Rounded with a Sleep
August was drawing to its end, and, with August, the holidays of the Blacksod Grammar School. The young aristocrats of Ramsgard had several weeks more before their new term began, but the humbler pupils whom it was Wolf’s destiny to teach were now on the eve of their return to work.
Anxious to make the utmost of these precious mornings of leisure, now so soon to be snatched from him, Wolf had lately got into the habit of persuading Gerda to start out with him, for some sort of rural expedition, directly the breakfast-things had been washed up.
They had explored the country in this way in almost every direction; but he found that the easiest thing to do was to have some sort of picnic-lunch in the direction of King’s Barton, so that when they separated he could reach his afternoon’s work at the manor without arriving too tired or too late.
Three days before the Grammar School was to reopen he had cajoled Gerda into accompanying him to Poll’s Camp. They had brought their provisions in a basket and had made their meal in unusual contentment under the shelter of a group of small sycamores that grew on the western slope of the camp, overlooking the great Somersetshire plain.
Gerda was now fast asleep. Stretched out upon her back, she lay as motionless as the shadows about her, one arm curved beneath her fair head and the other flung upon a bed of moss. Wolf sat with his arms hugging his knees, and his back against a sycamore-trunk.
The weather had been good for the wheat that Summer, and not too scorching to the grass; so that what he looked at now, as he let his eyes wander over that great level expanse towards Glastonbury, was a vast chessboard of small green fields, surrounded by pollarded elms of a yet darker colour, and interspersed by squares of yellow stubble.
The earthworks of Poll’s Camp were not as deeply dug or as loftily raised as many Roman-British ramparts in that portion of the West Country. They were less of a landmark than Cadbury Camp, for instance, away to the northwest. They were less imposing than Maiden Castle, away to the south. But such as they were, Wolf knew that the mysterious movements of King Arthur … rex quondam rex-que futurus … had more than once crossed and recrossed, in local legend, this promontory of grassy ridges.
The day was warm; but the fact that the sky was covered with a filmy veil of grey clouds gave to the vast plain before him the appearance of a landscape whose dominant characteristic consisted in a patient effacement of all emphatic or outstanding qualities. The green of the meadows was a shy, watery green. The verdure of the elm-trees was a sombre, blackish monotony. The yellow of the stubble-land was a whitish yellow, pallid and lustreless.
He glanced at the sleeping figure of his companion, and it seemed to him that the milk-white delicacy of Gerda’s face, as she lay there, had never been touched by a more tender bloom than it wore today, under this vaporous, windless sky.
Her breathing was so light as to be almost imperceptible, her lips were just parted in a confiding abandonment to a happy sleep; while the rounded whiteness of the bare arm she had flung out upon the moss had that youthful charm of unconscious trust in the kindness of man and nature, which, whenever he noted it, always struck him as one of the most touching of a young girl’s qualities.
And it was borne in upon him how terrible the responsibility was when a man had once undertaken to “make,” as the phrase runs, one of these fragile beings “happy.” It came upon him, as he watched Gerda asleep, that a girl is much more committed to what is called “happiness” than a man is.
Or is it, he thought, that a man can create happiness by sheer obstinate force out of the machinery of his own mind, while a girl is dependent upon all manner of subtle external forces emanating from nature and returning to nature?
Certainly at this moment Gerda seemed to have most deliciously abandoned herself to the power of the grass, the grey sky, the warm, windless air.
A sad, helpless craving possessed him as he turned from the girl and once more surveyed that undemonstrative, unobtrusive distance. He felt as though he longed to fly across it in some impossible nonhuman shape—fly across it not with any actual living companion, but with some shadowy essence, light as that dandelion-seed, which at this moment he saw rising high above him and floating away westward—with some shadowy essence that at the same time was and was not Christie Malakite—some essence that was what Christie was to her own inmost self, the bodiless, formless identity in that slim frame, that in confronting infinite space could only utter the mysterious words, “I am I,” and utter nothing else.
If only he could do this now, by some occult manipulation of the laws of nature! Gerda’s sleep was deep and sound. To her at this moment Time was nothing. How mad it was that he couldn’t plunge with Christie, with the inmost soul of Christie, into some region outside these things, where a moment was like a whole year of mortal life!
The vast expanse he looked at, had about it, under this grey sky, something wistful and withdrawn. It resembled those patient, melancholy fields, neither happy nor unhappy, where Dante met the souls of the great intellects in Limbo. With his eyes fixed upon its patient-coloured horizons, it did not seem so crazy a notion that he and Christie might meet and escape, lost, merged, diffused into all this!
