One September midnight, as he stirred a late supper over a small wood-fire, he was hailed by a cry from above. “Ho, you! I ask shelter,” he was adjured. The quarter moon showed him a slim figure dark against the sky.
“Come down, and you shall have it,” he answered, and continued to skim his broth.
The descent was painfully made, and it was long before the traveller stood blinking by his fire—a gaunt and hollow-eyed lad. Senhouse took him in at a glance, stained, out-at-elbows with the world, nursing a grudge, footsore and heartsore. He had a gypsy look, and yet had not a gypsy serenity. That is a race that is never angry at random; and never bitter at large. A gypsy will want a man's life; but if the man is not before him, will be content to wait until he is. But this wanderer seemed to have a quarrel with time and place, that they held not his enemy by the gullet.
“You travel late, my friend,” said Senhouse briskly.
“I travel by night,” said the stranger, “lest I should be seen by men or the sun.”
Senhouse laughed. “In girum imus noctu, non ut consumimur igni.' They used to say that of the devils once upon a time. Devilish bad Latin; but it reads backwards as well as forwards, like the devil himself.”
“My devil rides on my back,” said the stranger, “and carries with him the fire that roasts me.”
He was at once bitter and sententious. Senhouse put down his hurts to bruises of the self-esteem.
“I hope that you dropped him up above,” he said cheerfully, “or that you will let me exorcise him. I've tried my hand with most kinds of devil. Are you a Roman?”
“Half,” he was told, and, guessing which half, asked no more questions.
“You are pretty well done, I can see,” he said. “You want more food. You want warm water, and a bed, and a dressing for your feet. You've been on the road too long.”
The stranger was huddled by the fire, probing his wounded feet. “I'm cut to pieces,” he said. “I've been over stubbles and flint. This is a cruel country.”
“It's the sweetest in the world,” Senhouse told him, “when you know your way about it. When you have the hang of it you need not touch the roads. You smell out the hedgerows, and every borstal leads you out on to the grass. But I'll own that there are thistles. I wear sandals myself. Now,” he continued, ladling out of his pot with a wooden spoon, “here's your porridge, and there are bread and salt; and here water, and here goat's milk. Afterwards you shall have a pipe of tobacco, and some tea. Best begin while all's hot—and while you eat I'll look to your wounds. Finally, you shall be washed and clothed.”
He went away, returning presently with water and a napkin. Kneeling, he bathed his guest's feet, wiped them, anointed, then wrapped them up in the napkin. The disconsolate one, mean-time, was supping like a wolf. He gulped at his porridge with quick snaps, tore his bread with his teeth. Senhouse gave him time, quietly eating his own supper, watching the red gleam die down in the poor wretch's eyes. Being himself a spare feeder, he was soon done, and at further business of hospitality. He set a great pipkin of water to heat, brought out a clean robe of white wool, a jelab like his own, and made some tea.
The stranger, then, being filled, cleansed and in warm raiment, stretched himself before the fire, and broke silence. He was still surly, but the grudge was not audible in his voice. “I took your fire for a gypsy camp, and was glad enough of it. I've come by the hills from Winterslow since dusk. You were right, though: I was done. I couldn't have dragged another furlong.”
Senhouse nodded. “I thought not. Been long on the road?”
“Two months.”
“From the North, I think? From Yorkshire?”
The stranger grunted his replies. His host judged that he had reasons for his reticence. There was a pause.
“You sup late,” was then observed.
Senhouse replied, “I generally do. I take two meals a day—the first at noon, the second at midnight; but I believe that I could do without one of them. I never was much of an eater—and I need very little sleep. Somehow, although I am out at sunrise most mornings, I rarely sleep till two or thereabouts. Four hours are enough for me—and in the summer much less. Sometimes, when the fit is on me, I roam all night long, and come back and do my routine—and then sleep where I am, or may be. Precisians would grow mad at such a life—and yet I'm awfully healthy.”
The stranger watched him. “You live here, then—and so?”
