Part 4

Little by little, likewise, the souls of the homelanders had reverted, as we should say, to type. There were no signs now of that mutual good-will which had been implanted in them by the common peril and had overflowed so wildly at the time when the peril ended. Mistrustfulness had revived, and surliness with it, and quickness to take offence, and a dull eagerness to retaliate on the offender. The shortcomings of others were once more the main preoccupation of the average homelander. Next to these, the weather was once more the favourite topic of conversation, especially if the weather were bad; but even if it were good, the prospect of bad weather was dwelt on with a more than sufficient emphasis. Work, of course, had to be done; but as little of it was done as might be, and that glumly, and not well. Meals were habitually larger than appetites. Eyes were duller, complexions less clear, chests narrower, stomachs more obtrusive, arms and legs less well-developed, than they had been under the dragon’s auspices. And prayers, of course, were not said now.

Thia in her childhood had thought the homelanders perfect; and thus after the coming of the dragon she had observed no improvement in them. But now, with maturer vision, she did see that they were growing less worthy of high esteem. This grieved her. She believed that she loved the homelanders as much as ever, she told herself truly enough that it was much her own fault that they had ceased to love her. In point of fact, their coldness to her, in course of time, cooled her feeling for them: she was human. What she did love as much as ever was the homeland. What grieved her was that the homeland should have an imperfect population.

She talked constantly to Thol about her sorrow. He was not a very apt auditor. Being a native of the homeland, he could not see it, as she could, from without. It was not to him an idea, as it was to Thia’s deep alien eyes. It was just the homeland. As for the homelanders themselves, he had never, as you may remember, loved them; but he liked them quite well now. He supposed he really was not a god; but it no longer embarrassed him to be thought so; indeed it pleased him to be thought so. The homelanders no longer knelt when he passed by. He had asked them not to, and they reverently obeyed his wish. He supposed Thia was right in saying that they were less good than in the days of the dragon; but in those days he had hardly known them. He was glad to know them better now. His nature had, in fact, become more expansive. He wished Thia were not so troubled about the homeland. He wished she would think more gently of the homelanders, and think less about them, and talk less to him about them.

Sometimes she even tried to enlist his help. ‘To me,’ she would say, ‘they would not hearken. But you, O Thol, whom in their folly they still believe to be a god, could give light to them and shame them back to goodness and strength, and so to happiness. I would teach you what words to say.’ But Thol, even though he was to be spared the throes of composition, would look so blankly wretched that Thia’s evangelical ardour was quenched in laughter. He did not know why she was laughing, and he hoped it was not at him that she was laughing: after all, he had slain the dragon. Nevertheless, her gaiety was a relief to him.

But her ardour was always flaming up again.

* * * * *

She had very soon exempted him from that task which failed to cure the homelanders of their delusion about him. She agreed that goose-driving was not a man’s work. As he did not wish to be a shepherd again, and as it was needful for his own good that he should be set to some sort of work, she urged him to be a goat-herd. Goats, she said, were less dull than sheep; fiercer; more like dragons. So, beside the goose-pond, he herded goats; but without the enthusiasm that she had hoped for.

One day, about a year after their marriage, he even suggested that he should have a lad to help him. She said, with a curl of the lip, that she had not known he was old and feeble. He replied, seriously, that he was younger than she; and as for feebleness, he asked her to remember that he, not she, had slain the dragon. He then walked away, leaving his goats to their own devices, and his wife to hers, and spent the rest of the day in company that was more appreciative of him. He returned of course before sundown, fearful of a lecture. Thia, who had already driven his goats into their pen, did but smile demurely, saying that she would always be glad to do his work for him, and that she was trustier than any lad.

But, as time went on, her temper was not always so sweet. Indeed, it ceased to be sweet. In his steady, rather bovine way, he loved her as much as ever; but his love of being with her was less great, and his pleasure in the society of others was greater, than of yore. Perhaps if Thia had borne a child, she might have been less troubled about the welfare of the homelanders. But this diversion and solace was not granted. Thia’s maternal instinct had to spend itself on a community which she could not help and did not now genuinely love, and on a husband who did not understand her simplest thoughts and was moreover growing fat. Her disposition suffered under the strain. One day, when she was talking to him about the homeland, she paused with sudden suspicion and asked him what she had said last; and he could make no answer; and she asked him to tell her what he had been thinking about; and he said that he had been thinking about his having slain the dragon; and she, instead of chiding him tenderly, as she would have done in the old days, screamed. She screamed that she would go mad if ever again he spoke to her of that old dragon. She flung her arms out towards the hills across the waters and said, with no lowering of her voice, that every day, out yonder, men were slaying dragons and thinking nothing of it, and doing their work, and not growing fat. He asked her whether she meant that he himself was growing fat. ‘Yea,’ she answered. He said that then indeed she was mad. Away he strode, nor did he return at sundown; and it was late in the night before the god retired from a cheery party of worshippers and went up to the cave, where Thia, faintly visible in the moonlight, lay sleeping, with a look of deep disdain on her face.

