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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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TAVERNER looked at a card that had been brought to him. 'Rhodes,' he said, 'if the County take to calling, I shall put up the shutters and write 'Ichabod' upon them, for I shall know that the glory is departed. Now what in the name of Beelzebub, Asmodius, and a few other of my friends to whom you have not been introduced, does this woman want with me?'
Taverner, his methods and his nursing home, were looked upon askance by the local gentry, and as he, for his part, did not care to prescribe for measles and influenza, we seldom came into contact with our neighbours. That my colleague was a man of profound learning and cosmopolitan polish would have availed him nothing at the local tea parties, which judge a man by his capacity to avoid giving offence.
A narrow-hipped, thin lipped woman was ushered into the room. The orderly waves of her golden hair and the perfection of her porcelain complexion bore evidence to the excellence of her maid and the care that was devoted to her toilette. Her clothes had that upholstered effect which is only obtained when the woman is made to fit the garment, not the garment the woman.
'I want to consult you,' she said, 'about my youngest daughter, she is a great source of anxiety to us. We fear her mind is not developing properly.'
'What are her symptoms?' asked Taverner with his most professional manner.
'She was always a difficult child,' said the mother. 'We had a great deal of trouble with her, so different to the others. Finally we stopped trying to bring her up with them, and got her special governesses and put her under medical supervision.'
'Which I suppose included strict discipline,' said Taverner.
'Of course,' said our visitor. 'She has been most carefully looked after; we have left nothing undone, though it has been a great expense, and I must say that the measures we took have been successful up to a point; her terrible outbreaks of wildness and temper have practically ceased, we have seen nothing of them for a year, but her development seems to have been arrested.'
'I must see your daughter before I can give an opinion,' said Taverner.
'She is out in the car,' said her mother. 'I will have her brought in.'
SHE appeared in the care of her governess, who looked the
excellent disciplinarian she was reported to be. As a Prussian
drill sergeant of the old regime, she would have found her
métier. The girl herself was a most curious study. She was
extraordinarily like her mother. There was the same thin figure,
though in the case of the mother the angularities had been padded
out by art, whereas in the daughter they came glaringly through
her garments, which looked as if she had slept in them. Lank,
mouse-coloured hair was wound round her head in heavy greasy
coils; a muddy complexion, fish-like eyes, and general air of
awkwardness and sprawling limbs completed the unpleasing
picture.
Huddled up on the sofa between the two women, who seemed to belong to another species, and who discussed her before her face as if she had been an inanimate object, the girl looked a typical low-grade defective. Now, defectives fill me with nothing but disgust, my pity I reserve for their families, but the girl before me did not inspire me with disgust, but only pity. She reminded me of a caged lark in some wretched animal dealer's shop, its feathers dull with dirt and frayed with the bars, apathetic, unhealthy, miserable, which will not sing because it cannot fly. What nature had intended her to be it was impossible to say, for she had been so thoroughly worked over by the two ardent disciplinarians who flanked her that nothing of the original material remained. Her personality displeased them, and they had effectually repressed it, but alas, there was nothing they could put in its place, and they were left with an unensouled automaton which they dragged off to alienist after alienist in the hopeless attempt to get the damage repaired while maintaining the conditions that had done the damage.
I awoke from my abstraction to hear the mother, who evidently had a taste for economy where the ugly duckling was concerned, bargaining shrewdly with Taverner with regard to fees, and he, who was always more interested in the human than the commercial aspect of the work was meeting her more than half way.
'Taverner,' I said as soon as the door closed behind them, 'what they are paying won't cover her board and keep, let alone treatment. They're not paupers, look at the car. Hang it all, why don't you make 'em fund up?'
'My dear boy,' said Taverner mildly, 'I have got to undercut the governess or I shouldn't get the job.'
'Do you think the job is worth having at that price?' I growled, for I hate to see a man like Taverner imposed upon.
'Hard to say,' he replied. 'They have driven a square peg into a round hole with such determination that they have split the peg, but to what extent we cannot tell until we have got it out of the hole. But what are your impressions of our new patient? First impressions are generally the truest. What reaction does she awake in you? Those are the best indications in a psychological case.'
'She seems to have given life up as a bad job,' I replied. 'She's an unlovely object, and yet she is not repellent. I don't so much pity her as sympathize with her, there is a difference you know. I can't put it clearer than that.'
'You have put it very clearly indeed,' said Taverner. 'The distinction between pity and sympathy is the touchstone in this case; we pity that which we ourselves are not, but we sympathize when, but for the grace of God, there goes you or I. You feel kinship for that soul because, whatever the husk of her may have been reduced to, she is "one of us," marred in the making.'
'And marred with a heavy hand,' I added. 'I should think it would have been a case of the S.P.C.C., if they had been poor people.'
