Part 9

At first there was bright sunshine every day, but the sun scorched; and then it set in to rain. One night a storm wakened her, and it seemed to her that she had never heard such thunder, or seen such lightning, as that which shook the old roof under which she lay, and blazed and flickered at the window until it seemed to be licking up the earth with liquid fire. The storm faded out in a morning of faint sunshine; only the rain clung furtively about the streets all day.

Day after day it rained, and Livia sat in the house, listlessly reading the novels which she had brought with her, or staring with fierce impatience out of the window. The rain came down steadily, ceaselessly, drawing a wet grey curtain over the city. Roserra liked that softened aspect which came over things in this uncomfortable weather; he walked every day through the streets in which the water gathered in puddles between the paving-stones, and ran in little streams down the gutters; he found a kind of autumnal charm in the dripping trees and soaked paths of the Aliscamps; a peaceful, and to him pathetic and pleasant, odour of decay. Livia went out with him once, muffled in a long cloak, and keeping her whole face carefully under the umbrella. She wanted to know where he was taking her, and why; she shivered, sneezed, and gave one or two little coughs. When she saw the ground of the Aliscamps, and the first trees began to drip upon her umbrella with a faint tap-tapping on the strained silk, she turned resolutely, and hurried Roserra straight back to the house.

After that she stayed indoors day after day, getting more irritable every day. She took up one book after another, read a little, and then laid it down. She walked to and fro in the narrow room, with nothing, as she said, to think about, and nothing to see if she looked out of the window. There was the square, every stone polished by the rain; the other houses in the square, most of them shuttered; the little church in the corner, with its monotonous bell, its few worshippers. She knew them all; they were mostly women, plain, elderly women; not one of them had any interest, or indeed existence, for her. She wondered vaguely why they went backwards and forwards, between their houses and the church, in such a regular way. Could it really amuse them? Could they really believe certain things so firmly that it was worth while taking all that trouble in order to be on the right side at last? She supposed so, and ended her speculations.

When Roserra was with her, he annoyed her by not seeming to mind the weather. He would come in from a walk, and, if she seemed to be busy reading, would sit down cheerfully by the stove, and really read the book which he had in his hand. She looked at him over the pages of hers, hating to see him occupied when she could not fix her mind on anything. She felt imprisoned; not that she really wanted to go out: it was the not being able to that fretted her.

About the time when, if she had been in London, she would have had tea, the uneasiness came over her most actively. She would go upstairs to her room, and sit watching herself pityingly in the glass; or she would try on hat after hat, hats which had come from Paris, and were meant for Paris or London, hats which she could not possibly wear here, where her smallest and simplest ones seemed out of place. Sometimes she brought herself back into a good temper by the mere pleasurable feel of the things; and she would run downstairs forgetting that she was in Arles.

One afternoon, when she was in one of her easiest moods, Roserra persuaded her to attend Benediction with him at the church of Notre Dame la Major, in the corner of the square. The church was quite dark, and she could only dimly see the high-altar, draped in white, and with something white rising up from its midst, like a figure mysteriously poised among the unlighted candles. Hooded figures passed, and knelt with bowed heads; presently a light passed across the church, and a lamp was let down by a chain, lighted, and drawn up again to its place. Then a few candles were lighted, and only then did she see the priest kneeling motionless before the altar. The chanting was very homely, like that in a village church; there was even the village church's harmonium; but the monotony of one air repeated over and over again brought even to Livia some sense of a harmony between this half-drowsy service and the slumbering city outside. They waited until the service was over, the priests went out, the lamps and the candles were extinguished, and the hooded figures, after a little silence, began to move again in the dimness of the church.

Sometimes she would go with Roserra to the cloisters of St. Trophime, where Arles, as he said, seemed to withdraw into its most intimate self. The oddness of the whole place amused her. Every side was built in a different century: the north in the ninth, the east in the thirteenth, the west in the fourteenth, and the south in the sixteenth; and the builders, century by century, have gathered into this sadly battered court a little of the curious piety of age after age, working here to perpetuate, not only the legends of the Church, but the legends that have their home about Arles. Again and again, among these naïve sculptures, one sees the local dragon, the man-eating Tarasque who has given its name to Tarascon. The place is full of monsters, and of figures tortured into strange dislocations. Adam swings ape-like among the branches of the apple-tree, biting at the leaves before he reaches the apple. Flames break out among companies of the damned, and the devil sits enthroned above his subjects. A gentle Doctor of the Church holding a book, and bending his head meditatively sideways, was shown to Livia as King Solomon; with, of course, in the slim saint on the other side of the pillar, the Queen of Sheba. Broken escutcheons, carved in stone, commemorate bishops on the walls. There is no order, or division of time; one seems shut off equally from the present and from any appreciable moment of the past; shut in with the same vague and timeless Autumn that has moulded Arles into its own image.

