A notable difference between the sexes is this: that a man will thrive for years—that is, his better part—upon love denied, and woman upon love fulfilled. So Senhouse, in his hopeless plight, starved and did well; dreams nourished him in what passes in England for solitude. From the grey of the mornings to the violet-lidded dusk his silence was rarely broken; and yet the music in his heart was continuous; his routine marched to a rhythm. The real presence of Sanchia was always with him, to intensify, accentuate, and make reasonable the perceptions of his quickened senses. Sense blended with sense—as when the sharp fragrance of the thyme which his feet crushed gave him the vision of her immortal beauty, or when, in the rustle of the wind-swept grasses, he had a consciousness of her thrilled heart beating near by. All nature, in fact, was vocal of Sanchia by day; and at night, presently, she stole white-footed down the slant rays of the moon and fed his soul upon exhalations of her own. Idle as he might have appeared to one who did not know the man—for beyond the routine of his handiwork he did nothing visible—he was really intensely busy. Out of the stores reaped and garnered in those meditative years was to come the substance of his after-life.
But no man in England may live three years in a grass valley unreported; his fame will spread abroad, scattered as birds sow seeds. Discreetly as he lived and little as he fared, he was at first a thing of doubt and suspicion, and won respect by slow degrees. Was he a coiner, stirring alloys over his night fires? Was he Antichrist, blaspheming the Trinity at daybreak? He was talked of by gaitered farmers at sheep-fairs, by teamsters at cross-roads, by maidens and their sweethearts on Sundays. The shepherds, it was thought, might have told more than they did. It was understood that they had caught him at his secrets times and again. But the shepherds had little to say of him but that he was a mellow man, knowing sheep and weather, and not imparting all that he knew. Similarly the gypsies, who alone travel the Race-plain in these days, and mostly by night, were believed to know him well; but they, too, kept their lore within the limits of their own shifty realm.
Rarely, indeed, he was seen. Sunday lovers, strolling hand in hand up the valley, came to a point where they went tiptoe and peered about for him. He might be described motionless, folded in his white robe, midway between ridge and hollow; or a gleam of him flashed between the trees of the brake would perhaps be all that they would get for an hour of watching. The hill brows would, on such days, be lined with patient onlookers; all eyes would be up the narrow valley to its head under Hirlebury, where, below the little wood, his grey hut could be seen, deep-eaved, mysterious, blankly holding its secrets behind empty windows. None ever ventured to explore at close quarters; and if the tenant had appeared, a thousand to one they would all have looked the other way. The Wiltshire peasant is a gentleman from the heart outwards. So, too, carters, ploughmen, reapers in the vales would sometimes see his gaunt figure monstrous on the sky-line, cowled and with uplifted arms, adoring (it was supposed) the sun, or leaning on his staff, motionless and rapt, meditating death and mutability. He lost nothing by such change apparitions; on the contrary, he gained the name of a wise man who had powers of divination and healing. In the cottage whither he went once a week for bread, a child had been sick of a burning fever. His hands, averred the mother, had cured it. Groping and making passes over its stomach, rubbing in oils, relief had come, then quiet sleep and a cool forehead. After this an old man, crippled with rheumatics, had hobbled up to the very edge of his dominion, and had waited shaking there upon his staff until he could get speech with the white stranger. He, too, had had the reward of his relief. If he was not made sound again, he was relieved and heartened. He had said that, if he was spared, he was hopeful to stretch to his height again, which had been six feet all but an inch. The stranger, said he, had put him in the way of new life, and whatever he might mean—whether that he were a Salvationist or a quack doctor—he would say no more. After that, a young woman went to him to get him to name the father of her child, and returned, and was modest for a month, and a good mother when the time came. And true it was that her chap came forward and saw the vicar about it, and that they were asked in church. Out of such things as these his fame grew.