And then he turned his gaze upon the beautiful girl lying there outstretched beside him, happy in her timeless dreamworld, trusting him, trusting nature, half-smiling in her sleep.
Looking at her lying there, he thought what an appalling risk these lovers of “happiness” take, when they burn their ships and trust their lives to the caprice of men.
As he contemplated the loveliness of her figure, it struck him as infinitely pathetic that even beauty such as hers should be so dependent on the sexual humours of this man or that man for its adequate appreciation.
Beauty like that, he thought, as he looked at her, ought to endow its possessor with superhuman happiness, as in the old legends, when the immortal gods made love to the daughters of men. There was a cruel irony in the fact that he of all men had been singled out to possess this beauty—he whose heart of hearts had been given to a different being!
And as he pondered on all this it struck him as strange that such rare loveliness should not protect her, like silver armour, against the shocks and outrages of life. Beauty as unusual as this was a high gift, like a poet’s genius, and ought to have the power of protecting a girl’s heart from the cruel inconstancies of love.
“I suppose it is true,” he thought, “that when they have been a man’s bedfellow, even for a few months, some peculiar link establishes itself which it is as difficult to break as if one tore a grafted sapling from the branch of a tree. I suppose,” so his thoughts drifted on, “that my love is really more important, in this blind primordial way, to Gerda—just because we have now slept together for three months—than it could ever be to Christie, though she lives inside my very soul! I suppose it’s the old fatality of flesh to flesh, of blind matter, proving itself, after all, the strongest thing on earth.”
And then, before he had the least notion that his thoughts would drift in such a direction, he found himself engaged in a passionate dispute with his father. It was as if the dispute were actually going on down at the bottom of that grave; and though he still found himself calling William Solent “Old Truepenny,” he felt as if he had become a lean worm down there, in the darkness of that hollow skull, arguing with it, arguing with what remained still conscious and critical, although lost “in the pit.”
“This world is not made of bread and honey,” cried Wolf, the worm, to the skull of his father, “nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.”
But the skull answered him in haste and spoke roughly to him. “What you have found out today, worm of my folly, I had outgrown when I was in the Sixth at Ramsgard and was seduced by Western Minor in the Headmaster’s garden. To turn the world again into mist and vapour is easy and weak. To keep it alive, to keep it real, to hold it at arm’s length, is the way of gods and demons.”
And Wolf, hearing this, lifted up his worm’s-voice within that mocker and cried out upon its lewd clay-cold cunning.
“There is no reality but what the mind fashions out of itself. There is nothing but a mirror opposite a mirror, and a round crystal opposite a round crystal, and a sky in water opposite water in a sky.”
“Ho! Ho! You worm of my folly,” laughed the hollow skull. “I am alive still, though I am dead; and you are dead, though you’re alive. For life is beyond your mirrors and your waters. It’s at the bottom of your pond; it’s in the body of your sun; it’s in the dust of your star-spaces; it’s in the eyes of weasels and the noses of rats and the pricks of nettles and the tongues of vipers and the spawn of frogs and the slime of snails. Life’s in me still, you worm of my folly, and girls’ flesh is sweet forever and ever; and honey is sticky and tears are salt and yellowhammers’ eggs have mischievous crooked scrawls!”
Wolf saw himself rising erect upon his tail as he heard these words.
“You lie to yourself, Truepenny! You lie with the old, hot, shuffling, fever-smitten lie. It’s the foam-bubbles of your life-mania that you think so real. They’re no more real than the dreams of the plantains that grow over your grave!”
A movement of Gerda, though she still remained asleep, broke up the current of his fancies, and he pulled out his watch.
Damn! It was time for him to start now, if he was to reach Mr. Urquhart’s house at the accustomed hour.
“I won’t have tea with him,” he thought. “I’ll have tea at the Otters’. Then I’ll find out if Mattie and Olwen are still all right there.”
He rose to his feet. From the hushed indrawn beauty of the hour he gathered up new strength for the burden of human fate he seemed destined to carry.
Fragment by fragment he collected what was over from their lunch and put it back in Gerda’s basket, prodding into the soft earth of a molehill, with the end of his stick, the bits of paper in which those things had been tied up.
Then, stretching out his arms and seizing with each hand a branch of a young sycamore, he swung these two pliant limbs backwards and forwards, while his gaze concentrated itself upon the girl at his feet.
