Chapter 6

He wrote, “She is good, sweet and wholesome. I have taught her what she knows--I mean by that that I have helped her to pick up a clue here and there to take her by some means to the heart of our mystery. She has had a dreadful mauling by the world; but her brain is sound. I intend to make her happy, but not here. We go to Baden a-painting. She vows she will keep the door of my tent like a Bedouin's wife. It's a great test. If she comes through it--with her upbringing--she will show mettle. Farewell, Queen Mab. One does what one must, being man. Pray for us both.”

She answered him frankly and kindly. Ingram was away on one of his long absences, and she felt acold. “I shall always wish for your happiness. How could I ever forget what you did to give me mine?” He read that as meaning that she had found and had it still, so wrote no more--not even when his venture, not too hopefully begun, had ended. His head was low in the dust, his zest was gone. It needed his austerities and solitude to restore his tone.

But now, in his hidden valley, she never left him, though she was always veiled. He could not call up her blue eyes' magic, nor her slow smile, nor the touch of her thin fingers. She had no bodily semblance; she was a principle. In his exalted mood, being tiptoe for Mystery, he identified her with the Spirit of all Life. For life to him was a straining at the leash, a reaching for the unattainable, a preparation to soar. He saw all things flowing towards heaven, which to him was Harmony, Rest, what he called Appeasement. And all this straining and yearning in infinite variety was figured to him in Sanchia, as he discerned, but could not perceive, her presence. He made her out in elemental images, into the contours of the hills read her bountiful shape, into the onslaught of the wind her dauntless ardour. In fire leaped her pride, in the mantling snow her chastity was proclaimed. The rain was her largess, her treasure poured to enrich mankind. All flowers were sacred to her--frail beauty salient from the earth. He never looked on one but he blessed her name.

On a later day he read a poem to his guest--which he called the Song of Mab. By this name, it seems, he also figured Sanchia, whose synonyms, threatened to be as many as those of Artemis or the Virgin Mary. From poring for signs of her in the face of earth he was come to see little else. If the west wind was her breath and the hills were her breasts, it needed a mystic to see them so; and he was become a mystic. A glorified and non-natural Sanchia pervaded the poem, which, for the form, was a barbaric, rough-hewn chant, stuffed with words and great phrases which had the effect rather of making music in the hearer than of containing it in themselves. It was poetry by hints, perpetually moving, initiating, lyrical phrases, then breaking off and leaving you with a melody in your ears which your brain could not render. Either the poet was inchoate or the subtlest musician of our day. He said of himself that he was a drain-pipe for the spirit--a dark saying to Glyde, who was himself, we have heard, something of a poet, of the Byronic tradition. The youth was extremely interested, though seldom moved by this chaotic piece. He was for ever on the point to drink, and had the cup snatched away. Senhouse tormented you with possibilities of bliss--where sight merges in sound and both lift together into a triumphant sweep of motion--whirled you, as it were, to the gates of dawn, showed you the amber glories of preparation, thrilled you with the throb of suspense; then, behold! coursing vapours and gathering clouds blot out the miracle--and you end in the clash of thunderstorms and dissonances. Something of this the listener had to urge. Senhouse admitted it, but he said, “You know that the splendour is enacting behind. You guess the opening of the rose. One stalks this earth agog for miracles. It is full of hints--you catch a moment--for flashed instants you are God. Then the mist wraps you, and you blunder forward, two-legged man swaying for a balance. Translate the oracle as you will--with your paint-pans, with your words--we get broken lights, half-phrases. But we guess the rest, and so we strain and grow. Who are you or I, that we should know her!”

He stuffed the pages into the breast of his jelab, and sat brooding over the paling fire for a while; then, by an abrupt transition, he said--“A fatal inclination for instructing the young was, perhaps, my undoing. I believe that I am a prig to the very fibres of me. If I had kept my didactics for my own sex, all might have gone well: I have never doubted but that I had things to teach my generation which it would be the happier of knowing. But it's a dangerous power to put into a man's hands that he shall instruct his betters. I was tempted by that deadliest flattery of all, and I fell. Despoina heard me, smiled at me, and went her way regardlessly; but my poor Mary was a victim. She heard me, and took it seriously. She thought me a man of God. I failed absolutely, and so badly that by rights I ought never to have held up my head again. But she is happy, dear little soul, after her own peculiar fashion,--which she never could have been with me. She writes to me now and then. The man, her husband, is her master, but not a bad one. She knows it, and glories in him. Isn't that extraordinary?”

