Rest Harrow: A Comedy of Resolution Part 3

_Poet_. A sweet, good girl, but--I was not speaking of Mary.

_Philosopher_. So I supposed. Let me remind you--

_Poet_. Remind me of nothing. I remember everything. She was like the dayspring from on high. When I think of Greece, I think not of Plato and Sophocles, but of things more delicate and shy; of the tender hedge- flowers of the Anthology, of Tanagra and its maidens in reedy gowns, of all of this in a sweet clean light, as she was, and is, and must be. Ah, and I think of her, as I saw her first in the woodland, in her white gown, with the sun upon her hair. She was like the fluting of a bird; she was clear melody. She girt herself high and set her foot in the black water.

She dipped her pure body in above the knees; she, the n.o.blest, the wholesomest the youngest of the G.o.ds. Remind me of nothing, I beg you.

_Philosopher_. I must really remind you of this. You renounced her of your own deliberation, and promised to dance at her wedding.

_Poet_ (with a sob). So I would, G.o.d bless her!

_Philosopher_. That is a charitable sentiment. I have done you good.

_Poet_. You are an a.s.s.

I have summarised an argument which was really prolonged and very acrimonious. The philosopher prevailed, and the poet, beaten at every point, forswore what ambitions remained to him, built himself a shepherd's hut in a valley of the Wilts.h.i.+re Downs, and planned out his memoirs in three stout volumes. He believed that he had reached that stage in life where retrospect is all.

Volume I., _Open Country;_ Volume II., _Halfway House;_ Volume III., _Shepherd's Crown_--are t.i.tles which indicate the scope and spirit of the projected work. They were characteristically chosen before a line was written; nor, indeed, was a single other word put to paper, not so much as an Advice to the Reader, for two years. The building of his house with his own hands, and the disposition of the land about it occupied him for the better part of one; the next, with its progressive seasons of fruition, was spent in meditative ecstasy; by the beginning of the third his cure was complete. The poet in him was now the philosopher's humble servant, as should surely always be the case. Resolved that the world should be sweetened yet, he attacked his book.

He began with the third volume, in which, under the heading of _Shepherd's Crown_, he proposed to discharge himself of the conclusions of his ripened manhood upon the world, as he now saw it from his gra.s.sy outlook. Not yet could he trust himself with _Open Country_. That was for Thoughts. That was to be filled with spheral music which lay under lock and bolt deep within his nature. Before he could set that free to throb and beat in his brain, he must be quite sure that it could not win a way back into his heart. For she of whom it must consist, whose very name was music, whose presence, as he said, was like the fluting of a bird, was the renounced, impossible She; that She whom for reason clear and good he had loved (upon his knees, with covered eyes), and suffered go her ways. The philosopher was clear upon the point that Volume I. must be withheld for a season, and that Volume II., if it was to deal with the enchantment of the flitted Mary, must wait also. Mary must be charitably handled; give her time. In Volume the third, now, we were to have neither music on the one hand, nor the sharp fragrance of loose hair and warm breath on the other; but green thoughts, rather, "calm of mind, all pa.s.sion spent," as surely at forty- two it must be. Let the wise book deal with life, not the living; with love, not of woman; with death, but not of the body.

Early in the third year this wanderer, come to anchor, began his book, and at his desk I propose to leave him until near the end of mine. But, that he shall know the man again when the tale hath need of him, the reader will be pleased to accompany me into his neighbourhood for a moment.

Into the great ridge of chalk which is the backbone of South Wilts, and runs east and west from Sarum to Shaftesbury, there cuts up from the south a deep, winding, and narrow valley. The hills, between whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s it runs a turfy way, fold one into the other; a man coming up from Blandford, and minded to strike across country to Marlborough, might well pa.s.s within two hundred yards of our recluse and never see a sign of him. It was at the head of this glen, sheltered by hills from north, east, and west, but open full to the south, he had built his one-storied, deep-eaved house of larch and s.h.i.+ngles. Here, under the sky, he watched and laboured and slept, and saw n.o.body, living princ.i.p.ally on vegetables of his own growing, and cheese, which he made from the milk of a flock of goats.

Bread he had once a week from a peasant's cottage at the valley's foot; gypsy folk brought him occasionally tea and tobacco. For the most part he drank water, and was too good a traveller to be rooted to his pipe.

The group behind him sloped sharply up to the ridge, which we call the Race-Plain in those parts, and had nourished, when he first took up his rest below it, little but nettles, mulleins, and scrub of elder. A few fair trees--ash, thorn, spindle, service--struggled with the undergrowth which should live. He was for the trees, needing their shade; cleared the ground, terraced it with infinite pains, and utilised the water of a mist pool which he had made on the high land by a system of ca.n.a.ls of remarkable neatness and ingenuity. Tree-trunks, split and hollowed out, conveyed what water he wanted as and whither he would.

