Rest Harrow: A Comedy of Resolution Part 20

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 G.o.d, what have I done? O G.o.d, 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 the way to be more. Come, we will be friends yet. You're near the end of your tether, I think. Let me tuck you into a blanket."

III

In the morning Glyde, in a humble mood, drank quant.i.ties of small beer. In other words, he told his story of Sanchia, of Ingram, and of Mrs. Wilmot.

He was so steered by questions from Senhouse that he came, towards the end, to see that if any one had driven his mistress into a life of bondage to Ingram it was himself and his presumptuous arm.

"You must have offended her beyond expression," he was told. "First, her fine esteem in her own spotless robe, which you have smeared with beastly blood and heat; next, her sense of reason clear as day; next, and worst, her logical faculty by which she sees it to be a law of the earth that nothing can be bought without a price. Oh, you precious young donkey! And who the mischief are you, pray, to meddle in the affairs of high ladies-- you who can't manage your own better than to do with your foolish muscles what is the work of a man's heart? Love! You don't know how to spell the word. But I am getting angry again, and I don't want to do that. I'll tell you what I shall do with you. You shall stay with me here till you are well, and then you shall go to London and find Despoina--"

"Do you mean Sanchia?" Glyde was still unregenerate at heart.

"I mean whom I say, your mistress and mine. You are not fit to name her by any other name."

"No, no--I know it," said the youth; "but her name is so beautiful."

"Everything about her is beautiful," said Senhouse, "therefore see that you go to her cleansed and sweetened. Now, when you have found her you shall beg her pardon on your knees--"

"Never!" said Glyde, grittily in his teeth.

"On your heart's knees, you fool," cried Senhouse, with a roar which rolled about the hills. "On the knees of your rat's heart. You shall beg her pardon on your knees for your beastly interference, presumption, mulishness, and graceless manhood; and then you shall leave her immediately, and thank G.o.d for the breath of her forgiveness. This also is important. You are not to name me who have sent you." His eyes shone with the gleam of tears. "Never name me to her, young Glyde, for I'll tell you now that for every stripe I've dusted your jacket with you owe me forty-- and you can lay on when you please."

"For I," he continued, after a pause for breath, while Glyde stared fearfully upon him, "for I, too, have betrayed her."

They said no more at that time, but all day Glyde followed Senhouse about like a dog.

In the evening of what to the undrilled youth was a hard-spent day, Senhouse unfolded his heart and talked long and eloquently of love and other mysteries of our immortal life.

"The attainment of our desires," he said, "appears to every one of us to be a Law of Nature, and so, no doubt, it is. But that is equally valid which says, 'To every man that which he is fit to enjoy.' The task of men is to reconcile the two. That once done you are whole--nay, you are holy."

"I believe that I am in the way of that salvation, look you, for I know now that there is hardly a thing upon the earth which I cannot do without.

That being so, and all things of equal value, or of no value, _I have them all_. They are at the disposal of that part of myself which enters no markets and cannot be chaffered away. Wind, rain, and sun have bleached me; dinners of herbs have reduced my flesh to obedience; incessant toil, with meditation under the stars, have driven my thoughts along channels graved deep by patient plodding of the field. I am become one with Nature.

I have watched the wheeling of the seasons until, to escape vertigo, I picture myself as a fixed point, and see the spheres in their courses revolve about me."

Mystic sayings, aphorisms oozed from him like resin from a pine.

"It is error to suppose that discomfort is holy. Holiness is harmony. Men have lost sight of the sanct.i.ty of the body. Rightly considered, indigestion is a great sin."

"Pa.s.sion, which is a state of becoming, is not holy, for holiness is a state of being. But it is n.o.ble, because it is a straining after appeas.e.m.e.nt, which is a harmony.

"Man is an ape, or a G.o.d, but certainly a G.o.d in this, that he can make himself either. It is by no means certain, however, that this potentiality is not also possessed by the ape.

"Appeas.e.m.e.nt of pa.s.sion is fulfilment of our being, which out of ferment makes wine, though riot seeks rest."

He was not always so transcendental. Here we have him closer to the matter.

"A woman when she loves is a seraph winged. When she does not she is a chrysalis, a husk, or a sh.e.l.l. In love she follows the man, but appears to fly him, as a shepherd goes before the sheep he is really driving. Out of it she is an empty vase, to be revered by us for the sacred wine which she may hold, as a priest handles fearfully the chalice.

"She has but one law, the law of her love, which says to her, 'Give, give, give.' See here how she differs from the man, to whom love is but one of many healthy appet.i.tes--not a divine mission. Love, hunger, hunting, or a taste for picture-dealing, say to him, 'Take, take.'

