The New Collected Short Stories Read online

  I was somewhat cheered by Emily’s mother, who puffed up exclaiming, ‘Kind Harry, to carry the things! What should we do without you, even now! Oh, what a view! Can you see the dear Cathedral? No. Too hazy. Now I’m going to sit right on the rug.’ She smiled mysteriously. ‘The downs in September, you know.’

  We gave some perfunctory admiration to the landscape, which is indeed only beautiful to those who admire land, and to them perhaps the most beautiful in England. For here is the body of the great chalk spider who straddles over our island – whose legs are the south downs and the north downs and the Chilterns, and the tips of whose toes poke out at Cromer and Dover. He is a clean creature, who grows as few trees as he can, and those few in tidy clumps, and he loves to be tickled by quickly flowing streams. He is pimpled all over with earthworks, for from the beginning of time men have fought for the privilege of standing on him, and the oldest of our temples is built upon his back.

  But in those days I liked my country snug and pretty, full of gentlemen’s residences and shady bowers and people who touch their hats. The great sombre expanses on which one may walk for miles and hardly shift a landmark or meet a genteel person were still intolerable to me. I turned away as soon as propriety allowed and said ‘And may I now prepare the cup that cheers?’

  Emily’s mother replied: ‘Kind man, to help me. I always do say that tea out is worth the extra effort. I wish we led simpler lives.’ We agreed with her. I spread out the food. ‘Won the kettle stand? Oh, but make it stand.’ I did so. There was a little cry, faint but distinct, as of something in pain.

  ‘How silent it all is up here!’ said Emily.

  I dropped a lighted match on the grass, and again I heard the little cry.

  ‘What is that?’ I asked.

  ‘I only said it was so silent,’ said Emily.

  ‘Silent, indeed,’ echoed the little friend.

  Silent! the place was full of noises. If the match had fallen in a drawing-room it could not have been worse, and the loudest noise came from beside Emily herself. I had exactly the sensation of going to a great party, of waiting to be announced in the echoing hall, where I could hear the voices of the guests, but could not yet see their faces. It is a nervous moment for a self-conscious man, especially if all the voices should be strange to him, and he has never met his host.

  ‘My dear Harry!’ said the elder lady, never mind about that match. That’ll smoulder away and harm no one. Tea-ee-ee! I always say – and you will find Emily the same – that as the magic hour of five approaches, no matter how good a lunch, one begins to feel a sort of——’

  Now the Faun is of the kind who capers upon the Neo-Attic reliefs, and if you do not notice his ears or see his tail, you take him for a man and are horrified.

  ‘Bathing!’ I cried wildly. ‘Such a thing for our village lads, but I quite agree – more supervision – I blame myself. Go away, bad boy, go away!’

  ‘What will he think of next!’ said Emily, while the creature beside her stood up and beckoned to me. I advanced struggling and gesticulating with tiny steps and horrified cries, exorcising the apparition with my hat. Not otherwise had I advanced the day before, when Emily’s nieces showed me their guinea pigs. And by no less hearty laughter was I greeted now. Until the strange fingers closed upon me, I still thought that here was one of my parishioners and did not cease to exclaim, ‘Let me go, naughty boy, let go!’ And Emily’s mother, believing herself to have detected the joke, replied, ‘Well I must confess they are naughty boys and reach one even on the rug: the downs in September, as I said before.’

  Here I caught sight of the tail, uttered a wild shriek and fled into the beech copse behind.

  ‘Harry would have been a born actor,’ said Emily’s mother as I left them.

  I realized that a great crisis in my life was approaching, and that if I failed in it I might permanently lose my self-esteem. Already in the wood I was troubled by a multitude of voices – the voices of the hill beneath me, of the trees over my head, of the very insects in the bark of the tree. I could even hear the stream licking little pieces out of the meadows, and the meadows dreamily protesting. Above the din – which is no louder than the flight of a bee – rose the Faun’s voice saying, ‘Dear priest, be placid, be placid: why are you frightened?’

