Part 11
That immortal scene has in my own mind got so intertwined with my own memories of the 27th of October that I cannot disentangle them. Twice, I remember, I saw Margery again after a long absence on the 27th, and with the tender memory of one who is dead there always wreathes itself the other association of the return of someone beloved. Dimly, as if the future would fulfil some dream of years ago, I picture some great joy coming to me on that day. I think that on that day I shall return from some captivity, and find that my life has been but a dream in the light of what shall be; that I shall have a joyful reaping--God knows what or how--for certain seed I have sown in tears; that some empty granary in my heart shall be made full of golden grain.
September was a month of ‘mellow fruitfulness’ in England, and I have returned to find my garden gone rampant. Somehow growth in autumn is utterly unlike summer growth in its wild opulence, as if the dear plants knew that it was nearly time for them to go to bed, but were determined to have one great romp first. A huge nasturtium, like a boisterous schoolboy, has sprung on to a Gloire de Dijon and is wrestling with it. A canariensis which I thought was finished has played hide-and-seek all over the trellis of the shelter until it met a wandering eccremocarpus, which it instantly embraced like a long-lost brother, and the sunshine of the flowers of the one is mixed with the orange trumpet of the other. Phloxes are still in flower, sunflowers have topped the garden wall, and the beautiful sylvestris is vigorous with pale leaf and snowy flower. But--only fancy--that vile Jackmanni is dead. Quite dead. God forgive it for a senseless fool.
* * * * *
These golden October days! Every morning I stray out before breakfast, sometimes only into the garden, sometimes as far as the water-meadows, to find the same glorious return of day. This morning the least pallor of hoar-frost was on the grass, and the clean smell of the morning was more exquisite than all the perfumes of Arabia. A tall chestnut had grown very suddenly yellow--how delightful if our hair turned brilliant gold (it does sometimes) when we grew old!--and the leaves were dropping one by one, without twist or turn, in the calm air, till a heap of unminted gold lay underneath the tree. Every now and then there was a thump on the grass, and the green rind of the chestnut fruit, split by the blow, jerked out its smooth and glossy globes. The chalk-streams flowing through the meadows were full and brimming, streams of living water, and the luxuriant grasses, grown to their longest, swam and dabbled in the flawless crystal. How good it was to breathe the chill of the morning, to look across the emerald of the meadows to the red town in the hollow, full of clustering roofs, over which the mists lay thin and level, pricked by the gray towers and solemn steeples which show golden in the clearness of the upper air! Then back to breakfast, and to this long quiet morning of work by the open window, interrupted only by the rapturous contemplation of a man in the road trying to drive a tandem. The leaders thought otherwise and went in different directions.
* * * * *
To-day is the 26th, and the march of these golden days has been suddenly interrupted. Last night I awoke to hear a great wind rattling at the panes, and snoring and fluting in the chimneys; and this morning, instead of the yellow sunshine, I find a gray and tattered sky of low storm-clouds, and sheets of driving rain flung against the windows. The flowers in the garden cower beneath the stinging lashes of water, and weep their petals silently away. A tree was blown down in the night not far from the house--an elm growing in a hedgerow--and a cruel gaping wound of torn earth has opened, with the fibres of the root like tortured and exposed nerves standing out into the air. For thirty yards round the field is littered with the pitiful debris--torn branches, bunches of leaf, even a couple of bird’s-nests. For it, poor soul! autumn has been the end of life, and spring will not build it anew.
All day the streaming heavens weep their violent and blinding tears, and the loud gale fills me with vague and intolerable apprehension. Like a lost soul it moans round the corners of the house, and through the cracks of the closed windows it whistles in descending and ascending chromatic scale. Now and then there comes a lull, but again it breaks out in a hooting maniac chorus, as if Bedlam were loose. The tattoo of the rain on the glass joins in the hurly-burly, and the swish and gurgle of the water down the roof-pipes lends a chuckling evil accompaniment. It is intolerable; there is the pain of hell and a certain hellish glee in this scream and riot. It is as if some lost soul cried aloud from its agony, yet exulted in its disobedience to God’s law. ‘Punish me, punish me!’ it seems to say; ‘never will I repent. It was You who made me, You who let my path on earth be hedged about with snare and temptation, and when I fall into the pits You have allowed to be digged, You say that I have sinned, and for that sin I burn in the fires of hell. But are You more at Your ease on the golden throne before the crystal sea? You will forgive me if I repent? A thousand thanks. But I will never repent, and I will never forgive You.’
