     dumb brutes by those who cannot speak their tongue. His
     simplicity and gentleness, and his forgetfulness of the
     harshness of his former judge, won upon the man. He felt
     remorse, and asked him what he had done when his songs were
     destroyed, ‘For I might,’ said he, ‘have left those to you
     in which I found no offence.’ The gipsy answered simply
     that he went hungry for three days; also his sweetheart
     followed another because he could not give her the beads he
     had promised her. There were tears in his eyes as he spoke
     and yet he laughed.

     “They went on for a while in silence; at last the lad
     stopped, and said:

     “‘Gentlemen, I am sorry. The wood is very strange to-night,
     and I have missed my way. I meant to lead you right. Do
     not think evil of me. I know now that you who are not of
     our race quarrel among yourselves. But in this you agree.
     To curse us who are not of any faith, and to believe evil
     of us because we live under the sky and have other ways
     and thoughts than yours. But――but I am very tired of being
     cursed.’

     “‘You shall not be cursed by me,’ said the man by whose
     side he walked. ‘Nor will I believe you wilfully led us
     wrong.’

     “Then the gipsy took courage; he listened a little while,
     and cried:

     “‘I hear the crackle of a camp fire. Perhaps some of my
     people are hereabouts. If so, do not fear us; we will
     welcome you if you trust us, and give you what we have to
     share.’

     “The others heard nothing, but the lad led them towards the
     sound his ears caught, and soon they saw he was right. They
     came to an open space in the wood; there was a circle of
     huge grey stones, a temple of the gods of a vanished faith;
     within the circle was turf, where rabbits leaped and ate;
     in the centre a pool twenty feet deep, crystal clear, and
     green as pale chrysolite; had it been day each tiny weed
     that grew in the depth, each little stone that lay there,
     would have shone clear. In the centre of the pool was an
     islet, and on the isle a little ruined chapel dedicated to
     the Mother of God; in the chapel was a gipsy fire streaming
     upwards towards the great starlit sky, and causing wondrous
     shadows to leap and chase on the ruined walls. A thin slab
     of rock rose from the depths of the pool to the surface of
     the water, so that there was a narrow perilous pathway from
     the shore to the isle. In the chapel by the fire there sat
     on the broken pavement a young barefooted woman, clad in a
     peasant dress of blue frieze, a cloak about her shoulders,
     her hair falling veilwise around her, and a young child
     sleeping in her arms. The boy called to her in Romany;
     she rose and came to the shore of the isle, her child in
     her arms, and answered him in the same tongue. She was a
     beautiful brown-haired young woman; her solemn eyes were
     grey, and as clear as the pool by which she stood.

     “‘Bid her speak in a tongue we can understand,’ said the
     preacher.

     “The boy did so; asking whether she could direct them.

     “‘I could, little brother,’ she answered in a sweet voice.
     ‘But you and these gentlemen might not understand me well.
     Better to shelter by these stones to-night, or cross the
     water to my fire; to-morrow you may seek your own way.’

     “‘Have you any food, mother,’ said the lad, ‘food fit to
     offer such worshipful gentlemen?’

     “‘Scarcely is it fit, brother,’ said the gipsy woman. ‘I
     have here bread, and a little wine, and one cup only in
     which to serve it.’

     “‘If I had known you camped here, sister,’ said the boy,
     ‘and if you had no man to see that all is well with you and
     the child, I could have set snares in the fern, and you
     would have supped better.’

     “‘I know it,’ she answered. ‘Had I asked it of you, you
     would have set snares for these little children. Nay, then,
     brother, you would have shared all you trapped till you
     went supperless yourself. Therefore you shall eat of my
     bread and drink the wine I have to give. Cross the water to
     me.’

     “‘But these good gentlemen, mother?’ asked the boy.

     “‘They may take you by the hand,’ she said, ‘and cross the
     water to me.’

     “‘I do not think they can tread a path so narrow as this
     rock. It is slippery. Sister, I will cross and bring to
     them what you have of food and drink, and fire that we may
     build a fire by the stone.’

     “‘You may take them fire,’ she answered, ‘but for food and
     drink they must cross to me. They cannot walk with your
     feet; they must use their own. They must cross barefoot, or
     they will fall into the pool.’

     “After a while the man who ruled this little northern
     village determined to cross; he was hungry, and preferred
     the scantiest fare to fasting; besides he saw the cross on
     the ruined altar, and he desired to enter the chapel and
     pray. The preacher demurred at the depth of the cold still
     water; the chapel was a former place of Popish worship, the
     cross on the altar offended him, and he was not yet very
     hungry, besides he had a little food still in his wallet.
     He tethered the horses and sat down to eat, while his two
     companions crept, hand in hand, inch by inch over the
     narrow rock path that was just visible above the shifting
     shimmer of the pool’s surface.

     “Entering the chapel they sat side by side on the broken
     pavement. The woman, sitting beside the fire, broke her
     cakes of bread; she gave them each a portion, and ate some
     herself; she drank from the cup and handed it to them.

     “‘Till the sun rises,’ she said, ‘I shall rest here, I and
     my child. Rest you here, also, and sleep or watch as you
     will. Through the night my fire will burn; at dawn I shall
     let it die. It will have lighted and warmed us till the sun
     shall rise.’

     “The preacher, having prayed, wrapped himself in his cloak,
     and sat at the foot of a great stone, watching the horses
     as they cropped the turf, lest they should stray and be
     lost; he mused profitably and seriously on his labours and
     doctrine. He heard the cropping of the horses, the murmur
     of the wind, and the trickle of a stream, fed by the deep
     still pool. He heard the woman singing softly to her child,
     in crooning snatches, in seeming unmindfulness of what she
     sang:

     “‘He that is down need fear no fall,’ she crooned. ‘He that
     is low no pride――――’

     “She whispered wordless music as she rocked to and fro;
     then her song changed:

     “‘O Tree of Beauty――Tree of Might,’ she sang, clear, faint,
     and high, in a monotonous chant, such as the chapel must
     have echoed to in the days when priests served before its
     ruined altar, and men and women knelt at the little shrine
     above which was the statue of a Mother and Child, ‘O Tree
     of Beauty――Tree of Beauty――Tree of Might――――’

     “The gipsy boy lay near the fire rejoicing in the warmth,
     looking sometimes up to the starlit sky, across which many
     a meteor flamed and died, sometimes at the shadows that
     leaped on the walls, sometimes into the woman’s face.

     “‘What do you sing, sister?’ he said. ‘It is not a song of
     our people.’

     “‘It is a song of all peoples, brother,’ she answered. ‘But
     they sing it in many tongues, and to many tunes.’

