Act 1 — Scene III.—TRAGEDY

Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all.—Sir. T. Browne.

While the two clergymen were in the dining-room the expected change in the weather occurred. When Mr. Price rode away, having decided to postpone his visit to the Strath, the sun was wrapped up in dense clouds, there was no sky, and the light was fading rapidly.

For some time Dr. Berry sat with a book in his study. Then he ventured upon the lawn to observe the heaving clouds, which each moment threatened to burst into lightning. There was not a breath of wind. The trees in the garden beyond were entirely without motion; the walls appeared to have no substance, and the very house seemed to float away into unreality. Afar the watcher sighted the chalk-pits on the downs, their white sides glowing fiercely against a sombre background.

“It is the hour of tragedy,” he murmured.

Here, as in the ancient drama, the actors played their parts in the open air, in order that their passions might blend with the fury of the elements. The proscenium, as in old time, was made by nature. The wall of the Strath formed the back-scene; the theatre was the garden; the orchestra that mound on which the sun-dial stood. Already the storm-cocks were chattering there, and their notes came into the doctor’s ears like the piping of flute-players.

“I must go,” said the dreamer with a slight shiver.

Passing back to the house he quickly reappeared carrying a small wooden box. He crossed the churchyard, where the sexton was digging a grave, singing hoarsely as he shovelled up the dirt. The man touched his hat and said, “Looks like a storm coming up yonder, sir. But the sun shines above Kingsmore.”

The rector hesitated, and asked absently, “Whose grave is that?”

“ ’Tis for old Jim Reeve, sir. Him as died a Tuesday, and is to be buried to-morrow.”

“Ah yes,” the doctor murmured, adding to himself as he passed on, “I thought it might be the grave of Henry Reed.”

The door in the wall was unlocked. Dr. Berry had felt assured that it would be so. He entered and stood within the influence of the garden.

The air no longer thrilled with the note of mirth, the intoxicating happiness and the exuberant laughter were gone. Instead of the sunshine sorrow brooded, and the flowers were shut, and a moaning came from the rotten gables of the house. The tragic note was dominant, and all the grotesque sounds of mirth were stilled.

Fully possessed by the influence, the priest ascended the mound and extended his white hands over the dial, which represented to him no longer a recorder of the flight of time, but an altar sacred to Bacchus. He opened his box, scattered its contents upon the metal slab, and applied a light. Then, as a filmy cloud of incense rose in a long thread into the gloom, he tramped slowly round the knoll reciting an Argive song.

No sane voice spoke from his inner consciousness to remind him that this was worse than folly; that he was offering sacrifice to a mythical deity. He was merely playing the part which had been allotted him, and reciting those words which were suitable to the occasion as they presented themselves to his memory. The impending storm was, he believed, about to break upon the house; and it was not to be dispelled until the last words had been spoken, the tragedy accomplished, and the stage abandoned.

The rain came, and the lightning, and then strong wind which sent leaves whirling across the knoll. But there came no sound from the house. Through the rain and the thunder and the wind moved the old atmosphere of fate and despair and the conquest of unbending human will. The Thymele streamed and smoked no more; but the elements fought on as the accompaniment of the drama, and the piping of the invisible storm-cocks became shriller and more stern.

Again the mood changed, and Dr. Berry was driven forth like a villain to the hisses of the wind. Instead of returning home he took the field path which led beside the beech wood; and ascended until he reached the summit of a grass hill where larches were odorous in the hot sunshine. Pausing there he looked out, and saw the growth of sable cloud above Thorlund and the lightning crossing it and the white steam of the rain ascending.

A rabbit bounded among the larches into the open, and after it came a female figure, young and lithe, her face tanned by exposure to the weather, her great eyes unashamed. At first sight she was beautiful; at the second pathetic, because the light in her eyes lacked reason. She bounded up to the rector, flung herself at his knees, and burst into a noisy incoherent prayer.

“Get up, girl,” cried the scholar, dragging her almost roughly from the grass. “How often must I tell you this is wrong?”