'You are wrong,' said Taverner. 'It is a case for the S.P.C.A.' With which cryptic remark he left me.
THE next day the new patient, who answered to the
inappropriate name of Diana, appeared. She looked about fifteen,
but as a matter of fact was nearer eighteen. Gaunt, slovenly,
ungainly, and morose, she had all the furtive ineptitude of a dog
that has been ruined by harsh treatment. She was certainly not an
addition to the social amenities of the place, and I should not
have been surprised if Taverner had segregated her, but he did
not seem disposed to, neither did he place her under any
supervision, but gave her complete freedom. Unaccustomed to this
lack of restraint, she did not seem to know how to employ
herself, and slunk about as if at any moment outraged powers
might exact retribution for some misdeed.
There was a good deal of comment upon the way our new patient was neglected, and she was certainly not a credit to the establishment, but I began to see what Taverner was driving at. Left entirely to her own devices the girl was beginning to find her level. If she wanted food, she had to prowl into the dining-room somewhere about the time it was being served; when her hands became uncomfortably sticky, she washed them, as the towels bore evidence, for we could not always observe any difference in the hands. And in addition to all this she was thinking and watching all that went on about her.
'She will wake up presently,' said Taverner, 'and then we shall see how the primitive wild animal will adapt itself to civilized society.'
We were summoned one day by the outraged matron and went along to Diana's den; one could hardly call it a room after she had occupied it for 24 hours. As we went down the corridor a strong smell of burning assailed our nostrils, and when we arrived we found the young lady in question sitting cross-legged on the hearth rug wrapped in the bedspread, a bonfire of the whole of her personal belongings smouldering in the fireplace.
'Why have you burnt your clothes?' enquired Taverner, as if this interesting and harmless eccentricity were a daily occurrence.
'I don't like them.'
'What is wrong with them?'
'They are not "me."'
'Come along to the recreation room and dig among the theatrical costumes and see if you can find something you like.'
We set off for the recreation room, Diana, swathed in her bed-spread, pattering behind Taverner's tall form, and the disgusted matron bringing up the rear of the ridiculous procession. I had no mind to play nursery maid to Miss Diana, so I left them to their own devices and went along the corridor to see a man we had there of the name of Tennant. His was a dreary existence, for, although a charming man when in his normal state, he had made several attempts at suicide, and had been placed with us by his family as a voluntary patient as an alternative to certification and an asylum. He could not be called mad in the ordinary sense of the word, but as one of those curious cases of tedium vitae, the desire for life had failed him. What tragedy lay hidden we did not know, for Taverner, unlike the psychoanalysts, never asked questions, he had his own way of finding out what he wanted to know and despised all such clumsy machinery.
To my surprise I found Tennant turning over a pile of music. I elicited by my questioning that he not only had a great love of music, but had studied seriously with a view to making a profession of it. This was news to us, for his family had given no hint of this when they placed him with us, merely leading us to believe that his means were sufficient for existence, but not for any fullness of life, and that he had passively resigned himself to his lot, sinking into a melancholy in consequence.
I told Taverner of this when we were having our usual after dinner chat in the office, half gossip, half report, which took place nightly while we smoked our cigars. 'So,' he said, and rose forthwith and went up to Tennant's room, fetched him down, set him at the piano, and bade him play. Tennant, who, started off with a push, went on like an automaton till the impulse died down, played fluently, but without the slightest feeling. I have little sense of music, but this hurdy-gurdy rendering distressed even me. Several of the other patients present in the drawing room made their escape.
At the end of the piece he made no attempt to start another, but sat motionless for a while; Taverner, likewise, sat silent, watching him to see what he would do next, as his custom was with his patients. Tennant slowly twisted round the revolving stool till he sat with his back to the keyboard and his face to us, with his hands hanging limply between his knees, gazing intently at the toes of his shoes. He was a prematurely aged man of 35 or 36. His hair iron-grey, his face deeply lined. The brow was low but broad, the mouth full and curving, the eyes set well apart were very bright on the few occasions when the lids were raised sufficiently to let one see them, but the ears were the thing that attracted my attention. I had not noticed them before, for when he came to us his hair was rather long, but Matron had fallen upon him with a pair of automatic hair clippers and given him such a shearing that everything now stood revealed, and I saw that the convolutions of the ear were so arranged that they formed a little peak at the apex that put me in mind of Hawthorne's story of the Marble Fawn and his little tufted ears.
While I was making this inventory Tennant had slowly raised his eyes to ours, and I saw that they were strangely luminous and animal, gleaming green in the shaded lamp, as a dog's will at night.
'I have got a violin in my room,' he said in a toneless voice.
It was the first sign of initiative he had shown, and I went off forthwith to fetch his instrument down. Taverner gave him the note on the piano, but he brushed it aside and tuned his fiddle according to his own liking, to some pitch known only to himself. When he first began to play, it sounded horribly flat, but after a few moments we became accustomed to the strange intervals, and, for me at any rate, they began to exercise an extraordinary fascination.