"Yet it is no wonder that the s.e.xes go in fear of each other, each a mystery to each. For my part, I have never been close to a woman without a desire to cover my eyes."

And here he got level with her, and showed her radiant beside him.

"A young woman with s.h.i.+ning eyes, blown-back hair and face on fire, holding out her heart from the threshold, stretching it out at arms'

length, crying, 'Who will take this? To whom may I give it?' A vision here of Heaven's core of light. I have seen it. I, Senhouse, have seen the Holy Grail.

"She stood with me upon the threshold of the world, just so, with blown- back hair and s.h.i.+ning eyes. Blessed one, blessed prodigal! She poured out her heart like water-for a dog to lap. He was dog-headed, full in the eye, a rich feeder. She decked him with the fair garlands of her thoughts, she made him glisten with her holy oils. She crowned him with starry beams from her eyes, she sweetened him with the breath of her pure prayers. She robed him in white and scarlet, for he was wrapped in her soul and sprinkled with her pa.s.sion. And she said, 'I love a divine person. I am ready to die for him. Make haste. Pile the fire, sharpen the knife; bind me with cords, and drive deep. I die that he may live.' O G.o.ds, and Sanchia gave herself for Nevile Ingram!"

He was never alone, it appeared, for she was with him constantly, a vivifying principle. He had ensphered her in light; she was una.s.sailable-- his fly in amber. Ingram, Chevenix, all Wanless, might have daily converse with her, and one might grudge her her self-sufficiency, and another see her a pretty girl in a mess. To him she was a fairy in harness, "a lovely lady garmented in light," to whom the rubs of the world could do no harm.

She wore crystal armour. They did not know her, could not see her, those who used her for their elemental needs. "Her soul was like a star and dwelt apart."

He told young Glyde that he had reached this transcendental eyrie of his by painful degrees. No person of Sanchia's acquaintance had suffered more than he by her desperate affair. He had been her first lover, and her only confidant, for she had been what one calls a "difficult" girl, who gave out nothing and had no friends. Her sisters knew very little about her, her mother nothing. It had been Senhouse who had called up the spirit that was in her--that extraordinary candour of vision which shrank from the judgment of nothing in heaven or earth "upon the merits." He had himself been at first amazed by her quality; but before he had discovered it he had adored her; so it had seemed all of a piece with her exquisite perfection. That first sight he had had of her, in the sun-dappled woodland glade, with her gown above her knees, setting her foot in the unknown depths of a black pool--that she might rescue lilies from suffocation--was surely typical of that which followed--when, barely twenty-one, she trod deliberately, in her world's shocked face, a road which leads without return to a point at which the world says, "I cannot see you, you are dead." But she had never faltered, had seen no shame, and felt none. Nevile was unhappy, and needed her. If there was no other way of serving him, she must take that way. So she told him, Senhouse, her only friend; and he cried aloud in his agony, "G.o.d save her," while his soul was saying, "Beatrice never shrank from h.e.l.l, nor ever looked back.

No more, G.o.d be thanked, does Sanchia." When the thing was done, and she had gone with unbowed head into the deeps, he had known his hours of desolation; but from that hour she had stood for him "a thing enskied and sainted." He felt that he was set apart for her wors.h.i.+p, and only regretted that Beatrice had had a better poet for the business than Sanchia could ever hope for.

For a year after her flight he continued a correspondence with her which had begun with their first acquaintance; and then he had stopped it, not she. His reason shall be admitted, to his credit or not. It appeared that she read his letters, as they came, to Nevile Ingram--she told him so-- and, further, that Ingram was bored. Sanchia did not tell him that, but he gathered it; and whether he felt that the intimacy was fatally invaded, or whether he was piqued--he stopped. Within two years or so from that he wrote once more to tell her that he was about to "join fortunes" with Mary Germain, a young widow.

She knew what he meant by that; he was too much of a poet to be anything but shocked at the marriage-bond. She hoped the best for him, but his letter did not encourage her.

He wrote, "She is good, sweet and wholesome. I have taught her what she knows--I mean by that that I have helped her to pick up a clue here and there to take her by some means to the heart of our mystery. She has had a dreadful mauling by the world; but her brain is sound. I intend to make her happy, but not here. We go to Baden a-painting. She vows she will keep the door of my tent like a Bedouin's wife. It's a great test. If she comes through it--with her upbringing--she will show mettle. Farewell, Queen Mab. One does what one must, being man. Pray for us both."

