The Slowworm of Lenty
The next two months brought no outward change in the existence of Wolf and the various people of his life; but when August arrived, all manner of strange developments, long prepared for under the surface, began to manifest themselves.
The trend of these developments began for the first time to grow clear to Wolf himself on the occasion of a small garden-party given by Mrs. Otter in her little front-garden. He had exhausted a great deal of energy in an attempt to entangle his mother in a more or less harmonious conversation with Selena Gault; and it was with a queer feeling of triumph that he left these old antagonists drinking tea side by side, in their low chairs, on Mrs. Otter’s lawn, to cross the grass so that he might speak to Jason.
He came upon him in the back garden, in converse with old Dimity Stone, who fled precipitately into her kitchen at his approach.
Wolf was as careful not to disturb the poet’s equilibrium as if he had been a leopard cajoling a nervous eland. He shuffled by his side into a narrow passage between two cucumber-frames, where they both sat down. A solitary wood-pigeon kept repeating its diapason of languid rapture from somewhere high up in the neighbouring trees. In the gravel-path, quite close to where they sat, a thrush, unruffled by their presence, cracked a snail upon a broken piece of brick; and as Wolf made one desultory remark after another, to set his companion at ease, he found himself complacently squeezing with the tips of his fingers certain sticky little bubbles of tar that the heat of the afternoon sun drew forth from the warm wooden planks of the frame.
“I composed a poem last night,” said Jason Otter. “And since you’re the only person who takes the least interest in what I do, I’ll repeat it to you, if no one comes round the corner.”
“I’d love to hear it,” said Wolf.
“It begins like this.” And in a voice almost as modulated as the wood-pigeon’s own, the drooping head by Wolf’s side swayed slowly to the rhythm of the following stanza:
The Slowworm of Lenty curses God;
He lifts his head from the heavy sod;
He lifts his head where the Lenty willow
Weeps green tears o’er the rain-elf’s pillow;
For the rain-elf’s lover is fled and gone,
And none curseth God but the Slowworm alone.
“It’s about the pond,” said Jason gravely. “I go there sometimes in the evening. When it’s misty you can easily imagine an elf or a nymph floating on its surface.”
“Is that all?” enquired Wolf.
“Not quite,” replied the other; “but you probably won’t like the way it ends. It’ll seem funny to you; too remote from your way of thinking; and it is rather funny; but Lenty Pond is a funny place.”
“Do go on,” said Wolf.
And once more in his delicately modulated voice the poet began intoning:
For the newts and the tadpoles at their play
Laugh at the rain-elf’s tear-wet pillow;
Laugh that her lover has fled away.
Little care they for elf or willow.
They flash their tails to a mocking cry—
“Slowworm of Lenty, prophesy!”
“That’s not the end, is it?” said Wolf.
The man’s head turned slightly towards him; and the one grey eye which was visible from where Wolf sat, passed through some extraordinary change, as if a glassy film separating the outward world from an inward abyss of desolation had suddenly melted away.
“Do you want to hear the end?” said Jason Otter.
Wolf nodded, and the voice went on:
But never again can God look down
As He did of old upon country and town!
In His huge heart, hidden all Space beyond,
There bides the curse of Lenty Pond;
The curse of the Slowworm, by Lenty willow,
Who pitied the elf on her tear-wet pillow,
Her pillow woven of pondweeds green
Where the willow’s twigs made a leafy screen;
And the purple loosestrife and watercress
Whisper above her sorrowfulness.
Once more the voice paused and Wolf listened to those two persistent summer sounds, the tapping of the thrush’s beak and the indescribable contentment of the wood-pigeon.
“Is there any more?” he asked. “I like this style of writing better than what you used to read to me a month ago.”
“A person can’t do more than he can,” remarked Jason Otter, while the flickering ghost of a smile came and went at the corners of his mouth. It seemed that even this indication of normal feeling was distasteful to him; for he hurriedly raised his hand in order to conceal it.
This movement of his arm made Wolf aware of the scent of incense.
“The chap’s clothes must be saturated with the stuff,” he thought. “Oh, damn!” he thought again. “I must get that idol away from him.”
