Lore of Proserpine Part 1

Lore of Proserpine.

by Maurice Hewlett.

PREFACE

I hope n.o.body will ask me whether the things in this book are true, for it will then be my humiliating duty to reply that I don't know.

They seem to be so to me writing them; they seemed to be so when they occurred, and one of them occurred only two or three years ago. That sort of answer satisfies me, and is the only one I can make. As I grow older it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish one kind of appearance from another, and to say, that is real, and again, that is illusion. Honestly, I meet in my daily walks innumerable beings, to all sensible signs male and female. Some of them I can touch, some smell, some speak with, some see, some discern otherwise than by sight. But if you cannot trust your eyes, why should you trust your nose or your fingers? There's my difficulty in talking about reality.

There's another way of getting at the truth after all. If a thing is not sensibly true it may be morally so. If it is not phenomenally true it may be so substantially. And it is possible that one may see substance in the idiom, so to speak, of the senses. That, I take it, is how the Greeks saw thunder-storms and other huge convulsions; that is how they saw meadow, grove and stream--in terms of their own fair humanity. They saw such natural phenomena as shadows of spiritual conflict or of spiritual calm, and within the appearance apprehended the truth. So it may be that I have done. Some such may be the explanation of all fairy experience. Let it be so. It is a fact, I believe, that there is nothing revealed in this book which will not bear a spiritual, and a moral, interpretation; and I venture to say of some of it that the moral implications involved are exceedingly momentous, and timely too. I need not refer to such matters any further. If they don't speak for themselves they will get no help from a preface.

The book a.s.sumes up to a certain point an autobiographical cast. This is not because I deem my actual life of any interest to any one but myself, but because things do occur to one "in time," and the chronological sequence is as good as another, and much the most easy of any. I had intended, but my heart failed me, to pursue experience to the end. There was to have been a section, to be called "Despoina,"

dealing with my later life. But my heart failed me. The time is not yet, though it is coming. I don't deny that there are some things here which I learned from the being called Despoina and could have learned from n.o.body else. There are some such things, but there is not very much, and won't be any more just yet. Some of it there will never be for the sorry reason that our race won't bear to be told fundamental facts about itself, still less about other orders of creation which are sufficiently like our own to bring self-consciousness into play.

To write of the s.e.xes in English you must either be sentimental or a satirist. You must set the emotions to work; otherwise you must be quiet. Now the emotions have no business with knowledge; and there's a reason why we have no fairy lore, because we can't keep our feelings in hand. The Greeks had a mythology, the highest form of Art, and we have none. Why is that? Because we can neither expound without wis.h.i.+ng to convert the soul, nor understand without self-experiment. We don't want to know things, we want to feel them--and are ashamed of our need. Mythology, therefore, we English must make for ourselves as we can; and if we are wise we shall keep it to ourselves. It is a pity, because since we alone of created things are not self-sufficient, anything that seems to break down the walls of being behind which we agonise would be a comfort to us; but there's a worse thing than being in prison, and that is quarrelling with our own nature.

I shall have explained myself very badly if my reader leaves me with the impression that I have been writing down marvels. The fact that a thing occurs in nature takes it out of the portentous. There's nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. With that I end.

