He wrote steadily for several long uninterrupted mornings and afternoons making a conscious effort to keep the image of Nelly, as well as that other image, far back in the recesses of his consciousness.
What, he thought fantastically to himself on one of these calm days, do these insidious phantoms of people, that for the time being we don’t want to think about, these bodiless haunters of our suppressed world, do with one another in that queer twilight? Do they gibber and squeak at one another — these Elises and Nellys — or are they, like the Queen of Carthage in the Elysian fields, silent and disdainful?
He found, as he wrote, that it was possible to reduce all these human entanglements to a vague far-off world that hardly infringed upon the world he visioned in his present humour. This world, of his mystical consciousness, was a world in which the immediate pain of things and the immediate thrill of things were both held back to a certain distance. It was a world in which his immediate pain and his immediate pleasure were taken up and absorbed in the great stream of all the pleasures and pains of the human race.
What he sought to give an enduring expression to, as he took his available words and squeezed out their subtler meanings and tried to make his thought clothe itself, rhythm within rhythm, with these delicate essences, was the large flowing tide of human experience as it gathered in great reiterated waves, under the old pressure of the old dilemmas, and rolled forward and drew back along the sea banks of necessity.
What he groped after was an entrance into some larger consciousness, not remote from this earthly world, but carrying forward, generation after generation, the faint surmises, the dim guesses, the broken half-glimpses, of men and women and, with all these gathered up within it, itself growing more and more responsive to deeper vibrations from the Unknown, more and more aware of itself as the true Son of Man, as the true logos, into whose being had been poured all the thwarted and baffled aspirations of all souls.
It was not that he wished to find some mere mystical sensation, inchoate and indistinct, and try to express the feeling of just that, in lulled and monotonous rhythms. It was that he wished to take the many poignant ‘little things’, bitter and sweet, tragic and grotesque, common and fantastic, such as the earth affords us all in our confused wayfaring, and to associate these, as each generation is aware of them before it passes away, as he himself was aware of them in his own hour, with some dimly conceived immortal consciousness that gave them all an enduring value and dropped none of them by the way.
It was, so to speak, some tentative, hesitant, as yet only half-conscious soul of the earth, to which he sought to feel his way, a kind of half-human, half-elemental logos, nearer the Goat-foot Pass than any vague dream of the old Gnostics, and yet with a music in its being, beyond the breath of any reed of the marshes.
It was comparatively easy to let the faint magic of his view of things ebb and flow before his mental vision in these long golden mornings in Selshurst, where the very streets were full of the fragrances of the fields. It was a very different matter when he came to attempt the task of putting all this into poetic form. How, in that little bedroom of his, opening on the light breaths of rosemary and balsam and newly budding lavender, where every now and then came lively voices from the back parlour, he wrestled with the obstinate mystery of words!
Why not put these thoughts of his into the simpler cadences of prose? Because there are certain things that refuse to be expressed in prose, that demand the austerer rhythms, the more oracular gestures, the more broken, fragmentary, evasive hints, of poetry.
But ‘Oh Prince, what labour, oh Prince, what pain!’ For the rhythms of poetry, expecially of the vers libre he was working in, are of such a kind that not only the general swing of the verse had to leap forth as the very exhalation of his own especial soul, but each separate line, nay! every word he uses, must fall into its place, not ‘by taking thought’, but by an indefinable movement of the energy of music in himself. The syllables have to form an essence compounded of strange subtleties; and as for the thoughts, they must be bitter and sweet, full of the mysterious saps and juices of the blood of life, cool-breathing, redolent of undying mornings and evenings, sprinkled with eternal dews.
Day followed day without any interruption to these mental and psychic labours. ‘I have not run away a second time,’ he kept saying to himself; but that was the very thing, as he well knew in his secret heart, that he had done! To fall suddenly after those vibrant and thrilling first meetings with her, into dead silence, was nothing less than to abscond, to quit the field, to bolt.
He did not attempt to bring into honest daylight the queer shadowy motives that tumbled over one another, like shifty humpbacked weasels in a rabbit hole, down there in the darkness of his hidden mind. But somehow by not actually clearing off, by not leaving Selshurst altogether, he satisfied the scruples of one part of his nature, while by offering the girl nothing but this profound silence he made a definite break with what had begun to occur between them, and in a queer sort of indirect way hit back at the meddling Canyot.
It was all the more easy to hide himself like this just because that ‘threatening letter’, as he called it, of the impulsive painter had quite definitely broken up the special kind of sentimental attraction he had begun to feel for the young girl. In those first days he never thought of her without thinking of buttercups, and celandines; but now whenever he thought of her he thought of that ‘choosing definitely between us’; until the fair face of the maiden floated, in his mind, above a horrid iron prong, that jerked and prodded him into that lamentable arena of duty where decisions are made!
One morning, however, after more than a week of this recluse existence, his whole line of action was scattered to the winds by a letter from the girl herself.
‘Dear Mr Storm,’ the letter said, in a firm clear round rather childish hand. ‘When are you coming to see us again? — or have you left Selshurst? If you have gone away I hope they won’t forward this because it’s only a dull invitation which it will be a bore to receive in Paris or wherever you may be. It’s to ask you to come over to tea tomorrow, to meet my friend Mrs Shotover. Please try and come if you can, as my father took a great fancy to you; which is rare with him as you can guess. But of course if you have left it’s no use. In that case may I say I’m sorry we didn’t say goodbye?’ And the letter ended with an evident hesitation between ‘Sincerely’ and ‘Very sincerely’, avoided by a manufactured blot and a hurried ‘And with best wishes for the success of your work — from Nelly Moreton.’
It is extraordinary what power a direct personal appeal has, to break up a whole fabric of moral speculation! The look of the letter, the way she had worded it, that blot at the last with the unconventional ending — all these things thrilled Richard as if they had been the very touch of her hand. ‘Ha! Ha! My good friend,’ one of his slyest demons whispered to him, ‘so, after all, the real reason for this retreat of yours was pure jealousy! You thought she did still care for Canyot!’
Tea tomorrow? That means today — this very afternoon. And Richard rushed out of the Crown Inn passage, into the street, sans hat and stick, and made his way to the leafy cathedral close, walking upon air.
He left an admirable lunch, that noon, very imperfectly dispatched, and found himself chatting to barmaids, gardeners, ostlers, boot boys, even to that old insinuating toper, half-beggar, half local-celebrity, who went by the name of Young Bill, with the most eager interest. –