“By the way, Otter,” he began, “while I think of it, don’t forget what you promised on the fairground!”
Jason turned his head away.
“She’ll be out again presently,” he remarked.
Whether this referred to the thrush that had just then flown away, or to Dimity Stone, Wolf could not tell.
“I can give you two pounds of that five pounds straight off,” he said, “if you’ll let me come in with you now and put the thing in my pocket.”
“And the other three?” cried the man, rising to his feet between the cucumber-frames and rubbing the back of his trousers with his hand.
“The other three next week,” said Wolf, thinking to himself, “I don’t care what happens, as long as I dispose of Mukalog.”
“Come on then, quick, before anyone sees!”
They hurried into the house together; and no sooner were they in the poet’s room than Wolf boldly snatched at the little demon on the jade pedestal, and shoved it unceremoniously into his side-pocket. Jason made a queer, stiff, formal movement of his hand towards this pocket; but when Wolf had thrown his arm roughly off, an expression of something like relief rippled down over his agitated countenance. His lips seemed to be muttering; and Wolf fancied that they were explaining to the object in the stranger’s pocket that its devotee had only yielded to sheer force.
Hurriedly Wolf put down two golden sovereigns on the table. He refrained from placing them upon the empty jade pedestal. He placed them side by side, close to an edition of the works of Vaughan the Silurist.
“And now,” he cried, “let’s hear the end of that Slowworm poem!”
“Not here, not here,” murmured the other, glancing, so Wolf imagined, with lamentable anxiety at the empty pedestal, as if at any moment seven other devils, worse than Mukalog, might take possession of it.
No sooner were they safe back at the cucumber-frame than Wolf resumed his request for the end of the Slowworm. Leaning back with his hands clasped meekly in front of him, like a child reciting a hymn, the astonishing man obeyed him with docility.
And the Lenty Slowworm curses God
For the sake of the rain-elf’s pitifulness.
He lifts his head from the watercress,
He lifts his head from the quaker-grass,
From the hoof-marks where the cattle pass,
He lifts his head from the heavy sod,
And under the loosestrife he curses God!
And the newts and the tadpoles who where she lay
Mocked her from bellies white, orange, and grey,
Cry now to willow and water and weed,
“Lenty Pond has a prophet indeed!”
For the rain-elf weeps no more to her pillow
Woven of twigs of the weeping-willow;
But her lover, come back to the laughing rain-elf,
Cries, “The Slowworm of Lenty is God Himself!”
“Bravo!” cried Wolf. “Thank the Lord you managed to comfort that poor girl!”
“She wasn’t a girl,” said Jason, colouring a little.
“Eh? What’s that?” ejaculated the other. “How could she have a lover then?”
The poet was protected, however, from having to answer this objection by a sudden, happily-timed interruption.
Mr. Urquhart, escorting Selena Gault, came shuffling amiably towards them.
“Our two young friends in the kitchen-garden, ha?” was the Squire’s greeting. “I’ve just been telling Miss Gault, haven’t I, lady, how well you and I, Solent, get on together as fellow authors. I never got on so well with our poor dear Redfern, did I, Mr. Otter?”
Wolf was aghast at the complicated significance of the look that his employer fixed upon the agitated Jason.
“Your boots have got something nasty on them,” the poet hurriedly rapped out to Miss Gault; and before the lady could stop him, he was down on his knees on the gravel, wiping one of her shoes with a handful of grass.
“It’s only manure,” he said presently, rising with a flushed face.
“Thank you, Mr. Otter, thank you very much,” said Selena Gault. “I must have trodden on something.”
“I hope you found my mother in her best mood,” said Wolf.
Miss Gault frowned a little and then smiled on him graciously.
“Thank you for helping us to renew our old acquaintance, boy,” she said. “But it’s really Mr. Urquhart who ought to be thanked by everybody for bringing you down to us at all.”
“Thank Redfern, not me,” said the Squire, in his silkiest tone. “It’s quite an art, isn’t it, Otter, this business of leaving the world conveniently?”