LORE OF PROSERPINE

THE WINDOWS

You will remember that Socrates considers every soul of us to be at least three persons. He says, in a fine figure, that we are two horses and a charioteer. "The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark colour, with grey eyes of blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, s.h.a.g-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur." I need not go on to examine with the philosopher the acts of this pair under the whip and spur of love, because I am not going to talk about love. For my present purpose I shall suggest another dichotomy. I will liken the soul itself of man to a house, divided according to the modern fas.h.i.+on into three flats or apartments. Of these the second floor is occupied by the landlord, who wishes to be quiet, and is not, it seems, afraid of fire; the ground-floor by a business man who would like to marry, but doubts if he can afford it, goes to the city every day, looks in at his club of an afternoon, dines out a good deal, and spends at least a month of the year at Dieppe, Harrogate, or one of the German spas. He is a pleasant-faced man, as I see him, neatly dressed, brushed, anointed, polished at the extremities--for his boots vie with his hair in this particular. If he has a fault it is that of jingling half-crowns in his trouser-pocket; but he works hard for them, pays his rent with them, and gives one occasionally to a nephew. That youth, at any rate, likes the cheerful sound. He is rather fond, too, of monopolising the front of the fire in company, and thinks more of what he is going to eat, some time before he eats it, than a man should. But really I can't accuse him of anything worse than such little weaknesses. The first floor is occupied by a person of whom very little is known, who goes out chiefly at night and is hardly ever seen during the day. Tradesmen, and the crossing-sweeper at the corner, have caught a glimpse on rare occasions of a white face at the window, the startled face of a queer creature, who blinks and wrings at his nails with his teeth; who peers at you, jerks and grins; who seems uncertain what to do; who sometimes shoots out his hands as if he would drive them through the gla.s.s: altogether a mischancy, unaccountable apparition, probably mad.

n.o.body knows how long he has been here; for the landlord found him in possession when he bought the lease, and the ground-floor, who was here also, fancies that they came together, but can't be sure. There he is, anyhow, and without an open scandal one doesn't like to give him notice. A curious thing about the man is that neither landlord nor ground-floor will admit acquaintance with him to each other, although, if the truth were known, each of them knows something--for each of them has been through his door; and I will answer for one of them, at least, that he has accompanied the Undesirable upon more than one midnight excursion, and has enjoyed himself enormously. If you could get either of these two alone in a confidential mood you might learn some curious particulars of their coy neighbour; and not the least curious would be the effect of his changing the gla.s.s of the first floor windows. It seems that he had that done directly he got into his rooms, saying that it was impossible to see out of such windows, and that a man must have light. Where he got his gla.s.s from, by whom it was fitted, I can't tell you, but the effect of it is most extraordinary. The only summary account I feel able to give of it at the moment is that it transforms the world upon which it opens. You look out upon a new earth, literally that. The trees are not trees at all, but slim grey persons, young men, young women, who stand there quivering with life, like a row of Caryatides--on duty, but tiptoe for a flight, as Keats says. You see life, as it were, rippling up their limbs; for though they appear to be clothed, their clothing is of so thin a texture, and clings so closely that they might as well not be clothed at all. They are eyed, they see intensely; they look at each other so closely that you know what they would be doing. You can see them love each other as you watch. As for the people in the street, the real men and real women, as we say, I hardly know how to tell you what they look like through the first floor's windows. They are changed of everything but one thing. They occupy the places, fill the standing-room of our neighbours and friends; there is a something about them all by which you recognise them--a trick of the hand, a motion of the body, a set of the head (G.o.d knows what it is, how little and how much); but for all that--a new creature! A thing like nothing that lives by bread! Now just look at that policeman at the corner, for instance; not only is he stark naked--everybody is like that--but he's perfectly different from the st.u.r.dy, good-humoured, red-faced, puzzled man you and I know. He is thin, woefully thin, and his ears are long and perpetually twitching. He p.r.i.c.ks them up at the least thing; or lays them suddenly back, and we see them trembling.

His eyes look all ways and sometimes nothing but the white is to be seen. He has a tail, too, long and leathery, which is always curling about to get hold of something. Now it will be the lamp-post, now the square railings, now one of those breathing trees; but mostly it is one of his own legs. Yet if you consider him carefully you will agree with me that his tail is a more expressive remnant of the man you have always seen there than any other part of him. You may say, and truly, that it is the only recognisable thing left. What do you think of his feet and hands? They startled me at first; they are so long and narrow, so bony and pointed, covered with fine short hair which s.h.i.+nes like satin. That way he has of arching his feet and driving his toes into the pavement delights me. And see, too, that his hands are undistinguishable from feet: they are just as long and satiny. He is fond of smoothing his face with them; he brings them both up to his ears and works them forward like slow fans. Transformation indeed. I defy you to recognise him for the same man--except for a faint reminiscence about his tail.