     “The lad looked at her wonderingly; then he began to watch
     the stars again, and the little thin clouds that flew
     across the dark sky. At last he went to sleep with his head
     resting on his arm; sometimes he laughed and whispered as
     he slept, and thrice he sobbed. The woman bent down and
     cast over him a fold of her cloak, as he lay and dreamed
     under the stars.

     “As for the third traveller, he, mindful of the sacredness
     of the place, stood not alone barefooted (for to cross the
     rock it had been needful to lay aside all covering of his
     feet), but also bareheaded he turned his face to the East,
     and perceiving the little side altar with the statue of
     the Mother, he approached and knelt before it, making the
     sign of the cross. There he knelt till dawn, for he was
     one used to prayer and vigil. The woman sat motionless,
     guarding the leaping flames; bread in her hands, the wine
     cup at her feet, her cloak enfolding the sleeping outcast,
     the swaddled babe on her knees. Now of her thoughts, which
     were measureless, there is no record I can read; nor can I
     tell of the gipsy boy’s dreams. But it is said the other
     two wanderers saw the place in very different fashion, and
     this is what they saw. The preacher beheld the dark circle
     of the enclosing oak trees, stirred by the wind; he saw the
     great grey stones reared by the dead pagans; he saw the
     turf, the horses, and the wild rabbits; he saw the pool
     shining in the firelight, the ruined chapel, the leaping
     flame, and the woman sitting beside it with her child on
     her knee, and the sleeping lad lying at her feet. And his
     eyes rested on her till he forgot the strife of creeds; he
     watched till she seemed to him the image or forthshowing of
     the motherhood of the world; and when next he preached he
     spoke no harsh doctrine, nor railed at idolatrous worship
     of a creature rather than of the Creator, as he was wont to
     do; but he spoke of the Love of God shown forth in human
     love, and above all in the great love of a mother for
     her little children; for this pure love, said he, is an
     example to us of the love that gives rather than takes, it
     is a symbol of the Divine Love, that, motherlike, feeds,
     sustains, and preserves all creatures.

     “Now the other traveller passed into profound musing, till
     his outer senses were locked as though in sleep; and he
     saw the place in which he was after the following manner
     and semblance. He saw the girdle of trees as the wall of
     a great temple, therein there were three courts, and at
     the centre a shrine. In the first court was the image
     of a woman bearing a child in her arms; about her were
     lights burning and the smell of incense, and the song of
     human praise; priests in rich vestments celebrated solemn
     rites, and worshippers, both male and female, old and
     young, bowed down before this mother and child. In the
     second court there was a dimness as of a starlit night;
     there was no incense save the smell of earth and flowers,
     no song but the song of birds, and of streams, and the
     boom of waves like the tones of an organ; no lights but
     strange fires that gleamed and flickered through the night,
     no worshippers save dim forms of the gracious ‘hidden
     peoples,’ the gods of wood and orchard, plain and tilth.

     “In the third court was a turmoil of cold flame; those who
     served and worshipped there (if servitors and worshippers
     there were), were many-hued, transparent, flame-like; here
     was no human being――neither was there male nor female, but
     in that turmoil of fires were strange forms moving in time
     to music, and wonderful shapes that changed and gleamed and
     moved in marvellous sort with a motion and rhythm that had
     therein nothing earthly whereof tongue can rightly speak or
     pen set down; but throughout the turmoil of this wondrous
     dance there was an order and a purpose, for they moved in
     time to a great song that seemed like silence.

     “But in the Shrine there was nothing visible; only from it
     a voice was heard crying:

     “‘She who is worshipped in this temple is the Mother of all
     Faiths, past and present. She is worshipped as the Divine
     Mother of the Worlds, as the Power of Wisdom, as the Secret
     Rose, as star-strewn space, as Mary the Virgin, Mother of
     God; as the deep waters of the sea, also; and some there
     be who think of Her as woman. She is the Form Divine,
     Memory and Time; She is angel and man, woman and child,
     beast and bird, sky and cloud and flower, song of bird,
     dew, sunshine and rain, wind and water, snow and frost,
     tree and stream, priests’ chant and sacred writ, learning
     and holy rites. She is the Sacred Mirror of God, in Whom
     are all things visible and invisible. They who toil in Her
     service worship and praise Her, and of Her the Holy Child
     is born in every human heart. She, the sacred cup, and the
     holy bread; She, the lily of flame set in the waters of
     space; She, the waters whence it springs; She, the hearts
     of men, and their souls and bodies; She, the Holy Cave, the
     consecrated Manger wherein the Babe is cradled; She is the
     Mother of the Sacred Humanity whereby we enter the mystery
     of the Godhead. She, then is Nature and Beauty, the Power
     of God, the Builder of all Forms, the Mother of all Tales.
     Those sing of Her and praise Her who love to worship God
     as Divine Form rather than as hidden all-sustaining Life.
     For He, though he be One, is likewise manifold; and those
     who adore Him in the many praise Him in the sacred Form,
     eternal in the heavens when all earthly forms have passed
     like spray driven by the wind; Mary the Ever-Virgin, the
     Root of all the worlds, one with the life that sustains
     them, eternally inseparate from It. She is the Temple of
     God, the glorified body of the saint, the celestial garden
     of the souls made one; She is the Sacred Wood of the Cross,
     the Tree of Might and Beauty――――’”

       *       *       *       *       *

The man who told this tale ceased to speak. He was silent till the
playwright touched his arm; he started:

“Is that the end?” said the playwright.

“It is the end,” said the man, dreamily. “There is nothing more to
tell.”




                           FORTY-EIGHT HOURS

    We are in Thee who art strength:
                Give us Thy strength!
    We are in Thee who art love:
                Give us Thy love!
    We are in Thee who art power:
                Give us Thy power!
    We are in Thee who art peace:
                Give, Lord, Thy peace!
    We are in Thee who dost wait:
                Teach us to wait!
                          _Litany of the Wood._


There were three men in the large square, solidly furnished room.
Two of them were talking; the third was silent. It was a comfortable
room――a library well filled with books. The men who talked were the
host and his guest; he who was silent was the secretary, who wrote in
the large bow window looking on the terrace, where sparrows quarrelled
in the ivy, and the daffodils and nancies nodded in the soft blustering
wind of late spring.

The secretary was a pale, shrewd-faced young man of twenty-eight; he
was of middle height, not plain, nor yet comely, except for his eyes,
which were very clear and quiet, and of a striking yellowish-grey.
He was unobtrusively dressed, and very impassive, not to say dull, in
manner. He was civil, however, attentive when he was spoken to; his
voice was pleasant, and rather conciliatory in tone, as though he was
deprecating anger.

He was writing letters in a small, neat hand, and showed no sign of
hearing any conversation that was not addressed to him.