  ‘I am not frightened,’ said I – and indeed I was not. ‘But I am grieved: you have disgraced me in the presence of ladies.’

  ‘No one else has seen me,’ he said, smiling idly. ‘The women have tight boots and the man has long hair. Those kinds never see. For years I have only spoken to children, and they lose sight of me as soon as they grow up. But you will not be able to lose sight of me, and until you die you will be my friend. Now I begin to make you happy: lie upon your back or run races, or climb trees, or shall I get you blackberries, or harebells, or wives——’

  In a terrible voice I said to him, ‘Get thee behind me!’ He got behind me. ‘Once for all,’ I continued, ‘let me tell you that it is vain to tempt one whose happiness consists in giving happiness to others.’

  ‘I cannot understand you,’ he said ruefully. ‘What is to tempt?’

  ‘Poor woodland creature!’ said I, turning round. ‘How could you understand? It was idle of me to chide you. It is not in your little nature to comprehend a life of self-denial. Ah! if only I could reach you!’

  ‘You have reached him,’ said the hill.

  ‘If only I could touch you!’

  ‘You have touched him,’ said the hill.

  ‘But I will never leave you,’ burst out the Faun. ‘I will sweep out your shrine for you, I will accompany you to the meetings of matrons. I will enrich you at the bazaars.’

  I shook my head. ‘For these things I care not at all. And indeed I was minded to reject your offer of service altogether. There I was wrong. You shall help me – you shall help me to make others happy.’

  ‘Dear priest, what a curious life! People whom I have never seen – people who cannot see me – why should I make them happy?’

  ‘My poor lad – perhaps in time you will learn why. Now begone: commence. On this very hill sits a young lady for whom I have a high regard. Commence with her. Aha! your face falls. I thought as much. You cannot do anything. Here is the conclusion of the whole matter!’

  ‘I can make her happy,’ he replied, ‘if you order me; and when I have done so, perhaps you will trust me more.’

  Emily’s mother had started home, but Emily and the little friend still sat beside the tea-things – she in her white pique dress and biscuit straw, he in his rough but well-cut summer suit. The great pagan figure of the Faun towered insolently above them.

  The friend was saying, ‘And have you never felt the appalling loneliness of a crowd?’

  ‘All that,’ replied Emily, ‘have I felt, and very much more——’

  Then the Faun laid his hands upon them. They, who had only intended a little cultured flirtation, resisted him as long as they could, but were gradually urged into each other’s arms, and embraced with passion.

  ‘Miscreant!’ I shouted, bursting from the wood. ‘You have betrayed me.’

  ‘I know it: I care not,’ cried the little friend. ‘Stand aside. You are in the presence of that which you do not understand. In the great solitude we have found ourselves at last.’

  ‘Remove your accursed hands!’ I shrieked to the Faun.

  He obeyed and the little friend continued more calmly: ‘It is idle to chide. What should you know, poor clerical creature, of the mystery of love of the eternal man and the eternal woman, of the self-effectuation of a soul?’

  ‘That is true,’ said Emily angrily. ‘Harry, you would never have made me happy. I shall treat you as a friend, but how could I give myself to a man who makes such silly jokes? When you played the buffoon at tea, your hour was sealed. I must be treated seriously: I must see infinities broadening around me as I rise. You may not approve of it, but so I am. In the great solitude I have found myself at last.’
/>   ‘Wretched girl!’ I cried. ‘Great solitude! O pair of helpless puppets——’

  The little friend began to lead Emily away, but I heard her whisper to him: ‘Dear, we can’t possibly leave the basket for Harry after this: and mother’s rug; do you mind having that in the other hand?’

  So they departed and I flung myself upon the ground with every appearance of despair.

  ‘Does he cry?’ said the Faun.

  ‘He does not cry,’ answered the hill. ‘His eyes are as dry as pebbles.’

  My tormentor made me look at him. ‘I see happiness at the bottom of your heart,’ said he.

  ‘I trust I have my secret springs,’ I answered stiffly. And then I prepared a scathing denunciation, but of all the words I might have said, I only said one and it began with ‘D’.