* * * * *

Sometimes Thia wondered whether in her childhood the characters and ways of the homelanders had been as they were now. She hated to think that they had not been perfect in those days; but she reasoned that they could not have been: before the coming of the dragon they must have been as they were now, and the only difference was that they had then loved her. Thus even the memory of her bright careless early years was embittered to her.

In point of fact, the homelanders had not been exactly as they now were. The sudden cessation of the strain imposed on them by the dragon’s presence, and of the comparative hardships also imposed by it, had caused a reaction so strong as to restore to them in a rather accentuated form what faults had originally been theirs. Human nature had grown rather more human than ever. Labour was a less than ever alluring thing. Responsibilities had a greater irksomeness. Freedom was all. And, as having special measure of vital force, especially were youths and maidens intent on making the most of their freedom. Their freedom was their religion; and, as every religion needs rites, they ritualistically danced. They danced much during the day, and then much by moonlight or starlight or firelight, in a grim and purposeful, an angular and indeflexible manner, making it very clear that they were not to be trifled with.

Thia, when first she saw them engaged thus, had been very glad; she imagined that they must be doing something useful. When she realised that they were dancing, she drew a deep breath. She remembered how she herself had danced--danced thoughtlessly and anyhow, from her heart, with every scrap of her body. She blushed at the recollection. She did not wonder that the homelanders had resented her dance on the morning after her marriage. She wondered that they had encouraged her to dance when she was a child. And she felt that there must, after all, be in these young people a deep fund of earnestness, auguring well for their future.

Time had not confirmed this notion. The young people danced through the passing seasons and the passing years with ever greater assiduity and solemnity; but other forms of seriousness were not manifested by them. Few of them seemed to find time even for falling in love and marrying. They all, however, called one another ‘beloved,’ and had a kind of mutual good-will which their elders, among themselves, would have done well to emulate. And for those elders they had a tolerant feeling which ought to have been, yet was not, fully reciprocated.

Thol within five years of the dragon’s death, Thol with his immense red beard and his stately deportment, was of course very definitely an elder; and still more so was that wife of his, that rather beautiful dark woman, Thia, whose face was so set and stern that she looked almost as though she--she!--were dancing. Thol was liked by the young people. They made much of him. They did not at all object to his being rather pompous: after all, he had slain that dragon, and they thought it quite natural that their parents should imagine he was a god. They liked him to be pompous. They humoured him. They enjoyed drawing him out. Among the youths there were several who, in the hours not devoted to earnest dancing and cursory guardianship of flocks, made pictures upon white stones or upon slabs of chalk. They liked especially to make pictures of Thol, because he was so ready to pose for them, and because he stood so still for them. They drew in a manner of their own, a manner, which made the veins of poor old Veo stand out upon his forehead, and moved him to declare that they would die young and would die in shame and in agony. Thol, however, was no critic. He was glad to be portrayed in any manner. And it much pleased him to have the colour of his mane and beard praised constantly by the young artists. He had supposed the colour was wrong. Thia had been wont to laugh at it, in her laughing days. Thia had never called him beautiful, in her praising days. It gladdened him that there were now many young women--Afa, for instance, and Ola, and Ispa, and Moa--who called him, to his face, ‘terribly’ beautiful.

Thol’s face, which Thia had admired for its steadfast look, and later had begun to like less for its heavy look, had now a look that was rather fatuous. Afa and the others did not at all object to this. They liked it; they encouraged it by asking him to dance with them. He did not, as they supposed, think that he was too old to dance: he only thought that he might not dance well and might lose his power over them. He believed that they loved him. How should they not? Thia, though she never told him so now, loved him with her whole heart, of course, and, for all the harsh words she spoke at times, thought that no man was his equal. How should not these much gentler young women not have given their hearts to him? He felt that he himself could love one of them, if he were not Thia’s husband. They were not beautiful, as Thia was; and they were not wise, as she was; but he felt that if he had never seen Thia he might love one of them, or even all of them.

* * * * *

For lack of a calendar, the homelanders had not the habit of keeping anniversaries. They never knew on what day of the year a thing had happened--did not even know that there was a year. But they knew the four seasons. They remembered that the apple-trees had been in blossom when Thol slew the dragon, and that since then the apple-trees had blossomed four times. And it seemed good to them that at the close of a day when those blossoms were again on those branches, a feast should be held in that part of the valley where the great deed had been done. Shib, who organised the feast, was anxious that it should be preceded by a hymn in praise of the slayer god. He thought this would have a good effect on the rising generation. But Thol opposed the idea, and it was dropped. Shib had also been anxious that Thia should attend the feast, sitting at Thol’s right hand and signifying to the young the blessedness of the married state. Thol promised that he would beg her to come; and he did so, as a matter of form, frequently. But Thia of course did not grace the convivial scene.