But all's of a piece. The crossing-sweeper now has s.h.a.ggy legs which end in hoofs. His way of looking at young people is very unpleasant;--and one had always thought him such a kindly old man. The butcher's boy--what a torso!--is walking with his arm round the waist of the young lady in Number seven. These are lovers, you see; but it's mostly on her side. He tilts up her chin and gives her a kiss before he goes; and she stands looking after him with s.h.i.+ning eyes, hoping that he will turn round before he gets to the corner. But he doesn't.

Wait, now, wait, wait--who is this lovely, straining, beating creature darting here and there about the square, bruising herself, poor beautiful thing, against the railings? A sylph, a caught fairy?

Surely, surely, I know somebody--is it?--It can't be. That careworn lady? G.o.d in Heaven, is it she? Enough! Show me no more. I will show you no more, my dear sir, if it agitates you; but I confess that I have come to regard it as one of the most interesting spectacles in London. The mere information--to say nothing of the amus.e.m.e.nt--which I have derived from it would fill a volume; but if it did, I may add, I myself should undoubtedly fill a cell in Holloway. I will therefore spare you what I know about the Doctor's wife, and what happens to Lieutenant-Colonel Storter when I see him through these windows--I could never have believed it unless I had seen it. These things are not done, I know; but observed in this medium they seem quite ordinary. Lastly--for I can't go through the catalogue--I will speak of the air as I see it from here. My dear sir, the air is alive, thronged with life. Spirits, forms, lovely immaterial diaphanous shapes, are weaving endless patterns over the face of the day. They s.h.i.+ne like salmon at a weir, or they darken the sky as redwings in the autumn fields; they circle, shrieking as they flash, like swallows at evening; they battle and wrangle together; or they join hands and whirl about the square in an endless chain. Of their beauty, their grace of form and movement, of the s.h.i.+fting filmy colour, hue blending in hue, of their swiftness, their glancing eyes, their exuberant joy or grief I cannot now speak. Beside them one man may well seem rat, and another goat. Beside them, indeed, you look for nothing else. And if I go on to hint that the owner of these windows is of them, though imprisoned in my house; that he does at times join them in their streaming flights beyond the housetops, and does at times carry with him his half-bewildered, half-shocked and wholly delighted fellow lodgers, I have come to the end of my tether and your credulity, and, for the time at least, have flowered myself to death. The figure is as good as Plato's though my Pegasus will never stable in his stall.

We may believe ourselves to be two persons, at least, in one, and I fancy that one at least of them is a constant. So far as my own pair is concerned, either one of them has never grown up at all, or he was born whole and in a flash, as the fairies are. Such as he was, at any rate, when I was ten years old, such he is now when I am heavily more than ten; and the other of us, very conscious of the flight of time and of other things with it, is free to confess that he has little more hold of his fellow with all this authority behind him than he had when we commenced partners.h.i.+p. He has some, and thinks himself lucky, since the bond between the pair is of such a nature as to involve a real partners.h.i.+p--a partners.h.i.+p full of perplexity to the working member of it, the ordinary forensic creature of senses, pa.s.sions, ambitions, and self-indulgences, the eating, sleeping, vainglorious, a.s.sertive male of common experience--and it is not to be denied that it has been fruitful, nor again that by some freak of fate or fortune the house has kept a decent front to the world at large. It is still solvent, still favourably regarded by the police. It is not, it never will be, a mere cage of demons; its walls have not been fretted to transparency; no pa.s.sing eye can detect revelry behind its decent stucco; no pa.s.sing ear thrill to cries out of the dark. No, no.

Troubles we may have; but we keep up appearances. The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and if it be a wise one, keepeth it to itself. I am not going to be so foolish as to deny divergences of opinion, even of practice, between the pair in me; but I flatter myself that I have not allowed them to become a common nuisance, a cause of scandal, a stumbling-block, a rock of offence, or anything of that kind. Uneasy tenant, wayward partner as my recondite may be, he has had a relations.h.i.+p with my forensic which at times has touched cordiality.

