Saint's Progress

“Don’t let us differ on this last night; I must go up to Nollie for a minute, and then to bed. I shan’t see you to-morrow; you mustn’t get up; I can bear parting better like this. And my train goes at eight. God bless you, Gracie; give George my love. I know, I have always known that he’s a good man, though we do fight so. Good-bye, my darling.”

He went out with his cheeks wet from Gratian’s tears, and stood in the porch a minute to recover his composure. The shadow of the house stretched velvet and blunt over the rock-garden. A night-jar was spinning; the churring sound affected him oddly. The last English night-bird he would hear. England! What a night-to say good-bye! ‘My country!’ he thought; ‘my beautiful country!’ The dew was lying thick and silvery already on the little patch of grass-the last dew, the last scent of an English night. The call of a bugle floated out. “England!” he prayed; “God be about you!” A little sound answered from across the grass, like an old man’s cough, and the scrape and rattle of a chain. A face emerged at the edge of the house’s shadow; bearded and horned like that of Pan, it seemed to stare at him. And he saw the dim grey form of the garden goat, heard it scuttle round the stake to which it was tethered, as though alarmed at this visitor to its’ domain.

He went up the half-flight of stairs to Noel’s narrow little room, next the nursery. No voice answered his tap. It was dark, but he could see her at the window, leaning far out, with her chin on her hands.

“Nollie!”

She answered without turning: “Such a lovely night, Daddy. Come and look! I’d like to set the goat free, only he’d eat the rock plants. But it is his night, isn’t it? He ought to be running and skipping in it: it’s such a shame to tie things up. Did you never, feel wild in your heart, Daddy?”

“Always, I think, Nollie; too wild. It’s been hard to tame oneself.”

Noel slipped her hand through his arm. “Let’s go and take the goat and skip together on the hills. If only we had a penny whistle! Did you hear the bugle? The bugle and the goat!”

Pierson pressed the hand against him.

“Nollie, be good while I’m away. You know what I don’t want. I told you in my letter.” He looked at her cheek, and dared say no more. Her face had its “fey” look again.

“Don’t you feel,” she said suddenly, “on a night like this, all the things, all the things – the stars have lives, Daddy, and the moon has a big life, and the shadows have, and the moths and the birds and the goats and the trees, and the flowers, and all of us – escaped? Oh! Daddy, why is there a war? And why are people so bound and so unhappy? Don’t tell me it’s God – don’t!”

Pierson could not answer, for there came into his mind the Greek song he had been reading aloud that afternoon —

“O for a deep and dewy Spring,
With runlets cold to draw and drink,
And a great meadow blossoming,
Long-grassed, and poplars in a ring,
To rest me by the brink.
O take me to the mountain, O,
Past the great pines and through the wood,
Up where the lean hounds softly go,
A-whine for wild things’ blood,
And madly flies the dappled roe,
O God, to shout and speed them there;
An arrow by my chestnut hair
Drawn tight and one keen glimmering spear
Ah! if I could!”

All that in life had been to him unknown, of venture and wild savour; all the emotion he had stifled; the swift Pan he had denied; the sharp fruits, the burning suns, the dark pools, the unearthly moonlight, which were not of God – all came with the breath of that old song, and the look on the girl’s face. And he covered his eyes.

Noel’s hand tugged at his arm. “Isn’t beauty terribly alive,” she murmured, “like a lovely person? it makes you ache to kiss it.”

His lips felt parched. “There is a beauty beyond all that,” he said stubbornly.

“Where?”

“Holiness, duty, faith. O Nollie, my love!” But Noel’s hand tightened on his arm.

“Shall I tell you what I should like?” she whispered. “To take God’s hand and show Him things. I’m certain He’s not seen everything.”

A shudder went through Pierson, one of those queer sudden shivers, which come from a strange note in a voice, or a new sharp scent or sight.

“My dear, what things you say!”