But Jason was occupied in picking up the bits of empty snail-shell left by the thrush.
“What do they do where there aren’t any stones to break ’em on?” commented the Squire as he watched him.
Miss Gault swept them both with her formidable gaze.
“Throw those things away, Mr. Otter, please. When the life’s gone that’s the end.”
“Not always,” murmured the Squire. “Not always, ha? What?”
Miss Gault lifted her eyebrows, and her distorted upper-lip twitched. “For the dead, it’s the end,” she repeated sternly; “but it’s better to be dead in death than dead in life.”
“I think I’d better go and see if my mother wants me,” murmured Jason uneasily.
“I’ll come with you, Otter,” said Mr. Urquhart, making a deprecating little gesture with his hand, as if brushing away Miss Gault’s indiscretion.
Then he turned to Wolf. “Be in good time tomorrow, Solent. I’ve got a book for you that’s more racy than anything we’ve found yet. Malakite sent it over. The old rogue knows exactly what suits us.”
Wolf felt it hard to believe the word “Malakite” was something that he had heard many times before quite calmly and casually. It teased his mind now that it should even be uttered by this man, whose pendulous cheek-folds seemed to him, as he looked at them, to resemble the crumpled rattles of a rattlesnake.
Conversing sympathetically with Miss Gault, now, on the harmless topic of Emma and the three cats, he led the lady back into the front-garden.
Here he was presently much amused by observing Miss Gault, with the graciousness of a ducal personage, offer to drive Mrs. Solent as far as Lenty Cottage—an offer that was promptly accepted. When both women were gone, and Wolf himself had bidden his hostess good night, he was surprised to hear Jason offering to walk a little way with him towards Blacksod.
Wolf instinctively kept his hand in his side-pocket as they walked, with an obstinate determination that nothing should induce him to return Mukalog to his idolater. But the poet’s thoughts seemed running in a quite different direction.
“It’s very difficult not to curse anyone,” Jason began, hesitating, and reddening a little, “when a person expects you to do it. But I’ve got the power of joining in, so as not to annoy; while really I’m thinking just the opposite!”
To himself Wolf explained this ambiguous remark by assuming that Mr. Urquhart had been secretly propitiating “the drunken individual at Pond Cottage” by disparaging to him his new secretary.
But the poet began again. “I don’t like the way some people egg on that young fool Weevil to boast so grandly of what lecherous things he’s done. When people encourage an idiot like that, it’s bad for everybody. It puts it into his head to play tricks he’d never dare to think out for himself.”
“Ho! Ho!” thought Wolf. “What’s up now? Now we’re beginning to learn something really curious!”
And the poet continued, in an excited voice: “You married people think you know everything. But no man ever knows what these girls are after; and I doubt if they know it themselves! It’s like a gadfly, that first tickles them and then stings them.”
“What’s like a gadfly?” enquired Wolf.
“The lust of your excellent young men, such as this worthy Bob Weevil.”
“Ah!” thought Wolf in his heart. “Now it’s coming!”
“I never myself talk of lechery to anyone,” went on the poet; “but this Squire of yours enjoys his little jest, whether it’s with a young man or a boy. I expect he’s a bit afraid of you, Solent.”
“I should have supposed,” said Wolf, “that Mr. Urquhart was too snobbish to treat a Blacksod tradesman like an equal, whatever his age was!”
“There is only one class,” said the poet, with an air of benign authority, “where these matters are concerned.”
“So you think Mr. Urquhart has been at work encouraging our friend Weevil in some pretty little bit of mischief, eh?” said Wolf.
A look of sheer pain came into Mr. Otter’s face. “What put that into your head?” he cried. “I’ve not been talking about anyone you know, or anyone I know. I’ve been talking about the general mass of people. A person is allowed to talk about them.”
“You’re afraid that Roger Monk might be hiding behind that wall?”
The poet turned toward him his sorrowful grey eyes. “I don’t like to be upbraided,” he said gravely.
“I’m not upbraiding you,” protested Wolf. “Look! There are none but very harmless people in there!”
