Part 14

She was quite right; though the silly barometer had gone up, we were but half through dinner when the wind, which had been no more than a breeze all afternoon, struck the house as suddenly as a blow. The wood fire on the hearth gave a little puff of smoke into the room, and then, thinking better, suddenly sparkled as if with frost, as the passage of the air above the chimney drew it up. At that Helen’s eyes were alight. She ate no more, but sat with her elbows on the table, while I, who have not the sixth sense, went gravely through mutton and anchovies on toast and an orange. Then they brought in coffee, and she shook her head to that. Meantime that first warning of the wind had been justified; a Niagara of air poured over us, screaming and hooting, and making a mad orchestra of sound. At times it ceased altogether--the long pause of the conductor--and then, before one heard the wind at all, a tattoo of the drums of rain, sounded on the window-pane. Then, heralded by those drums, the whole mad orchestra burst into a great _tutti_ of screaming, hooting, sobbing. So much I could hear, but Helen was _of_ it somehow. Something secret and sensitive within her vibrated to the uproar.

I have seen her in the grip of the wind, as she expresses it, perhaps half a dozen times, and it always makes me vaguely uneasy. It is no less than a possession, and yet I can think of no one whom I would have imagined less liable to such a thing. I can imagine her surrounded by the terrors of fire or shipwreck, or any catastrophe that overthrows the reason, and makes men mere panic-stricken maniacs, keeping absolutely calm, and infecting others by her self-possession. But now and then the wind takes possession of her, and she becomes like the Pythian prophetess.

‘Oh, to be alone with the sea and the gale to-night!’ she said. ‘Jack, what splendid things are happening in the great empty places of the world! This has been brewing out on the Atlantic for a couple of days by now, and there are thousands of miles of great white-headed waves rising and falling in the darkness, and calling to each other, and dancing together. Up above them, as in the gallery of the ball-room, is the great mad band of which we hear a little in our stuffy house, and it will play to them all night and all to-morrow, and the waves will dance without ceasing, growing bigger as they dance, like some nightmare. Oh, you can imagine nothing! But I see so clearly Mr. and Mrs. Wave and all their family dancing, dancing, all young, though white-headed, and growing bigger as they dance. They are cannibals, too, and a big wave will eat up a little one, which makes it bigger yet. The wind loves to see that. He gives a great blare of trumpets when he sees a cannibal wave. Oh, it must have happened this moment! That scream meant, “Well done, wave! That was a big one you swallowed!”

‘Sometimes they see a ship coming along, and they love playing with ships, because all proper ships like being out in the Atlantic ball-room, and the waves crowd towards it, seeing which can lift it highest. Whiz! Can’t you hear the screw racing, as the wave that lifted the stern runs away from under it? How the masts strike right and left across a thousand stars, for the sky is quite clear! The winds have turned out the clouds as you turn out the chairs and tables from a room where you dance.’

We had gone up to Legs’ room after dinner, and as she talked she went quickly from place to place, now pausing for a moment to look at a photograph, now putting coal on the fire, or drawing aside the curtain to look into the night.

‘Oh, there is the eternal youth of the world,’ she said--‘the song of the winds and the dance of the waves. I think all the souls of the little babies that are born come to land in the blowing from the sea. It is by that that vitality burns higher, and the fruitfulness of the world is renewed. Millions of blossoms of life are rushing over the land to-night, ready to drop into lonely homes----’

‘Ah, don’t, don’t,’ I said. ‘Helen, come and sit down and be quiet.’

She paused for a moment opposite me, looking at me with her wonderful shining eyes.

‘Not I, not I,’ she said.

She still paused, still looking at me, still waiting for me to join her, as it were. And in that pause a sudden faint far-away light broke on me. She had said words which must have awoke in her, even as they awoke in me, the most keen and poignant sorrow that can touch those who love each other, and yet she was still smiling, and her eyes shone.

I got up. Something of that huge joy that transfigured her was wrapping me round also. The thrill, the rapture in which she was enveloped, began to encompass us.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘It is for you to tell me,’ she said. ‘It must be done that way.’

‘You said “ready to drop into lonely homes,”’ I said.

‘“So that they are filled with laughter,”’ said she.

Then I knew.

‘It is here,’ I said--‘the nursery.’

And at that the excitement, the exultation slowly passed from the face of my beloved, for there was no room there for more than motherhood. Though the wind still bugled and trumpeted outside, she heard it no more; the wildness of the dancing waves, grey-headed, growing waves, passed by outside her.... The blossom ready to drop filled her heart with the tenderness of the infinite deep love of the mother that shall be.

She sat there on the floor at my feet, with her arms round my knees and her head pillowed there.