Hell is loose, and swarms round me. The poor souls whom the Will of God caused to be made--have they not a right to resent their birth, if they are born to pain only and hopeless struggling? And if for a while they forget the evil plight into which they by no fault of theirs have been born, by tasting pleasures which a code--to them merely arbitrary--has labelled sinful, by what justice shall they be punished? Human justice at least would be less merciless. Is it just to make a frail thing like a man, place him in the midst of temptation, and then punish him because he falls? Supposing I buy a doll at a toy shop, and place it insecurely on the edge of a table and it falls off, is it just that I should then whip it? Or go a step further, and grant that I can endow that doll with consciousness, _so that it has an existence separate from mine_--may I whip it then? Is it not the most elementary justice that I should respect the free-will with which I have endowed it? But if it has a consciousness which is yet not separate from mine, then I punish myself if I punish it for transgressing laws which are of my own making. I, in fact, have transgressed my own laws. In that case I had better repeal them.
Now, possession of the devil is a very real thing, and though I hold that in the majority of cases--they occur to each one of us every day--the best thing to do is to run away if you possibly can, not stop and argue, there are occasions, and this seemed to me to be one, where you cannot run away, for you are with your back to the wall, and have to fight. So I fought, and I am glad to be able to say that the devil was sorry he spoke. For, as always, he is a very shallow fellow, and though with his loud words--the gale to help him outside--he had seemed very convincing for the moment, I think I never heard a sorrier argument than his. He suggests, so I take it, the repeal of all moral laws: the binding force of them is to vanish. What will happen then? The child crossing the street will be driven over by the first carriage, and left to lie there with broken limbs till the next ends its torture. I shall go out of my house to-morrow and be clubbed by two men, who will rob me, who in turn will be clubbed and robbed by three. In ten days--I wager my immortal soul on this--the kingdoms of the world will be entirely in the hands of a dozen men, all strong, all fearing each other, and desiring to get rid of each other. For reasons of self-preservation they will sign a contract that they will not kill, injure, or rob each other. Moral law has therefore begun again, for it is necessary for the preservation of human life. Next day they will sign another contract to protect their women and children, and before the year is out they will have found it necessary to have in force every human moral law that exists to-day. If it were not so, those laws could never have existed. Once more the spirit of good triumphs over the spirit of evil. God does not punish us; it is our own punishment which we inflict on ourselves each time that we, in ever so slight a degree, do anything which tends towards that chaos which must exist without morality.
* * * * *
The gale has blown itself tired, and now, as I stand on the doorstep about midnight, looking out, an extraordinary peace prevails. The moon is high in heaven, bare of clouds, and the air is utterly calm and windless. It seemed to me impossible only a few hours ago that so serene a tranquillity should succeed the wild riot of to-day. And steadfast remain the stars; they have not, as seemed almost inevitable, been blown, like those heaps of dead leaves, about the floor of the skies, so that one quarter was bare, while in another the Pleiades had been blown against the Twins, and Orion sat on Cassiopeia’s chair.
* * * * *
The morning of the 27th was of the same pellucid serenity as the midnight before. The trees were much barer than they had been twenty-four hours before, and the inimitable tracery of the branches against the sky was outlined with the precision of the South. The sun was extraordinarily warm, and I sat out for an hour in the morning to the chuckling of birds in the bushes and an unread paper. Then in the afternoon I went to the cathedral for the evening service.
* * * * *
It has happened. For years past, as you know, I have felt certain it would happen on this day, and when it happened I knew it could not have been otherwise. Thus:
The service was at half-past three, and I got to the cathedral, I suppose, some five minutes before it began, and was given a stall on the south side. Through the windows behind me the sun streamed low--nearly level--for it was not far from its setting, and I lived over again a certain October 27, years ago, when I got home too late, and knew that one of the sweetest and dearest souls that ever lived on earth had gone home. It was just such a day as this, bright and unclouded, and even then, on the day itself, I felt it wholly impossible to be sad. It was all right with the world, then as always, and God, as always, was in His heaven. We walked all together--those of us who were left--through the woods, and it was right and meet that the sun shone, and that we recalled and spoke of her merriness, and were ourselves merry with the memory. Then my two strange meetings with Margery, also on this day, intertwined themselves with the other: it was a day of home-coming.
At this point I became aware that I could not have been attending to the service, for automatically, with the rest of the congregation, I rose from my knees for the Psalms. No chant was played over, but a long pedal note from the organ vibrated in the carved stalls, and at the first chord the choir began. And they sang, ‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, then were we like unto them that dreamed.’ I did not need to open the big Prayer-Book, and for the first time I looked up.
Opposite me stood--Margery. And the sunlight was round her head.
It could not be Margery, for she is dead. Only when I looked up my brain said ‘Margery.’
NOVEMBER
When the service was over, I waited by the west front watching the congregation stream out of the gray gloom inside into the primrose-coloured lights of sunset. There were two big collies sitting patiently side by side on the edge of the grass, looking with liquid, eager eyes at the people coming out. Suddenly two tails began to thump ecstatically, but neither dog moved. It was She--I think I knew from their eagerness it could be none else. With a smile lurking in her eyes, she walked to them, and from where I was I could hear her say, ‘Dear angels! come along,’ and two tawny streaks fled over the grass.
