Beggars on Horseback Part 13

You see, that brave, wise letter of yours might have meant a huge effort of the will and brain, and not be a direct outflow from the you that gave me those days. Shall I ever see that you again, I wonder? Your letter's like the touch of your lips on my forehead--cooling, healing, bracing and most sweet. Dear, you're not only all I've told you before that you are, but you're wise as well. Oh! child, girl, most wonderfully woman-wise. My sweet, what you could do for me if only we could belong to each other.

Sophia, I'm trying hard to knock it into my head that we can't, but I can see now that the trouble's going to be, not remorse or anxiety, but just the big, aching lack of you, and not of your beauty so much as of your tenderness and wit and your weak, clinging strength. Oh, Sophia, I'm writing a lot of rot, but it isn't rot really. I mean, you understand. D'you remember the day when you said you'd exactly fitted that long body of yours into the ground? That's how I feel when I rest my mind on yours, only it's the ground and not me that does the shaping."

The next letter was from Ma.r.s.eilles. The last page, which Sophia read through twice, ran thus:

"So good-bye to it all, but not good-bye to Sophia. Dear, I believe very strongly in spiritual converse (I can't find the word I want for it). But don't you feel that my arms _are_ round you? I can feel your head on my shoulder and your hair against my cheek. I mean that it isn't just cheating oneself with vain imaginations to meet like that. I mean to go on thinking of you hard and the vision soothes, not aggravates, the longing, and I will meet you like that at our Castello di Luna. But oh, my dear, I wish it were really true _now_! There is so much I want from you and must go on wanting. Come to me in thought, my sweet, until we can see and touch and hear each other again. We will always say to each other whatever is in our hearts and minds. And so I'm just starting to go back--Sophia, I can't say 'home.' Home means what you are. Oh, I thought I should go back gaily and take it all up, but it makes me sick with dread. I ought never to have got out of harness. It's better to go on till one drops than to taste freedom and have to give it up.

Sweet, your eyes and your mouth and your hair are with me always. Don't call me a materialist, and say it's only your body's beauty that I value. You're sweet to me through and through. Oh, Sophia, come often to meet me in Monte Luna. And there is Lucia to say sweet, impossible things to make us dream.

_Ti bacio gl'occhi._ "RICHARD."

Sophia opened the last sheet of paper. It enfolded three primroses, and on it was written "_Primavere per la Primavera_." She looked at them a moment, then wrapped them up again and put letters and flowers back in the bag. Behind her the sun was near to setting, and the blaze of it lay full on the towers, making them a bright tawny-grey against the sky of deep steel-colour, and turning to tongues of flame the tufts of yellow gillyflowers--Santa Beata's own plant--that sprang out here and there from the sheer masonry. Some jackdaws flew out of the nearest belfry, and circled round it, black amid the brightness. Sophia sprang up and walked to and fro.

"I shall feel again, if I stay here. Unbearably. I wish I hadn't come.

I'll go away to-morrow. _Richard, Richard, Richard!_"

But on the morrow, instead of leaving Sant' Ambrogio, Sophia moved from the inn to the little house in the walled garden. Not until she was installed there did she discover that though the house was comparatively modern, the garden was the very one where Santa Beata had seen her visions and dreamed her dreams.

III

The first morning she spent in the place in the wall, writing him a letter.

"My dear boy," she wrote, "by the time you get this you will be back in the thick of things. If I have given you anything that will help you to go on it's all I want. You must just look on this past month as a holiday s.n.a.t.c.hed from the lap of the G.o.ds, and realize, what you're always telling me, that what one's once had one has for always. For there can't be any more, and I'm not even going to write to you. Oh, I feel as though I were failing you in not writing, but I always meant not to, even when you were making plans about it. Letters keep up an atmosphere, and that's better not. Yes, I know what you mean about spiritual meeting. I'm sort of fused with you as I write. I'm not here--or even in the future with you--as you read, for I've pulled the future to me and made it now, now, now, and I'm with you, in the present, as you read this, and I'm drawing your tired head to me, and I feel the very way the thick stuff of your coat arches up under the pressure of my arm. I am you in every bit of me as I write; not yours, but you. But, for the future, in that way only. I felt nothing wrong in all I gave you here, because you needed what I had to give and we were hurting n.o.body. I'm sure that's the great thing, to hurt n.o.body, and that includes you and even me. It would be hurting both of us if we were to go on writing because it would keep it all up and we shouldn't be able to meet again just as friends, and if we make the break we shall; we are strong--or weak--enough for that. Richard, let your answer to this be a long one, won't you? Try and tell me everything I shall want to hear in it because it will be all I shall have to live on. Dear child, take care of yourself, don't overwork and don't forget that open windows are the best thing for that throat of yours. Don't let things at home worry you more than you can help, and always remember there's no need to worry about me at all.

