Lore of Proserpine Part 8

And would he come if I waited for him? And would he share her watch, her quiet content, her still rapture?

Idle, man-made questions, custom-taught! I did wait. I sat by her waiting. But he did not come.

IV

A month later, in October, I saw a great a.s.sembling of Oreads, by which I was able to connect more than one experience. I could now understand the phenomenon of the luminous ring.

I reached the valley by about six o'clock in the evening. It was twilight, not yet dusk. The sun was off the hollow, which lay in blue mist, but above the level of the surrounding hills the air was bathed in the sunset glow. The hush of evening was over all, the great cup of the down absolutely desert; there were no birds, nor voices of birds; not a twig snapped, not a leaf rustled. Imperceptibly the shadows lengthened, faded with the light; and again behind the silence I guessed at, rather than discerned, a preparatory, gathering music. So finally, by twos and threes, they came to their a.s.sembling.

Once more I never saw them come. Out of the mist they drifted together. There had been a moment when they were not there; there was a moment when I saw them. I saw three of them together, two females and a male. They formed a circle, facing inwards, their arms intertwined. The pale colour of their garments, the grey tones in their flesh were so perfectly in tune with the hazy light, that it would have been impossible, I am certain, to have seen them at all at a hundred yards' distance. I could not determine whether they were conversing or not: if they were, it was without speech. I have never heard an articulate sound from any one of them, and have no provable reason for connecting the unvoiced music I have sometimes discerned with any act of theirs. It has accompanied them, and may have proceeded from them--but I don't know that. Of these three linked together I remember that one of them threw back her head till she faced the sky. She did not laugh, or seem to be laughing: there was no sound. It was rather as if she was bathing her face in the light. She threw her head back so far that I could see the gleam in her wild eyes; her hair streamed downward, straight as a fall of water. The other two regarded her, and the male presently withdrew one of his arms from the circle and laid his hand upon her. She let it be so; seemed not to notice.

Imperceptibly others had come about these three. If I took my eyes off a group for a moment they were attracted to other groups or single shapes. Some lay at ease on the sward, resting on elbow; some p.r.o.ne, on both elbows; some seemed asleep, their heads on molehill pillows; some sat huddling together, with their chins upon their knees; some knelt face to face and held each other fondly; some were teasing, some chasing others, winding in and out of the scattered groups. But everything was doing in complete silence.

Now and again one, flying from another, would rise in the air, the pursuer following. They skimmed, soared, glided like swallows, in long sweeping curves--there was no noise in their flight. They were quite without reticence in their intercourse; desired or avoided, loved or hated as the moment urged them; strove to win, struggled to escape, achieved or surrendered without remark from their companions. They were like children or animals. Desire was reason good; and if love was soon over, hate lasted no longer. One pa.s.sion or the other set them scuffling: when it was spent they had no after-thought.

One pretty sight I saw. A hare came lolloping over the valley bottom, quite at his ease. In the midst of the a.s.sembly he stopped to nibble, then reared himself up and cleaned his face. He saw them and they him without concern on either side.

The valley filled up; I could not count the s.h.i.+fting, crossing, restless shapes I saw down there. Presently, without call or signal, as if by one consent, the Oreads joined hands and enclosed the whole circuit in their ring. The effect in the dusk was of a pale glow, as of the softest fire, defining the contour of the valley; and soon they were moving, circling round and round. Shriller and louder swelled the hidden music, and faster span the ring. It whirled and wavered, lifted and fell, but so smoothly, with such inherent power of motion, that it was less like motion visible than motion heard. Nothing was distinguishable but the belt of pale fire. That which I had seen before they had now become--a ring of flame intensely swift. As if sucked upward by a centripetal force it rose in the air. Wheeling still with a sound incredibly shrill it rose to my level, swept by me heralded by a keen wind, and was followed by a draught which caught leaves and straws of gra.s.s and took them swirling along. Round and up, and ever up it went, narrowing and spiring to the zenith. There, looking long after it, I saw it diminish in size and brightness till it became filmy as a cloud, then melted into the company of the stars.