They exercised a fascination for someone else also, for out of a dark corner where she had tucked herself away unobserved by us, Diana came creeping; for a moment I hardly realized who it was, for a profound change had been wrought in her since the morning. Out of the garments available for her in our theatrical wardrobe she had chosen a little green tunic we had had for Puck when we did A Midsummer Night's Dream. Someone (I found out afterwards it was Taverner) had 'Bobbed' her hair; long green stockings showed under the tagged edge of the tunic and revealed the lean and angular lines of her limbs. Some freak of imagination carried my mind back to my school days, and as I sat listening to the strange wailing of the violin, in which the voices of sea-gulls and moor-birds and all creatures of barren and windy spaces seemed to be crying and calling to each other, I seemed to see myself coming in from hare and hounds, glowing with the beat of wind and rain, to tub and change in the steam and babel of the dressing-rooms. For a moment, under the magic of that music, the sense of power and prestige was mine again, for I had been a great man in my school, though of the rank and file in my profession. Once again I was Captain of the Games, running my eye over the new boys in the hope of finding something promising, and then in a flash I found the linking idea that had taken my mind back to those dead and gone days—the sprawling limbs in the long green stockings were those of a runner. The lay-on of the muscles, the length of the bones, all denoted speed and spring. She might not be a hopeful sight for a match-making mamma, but she would have rejoiced the heart of a captain of the games.
Matron appeared at the door like an avenging Nemesis; the hour for lights-out was long overpast, but in our absorption in the music we had forgotten it. She looked at me reproachfully, we were usually allies in upholding discipline, but tonight I felt like a rebellious urchin, and wanted to join Tennant and Diana and the other unmanageables in some outrageous escapade against law and order.
The interruption broke the spell. For a moment Diana's eyes flashed, and I thought we were going to be treated to one of the exhibitions of temper we had heard about but not yet seen. They faded, however, to their usual fish-like neutrality, and the gawky female hobbledehoy shambled off at the bidding of authority.
Tennant, however, turned at bay for a minute, recalled from some upland pasture of the spirit where he had found freedom, and much inclined to resent the disturbance. My hand on his arm, and a word of authority in his ear, however, soon restored him to normal, and he too trudged off in the wake of the matron.
'Damn that woman,' said Taverner as he secured the windows, 'she is no use for this work.'
I stepped outside to fasten the shutters, but paused arrested on the threshold.
'By Jove, Taverner,' I exclaimed. 'Smell this!'
He joined me on the terrace and together we inhaled the odour of a garden in blossom. Frost lay white upon the grass, and the bleak March wind cut keenly, but the air was full of the odour of flowers, with an undercurrent of sun-warmed pine-woods. Something stirred in the shadow of the creepers, and a huge hare shot past us with a scurry of gravel and gained the shelter of the shrubbery.
'Good gracious,' I exclaimed. 'Whatever brought him here?'
'Ah, what indeed?' said Taverner. 'We should know some rather important things if we knew that.'
I had hardly reached my room when I was summoned by a loud knocking at the door. I opened it to find one of the patients clad only in his pyjamas.
'There is something wrong in Tennant's room,' he said. 'I think he is trying to hang himself.'
He was right. Tennant suspended by the cord of his dressing-gown, swung from the cornice pole. We cut him down, and after some hard work at artificial respiration, got him round, and even Taverner was convinced that constant supervision was the only way of dealing with him. Next day he let me send for a male nurse, but the train that brought him also took away the matron, a much-injured woman, not altogether soothed by the generous cheque and excellent testimonial Taverner had bestowed upon her when he dismissed her without either cause or notice.
SUCH incidents do not cause a three days wonder in a mental
home, and we settled down to our routine next morning.
Nevertheless I could not get out of my mind the gull-like wailing
of the violin and the strange odour of flowers. They seemed to go
together, and in some subtle way they had unsettled and disturbed
me. Though spring had not shown itself, a spring restlessness was
upon me. Unable to endure the closeness of the office, I set wide
open the French windows, letting the bitter wind blow over me as
I wrestled with the correspondence that had to be got off by the
afternoon post.
It was thus Taverner found me, and he surveyed me curiously.
'So you heard it too?' he asked.
'Heard what?' I answered impatiently, for my temper was on edge for some unknown reason.
'The call of Pan,' said my colleague, as he shut out the whirlwind.
'I am going out,' I announced, gathering up the last of the mail. Taverner nodded without comment, for which I was grateful.
What freak possessed me I do not know, but finding Diana curled up on a sofa in the lounge, I called to her as I would to a dog: 'Come on, Diana, come for a run,' and like a dog she rose and followed me. Forgetting that though a child in mind, she had reached years of womanhood, forgetting that she had neither coat, hat, nor boots, and for the matter of that, neither had I, I took her with me through the dripping shrubbery to the garden gate.