"SOPHIA."

During the time that she was waiting for the answer to her letter Sophia lived at tension, finding relief in the making of her last gift to him--for she wrote him a poem, and in spite of the deliberate placidity of the thing it eased the fierce pressure of her thoughts in the way that only creation can. Sophia was soon to enter on her greatest strength of feeling. Richard felt more intensely at the time than at looking back, when his emotions were stale to him, and he marvelled at the strength they had had; Sophia never knew till the actual hour was past what the depth of her emotion was. Partly this was that in their weeks together the need for calm and clarity on her side was so great, that when with him her being was absorbed in his and so her own feelings had no room for conscious movement until afterwards. There are times, when affairs are at the crest, when, by its intensity, sensation seems numb, but all the while each little thing seen by both inward and outward vision is registered on the mind with peculiar sharpness of edge; only to be realized when the wave of incident has pa.s.sed, and even then a period of numbness may intervene before realization enters the soul, deep-driven by the intolerance of memory. Sophia was living in that tense numbness now, but through it external things made their potency felt. She grew to know every corner of the little town, and during the day she would wander several times into the cool dim church, to breathe the silence and the peace of it. And "Richard . . ." she prayed, "Richard . . ." She knew of no definite thing to ask for him, she could not pray he might be free, and happiness was an illusion she had learned to dread; she could only turn his name over and over in her mind, lift it up, hold it up and out with all the strength of her will.

Still, in spite of this focusing of her life--a focusing that was to grow even more pa.s.sionate in long, hot London months to come--there was no unity about it, little sights and impulses fraught with value, yet failed to show any coherent reason; some great cord that could bind everything together was still not gathered up.

One afternoon she wandered out of the town by the big gates, and turning to look back at the sweeping wall she saw a narrow path that girdled its base, rising and falling over the rippling flanks of the hill. As she looked at it some dim memory stirred in her--she remembered having read in her childhood that in olden days a man might own as much land as he could encompa.s.s in one walk, returning to his starting-point. The root-instinct of enclosure was in the idea, and Sophia had a sudden fancy to make the unconscious town her own by the old method. Without thinking of much beyond the physical act, she started along the little track noting idly yet definitely the look of the stones along the spreading base of the fortifications and the sickles of light made by the sky's reflection on the curving-over gra.s.s blades on the other side of the path. She went slowly and when she had half-girdled the town she lay down on a smooth slope, and, locking her hands behind her head, gazed over the fertile plain. On an almond-tree near a nightingale began to sing; against the first pink of sunset she saw his little body as a slightly ruffled blot. She let her mind fill with the song so that it became the accompaniment to her thought, and slowly the first glimpse of comprehension began for her.

First she fell to wondering what the plain would look like seen from above--from the point of view of G.o.d. "The human mind, looking from such a standpoint, would have to concentrate on one thing at a time if it wanted to attain any idea but a general vagueness," thought Sophia. "One would have to focus on mountain-ranges, or rivers, or railway-lines. . . ."