I waited a little, then followed her. She turned southwards out of the Close, over the bridge, below which the big trout lie, and into the path through the water-meadows, the two tawny streaks cutting figures like a swallow’s flight up and down the road, running at top speed just for the joy of the life that was in them. And once clear of the town, she looked furtively round, saw only one wayfarer a hundred yards behind, and ran too. The wayfarer quickened his pace, ready to drop into a sedate walk if she looked round. Then on the edge of the water she found a stick, and, whistling to the dogs, threw it clean across the river, and a double plunge and splash of flying spray followed it. Then the streaks swam back, each holding an end of the beloved stick, dropped it at her feet, and, one on each side of her, shook themselves, so that she was between the waters, and I heard a faint scream of dismay and then a laugh. My house stands in the road close beyond the end of the meadows, but she went on, and still I followed, past the group of labourers’ cottages, where lights were already springing up beneath the dark thatch, and out on to the main-road. And at that moment I guessed where she would go. Yes, to that house--no other--the house where Margery lived, the house which was the scene of my dark dreams in August last. The collies rudely pushed their way in before her, after the manner of their impulsive kind, and the door was shut.
I was dining that evening with some people in the town, and met there an old friend of mine who lives a mile or two from here, who has usually some fault to find with me. She had this evening.
‘You are a perfect disgrace,’ she said. ‘We consider you an old inhabitant of the town, and yet when new and charming people come you cannot find the civility even to leave a card.’
‘I am sorry,’ said I penitently. ‘Who are they? You know, I have been away.’
‘Well, they are coming here to-night,’ she said.
‘My dear lady, _who_ are coming here to-night?’
Then the door opened, and they came, father and daughter.
This afternoon I went up the dark road of my dreams to call. She had said they would not be in till nearly six, and it was already deep dusk when I reached the house, which stood a black blot against the gray sky. But the window over the porch was lit and open, and the blind drawn down over it, and from inside came a voice singing. I was admitted, but the hall was dark, and as the servant was feeling for the button of the electric light, a step passed along the passage at the head of the stairs and began to descend, and it was a step that caught my ear with a strangely familiar sound. Then halfway down, even at the moment the light was turned up, it paused, and a voice said, ‘Oh! is there somebody?’ and in the sudden blaze I saw her, and the passages were dark no longer.
‘Ah, it’s you,’ she said; ‘how nice of you to come! Oh, I’ve left the dogs shut up. Please go into the drawing-room; I’ll be there in a moment.’
So I turned up the hall, to the right, and through the little sitting-room into the drawing-room beyond. She came in a moment afterwards.
‘How did you know where the drawing-room was?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it the most inconveniently built house you ever saw?’
‘The most,’ said I; ‘but I know it well. There was a great friend of mine who used to live here----’
She looked up suddenly.
‘Dick, do you mean,’ she asked, ‘who was killed in South Africa? He was a distant cousin of mine.’
‘Then his wife was, too?’ said I.
‘Yes, I believe so. Why?’
‘It partly accounts for it.’
‘Accounts for what?’ she said.
‘That you are absolutely the living image of her.’
She laughed again.
‘Oh dear! it is a terrible responsibility to be like an old acquaintance of somebody’s. I shall have to live up to her. I do hope she wasn’t very nice. It will be so difficult for me if she was.’
‘She and Dick were the greatest friends I ever had,’ said I.
Those beautiful gray eyes grew serious.
‘Ah, how dreadful for you!’ she said. ‘It was all very sudden, was it not? The child, too!’
‘Yes, very sudden. I had been dining with her here, and she had gone upstairs when the telegram came. She heard the ring, and leaned over the banisters above the hall, and knew. Then the child was born. She died just at day-break next morning. She asked me, I remember, to pull up the blind, and said, “Let in the morning.” That was all.’
‘Ah, poor thing--poor thing!’ she said. Then she looked up at me: ‘Poor thing!’ she repeated.
The tea was brought in, and before many minutes her father came in also. They are coming to lunch to-morrow.
That night I was out to dinner, but came home early and sat for a long time in front of the fire, with work calling on me to do it, but simply incapable. What a strange, inexplicable coincidence it all is! How I long for, and dread, and love, and fear, the thought of these days that are coming! Surely this is meant to mean something! Think of the millions of little events and decisions which have gone to make up this particular conjuncture. Is it possible that they were all done in haphazard? Or is it another teasing problem that has been set me on the curious chequer-board of life, ending in my checkmate? just a piece of ingenious manœuvring of the pieces, all leading to nothing? I cannot believe that. Yet if it is not that, if love is the answer to it all....
