Section 2
I remember that first Beltane festival as the most terribly lonely
night in my life. It stands in my mind in fragments, fragments of
intense feeling with forgotten gaps between.
I recall very distinctly being upon the great staircase of Lowchester
House (though I don't remember getting there from the room in which
my mother lay), and how upon the landing I met Anna ascending as I
came down. She had but just heard of my return, and she was hurrying
upstairs to me. She stopped and so did I, and we stood and clasped
hands, and she scrutinized my face in the way women sometimes do.
So we remained for a second or so. I could say nothing to her at
all, but I could feel the wave of her emotion. I halted, answered
the earnest pressure of her hand, relinquished it, and after
a queer second of hesitation went on down, returning to my own
preoccupations. It did not occur to me at all then to ask myself
what she might be thinking or feeling.
I remember the corridor full of mellow evening light, and how I
went mechanically some paces toward the dining-room. Then at the
sight of the little tables, and a gusty outburst of talking voices
as some one in front of me swung the door open and to, I remembered
that I did not want to eat. . . . After that comes an impression
of myself walking across the open grass in front of the house, and
the purpose I had of getting alone upon the moors, and how somebody
passing me said something about a hat. I had come out without my
hat.
A fragment of thought has linked itself with an effect of long
shadows upon turf golden with the light of the sinking sun. The
world was singularly empty, I thought, without either Nettie or my
mother. There wasn't any sense in it any more. Nettie was
already back in my mind then. . . .
Then I am out on the moors. I avoided the crests where the
bonfires were being piled, and sought the lonely places. . . .
I remember very clearly sitting on a gate beyond the park, in a
fold just below the crest, that hid the Beacon Hill bonfire and its
crowd, and I was looking at and admiring the sunset. The golden
earth and sky seemed like a little bubble that floated in the globe
of human futility. . . . Then in the twilight I walked along an
unknown, bat-haunted road between high hedges.
I did not sleep under a roof that night. But I hungered and ate.
I ate near midnight at a little inn over toward Birmingham, and
miles away from my home. Instinctively I had avoided the crests
where the bonfire crowds gathered, but here there were many people,
and I had to share a table with a man who had some useless mortgage
deeds to burn. I talked to him about them--but my soul
stood at a great distance behind my lips. . . .
Soon each hilltop bore a little tulip-shaped flame flower. Little
black figures clustered round and dotted the base of its petals,
and as for the rest of the multitude abroad, the kindly night
swallowed them up. By leaving the roads and clear paths and wandering
in the fields I contrived to keep alone, though the confused noise
of voices and the roaring and crackling of great fires was always
near me.
I wandered into a lonely meadow, and presently in a hollow of
deep shadows I lay down to stare at the stars. I lay hidden in the
darkness, and ever and again the sough and uproar of the Beltane
fires that were burning up the sere follies of a vanished age, and
the shouting of the people passing through the fires and praying to
be delivered from the prison of themselves, reached my ears. . . .
And I thought of my mother, and then of my new loneliness and the
hunger of my heart for Nettie.
I thought of many things that night, but chiefly of the overflowing
personal love and tenderness that had come to me in the wake of
the Change, of the greater need, the unsatisfied need in which I
stood, for this one person who could fulfil all my desires. So long
as my mother had lived, she had in a measure held my heart, given
me a food these emotions could live upon, and mitigated that emptiness
of spirit, but now suddenly that one possible comfort had left me.
There had been many at the season of the Change who had thought that
this great enlargement of mankind would abolish personal love; but
indeed it had only made it finer, fuller, more vitally necessary.
They had thought that, seeing men now were all full of the joyful
passion to make and do, and glad and loving and of willing service
to all their fellows, there would be no need of the one intimate
trusting communion that had been the finest thing of the former
life. And indeed, so far as this was a matter of advantage and
the struggle for existence, they were right. But so far as it was
a matter of the spirit and the fine perceptions of life, it was
altogether wrong.
We had indeed not eliminated personal love, we had but stripped it
of its base wrappings, of its pride, its suspicions, its mercenary
and competitive elements, until at last it stood up in our minds
stark, shining and invincible. Through all the fine, divaricating
ways of the new life, it grew ever more evident, there were for
every one certain persons, mysteriously and indescribably in the
key of one's self, whose mere presence gave pleasure, whose mere
existence was interest, whose idiosyncrasy blended with accident
to make a completing and predominant harmony for their predestined
lovers. They were the essential thing in life. Without them the
fine brave show of the rejuvenated world was a caparisoned steed
without a rider, a bowl without a flower, a theater without a play.
. . . And to me that night of Beltane, it was as clear as white
flames that Nettie, and Nettie alone, roused those harmonies in
me. And she had gone! I had sent her from me; I knew not whither
she had gone. I had in my first virtuous foolishness cut her out
of my life for ever!
So I saw it then, and I lay unseen in the darkness and called upon
Nettie, and wept for her, lay upon my face and wept for her, while
the glad people went to and fro, and the smoke streamed thick
across the distant stars, and the red reflections, the shadows and
the fluctuating glares, danced over the face of the world.
No! the Change had freed us from our baser passions indeed, from
habitual and mechanical concupiscence and mean issues and coarse
imaginings, but from the passions of love it had not freed us. It
had but brought the lord of life, Eros, to his own. All through the
long sorrow of that night I, who had rejected him, confessed
his sway with tears and inappeasable regrets. . . .
I cannot give the remotest guess of when I rose up, nor of
my tortuous wanderings in the valleys between the midnight fires,
nor how I evaded the laughing and rejoicing multitudes who went
streaming home between three and four, to resume their lives, swept
and garnished, stripped and clean. But at dawn, when the ashes of
the world's gladness were ceasing to glow--it was a bleak dawn that
made me shiver in my thin summer clothes--I came across a field
to a little copse full of dim blue hyacinths. A queer sense
of familiarity arrested my steps, and I stood puzzled. Then I was
moved to go a dozen paces from the path, and at once a singularly
misshapen tree hitched itself into a notch in my memory. This was
the place! Here I had stood, there I had placed my old kite, and
shot with my revolver, learning to use it, against the day when I
should encounter Verrall.
Kite and revolver had gone now, and all my hot and narrow past, its
last vestiges had shriveled and vanished in the whirling gusts of
the Beltane fires. So I walked through a world of gray ashes at
last, back to the great house in which the dead, deserted image of
my dear lost mother lay.