A SUMMARY CHAPTER

Now, it is the recent publication by Mr. Evans Wentz of a careful and enthusiastic work upon _The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries_ which has inspired me to put these pages before the public. Some of them have appeared in the magazines as curious recitals and may have afforded pastime to the idle-minded, but without the courageous initiative of Mr. Wentz I don't know that I should have attempted to give them such coherence as they may claim to possess. And that, I fear, will be very little without this chapter in which I shall, if I can, clear the ground for a systematic study of the whole subject. No candid reader can, I hope, rise from the perusal of the book without the conviction that behind the world of appearance lies another and a vaster with a thronging population of its own--with many populations, indeed, each absorbed in uttering its being according to its own laws. If I have afforded nothing else I have afforded glimpses into that world; and the question now is, What do we precisely gather, what can we be said to know of the laws of that world in which these swift, beautiful and apparently ruthless creatures live and move and utter themselves? I shall have to draw upon more than I have recorded here: cases which I have heard of, which I have read of in other men's books, as well as those which are related here as personal revelation. If I speak pragmatically, _ex cathedra_, it is not intentional. If I fail sometimes to give chapter and verse it will be because I have never taken any notes of what has gone into my memory, and have no doc.u.ments to hand. But I don't invent; I remember.

There is a chain of Being of whose top alike and bottom we know nothing at all. What we do know is that our own is a link in it, and cannot generally, can only fitfully and rarely, have intercourse with any other. I am not prepared with any modern instances of intercourse with the animal and vegetable world, even to such a limited extent, for instance, as that of Balaam with his a.s.s, or that of Achilles with his horses; but I suspect that there are an enormous number unrecorded. Speech, of course, is not necessary to such an intercourse. Speech is a vehicle of human intercourse, but not of that of any other created order so far as we know.[8] Birds and beasts do not converse in speech, smell or touch seems to be the sense employed; and though the vehicles of smell and touch are unknown to us, in moments of high emotion we ourselves converse otherwise than by speech. Indeed, seeing that all created things possess a spirit whereby they are what they are, it does not seem necessary to suppose intercourse impossible without speech, and I myself have never had any difficulty in accepting the stories of much more vital mixed intercourse which we read of in the Greek and other mythologies. If we read, for instance, that such and such a man or woman was the offspring of a woman and the spirit of a river, or of a man and the spirit of a hill or oak-tree, it does not seem to me at all extraordinary. The story of the wife who suffered a fairy union and bore a fairy child which disappeared with her is a case in point. The fairy father was, so far as I can make out, the indwelling spirit of a rose, and the story is too painful and the detail in my possession too exact for me to put it down here. I was myself actually present, and in the house, when the child was born. I witnessed the anguish of the unfortunate husband, who is now dead. Mr. Wentz has many instances of the kind from Ireland and other Celtic countries; but fairies are by no means confined to Celtic countries, though they are more easily discerned by Celtic races.

[Footnote 8: The speech of Balaam's a.s.s or of Balaam, of Achilles and his horses are, of course, necessary conventions of the poet's and do not imply that words pa.s.sed between the parties.]

Of this chain of Being, then, of which our order is a member, the fairy world is another and more subtle member, subtler in the right sense of the word because it is not burdened with a material envelope.

Like man, like the wind, like the rose, it has spirit; but unlike any of the lower orders, of which man is one, it has no sensible wrapping unless deliberately it consents to inhabit one. This, as we know, it frequently does. I have mentioned several cases of the kind; Mrs.

Ventris was one, Mabilla By-the-Wood was another. I have not personally come across any other cases where a male fairy took upon him the burden of a man than that of Quidnunc. Even there I have never been satisfied that Quidnunc became man to the extent that Mrs.