The sandy road in which the pillar box stood ended in the heather of the moor. Diana advanced tentatively to the edge of the turf and then stood looking back at me. It was so exactly like a dog asking to be taken for a run that I gave myself up to the illusion. 'Come on, Diana,' I shouted, 'Let's have a scamper.'
I raced down the path towards her, and with a bound she was off and away over the heather. Away we went as hard as we could go over the soaked black ground into the rolling mists. I was only just able to keep the figure ahead in sight, for she ran like a deer, leaping what I had to plough through.
We went straight across the level plain that had once been the bed of a lake, heading for the Devil's Jumps. Long after I was struggling for my second wind the bounding figure ahead held its pace, and I did not catch up with her until rising ground gave me the advantage. In the little pinewood on its crest she slipped on the twisted roots and came down, rolling over and over like a puppy. I tripped over the waving green legs and came down too, so heavily, however, that I winded myself.
We sat up gasping, and looked at each other, and then with one accord burst out laughing. It was the first time I had ever heard Diana laugh. Her eyes were as green as a cat's, and she showed a double row of very sharp white teeth and a pretty pink tongue. It was not human, but it was very fascinating.
We picked ourselves up and trotted home over the heather, and sneaked in at the scullery door while the maids were at tea. I felt rather uncomfortable about the whole business, and sincerely hoped no one had seen my escapade and that Diana would not speak of it.
Speech was not a habit of hers, however, but she was rich in the language of unconscious gesture and speedily announced to the petty world of the nursing home that there was an understanding between us. Her eyes gleamed green on my appearance, and she showed her sharp white teeth and little pink tongue. If she had a tail, she would have wagged it. I found all this rather disconcerting.
NEXT day, when Taverner and I went down to the post for a
breath of fresh air, we found Diana at our heels.
'Your little pet dog, I see,' said Taverner, and I mumbled something about transference of libido and fixations.
Taverner laughed. 'My dear boy,' he said, 'she is not sufficiently human to fall in love with you, so don't worry.'
At the end of the road Diana repeated her tactics of the previous day.
'What does she want?' demanded Taverner. I felt myself going an uncomfortable scarlet, and Taverner looked at me curiously.
'She wants me to run with her,' I said, thinking that the truth was the only possible explanation and that Taverner would understand it.
He did. But his reply was more disconcerting than his question.
'Well, why not?' he said. 'Go on, run with her, very good for both of you.'
I hesitated, but he would take no denial, and compelled by his will I lumbered off. But Diana saw the difference. Deep had called unto deep the previous day, but now I was one of the Philistines, and she would not run with me. Instead, she trotted in a circle and looked at me with troubled eyes, her pink tongue hidden behind drooping lips. My heart was filled with a furious hatred of Taverner and myself and all created things, and vaulting the fence, I bolted down the shrubbery and took refuge in my own room, from which I did not descend till dinner.
At that meal Diana gazed at me with her odd green eyes that almost seem to say: 'Now you know what I have felt like all these years,' and I telepathed back, 'I do. Damn everybody.'
Taverner tactfully refrained from referring to the matter, for which I was devoutly thankful. A week went by and I thought it was forgotten, when suddenly he broke silence.
'I cannot get Diana to run by herself,' he said. I squirmed, but wouldn't answer.
He went to the window and drew up the blind. A full moon shone into the room, clashing horribly with the electric light.
'It is the night of the Vernal Equinox,' said Taverner, à propos of nothing.
'Rhodes,' he said. 'I am going to try a very dangerous experiment. If I fail, there will be trouble, and if I succeed there will be a row, so put your coat on and come with me.'
IN the drawing-room we found Diana, oblivious of the good
ladies knitting jumpers round the fire, curled up on a window
seat with her nose pressed to the pane. Taverner opened the
window, and she slipped out as noiselessly as a cat; we threw our
legs over the sill and followed her.
She waited in the shadow of the house as if afraid to advance. The years of discipline had left their mark upon her, and like a cage-bird when the door is left open, she desired freedom, but had forgotten how to fly. Taverner wrapped around her a heavy tweed cape he was carrying, and putting her between us, we set out for the moors. We went by the same route that our wild flight had followed, to the pine wood that rose on its low crest out of the level of the ancient sea bed.
The Scotch firs, with their sparse tufted crests, were too scanty to make a darkness, but threw grotesque goblin shadows on the needle-carpeted ground. In a hollow of the moor a stream made water-noises away out of sight.
Taverner took the cloak from Diana's shoulders and pushed her out into the moonlight. She hesitated, and then fled timidly back to us, but Taverner, glancing at his watch pushed her out again. I was reminded of that wonderful story of jungle life in which the cubs are brought to the Council Rock so that the wolves of the pack may know and recognize them. Diana was being handed over to her own people.