“But He hasn’t, and it’s time He did. We’d creep, and peep, and see it all for once, as He can’t in His churches. Daddy, oh! Daddy! I can’t bear it any more; to think of them being killed on a night like this; killed and killed so that they never see it all again – never see it – never see it!” She sank down, and covered her face with her arms.

“I can’t, I can’t! Oh! take it all away, the cruelty! Why does it come – why the stars and the flowers, if God doesn’t care any more than that?”

Horribly affected he stood bending over her, stroking her head. Then the habit of a hundred death-beds helped him. “Come, Nollie! This life is but a minute. We must all die.”

“But not they – not so young!” She clung to his knees, and looked up. “Daddy, I don’t want you to go; promise me to come back!”

The childishness of those words brought back his balance.

“My dear sweetheart, of course! Come, Nollie, get up. The sun’s been too much for you.”

Noel got up, and put her hands on her father’s shoulders. “Forgive me for all my badness, and all my badness to come, especially all my badness to come!”

Pierson smiled. “I shall always forgive you, Nollie; but there won’t be – there mustn’t be any badness to come. I pray God to keep you, and make you like your mother.”

“Mother never had a devil, like you and me.”

He was silent from surprise. How did this child know the devil of wild feeling he had fought against year after year; until with the many years he had felt it weakening within him! She whispered on: “I don’t hate my devil.

“Why should I? – it’s part of me. Every day when the sun sets, I’ll think of you, Daddy; and you might do the same – that’ll keep me good. I shan’t come to the station tomorrow, I should only cry. And I shan’t say good-bye now. It’s unlucky.”

She flung her arms round him; and half smothered by that fervent embrace, he kissed her cheeks and hair. Freed of each other at last, he stood for a moment looking at her by the moonlight.

“There never was anyone more loving than you; Nollie!” he said quietly. “Remember my letter. And good night, my love!” Then, afraid to stay another second, he went quickly out of the dark little room…

George Laird, returning half an hour later, heard a voice saying softly: “George, George!”

Looking up, he saw a little white blur at the window, and Noel’s face just visible.

“George, let the goat loose, just for to-night, to please me.”

Something in that voice, and in the gesture of her stretched-out arm moved George in a queer way, although, as Pierson had once said, he had no music in his soul. He loosed the goat.

IV

1

In the weeks which succeeded Pierson’s departure, Gratian and George often discussed Noel’s conduct and position by the light of the Pragmatic theory. George held a suitably scientific view. Just as he would point out to his wife – in the physical world, creatures who diverged from the normal had to justify their divergence in competition with their environments, or else go under, so in the ethical world it was all a question of whether Nollie could make good her vagary. If she could, and grew in strength of character thereby, it was ipso facto all right, her vagary would be proved an advantage, and the world enriched. If not, the world by her failure to make good would be impoverished, and her vagary proved wrong. The orthodox and academies – he insisted – were always forgetting the adaptability of living organisms; how every action which was out of the ordinary, unconsciously modified all the other actions together with the outlook, and philosophy of the doer. “Of course Nollie was crazy,” he said, “but when she did what she did, she at once began to think differently about life and morals. The deepest instinct we all have is the instinct that we must do what we must, and think that what we’ve done is really all right; in fact the – instinct of self-preservation. We’re all fighting animals; and we feel in our bones that if we admit we’re beaten – we are beaten; but that every fight we win, especially against odds, hardens those bones. But personally I don’t think she can make good on her own.”

Gratian, whose Pragmatism was not yet fully baked, responded doubtfully:

“No, I don’t think she can. And if she could I’m not sure. But isn’t Pragmatism a perfectly beastly word, George? It has no sense of humour in it at all.”

“It is a bit thick, and in the hands of the young, deuced likely to become Prigmatism; but not with Nollie.”

They watched the victim of their discussions with real anxiety. The knowledge that she would never be more sheltered than she was with them, at all events until she married, gravely impeded the formation of any judgment as to whether or no she could make good. Now and again there would come to Gratian who after all knew her sister better than George – the disquieting thought that whatever conclusion Noel led them to form, she would almost certainly force them to abandon sooner or later.