Ventris did. Quidnunc, no doubt, was the father of Lady Emily's children; but were those children human? There are some grounds for thinking so, and in that case, if "the nature follows the male,"

Quidnunc must have doffed his immateriality and suffered real incarnation. If they were fairy children the case is altered. Quidnunc need not have had a body at all. Now since it is clear that the fairy world is a real order of creation, with laws of its own every whit as fixed and immutable as those of any other order known to naturalists, it is very reasonable to inquire into the nature and scope of those laws. I am not at all prepared at present to attempt anything like a digest of them. That would require a lifetime; and no small part of the task, after marshalling the evidence, would be to agree upon terms which would be intelligible to ourselves and yet not misleading. To take polity alone, are we to understand that any kind of Government resembling that of human societies obtains among them? When we talk of Queens or Kings of the Fairies, of Oberon and t.i.tania, for example, are we using a rough translation of a real something, or are we telling the mere truth? Is there a fairy king? The King of the Wood, for instance, who was he? Is there a fairy queen? Who is Queen Mab?

Who is Despoina? Who is the Lady of the Lake? Who is the "_?as???ssa t?? ?????_," or "_?e???? ????_" of whom Mr. Lawson tells us such suggestive things in his _Modern Greek Folk-lore?_ Who is Despoina, with whom I myself have conversed, "a dread G.o.ddess, not of human speech?" The truth, I suspect, is this. There are, as we know, countless tribes, clans, or orders of fairies, just as there are nations of men. They confess the power of some greater Spirit among themselves, bow to it instantly and submit to its decrees; but they do not, so far as I can understand, acknowledge a monarchy in any sense of ours. If there is a Supreme Power over the fairy creation it is Proserpine; but hers is too remote an empire to be comparable to any of ours. Not even Caesar, not even the Great King, could hope to rule such myriads as she. She may stand for the invisible creation no doubt, but she would never have commerce with it. No fairy hath seen her at any time; no sovereignty such as we are now discussing would be applicable to her dominion. That of Artemis, or that of Pan, is more comparable. Artemis is certainly ruler of the spirits of the air and water, of the hills and sh.o.r.es of the sea, and to some extent her power overlaps that of Pan who is potent in nearly all land solitudes.

But really the two lord-s.h.i.+ps can be exactly discriminated. They never conflict. The legions of Artemis are all female, though on earth men as well as women wors.h.i.+p her; the legions of Pan are all male, though on earth he can chasten women as well as men.[9] But Pan can do nothing against Artemis, nor she anything against him or any of his.

The decree or swift deed of either is respected by the other. They are not, then, as earthly kings, leaders of their hosts to battle against their neighbours. Fairies fight and marshal themselves for war; Mr.

Wentz has several cases of the kind. But Pan and Artemis have no share in these warfares. Queen Mab is one of the many names, and points to one of the many manifestations of Artemis; the Lady of the Lake is another. Both of these have died out, and in the country she is generally hinted at under the veil of "Mistress of the Wood" or "Lady of the Hill." I heard the latter from a Wilts.h.i.+re shepherd; the former is used in Suss.e.x, in the Cheviots, and in Lincolns.h.i.+re, and was introduced, I believe, by the Gipsies. t.i.tania was a name of romance, and so was Oberon, that of her husband in romance. Queen Mab has no husband, nor will she ever have.

[Footnote 9: But if this is true, who is the King of the Wood? The statement is too sweeping.]

But she is, of course, a G.o.ddess, and not a queen in our sense of the word. The fairies, who partake of her nature just so far as we partake of theirs, pray to her, invoke her, and make her offerings every day.

But a vital difference between their kind and ours is that they can see her and live; and we never see the G.o.ds until we die.

They have no other leaders, I believe, and certainly no royal houses.

Faculty is free in the fairy world to its utmost limit. A fairy's power within his own order is limited only by the extent of his personal faculty, and subject only to the G.o.ds. There is no civil law to restrain him, and no moral law; no law at all except the law of being.[10]

[Footnote 10: Apparent eccentricities of this law, such as the obedience to iron, or zinc (if we may believe Beckwith), should be noted. I can't explain them. They seem arbitrary at first sight, but nothing in Nature is arbitrary.]