We waited, while the full moon sailed across the heavens in a halo of golden cloud. Taverner glancing at his watch from time to time. The wind had dropped and in the stillness the stream sounded very loud, but though I neither saw nor heard anything, I knew that something was coming towards us through the shadow of the wood. I found myself trembling in every limb, not from fear, but excitement. Something was passing us, something big and massive, and in its train many lesser things of the same nature. Every nerve in my body began to sing, and without my volition, my foot took a step forward. But Taverner's hand on my arm restrained me.
'This is not for you, Rhodes,' he said. 'You have too much mentality to find your mating here.'
Reluctantly I let him check me. The mad fit passed, and as my eyes cleared again I saw the girl in the moonlight, and knew that she too had felt Their coming.
She turned towards Them, half in fear, half in fascination.
They lured her, but she dared not respond. Then I felt that they had surrounded her, and that she could not escape, and then I saw her surrender. She stretched out her hands towards Them, and I was sure that invisible hands clasped hers; then she raised them towards the sky, and the moon seemed to shine straight between the cupped palms into her breast; then she lowered them towards the earth, and dropping on her knee, pressed them to the ground, and sinking lower, pressed her whole body to the earth till her form hollowed the light soil to receive it.
For a while she lay quiet, and then suddenly she sprang up, and flinging out her hands like one diving, was off like an arrow in the wind.
'Quick, after her!' cried Taverner, starting me off with a blow on the shoulder, and like a flash I too was speeding down the heather paths.
But oh, the difference from our last run. Though Diana still ran like a deer, my limbs were of lead. Life seemed without savour, as if there would never again be any zest in it. Only my sense of duty kept my labouring limbs at work, and presently even that proved ineffective. I dropped further and further behind, no second wind came to ease my labouring lungs, and the figure ahead, bounding on feet of the wind, was lost among the heather.
I dropped to the ground gasping, run off my feet in the first burst. As I lay helpless in the heather, my heart pounding in my throat, I seemed to see a great streaming procession like an undisciplined army, passing across the sky. Ragged banners flapped and waved, wild, discordant, but maddening music broke here and there from the motley rout. Furry snouts on human faces, clawed paws on human limbs, green, vine-like hair falling over flashing eyes that gleamed as green, and here and there, half-frightened but half-fascinated human faces, some hanging back though lured along, others giving themselves up to the flight in a wild abandonment of glamour.
I awoke to find Taverner bending over me.
'Thank God,' he said, 'your eyes are still human.'
NO Diana appeared next day, and whether Taverner was anxious
or not, he would not reveal.
'She will come back to be fed,' was all he would vouchsafe.
The following day there was still no sign of her, and I was becoming very uneasy, for the nights were bitter though the days were warm, when, as we sat by the office fire after 'lights out,' a faint scratching was heard at the window. Taverner immediately rose and opened it, and in slipped Diana, and sank in a heap on the hearth at my feet. But it was not me she turned to, as in my embarrassment I had expected, but the fire. Taverner and I meant nothing to her.
Taverner returned to his chair, and in silence we watched her. Puck's tunic, soaked and tagged and stained out of all recognition, seemed the only possible clothing for the strange, wild, unhuman figure at our feet. Presently she sat up and ran her hands through matted hair, now steaming in the heat, and seeing me through the thatch, showed white teeth and pink tongue in her strange elfin smile, and with a quick birdlike movement, rubbed her head against my knee. After which token of recognition she returned to her enjoyment of the fire.
Taverner rose and quietly left the room. I hardly dared to breathe lest I should break the spell that kept our visitor quiet, and she should do something embarrassing or uncanny; but I need not have troubled, I meant no more to her than the rest of the furniture.
Taverner returned with a laden tray, and Diana's eyes gleamed. She looked much more human eating with a knife and fork. I had expected her to tear her food with her teeth, but ingrained habit remained.
'Diana,' said Taverner, after the completion of her meal.
She smiled.
'Aren't you going to say thank you?'
She smiled again, and with her quick, birdlike movement, rubbed her head against his knee as she had done against mine, but she did not speak. He stretched out his hand, and began to smooth and stroke the tangled mass of her hair. She snuggled down at his feet, enjoying the caress and the warmth, and presently there arose a low crooning of contentment, very like the purr of a cat.
'We have done it this time!' said Taverner.
After a while, however, Diana seemed to wake up. Her animal needs being satisfied, the human part of her began to reassert itself.
She twisted round, and resting her elbow on Taverner's knee looked up into his face.
'I came back because I was hungry,' she said.
Taverner smiled and continued to smooth her hair.
'But I shall go away again,' she added with a touch of defiance.
'You shall come and go as you please,' said Taverner. 'There will be food when you want it and the doors will never be locked.'