She lay imagining it, seeing how the shining network of railroads formed a web over the roundness of the world; thinking how it would seem to this poised mind a mere web and nothing more. A meaningless web; instead of thousands of roads each leading to a different destination and intent on its own business. But if the mind, as well as the point of vision, were that of a G.o.d, then each line would be fraught with its individuality--and not merely because each led somewhere; there was more to it than that--Sophia struggled towards it. . . . A different time had seen the making of each railroad, different men worked at the making of them, men with souls which had thought and felt as they laid the steel ribbons on which other souls would be rushed along without guessing anything of the thoughts and feelings. And yet, surely those emotions could not die. . . . Perhaps, one evening, a workman, straightening his back and drawing his hand over his wet forehead, had looked towards the sunset, and in the vague irrational way some scenes are registered on the mind for always, that aspect of sky and darkening hedge against it would stay in his memory, oddly mixed with the feel of the wet drops on his hand and the easing of the muscles across his back, to be recalled by any similar moment for the rest of his life. If so, how steeped with humanity those few yards of steel would be! And, apart from the emotions connected with it by the sense of sight, what an important part the railroad must play to the men and their wives and children to whom it meant food and fire! And then, the lines finished, each train going over them would pile the human a.s.sociations thicker yet, heaping up all the feelings, according to their intensity, of the people in the trains. A G.o.d, looking down, instead of merely seeing the network of steel, would see as well all the human emotions still clinging to the places where they were lived--a mystical web woven over tangible things, growing deeper with the years. "Which," said Sophia, the first gleam of personal light flashing through her, "is why walking round a place makes it yours if you do it for that. My seeing of this path will be here always, I'm making a belt of consciousness round the town. It's my city! My city set upon a hill!"

She scrambled to her feet and for a moment leant her cheek against the rough stone of the wall, then she went on round the town and in at the great gate.

That evening she sat in Beata's garden, finishing her poem to Richard.

Elate as she was, she still had no hint of what her discovery meant, or of how the garden would bring the final revelation to her, but even then she felt the soothing influence that held it and her as she wrote out her poem. It went to him without a t.i.tle, but for herself she headed it:

TO THE FORBIDDEN LOVER

That time I gave you half-a-moon of days In the dear Southern land of many moods She lured us up among her hill-ringed ways Far from the ordered gardens, far from where, Sacring the sky, the Christs hang on their roods.

We saw the sea-grey slopes of olive-trees Blown foamy-pale, from the cloud-ridden air Fell the swift shadows on those leafy seas.

To lakes of hardened lava we would come, Scarred, as by whirlpools, with cold crater-rings Or packed in furrows, like mammoth slugs grown numb At some disaster of creation's dawn-- A burnt-out lunar landscape of dead things.

And there some kindlier whim of path would show Rocks that might echo to a piping Faun, Or hide a huntress nymph with spear and bow.

Pan-haunted is that valley where we lay (Lay, till lulled senses slid into a dream) Watching sun-wrought reflections of ripples play And break in shining scales through that green pool, Deepest of seven strung on a ribbon of stream That seven times wings the air in curving flight.

And from the gleaming arc blew spray to cool Lids that were rosy films against the light.

A hut with fluted roof we found one morn, A fairy-story hut; an empty shrine Haply once dear to comrades less forlorn, For on the walls were names of lover-folk.

And there we ate our bread and drank our wine, A Sacrament of Fellowship; only dregs We poured to envious G.o.ds, and laughing broke Thrush-like, against a stone, our brown-sh.e.l.led eggs.

Dearest that castle set in sun and winds Remote as though upon Olympus hung, Yet with a human tang that drew our minds To gentle restful things; an open door, Warm hearths, silk-curtained beds, and shutters flung Wing-wide to let us watch the stars pulsating.

Now through closed slats their light must bar the floor And on the hearth the ash be grey with waiting.

And when for daily troubles you make dole (Now that the miles have set you far away) Then to our little castle come in soul.

There, where the two girl-children thought us wed, There, surely, I need never say you nay; But, where the hollow curves between the breast And rounded shoulder, draw your weary head, And, when the day's lid droops, there give you rest.

The weakness of you I can hold to me, For since at the world's door the babes unborn Must vainly beat for us; oh, I will be A Virgin-Mother to the child in you. . . .

And comradeship is good when sweetly sworn, Being no less tender for its commonplace And for its lack of fetters no less true-- Take what you may, my dear, and with good grace.

It was Sophia's first and only love-letter, and she sent it when she got back to England, as a summons to that friendship in which she could have given as richly as in love; and for which, although he had planned it so eagerly, he had too much knack of pa.s.sion and too little depth of feeling.

IV

The following evening his letter came, and Sophia, noting the thinness of it compared with those others she had had, knew how his need of her had slackened. She took the letter to her refuge on the wall and sat for a while unable to read it, the old nausea upon her. Then she took a firm grip of herself and opened the envelope. As she read it seemed as though a great blow were struck at her heart. She knew she had expected this, yet the actuality was worse to bear than she had thought.

Richard laughed at her intention of not writing, and himself wrote her little over a page. He began, as usual, "Sophia, my sweet," and made a brief reference to his wife--"She has not had a bad phase yet--and things are quiet, but what is that when one wants sympathy and pa.s.sion?

I feel I am caught up in the old life again and something seems to have gone snap in me. Write to me--for you will write--to my club." The a.s.surance of his tone jarred Sophia, but what hurt her cruelly was his brevity. The fact that she had wanted this letter to be a long one had honestly seemed to him of no importance when set against the fact that he was not in the mood to write it; for he was the creature of his moods and consequently unheeding of those which other folk might wish to have indulged.

Sophia read the letter over and over, and then quite suddenly felt she could not look at it again, and for the first time since the whole affair began, she cried. Crouched on the seat she hid her face while the sobs tore at her and the tears ran over her crossed wrists, and she heard the sound of her own sobs coming to her from a great distance.

After a while she sat up, dried her wet face and made herself confront the new aspect of things. She saw that up till now she had not been wholly unhappy, for she had had the past. If he were going to prove unworthy the past would no longer be hers to glory in but would become a time of shame. If--as prevision showed her--she was to know him as unfit for what she had given, the giving would cease to be her happiness. For Sophia was still so ignorant she thought mere companionship and the spiritual force of her feeling had been a continuous giving. The knowledge that from a man's point of view she had given nothing at all was spared her. Since the parting she had repeated over and over to herself two sentences from his letters--"_Virgin Mother, friend and lover and comforter_" and "_Home means where you are_." If he could still mean those things she would be perfectly content that he should never again express them; if he were to mean them less as the old life and the old allegiance gripped him, then they would cease to be true and she could not live on them in memory. Few men are strong enough to leave the past alone, many are so afraid of its re-appearance that they try to bury it alive--was he going to deal this last and most cruel blow, a future that would destroy the past? The pitiful part of it all was that Sophia would never have seen him again sooner than try to revive what had happened; had he continued to make love to her she would have refused to let him--all she asked was that the past might be unprofaned.

Reading his letter she began for the first time to realize the selfishness of his brilliant, lovable drifting nature, and in that moment her love of him took its firmest hold of her. The merciful phase of numbness was over, and she entered the deep waters at last. She had no strength left to struggle, she could only let them go over her head and await their pa.s.sing. For her month of joy she was to pay in a year's pain, and she entered on the payment now.

It was the payment for what she had gone without that hit Sophia hardest. In what she had given was the supreme comfort--"It was for him"; and this upheld her even when her want of him was worst, when she lay the whole night through on the floor of the wall-refuge, thoughts and pulses knocking out "I want you . . . I want you . . ." against the stones. It upheld her when, towards dawn, she paced the garden, pausing every now and then to lean her cheek against the dew-wet lilac leaves; or when she tangled her hands in the gra.s.s till the damp blades whimpered as she pulled her fingers up them. Sound was a help to her, and when she roused the gra.s.s to cries or stirred the bushes to quick whispering the voice in herself was quieter. She was never violent to anything in the garden, and when action became hurried she turned it upon herself, beating her hands against her thighs. And always "It was for him" upheld her through the darkest times of paying for what she had given.

For what she had gone without that help was lacking. It was not pa.s.sion, which, when with him, she had never felt, that plucked at her unbearably, it was the thwarted fruit of pa.s.sion that haunted and reproached her. Before his letter came, dream-babies had cl.u.s.tered round her, wringing their little hands behind a closed transparent door, but these were visions of what might have been had circ.u.mstances been different--them she could bear. Now thought narrowed and gained in meaning: one baby surged towards her, cried to her, smiled at her, lay in air always just away from her breast--one baby that was what might have been even as things were. How would it matter what other women he loved better if she had only given him what no other woman had? She saw herself his slayer in that she had not made life for him in the way a woman can make it for her lover, by taking it of his and creating afresh with it. Her own life would be such a small price to pay. For Sophia was a born creator, and the seeming futility of all she was undergoing, and the barrenness it bound her to, filled her with a sense of waste.

It was not until the compulsion which bread-winners know was making it clear to Sophia that her last days at Sant' Ambrogio were come, that the influences at work upon her ever since her arrival, that had first revealed themselves to her in her walk round the town, fused and concentrated.