Influential he has not been, for his colleague has always had the upper hand and been in the public eye. He may have instigated to mischief, but has not often been allowed to complete his purpose. If I am a respectable person it is not his fault. He seeks no man's respect. If he has occasionally lent himself to moral ends, it has been without enthusiasm, for he has no morals of his own, and never did have any. On the other hand, he is by nature too indifferent to temporal circ.u.mstances to go about to corrupt his partner. His main desire has ever been to be let alone. Anything which tended to tighten the bonds which held him to his co-tenant would have been a thing to avoid. He desires liberty, and nothing less will content him. This he will only have by inaction, by mewing his sempiternal youth in his cage and on his perch.

But the tie uniting the pair of us is of such a nature that neither can be uninfluenced by the other. It is just that you should hear both sides of the case. My forensic, eating and arguing self has bullied my other into hypocrisy over and over again. He has starved him, deprived him of his holidays, ignored him, ridiculed him, snubbed him mercilessly. This is severe treatment, you'll allow, and it's worse even than it seems. For the unconscionable fellow, owing to this coheirs.h.i.+p which he pretends to disesteem, has been made privy to experiences which must not only have been extraordinary to so plain and humdrum a person, but which have been, as I happen to know, of great importance to him, and which--to put the thing at its highest--have lifted him, dull dog as he is, into regions where the very dogs have wings. Out upon it! But he has been in and out with his victim over leagues of s.p.a.ce where not one man in ten thousand has been privileged to fare. He has been familiar all his life with scenes, with folk, with deeds undreamed of by thirty-nine and three-quarters out of forty millions of people, and by that quarter-million only known as nursery tales. Not only so, but he has been awakened to the significance of common things, having at hand an interpreter, and been enabled to be precise where Wordsworth was vague. He has known Zeus in the thunder, in the lightning beheld the shaking of the dread aegis. In the river source he has seen the breasted nymph; he has seen the Oreads stream over the bare hillside.

There are men who see these things and don't believe them, others who believe but don't see. He has both seen and believed. The painted, figured universe has for him a new shape; whispering winds and falling rain speak plainly to his understanding. He has seen trees as men walking. His helot has unlocked the world behind appearance and made him free of the Spirits of Natural Fact who abide there. If he is not the debtor of his comrade--and he protests the debt--he should be. But the rascal laps it all up, as a cat porridge, without so much as a wag of the tail for Thank-you. Such are the exorbitant overlords in mortal men, who pa.s.s for reputable persons, with a chief seat at feasts.

Such things, you may say, read incredibly, but, _mutatis mutandis_, I believe them to be common, though unrecorded, experience. I deprecate in advance questions designed to test the accuracy of my eyesight or the ingenuous habit of my pen. I have already declared that the windows of my first-floor lodger are of such properties that they show you, in Xenophon's phrase, t? ??ta te ?? ??ta, ?a? t? ? ??ta ??

??? ???a. Now consider it from his side. If I were to tell the owner of those windows that I saw the policeman at the corner, a helmeted, blue-tunicked, chin-scratching, ponderous man, some six foot in his boots, how would he take it? Would he not mock me? What, that rat?

Ridiculous! And what on earth could I reply? I tell you, the whole affair is one of windows, or, sometimes, of personally-conducted travel; and who is Guide and who Guided, is one of those nice questions in psychology which perhaps we are not yet ready to handle.

Of the many speculations as to the nature of the subliminal Self I have never found one to be that he may be a fairy prisoner, occasionally on parole. But I think that not at all unlikely. May not metempsychosis be a scourge of two worlds? If the soul of my grandam might fitly inhabit a bird, might not a Fairy ruefully inhabit the person of my grandam? If Fairy G.o.dmothers, perchance, were Fairy Grandmothers! I have some evidence to place before the reader which may induce him to consider this hypothesis. Who can doubt, at least, that Sh.e.l.ley's was not a case where the not-human was a prisoner in the human? Who can doubt that of Blake's? And what was the result, forensically? Sh.e.l.ley was treated as a scoundrel and Blake as a madman. Sh.e.l.ley, it was said, broke the moral law, and Blake transcended common sense; but the first, I reply, was in the guidance of a being to whom the laws of this world and the accidents of it meant nothing at all; and to the second a wisdom stood revealed which to human eyes was foolishness. Windows! In either case there was a martyrdom, and human exasperation appeased by much broken gla.s.s. Let us not, however, condemn the wreckers of windows. Who is to judge even them? Who is to say even of their harsh and cruel reprisals that they were not excusable? May not they too have been ridden by some wild spirit within them, which goaded them to their beastly work? But if the acceptance of the doctrine of multiple personality is going to involve me in the reconsideration of criminal jurisprudence, I must close this essay.