  He gave a joyful cry, ‘Oh, now you really belong to us. To the end of your life you will swear when you are cross and laugh when you are happy. Now laugh!’

  There was a great silence. All nature stood waiting, while a curate tried to conceal his thoughts not only from nature but from himself. I thought of my injured pride, of my baffled unselfishness, of Emily, whom I was losing through no fault of her own, of the little friend, who just then slipped beneath the heavy tea basket, and that decided me, and I laughed.

  That evening, for the first time, I heard the chalk downs singing to each other across the valleys, as they often do when the air is quiet and they have had a comfortable day. From my study window I could see the sunlit figure of the Faun, sitting before the beech copse as a man sits before his house. And as night came on I knew for certain that not only was he asleep, but that the hills and woods were asleep also. The stream, of course, never slept, any more than it ever freezes. Indeed, the hour of darkness is really the hour of water, which has been somewhat stifled all day by the great pulsings of the land. That is why you can feel it and hear it from a greater distance in the night, and why a bath after sundown is most wonderful.

  The joy of that first evening is still clear in my memory, in spite of all the happy years that have followed. I remember it when I ascend my pulpit – I have a living now – and look down upon the best people sitting beneath me pew after pew, generous and contented, upon the worse people, crowded in the aisles, upon the whiskered tenors of the choir, and the high-browed curates and the church-wardens fingering their bags, and the supercilious vergers who turn late comers from the door. I remember it also when I sit in my comfortable bachelor rectory, amidst the carpet slippers that good young ladies have worked for me, and the oak brackets that have been carved for me by good young men; amidst my phalanx of presentation teapots and my illuminated testimonials and all the other offerings of people who believe that I have given them a helping hand, and who really have helped me out of the mire themselves. And though I try to communicate that joy to others – as I try to communicate anything else that seems good – and though I sometimes succeed, yet I can tell no one exactly how it came to me. For if I breathed one word of that, my present life, so agreeable and profitable, would come to an end, my congregation would depart, and so should I, and instead of being an asset to my parish, I might find myself an expense to the nation. Therefore in the place of the lyrical and rhetorical treatment, so suitable to the subject, so congenial to my profession, I have been forced to use the unworthy medium of a narrative, and to delude you by declaring that this is a short story, suitable for reading in the train.

  THE ROAD FROM COLONUS

  I

  For no very intelligible reason, Mr Lucas had hurried ahead of his party. He was perhaps reaching the age at which independence becomes valuable, because it is so soon to be lost. Tired of attention and consideration, he liked breaking away from the younger members, to ride by himself, and to dismount unassisted. Perhaps he also relished that more subtle pleasure of being kept waiting for lunch, and of telling the others on their arrival that it was of no consequence.

  So, with childish impatience, he battered the animal’s sides with his heels, and made the muleteer bang it with a thick stick and prick it with a sharp one, and jolted down the hillsides through clumps of flowering shrubs and stretches of anemones and asphodel, till he heard the sound of running water, and came in sight of the group of plane trees where they were to have their meal.

  Even in England those trees would have been remarkable, so huge were they, so interlaced, so magnificently clothed in quivering green. And here in Greece they were unique, the one cool spot in that hard brilliant landscape, already scorched by the heat of an April sun. In their midst was hidden a tiny Khan or country inn, a frail mud building with a broad wooden balcony in which sat an old woman spinning, while a small brown pig, eating orange peel, stood beside her. On the wet earth below squatted two children, playing some primaeval game with their fingers; and their mother, none too clean either, was messing with some rice inside. As Mrs Forman would have said, it was all very Greek, and the fastidious Mr Lucas felt thankful that they were bringing their own food with them, and should eat it in the open air.

  Still, he was glad to be there – the muleteer had helped him off – and glad that Mrs Forman was not there to forestall his opinions – glad even that he should not see Ethel for quite half an hour. Ethel was his youngest daughter, still unmarried. She was unselfish and affectionate, and it was generally understood that she was to devote her life to her father, and be the comfort of his old age. Mrs Forman always referred to her as Antigone, and Mr Lucas tried to settle down to the role of Oedipus, which seemed the only one that public opinion allowed him.