She answered him frankly and kindly. Ingram was away on one of his long absences, and she felt acold. "I shall always wish for your happiness. How could I ever forget what you did to give me mine?" He read that as meaning that she had found and had it still, so wrote no more--not even when his venture, not too hopefully begun, had ended. His head was low in the dust, his zest was gone. It needed his austerities and solitude to restore his tone.

But now, in his hidden valley, she never left him, though she was always veiled. He could not call up her blue eyes' magic, nor her slow smile, nor the touch of her thin fingers. She had no bodily semblance; she was a principle. In his exalted mood, being tiptoe for Mystery, he identified her with the Spirit of all Life. For life to him was a straining at the leash, a reaching for the unattainable, a preparation to soar. He saw all things flowing towards heaven, which to him was Harmony, Rest, what he called Appeas.e.m.e.nt. And all this straining and yearning in infinite variety was figured to him in Sanchia, as he discerned, but could not perceive, her presence. He made her out in elemental images, into the contours of the hills read her bountiful shape, into the onslaught of the wind her dauntless ardour. In fire leaped her pride, in the mantling snow her chast.i.ty was proclaimed. The rain was her largess, her treasure poured to enrich mankind. All flowers were sacred to her--frail beauty salient from the earth. He never looked on one but he blessed her name.

On a later day he read a poem to his guest--which he called the Song of Mab. By this name, it seems, he also figured Sanchia, whose synonyms, threatened to be as many as those of Artemis or the Virgin Mary. From poring for signs of her in the face of earth he was come to see little else. If the west wind was her breath and the hills were her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, it needed a mystic to see them so; and he was become a mystic. A glorified and non-natural Sanchia pervaded the poem, which, for the form, was a barbaric, rough-hewn chant, stuffed with words and great phrases which had the effect rather of making music in the hearer than of containing it in themselves. It was poetry by hints, perpetually moving, initiating, lyrical phrases, then breaking off and leaving you with a melody in your ears which your brain could not render. Either the poet was inchoate or the subtlest musician of our day. He said of himself that he was a drain- pipe for the spirit--a dark saying to Glyde, who was himself, we have heard, something of a poet, of the Byronic tradition. The youth was extremely interested, though seldom moved by this chaotic piece. He was for ever on the point to drink, and had the cup s.n.a.t.c.hed away. Senhouse tormented you with possibilities of bliss--where sight merges in sound and both lift together into a triumphant sweep of motion--whirled you, as it were, to the gates of dawn, showed you the amber glories of preparation, thrilled you with the throb of suspense; then, behold! coursing vapours and gathering clouds blot out the miracle--and you end in the clash of thunderstorms and dissonances. Something of this the listener had to urge.

Senhouse admitted it, but he said, "You know that the splendour is enacting behind. You guess the opening of the rose. One stalks this earth agog for miracles. It is full of hints--you catch a moment--for flashed instants you are G.o.d. Then the mist wraps you, and you blunder forward, two-legged man swaying for a balance. Translate the oracle as you will-- with your paint-pans, with your words--we get broken lights, half-phrases.

But we guess the rest, and so we strain and grow. Who are you or I, that we should know her!"

He stuffed the pages into the breast of his jelab, and sat brooding over the paling fire for a while; then, by an abrupt transition, he said--"A fatal inclination for instructing the young was, perhaps, my undoing. I believe that I am a prig to the very fibres of me. If I had kept my didactics for my own s.e.x, all might have gone well: I have never doubted but that I had things to teach my generation which it would be the happier of knowing. But it's a dangerous power to put into a man's hands that he shall instruct his betters. I was tempted by that deadliest flattery of all, and I fell. Despoina heard me, smiled at me, and went her way regardlessly; but my poor Mary was a victim. She heard me, and took it seriously. She thought me a man of G.o.d. I failed absolutely, and so badly that by rights I ought never to have held up my head again. But she is happy, dear little soul, after her own peculiar fas.h.i.+on,--which she never could have been with me. She writes to me now and then. The man, her husband, is her master, but not a bad one. She knows it, and glories in him. Isn't that extraordinary?"

"Not at all," Glyde said, who knew nothing of Mary. "It's a law of Nature.

The woman follows the man. I suppose you treated her as an equal?"

"No, as a superior, which she plainly was," said Senhouse.

"Then," Glyde said, looking at him, "then you made her so. If you fly against Nature, you must get the worst of it." He waited, then asked, "It's against your principles to marry a woman, no doubt."

"Quite," Senhouse said. "It seems to me an insult to propose it to her."