I will close it with the sentence of another philosopher who has considered deeply of these questions. "It is to be observed," he says, "that the laws of human conduct are precisely made for the conduct of this world of Men, in which we live, breed, and pay rent. They do not affect the Kingdom of the Dogs, nor that of the Fishes; by a parity of reasoning they need not be supposed to obtain in the Kingdom of Heaven, in which the schoolmen discovered the citizens dwelling in nine spheres, apart from the blessed immigrants, whose privileges did not extend so near to the Heart of the Presence. How many realms there may be between mankind's and that ultimate object of pure desire cannot at present be known, but it may be affirmed with confidence that any denizen of any one of them, brought into relation with human beings, would act, and reasonably act, in ways which to men might seem harsh and unconscionable, without sanction or convenience. Such a being might murder one of the ratepayers of London, compound a felony, or enter into a conspiracy to depose the King himself, and, being detected, very properly be put under restraint, or visited with chastis.e.m.e.nt, either deterrent or vindictive, or both. But the true inference from the premises would be that although duress or banishment from the kingdom might be essential, yet punishment, so-called, ought not to be visited upon the offender. For he or she could not be _nostri juris_, and that which were abominable to us might well be reasonable to him or her, and indeed a fulfilment of the law of his being. Punishment, therefore, could not be exemplary, since the person punished exemplified nothing to Mankind; and if vindictive, then would be shocking, since that which is vindicated, in the mind of the victim either did not exist, or ought not. The Ancient Greek who withheld from the sacrifice to Showery Zeus because a thunder-bolt destroyed his hayrick, or the Egyptian who manumitted his slaves because a G.o.d took the life of his eldest son, was neither a pious, nor a reasonable person."

There is much debatable matter in this considered opinion.

A BOY IN THE WOOD

I had many bad qualities as a child, of which I need mention only three. I was moody, irresolute, and hatefully reserved. Fate had already placed me the eldest by three years of a large family. Add to the eminence thus attained intentions which varied from hour to hour, a will so little in accordance with desire that I had rather give up a cherished plan than fight for it, and a secretive faculty equalled only by the magpie, and you will not wonder when I affirm that I lived alone in a household of a dozen friendly persons. As a set-off and consolation to myself I had very strongly the power of impersonation.

I could be within my own little ent.i.ty a dozen different people in a day, and live a life thronged with these companions or rivals; and yet this set me more solitary than ever, for I could never appear in any one of my characters to anybody else. But alone and apart, what worlds I inhabited! Worlds of fact and worlds of fiction. At nine years old I knew Nelson's ardour and Wellesley's phlegm; I had Napoleon's egotism, Galahad's purity, Lancelot's pa.s.sion, Tristram's melancholy. I reasoned like Socrates and made Phaedo weep; I persuaded like Saint Paul and saw the throng on Mars' Hill sway to my words. I was by turns Don Juan and Don Quixote, Tom Jones and Mr. Allworthy, Hamlet and his uncle, young Shandy and his. You will gather that I was a reader. I was, and the people of my books stepped out of their pages and inhabited me. Or, to change the figure, I found in every book an open door, and went in and dwelt in its world. Thus I lived a thronged and busy life, a secret life, full of terror, triumph, wonder, frantic enterprise, a n.o.ble and gallant figure among my peers, while to my parents, brothers and sisters I was an incalculable, fitful creature, often lethargic and often in the sulks. They saw me mooning in idleness and were revolted; or I walked dully the way I was bid and they despaired of my parts. I could not explain myself to them, still less justify, having that miserable veil of reserve close over my mouth, like a yashmak. To my father I could not speak, to my mother I did not; the others, being my juniors all, hardly existed. Who is to declare the motives of a child's mind? What was the nature of this reticence? Was it that my real habit was reverie? Was it, as I suspect, that const.i.tutional timidity made me diffident? I was a coward, I am very sure, for I was always highly imaginative. Was it, finally, that I was dimly conscious of matters which I despaired of putting clearly? Who can say? And who can tell me now whether I was cursed or blessed? Certainly, if it had been possible to any person my senior to share with me my daily adventures, I might have conquered the cowardice from which I suffered such terrible reverses. But it was not. I was the eldest of a large family, and apparently the easiest to deal with of any of it. I was what they call a tractable child, being, in fact, too little interested in the world as it was to resent any duties cast upon me. It was not so with the others. They were high-spirited little creatures, as often in mischief as not, and demanded much more pains then I ever did. What they demanded they got, what I did not demand I got not: "Lo, here is alle! What shold I more seye?"