This seemed to please her, and she became more communicative, evidently wishing to share with us the experience through which she had passed and to receive our wonder and sympathy. That was the human side of her.
'I saw Them,' she said.
'We felt Them,' said Taverner. 'But we did not see Them.'
'No,' replied Diana. 'You would not. But then you see They are my people, I have always belonged to Them but I did not know it, and now They have found me. I shall go back,' she repeated again with conviction.
'Were you cold?' asked Taverner.
'No, only hungry,' she replied.
TAVERNER had her belongings removed to a room on the ground
floor, whose window, opening on to the shrubbery, permitted her
to come and go freely and unobserved. She never slept there,
however, but came each night after 'lights out' to the office
window. We admitted her, fed her, and after basking for a while
in the warmth of the hearth, she slipped out again into the
night. Weather made no difference to her; out into the wildest
gale she went unflinchingly and returned unharmed. Sometimes she
would talk to us in her clipped childish sentences, trying to
convey to us something of what she saw, but for the most part she
kept silence.
AT the next full moon, however, she returned bursting with
information. They had had a wonderful dance, in which she
had been allowed to take part. (We knew now why the kitchen-maid,
returning from her evening out, had had hysterics all the way up
the drive, and wound up with something very like a fit in the
servants' hall.) They had been so wonderful that she
simply had to tell us all about it, and in speaking of Them in
her limited vocabulary she used a phrase that another seer of
vision had used: They were the Lordly Ones. More she could not
tell us; words failed her, and she made strange play with her
hands as if moulding a figure in invisible clay. With quick
intuition Taverner gave her pencil and paper, and with lightning
rapidity there appeared before us the nude figure of a winged
being, drawn with amazing vigour and perfect accuracy.
No attempt had ever been made to teach Diana to draw in all the course of her arduous upbringing—it was considered sufficient if she achieved the decencies without aspiring to accomplishments—neither had she had the opportunity of studying anatomy, yet here was a figure rendered with marvellous draftsmanship and the minute accuracy of detail that is only possible in a study from life.
Diana's interest and delight was as great as ours. Here was indeed a discovery, a way of expression for her cramped and stifled soul, and in half an hour the office was strewn with drawings—a whirling snow spirit who seemed to be treading water; a tree-soul, like a gnarled human torso emerging from the trunk of a tree and blending with its branches; faeries, demons, and quaint and engaging animal studies followed each other in bewildering succession. Finally quite worn out with the tension and excitement of it, Diana consented to go to bed for the first time since that strange night of the Vernal Equinox.
Her need of a supply of paper kept Diana at the house, and her need of an audience made her seek human relationships. The artist creates not only for the pleasure of creation, but also for the pleasure of admiration, and Diana, though she might go to the woods, must needs return to her kind to display her spoils.
With her new-found harmony had come the correlation of mind and body; the long limbs no longer sprawled, but had the grace of a deer's. She was as friendly as a puppy where before she had been morose. But alas, her readiness of response exposed her to some painful knocks in the world of warped lives which is a mental home. For a moment she was crushed, and we feared that she might become again that which she had been, but she discovered that a means of retaliation as well as of expression lay in her pencil, and the discovery saved her. She drew portraits of her persecutors, stark naked (for she never drew clothes), with the anatomical detail and accuracy of all her studies, with their usual expression on their faces, but with the expression of their secret souls in every line of their bodies. These portraits appeared in conspicuous places as if by magic, and their effect can be more easily imagined than described.
DIANA had found her place in the march of life. She was no
longer the outcast, uncouth and unfriendly. Her spontaneous elfin
gaiety, which she had brought back from the woods, was charm in
itself; the mouse-coloured hair had taken on a gloss and gleam of
gold, the sallow complexion was nut-brown and rose-red, but her
springing swaying movement, her amazing vitality, were her chief
distinctions.
For she was extraordinarily vital; she drew her life from the sun and the wind and the earth, and as long as she was allowed to keep in touch with them, she glowed with an inner light, an incandescence of the spirit that blazed but did not consume.
She was the most vital thing I have ever seen. The hair of her head was so charged with electricity that it stood out in a light cloud-like aureole. The blood glowed under her skin, and if her hand touched you, sharp magnetic tinglings ran through the bare flesh.
And this strange vitality was not limited to herself, but infected everybody in her immediate neighbourhood, and they reacted to it according to temperament; some would go and sit near her as by a fire; others went nearly demented. To me she was lyrical, the wine of life; she went to my head like some intoxicating drug, I got drunk on her and saw the visions of an opium dream; without a word spoken, she lured me from my work, from my duties, from all that was human and civilized, to follow her out on the moor and commune with the beings whose orbit she seemed to have entered upon that fatal night of the Equinox.