“I have lived here,” said Senhouse, “for three years or more; but I've lived so for over twenty. I've wandered for most of that time, and know England from end to end; but now I seem to have got into a backwater, and I find that I travel farther, and see more, than I did when I was hardly for a week together in the same place. But that's reason-able enough, if you think of it. If you can do with-out time, space goes with it. If it don't matter when you are, it don't matter where.”
The stranger lent this reasoning his gloomy meditation, which turned it inwards to himself and his rueful history. “I don't follow you, I believe,” he said, “for very good reason. I hope you will never learn as I have that it does matter where you are.” He stopped, then added, as if the admission was wrung out of him, “I've been in prison.”
“So have I,” said Senhouse, “and in Siberia at that. I was there for more than a year, though not all that time within walls. They let me loose when they found that I could be trusted, and I learned botany, and caught a marsh fever which nearly finished me. They wouldn't have me in after that, being quite content that I should rot in the open. I was succoured by a woman, one of those noble creatures who are made to give themselves. She gave me what blood she had left. God bless her: she blessed me.”
“It was a woman,” said the stranger, “that sent me to prison.”
Senhouse, after looking him over, calmly replied, “I don't believe you. You mean, I think, that there was a woman, and you went to prison. You confuse her and your feelings about her. It is natural, but not very fine-mannered. No woman would have put the thing as you have put it to me.”
The stranger shifted two or three times under his host's quiet regard: presently he said, “This is the tale in a nutshell. She was beautiful and kind to me; she was in a hateful place, and I loved her—and she knew it. There was a man with claims—rights he had none—preposterous claims, made infamous by his acts. The position was impossible, intolerable. She knew it, but did nothing. Women are like that—endlessly enduring; but men are not. I dragged him off a horse and thrashed him. He had me to gaol, and she went her ways, leaving a note for me, hoping I should do well. Do well! Much she cares what I do. Much care I.” He ended with a sob which was like the cough of a wolf at night, and then turned his face away.
“Why should she care,” asked Senhouse, “what becomes of you? By your act you dropped yourself out of her sphere. If she was to be degraded, as you call it, by whom was she degraded? But you talk there a language which I don't understand. You say that she was beautiful, and I suppose you know what you mean by the word. How then is a beautiful person to be degraded by anything the likes of you, or your fellow-dog, do to her? The thing's absurd. You can't claw her soul or blacken the edges of that. You can't sell that into prostitution or worse. That is her own, and it's that which makes her beautiful,—in spite of the precious pair of you, bickering and mauling each other to possess her. Possess her, poor fool! Can you possess moonlight? If you have degraded anything, you have degraded yourself. She remains where she is, entirely out of your reach.”
The young man now turned his trapped and wretched face to the speaker. “You little know—” he began, then for weakness stopped. “I can't quarrel with you; wait till I've had a night's rest.”
“You shall have it, and welcome,” said Senhouse. “But you'll never quarrel with me. I believe I've got beyond that way of enforcing arguments which I fear may be unsound. I doubt if I have quarrelled with anybody for twenty years.”
“There are some things which no man can stand,” said the other, “and that was one. Your talk of the soul is very fine; but do you say that you don't love a woman's body as well as her soul?”
Senhouse was silent for a while; then he said, “No,—I can't say that. You have me there. I ought to, but I can't. And I think I owe you an apology for my heat, for the fact is that I've been in much of your position myself. There was a man once upon a time that I felt like thrashing—for much of your reason. But I didn't do it—for what seemed to me unanswerable reason. I did precisely the opposite—I did everything I could to ensure a miserable marriage for the being I loved best in all the world. I loathed the man, I loathed the bondage; but that's what I did. Now mark what follows. I didn't—I couldn't—degrade her; but I saw myself dragging like a worm in the mud while she soared out of my reach. And there I've been—of the slime slimy ever since. Where she is now I don't know, but I think in heaven. Heaven lay in her eyes—and whenever I look at the sky at night I see her there.”
“You are talking above my head,” said the stranger, “or above your own. Either I am a fool, or you a madman. You love a woman, and give her to another man? You love her, and secure her in slavery? You love her, and don't want her?”