But it was just this, for which Roserra loved Arles above all other places, that made Livia more and more acutely miserable. Wandering about the streets which bring one back always to one's starting-point, or along the boulevards which suggest the beginning of the country, but set one no further into it, nothing seems to matter very much, for nothing seems very much to exist. In Livia, as Roserra was gradually finding out, there was none of that sympathetic submissiveness to things which meant for him so much of the charm of life. She wanted something definite to do, somewhere definite to go; her mind took no subtle colour from things, nor was there any active world within her which could transmute everything into its own image. She was dependent on an exterior world, cut to a narrow pattern, and, outside that, nothing had any meaning for her. He began to wonder if he had made the irremediable mistake, and, in his preoccupation with that uneasy idea, everything seemed changed; he, too, began to grow restless.

Meanwhile Livia was deciding that she certainly had made a mistake, unless she could, after all, succeed in getting her own way; and to do that she would have to take things into her own hands, much more positively than she had yet done. She would walk with him when it was fine, because there was nothing else to do. Once they walked out to the surprising remains of the abbey of Mont-Major, and it began to rain, and they lingered uncomfortably about the ruins and in the subterranean chapel. She walked back with him, nursing a fine hatred in silence. She turned it over in her heart, and it grew and gathered, like a snowball rolled over and over in the snow. It was comprehensive and unreasoning, and it forgot the small grievance out of which it rose, in a sense of the vast grievance into which it had swollen. To Roserra such moods, which were now becoming frequent, were unintelligible, and he suffered from them like one who has to find his way through a camp of his enemies in the dark.

When they got back to the house, Livia would silently take up a book and sit motionless for hours, turning over the pages without raising her eyes, or showing a consciousness of his presence. He pretended to do the same, but his eyes wandered continually, and he had to read every page twice over. He wanted to speak, but never knew what to say, when she was in this prickly state of irritation. To her, his critical way of waiting, and doing nothing, became an oppression. And his silence, and what she supposed to be his indifference, grew upon her like a heavy weight, until the silent woman, who sat there reading sullenly, felt the impulse to rise and fling away the book, and shriek aloud.

Livia did not say that she wished to go away from Arles, anywhere from Arles, but the desire spoke in all her silences. She made no complaint, but Roserra saw an unfriendliness growing up in her eyes which terrified him. She held him, as she had held him since their first meeting, by a kind of magnetism which he had come to realise was neither love nor sympathy. He felt that he could hate her, and yet not free himself from that influence. What was to be done? He would have to choose; his life of the future could no longer be his life of the past. His introduction of a woman to his best friend had been unfortunate, as such introductions always are, in one way or another. He had tended his soul for more than half a lifetime, waited upon it delicately, served it with its favourite food; and now something stronger had come forward and said: No more. What was it? He had no wish to speculate; it mattered little whether it was what people called his higher nature, or what they called his lower nature, which had brought him to this result. At least he had some recompense.

When he told Livia that he had decided to go back to Marseilles ('Arles does not suit you,' he said; 'you have not been well since we came here') Livia flung herself into his arms with an uncontrollable delight. On the night before they left, he sat for a long time, alone, under the Allée des Tombeaux. When he came back, Livia was watching for him from the window. She ran to the door and opened it.

It was midday when they reached Marseilles. The sun burned on the blue water, which lay hot, motionless, and glittering. There was not a breath of wind, and the dust shone on the roads like a thick white layer of powder. The light beat downwards from the blue sky, and upwards from the white dust of the roads. The heat was enveloping; it wrapped one from head to foot like the caress of a hot furnace. Roserra pressed his hands to his forehead, as he leaned with Livia over the terrace above the sea; his head throbbed, it was an effort even to breathe. He remembered the grey coolness of the Allée des Tombeaux, where the old men sat among the tombs. A nausea, a suffocating nausea, rose up within him as he felt the heat and glare of this vulgar, exuberant paradise of snobs and tourists. He sickened with revolt before this over-fed nature, sweating the fat of life. He looked at Livia; she stood there, perfectly cool under her sunshade, turning to watch a carriage that came towards them in a cloud of dust. She was once more in her element, she was quite happy; she had plunged back into the warmth of life out of that penetential chillness of Arles; and it was with real friendliness that she turned to Roserra, as she saw his eyes fixed upon her.