We are contemplating, then, a realm, nay, a world, where anarchy is the rule, and anarchy in the widest sense. The fairies are of a world where Right and Wrong don't obtain, where Possible and Impossible are the only finger-posts at cross-roads; for the G.o.ds themselves give no moral sanction to desire and hold up no moral check. The fairies love and hate intensely; they crave and enjoy; they satisfy by kindness or cruelty; they serve or enslave each other; they give life or take it as their instinct, appet.i.te or whim may be. But there is this remarkable thing to be noted, that when a thing is dead they cannot be aware of its existence. For them it is not, it is as if it had never been. Ruth, therefore, is unknown, their emotions are maimed to that serious extent that they cannot regret, cannot pity, cannot weep for sorrow. They weep through rage, but sorrow they know not. Similarly, they cannot laugh for joy. Laughing with them is an expression of pleasure, but not of joy. Here then, at least, we have the better of them. I for one would not exchange my privilege of pity or my consolation of pure sorrow for all their transcendent faculty.

It is often said that fairies of both s.e.xes seek our kind because we know more of the pleasure of love than they do. Since we know more of the griefs of it that is likely to be true; but it is a great mistake to suppose that they are unsusceptible to the great heights and deeps of the holy pa.s.sion. It is to make the vulgar confusion between the pa.s.sion and the expression of it. They are capable of the greatest devotion to the beloved, of the greatest sacrifice of all--the sacrifice of their own nature. These fairy-wives of whom I have been speaking--Miranda King, Mabilla By-the-Wood--when they took upon them our nature, and with it our power of backward-looking and forward-peering, was what they could remember, was what they must dread, no sacrifice? They could have escaped at any moment, mind you, and been free.[11] Resuming their first nature they would have lost regret. But they did not. Love was their master. There are many cases of the kind. With men it is otherwise. I have mentioned Mary Wellwood, the carpenter's wife, twice taken by a fairy and twice recaptured. The last time she was brought back to Ashby-de-la-Zouche she died there.

But there is reason for this. A woman marrying a male fairy gets some, but not all, of the fairy attributes, while her children have them in full at birth. She bears them with all the signs of human motherhood, and directly they are born her earthly rights and duties cease. She does not nurse them and she can only rise in the air when they are with her. That means that she cannot go after them if they are long away from her, unless she can get another fairy to keep her company. By the same mysterious law she can only conceal herself, or doff her appearance, with the aid of a fairy. For some time after her abduction or surrender her husband has to nourish her by breathing into her mouth; but with the birth of her first child she can support herself in the fairy manner. It was owing to this imperfect state of being that Mary Wellwood was resumed by her friends the first time.

The second time she went back of her own accord.

[Footnote 11: When a fairy marries a man she gradually loses her fairy-power and her children have none of it or only vestiges--so much as the children of a genius may perhaps exhibit. I am not able to say how long the fairy-wife's ability to resume her own nature lasts. _The Forsaken Merman_ occurs to one; but I doubt if Miranda King, at the time, say, of her son's marriage with Mabilla, could have gone back to the sea. Sometimes, as in Mrs. Ventris's case, fairy-wives play truant for a night or for a season. I have reason to believe that not uncommon. The number of fairy-wives in England alone is very considerable--over a quarter of a million, I am told.]

But with regard to their love-business among themselves it is a very different matter, so far as I can understand it. The fairy child is initiated at the age of p.u.b.erty and is then competent to pair. He is not long in selecting his companion; nor does she often seem to refuse him, though mating is done by liking in all cases and has nothing whatever to do with the parents. It must be remembered, of course, that they are subject to the primitive law from which man only has freed himself. They frequently fight for the possession of the female, or measure their powers against each other; and she goes with the victor or the better man.[12] I don't know any case where the advance has been made by the female. Pairing may be for a season or for a period or for life. I don't think there is any rule; but in all cases of separation the children are invariably divided--the males to the father, the females to the mother. After initiation the children owe no allegiance to their parents. Love with them is a wild and wonderful rapture in all its manifestations, and without regard necessarily to s.e.x. I never, in my life, saw a more beautiful expression of it than in the two females whom I saw greet and embrace on Parliament Hill.