“Not at all,” Glyde said, who knew nothing of Mary. “It's a law of Nature. The woman follows the man. I suppose you treated her as an equal?”

“No, as a superior, which she plainly was,” said Senhouse.

“Then,” Glyde said, looking at him, “then you made her so. If you fly against Nature, you must get the worst of it.” He waited, then asked, “It's against your principles to marry a woman, no doubt.”

“Quite,” Senhouse said. “It seems to me an insult to propose it to her.”

“Your Mary didn't think so.”

“She did at first; but she couldn't get used to it.”

“She felt naked without the ring? And ashamed?”

“God help me,” said Senhouse, “that's true. The moment I realised what had happened, I gave in.”

“And then she refused?”

“She neither accepted nor refused. She lived apart. We were in Germany at the time. I was naturalising plants for the Grand Duke of Baden--filling the rocks and glades in the Black Forest. She went into an hotel in Donaueschingen, and I went to see her every day. We were friends. Then we went to England, to London. She held to that way of life, and I did the best I could for myself. At any moment I would have taken her. I considered myself bound in every way. I could have been happy with her. She had great charm for me--great physical charm, I mean--and sweet, affectionate ways. I could have made her a wife and a mother.

“I intended her the highest honour I could show to a woman. To make her your property by legal process and the sanction of custom seems to me like sacrilege. But, however--One day she told me that a former lover of hers wanted to marry her, and left it for me to judge. She wouldn't say whether she wished it herself or not; but I knew that she did, for when I advised her to accept him she got up and put her arms round my neck and kissed both my cheeks. I was her elder brother, I perceived, and said so. She laughed, and owned to it. And yet she had loved me, you know. She had refused that same man for me. She was afraid of him, and gave me her hand before his face.”

“That to me,” Glyde said, “is proof positive that she loved him. Of course she feared him. It is obvious. My poor master!”

Senhouse serenely replied, “She's happy, and I've done her no harm at all. But it's impossible for me to treat any living creature otherwise than as my better.”

“I believe you,” said Glyde, “and so it may be in a rarer world than this. In this world, however, a man is the most cunning animal, and in that both are flesh he is the stronger of the sexes. In this world the law is that the woman follows the man.” He thought before he spoke, then added, “That applies all this world over. You will marry Sanchia.”

Senhouse would not look up. He sat, nursing one leg. He bent his brows, and a hot flush made his skin shine in the firelight.

IV

The poet and his disciple continued their partnership through the sogging rains of Christmas, well into the chill opening of the new year. Then came the snow to fill up the valley in which stood the hut, and blur the outlines of the folded hills. Poetry and Sanchia drew together a pair who could have little in common.

But Glyde became the slave of the strange man who blended austerity with charitable judgment, and appeased his passion by blood from his heart. He was not himself a mystic, but a sensitive youth whom the world's rubs had taught the uses of a thick hide. Either you have that by nature, or you earn it by practice. Glyde had found out that the less you say to your maltreaters the less, in time, you have to say about it to yourself. He was conscious of his parts and all too ready to be arrogant. Senhouse's goddess had been kind to him, and he had presumed upon that. Senhouse's own method was to alternate extreme friendliness with torrential contempt. He knocked Glyde down and picked him up again with the same hand. He treated him as his equal whenever he was not considering him a worm. There is no better way of gaining the confidence of a youth of his sort. At the end of a fortnight there was nothing Glyde would not have told him; at the end of six months he would have crossed Europe barefoot to serve him.

He was nothing of a mystic, and therefore had his own ideas of what seemed to afford his master so much satisfaction; he was enough of a poet to be sure that Senhouse's romantic raptures were only a makeshift at best. To his mind here was a man aching for a woman. He thought that the poet sang to ease his bleeding heart. He came to picture the mating of these two--Sanchia the salient, beautiful woman, and his master of the clear, long-enduring, searching eyes, and that strange look of second-sight upon him which those only have who live apart from men, under the sky. It is a look you can never mistake. Sailors have it, and shepherds, and dwellers in the desert. The eye sees through you--into you, and beyond you. It is almost impossible for any person to be either so arresting in himself or possessed of such utterance as will cause the weathered eye to check its scanning of distance and concentrate upon an immediate presence. To such an eye, communing with infinite and eternal things, no creature of time and space can interpose solidly. Each must be vain and clear as bubbles of air. Behind it float spirits invisible to other men--essential forms, of whose company the seer into distance really is. He will neither heed you nor hear you; his conversation is other-where. And what then would Senhouse do confronted with Sanchia? Would he look beyond her, towards some horizon where she could never stand? Or would he not see in her blue eyes the goal of all his searching--the content of his own? What would he say but “You!” and take her? What she but sigh her content to be taken? Appeasement is holiness, says Senhouse. And what of their holy life thereafter, breast to breast, fronting the dawn? Glyde's heart, purged of his dishonesty, beat at the thought. He turned all his erotic over to the more generous emotion, and faced with glowing blood the picture of the woman he had coveted in the arms of the master he avowed.

