The Works of "Fiona Macleod", Volume IV

He went to the window again, brooding darkly. A slight sound caught his ear. He saw a yellow light run out, leap across the pavement and pass like a fan of outblown flame. Then the door closed, and we heard a step on the stone flags. He looked down. The Soul was there.

"Are you restless? Can you not sleep?" he asked.

"No, dear friend. But my heart is weary because of the Body. Yet before I go, let me bid you read that which follows upon what you have just read. It is not only Time and Chance upon which to dwell; but upon this, that God knows that which He does, and the hour and the way, and sees the end in the beginning."

And while the Soul moved softly down the little windy street, the Will opened the Book again, and read as the Soul had bidden.

"It may be so," he muttered, "it may be that the dreamer may yet wake to behold his dream – As thou knowest not what is the way of the wind, even so thou knowest not the work of God Who doeth all?"

With that he sighed wearily, and then, afraid to look again at the bitter eloquence of the stars, lit a candle as he lay down on his bed, and watched the warm companionable flame till sleep came upon him, and he dreamed no more of the rue and cypress, but plucked amaranths in the moonshine.

Meanwhile the Soul walked swiftly to the outskirts of the little town, and out by the grassy links where clusters of white geese huddled in sleep, and across the windy common where a tethered ass stood, with drooping head, his long, twitching ears now motionless. In the moonlight, the shadow of the weary animal stretched to fantastic lengths, and at one point, when the startled Soul looked at it, he beheld the shadow of the Cross.

When he neared One-Ash Farm he heard a loud uproar from within. Many couples were still dancing, and the pipes and a shrill flute added to the tumult. Others sang and laughed, or laughed and shouted, or cursed hoarsely. Through the fumes of smoke and drink rippled women's laughter.

He looked in at a window, with sad eyes. The first glance revealed to him the Body, his blue eyes aflame, his face flushed with wine, his left arm holding close to his heart a bright winsome lass, with hair dishevelled, and wild eyes, but with a wonderful laughing eagerness of joy.

In vain he called. His voice was suddenly grown faint. But what the ear could not hear, the heart heard. The Body rose abruptly.

"I will drink no more," he said.

A loud insensate laugh resounded near him. The stone-breaker lounged heavily from a bench, upon the servant's table.

"I am drunk now, my friend," the man cried with flaming eyes. "I am drunk, an' now I am as reckless as a king, an' as serene as the Pope, an' as heedless as God."

The Soul turned his gaze and looked at him. He saw a red flame rising from grey ashes. The ashes were his heart. The flame was his impotent, perishing life.

Stricken with sorrow, the Soul went to the door, and entered. He went straight to the stone-breaker, who was now lying with head and arms prone on the deal table.

He whispered in the drunkard's ear. The man lifted his head, and stared with red, brutish eyes.

"What is that?" he cried.

"Your mother was pure and holy. She died to give you her life. What will it be like on the day she asks for it again?"

The man raised an averting arm. There was a stare of horror in his eyes.

"I know you, you devil. Your name is Conscience."

The Soul looked at the Speaker. "I do not know," he answered simply; "but I believe in God."

"In the love of God?"

"In the love of God."

"He dwells everywhere?"

"Everywhere."

"Then I will find Him, I will find His love, here" – and with that the man raised the deathly spirit to his lips again, and again drank. Then, laughing and cursing, he threw the remainder at the feet of his unknown friend.

"Farewell!" he shouted hoarsely, so that those about him stared at him and at the new-comer.

The Soul turned sadly, and looked for his strayed comrade, but he was nowhere to be seen. In a room upstairs that friend whom he loved was whispering eager vows of sand and wind; and the girl Morag, clinging close to him, tempted him as she herself was tempted, so that both stood in that sand, and in the intertangled hair of each that wind blew.

The Soul saw, and understood. None spoke to him, a stranger, as he went slowly from the house, though all were relieved when that silent, sad-eyed foreigner withdrew.

Outside, the cool sea-wind fell freshly upon him. He heard a corncrake calling harshly to his mate, where the corn was yellowing in a little stone-dyked field; and a night-jar creeping forward on a juniper, uttering his whirring love-note; and he blessed their sweet, innocent lust. Then, looking upward, he watched for a while the white procession of the stars. They were to him the symbolic signs of the mystery of God. He bowed his head. "Dust of the world," he muttered humbly, "dust of the world."

Moving slowly by the house – so doubly noisy, so harshly discordant, against the large, serene, nocturnal life – he came against the gable of an open window. On the ledge lay a violin, doubtless discarded by some reveller. The Soul lifted it, and held it up to the night-wind. When it was purified, and the vibrant wood was as a nerve in that fragrant darkness, he laid it on his shoulder and played softly.