“It is I that am the fool, not you,” said Senhouse. “I do want her. I want nothing else in earth or heaven. And yet I know that I have her for ever. Our souls have touched each other. She is mine and I am hers. And yet I want her.”
“Won't you get her? Don't you believe that you will?”
“God knows! God knows!”
“She was beautiful?”
“The dawn,” said Senhouse, “was not more purely lovely than she. The dawn was in her face—the awfulness of it as well as its breathless beauty.”
“My mistress,” said the young man, “had the gait of a goddess in the corn. One thought of Demeter in the wheat. She was like ivory under the moon. She laughed rarely, but her voice was low and thrilled.”
“Her breath,” Senhouse continued, “was like the scent of bean-flowers. She sweetened the earth. It is true that she laughed seldom, but when she did the sun shone from behind a cloud. When she was silent you could hear her heart beat. She was deliberate, measured in all that she did—yet her spirit was as swift as the south-west wind. She did nothing that was not lovely, and never faltered in what she purposed. When first I came to know her and see the workings of her noble mind, I was so happy in the mere thought of her that I sang all day as I worked or walked. It never entered me for one minute that I could desire anything but the knowledge of her.”
“I wanted my mistress altogether,” the other broke in, “from the first moment to the last—fool, and wicked fool, as you may think me. I could see her bosom stir her gown—I could see the lines of her as she walked. She was kind to me, I tell you, and there were times when—alone with her—in her melting mood—in the wildness of my passion—but no! something held me: I never dared touch her.... And then he—the other—came back; he, with his 'claims' and 'rights'; and the thought of him, and what he could do—and did do—made me blind. You tell me that I sinned against her—”
“I don't,” said Senhouse. “I tell you that you sinned against love. You don't know what love is.”
“You say so. Maybe you know nothing about it. If you have reduced yourself to be contented with the soul of a woman, I have not. What have I to do with the soul?”
“Evidently nothing,” said Senhouse. “How, pray, do you undertake to apprehend body's beauty unless you discern the soul in it—on which it shapes its beauty?”
“I know,” the other replied, “that she has a lovely body, and gracious, free-moving ways; and I could have inferred her soul from them. I'll engage that you did the same thing. How are you to judge of the soul but by the hints which the body affords you?”
Senhouse made no answer, but remained musing. When he spoke it was as if he was resuming a tale half-told....
“She was in white—white as a cloud—and in a wood. Her hair reflected gold of the sun. She pinned her skirts about her waist, and put her bare foot into a pool of black water. She sank in it to the knee. She did not falter: her eyes were steady upon what she did.”
The stranger took him up where he stopped, and continued the tale. “She could never falter in her purpose. She bared herself to the thighs. She went into the pool thigh-deep. Whiter than the lilies which she went to save, she raked the weed from them—you helping her.”
“She did,” said Senhouse, his eyes searching the fire. “And when, afterwards, she did what her heart bade her, she never faltered either, though she steeped her pure soul in foulness compared to which the black water was sweet. But do you suppose that any evil handling would stain her? You fool! You are incapable of seeing a good woman. In the same breath with which I spurned myself for having a moment's fear for her, I thanked God for having let me witness her action.”
The rebuke was accepted, not because it was felt to be justified; but rather, it passed unheeded. The stranger had questions to ply.
“Knowing her, loving her—loveworthy as she was—how could you leave her?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Senhouse, “I have never left her.” But in the next breath he had to qualify his paradox.
He spoke vehemently. “I had of her all that I dared have. That has never left me. I had all that she could give me—she that was self-sufficing, not to be imparted. She did not love me, as you could understand love: I don't think she could love anybody. But I only could read her thoughts and grasp her troubles for her. She was at ease with me, let me write to her, was glad to see me when I came, but perfectly able to do without me. She was, of course, not human; she inhabited elsewhere. Her 'soul was like a star and dwelt apart.' She remembered things as they had been, yet not as affecting her to pleasure or pain; she remembered them as a tale that is told, as things witnessed. So she remembered me—and so she still does. If I was there, with her, she was glad; if I was not there, she wasn't sorry. I was nothing to her but a momentary solace—and I knew it and taught myself to be contented. I believe that she was the spirit of immortal youth fleeting over the world. I called her Hymnia. What Beatrice was to Dante, the visible incarnation of his dream of holiness, such was she to me. I picture her and Beatrice together in heaven.