But as he did this the transparency ebbed away from the vision of his days, and a fantastic doubt assailed him. Was Gerda’s sleep so deep and happy because of some occult affinity between her nerves and this historic hill?
As if to give substance to his fancy, the girl rolled over languidly at that moment and lay prone, burying both her outstretched hands in the soft moss. A deep, shuddering sigh passed through her; and her body visibly quivered under her thin dress.
Was there some strange nonhuman eroticism, he wondered, in this contact between the heathen soil and that sleeping figure? He smiled to himself and then frowned uneasily. He began to feel obscurely piqued by the girl’s remoteness and inaccessibility. He felt as if he were actually looking on at some legendary encounter between the body of Gerda and the crafty superhuman desire of some earth-god. He began to feel an insidious jealousy of Poll’s Camp, an obstinate hostility to its mossy curves and grassy hollows.
“Very well!” he thought, in his fantastic irritation, as if he actually beheld his companion in the very arms of the hill-god. “If she draws away from me, I can draw away from her!” And his eyes, wandering to the roofs of the town, settled on that quarter where he knew the roof of the bookshop to be. He tightened his hold upon the two saplings; and inhaling deeply that hushed, warm air, he mentally swept off the roof of Christie’s house, and lifting the wraith-image of her high into the clouds—he never visualized Christie’s actual appearance in any of these cerebral excursions—he whirled her away with him towards that lonely cone-shaped hill, rising out of the plain, that he knew to be Glastonbury.
It was a queer dalliance of the mind that he indulged in just then; for he felt that this airy wraith, that was Christie Malakite, was in some way the child of that mystical plain down there, that “chessboard of King Arthur”; whereas the girl at his feet was in league with whatever more remote and more heathen powers had dominated this embattled hill. King Arthur’s strangely involved personality, with the great Merlin at his side, was associated with both. But Christie’s “Arthur” belonged to Glastonbury; Gerda’s, to a far earlier time.
Wolf’s mind now began analyzing in a more rational manner this difference between the hill he stood upon and the landscape stretched out before him. “It must be,” he thought, “that this mass of earth is a far older portion of the planet’s surface than the plain beneath it. Even if its magnetism is purely chemical and free from anything that reverts to the old religions, it may very well exercise a definite effect upon human nerves! The plain must, within measurable years, have been covered by the sea. Where those elm-trees now grow there must have been shells and sand and swaying seaweeds and great sea-sponges and voyaging shoals of fish. And this recent emerging from the ocean cannot but have given a certain chastened quality, like the quality of old medieval pictures, to these ‘chessboard fields.’ ”
He stared, frowning intently, at the curves and hollows of Poll’s Camp.
“How many men,” he wondered, “since the black cormorants and foolish guillemots screamed around these escarpments, have stood still, as I am doing now, and wrestled with the secret of this promontory?” Did any of the serfs of Arthur, or of Merlin the magician, lean here upon their spades and let their souls sink down and down, into motions of primal matter older than any gods? Did any of the Roman legionaries, stark and stoical, making of this hill “a sacred place” for some strange new cult of Mithras, forget both Mithras and Apollo under this terrestrial magnetism—this power that already was spreading abroad its influence long before Saturn was born of Uranus?
“Poll’s Camp is heathen through and through,” he thought; “and even if the old gods never existed, there’s a power here that in some queer way … perhaps just chemically … is at once bewildering and hostile to me. But the valley … this unobtrusive, chastened valley … like some immense sad-coloured flower floating upon hidden water … oh, it is the thing I love best of all!”
He released the two pliable sycamore-branches and let his hands sink down; while the thick, cool leaves of the young trees, so resilient and sturdy on their smooth purplish stalks, flapped against his forehead.
“The spirit of this hill escapes me,” he thought. “I have an inkling that it is even now watching me with definite malignity. But I can’t understand the nature of what it threatens. There are powers here … powers … though, by God! they may be only chemical. But what is chemical? …”
He turned his eyes almost petulantly to the southwestern limits of the valley, to where Leo’s Hill and Nevilton Hill broke the level expanse.
“Those hills are not like this one,” he thought; “and as for Glastonbury, it’s like the pollen-bearing pistil of the whole lotus-vale! But this place … on my soul, it has something about it that makes me think of Mr. Urquhart. It’s watching me. And I believe at this moment it is making love to Gerda!”
He sighed and picked up his hat and oak-stick.
“I must wake Gerda and be off,” he said to himself. “I shall be late as it is.”