SEAWARD LACKLAND.

Seaward Lackland was born on a day of storm, when his father was out at sea in his fishing-boat; and the mother vowed that if her husband came home alive the boy should be dedicated to the Lord. Isaac Lackland was the only one of his mates who came home alive out of the storm; and the boy got the queer name of Seaward because his mother had looked out to sea, as soon as she had strength enough to be propped up in bed, praying for her husband every minute of the time until he came back. She could see the sea through the little leaded windows of the cottage which stood right on the edge of the cliff above Carbis Bay. The child's earliest recollection was of the shape and colour of the waves, between the diamond leadings, as he was held up to the window in his mother's arms. It was like looking at pictures in frames, he thought afterwards.

The child was dedicated to the Lord. Isaac knelt down by the bedside and prayed over him as Mary held him in her arms, and when he got up from his knees he said: 'Mary, if the boy lives, please God, he shall have his schooling; and I wouldn't say but he might make a fine preacher of the Gospel.'

'It was little schooling Peter ever had,' said his wife.

'Peter was wanted in the boat; this youngster can wait.'

'Oh, Isaac, do you think he'll go to America, when he's grown up, like Peter?'

'No, Mary, he'll not go farther than Land's End by land, or Mount's Bay by sea, if what I feel is the truth. We've given him to the Lord, and I say the Lord will lend him to us.'

Mary said under her breath, 'Oh, please, Lord Jesus,' several times over, with her eyes tight shut, as she did when she seemed to pray best. Her first son had been drowned at sea, her second had run away from home and gone to America; and she hardly dared think of what would happen to this one. But they had done what they could. Would not God watch over him, and would he not be kind to her because she had given up some of her rights in the child?

The child grew strong and gentle; he learned quickly what he was taught, and when he had learned it he would set himself to think out what it really meant, and why it meant that and not something else. He was always good to his mother, and as soon as he had learned to read he would read to her out of a few books which she cared for, the Bible chiefly, and Bogatzky's 'Golden Treasury,' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' Through reading it over and over to his mother, he got to know a good part of the Bible by heart, and he was always asking what this and that puzzling passage meant exactly, and, when he got no satisfying answer, trying to puzzle out a meaning for himself.

Every day he went in to the Wesleyan day-school at St. Ives, and as he walked there and back along the cliff-path, generally alone, all sorts of whimsical ideas turned over in his head, ideas that came to him out of books, and out of what people said, and out of the queer world in which he found himself, half land and half water. It was always changing about him and yet always there, in the same place, with its regular and yet unaccountable tides and harvests. Sometimes there was a storm at sea and all the boats did not come back, and the people he had talked with yesterday had gone, like the stone he kicked over the cliff in walking, or he saw them carried up the beach with covered faces. Death is always about the life of fishermen, and he saw it more visibly and a thing more natural and expected than it must seem to most children.

He had always loved the sea, and it was his greatest delight to be taken out when the pilchards were in the bay, and to sit in the boat watching the silver shoals as they crowded into the straining net. He waited for the cry of 'Heva!' from the watchman on the hill, and often sat beside him, or stared out to sea through his long telescope, longing to be the first to catch the moving glitter of silver. He talked with the men 'like a grown-up chap' they said, and they talked with him as if he were a man, telling him stories, not the stories they would have told children, but things out of their own lives, and ideas that came into their heads as they lay out at sea all night in the drift-boats.

There was one old man with whom the boy liked best to talk, because he had been a sailor in his youth and had gone through all the seas and landed at many ports, and had been shipwrecked on a wild island and lived for a year among savages, and he was not like the other men, who had always been fishers, and thought Plymouth probably as good as London. Old Minshull seemed to the boy a very clever as well as a far-travelled person, and he discussed some of his difficulties with him and got help, he thought, from the old man.