His employer was talking; he was a good talker, and a good lecturer.
He was a very public-spirited person full of affairs and had just
written a certain world-compelling pamphlet, which was intended to
revolutionise thought in various unexpected quarters. He was a very
well-known, much-applauded, and generally respected person.

He was talking to a guest who was less applauded because he was held to
be soberly commonplace; nevertheless he too was generally respected,
for he did nothing in particular, whether of good or evil, and was
known to be very rich and growing richer.

He listened to his host, but an observant person would have noticed
that he often glanced at the secretary.

When the host proposed a stroll before luncheon he rose; he was silent
till they were on the terrace, then he said carelessly:

“That man of yours, Dexter, is a steady-looking fellow.”

“O yes; he’s steady and shrewd too. I believe him to be a good fellow
in the main. Not quite reliable――as regards money matters some years
ago. However, he was young, and he paid the penalty. I gave him a fresh
start, and I’ve never repented it. I think bygones should be bygones.”

“Quite so,” said the guest.

The host had a “carrying voice”; it “carried” into the room where the
secretary sat.

He had finished the letters; he was sorting and arranging the MS. of
the world-compelling pamphlet, before proceeding to type it. The writer
was a religiously-disposed man and a church-goer; he liked to preface
his pamphlets with a motto, generally a text. This one was a text; it
ran: “Do unto others as ye would they should do unto you.”

He was an excellent man; but he never stopped to think whether he
was in the habit of making a catalogue of his past offences to his
listening friends and new acquaintances or whether he would like to
know that they did so on his behalf.

There was once a converted heathen who was much cleverer than those
who converted him. He told the bishop of the diocese that he and his
fellow-converts were in the habit of gathering together to make public
confession of their sins.

“An excellent discipline, doubtless,” said the good bishop, “but such
public confession must be painful.”

“By no means,” said the simple penitent. “Because we do not confess our
own sins, but each others’.”

The bishop mused on the childlike simplicity of the convert; but――was
the former heathen as guileless as he sounded?

The secretary heard the words of his employer; his hands began to
shake. Presently he dropped the MS. and sat staring out of the window.
It was seven years since he had “paid the penalty,” seven solid years
of dull drudgery and loneliness, and they were still discussing it, and
his “fresh start.”

He sighed; picked up his pencil (he was numbering chaotic scraps of a
very badly written MS.), let it slide to the carpet, rested his arms
on the table, and his head on his arms, and sighed, and sighed, and
sighed again; a sigh sadder than a sob, because it spoke of a greater
weariness, and a more utter depression and spiritlessness.

The door opened; the guest appeared; he shut the door quietly and stood
looking at the secretary. At last he said softly:

“Dexter.”

The man started and sprang up; his eyes looked nervous and ashamed.

“That’s all right,” said the other. “I only want to tell you what I’ve
been leading up to for days. You knew I’d been leading up to something.”

“I thought you were. I don’t know what it is.”

“I should not have come in here when I was supposed to be writing
letters and talked to you, unless I had been trying to size you up. I
shouldn’t size you up unless I wanted you for something.”

“Want me! For what?”

“I’ll tell you.”

The guest sat in the bow window and began to talk in a low voice. It
does not matter specially what he said: it was a plan of action which
a man of fair repute could only have told to one whose reputation for
honesty was smirched. It was a very creditable scheme from the point
of view of a skilful speculator and financier who was not particular
about his methods.

“My name must never appear,” he said, “though of course I am the backer
of the concern. If you will run the thing for me as your own, you
understand, then――I will make it worth your while. I don’t mind, to
speak quite frankly, broaching the matter to you, because my reputation
stands high, and I can back it with a big cheque. If you were to say I
had spoken to you thus, you would not be believed if I denied it. You
would be thought a blackmailer, that’s all.”

“I suppose so. I’m not likely to tell any one. I don’t talk much; and I
should only get into fresh trouble if I talked of this.”

“Yes. You’re quiet and shrewd. I’ve watched you a long time. Your
life here is a dog’s life. You are ticketed as the man――who was found
out. Now there’s very little risk in this; practically none. For if
the thing fails I don’t think the law can touch you. Of course your
reputation would be gone; but then you’ve damaged that already, and he
doesn’t forget it, any more than you do, does he?”

“Naturally he does not.”

“If it succeeds, and I think it will, then I will give you enough of
the proceeds to give you a real “fresh start” in America. My name will
never appear; it will never be traced who paid you the money; you will
simply reserve a sum agreed on between us. That’s tempting to you,
isn’t it? It means freedom, and a clean record in another country.
That’s tempting?”

“I think so. Will you give me twenty-four hours to think it over?”

“As long as you like in moderation.”

“It’s only that I feel rather played out and tired, that’s all. I funk
at anything that is fresh; anything that needs thought and smartness.”

“Ask for a holiday; rest and think it over.”

So the man asked for a holiday, and was granted forty-eight hours; not
more, because there was haste to produce the world-compelling pamphlet.
He thought he would walk five miles to the forest, and live two days
and nights in solitude under the open sky. He started in the dark,
with a knapsack strapped to his shoulders. It was dawn when he reached
the forest, and crossed a stretch of heath, whence the sea could be
smelt, salt and pungent; and the island, too, could be seen, lying,
indigo-blue, in the clear distance.

It was a very clear dawn, as clear as crystal, and sights and sounds
and smells had a bell-like clean-cut purity that struck the soul
at first hand, so that one hardly realised the perception of them
came by way of the body. There was a winding ribbon-like road, which
crossed the heath after it crept out of the thick forest, and along
it a red-painted mailcart went. Behind the cart ran an old dog, lured
neither to the right nor to the left in his steady following. The cart
clattered over a railless wooden bridge which crossed a slow stream in
which watergrasses waved; there were two moor-fowl swimming on it, and
its banks were shining with water forget-me-nots.

He passed the mailcart and crossed the bridge; then he reached the
woods and left the road. He wanted a quiet place in which to think;
he had brought with him, in his knapsack, bread and cheese and
apples,――enough food for two days. He walked down a turf path, climbed
a gate, walked through two straight pine avenues, and gained the “open
forest,” a great silent glade solemn and wonderful in the breathless
waiting of dawn. Here companies of rabbits were feeding; here were huge
spring-flushed oaks, twisted thorns, delicate birches glowing with the
marvel of young leafage. Here too was gorse ablaze with the fire of
God, and on the top-most twig of a larch, outlined against the sky, was
a thrush, a-quiver with a passion of song, telling a marvellous secret
of the heart of things, as only those can tell who do not understand
the uttermost meaning of their speech.

He had walked through the place looking at nothing until now; he had an
important decision to make. But now he stopped as though a great hand
had gripped him, and he stared at the bird with his eyes half-shut.
It was so clear; he could see the little feathers a-tremble at its
quivering throat, as the notes bubbled up like drops of bright water
from a well of joy.