How it was that, taking no interest in my actual surroundings, I became aware of unusual things behind them I cannot understand. It is very difficult to differentiate between what I imagined and what I actually perceived. It was a favourite string of my poor father's plaintive lyre that I had no eyes. He was a great walker, a poet, and a student of nature. Every Sunday of his life he took me and my brother for a long tramp over the country, the intense spiritual fatigue of which exercise I should never be able to describe. I have a sinking of the heart, even now, when I recall our setting out.

Intolerable labour! I saw nothing and said nothing. I did nothing but plug one dull foot after the other. I felt like some chained slave going to the hulks, and can well imagine that my companions must have been very much aware of it. My brother, whose nature was much happier than mine, who dreamed much less and observed much more, was the life of these woeful excursions. Without him I don't think that my father could have endured them. At any rate, he never did. I amazed, irritated, and confounded him at most times, but in nothing more than my apathy to what enchanted him.[1] The birds, the flowers, the trees, the waters did not exist for me in my youth. The world for me was uninhabited, a great empty cage. People pa.s.sed us, or stood at their doorways watching us, but I never saw them. If by chance I descried somebody coming whom it would be necessary to salute, or to whom I might have to speak, I turned aside to avoid them. I was not only shy to a fault, as a diffident child must be, but the world of sense either did not exist for me or was thrust upon me to my discomfort.

And yet all the while, as I moved or sat, I was surrounded by a stream of being, of infinite const.i.tuents, aware of them to this extent that I could converse with them without sight or speech. I knew they were there, I knew them singing, whispering, screaming. They filled my understanding not my senses. I did not see them but I felt them. I knew not what they said or sang, but had always the general sense of their thronging neighbourhood.

[Footnote 1: And me also when I was enabled at a later day to perceive them. I am thankful to remember and record for my own comfort that that day came not too late for my enchantment to overtake his and proceed in company.]

I enlarge upon this because I think it justifies me in adding that, observing so little, what I did observe with my bodily eyes must almost certainly have been observable. But now let the reader judge.

The first time I ever saw a creature which was really outside ordinary experience was in the late autumn of my twelfth year. My brother, next in age to me, was nine, my eldest sister eight. We three had been out walking with our mother, and were now returning at dusk to our tea through a wood which covered the top of a chalk down. I remember vividly the scene. The carpet of drenched leaves under bare branches, the thin spear-like shafts of the underwood, the grey lights between, the pale frosty sky overhead with the sickle moon low down in it. I remember, too, various sensations, such as the sudden chill which affected me as the crimson globe of the sun disappeared; and again how, when we emerged from the wood, I was enheartened by the sight of the village shrouded under chimney smoke and by the one or two twinkling lights dotted here and there about the dim wolds.

In the wood it was already twilight and very damp. Perhaps I had been tired, more likely bored--as I always was when I was not being somebody else. I remember that I had found the path interminable. I had been silent, as I mostly was, while the other two had chattered and played about our mother; and when presently I stayed behind for a purpose I remember that I made no effort to catch them up. I knew the way perfectly, of course, and had no fear of the dark. Oddly enough I had no fear of that. I was far less imaginative in the night than in the day. Besides that, by the time I was ready to go after them I had much else to think of.