To the west of his dwelling the slope was gentler, and there woods and brake-fern grew peacefully together and made a fine refuge from the heats.

Behind this shelter, hidden from sight of the house, he had a broad lynch for his vegetables, and grew and protected them to be the envy and despair of rabbits. In the woods, and below, in the valley bottom, where wind-sown thorns made a natural park, his goats found eatage. He reserved the terraces about the house for the flowers which he loved and understood.

He was an expert gardener, who in his day had been famous for his skill in naturalisation. His feats in this work have made a stir beyond our sh.o.r.es.

Alpine plants grow wild upon English rock-faces at his whim, irises from the glaring crags of the Caucasus spread out their filmy wings, when he bids them, on Devons.h.i.+re tors. These wonders he chose not to repeat--for reasons. Pence, to begin with, failed him. The work itself was a.s.sociated with the happiest and the saddest moments of his life; he had not the heart to begin it. Moreover, in the course of his year's work of house- building and settling in, he had kept an eye for Nature's way in his valley, and when it came to making a flower-garden he found that she had one there to his hand.

He said, "Nothing is lovelier in flowers than true colour. Form is nothing to Nature; it is one of Art's tricks. Here I may have a succession of pure washes by mere concentration of what I find. The downs give me everything; all I have to do is to group them.

"Here is my design. For early spring, cowslips in a cloud. Scattered broadcast, they are happy accidents which you come upon walking; but if you ma.s.s them their scent tells, and you find they are nearer the colour of oranges than of limes.

"For mid-April and early May I have the orchids--a blood-spatter on the bottom; higher the flecked white, the pink, and the yellow with brown.

Then for a shelf among rocks the milk-worts, the sky-blue, the white and the pink; with these I float out May like Fra Angelico. For June there are Ragged Robins like filaments of rosy cloud, and Forget-me-not to drift like wood-smoke over the chalk rubble. In July I have a pageant. Foxglove and Eglantine make melodious my woods; Ladies' Slipper gives a golden cope to the hillside, with purple campanula to wind about it like a scarf.

After this--August, September, October--our uplands faint out in semitones: grey scabious, grey harebell, pale bed-straw, white meadowsweet, like the lace of an old lady's cap. But even so, if I must have a sunset glow of brown-pink, herb-willow gives it me. Pinch out the leader of each slim spike, and you make a different plant of it." Thus the poet embroidered the philosopher's text, and kept away from his memories, and husbanded his pence.

These things, at any rate, he did, collecting with diligence the plants to his hand, separating them from the gra.s.ses and bents in which they hid, ma.s.sing them and marshalling to his purposes. The thing was done with extreme art and infinite patience; the result, a rainbow stream of colour through the working year.

He added a few foreign growths: cyclamen for the woods, because he did not see how one could do without them who had once seen them in Calabria; wild gladiolus, because it loved the corn, and there was land in tillage within a mile of him; a few primulas for his conduit's edges; wild crocus, because She whom he had loved best had loved them; colchic.u.ms for the bottoms in Autumn, because once She, straying with him in meadows, had picked some for her bosom and at parting given him one. He had it still, though he never cared to look at it. She and it belonged to his first volume, and neither crocus nor colchic.u.m had been added at the date of which I write. He planted them when he reopened that book, and they are thriving now.

Here was work enough for a man somewhat mauled by the world to forget his hard knocks withal; and he forgot them. Looking about him, the length and breadth of his silent and lonely valley, he could see nothing but amenity in the earth which owed man so little. It was so with him at this time that the more he saw to love in Nature the less he could find admirable in man, who denied her at every turn. It was men, not She, who had given him his bruises; it was She, not men, who had taught him how to forget them.

When outraged Society cried him down for a breaker of laws, he had replied that, so far as he knew, he had broken none of Nature's; and had it been argued that we live otherwise than as the beasts that perish, he would have retorted, "Whether the beasts perish or not, it is very clear that they live to the full in this world, and that we don't. Suppose they perish, at least they have lived. If we are to live hereafter, as to which no one is certain, we are faced at our temporal death with the fact that, born into this world with certain faculties, instincts, appet.i.tes, and senses, we have let most of them atrophy, and the rest rot, by many contributory causes, of which the chief is over-eating. If I die, to live again, I have it behind me that I have lived well already. I am that much to the good. And, that others may have the same fortune, I shall devote what time remains to me to teaching the truth, _The less you have the more you are._ This was his intention when he sat down to pen his _Shepherd's Crown_; before he dared look back upon _Open Country_, or to plant the sacred crocus, or to look upon the dry colchic.u.m flower which had been granted the grace of a fair breast."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The hum of cities and buzz of dinner tables ... sound in his ears not at all.]