“Here are flowers for you,” cried the girl, pressing a quantity of pale-blue and white harebells, warm and withering, into his hand. “They are always ringing, and I am tired of their noise. Take them and curse them. They will stop that wild nodding of their heads for you. Why will you not let me touch you? There is force coming out of your fingers, and when I hold your hand I see no longer the strange things in the wind. I have been among the larches, and in the white chalk-pits, and down by the stream, and in the cold churchyard, but I still see the strange things coming down the wind. And you too walk alone. Do you see figures? Have you seen the masked man running, and the white woman crying into the lilies? Do you see them in the garden in the valley?”

This girl, a well-known character of the neighbourhood, lived at Kingsmore with her grandparents, but was seldom to be found within the cottage of her relatives. Her real home was upon the grass hills, or in the dry beech wood, or down in the valley. Nancy Reed, Lone Nance as the villagers called her, passed about the country like a will o’ the wisp, talking to the birds and the creatures of her imagination, revelling in wind and shouting through storm. Yet for all her wild speech she was as gentle as a child, although perfect reason had been witheld from her all the twenty-four years of her life. She was sane enough to know that she was not as others, and her one desire was to become perfect and womanly; but relentless nature continued to bear her from place to place against her will, flinging her body about the hills like drift wood tossed upon the sea.

“You go into that garden with a book in your hand,” she cried, pointing into the vapours. “I watched you come out, your lips moving, and your face as white as that chalk. You saw and heard a great deal in that garden, and you were wondering what you had missed. If I had been nearer I would have told you.”

“You have never been in that garden,” said Dr. Berry sternly. “And you must never go.”

The girl laughed noisily into his face.

“That house is filled with sounds which you cannot understand. But if you go there much more, and sit under its shadow a few more years, you will begin to understand. And then you will come out and call for me, and we shall chase the sunbeams into the valley.”

The rector drew away from her. The note of inspiration was there and he had recognised it. It was true he had felt a slow unloosening of mind from body, an exaltation of the brain, and a tingling of each sense, while he had tarried in that garden. He had called this the birth of higher knowledge and the stirring of genius; but when the girl spoke he remembered that the bridge which separates the inspired from the diseased mind is perilously narrow and frail.

“I cannot keep away from the place,” he muttered, forgetful that Lone Nance was his listener. “I cannot stop my ears. I must go there, to sink into sleep and dream. It is good for me. The Aeolian poets walk at my side. I can describe their land, their speech, and their manners, as though I had lived in that far off time. Their language is as familiar to me as my own. I can enter into their moods. I can see where history has erred. I can make the crooked places straight. I can see the outlines of their figures and describe the very texture of their raiment. I can even detect the odour of Sappho’s anointed hair as she passes along the road to Mytilene.”

He stopped, remembering the status of the wild girl. She was looking beyond him into vacancy, her hands locked behind her back. The dark clouds were lifting from Thorlund, but the vapour still ascended like the mist of the genie from the fisherman’s vessel.

Twilight was trailing over the land as Dr. Berry descended, and the beech wood became a black sea, tossing and moaning with the voices of life. A labourer cutting hay stopped from his work and leaning upon his two-handled knife pulled at the brim of his hat as he peered down from the strong-smelling rick.

The rector looked closely at the man, until his sluggish memory awoke and suggested a name.

“Was it not your father who was taken ill? How is he now?” he asked, with a dim feeling that he had neglected his very inconsiderable parochial duties of late.

“Broke,” said the hay-cutter, abruptly and hoarsely. “Broke a week ago and been took. Sixty-one he wur, a good age for the likes of we.”

“I do not remember burying him. When was it?” Dr. Berry asked.

“ ’E didn’t not ’xactly die,” the man explained. “ ’E was took to the ’ouse, and so ’e be done to we. Us all get broke, some sooner, some later. Us can’t last for always. Father broke quick when ’e started, but ’is brother, my Uncle Tom as was, ’e took a terrible time. Us all said every fall, ‘ ’e’ll get broke this time for sure,’ but ’e’d pull through and laugh at us. ’E went sudden at the last. ’E’d been threshing all day, and ’bout evening ’e couldn’t carry. Tried time and time ’e did, but couldn’t carry. ’E walked ’ome, and sat down ’e did aside the fire, and ’e said, ‘I be broke.’ ’E was took that month.”