I must have been looking at him for some time before I made out that he was there. So you may peer into a thicket a hundred times and see nothing, and then a trick of the light or a flutter of the mood and you see creatures where you had been sure was nothing. As children will, I had stayed longer than I need, looking and wondering into the wood, not observing but yet absorbing the effects of the lights and shades. The trees were sapling chestnuts if I am not mistaken, Spanish chestnuts, and used for hop-poles in those parts. Their leaves decay gradually, the fleshy part, so to speak, dropping away from the articulation till at last bleached skeleton leaves remain and flicker at every sigh of the wind. The ground was densely carpeted with other leaves in the same state, or about to become so. The silver grey was cross-hatched by the purple lines of the serried stems, and as the view receded this dipped into blue and there lost itself. It was very quiet--a windless fall of the light. To-day I should find it most beautiful; and even then, I suspect, I felt its beauty without knowing it to be so. Looking into it all without realising it, I presently and gradually did realise something else: a shape, a creature, a thing of form and pressure--not a wraith, not, I am quite certain, a trick of the senses.

It was under a clump of the chestnut stems, kneeling and sitting on its heels, and it was watching me with the bright, quick eyes of a mouse. If I were to say that my first thought was of some peering and waiting animal, I should go on to qualify the thought by reference to the creature's eyes. They were eyes which, like all animals', could only express one thing at a time. They expressed now attention, the closest: not fear, not surprise, not apprehension of anything that I might be meditating against their peace, but simply minute attention.

The absence of fear, no doubt, marked their owner off from the animals of common acquaintance; but the fact that they did not at the same time express the being itself showed him to be different from our human breed. For whatever else the human pair of eyes may reveal, it reveals the looker.

The eyes of this creature revealed nothing of itself except that it was watching me narrowly. I could not even be sure of its s.e.x, though I believe it to have been a male, and shall hereafter treat of it as such. I could see that he was young; I thought about my own age. He was very pale, without being at all sickly--indeed, health and vigour and extreme vivacity were implicit in every line and expressed in every act; he was clear-skinned, but almost colourless. The shadow under his chin, I remember, was bluish. His eyes were round, when not narrowed by that closeness of his scrutiny of me, and though probably brown, showed to be all black, with pupil indistinguishable from iris.

The effect upon me was of black, vivid black, unintelligent eyes--which see intensely but cannot translate. His hair was dense and rather long. It covered his ears and touched his shoulders. It was pushed from his forehead sideways in a thick, in a solid fold, as if it had been the corner of a frieze cape thrown back. It was dark hair, but not black; his neck was very thin. I don't know how he was dressed--I never noticed such things; but in colour he must have been inconspicuous, since I had been looking at him for a good time without seeing him at all. A sleeveless tunic, I think, which may have been brown, or grey, or silver-white. I don't know. But his knees were bare--that I remember; and his arms were bare from the shoulder.

I standing, he squatting on his heels, the pair of us looked full at one another. I was not frightened, no more was he. I was excited, and full of interest; so, I think, was he. My heart beat double time. Then I saw, with a curious excitement, that between his knees he held a rabbit, and that with his left hand he had it by the throat. Now, what is extraordinary to me about this discovery is that there was nothing shocking in it.

I saw the rabbit's wild and panic-blown eye, I saw the bright white rim of it, and recognised its little added terror of me even in the midst of its anguish. That must have been the conventional fright of a beast of chase, an instinct to fear rather than an emotion; for of emotions the poor thing must have been having its fill. It was not till I saw its mouth horribly open, its lips curled back to show its shelving teeth that I could have guessed at what it was suffering. But gradually I apprehended what was being done. Its captor was squeezing its throat. I saw what I had never seen before, and have never seen since, I saw its tongue like a pale pink petal of a flower dart out as the pressure drove it. Revolting sight as that would have been to me, witnessed in the world, here, in this dark wood, in this outland presence, it was nothing but curious. Now, as I watched and wondered, the being, following my eyes' direction, looked down at the huddled thing between his thighs, and just as children squeeze a snap-dragon flower to make it open and shut its mouth, so precisely did he, pressing or releasing the windpipe, cause that poor beast to throw back its lips and dart its dry tongue. He did this many times while he watched it; and when he looked up at me again, and while he continued to look at me, I saw that his cruel fingers, as by habit, continued the torture, and that in some way he derived pleasure from the performance--as if it gratified him to be sure that effect was following on cause inevitably.