‘I have got to confess, too,’ she said, ‘though I am not ashamed of my confession. But don’t allow yourself to be hurt, Jack. Just hold on for a minute without being hurt, and you will find that you are not. Now I shall hide my face, and speak to you like that. I have known it quite a long time: before Legs died I knew it.’

Well, I had to hold on for a minute or two, and not be hurt. If you think it over, you, will agree it was rather a hard task that I had been set. On the other hand, about big things, about things that really matter, you must take my word for it that Helen is never wrong. But I had not been forbidden to ask a question.

‘Then why did you not tell me?’ I said.

Her head with the sunlit billows just stirred a moment, but she did not look up, but spoke with a hidden face.

‘Because through all these weeks, my darling, you have been struggling against some bitterness of soul. You have made light of it to me, but I had to be quite sure it had gone from you before I told you this. I know what it was--it was the doubts you talked about to me when we sat one night at the edge of dear Legs’ grave--when it was dug, but empty. And I had to be quite sure it had all passed from you before I told you this. I have not been sure till now, and--and I wanted you so much to guess. You nearly guessed, I felt, when we arranged this heavenly nursery.’

Then again there was silence, and I think I never knew till then how desperately difficult it is to be honest with oneself. It is so much easier to be honest with other people. At the first glance I told myself I had got over the bitterness and blindness of which she had spoken when we talked together over Legs’ grave, but gradually I became aware that I had not. Somewhere deep down, so that while the days passed it concealed itself from me, that bitterness had still been there. In this book, which has tried to be honest, you will, I dare say, find no trace of it since that night, but I had not probed deep enough. It had been there, and I think the days when we arranged the nursery finally expelled it. To-night, at least, I believed it was gone, and since Helen believed so, too, perhaps we are right about it. She, the witch, the diviner, had known me so much better than I had known myself all along.

All this took time, for the processes of honesty with me are slow. But there is no difficulty about the matter, perhaps, if the head you love best in all the world is pillowed on your knee. That is a stimulant, one must imagine. So at last I said:

‘Yes, it’s done.’

She came closer yet, and, like Mr. Holmes, we talked below our breath, in whispers, as if afraid of disturbing this great joy that had come floating down on us, borne on the sea-spray, borne on the wind-tide, borne as you will, so that only it came here.

Then, very soon after, she went to bed, and I was left sitting in the nursery, with its new significance. Yet it was not quite new. I had, as Helen said, ‘half guessed before,’ and I but wondered, now I knew, how my imagination had halted half-way, and had not clearly seen the star on which Helen’s eyes were fixed. Yet who would have known? She had been so full of art in her wording; even that master-word she had used, ‘nursery,’ seemed but to have slipped in, and I had thought she meant only--as, indeed, she had said--that it was to be the room of young things, where she should sit when the shadow of childlessness was chill, and with the aid of the memories of youth and play keep the mists of middle age from closing round us, and the frosts of old from settling too stiffly on the later years of our travel. The room was to be but a palliative or a tonic, as you will, a consolation for the things that were not to be for us, and now it showed another face. It was not the past of which it spoke, but the future.

* * * * *

I suppose I sat long over the embers of the fire, but these were hours that had escaped from the hand of Time, and were not to be computed by his scale. Sometimes I threw a log into the open hearth of the fireplace (ah, but that open hearth must be altered now; it would never do in the nursery), and sometimes I plied an industrious pair of bellows, but for the most part I sat idle, looking into the fiery heart of the blaze; for the news that Helen had made me guess was at first unrealizable. Though I knew it to be true, I had to absorb, digest it, since a great joy is as stunning a thing as the stroke of sorrow. And gradually, as gradually as the workings of the process of beauty, I began to feel, and not only to know, the name of the room where I sat. It was the nursery.

* * * * *

But Helen was wrong about one thing. She had said that the wind would play to the dancing of the waves all night and all next day, but before I went to bed that wild orchestra of the storm had ceased. Its work was done for us. It had blown the bud of the blossom of life into the house that so longed for it.

* * * * *

It is strange how quickly the events of life become part of one. Next morning I woke in full possession of the new knowledge. There was no question or uncertainty as to what that was which made a rapture of waking. And with the same suddenness all real knowledge of what life had been before I knew this had passed from me. I could no longer in the least realize what I had felt like before the moment came when Helen had made me guess. Though that moment was so few hours away, yet I could no more conceive existence without it than one can form any mental picture of what life would be without the gift of sight or hearing. It is not that any huge event destroys all that went before it, but it so stains back through the turned pages of the past that they are all coloured and suffused with it.