  He had this in common with Oedipus, that he was growing old. Even to himself it had become obvious. He had lost interest in other people’s affairs, and seldom attended when they spoke to him. He was fond of talking himself but often forgot what he was going to say, and even when he succeeded it seldom seemed worth the effort. His phrases and gestures had become stiff and set, his anecdotes, once so successful, fell flat, his silence was as meaningless as his speech. Yet he had led a healthy, active life, had worked steadily, made money, educated his children. There was nothing and no one to blame: he was simply growing old.

  At the present moment, here he was in Greece, and one of the dreams of his life was realized. Forty years ago he had caught the fever of Hellenism, and all his life he had felt that could he but visit that land, he would not have lived in vain. But Athens had been dusty, Delphi wet, Thermopylae flat, and he had listened with amazement and cynicism to the rapturous exclamations of his companions. Greece was like England: it was a man who was growing old, and it made no difference whether that man looked at the Thames or the Eurotas. It was his last hope of contradicting that logic of experience, and it was failing.

  Yet Greece had done something for him, though he did not know it. It had made him discontented, and there are stirrings of life in discontent. He knew that he was not the victim of continual ill-luck. Something great was wrong, and he was pitted against no mediocre or accidental enemy. For the last month a strange desire had possessed him to die fighting.

  ‘Greece is the land for young people,’ he said to himself as he stood under the plane trees, ‘but I will enter into it, I will possess it. Leaves shall be green again, water shall be sweet, the sky shall be blue. They were so forty years ago, and I will win them back. I do mind being old, and I will pretend no longer.’

  He took two steps forward, and immediately cold waters were gurgling over his ankle.

  ‘Where does the water come from?’ he asked himself. ‘I do not even know that.’ He remembered that all the hillsides were dry; yet here the road was suddenly covered with flowing streams.

  He stopped still in amazement, saying: ‘Water out of a tree – out of a hollow tree? I never saw nor thought of that before.’

  For the enormous plane that leant towards the Khan was hollow – it had been burnt out for charcoal – and from its living trunk there gushed an impetuous spring, coating the bark with fern and moss, and flowing over the m
ule track to create fertile meadows beyond. The simple country folk had paid to beauty and mystery such tribute as they could, for in the rind of the tree a shrine was cut, holding a lamp and a little picture of the Virgin, inheritor of the Naiad’s and Dryad’s joint abode.

  ‘I never saw anything so marvellous before,’ said Mr Lucas. ‘I could even step inside the trunk and see where the water comes from.’

  For a moment he hesitated to violate the shrine. Then he remembered with a smile his own thought – ‘the place shall be mine; I will enter it and possess it’ – and leapt almost aggressively on to a stone within.

  The water pressed up steadily and noiselessly from the hollow roots and hidden crevices of the plane, forming a wonderful amber pool ere it spilt over the lip of bark on to the earth outside. Mr Lucas tasted it and it was sweet, and when he looked up the black funnel of the trunk he saw sky which was blue, and some leaves which were green; and he remembered, without smiling, another of his thoughts.

  Others had been before him – indeed he had a curious sense of companionship. Little votive offerings to the presiding Power were fastened on to the bark – tiny arms and legs and eyes in tin, grotesque models of the brain or the heart – all tokens of some recovery of strength or wisdom or love. There was no such thing as the solitude of nature, for the sorrows and joys of humanity had pressed even into the bosom of a tree. He spread out his arms and steadied himself against the soft charred wood, and then slowly leant back, till his body was resting on the trunk behind. His eyes closed, and he had the strange feeling of one who is moving, yet at peace – the feeling of the swimmer, who, after long struggling with chopping seas, finds that after all the tide will sweep him to his goal.

  So he lay motionless, conscious only of the stream below his feet, and that all things were a stream, in which he was moving.

  He was aroused at last by a shock – the shock of an arrival perhaps, for when he opened his eyes, something unimagined, indefinable, had passed over all things, and made them intelligible and good.