I have never, I believe, been cruel to an animal in my life. I hated cruelty then as I hate it now. I have always s.h.i.+rked the sight of anything in pain from my childhood onwards. Yet the fact is that not only did I nothing to interfere in what I saw going on, but that I was deeply interested and absorbed in it. I can only explain that to myself now, by supposing that I knew then, that the creature in front of me was not of my own kind, and was not, in fact, outraging any law of its own being. Is not that possible? May I not have collected unawares so much out of created nature? I am unable to say: all I am clear about is that here was a thing in the semblance of a boy doing what I had never observed a boy do, and what if I ever had observed a boy do, would have flung me into a transport of rage and grief. Here, therefore, was a thing in the semblance of a boy who was no boy at all. So much must have been as certain to me then as it is indisputable now.

One doesn't, at that age, reason things out; one knows them, and is dumb, though unconvinced, before powerful syllogisms to the contrary.

All children are so, confronted by strange phenomena. And yet I had facts to go upon if, child as I was, I had been capable of inference.

I need only mention one. If this creature had been human, upon seeing that I was conscious of its behaviour to the rabbit, it would either have stopped the moment it perceived that I did not approve or was not amused, or it would have continued deliberately out of bravado. But it neither stopped nor hardily continued. It watched its experiment with interest for a little, then, finding me more interesting, did not discontinue it, but ceased to watch it. He went on with it mechanically, dreamingly, as if to the excitation of some other sense than sight, that of feeling, for instance. He went on lasciviously, for the sake of the pleasure so to be had. In other words, being without self-consciousness and ignorant of shame, he must have been non-human.

After all, too, it must be owned that I cannot have been confronted by the appearance for more than a few minutes. Allow me three to have been spent before I was aware of him, three more will be the outside I can have pa.s.sed gazing at him. But I speak of "minutes," of course, referring to my ostensible self, that inert, apathetic child who followed its mother, that purblind creature through whose muddy lenses the pent immortal had been forced to see his familiar in the wood, and perchance to dress in form and body what, for him, needed neither to be visible. It was this outward self which was now driven by circ.u.mstances to resume command--the command which for "three minutes" by his reckoning he had relinquished. Both of us, no doubt, had been much longer there had we not been interrupted. A woodman, homing from his work, came heavily up the path, and like a guilty detected rogue I turned to run and took my incorruptible with me. Not until I had pa.s.sed the man did I think to look back. The partner of my secret was not then to be seen. Out of sight out of mind is the way of children. Out of mind, then, withdrew my incorruptible. I hurried on, ran, and overtook my party half-way down the bare hillside. I still remember the feeling of relief with which I swept into the light, felt the cold air on my cheeks, and saw the intimacy of the village open out below me. I am almost sure that my eyes held tears at the a.s.surance of the sweet, familiar things which I knew and could love. There, literally, were my own people: that which I had left behind must be unlawful because it was so strange. In the warmth and plenty of the lighted house, by the schoolroom table, before the cosily covered teapot, amid the high talk, the hot toast and the jam, my experience in the dusky wood seemed unreal, lawless, almost too terrible to be remembered--never, never to be named. It haunted me for many days, and gave rise to curious wonderings now and then. As I pa.s.sed the patient, humble beasts of common experience--a carter's team nodding, jingling its bra.s.ses, a donkey, patient, humble, hobbled in a paddock, dogs sniffing each other, a cat tucked into a cottage window, I mused doubtfully and often whether we had touched the threshold of the heart of their mystery. But for the most part, being const.i.tutionally timid, I was resolute to put the experience out of mind. When next I chanced to go through the wood there is no doubt I peered askance to right and left among the trees; but I took good care not to desert my companions. That which I had seen was unaccountable, therefore out of bounds. But though I never saw him there again I have never forgotten him.

HARKNESS'S FANCY