His difficulties were chiefly religious ones. He knew much more about the Bible than about the world, and his imagination was constantly at work on those absorbing stories in Kings and Judges, and all sorts of cloudy pictures which he made up for himself out of obscure hints in the Prophets and the Apocalypse. The old Cornishman knew his Bible pretty well, but not so well as the boy; and the boy would bring the book out on the cliff and read over some of the confusing things; murders, with God's approval, it seemed, and treacheries which set nations free, and are called 'blessed,' and the sins of the saints; and then mysterious curses and unintelligible idolatries, and the Scarlet Woman and Jonah's whale. He liked best the Old Testament, and had formed a clear idea of God the Father as a perfectly just but constantly avenging deity; it pained him if he could not bring everything into agreement with this idea; and in the New Testament he was often perplexed by what Jesus seemed to do and undo in the divine affairs. The old sailor turned over all these matters in his head; they were new to him, but he faced them, and he was sometimes able to suggest just the common-sense way out of the difficulty.

When Mary Lackland thought the boy old enough to understand the full meaning of it, she told him how, on the day of his birth, he had been dedicated to God, and she told him that he was never to forget this, but to think much of God's claims upon him, and to be certain of a special divine guardianship. He listened gravely, and promised. From that time he began to look on God, not with less awe, but with a more intimate sense of his continual presence, and a kind of filial feeling grew up in him quite simply, a love of God, which came as a great reality into his life. He felt that he must never dishonour this divine father, either by anything he did or by the way in which he thought of him even. Did not God, in a sense, depend on him as a father depends on his son, to keep his honour spotless, to be more jealous of that honour than of his own? That, or something like it, only half-defined to himself, was what he felt about God, to whom his whole life had been dedicated.

When he had finished his schooling, the boy joined his father in the boats, first, only by day, in the pilchard fishery, and then in the drift-boats that went far out, at night, in the herring season. His father was a silent man and rarely spoke to him; the other men half feared and half despised him, because he would not drink or play cards with them, and seemed to be generally either reading or thinking. He thought a great deal in those long nights, and when he was eighteen he began to be seriously alarmed because, so far as he knew, he was not converted.

He knew that he tried to do what was right, that he kept all the commandments, prayed night and morning, and that he had this instinctive love of God; but, according to the Methodists, all that was not enough. There must be a moment, they held, in every man's life when he becomes actively conscious of salvation; for every man there is a road to Damascus. Seaward Lackland had not yet come to that great crisis, and he waited for it, wondering what it was and when he would come to it.

He began to be troubled about his sins. The Bible said that every evil thought was a sin, and he did not know how many evil thoughts had come into his mind since he had become conscious of good and evil. A heavy burden of guilt weighed upon him; he could not put it aside; the more he thought of God, the more conscious did he become of that awful gulf which lay between him and God. Conversion, he had heard, bridged that gulf, or your sins fell off into it and were no more seen, even if, somewhere out of sight, they still existed, and would exist through all eternity. He would have despaired but for the hope of that miracle. And if I die, he said to himself, before I am converted?

He had always gone regularly to chapel on Sundays and as often as he could on week-days, but now he began to stay to the prayer-meetings after the service, and the minister at St. Ives noticed him, and often prayed with him and talked with him, but to no avail. A year went by, and he grew more despondent; even his love for God seemed to be slackening. One winter evening he heard that a famous revivalist was coming to Lelant. He thought he would go and hear him, then something seemed to urge him not to go; and he walked half-way there, and then back again, unable to make up his mind. Then, thinking that it was the devil who was trying to keep him away, he turned and walked resolutely to Lelant.

When he reached the chapel the service had begun. They were singing 'Jesu, lover of my soul,' and the preacher was standing inside the communion-rail (he liked to be nearer the people than he could be in the pulpit), and, as Seaward had the first glimpse of his face, he was singing as if every word of the hymn meant something wonderful to him. His eyes were wide open and shining; he held the closed hymn-book in both hands, rigid in front of him, and the people seemed already to have begun to feel that magnetic influence which he rarely failed to establish between himself and his hearers. After the hymn he stretched out his hand with a sudden gesture, and the people stood motionless for a moment and then gradually sank down on their knees as he began to pray rapidly. He seemed to be talking with God as if God were there in the midst of them, and as he passed from supplication into a kind of vivid statement, meant for the people rather than for the ear of God, there seemed to be a dialogue going on, as if the answers which he gave were hardly his own answers. He ended abruptly, and, without the harmonium, started an almost incoherent marching-song which was well known at all revivals. 'Hallelujah, send the glory!' he sang, and the voices of the people rose louder and louder and feet began to beat time to the heavy swing of the tune. Then he read the lesson and, without a pause, gave out the text, and began to speak.