He stared and listened till the thrush flew away.

He came to a little grove of holly trees; and there, on the round
circle of oozing wood where a great apple tree had been felled, he lay
down and ate some bread and an apple. Then he went to sleep, and when
he woke it was noon; the glade was a marvel of dappled shade and shine.

There was a blue tit swinging on the holly bough above him; and a fox
was trotting demurely through the fern a few yards away. It was all
sacredly, wonderfully still. The place taught nothing; said nothing;
it was itself――it was what it was. That was all.

He heard a quick patter of rain; and the leaves shone with diamonds; he
watched them a-glitter in the sun, when it shone forth again. A drove
of shaggy cream-coloured cattle came by, crashing through the tangle,
and passing the little grove of hollies, all a-shine in the sun, where
he lay.

When they passed he rose and wandered down a turf alley till the
pines hid the wide stretch of the open forest; then he lay with
his face hidden on the great cushions of the moss; and listened
half-unconsciously to the silence――the wonderful sounding silence――of
the wood.

There was a big beech tree near; it blazed with the green fire of
spring; at its foot were the shining sticky brown sheaths that once
shielded the young leaves. The oaks were pink, they were as rosy as the
dawn sky when he reached the forest. From the wood――only he was too
tired to rise and seek them――he could smell some late primroses yet
lingering on the sweet wet earth, from which the young grass sprang.
He heard a wood-pigeon’s slow, sleepy note a-purr from a little grove
of larches. Presently, with a strong beat of blue-grey wings the bird
flew between him and the sky. Then a jay swung silently from the pines
and perched on a bough above him; the conscienceless bird chuckled and
preened his feathers; a tiny blue black-barred wonder fluttered down on
the man’s chest.

Lying so, he could see the stiff, straight stems of the uncurling
bracken, quite differently from the fashion in which they are seen
when they are looked at from above; they stood rank by rank, straight,
stiff, and green, with their little brown cowled heads bent like monks
in prayer.

There was a much bigger life than his unfolding its affairs there
in the wood; and it made no turmoil or fuss about it; it lived and
reasoned not; it kept the commandments because it was not aware they
were apart from itself. And what were the commandments of the wood?
Certainly they were kept, whatever they were, for the place was full of
beauty and of rest.

The shadows grew long; it was time to eat some bread and cheese; he ate
some, and drank from a little stream. It struck him he had not been
thinking of the things he came there to think about; but after all he
should probably accept the offer, and he was very tired. He had not
realised before how much he was over-worked. To-morrow he would think.
In the meantime he would walk through the darkening pine avenue, and
see the dusk, like a purple-robed giant, stalk over the land.

He walked on and on; the pine walks were unending. Each walk was cut
and crossed by another vista of mystery; and always there was some hint
of wonders veiling unseen marvels. Sometimes a milky-white bush of
blackthorn; sometimes a little stream; sometimes a circle of great dead
oaks like frosted silver, all ringed about by frost-bleached grass,
through which the new green blades were pushing, and walled by dark
pines touched by the little sticky buds of spring growth. Sometimes
there was a pool of water shimmering in the shadow of the trees, set
about with rose-pink blossoming bog-myrtle, and white bog-cotton, and
wonderful little flat leaves shining like emeralds.

But at last he reached the gate. Beyond the gate was a stretch of
green heather; and thereon forest ponies feeding, and cows with
sleepily tolling bells. On it, too, great raised mounds; bracken and
heather-clothed barrows where rabbits burrowed in the grave of some
long-dead fighter. To the right was a curved line of woods that seemed
to be made of dusky red and green jewels. Before him was the island
glowing like sapphire; in the foreground on the open barren heath was
a little dark wind-twisted pine clear-cut against the sky; and the sky
ablaze with the colour that is the parting blessing of the Lord of
Light.

It was a pale sky of dream-blue; in the west it shone with crimson and
orange flame, fading into green like a breath of some secret mystery
of tenderness, and pinks like a dream of the love of God; and a violet
so faint, pure, and holy that the heart quivered at the sight of it.
Colour that speaks the tongue of the gods when thought falls dead and
the sound of speech is mere hollowness.

When the colour faded big purple clouds began to drift up over the pale
yellow sky until it was all a wonderful thick purple-blue darkness in
which sounds were both clear and muffled; faraway sounds were clear,
and sounds close at hand were muffled and eerie; pale milk-grey lights
began to slide through the darkness.

There were no stars; only the warm, dark, sweet-smelling half-silence.
He could not see a yard before his face, and yet he felt the darkness
was a big, far-reaching space about him.

There was a dry ditch among the pines; it was full of yellow-brown
pine-needles. He lay down there and heard the noises of the night; the
snapping of twigs, the rustle of little night-prowling beasts. Once a
badger stole by; once a night-bird shrieked; the owls called hoo-hoo
in the branches. Once there echoed a cry of pain and fear through the
wood, the death-shriek of some tiny citizen. Once a night-jar purred in
the tree above his head; and once the magic of the nightingale trembled
through the warm dark air in a limpid river of sound.

At last he slept; and he woke to a wild rush of rain. The wood was full
of a pale cool light; the pine-needles dripped; he heard the gurgle of
a hurry of water in the ditch beyond the gate. He got up; the livid
greenish-purple clouds were rushing across the sky; the island was
veiled in a white mist of rain; the forest ponies galloped for some
scant shelter; some of the herd turned disconsolate noses from the
rush of waters; some squealed and kicked and bit at each other; others
endured in meekness. A big ants’ nest near the gate was flooded; pools
stood in the heather; and a heap of cream-white foam swirled on the
brown water in the ditch.

Light wisps of cloud fled across the background of livid green-purple.
He stood under shelter of the trees and watched the storm.

It passed; the clouds flew seawards; the sky grew a pale even grey;
then a cool, soft wind began to blow. The east grew faint pink, then
yellow-grey; then a long line of light quivered over the heather. The
new day had come. The birds were stirring and singing; the rabbits
hopped out to feed; a stoat darted across the track; and the clang of a
cow-bell echoed across the moor.

He found the slowly moving stream he crossed yesterday; there he
bathed; then he ate some of the food he had brought with him. Finally
he walked down a path of silver-grey sand, skirting a wood of oaks.

It waxed very warm and still; there were no clouds; the air shimmered
over the heather; white and little brown butterflies skipped over it;
the island was veiled in a soft white haze with violet shadows in it.
Snakes slid out into the open to sun themselves; the air was full of
slanting gleams of gossamer and little drifting lives of insects that
lived a day and never knew the night.