Their motions to each other, their looks and their clinging were beyond expression tender and swift. Nor shall I ever forget the pair of Oreads in the snow, of whose meeting I have said as much as is possible in a previous chapter. It must be remembered that I am dealing with an order of Nature which knows nothing of our shames and qualms, which is not only unconscious of itself but unconscious of anything but its immediate desire; but I am dealing with it to the understanding of a very different order, to whom it is not enough to do a thing which seems good in its own eyes, but requisite also to be sure of the approbation of its fellow-men. I should create a wrong impression were I to enlarge upon this branch of my subject; I should make my readers call fairies shameful when as a fact they know not the meaning of shame, or reprove them for shamelessness when, indeed, they are luckily without it. I shall make bold to say once for all that as it is absurd to call the lightning cruel, so it is absurd to call shameful those who know nothing about the deformity. No one can know what love means who has not seen the fairies at their loving--and so much for that.

[Footnote 12: I saw an extraordinary case of that, where a male came suddenly before a mated pair, a.s.serted himself and took her to himself incontinent. There was no fighting. He stood and looked. The period of suspense was breathless but not long.]

The laws which govern the appearance of fairies to mankind or their commerce with men and women seem to be conditioned by the ability of men to perceive them. The senses of men are figuratively speaking lenses coloured or shaped by personality. How are we to know the form and pressure of the great river Enipeus, whose shape, for the love of Tyro, Poseidon took? And so the accounts of fairy appearance, of fairy shape, size, vesture, will vary in the measure of the faculty of the percipient. To me, personally, the fairies seem to go in gowns of yellow, grey, russet or green, but mostly in yellow or grey. The Oreads or Spirits of the hills vary. In winter their vesture is yellow, in summer it is ash-green. The Dryad whom I saw was in grey, the colour of the lichened oak-tree out of which she gleamed. The fairies in a Norman forest had long brown garments, very close and clinging, to the ankles. They were belted, and their hair was loose.

But that is invariable. I never saw a fairy with snooded or tied up hair. They are always bare-footed. Despoina is the only fairy I ever saw in any other colour than those I have named. She always wears blue, of the colour of the shadows on a moonlight night, very beautiful. She, too, wears sandals, which they say the Satyrs weave for her as a tribute. They lay them down where she has been or is likely to be; for they never see her.

But this matter of vesture is really a digression: I have more important matter in hand, and that is to consider the intercourse between fairy and mortal, as it is governed by appearance. How does a man, for instance, gain a fairy-wife? How does a woman give herself to a fairy-lover? I have given a careful account of a case of each sort in answer. Young King gained his wife by capture; Lady Emily Rich followed her lover at a look.

But this does not really touch the point, which is, rather, how was Lady Emily Rich brought or put into such a relation with Quidnunc that she could receive a look from him? How was King put into such a relation with Mabilla that he could take her away from her own people?

There must have been an incarnation, you would say; and I should agree with you. Now in Andrew King's case there was belief to go upon, the belief common to all the Cheviot side, handed down to it from untold generations and never lost; coupled with that, there was an intense and probably long-standing desire in the young man himself to realise and substantiate his belief. He had brooded over it, his fancy had gone to work upon it; he loved his Mabilla before ever he saw her; his love, it was, which evoked her. And I take it as proved--at any rate it is proved to my own satisfaction--that faith coupled with desire has power--the power of suggestion it is called--over Spirit as it certainly has over Matter. If I say, then, that Andrew King evoked Mabilla By-the-Wood, called her out of her own world into his, I a.s.sert two things: the first, that she was really at one time in her own world, the second, that she was afterward really in his. The second my own senses can vouch for. That she was fetched back by the King of the Wood and recaptured by Andrew are minor points. Grant the first taking and there is no difficulty about them.

Mr. Lawson gives cases from Greece which point to certain ritual performances on the part of the lover; the s.n.a.t.c.hing, for instance, of a handkerchief from the beloved, of which the preservation is tantamount to the permanence of the subsequent union. He has a curious case, too, of a peasant who married a nymph and gave her a child but could not make her speak to him. He consulted a wise woman who advised him to threaten her with the fire for the baby if she would not talk.

He did it and the charm worked. The Nymph spoke fiercely to him, "You dog, leave my child alone," she said, and seized it from him, and with it disappeared. That is parallel to my case where love made Mabilla speak. It was love for her husband, to be sure; but she had then no children.