How the blackbirds and thrushes sang on that March morning! I had awoke before dawn to hear the early tuning-up going on in the bushes, and before long, since I was too happy to sleep, I got up, dressed quietly, and went out. The tuning-up was just over, and the birds were all busy with breakfast, for you must know, as soon as they wake, they get in singing-trim for the day before their bright-eyed quest, listening, with head cocked as they scuttle over the lawn, for the sound of a worm moving. They are so close to the ground themselves that they can localize this to within a fraction of an inch, and then in goes the spear-like beak, and the poor thing is dragged out of the soft, dew-drenched earth. They are not quite tidy eaters, these dear minstrels of the garden, for the point is to get your breakfast inside you beyond recall, with the least possible delay. Swallow, gulp, swallow, and the thing is done. Then you give one long flute-like note of satisfaction, and listen again for the second course. But one cannot exactly say that they have bad manners at table, for the extreme sensibleness of the plan excludes all other considerations. Also, bad manners at table irresistibly suggest greediness, and no bird is ever greedy. They have excellent appetites, and when they have had enough they stop eating, and instantly begin to sing.

It was just at the end of birds’ breakfast that I got out--that is to say, it still wanted some minutes to sunrise. The lawn was all gossamer-webbed and shimmering with dew, as if some thin layer of moonstone or transparent pearl had been veneered over emerald, and I felt it almost a vandalism to walk over it, removing with my clumsy feet whole patches of thin inimitable jewellery. The three-hour gale of the night before had vanished to give place to a morning of halcyon calm, and I augured one of those rare and exquisite days which March sometimes gives us--days of warm windlessness and the promise of spring. Straight in front of me rose the Beacon, still submerged in clear dark shadow, but high in the heavens above dawn had come, for it made a golden fleece--one such as never Jason handled--of the little cirrhus clouds that the gale had forgotten to sweep away. Dawn would soon strike the Beacon, too, but before that I hoped to stand on its top, and see the huge embrace of day and night, the melting and absorption of darkness into light. Even the river, with its waving water-weeds and aqueous crystal, did not detain me, and I gave but ten minutes to the ascent, for I wanted to welcome the dawn from a high place, to stand on the roof of the hills to greet it.

Slowly dawn descended from the sky, quivering and palpitating with light. The great golden flood came nearer and nearer the earth, which as yet caught but the reflection from the radiant heavens. It hung a moment hovering, the bright-winged iridescent bird of dawn, just above my head, and then the sun leaped up, vaulting above the eastern hills. The level shafts of light swept across the land, a mantle of gold, while in the valleys below the clear dusk still lay like tideless waters. But down the hill-sides strode the day, throwing its bright arms about the night, enfolding and encompassing it in miraculous embrace, and I looked to where home was. Already the big elms in the garden were pillars of flame, then the roof burned, and suddenly the windows blazed signal-like. Dawn had come.

That was not half the miracle. Light had awoke, the hills were gilded with the sun, but at the touch of the gilding larks innumerable sprang from the warm tussocks of down-grass and aspired. A hundred singing specks rose against the sky, each infinitesimal, so that they seemed but like the little motes that swim across the eyeball, but these were living things with open throat that hailed the sunrise. Perpendicularly they rose, wings quivering, and throat a-tremble with song, till the eye lost them against the dazzling azure of day, and only enraptured voices from the air made the heavens musical, as if the morning stars sang together. Heaven made holiday. Its company of sweet singers and the gold of sunrise were one thing--the dawn.

Dear God, dear God, how I thank You for that indestructible minute! I knew now what the sunlit curtain that lay between the future and me was, and the very morning after I had known You let me see from this high place the birth of day. In this physical world there was reproduced that golden sunlit curtain. You made visible to me what my heart knew. And to me on the top of the Beacon the windows of my home flashed a beacon to me. And all was of Your making--the sun and the mounting skylarks, and down below the trees of the garden, and the beaconing, flushing window of my beloved, and the fruit of the womb. When I come to die, I want to remember all that. Truth and Life were there, and the Way also. And what is the sum of those three things?

Yet was I content even then? Good heavens, no! There were many beautiful things yet to be, and the glory of His gifts just lies in this--that there is always something better to come. This great bran-pie of the earth never gives to our little groping hands its best present. There is always something more. Your heart’s desire is given you, but at the moment of giving your heart is enlarged, and you ask for something better yet. And if you want it enough, you get it. The only difficulty is to want enough. For you are not given, so I take it, things that you have not really desired. All sorts of bonuses come in, pleasant surprises, but the solid dividend is for the man who wills. There are fluctuations, of course, but to look upwards, without doubt, is a gilt-edged affair. I correct that. The edge is gilt, and so is the rest of it, and the gilt is laid over gold.

* * * * *

It was thus that I looked from the top of the Beacon, with the mist of the song of the invisible skylarks all round, and the blazing reflection of the windows of our room in the valley; and there among the skylarks it seemed that Legs joined me. It was of no use to deny he was there, simply because it was silly to deny it. There is a French word--_revenant_--to express his presence, but even the solidity of that word failed to do justice. He had never gone away, and so he could never have come back. He was with us all the time, and rejoiced in the arrangement of the nursery, even as he had been so hopelessly amused at the correctness of Mr. Holmes on the morning of his funeral.