I love to be with her, and since that afternoon in the cathedral I have thought of nothing but her. But love her? I know it is not that--yet. It is, that, by this curious trick which Nature has played, I feel--I am cheated into feeling--that Margery is here with me again. It is as if there had been made an image of Margery, like in every respect, not only in externals, in voice, appearance, gesture, but in the deeper things as well--in her gaiety, her tenderness, and in that quick sympathy which sprang into being at the moment the call was made. Yet God never makes facsimiles; she, too, is a living soul, of her own identity, and none other’s. Or--the wildest impossibilities riot in my brain to-night--is this some wraith of my Margery--Dick’s Margery--sent, God knows from where, to comfort me or to drive me insane? Was there in my love for Margery, after she was Dick’s wife, something which was evil, which kept suggesting, ‘If this had been otherwise--if Dick died?’... Yes, there was that. Day after day there was that. I tried to fight it--indeed I tried. But I did not conquer it for a whole year. But in June, on the last evening of all, when she spoke to me in the garden of the dear event that was coming, it dropped dead, or so I hoped and believed. Yet for a whole year I let it live: is God going to punish me for that by these cruel means? To make me love again, and again go hungry?
It cannot be; again and again I tell myself it cannot be. But so I told myself when the telegram of Dick’s death came, and in spite of all my telling it was true, and the tears of the whole world could not wash out a word of it. But if once more I am to go unrequited, I do not see how I can bear it. It would be wiser to see no more of this incarnation of Margery. At present I love seeing her, because--because that pressed and withered flower I always carry with me has, so to speak, blushed again with the hues of life, and a living fragrance breathes from it. But Helen--I think I have not mentioned her name before--this incarnation of Margery, is also a living woman, with an identity of her own. How if from loving her of whom she so sweetly and poignantly reminds me I pass to loving the woman herself? And if she does not care?
No, I will see her no more. My life is my own, and I will not risk that great stake again. I know the unutterable sweetness of loving. I know, too, the unutterable emptiness of love unrequited, even though from her who loved me not I had such a wealth of tender and womanly affection. I know also how good the world is, how full and brimming with things that are lovely and of good report. For two years, in spite of what went before, God knows how much happiness I have been allowed to enjoy, how rich I have been, levying my tax of joy on all created things, finding music in all the strings of human emotions except one only--love, definite love for one woman. It is strange if I cannot be content without it. True, often and often I have felt, and shall feel again, that this would crown all the rest; but if I again do my part in it, let myself love this girl, and nothing comes of it, how well I know with what a sense of dejection and impotence I shall have to begin again from the beginning, picking up the scattered pieces of the structure known as ‘I,’ fitting them together till some sort of coherent entity, a person of some kind, again pursues some sort of reasonable way through the world! And I distrust my own power of picking myself up again; I am afraid that this time I should let the pieces lie about, shrug shoulders at them, and drift, fossilize, vegetate, what you will.
Bitterness as black as sin and salt as the Dead Sea rises in my throat. What would I not give to see a mother with her child--my child--at her breast? How unspeakably I long for that! Was it my fault that Margery loved Dick, not me? Very good, it was my fault. I have borne the punishment, and I bear it now, and I shall always bear it; and I will try to avoid the possibility of being punished for another such fault.
* * * * *
So I fall back again on my life of little things. I will read the whole of Shakespeare through by next March; I will know a little more about gardening by next spring; I will try to keep my temper; I will try to do a little honest work at a book I am engaged on; I will try, dancing here with the rest of the human race, like a swarm of flies in the sunlight, or, if you will, like worms in the dust, not to sting and wriggle; and I will try not to behave again as I behaved this morning, in this manner, to wit:
A small boy ‘does’ the shoes, boots, and knives of this establishment. He is blessed with sky-scraping spirits and a piercing whistle. He likes taking the boots up to my bedroom, because he slides down the banisters afterwards. I have frequently told him not to. This morning he whistled so loudly and continuously that I told myself it disturbed me, though, as a matter of fact, it did not, and I knew it. But without effort almost I worked myself into a fume of nagging ill-temper over it. Shortly after I heard him taking the boots up to my bedroom, and deliberately, like a spy, went to the door of the room where I was working, and held it ajar so that I might catch him sliding down the banisters. I was gorgeously successful, stood before him as he landed at the bottom with a face of April, and looked at him with an odious and baleful countenance till April fled. I wrung from him the admission that he had often been told not to do this, and assured him that if he could not remember it was perfectly easy for me to find someone who could. Then I went back to work again with a sort of fiendish pleasure at having spoiled somebody’s happiness, though it was only a boot-boy’s. There was no more whistling from downstairs, and I congratulated myself on having secured tranquillity also at one fell swoop.