He sat among the pines and saw the brown lizards and the squirrels and
watched the golden lights flit over the dry pine-needles; the boles of
the trees shone red, and in among the far-off oaks was a mist of pale
green.

In the afternoon he walked through the oak wood over dry leaves of last
year, and cushions of bright emerald moss, set with scarlet, purple,
and orange fungi.

At sunset he stood by a little clearing; it was near a ranger’s
cottage. He could smell woodsmoke and see its swaying blue column rise
above the thatched roof covered with stonecrop and little ferns. Here
were rows of hives where lived the bees whose soft organ-like drone he
had heard mingling with the ’cellos of the pines.

The sky was less brilliant than it had been the night before; it was
bluish-white and the long slender clouds on the horizon were violet and
pink. The sky grew paler and more pale; the silver of the evening star
glimmered out, a tiny point of light. The pines were very dark; they
looked black against the sky; a bat flickered over them.

He walked over the moor to the shore; he saw the ghost-white of the
foam, and heard the rush and draw of the tide on the smooth pebbles.
The moon was up when he walked back.

This night he did not try to sleep; not because he was worried and
thoughtful; he had not thought all day, and he did not think all
night. It was very still and cloudless, and the moon was full; when
it set the sky was solemnest blue; the stars and the white fire made
the mystery of space more wonderful. It was one of those nights which
are living symbols of largest patience; of breadth that includes
all things, of silence whose root is the wisdom that knows; of that
mighty indifference that is indifferent because of its tenderness
rather than its coldness. A night sky that was a symbol of a Holy
Catholic Church of the entire universe; not tolerant――because, after
all, tolerance is a little, narrow, patronising invention of man’s
aggressive superiority. That which is all-inclusive is not tolerant; it
is omnipotent, omniscient, Alpha and Omega; the first but also the last.

He did not think of these things; he never mused on such matters; he
did not think at all that night nor notice anything particularly. He
sat under the sky, his hands clasping his knees; he was not sleepy,
because to be out of doors two days and nights after a life spent
chiefly within walls is apt quite naturally to cause wakefulness.

He saw three shooting stars slide through the blue heart of the night.
At dawn he saw a fox, a vixen, and four little furry creatures with
sharp, bright eyes; they played together and rolled in the heather
without fear of man. He began wandering through the wood looking for
birds’ nests; he found four before the sun rose.

When it rose he began to walk back, for the forty-eight hours’ holiday
from the world-compelling pamphlet was ended.

He reached the house at seven o’clock; had a bath, dressed himself,
ate a moderate breakfast, and began to open and arrange his employer’s
letters. That was at 8.30.

At nine o’clock his employer’s guest on his way to breakfast looked
into the library. He nodded, came in, and shut the door.

“Good morning, Dexter,” he said. “You’ve got back, I see. I suppose I
know your answer?”

“No, I believe you don’t; for I think I’ll go on here.”

“You don’t mean that?”

“I do.”

“Afraid?”

“No.”

“Moral scruples?”

“No.”

“What then?”

The other hesitated, because he really did not know the answer. At last
he said:

“I have my Sundays free. And I think I should miss the forest if I went
away. I haven’t any other reason――that I know of.”


                L’ENVOI

    Power of the wave and the light,
    Power of the wind and the dawn,
    Fanned by the strength of thy breath
            Man’s soul is born.

    Power of the song of the lark,
    Power of the gold of the corn,
    By perfume and silence and speech
            Man’s soul is born.

    Power of the whispering rain,
    Power of the day when it dies,
    By magic of sunset and dusk
            Man’s soul doth rise!

    Power of the stars and the night,
    When singing and sighing shall cease
    By the unknown span of thy rest
            Man’s soul knows peace!




                       THE BREATH UPON THE SLAIN

    Shall these bones live? God knows.
    The prophet saw such clothed with flesh and skin.
    A wind blew on them, and Life entered in;
                  They shook and rose.
    Shorten the time, O Lord! Blot out their sin!
                  Let Life begin!
                               CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.


The wind was blowing through the heather, singing softly from the
distant sea. The tiny tinkling sound of the purple bells was like faint
music of faery.

They lay on an ancient barrow――three men on a summer holiday by the
southern sea.

One was a thin, nervous-looking man, who knew much of the purlieus of
the “primrose path,” wherein he strayed to gather up its wreckage and
mend it if he might, by the power of a God in whom he said he did not
believe.

The second was an ascetic, devout, and hard-working priest of the
Anglican Church.

The third was a man still young, but looking even younger than his
years. Dennis Barra was his name; a man with a smooth, boyish face,
strange yellow-grey eyes, and thick hair streaked a little with grey;
it gave the effect of dark hair lightly powdered, and added to the lack
of modernity about the face. It was not a modern face; it had delicate
irregular features, and a wide, thin-lipped mouth; the face looked
curiously luminous in the strong sunlight.

The first man――Ralph Ingram――was speaking.

“No, Cardew,” he said to the priest, “I tell you if I did not hold to
that belief I should go mad. If it be not thus, the world is based on
injustice. If we climb a ladder rung by rung, if we work out the result
of our deeds――that’s just. But no other theory is. What! a man murders
and wipes out all his past by ‘grace at the last,’ ‘forgiveness of
sins’ and ‘faith’ which his victim never had.

“You speak of these things as though they were outer contracts or a
mental attitude,” said the priest, “whereas they are real spiritual
forces, definite powers of the unseen. I do not see that you can
parcel out guilt thus, according to your system. If life be as you
say it is, the fine threads of cause and effect, of will, speech,
thought, impulse, action, are endless. It appears to me that by pushing
‘causes’ so far back, you have complicated everything so hopelessly
that you need some universal solvent to melt the bonds. If you accept
Adam as collective man rather than as an individual ancestor, then
Man――collective, heavenly man――has chosen his own lot; he has chosen
his fall. His true life is elsewhere; in some mysterious Eden of the
spirit he views all our inequalities with a wider view. Our misfortunes
may be his opportunity; and our happiness his slough of despond. The
view of man spiritual and man carnal may be diametrically opposed. His
justice may be your injustice.”

“Well! I should as soon believe in the sea-serpent as in the doctrine
of regeneration, grace, and faith.”

At this point Dennis Barra laughed.

“Are you laughing at Ingram or at me?” said the priest.

“I was laughing because I believe I once saw a sea-serpent off the
coast of Scotland, and I would say so if I were not afraid of Ingram.
And I was also laughing because I thought you didn’t see that your
views fit and where they fit. Ingram believes in the law which governed
the past and governs the majority in the present; you believe in a
possibility of the present――the certain law of the future.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well! because it struck me it was true! And regeneration is a
possibility, regeneration of body and soul; and grace is a fact, and
the swift transmutation of the sinner into the saint I believe to be
possible.”