When February began to show a hint of spring, in pairing plovers and breaking eglantine, Senhouse, in a temporary dejection, ceased work upon his poem, and Glyde said that he must know the news. All through the winter they had had little communication with the world beyond their gates. A shepherd homing from the folds, a sodden tinker and his drab, whom he touchingly cherished, a party of rabbit-shooters beating the furze bushes, had been all their hold upon a life where men meet and hoodwink each other. Once in a week one of them ploughed through the drifts to the cottage at the foot of the third valley, and got as he needed flour and candles, soap or matches. It had not yet occurred to either of them--to Senhouse it never did occur--to beg the sight of a newspaper. But Saint Valentine's call stirred the deeps of Glyde, who now said that he must have news. He departed for Sarum, and stayed away until March was in.

He returned with certain information, absorbed by Senhouse with far-sighted patient eyes and in silence. The only indication he afforded was inscrutable. His cheek-bones twitched flickeringly, like summer lightning about the hills.

Sanchia, Glyde said, was well and in London. She was living in a street off Berkeley Square, with an old lady who wore side-curls and shawls, and drove out every afternoon in a barouche with two stout horses and two lean men-servants. Sanchia sometimes accompanied her, stiff and pliant at once, bright-eyed and faintly coloured. She was taken about to parties also, and to the opera--and very often there were parties at the old lady's house--carriage-company, and gentleman in furred coats, who came in hansom cabs. He thought that she had suitors. There was a tall, thin man who came very often in the afternoons. He was sallow and melancholy, and wore a silk muffler day and night. Glyde thought that he was a foreigner, perhaps a Hungarian or Pole.

He had seen Sanchia often, but she could not have caught a glimpse of him. He admitted that he had haunted the house, had seen her come out and go in, knew when she dressed for dinner and when she went to bed. Long practice had acquainted him with the significance of light and darkness seen through chinks in shutters. “I know her room,” he said, “and the times of her lights. She looks out over the streets towards the Park twice every night--once when she is dressed, and once before she goes to bed. It is as if she is saying her prayers. She looks long to the west, very seriously. I think her lips move. I believe that she always does it.” Senhouse, who may have been listening, bowed his head to his knees, below his clasped hands.

“Twice she looked full at me without knowing me. Why should she know me now? Her pale and serious face, master, was as beautiful as the winter moon, as remote from us and our little affairs. No words of mine can express to you the outward splendour of her neck and bosom. She was uncovered for a party at the house. In the morning she came out to walk. You know her way, how she glides rather than seems to move her feet--the soaring, even motion of a sea-bird. She walked across the Park, and I followed, praising God, whose image she is. On the further side the Pole met her in his furs, and she walked with him for an hour in the sun. She had no wrappage to hide her blissful shape. Close-fitted, erect, free-moving, gracious as a young birch-tree. Master, she is the Holy One.”

“You played Peeping Tom, my ingenuous young friend,” said Senhouse, who was fastidious in such matters.

But Clyde cried out, “God forbid! Are you prying when you look at the sun! Master, you need not grudge the Pole. He is nothing.”

“I grudge no man anything he can get of her,” said Senhouse. “He will get precisely what lies within his scope.”

“He has the eyes of a rat,” Glyde said.

Senhouse answered, “Rats and men alike seek their meat of the earth. And the rats get rat-food, and the men man's food. Despoina's breasts are very large.” He turned to his poem, folded his jelab about his middle, and went out over the downs. Glyde saw him no more that day, nor, indeed, till the next morning, when he found him squatted over a pipkin simmering on the fire.

The year went on its course, and windy March broke into a wet, warm April. Glyde sat at the knees of his master, and imbibed learning and fundamental morality. But now and then he absented himself for a day at a time, and was understood to get news from Salisbury market. He came back one day with a newspaper. Senhouse read without falter or comment:

“A marriage is arranged, and will take place in July, between Nevile Ingram of Wanless Hall, Felsboro', Yorks, and Sanchia-Josepha, youngest daughter of Thomas Welbore Percival of--Great Cumberland Place, W., and The Poultry, E.G.”

In that night, or very early in the morning, Glyde disappeared without word or sign left behind him.