'In the clear spaces of heaven, As sisters and lovers, sit Beatrice and Thou embraced— Hand and hand, waist and waist, And smile at the worship given By Earth, and the men in it To whom you were manifest.'
I quote my own poetry, because, oddly enough, nobody else has remarked upon the fact.”
He continued: “When she did what it pleased her to do, it was said by fools that I had inspired her. Fool among fools, I thought so myself at the time, and moved Earth and Heaven, and Hell and Ingram, to save her from an act of magnanimity the like of which I have never heard of. Bless you! if I had never lived, she would have acted as she did, because she was incapable of seeing evil, incapable of acting against her heart. Well! and the thing was done—and I had to face it. I had it all out with myself, and decided that no harm could come to her. From that hour I have never seen her with my waking eyes. Yet she is here. She is always here....
“My answer to you is simple. I have all of her of which I am capable. I have never left her because she has never left me....
“I wrote out my heart in my first years of knowing her; but since then I have gone under the harrow of this world, where there can be no singing. Now that I am at peace my voice has come back. I listen to what she tells me, and note it. Like Dante, vo significando: I am a drain-pipe for her spirit. She was Hymnia to me once, and I sang of Open Country; now she is Despoina, Mistress of the Night. Words come thronging to me, phrases, rhythms; but not Form. I shall get out a poem one of these days—when the harrow rests. And that will be its name: Rest Harrow.”
He broke out after a pause-“Her beauty! What is it to the purpose to put its semblance into words? Its significance is the heart of the matter. We see the earth as hill and valley, pasture and cloud, sky and sea. Really it is nothing of the kind, but infinitely more. It is tireless energy, yearning, force, profusion, terror, immutability in variety. What are words to such a power? It is to that I stretch out my arms. I must lie folded in that immensity, drown and sink in it, till it and I are one. I must be resumed into the divine energy whose appearance is but a broken hint of it. So it is with Her: not what she appears, but what she stands for is the miracle. Her beauty is not in dimple and curve, though her breasts are softer than the snowy hills, and the liquor of her mouth sweeter than honey of limes. If I lay on the floor of the Aegean and looked up to the sun I should not see such blue as glimmers in her eyes. But these are figures, halting symbols. Her form, her glow, her eager, lovely breath are her soul put into speech for us to read. You might say that her nobility was that of the Jungfrau on a night of stars. So her body's beauty is but a poem written by God about her soul.”
Glyde sat up and looked at him across the fire. “I know you. There is but one man who has loved her as you do. You are her poet. You are Senhouse.”
Senhouse nodded. “That is my name. You know her, then?” His face glowed darkly. “You have known her—you!”
“I saw her four months ago. I was in servitude in a house where she too was made a servant. For her sake, I tell you again, I downed Ingram.”
Senhouse said sharply, “It was for your own. You aren't fit to talk to her. You have unclean lips. You don't hurt her, for you cannot. You hurt yourself infinitely. Why, a dog would do as you did, and possibly be right; but you, not being a dog, have broken your own rules. You have trodden on your own honour, and, like the dull fool that you are, come out wrapped in your silly self-esteem as if it was a flag. I wish that you could see yourself as I see you—or rather I hope you never may; for if you did you would see no reason to live.” The words, frozen with scorn, cut like hailstones. The guest cowered, with the whip about his face. Senhouse rose.
“Follow me,” he said.
Glyde also rose to his feet, and, as if he was giddy, looked blankly about him. “O God, what have I done? O God, what am I?” He dashed his hand over his eyes. “I can't see. I suppose I never could.” He turned upon Senhouse. “You! Why do you harbour such a rat as I?”
Senhouse gave him pitiful eyes. “If you think yourself a rat, you are in your tether, I think. Let me tuck you into a blanket.”
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg