Captivity Part 1

Captivity.

by M. Leonora Eyles.

TO E. J. R-S.

You have often said that you could never write a book. You have written this one just as surely as Beatrice wrote the Vita Nuova for Dante.

Until I talked with you I did not know that our lives are the pathway for G.o.d's feet; I had not realized that Trinity of body, brain and spirit; and it had never come to me before how, for each other's sake, we must set a censor, very strong and austere, upon our secret thoughts.

I have learnt these things from you; the gold of your thoughts has pa.s.sed through the crucible of my experience to make a book. Perhaps a little of the gold has been left clinging to the crucible--and for that I have to thank you, my dear.

Margaret Leonora Eyles.

Bexhill-on-Sea, _1st February, 1920._

"Man comes into life to seek and find his sufficient beauty, to serve it, to win and increase it, to fight for it; to face anything and dare anything for it, counting death as nothing so long as the dying eyes still turn to it. And fear and dulness and indolence and appet.i.te--which, indeed, are no more than fear's three crippled brothers who make ambushes and creep by night--are against him, to delay him, to hold him off, to hamper and beguile and kill him in that quest."

H. G. Wells ("The History of Mr. Polly").

Captivity

CHAPTER I

As long as Marcella could remember, the old farm-house had lain in shadows, without and within.

Behind it rose the great height of Ben Grief, with his gaunt face gashed here by glowering groups of conifers, there by burns that ran down to the River Nagar like tears down a wrinkled old face. Marcella had read in poetry books about burns that sang and laughing waters that clattered to the sea for all the world like happy children running home from school. But the waters on Ben Grief neither laughed nor sang. Sometimes they ran violently, as though Ben Grief were in a rage of pa.s.sionate weeping; sometimes they went sullenly as though he sulked.

It was upon Ben Grief that Marcella looked when she went to bed at night and when she wakened in the morning in her little stark room at the back of the house. There was another window in the room from which she could have seen the sea, but Aunt Janet had had a great mahogany wardrobe placed right across it, and only the sound of the sea, creeping sometimes, lashing most often, came to her as she lay in bed, reminding her that the sea was there all the time.

In front of the house rose Lashnagar, the home of desolation, a billowing waste of sand rising to about a thousand feet at the crest.

Curlews called and sea-gulls screamed over Lashnagar; heather grew upon it, purple and olive-green; fennel and cooch and henbane sprang side by side with dwarfed stink-nettles, stunted by the salt sand in which they were rooted. But the soil was not deep enough for trees or bushes to take root.

In Marcella's lifetime men had been lost on Lashnagar, and sheep and dogs, adventuring too far, had never come back. Legend had it that hundreds of years ago Lashnagar had been a quiet little village nestling round Castle Lashcairn, the home of Marcella's folks. That was in the year before Flodden Field, a hot, dry time that began with Lady Day and lasted till the Feast of All Souls without rain or storm. In that hot summer a witch-woman, very beautiful, had come to Lashnagar to win the soul of Andrew Lashcairn, winning with his soul his bed and his board. A wild wooing it was, and a wilder wedding. All the wooing had been done by the woman--as was the way of the Lashcairn women ever afterwards--in the dry heat of that unnatural summer when the sap dried in the trees and the marrow in men's bones, while the heated blood surged through their veins more quickly than ever before. On the Feast of All Souls, the wedding day, a copper sun rose in a sky of blood and lead, and all the folks of Lashnagar drank deeply to drive away impending horror. That night, after they slept, while Andrew Lashcairn lay awake in the witch-woman's arms, a great wind came in from the sea, sweeping before it the salt sand of the dunes, covering the village and the castle and the old feet of Ben Grief where sheep and cattle fed. The witch-woman, with her lord and a few servants, fought and battled a way through the storm of sand and stones to settle where the last of the wind-blown desert piled on the knees of Ben Grief. The next year Andrew rode away to the fight at Flodden Field. Unknown to him, the witch-woman who loved him rode close to his heels.

There his pennant, with its sun in splendour and its flaunting "By myself I stand," went down. When the hush of death fell on the noise of battle the witch-woman crawled by night among the dead to find her lord lying with one arm thrown carelessly over his dead horse's neck. It was there, companioned only by the dead, that the witch-woman's twins--a boy and a girl--were born. And it pleased their mother's grim humour to creep about the battlefield in the darkness until she found banners and trappings of the Southrons, whom she hated, to act as birth-clothes for her son and daughter when she carried them back mile after mile to brooding Lashnagar. It was the boy who was Marcella's ancestor.

Lashnagar was her nursery. On Lashnagar she had seen queer things. One night, when everyone was asleep and the path of the full moon lay shining across the sea, she went up on to Lashnagar with the shadows of the flowering henbane clean-cut and inky about her feet. Half-way up a great jagged hole lay gashed. Peering into it--she had never seen it before--she could distinguish the crumbling turret of a church, the roof of a house and the stiff tops of trees buried partly in a soft sea of sand in the middle of which was a depression. The heathery ground on which she kneeled began to crack very gently, and, with beating heart, she started back, realizing that the hillside was hollow, formed here of rotted trees thinly overgrown with turf and sand. Next morning she heard that a shepherd was missing, and then she guessed with horror the meaning of the chasm and the soft depression.

Next day she went back to gaze fascinated at the hole, only to find that already the dry sand had almost filled it, quite covering the cracked place where she had kneeled, the turret and the roof. She told no one but Hunchback Wullie, an old man who tended the green-wood fires in the huts on the beach, where fish were cured. Excepting her mother, he was Marcella's only friend--he it was who had soaked her mind in the legends of Lashnagar and the hills around; he it was who had taught her the beautiful things learnt by those who grow near to the earth and humble living things.

She ran down the hillside to him that day, her eyes--the blue-grey eyes of her people--wide with horror, her long, straight, fair hair, that she wore in two Marguerite plaits, loosened and swinging in the wind.

Hunchback Wullie was in the first hut, threading the herrings through their gills on the long strings that went from side to side high up under the roof. His ruddy brown beard glistered with the shining scales of the fish, for he had a habit of standing by the hut door looking out to sea and stroking his beard, when another man would have smoked and rested.

"Things never come tae an ending, la.s.sie," he said, his little red-brown eyes looking out over the grey water. "Either for good or for ill they're always gaun on. They may be quiet like Lashnagar for years, an'

then something crops out--like yon crumbling last night that killed young Colin. But it's not always evil that crops out, mind ye."

Marcella did not go on Lashnagar again for months. The next time Wullie was with her, and half-way up the incline they found apple blossom growing about one foot from the ground on a little sapling with a crabbed, thick trunk.

"Why, look at that little apple tree, Wullie--how brave of it! I'm going to root it up and take it to my garden. It can never live here in the sand and the wind."

Wullie sat down and watched her, smiling a little and stroking his beard as she dug with her hands in the friable soil. For a long time she dug, but the sapling went deeper and deeper, and at last she sat down hot and tired.

"D'ye ken what ye're daein', la.s.sie?" he said, looking at the pink and white bloom reflectively. "Ye're diggin' doon intae death! Yon flooer's the reaping of a seedtime many a hundred years gone by. If ye was tae dig doon an' doon all the day ye'd find yon apple tree buried deep i'

th' sand. The last time it fruited was afore Flodden, when Lashcairns were kings--"

"What, Wullie, a poor old tree buried all those years, pushing up to light like this? How could it?" said Marcella, staring at it fascinated.

"I've tauld ye afore, Marcella. There's no ending tae things! Sometimes the evil comes cropping oot, like when men get caught an' buried on Lashnagar. Sometimes it's something bonny, like yon flooer. Yon apple was meant to live an' bear fruit; the bonny apple's juist the makeweight. It's the seed that matters all the time--the life that slides along the tree's life. Yon tree was buried before its seedtime, and all these years it struggled, up an' up, till it broke through into the light of the sun. Like G.o.d strugglin' at the end through a man's flesh--"

Marcella stared at him: Wullie often talked like this, and she only understood very vaguely what he meant. But she could grasp the idea of something trying to struggle through desperately, and looked pityingly at the little frail plume of blossom.

"And after all these years, to struggle through on this bleak hill! Poor little tree!" she said.

"That happens often to folk's lives. They come struggling through tae something very rough and hard. But it's the struggling that matters. Yon tree may only have one fruit that will seed. And so life goes on--"

He stroked his beard and stared over the sea to where the brown-sailed herring boats of his brother and his nephew were coming in through the morning sunlight.

"It's a bit sad, isn't it?" Marcella said dreamily. "It seems hard on the tree somehow, Wullie. Just as if the poor tree was only a path for the new tree to walk along--"

"Well, that's all life is--a path for other life to walk along."

"I wish you'd explain better, Wullie," she said, staring from him to the plant.

"Explaining's never any use, la.s.sie. Folks have to live things to find them out." He stood up slowly. "There's the boats comin' in, an' I must get on back to the huts. Ye'll learn, Marcella--ye'll come tae it some day that ye're only a path yerself for things to walk along--"

"Wullie--_what_ things?" she demanded.

"Other folks, maybe. Maybe G.o.d," he said, and went off to the huts.

Overcome by the pathos of the little hopeful tree, Marcella carried baskets of soil from the farm and pots of water to lay them round about it. She planted stakes round it to keep off the force of the wind. But that year the flowering bore no fruit. And Wullie smiled at her attempts to help the tree.

"The roots are doon too deep, la.s.sie," he said. "Sae deep ye canna reach them. There's little ye can dae for tree or man, Marcella, but juist not hinder them. All we can do, the best of us, is to put a bit of soil an'

watter half-way up a tree trunk an' hope we're feeding the roots--"

"Then what can anyone do?" she said, looking at the pitiful little tree, stripped now of its leaves in the autumn chill.

"I tauld ye--juist not hinder. An' lie as quiet as ye can because ye're a path--"

It was in this way that Marcella got her education. Most of the time Wullie talked above her head save when he told her of the habits of animals and plants, of the winds and the seasons. Her mother, before she was too ill, had taught her to read and that was all. Even her mother, drawn in upon herself with pain, talked above her head most of the time, too. The girl turned herself loose in the big room at the farm where books were stored and there she spent days on end when the weather was too wild to be braved. It was a queer collection of books. All Scott's novels were there; she found in them an enchanted land. She lived them, she fed on them. She never read herself into the woman's part in them.

Only Jeannie Deans really met her requirements as a "part" and she left much to be desired in the way of romance and beauty. Most often she was young Lochinvar or Rob Roy; sometimes Coeur de Lion led her on full-blooded adventure. There were quaint old books of Norse and Keltic legend, musty, leather-bound books with wood-cut ill.u.s.trations and long "s's" in the printing. There was Fox's Book of Martyrs: there were many tales of the Covenanters, things hard, austere and chill.

One summer a young student came to the farm for the harvest. He was a peasant lad, a penniless bursary student at Edinburgh University. In the Long Vacation, he worked at his native farming, reading voraciously all the time and feeding sparingly, saving his wages against the coming bleak winter in his fireless attic in an Edinburgh wynd. He talked to Marcella, dogmatically, prodigiously, unanswerably. On her legends and fairy-tales and poetry he poured contempt. He read the "Riddle of the Universe" and the "Kritic of Pure Reason," orating them to Marcella as they worked together in the harvest field. She did not even understand their terminology. He had a quite unreasoning belief in the stolidly utilitarian of German philosophers and laid siege to Marcella's mysticism, but after he went back one day she discovered a box of her mother's poetry books and so Tennyson, Sh.e.l.ley and Keats shone into her life and, reading an ancient copy of "David and Bethsaibe," she gathered that the Bible Aunt Janet read sourly had quite human possibilities.

This box of books was her first glimpse of a world that was not a long tale of stern fights; it was her first glimpse of something softly sensuous instead of austere and natural and pa.s.sionate.