The wall by which they were now walking was indeed the wall of the churchyard; and the idea of Death, like a flying, sharded beetle, struck them simultaneously in the face.
“I think I’ll cancel our bargain, Solent,” said Jason suddenly, “and give you back that money, and take back my piece of jade!”
It was a transformed countenance that the poet turned now to his companion. Abysmal desolation had descended upon him, and he almost whimpered as he implored Wolf to return his idol.
“It’s no use, man. I tell you it’s no use. If you went straight down on your knees to me I wouldn’t give it up!”
Jason Otter pushed his hat back from his forehead and stood for a moment with his eyes tight shut. Wolf, who had no idea what thoughts were passing through that heavy head, clutched tightly the handle of his stick, thinking within himself: “He’s capable of anything. He’s like a drug-addict, and I’ve got his drug in my pocket!”
For a perceptible passage of time, though it may have been no more than a few seconds, they remained thus facing each other, while a group of King’s Barton children, running with noisy shouts down the road, stopped and stared at them open-mouthed.
Then Wolf was aware that the man’s lips, out of the middle of that eyeless mask of misery, were muttering something—something that sounded like an incantation.
“I’d better sheer off!” he thought; and as he tightened his fingers round the handle of his stick, he overheard one of the children who were looking on say to another in a whisper: “It be only thik poor Mr. Otter, took wi’ one o’ they fits, look-see! T’other gent be a-going to hit he, present, long-side the ear-hole!”
“Well, good night, Otter!” he called out to him. “If you don’t mind I’ll shog on! I’ve got to walk fast now, or Gerda will be worrying.”
The figure in front of him made a blind step forward like a somnambulist; and in a rapid mental vision as definite as if it were a reality, Wolf saw him fallen prone in the white dust, crying aloud for the return of the image.
“Well, good night!” he repeated brusquely; and turning on his heel, he strode off at a pace which it was not easy to keep from becoming a run.
For some distance he had an uncomfortable sensation in the back of his spine; but nothing happened. With his left hand fiercely clutching the thing in his pocket, and his right hand swinging his stick, he achieved an inglorious but effective retreat.
It was not, however, till he was nearly a mile from King’s Barton that he dared to reduce his speed and take his mental bearings. Even then his disturbed fancy mistook the faint thudding of some tethered animal’s hooves on the floor of a shed for the patter of Jason’s steps in pursuit.
It must have been half-past six before he began to recover himself and to look about him. There was hardly a breath of wind stirring. There had fallen upon that portion of the West Country one of those luminous late-summer evenings, such as must have soothed the nerves of Romans and Cymri, of Saxons and Northmen, after wild pell-mells of advances and retreats, of alarums and excursions, now as completely forgotten as the death-struggles of medieval hernshaws in the talons of goshawks.
The fields of wheat and barley, pearl-like and opalescent in the swimming haze, sloped upwards to the high treeless ridge along which ran the main road from Ramsgard to Blacksod. On his left, lying dim and misty, yet in some strange way lustrous with an inner light of their own, as if all the earth had become one vast phosphorescent glowworm, rolled away from beneath that narrow lane the dew-soaked pastures of the Blackmore Vale, rising again in the distance to the uplands of High Stoy.
Wolf was tempted to rest for a while, so as to gather into some kind of focus the confused impressions of that crowded afternoon; but he found, when he paused for a moment, leaning over a gate, that the dew-wet herbage brought to his mind nothing but one persistent image, an image calm and peaceful enough, but full of a most perilous relaxation of heart and will and spirit—the image, in fact, of a young man lying dead in a bedroom at Pond Cottage, a young man with a shrouded face, and long, thin legs. Who was it who had told him that young Redfern was tall and thin?
He moved on, with a wave of his stick, as if to dispel this phantom; and it was not long before the first houses of Blacksod began to appear, some of them with windows already displaying lamplight, which mingled queerly enough with the strange luminosity such as still emanated from earth and sky. Wolf noted how different such spots of artificial light appeared, when they thus remained mere specks of yellow colour surrounded by pale greyness, from what they would be in a brief while, when they broke up the complete darkness.