I saw that Taverner was worried; he said no word of reproach, but silently picked up the threads I dropped; I also knew that he had cancelled certain engagements and remained at home. I was untrustworthy, and he dared not leave things to me. I loathed myself, but I could no more pull myself together than the drug-taker far gone in morphia.
A form of clairvoyance was growing fast upon me, not the piercing psychic perceptions of Taverner, who saw straight into the inner soul of men and things, but a power to perceive the subtler aspects of matter; I could distinctly see the magnetic field which surrounds every living thing, and could watch the changes in its state; presently I began to be aware of the coming and going of those unseen presences which were the gods that Diana worshipped. A strong wind, hot sun, or the bare uncultivated earth, seemed to bring them very near me, and I felt the great life of the trees. These things fed my soul and strengthened me as the touch of earth always strengthens any child of the Earth-mother.
THE days were lengthening towards the longest day; it would
soon be three months since Diana returned to her own place, and I
began to wonder how much longer Taverner would keep our now
entirely cured patient, but he gave no sign. I began to feel,
however, that Diana was now no longer a patient, but that I had
become one, and that I was being closely watched in anticipation
of a crisis that was imminent. Some abscess of the soul had to
come to a head before it could be lanced, and Taverner was
awaiting the process.
The idea was slowly growing in my mind that I might marry Diana; marriage did not express the relationship I wished to establish, but I could see no other course open to me; I did not wish to possess her, I only wanted our present relationship to continue, and that I should be free to come and go with her without running the gauntlet of censorius eyes. Taverner, I felt, knew this and fought it, and I could not see why. I could understand his objection to my compromising Diana, but I did not see why he should oppose my marriage to her. My brain, however, was in abeyance in these days, my thoughts were a series of pictures fading into each other like a phantasmagoria, and they told me afterwards that my speech had reverted to the simplicities of early childhood.
But still Taverner waited, biding his time.
THE crisis came suddenly. As the sun was setting upon the
evening of the longest day Diana appeared upon the steps of the
office window and beckoned me out. She appeared extraordinarily
beautiful, with the burning sky, behind her; the bright fluffed
hair caught the level light and shone like an aureole as she
stood with her strangely eloquent hands beckoning me out into the
gathering dusk. I knew that there was in prospect such a race
across the heather as had never yet been, and at the end of it I
should meet the Powers she worshipped face to face, and that from
that meeting my body might return to the house, but my soul would
never enter the habitations of men again. It would remain out
there in the open, with Diana and her people. I knew all this,
and with the inner vision could see the gathering of the clans
that was even now taking place.
Diana's hands called to me, and as if drawn by a spell, I rose slowly from my desk. Diana, thing of air, was calling me out to run with her. But I was not a thing of air, I was a man of flesh and blood, and in a flash of revelation I saw Diana as a beautiful woman and I knew that she was not the woman for me; to part of my nature she called, but she did not call to the whole of me, and I knew that the best in me would remain unmated and uncompanioned if I were to join Diana.
It did Diana no harm to return to Nature, because she was not capable of greater things, but there was more in me than the instincts, and I might not so return without loss to my higher self. The room was lined with books, the door leading into the laboratory stood open and the characteristic smell of the blended drugs came to me. 'Smells are surer than sights or sounds to make your heartstrings crack.' Had the wind been the other way, had the smell of the pines blown in at the open window, I think I should have gone with Diana, but it was the odour of the laboratory that came to me, and with it the memory of all that I had hoped to make of my life, and I dropped back into my chair and buried my face in my arms.
When I raised my head again the last light of the sunset had gone, and so had Diana.
THAT night my sleep was heavy and dreamless, which was a great
relief, for of late it had been troubled by strange, almost
physical impressions; the fantasies of the day becoming the
realities of the darkness; but with my rejection of Diana a spell
seemed to break, and when I awoke in the morning it was to a
normality to which I had been a stranger for many a day. My grip
on the organization of the home had come back to me, and I felt
as one who had been in exile in a foreign country and has at
length returned to his native land.
Diana I did not see for several days for she had again taken to the heather, and rumours of raids upon gardens and fowl houses by a particularly ingenious and elusive gipsy explained why she did not even return to be fed.
My conscience pricking me for my recent lapse, I took upon myself the somewhat arduous task of taking Tennant out for walks, for since his attempt at suicide we had not dared to let him go about alone. It was a dreary business, for Tennant never spoke unless he was addressed, and then only employed the unavoidable minimum of speech. He had certainly made no progress during the months he had been at the nursing home, and I was surprised that Taverner had kept him so long, for he usually declined to keep any case which he considered hopeless. I therefore concluded that he had hopes for Tennant, though in what direction they lay he did not confide to me.