It was at a late hour of the moonlit night that Thol, flushed with adulation, withdrew from the revels, amidst entreaties that he should remain. He was still wearing the chaplet of flowers that Afa had woven for him. Afa herself was clinging to one of his arms, Moa to the other, as he went round to the eastern spur of the hill; and Ola and Ispa and many others were footing around lightly and lingeringly, appealingly. It was rather the thought of Thia’s love for him than of his for her that withheld him from kissing these attendants before he bade them good-night. For his own sake he wished, as he climbed the hill, that they would not stand cooing so many farewells up to him so loudly. Thia might not understand how true he was to her. He hoped she was sleeping. But she was awake. Nor was he reassured by the laughter with which, after a moment, she greeted him. She was looking at his head. He became suddenly aware that he had not shed that chaplet. He snatched it off. She laughed the more, but with no kindness in the sound of her laughter.

‘O Thia,’ he said, after a search for words, ‘be not wroth against those maidens! I love none of them.’

‘Is that not cruel of you, O Thol? Do they not love you?’

‘Though they love me, O Thia, I swear to you that I love not them.’

‘Why should you not?’ she laughed. ‘Are you so foolish that you think I should be sorry?’

‘O Thia,’ he rebuked her, ‘you speak empty words. You speak as though you did not love me.’

‘I have long ceased to love you, O Thol,’ she said in a low voice.

He stared at her blankly in the moonlight. His slow mind strove hard. ‘But you are my wife,’ he said at last. ‘I am your husband. O Thia, is it indeed true that you have ceased to love me?’

‘O Thol, it is most true.’

Then, by stress of the great anger that rose in him, his mind worked more quickly--or rather his tongue was loosened. He told Thia that she had never loved him. She denied this coldly. He said that she had never understood him. She denied this warmly. He reminded her that even when she was a little girl she had once called him a coward; and this too she denied; but he maintained that it was so; and she reminded him that after he had been beaten by his master for seeing the dragon he said that she too ought to have been beaten for seeing the dragon; and he denied this; but she persisted that it was so; and he then said that she ought to have been beaten; and she replied that she could be now, and she challenged him to beat her; but he did not accept her challenge; and this, she said, proved that he was a coward; and he asked her to repeat this, and she repeated it, and he then reminded her that he had slain the dragon; and she, stamping her foot, said she only wished the dragon had slain him; and she made a face at him, and rushed out of the cave, and if there had been a door she would have slammed it; and really he was quite glad that she had gone; and after she had run far she lay down upon the grass and slept till dawn, and then, rising and brushing the dew off her arms and legs, went in search of some lonely spot where she should build her a hut of clay and wattles.

And perhaps it was a sign of her alien blood that the spot chosen by her was in what we call Soho. It was the spot on which, many years later, many of my coævals were to dine in the little Restaurant du Bon-Accueil, half-way along Gerrard Street. Gone, as utterly as Thia’s hut, is the dear little Restaurant du Bon-Accueil. But again I must hark back.

* * * * *

‘Very surely,’ thought Thol, some moments after the sun had waked him and shown him the empty cave and brought back last night to his memory, ‘I shall find her by the pond.’

Thither, with much dignity of gait, but with the promise of forgiveness on his brow, he presently went. She was not there. There only her geese were.

These he unpenned and let go into the pond, and then, having freed his goats also, sat down and waited. He waited all day long. She did not come. Nor was she there for him in the cave when he went back to it at sunset. Neither was she at the pond next morning. Not even her geese were there now.

That she had wanted them, and not him, was a bitter thought to Thol. He had not, till now, known how much he loved her. That she had been here this morning, or in the night, made the ground somehow wonderful to him. But he frowned away from his brow the promise of forgiveness. He would not forgive Thia now. Still less would he go in quest of her. He freed his goats, guided them to some long grass and, sitting down, tried to take an intelligent interest in their doings and a lively interest in their welfare, and not wonder where Thia was.

For three whole days he tried hard--tried with all that fixity of purpose which had enabled him at last to slay the dragon. It was Afa’s visit that unmanned him.

Not she nor any other of those maidens had ever come to him at the pond in Thia’s time. If they happened to pass that way, they would gaze straight before them, or up at the sky, greeting neither the husband nor the wife, and simpering elaborately, as much as to say, ‘We are unworthy.’ But now it was straight at Thol that the approaching Afa simpered. And she said, ‘I am come to be the goat-herd’s help!’