Mr. Wentz gets no evidence of fairy-wives from Ireland, but a great number out of Wales. One of them is the beautiful tale of Einion and Olwen (p. 161) which has many points of resemblance with mine from the Border. Einion also seems to have met the King of the Wood. Like Andrew King he was kissed by the nymphs, but only by one of them; but unlike him he stayed in their country for a year and a day, then went back to his own people, and finally returned for his fairy-wife.

Taliesin was their son. No conditions seem to have been made.

So much for fairy brides, but now for fairy grooms. I have two cases to add to that of Quidnunc, but before giving them, let me say of his affair that since the suggestion there seems to have come from him to the woman, the incarnation, if such there were, must have been voluntary. Evocation was not instrumental in it. He appeared before her, as she had appeared before others, many others, including myself, and his subsequent commerce with her was achieved by his own personal force. You may say that she had been prepared to see him by belief and desire, by belief and desire acting upon a mind greatly distressed and probably overwrought. You may say that she saw what she ardently desired to see. It is quite true, I cannot deny it; but I point to his previous manifestations, and leave it there.

Here is a tale to the purpose which I got out of Worcesters.h.i.+re. Two girls, daughter and niece of a farmer, bosom friends and bed-fellows, became involved in a love-affair and, desperate of a happy issue, attempted a charm to win their lovers back. On All Hallow Eve, two hours before the sun, they went into the garden, barefoot, in their nightgowns and circled about a stone which was believed to be bewitched.[13] They used certain words, the Lord's prayer backward or what not, and had an apparition. A brown man came out of the bushes and looked at them for some time. Then he came to them, paralysed as they may have been, and peering closely into the face of one of them gave her a flower and disappeared. That same evening they kept the Hallow E'en with the usual play, half-earnest, half-game, and, among other things which they did, "peascodded" the girls. The game is a very old one, and consists in setting the victim in a chair with her back to the door while her companions rub her down with handfuls of pea-shucks. During this ceremony if any man enter the room he is her lover, and she is handed over to him. This was done, then, to one of the girls who had dared the dawn magic; and in the midst of it a brown man, dressed in a smock-frock tied up with green ribbons, appeared, standing in the door. He took the girl by the hand and led her out of the house. She was seen no more that night, nor for many days afterward, though her parents and neighbours hunted her far and wide.

By-and-by she was reported at a village some ten or twelve miles off on the Shrops.h.i.+re border, where some shepherds had found her wandering the hill. She was brought home but could give no good account of herself, or would not. She said that she had followed her lover, married him, and lost him. Nothing would comfort her, nothing could keep her in the house. She was locked in, but made her way out; she was presently sent to the lunatic asylum, but escaped from that. Then she got away for good and all and never came back again. No trace of her body could be found. What are you to make of a thing of the sort?

I give it for what it is worth, with this note only, that the apparition was manifest to several persons, though not, I fancy, to any but the girls concerned in the peascodding.

[Footnote 13: It is said to have been the base of a Roman terminal statue, but I have not seen it.]

The Willow-lad's is another tale of the same kind. It was described in 1787 by the Reverend Samuel Jordan in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, if I am not mistaken.

The Willow-lad was an apparition which was believed to appear in a withy-bed on the banks of the Ouse near Huntingdon. He could only be seen at dusk, and only by women. He had a sinister reputation, and to say of a girl that she had been to the withy-bed was a broad hint that she was no better than she should be. Yet, according to Mr. Jordan, the girls did go there in numbers, and to such effect that by an order of the Town Council the place was stubbed up. You had to go alone to the withy-bed between sunset and sunrise of a moonless night, to lay your hand upon a certain stump and say, and in a loud voice:--

Willow-boy, Willow-boy, come to me soon, After the sun and before the moon.

Hide the stars and cover my head; Let no man see me when I be wed.

One would like to know whether the Willow-lad's powers perished with the withy-bed. They should not, but should have been turned to malicious uses. There are many cases in Mr. Lawson's book of the malefical effect upon the Dryads of cutting down the trees whose spirit they are. And most people know Landor's idyll, or if they don't, they should.