We swung over the heather paths in the direction of Frensham, and I suddenly realized to my annoyance, that we were following Diana's favourite trail to the little fir-wood of magic and ill omen. I would willingly have avoided it if I could, for I did not wish to be reminded of certain incidents which I felt it was better for my peace of mind that I should forget, but there was no alternative unless we waded for a mile or two through knee-deep heather. In the light shadow of the trees we paused, Tennant gazing up the long shafts of the trunks into the dark tufted crests that looked like islands in the sky.
'Wendy's house in the tree tops!' I heard him say to himself, oblivious of my presence, and I guessed that his weary soul would love to sleep for ever in the rocking cradle of the branches. The sun drew all the incense from the firs, and the sky had that intense Italian blue that is often seen over these great wastes; a warm wind blew softly over the heather, bringing the sound of innumerable bees and faraway sheep; we flung ourselves down on the sun-warmed earth, and even Tennant, for once, seemed happy. As for me, every breath I drew of that warm radiant air brought peace and healing to my spirit.
Tennant propped against a tree, hat off, shirt open, and head thrown back against the rough red bark, sat gazing into the blue distance and whistling softly between his teeth. I lay flat on my back among the pine needles, and I think I went to sleep. At any rate I never heard the approach of Diana, nor was aware of her presence until I raised my head. She lay at Tennant's feet gazing into his face with the unblinking steadiness of an animal, and he was whistling as softly as before, but with an exquisite, flute-like tone, those strange cadences of his that had been the origin of all my trouble. I thought of the older Greek world of centaurs and Titans, who ranged and ruled before Zeus and his court made heaven human. Tennant was not even primitive, he was pre-Adamic. As for Diana, she was no daughter of Eve, but of the Dark Lilith who preceded her, and I realized that those two were of the same world and belonged to each other. A twinge of the old wound shot through me at this realization, and also a twinge of envy, for theirs was a happier lot than our civilized bondage, but I lay quiet, watching their idyll.
The shadows of the firs lay far out over the heather before I roused Tennant for our return to earth, and as we came back through the golden evening light, Diana came with us.
WHEN I told Taverner of this incident, over our usual
after-dinner smoking, half report, half gossip, I saw that it was
no surprise to him.
'I hoped that would happen,' he said. 'It is the only possible solution to the case that I can think of, but what will her family say?'
'I think they will say, 'Praise the Lord,' and economize over her trousseau,' I replied, and my prophecy proved correct.
It was the queerest wedding I ever saw. The parson, thoroughly uncomfortable, but afraid to refuse to perform the ceremony; the upholstered mother and her friends trying hard to do the thing properly; the bridegroom's relatives, whose attempt to get him certified at the eleventh hour had been baulked by Taverner, furiously watching ten thousand pounds of trust moneys passing out of their keeping; a bride who looked like a newly-caught wild thing, and who would have bolted out of the church if Taverner had not shown her very clearly that he was prepared for such a manoeuvre and would not permit it; and a bridegroom who was far away in some heaven of his own, and upon whose face was a glory that never shone on land or sea.
The departure of the happy couple upon their honeymoon was a sight for the gods, whom I am convinced were present. All the wedding guests in their wedding garments were drawn up about the front door, when out came Diana in her Puck's tunic and bolted like a rabbit down the drive; at a more sober pace followed her spouse leading a donkey upon whose back was packed a tent and from whose flanks dangled cooking pots.
Surrounded by the broadcloth of the men and the silks of the women, and against the background of the clipped laurels of the shrubbery they looked incongruous, daft, degenerate, everything their relatives said they were, but the minute they had passed the gate and set foot upon the black soil of the moor, there was a change. Great Presences came to meet them, and whether they perceived Them or not, a silence fell upon the wedding party.
In ten seconds the moor took them, man, girl, and donkey fading into its grey-browns in the most amazing fashion, as if they had simply ceased to exist. They had gone to their own place, and their own place had made them welcome. A civilization with which they had nothing to do would never again have the power to torture and imprison them for being different. In dead silence the wedding party went in to eat its wedding breakfast and no one remembered to give any toasts.
WE heard no more of the wayfarers until the following spring,
when there came a tap upon the office window after 'lights out,'
which instantly put me in mind of Diana. It was not she, however,
but her husband. Taverner was absent, but in response to a brief
request I accompanied my summoner. We had not far to go; the
little brown tent was pitched almost under the lea of our wood,
and I saw in an instant why I had been summoned, though there was
little need to summon me, for the Nature-gods can look after
their own, it is only we superior beings who have to be dragged
into the world by the scruff of our necks; the gates of life
swung upon easy hinges, and in a few minutes a little
granddaughter of Pan lay in my hands, a little, new-made
perfection, save for the tufted ears. I wondered what new breed
of mortals had been introduced into our troubled old world to
disturb its civilization.
'Oh, Taverner,' I thought, 'what will the future hold you responsible for? Will it rank you with the man who introduced rabbits into Australia... or with Prometheus?'
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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