The hunt struck upon him now and again, when the hounds in full cry streamed down his steep escarpments and threatened panic to his browsing goats. At such times he would rise up, white-robed and calm, as stay with a quiet gesture the scattering beasts. The whips would cap him, and the Master with his field find themselves in company of an equal. For his ease of manner never left him, nor that persuasive smile which made you think that the sun was come out. He had none of the airs of mystagogue, but talked to men, as he did to beasts, in the speech which was habitual to them. The lagging fox understood him when, grinning his fear and fatigue, he drew himself painfully through the furze. So did the hounds, athirst for his blood. Buck-skinned gentlemen, no less, found him affable and full of information—about anything and everything in the world except the line of the hunted fox. “Oh, come,” he said once, “don't ask me to give him away. You're fifty to one, to start with; and the fact is I passed him my word that I wouldn't. I'll tell you what though. You shall offer me a cigarette. I haven't smoked for six days.” Which was done.
His powers with children, his charm for them, his influence and fascination, which in course of time made him famous beyond these shores, arose out of a chance encounter not far from his hut. Three boys, breaking school in the nesting season, came suddenly upon him, and paled, and stood rooted. “Come on,” he said, “I'll show you a thing or two that you've never seen before.” He led them to places of marvel, which his speech made to glimmer with the hues of romance: the fresh grubbed earth where a badger had been routing, the quiet glade where, that morning, a polecat had washed her face. He brought them up to a vixen and her cubs, and got them all playing together. He let them hold leverets in their arms, milk his goats, as the kids milk them for their need; and showed them so much of the ways of birds that they forgot, while they were under the spell of him, to take any of their eggs. Crowning wonder of all—when a peewit, waiting on the down, dipped and circled about his head for a while and finally perched on his shoulder while he stood looking down upon her eggs in the bents! Such deeds as these fly broadcast over the villages, and on Saturdays he would be attended by a score of urchins, boys and girls. To a gamekeeper who came out after his lad, sapling ash in hand, he had that to say which convinced the man of his authority.
“'A says to me, 'There's a covey of ten in thicky holler,' where you could see neither land nor bird. 'I allow 'tis ten,' he says, 'but we won't be particular to a chick.' There was nine, if you credit me, that rose out of a kind of a dimple in the down, that you couldn't see, and no man could see. 'Lord love you,' I said, 'Mr. John, how ever did you see 'em?' He looks at me, and he says, very quiet, 'I never saw the birds, nor knew they was there. I saw the air. There's waves in this air,' he says, 'wrinkled waves; and they birds stirred 'em, like stones flung into a pond. Tom,' he says, to my Tom, 'if you look as close as I do,' he says, 'you'll see what I see.' And young Tom looks up at him, as a dog might, kind of faithful, and he says, 'I 'low I will, sir, please, sir.' I says to him, 'Can a man be taught the like o' that?' 'No,' says he, 'but a boy can.' 'What more could thicky boy learn?' I says, and he says, 'To understand his betters, and get great words, and do without a sight of things—for the more you do without,' he says, 'the more you have to deal with.' 'Such things as what, now, would he do without?' I wants to know. He looks at me. 'Food,' he says, kind of sharp; 'food when he's hungry, and clothing, and a bed; and money, and the respect of them that don't know anything, and other men's learning, and things he don't make for himself.' Heard any man ever the like o' that? But just you bide till I've done. 'Can a boy learn to do without drink?' I wants to know—for beer's been my downfall. 'He can,' says thicky man. 'And love?' I says; and 'No,' says he straight, 'he cannot. But he can learn the way of it; and that 'ull teach him to do wi'out lust.' 'Tis a wise thought, the like of that, I allow.”
The gamekeeper paused for the murmurs of his auditory to circle about the tap-room, swell and subside, and then brought out his conclusion. There was book-learning to be faced. “How about scholarship? 'I'd give him none,' says the man. 'Swallerin' comes by nature, and through more than the mouth. I'd open him his eyes and ears, his fingers and toes, and the very hairs on the backs of his hands; and they'll all swaller in time, like the parts of the beastes do.' Now, that's a learned man, I allow. My boy must go to the Council School it does appear; but thicky man will give him more teaching in a week than school-master in a year—and there he goes o' Saturdays—and wants no driving, moreover.” He returned to his beer, thoughtful-eyed.
The gamekeeper's son was twelve years old, and was the nucleus round which grew the Senhusian school of a later day, where neither reading nor writing could be had until the pupil was fifteen years old. But this is birth.
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