“Are these things facts? I don’t believe they are.”

“Will you believe me if I tell you a story?”

“If you vouch for it.”

“I do vouch for it. I know it’s true. There was a man once who had
just come out of prison. He deserved his punishment. His friends cut
him――quite justly; and he did not greatly care, save that he was angry.
He had some means; he was not in want; he was independent both of work
and friends. He drank a little when he came out of prison, not much. He
would drink for a day or two, and then keep sober for a week. In the
place where he was, a mission was being held; and with no great result.”

“They needed you there, Barra!”

The young man smiled.

“The people were indifferent. Something was lacking. The mission was
to last a week. The clergy paraded the streets each night with a cross
and the choir and banners. On the third night the man of whom I speak
joined the procession and entered the church. It was a gloomy church;
the singing was bad; the preacher had little power. There was nothing
to stir the emotions. It was dull; the man was just sitting there,
bored. He was thinking he would go out, when something――Something, I
say――Some one――stood beside him. He saw no one, but some one was there;
and that some one laid a hand upon his head. What that touch did to
him he did not know; he never knew. It revolutionised him mentally,
morally, yes, and bodily. There came to that man a bodily change, as
though he was fused and re-made in a crucible of the spirit,――a cup
of the Holy Graal. The only words which were clear to him were: ‘The
Fire of the Sacred Heart, the Fire of the Heart of the Ascended.’ They
were not spoken, but he knew they were there. And he knew too, that he,
the drunkard, the criminal, the man fresh from gaol, must speak to the
people. It was not a case of what spiritualists call ‘control.’ No;
but God had laid a measure of His power in the trembling hands of that
sinner, and said to him: ‘Own thy sins in humbleness, and then――not
thyself but Myself; give Me to my children!’

“He stood up and walked to the pulpit steps; the preacher was just
coming down and he laid his hand on his arm and said: ‘Let me speak to
them.’

“It seems little less than a miracle; for it was a church of the
Established Church in England and he an unknown layman. But the
preacher let him stand on the altar steps and speak. He told them very
quietly and briefly who he was, and what was his character, and that he
was sorry; and then he spoke.

“He had not spoken for three minutes before the women were sobbing, and
the men were white as ashes, and many of them shaking like reeds in a
wind. There was a great ‘revival,’ and people laid themselves, body,
soul, and spirit, at the Feet of God.”

“It must have been such a power as I have known you wield over people,
Barra.”

“It was the Fire of the Lord that had struck one man, and he passed it
on. Of course some went back; but others didn’t, and their lives were
changed. But what I want to make you see is that what happened to that
man could happen to all men; and his sins and his past were made naught
when God’s Hand touched him. It didn’t matter so much that he didn’t
know how it was done. It was done. That is a living Power that could
work in the world at any minute if the time was ripe; and if and when
it does we shall have a new heaven and a new earth.”

“It seems to me hard that this fellow’s sins and past were blotted
out, and not those of the other poor wretches. Why should he escape
suffering he had earned by the touch of a hand on his head? You say he
deserved what he got. I daresay he deserved much more. Most likely he
was a scoundrel who deserved the cat.”

“Very likely he did. He never thought anything else. He always admitted
his sins. But don’t mistake. I never said he escaped suffering. The
sins of the other poor wretches were blotted out _in him_ for the time
being only, of course. They swept into him like a tide of foulness
and anguish, and the Fire burned them. They were its fuel; so that it
swept out in a fuller flood and touched the people with its power and
cleansed them. Escaped suffering! People who feel the burden of their
own sins and sorrows to be too much to bear, little realise what it
means to feel other people’s as well. Do you know there are simple,
unlearned, unknown women, secluded from the world, who _pray_ the
temptations of the strong (the ‘vibrations’ or ‘magnetisms,’ to use
the popular shibboleth) into their own bodily frames, and then endure
their anguish to ease others’ burdens? They _endure_ them, I say;
they offer them to be transmuted in their own bodies and souls by the
spiritual force they call the Blood of Christ; and that Force flows out
from them to the people for whom they pray. That is true, possible,
a fact. Many a time, maybe, have those very people laughed at their
inactive lives, simple faith, superstitious creeds, and all the rest
of it. They’d be wallowing deep in mud, many of those strong ones, if
it were not for that very superstitious creed that prompts the women’s
prayers. That is the real meaning of the Cross to these women; that is
the vital, poignant meaning to them of being crucified with Christ.”

The wind muttered in the heather, and the corncrake called from a
distant field. The speaker’s voice deepened a little; but it was quite
steady, there was in it neither emotion nor excitement.

The priest raised himself a little on his elbow and looked at him
thoughtfully. He did not speak.

“Barra,” said Ralph Ingram, “do you _know_ this story of your inspired
criminal to be true?”

“I know it to be true,” said Dennis Barra, quietly, “I know it, because
I was the man!”




                            THE GLAMOUR-LAND

    He follows on for ever, when all your chase is done,
    He follows after shadows, the King of Ireland’s son.
                                                   ――――(?)


In the late autumn snow had fallen; it lay unmelted on the highest of
the hills; it often lay there when on lower ground not even a light
frost crisped the earth. But now it was very cold, and the trees were
glittering with hoar-frost and delicate spikes of ice. The sea ran
far inland and made a salt-water lake, almost land-locked. Blue was
the key-colour of the place. The sky glowed blue and cloudless; the
smooth water was gentian blue; seawards there was a huge bar of sand
and shingle, heaped high, and running almost the whole way across the
arm of the inrushing sea; therefore whether the tide was high or low
the waves broke and leaped and swirled on it, so that the sea looked
like a great lake, land-locked on three sides, and bounded on the
fourth by a tossing, spouting, milk-white cataract of foam, as the
great breakers raged and tumbled over the bar of sand. There were no
vague tones nor shadowy outlines; the blue and white were vivid,
brilliant. Blue sea――blue sky――blue shadows on the white hills; white
snow, white frost on leafless boughs, white foam aglitter in the sun.
Blue――blue――blue――and unspeakably blue the shining wells of the sky,
into which one might send one’s thought forth in quest of Truth, and
return anon bewildered and without booty, for the whole Truth was never
yet gleaned from without nor yet from another man. White were the
sea-gulls feeding on the foreshore; only a little seaweed-plastered
jetty was rich brown and amber yellow; crouched at the foot of the
jetty sheltered from the keen wind were some children who added a touch
or two of red to the picture, for one of the girls wore a crimson coat
and one of the boys a scarlet woollen cap.

These children were telling stories, and it was the red-capped boy’s
turn. He was not a very popular teller of tales; yet he gripped his
hearers because he wove the stories of the things which he knew in his
heart, and not of the things he had heard.