What was it that he played? Many heard it, but none knew what the strain was, or whence it came. The Soul remembered, and played. It is enough.

The soft playing stole into the house as though it were the cool sea-wind, as though it were the flowing dusk. Beautiful, unfamiliar sounds, and sudden silences passing sweet, filled the rooms. The last guests left hurriedly, hushed, strangely disquieted. The dwellers in the farmstead furtively bade good-night, and slipt away.

For an hour, till the sinking of the moon, the Soul played. He played the Song of Dreams, the Song of Peace, the three Songs of Mystery. The evil that was in the house ebbed. Everywhere, at his playing, the secret obscure life awoke. Nimble aerial creatures swung, invisibly passive, in the quiet dark. From the brown earth, from hidden sanctuaries in rocks and trees, green and grey lives slid, and stood intent. Out of the hillside came those of old. There were many eager voices, like leaves lapping in a wind. The wild-fox lay down, with red tongue lolling idly: the stag rose from the fern, with dilated nostrils; the night-jar ceased, the corncrake ceased, the moon-wakeful thrushes made no single thrilling note. The silence deepened. Sleep came stealing softly out of the obscure, swimming dusk. There was not a swaying reed, a moving leaf. The strange company of shadows stood breathless. Among the tree-tops the loosened stars shone terribly – lonely fires of silence.

The Soul played. Once he thought of the stone-breaker. He played into his heart. The man stirred, and tears oozed between his heavy lids. It was his mother's voice that he heard, singing-low a cradle-sweet song, and putting back her white hair that she might look earthward to her love. "Grey sweetheart, grey sweetheart," he moaned. Then his heart lightened, and a moonlight of peace hallowed that solitary waste place.

Again, at the last, the Soul thought of his comrade, heavy with wine in the room overhead, drunken with desire. And to him he played the imperishable beauty of Beauty, the Immortal Love, so that, afterwards, he should remember the glory rather than the shame of his poor frailty. What he played to the girl's heart only those women know who hear the whispering words of Mary the Mother in sleep, when a second life breathes beneath each breath.

When he ceased, deep slumber was a balm upon all. He fell upon his knees and prayed.

"Beauty of all Beauty," he prayed, "let none perish without thee."

It was thus that we three, who were one, realised how Prayer and Hope and Peace, how Dream and Rest and Longing, how Laughter and Wine and Love, are in truth but shadowy analogues of the Heart's Desire.

V

At dawn we woke. A movement of gladness was in the lovely tides of morning – delicate green, and blue, and gold. The spires of the grasses were washed in dew; the innumerous was as one green flower that had lain all night in the moonshine.

We had agreed to meet at the bridge over the stream where it lapsed through gravelly beaches just beyond the little town.

There the Soul and the Will long awaited the Body. The sun was an hour risen, and had guided a moving multitude of gold and azure waters against the long reaches of yellow-poppied sand, and to the bases of the great cliffs, whose schist shone like chrysolite, and whose dreadful bastions of black basalt loomed in purple shadow, like suspended thunder-clouds on a windless afternoon.

The air was filled with the poignant sweetness of the loneroid or bog-myrtle, meadow-sweet, and white wild-roses. The green smell of the bracken, the delicate woodland odour of the mountain-ash, floated hitherward and thitherward on the idle breath of the wind, sunwarm when it came across the sea-pinks and thyme-set grass, cool and fresh when it eddied from the fern-coverts, or from the heather above the hillside-boulders where the sheep lay, or from under the pines at the bend of the sea-road where already the cooing of grey doves made an indolent sweetness.

The Soul was silent. He had not slept, but, after his playing in the dark, peace had come to him.

Before dawn he had gone into the room where the Will lay, and had looked long at his comrade. In sleep the Will more resembled him, as when awake he the more resembled the Body. A deep pity had come upon the Soul for him whom he loved so well, but knew so little.

Why was it, he wondered, that he felt less alien from the Body? Why was it that this strange, potent, inscrutable being, whom both loved, should be so foreign to each? The Body feared him. As for himself, he, too, feared him at times. There were moments when all his marvellous background of the immortal life shrank before the keen gaze of his friend. Was it possible that Mind could have a life apart from mortal substances? Was it possible? If so —

It was here that the Will awoke, and smiled at his friend.

He gave no greeting, but answered his thought.

"Yes," he said gravely, and as though continuing an argument, "it is impossible, if you mean the mortal substance of our brother, the Body. But yet not without material substance. May it not be that the Mind may have an undreamed-of shaping power, whereby it can instantly create?"