The day had been unbearably hot, and Sophia lay behind closed _persiani_, the green of the leaves without reflecting on to the whitewashed walls so that the room seemed a pool of green dusk. Sophia read a little old Latin _Vita Sanctae Beatae_, which she pondered over when, in the cool of the evening, she sought the place in the wall.

"She found something," thought Sophia; "I wonder what it was? Peace, of course, but what got her to it? For outwardly her life was as bare as mine--and she had never known even what I know of--things. And yet, they say that in religion there is every experience. . . . I wonder if the babies she might have borne if she'd married some fellow-peasant ever beat at her reproachfully? And if so, what it was she found? She lived here, I suppose, walked in the garden and sat in my place in the wall--I wonder what she felt here. . . ."

All was very quiet and still on the wall, and for the first time since Richard's letter had come Sophia's aching was a little soothed, the taut fibres of her relaxed and her mind slid into receptivity. Then a more positive change began to make itself felt to her, though she could not have traced its birth or growth if she had tried.

The first note of difference was a physical one. Sophia was short-sighted and saw the world in a blur; now her sight began to take precision of outline and then the things at which she was looking changed too. The towers were more numerous, and from some of them flags fluttered out, and not till long after did Sophia remember that there had been no breeze that evening. Looking for the house over the tree-tops of the garden she saw that it had shrunk oddly, and an outer stairway crawled up its wall. On the sundial lay a rosary of dark beads--Sophia could see its steel cross glitter in the evening light.

These were outward changes, on their heels came the inward change that made them seem natural to her. It was as though she were in one of those dreams when the dreamer knows who he is and that he will soon wake up, and yet does and says the most incongruous things; with this difference--Sophia had a curious feeling that it was some one else's dream which had taken hold of her. She struggled against it at first as against an anaesthetic, but the thing crept over her like a tide.

A child's cry came from the town, and Sophia felt a sudden contraction at the heart, and with a thrill realized that this new Person in her felt it also--that they were at one. With that shock of mutual sensation the fusion became more nearly complete; of Sophia's own consciousness was left only enough to know that she was still herself, hearing, seeing, and feeling what some one else had heard and seen and felt before her in that place. She knew, too, that the drama played in her soul ever since she came to Sant' Ambrogio, a wordless drama in which no human being had taken part, was drawing to a climax, and that the human element had invaded it at last. She was about to learn what it was for which those weeks, especially that hour outside the wall, had prepared her.

The air was very clear, and to the long sight with which Sophia was seeing, seemed preternaturally so, as though everything were set in a vast crystal which made visible each pebble and gra.s.s-blade. A numbness stole over her body, her hands ached with cold before they, too, lost sensation, and in this numbed frame her consciousness gathered intensity. Then with a shock, as sudden as a plunge into cold water, her mind slid on to what seemed another though not an alien plane. Her mind's eye saw all the old points of view, the accepted angles of vision, as though torn up and scattered like flung wreckage over the shining sh.o.r.e of the world that swung below her; things which had seemed big were small, all relative sizes were altered, perspective itself seemed run mad, except that after the first breath the knowledge that this was the true angle swept over her--that she, or rather, the Person whose vision she was receiving, was looking at the spiritual world from the point at which she herself had vaguely imagined gazing at the physical.

Round this spiritual globe she saw the Breath of G.o.d hang as the air hangs round the earth, and she saw it full of ebbing and flowing like a current-whorled river. She saw how no wind left emptiness where it had been, but how the elastic tissue thinned out, spread, gathered together, ran here and there so that no outflow was without its inevitable influence of contraction: the whole sphere of air was a medley of pattern, always rhythmic and interchanging. She felt how this elasticity was brought into play over the surface of the spiritual world, how actions, sins, pains of mind and body, rack this way and that as they would, were always enveloped by the divine Breath, even as on the material globe not a wave can break or a leaf stir but the river of air holds true. Always the movements of the Breath made a pattern, as invisible to the soul in the midst of it as the wind-pattern is to those on earth, a pattern inevitable in the sense that achieved beauty always strikes the eye, as being inevitable in its rightness.

Then, this measure of universal comfort given, sensation narrowed and concentrated, not on her soul, but on the soul which had felt long ago, probably far more intensely, what she was seeing by it and through it now.