Now the other boys told of pirates and brigands, whether they had
practical experience of them or not; for which reason one only of their
number knew what he was talking about; he afterwards became a great
writer, for he drew upon the bank of knowledge, though how he came
by the knowledge he could not tell. His swashbucklers and sea-wolves
breathed the breath of life; and people who spent their time in wearily
wrestling with office work and household accounts found them very
refreshing company.

Redcap stood in the middle of the circle; the frosty wind fluttered
his flaxen curls beneath his scarlet headgear. He was telling tales
of Glamour-Land, the customs of which country he knew well; the
group listened. The boys were not wholly absorbed; the girls who
are generally quick to hear the Songs of the Glamour were the more
interested. When the speaker ended his tale the girl in the crimson
coat drew a long breath and gave her verdict “Lovely.” The tale-teller
did not heed her; he was one of those people who care nothing for the
breath of fame and praise. He who understood pirates so well nodded
approvingly. Throughout his life this boy knew good work when he saw
it, because his own was so good. One of the boys offered criticism.

“It’s all beastly rot,” he said with the simple directness of boyhood.
“There isn’t any such place.”

Redcap crushed him with swift scorn.

“That’s all you know about it,” he said. “That place I tell you
about is real, and this place isn’t; this place”――he waved his arms
patronisingly at the sky and sea――“is an evil enchantment of the
Black Witch; one of these days the Wise Queen will snuff her and her
enchantment out――puff! like that!”

He snapped his fingers; the listeners looked uneasy and momentarily
doubted the stability of the earth.

The boy who had criticised repeated his former remark: “It’s all rot.”
Inwardly he hoped the Wise Queen would not snuff out the enchantment
before tea time; for he knew there were hot cakes, and he could not
honestly view them as evil enchantments. But where did the red-capped
boy get his ideas about the relative reality of the seen and unseen?

Eight years after, that boy’s father died; his mother married again,
and thereafter great trouble and poverty fell upon a family that had
hitherto been happy and prosperous. This boy, then a lad of eighteen,
given to great dreams and visions of the Glamour-Land, was torn away
from all he loved and hoped for and dreamed of; he was sent to work at
dull drudgery for a weekly pittance in a house of business in London.
There, sick for the sights and sounds of Glamour-Land, he nearly broke
down both mentally and physically. He was poor, friendless, proud,
and unsociable; but that was nothing. If he could have had one daily
glimpse of the Glamour Country, one note of its songs, he could have
borne the rest. He fenced himself about with a wall of practical
cheeriness and hard-headed common-sense and lived inside it in a hell
of his own. In a narrow black street the child of the blue land, of
sea, and wide distances lived and suffered for five dreadful years;
then he chanced to find a room over some offices which looked upon the
river, and suffered a little less. He began to earn more money; he was
promoted. He did his work very well; he was to be depended upon; he was
steady, alert, and “on the spot,” said his employers. He was thoroughly
practical. Once some reference was made to his prospects by a man who
was his superior in the business house where he was employed. This man
told him he was bound to get on; it was “rare to see a young fellow so
steady, and with his heart in his business.” The young man (he was then
twenty-three) laughed a little laugh that was as chill and dreary as
the wuther of the north wind in frozen rushes by a bleak ice-coated
mountain tarn.

“When you don’t care for anything you have to do, one thing comes as
easy as another,” he said. “Besides you can ‘give your mind’ to heaps
of things. If you like a piece of work it is hard to pull away from
it to something else; but if one is much like another to you, and all
equally dull, then, if you’ve a decent amount of self-control you can
do them all fairly effectively.”

While his superior was trying to understand his extraordinary
sentiments, he said “Good-night, sir,” and went out. He walked back to
his room.

This befell just before he found the room overlooking the river; it was
a sultry, ill-smelling summer night; the straight line of the houses
rose before him in their terrible hideousness. There was a little
church in the street in which they sang anthems. A choir practice was
going on. He could hear the voices plainly:

“By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered
thee, O Zion. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget
her cunning.”

The man hid his face in his hands and sighed; his heart was sick with
great longing and intolerable weariness.

“God!” he said. “Let me go mad with memory rather than forget.”

Yet after all it seemed undesirable to go mad, therefore he rose and
went to a little cheap club; the members were many of them “thoughtful
people” with “views”; most of their views were theoretically partly
true, and practically partly false and wholly impossible to carry out;
it was not always possible to put one’s finger on the flaw in them.
The members of that club talked a great deal; a man was talking very
earnestly when he who desired to remember entered there. He was a
reformer, and willing to make any personal sacrifice to further his
regenerative views. He said:

“A wider charity is what men need. That is the root of the matter.”

“Nothing has been so fruitful a cause of pauperisation,” said a
red-haired man who was listening for the sole purpose of disagreeing
with him. This man was the type of person who can never extend his
views beyond the meaning which he has decided to apply to a word.

“I do not mean Charity in that sense. I mean rather Love, which I have
heard is Wisdom in activity, that which perceives a common basis of
life. This is Wisdom, this is Love, this is Charity.”

“Statistics prove,” began the man, who while the other spoke had been
thinking of his own views as to the meaning of charity.

“Statistics have no more to do with Charity than they have with Truth.
They are the worst form of lying extant. Charity, in my sense, is the
deepest of all wisdom. Faith, Hope, Charity, these three――and the
greatest of these is Charity.”

Then another voice uplifted itself.

“I think St. Paul was wrong there,” it said. “The greatest of these is
Faith.”

It was the young man from the north.

“Faith! What do you mean by faith?”

“The sense of the unseen, and the trust in it,” said he who used to
tell the stories of the Glamour-Land. “The man who never loses the
sense of that which he does not see, can move the world. All the force
side of nature is allied with him. It is the unseen that is the motive
power everywhere. The man who in an east-end slum, a city office, a
factory, a gambling hell, a music hall, or in the trivial round of
society can realise that, has allied himself with the sun and the sea,
with the wind and the light, with the Power that lies behind all and
causes the whole to be.”

Having thus spoken he wandered out as he had wandered in.

“That’s a queer young fellow,” said the red-haired man, “I think he’s
cracked.”

“No,” said one of the listeners, “I think not. He’s a practical chap;
quiet, solid, steady-going fellow, and no fool. A good man of business
too. I’ve never seen him taken like that before.”