And as he began to encounter the evening stir of the town’s precincts, and the heavy breath of the Blackmore pastures ceased to drug his senses, he found that what he had gone through that day was now slowly sifting itself out in the various layers of his consciousness. “Either Urquhart is up to something,” he thought, “or Jason has just invented the whole thing to satisfy his own strange mind! God help us! What a crazy set they all are! I’m thankful I’m out of it down here. Blacksod doesn’t lend itself to such whimsies.”
Thus did the outer surface of his mind report on the situation, making use of the artificially acquired genial optimism of many a forgotten mental tour de force.
But another—a deeper—layer in his mind made quite a different report.
“There’s something up, over there, that’s hostile to me and to my life. They seem to have nothing else to do, these King’s Barton people, but plot with one another against someone. Good Lord! No wonder they finished off Redfern among them all! I can see I’m going to have to defend myself. And easily could I do it, too, if it weren’t for mother. Damn! It’s mother being up there that’s the rub; so dependent on Urquhart. If it weren’t for her, I’d laugh at the whole lot of them. I’ve got my job at the school, thanks to Darnley. What a man Darnley is, compared with these madmen! They’ve worried him a lot though. Anyone can see that.”
This second layer of his consciousness seemed so crowded with thoughts and surmises that he found himself standing stock-still outside a little greengrocer’s shop, the better to get things clear.
A small ornament, perched in the lighted window, among the oranges and lettuces, made him recall the idol in his pocket; and from Mukalog his mind rushed back to Jason.
“I can’t understand him,” he said to himself. “Valley, I know, is a good man. Urquhart is a demon. But Jason baffles me. The Slowworm of Lenty! That’s about what he is. I had a feeling just now, when he stood with his eyes shut and his mouth gibbering, that he belonged to some primeval order of things, existing before good and evil appeared at all. But it’s clear that Urquhart’s cajoled him somehow. And yet I don’t know! I’m tempted to think he’d be a match even for him—very much in the way some cold wet rain from the aboriginal chaos would discomfort the Devil!”
He turned from the shopwindow and moved on. Soon he came to where two crossroads branched off from the one he followed, the road to the right leading up Babylon Hill, the road to the left leading to that portion of the town where Christie’s house was. Should he turn to the left and return home that way? Or should he go straight on, past his father-in-law’s yard?
The hesitation into which he now fell left an empty space in his mind; and at once there rose to fill it, from the invisible depths of his being, quite a new report upon the events of that day. Was there something more than those old sea-beach afternoons, those Lovers’ Lane naughtinesses, between Gerda and Bob Weevil? He could not help remembering the exciting photograph of the girl astride of the tombstone which he had seen the two lads enjoying so much, that day he bought the sausages for Roger Monk.
The more rational layers of Wolf’s consciousness now began a derisive criticism of this new mood. Had he the instincts of the lord of a seraglio? Did he demand that both Gerda and Christie should be faithful to him … while he himself was … as he was? No, it was different from that! After his fashion he was being faithful to Gerda. It was the nature of this particular case. It was, in fact, Mr. Weevil! To be cuckolded by Bob, the scamp of Blacksod, was not any way a very soothing destiny; but to be cuckolded by Bob as a sort of schoolboy-lark, a lark set in motion by the sardonic Mr. Urquhart, was a fantastic outrage.
Still he hesitated at these crossroads, teased beyond his wont by the difficulty of deciding which way to go. He was so pulled at in both directions, that as he wavered he seemed actually to see before him the objects he would meet under either choice, and to feel the sensations he would experience under either.
In the end a motive simpler than love or jealousy decided the point. He took the shorter way, the way by Mr. Torp’s yard, because of a secret craving for food in the recesses of his stomach. But though this was his real motive, what he thought was his motive was jealousy over Bob Weevil. And the idea of this, that he should have such a feeling at all, in connection with the romance of passing close to Christie’s room, at once puzzled and shamed him.