We meet him again, but not yet. We have him fast in his moorings, and are to see him rather as a fixed point about which other wandering lights stray in narrowing circles, to which they converge. We are to conceive of him, if you please, as writing his Book, while the hum of cities, and buzz of dinner-tables, noisy enough to us and full of excitement, sound in his ears not at all. And when I have done, you will discover, if you care, why he changed the t.i.tle of his third volume from _Shepherd's Crown_, and chose it to be called _Rest Harrow_.

The way thither is long, and many things are to happen to many people; but little happens to him except the wheeling of the years.

BOOK II

SANCHIA AT WANLESS HALL

I

A telegram was handed to her as she came in from the garden, her broad- brimmed straw hat in her hand, and a bunch of fritillaries nodding in her blouse. That dates and places her at once: the time was April, and she was fond of curious flowers. She stood in the doorway to get the sunset glow upon the missive, and was herself ensanguined and enhanced, a sunny- haired, low-breasted young woman of middle height, rather faintly coloured, wholesome to see, with a bowed upper lip, and clear, grey-blue eyes of extreme directness and candour. A trick of looking you full, of considering you and her answer together, she had--a mild, steady beam, a radiance within the orb which told of a hidden glory. Her brows were level, eyebrows arched; her bust, though set like Aphrodite's of Melos, was full. The curving corners of the bow of her lips a.s.sured her the possession, even when she was most serious, of a lurking smile. Taking off her gardening gloves that she might break the red envelope, she disclosed a pair of fine, white, nervous hands, and pointed fingers which wore no rings.

The address, which she was careful to read before she tore the envelope, was--

Miss Percival, Wanless, Felsboro'.

Opening then, she read as follows:--

Home to-morrow seven people Ingram.

If she frowned slightly, it was a mere approach of the fine eyebrows to each other. She certainly smiled--wisely and meditatively, without showing her teeth. She touched her chin--a rounded, full chin--with the telegram, as she looked up at the maid who brought it.

"I must see Mrs. Benson about this. It's from Mr. Ingram."

"Yes, Miss Percival."

A friendly desire to share the puzzle was now manifest in the clear eyes.

"You see, Minnie, it might mean one of two things, and I am not quite sure which of them it does mean." She looked again at the message with amused interest; but one could not have said whether she was amused at her interest, or interested in her amus.e.m.e.nt. That was part of Miss Percival's charm, that she was always baffling you.

But Minnie, the maid, was demure and monotonous under the attack of friendly desires. "No, Miss Percival," she said, and added, "I am sure I couldn't say." She stood aside from the doorway as the young lady entered the billiard-room, saying, as she went, "Ask Mrs. Benson to come to my room, Minnie, please; and tell Frodsham I should like to see him directly he comes to-morrow morning."

She heard Minnie's "Very well, Miss Percival," as she disappeared, smiling still, and with a slight heightening of colour. When her colour rose, it rose evenly, flooding her face and neck with the dawn-hue. There were no patches or streaks of flame; she showed, as it were, incandescent.

She crossed the hall in the deepening dusk, a fine, littered room, where a great log-fire revealed the tall portraits of ladies and gentleman of long ago--sportsmen with spaniels at their feet, general officers in scarlet, pointing through smoke the direction of the enemy, a judge in ermine and full bottomed wig, a lady in white satin leaning against a broken column in a park, and backed by a brewing thunderstorm; and as she went her way gave a couple of glances to right and left, picked up a _Bradshaw_ from a side-table, stooped to put a tiger-skin straight. She continued down a long corridor, swinging her hat, and entered an open doorway at the extreme end. By the way she tossed the hat on to a chair and stirred the crackling logs with the point of her shoe, it was to be supposed that she was in her demesne. Standing with a foot on the fender she presently fell into a reverie, and presently reopened and re-read her telegram. Certainly she was smiling, and certainly her colour was enhanced.

The room, though business-like, was feminine. It had a Chippendale bureau between the windows, its pigeon-holes stuffed with papers; but there were flowers upon it, and elsewhere many photographs, and pictures evidently chosen by the tenant. The _Dante_ from the Bargello was one, the three headless _Fates_ of the Parthenon another; the _Hermes_ and the _Sophocles_, all in autogravure. It had a piano and a small bookcase containing the poets in green morocco, a uniform set. Elsewhere, in a larger bookcase, were miscellaneous volumes, by no means all novels, though novels there were. One shelf was filled with household books: cookery, bee-keeping, poultry, the _Dog in Health and Disease_, the horse, the flower-garden, _Botany, British Edible Fungi_, the _World of Vegetables_, were some of the subjects treated of. Below the bookcase was a row of j.a.panned tin boxes, carefully lettered in white paint. House Accounts, Garden Accounts, Stable Accounts, one read. A fourth bore the words "Wood Sales and Miscellaneous."