He spoke as though he was the victim of some malady. If this was
the case it did not assert itself again. The man worked on steadily
and rose in the estimation of his employers, who were very sober,
business-like people. When he had been nearly twenty years in London he
met the boy who told the pirate stories by the blue sea. The boy was
now a man and he told his stories to a wider public; he was married to
the girl who wore the crimson coat. He recognised his former brother
of the craft, and was very kind and glad to see him; he asked him to
his house and insisted on his coming there. He saw, what no one in his
guest’s world saw, that such prosperity as was his was not the full
measure of that which the promise of his youth once seemed to deserve.
He asked him why he had toiled in a London office; why he had ceased to
tell the tales of Glamour-Land, of the Wise Queen, and the Black Witch.
The other was silent awhile. At last he said: “I couldn’t. That part of
me is dead, and buried by the sea up yonder.”

His host said no more at the time; he referred to it once again, very
carefully and tactfully.

“No,” said his guest. “I told you I couldn’t. First, because my mind
is like a hollow pipe, for other people’s thoughts to blow through.
Secondly, because I don’t properly know any of the things I used to
know when I was young.”

He talked a while longer; then he rose, said good-bye, and never
returned to that house again. He went back to the room which overlooked
the river; for fifteen years he had lived therein. He sat by the window
and muttered to himself:

“They that wasted us required of us mirth; saying: Sing us one of the
songs of Zion.”

It was the hour between light and darkness; the river was clear silvery
greyish blue, and the light struck down into it like daggers of
quivering pallid fire; the bridge showed threadlike arches of vague
darkness through the blue mist; little busy tugs sped up the water-way,
dragging long, thin, black barges; a big waggon piled high with
gleaming yellow straw creaked along the bank, coming townwards from the
country. There was the half-light that brings out a thousand shifting
tints; lights began to dot the shore and the boats lying at anchor.

On a sudden the scent of wild thyme smote through the room; there was
a hill near his old home that was carpeted with it in summer time; and
behold the Glamour-Land he had not seen for twenty years lay below him,
in the very heart of the city. It was perhaps the shadowy silver-blue
that opened the way; faint vague blue, unlike the gentian glow of the
sea-lake, yet reminiscent of it. The room was palpably full of the
perfume of wild thyme. The man rose. For ten years he had hungered for
the beauty of his old home, and there had been no money to take him
there, nor welcome for him had he journeyed thither. For ten years the
money had been there and a temperate welcome to boot, but the desire
lay, half-dead, numbed with over-long thwarting, weariness, and pain.
Now he suddenly realised he could go back if he would. The next day he
asked for and obtained a holiday and started northwards.

It was evening when he arrived; he went to a little inn, and after
dinner he walked to the jetty and stood upon it looking at the water
leaping on the bar, and the glowing line of the sun-bathed hills. He
looked and he looked and he looked, and behold! there was nothing
there which he desired. The hunger of twenty years was for something
which this beauty recalled to him――nothing more. The Glamour-Land was
not here. The purple of the darkening sea, the tossing of the water,
foaming ghost-white on the great bar, the clear golden light of the
hills, woke in him only a great hunger for that of which they made him
think; for which they caused him to long; and of what he thought, for
what he longed he did not know. It eluded him; it fled before him like
a flickering elf-flame, never to be grasped or known.

“How can we sing the Lord’s Song in a strange land?”

He said the words aloud; as a stranger in that country in which he had
been born and reared. The next day he went back to London to the room
that overlooked the river. He sat alone; he was alone in the house; the
offices below were closed; the place was quiet; the roar of London
sounded distant, it was like the far-off breaking of the waves on
the bar; the river water was lapping against the walls that pent it
in. As he walked homewards he had crossed the bridge, and stopped to
buy watercress of an old man. This old man was one who, through the
ignorance which is the heritage of every man, had, in an hour of that
madness which we call sin, become outcast from the rank wherein he was
born; now, ill, old, and very poor, he sold watercress, groundsel, and
pencils on the bridge by day and slept in a common lodging-house by
night. This man was the one soul on earth to whom he who once told the
tales of Glamour-Land ever spoke of the longing that consumed him. This
old man also had a hopeless longing of his own; he desired one hour
back of the seventy years that lay behind him; one hour to fashion as
he chose, one hour which had darkened and made a hell of forty years.
The man from the north stopped and bought cress of him. As he took the
cress he spoke. “I used to think I longed for my old home,” he said. “I
went back there yesterday after twenty years.”

“What did you find?”

“The country I seek is not there,” answered the other; his voice
sounded tired, as though with much journeying of soul and body.

“Ah! you’d better not have gone. It is better to believe there is
something which would make you content if you had it.”

“I’d rather know the truth.”

“You are young still,” said the pencil-seller. “If I believed I were
young and strong, loved and honoured, I should believe a lie. But I
should prefer to believe it.”

“It is probably just as true as your present beliefs about yourself,
whatever they may be. Don’t you think so?”

He walked on. Now the cress lay on the table and withered; he sat by
the window and listened to the lapping of the tide. For twenty years he
believed he knew what he desired, if he had been free to seek it; now
he knew otherwise. He did not know where Glamour-Land was, and yet――“If
I forget thee, O Jerusalem,” he murmured, “may my right hand forget her
cunning.”

Into the silence of his soul there broke many voices speaking as one
voice and they spoke after this manner:

“When we who guard the Songs of the Glamour will that they shall be
sung, they are sung. They ring through the world, though none know
whence they sound, nor the manner of their sounding. Some say they come
from here, and some from there. And it is nothing to us whether our
singers be kings or slaves, saints or sinners, fools or sages, men or
women, for it is we who sing through their lips, and it is the world
that hears when the time is ripe. We have before this day caused those
who were blind, and dumb, and deaf to sing the songs of the Glamour,
and some of these never knew they sang. Moreover, you have sung them
here in the city’s heart for twenty years and more, while you thought
your lips were mute and your heart hungry with desire of Glamour-Land.
And because you had nothing for which you longed, you learned to look
for nothing your hands could grasp, but to hold all things readily and
loose them easily at the appointed hour. Wherefore we, who know how it
is with a man’s soul, drew from you the common desires of men as pith
is drawn by a shepherd boy from a reed when he would pipe therewith;
thereafter we fashioned these your body and soul into a pipe whereon we
might pipe the Songs of the Glamour, and the world has heard them. You
felt their notes ring through your soul, while your ears were deaf,
strain them as you would.”

“And I?” he asked, “am I nothing?”

“Nothing,” they made answer, “nothing――or all that is.”

Whereat he fell to musing on their words, until the lapping water, the
roaring city, and the beating of the heart within his body, seemed
alike to be but the pulsing of a life that swept outward from the
Unknown God of the Worlds.




[Illustration:
                      THE
                        TEMPLE PRESS LETCHWORTH
                                           ENGLAND]




Transcriber’s Note:

Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Final stops missing at the end of sentences were added. Words
may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in
the text. These have been left unchanged. Obsolete and alternative
spellings were left unchanged. At the end of line 3344, the word 
“that” may have been omitted from the text, “... once told [that] the
tales of ...”





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