And at the moment of this I expected the ‘open vision.’ Life, and death, and birth, the three great facts, were so near realization. Again I expected to see Pan peep over the brow of the Beacon, and to hear a flute-like song that was not of skylarks. I was ready--dear God, I was ready.

So I thought for the moment, but before the next had beaten I knew I was not. I wanted more--more of this divine world, more of what the next few months will bring. Should all be well when summer comes, I think I would choose to die now. And the moment I thought that I knew its unreality. I want to live through the beautiful years that will come. I want to have a son at Eton or a daughter who turns the heads of eligible youths. I want both, and more than both. Die! Who talked of that? I want to have a full nursery. I want to see Helen old and grey-headed, with grandchildren round her, and herself the youngest of them all. I want to live through the whole of this beautiful life till old age; and though that is called the winter of life, there is no need that it should be so. The last day of a man of eighty should be the most luxuriant of autumn, before the touch of winter has blackened the flowers; for it is only the thought of death that makes us think of old age and winter together, and the thought that does that conceives falsely of death.

So, anyhow, it seemed to me on this midsummer morning of March. I knew that all that was was kind. Pan smiled without cruelty, and if he smiled from the cross, it was from the throne of ineffable light that he smiled also.

One by one the skylarks, sated with song, dropped down again to the sunlit down. Dawn had passed, and day had come, and--oh, bathos of bathos!--I was so hungry. If I had given but ten minutes to the ascent, I made but five of the reversed journey, and designed an early breakfast to make existence possible till Helen came down; for it was yet not long after seven, and a Sahara of starvation lay between me and bacon. Yet, though I have said that this was bathos, I do not know that I really think so, since in this delightful muddle of life everything is so inextricably intertwined that bathos of some kind invariably is the sequel of all high adventure. The great scene is played, the sublime thing said, and then you have tea or take a ticket for somewhere. So I confess only to literary bathos, and to disarm the critic I may state that these quiet chronicles are not supposed to be literary at all, but merely the plain account of quiet things as they happened.

So I lingered for a moment after the knee-shaking descent was over to talk for a little, but not for long, with the river. There was a great trout just below the bridge, and I am sure he knew it was still March, for he wagged his impudent head at me, saying: ‘I am perfectly safe. I shall eat steadily till April, and then observe your silly flies with a contemptuous eye.’ And though he was a three-pounder at least, I bore him no grudge. I don’t think I wanted to kill anything that morning.

Then I crossed the further field, and came down into the rose-garden, still meditating on the immediate assuagement of hunger. But then I saw who stood there, and I meditated on this no more; for she was there.

‘I got up early,’ she said, ‘and found you had already gone. Oh, good-morning! I forgot.’

‘I shall never forget the goodness of this morning,’ said I.

Then I saw that her eyes were brimming.

‘Ought I to have told you before?’ she said. ‘Forgive me if I ought.’

In that first hour of day we came closer to each other than ever before. My beloved was mine, and the time of the singing-birds had come.

APRIL

I must remind the indulgent reader, lest Helen and I should appear tediously opulent, that our Swiss trip in the winter was due to a windfall of a hundred pounds--a thing which may conceivably happen to anybody, and in this instance happened to us. Consequently, the fact that we went abroad again in April does not, if it is considered fairly, argue aggressive riches. In any case, refuse to stoop to degrading justifications. We did not go because it was good for our healths, which were both excellent, nor because foreign travel improves and expands the mind. As a matter of fact, I do not believe it does, for the majority of travellers are always comparing the foreign scenes they visit with spots in their native land, vastly to the advantage of the latter, and the farther and more frequently they go, the more deep-rooted becomes their insularity. We went merely because we enjoyed it, and had formed a careful plan of retrenchment afterwards, being about to let the Sloane Street house for the three summer months. That was rather a severe decision to come to, since we both hate the idea of strangers using ‘our things’ and sleeping in our beds; but by these means this expedition to Greece became possible, and when once it was possible it had already become necessary.

* * * * *

So here we sat this morning on the steps of the little temple of Wingless Victory, wingless, as the old sunlit myth said, because, when the nymph lighted on the sacred rock of the Acropolis, she stripped off her wings, which were henceforward useless to her, since she would abide here for ever, just below the great house of defence that the Athenians had raised to the Wisdom of God, Athene, who was born full-grown and in panoply of shield, and helmet, and spear, from the head of Zeus. Out of his head she sprang in painless birth, with a cry that was heard by Echo on Hymettus, and rang back in Echo’s voice across the plain, the shout of the wisdom of God incarnate.