He walked on with rapid strides now; and as he passed the familiar Torp yard, which lay in a hushed and rather ghastly pool of twilight, he thought how little he had foreseen, that March day when he turned into this enclosure, what occurrences would be the result of it! Bound by intimate habit to the one he had married—in love, for good and all, with the one he had not married—his situation just then was sufficiently complicated, without all this bewildering turmoil of personalities in King’s Barton!
It was with an accumulated measure of sheer animal relief that he found himself entering his own house at last. This was increased by a delicious abandonment to unhindered amorousness when he discovered that Gerda was waiting for him at the kitchen-stove in her nightdress and dressing-gown. The girl had certain very quaint and pretty ways of expressing her desire to be made love to; and she had seldom been more excitable or more whimsically provocative than she was that night.
Though hunger had brought him so quickly home, it was more than an hour after his return that they sat down to their supper; and during the lingered-out and shameless caresses which he enjoyed before he would let her approach the stove, Wolf was compelled to come to the conclusion that erotic delight has in itself the power of becoming a kind of absolute. He felt as if it became a sort of ultimate essence into which the merely relative emotions of the two preoccupied ones sank—indeed were so utterly lost that a new identity dominated the field of their united consciousness, the admirable identity of amorousness in itself, the actual spiritual form, or “psychic being,” of the god Eros!
What Wolf found to his no small content was that when this spiritual emanation of sweet delight had vanished away he was entirely free from any feeling of having committed sacrilege against his love for Christie. Whether this would have been the case had Christie been different from what she was, he found it difficult to decide; though in the intervals of pleasant discourse with Gerda, as they sat over their supper, he pondered deeply upon that nice point.
Another side-issue that had a curious interest for him was the question whether the accident of his having remembered that wicked tombstone-picture on his way home had had anything to do with the completeness of his pleasure! He had noted before in himself the peculiar role played by queer out-of-the-way imaginations in all these things! And finally—but this thought did not come to him till their meal was over—he caught himself at least once that night in a grim wondering as to how far the sweet desirability of his companion had been enhanced for him by those sinister rumours of a rival in the field, even though that rival was this water-rat-featured seller of sausages!
Gerda was the first to go to sleep that night as they lay side by side, with the familiar odours of summer grass and pigsty drainage floating in upon them. Wolf had arrived, not without many mental adjustments, during the last two months, at a more or less satisfactory compromise between what he felt for this girl, thus lying with his arm stretched out beneath her, and what he felt for the other one. Christie’s inflexible pride and the faint, hardly-stirred pulse of her subnormal senses, made it much easier for him. An instinctive unwillingness, too, in his own nature, to introduce any strain of harsh idealism, led him to get all the contentment he could out of his life with his lovely bedfellow. As he listened to her evenly-drawn breathing, and felt, through all his nerves, the delicious relaxation of her love-exhausted limbs, he was conscious now more than ever that it was completely unthinkable that he should be guilty of making her unhappy by any drastic change. In a sense what he had said to Selena Gault was true. He was happy. But he knew in his heart perfectly well that he was only happy because the deepest emotion he was capable of was satisfied by his nearness to Christie. Profoundly self-conscious as he was, Wolf was never oblivious of his lack of what people have agreed to call by the name of “passion.” Luckily enough Christie, too, seemed, as far as he was able to tell, devoid of this exigency; so that by their resemblance in this peculiarity the strange intensity of their love was not disturbed by his easy dalliance with Gerda.
What Wolf at this moment felt, as he listened to the girl’s soft breathing and held her in his arms, was a delicious, diffused tenderness—a tenderness which, like the earth itself, with the cool night-airs blowing over it, was touched by rumours and intimations belonging to another region. His sensual nature tranquillized, satisfied, appeased, permitted his spirit to wander off freely towards that other girlish form, more elusive, less tangible, hardly realizable to any concrete imagination, which now lay—sleeping or waking, he knew not which—in the room that looked out upon Poll’s Camp! There, above the books of that incestuous old man’s shop, that other one was lying alone. Was she satisfied in this ambiguous love of his? He preferred not to let himself dwell upon that aspect of the matter just then; and holding Gerda fast, and inhaling the mingled night-airs, he let his mind sink into the plenary absolution of a deep, dreamless sleep.