He marvelled that there was a time when he had thought he might have loved one of these maidens. He was not even sure that he knew which of them this one was. He was sure only that he despised them all. And this sentiment so contorted his mild face that there was nothing for Afa to do but toss her head and laugh and leave him.

Presently the look of great scorn in his face was succeeded by a look of even greater love. He arose and went in search of Thia. But he did not in his quest of her throw dignity to the winds. He did not ask anybody where he should find her. He walked slowly, as though bent on no errand. It was near sunset when at length he espied his lost one near to a lonely pool at the edge of the forest.

She did not see him. She sat busily plaiting wattles. There was a great pile of these beside her. And in and around the pool were her geese.

It was they that saw him first, and at sight of him they began to quack, as though in warning. Thia looked up quickly and saw Thol. He held out his arms to her, he strode towards her, calling her name; but she was up, she was gone into the darkness of the forest.

Long he peered into that darkness, and called into it, and even groped through it, but vainly.

* * * * *

For people who are not accustomed to think, thought is a fatiguing affair. Thol, despite his robust body, was tired when he awoke next morning, for he had spent a great part of the night in wondering how to win back his wife. In the days before he slew the dragon he had been a constant thinker. Little by little he was now to regain the habit.

Step by step he reached the premiss that in order to find a means of winning Thia back he must first make clear to himself why she had ceased to love him. He put together what he could recall of the many things that in the course of time she had said in anger against him. And he came to the conclusion that he had displeased her most by dwelling so much upon his great deed. He would dwell less upon it, try even to forget it. But this would not suffice. How was she to know that he was no longer dwelling as of yore? Perhaps he could do a second great deed? There seemed to be none to do. He must nevertheless try to think of one--some second great deed that would much please her. It was for the homelanders’ sake that the first one had found favour in her sight. And then somehow the homelanders had become less good because of it. Thia had often said so. Of course she had never blamed him for that. Still, perhaps she would not have ceased to love him if his deed had not done harm. Was there no deed by which the harm could be undone? Day by day, night by night, Thol went on thinking.

After the lapse of what we should call a week or so, he began to act also.

He knew that there could be no great thickness of barrier between the back of his cave and the back of the cave that had been the dragon’s; for in his childhood he had often heard through it quite clearly the sound of the voices of Gra and her children. To make in it now a breach big enough to crawl through on hands and knees was the first step in the plan that he had formed. With a great sharp stone, hour after hour, daily, he knelt at work. Fortunately--for else must the whole plan have come to naught--the barrier was but of earth, with quite small stones in it. Nevertheless, much of strength and patience had been exerted before the first little chink of daylight met Thol’s eyes.

It was a glad moment for him when, that same evening, at sunset, at last he was able to crawl through into the western cave; but as he rose and gazed around the soot-blackened lair he did not exult. His work had but begun. And his work would never end while he lived. He prayed earnestly to the sun that he might live long and always do his work rightly. Also he prayed that Thia might soon again love him.

That night, in his own cave, just as he was falling asleep, he had a doubt which greatly troubled him. He arose and went forth to a place where some ducks were. One of these he took and slew, and strode away with it to the marshes. There he heaved it into the ooze. It was quickly sucked down. This was well.

On the next night he became a woodman; and many were the nights he spent in going to and fro in the dark between his cave and the nearest margin of the forest, lopping off great branches and bearing them away for storage, and even uprooting saplings and bearing away these also, and, with a flint axe, felling young trees, and chopping them into lengths that were portable. He continued this night-work until both caves were neatly stacked with wood enough to serve his purpose for a longish while.

And then--for he had thought out everything, with that thoroughness which is the virtue of slow minds--he wove two thick screens of osiers and withes, each screen rather bigger than either end of the tunnel. On the evening when the second of these was finished, he made in the dragon’s cave, not far from the left-hand side of the cave’s mouth, a thick knee-high heap of branches and logs, some of them dry, others green. He placed at the other side of the mouth two thick flat stones, one upon the other.

Back in his own cave, he smeared with sheep’s fat a certain great stick of very dry pine-wood.

* * * * *

And on the following morning history began to repeat itself. With some variations, however. For example, it was not a puny little boy but a great strong man who, as the sun rose, came rushing with every symptom of terror down the western side of the hill. And the man was not really frightened. He only seemed so.

He careered around the valley, howling now like one distraught. Responsive sheep, goats, geese, what not, made great noises of their own. From the mouths of caves and huts people darted and stood agape. Thol waved his arms wildly towards the cave upon the hill. People saw a great column of smoke climbing up from it into the sky.

‘A dragon! Another dragon!’ was Thol’s burthen.