“Is he still alive?” the rector asked.

“Ay, sir. I saw ’im one day walkin’ the yard, when I druve the waggon by, but I didn’t want ’im to see I. When they gets broke they don’t come back no more. Some on ’em lasts a powerful time yonder too. But they ain’t of no account, and us don’t talk on ’em. Us ain’t got nothing to do wi’ they. I’ll get broke in my time. Us don’t think on’t till it comes.”

“Would it not have been possible for you to have kept your father out of the workhouse?” protested Dr. Berry. “You are in regular work with good wages, and an old man does not cost much to keep.”

The hay-cutter looked perplexed, and a trifle puzzled, at the scholar’s lack of very ordinary knowledge.

“Father wur broke, sir. ’E couldn’t earn no wages,” he explained.

“So I understand,” said Dr. Berry. “But did it never occur to you that you might maintain him? It should surely be the son’s duty to support the father in his old age.”

The labourer smiled more and more at the rector’s ignorance.

“They that be broke be took, sir,” he said heavily. “When I be broke I’ll be took, and my son will say, ‘Good-bye, father,’ and wait for ’is turn. Wife and me ’ave six children, and another comin’ ’fore harvest. I gets twelve shillun, and pays ’alf-a-crown rent and sixpence club money, and my wife and me live clear of charity. There ain’t no room for old folk along wi’ a big fambly. ’Sides, sir, it ain’t proper. Them that be broke, be took. And them that works get wages.”

“Good-night,” said Dr. Berry abruptly.

“Good-e’en, sir,” replied the hay-cutter gruffly.

“Broken in pieces like a potter’s vessel,” the scholar muttered as he walked away. “As we cast the sherds of shattered utensils from our houses, so are these men cast forth from their homes when their strength breaks and their utility as machines passes. There is matter for the thinker here, but it is colourless and cold. It lacks the warmth and glamour of the past.”

One last sunbeam passed over the hills and slanted across the Strath. From a point, where the grass road swung round, a side of the old house became visible, and a single window blinking in the middle of the light. Dr. Berry watched with shaded eyes, and suddenly came to a stop. There was a white figure bending across the window, and as he saw it the question of the wild girl flashed back: “Have you seen the white woman crying into the lilies?”

The same minute he was smiling, because a breath of wind had passed, shaking the foliage, and the white figure rocked in unison and vanished, as the sunlight died away. The shape had been caused by the ivy and a certain arrangement of the boughs of an elm acted upon by the white ray. The rector breathed more easily when the window became blank.

Yet he knew that the people of the hamlet would be saying that evening, “It is noisy in the Strath.” They who behold a tragedy see only the outward passions of the actors; of the influence which is behind they can see nothing. So one may watch the tree tormented by the wind, but not see the wind.

Supper was awaiting the poet, and he ate and drank mechanically. Then entering his study he spread his translations before him, and straightway became an Athenian, floating delicately through most pellucid air.

The poetic mountains breathed their influence into him over the deeps of time. Fragrant odours were in his nostrils, and in his ears the murmur of bees upon Hymettus. He passed restlessly to Olympus where the Gods were in council, and saw the Father aiming his thunderbolt, and like Menippus sat at the door whence issued the supplications of the world, and heard the petitions for wealth, honour, and long life repeated in shameless monotony. He heard also the prayer of Reed entreating that the terrible atmosphere might be dispelled, and he felt no sorrow when the frown on the thunderer’s brow remained unrelaxed. Through all the shifting figures he dimly perceived the table before him and the passionate iambics of Archilochus spread upon paper by his hand, and aloud he read, “My soul, my soul care-worn, bereft of rest.” And at that his head sank forward upon his breast.

The study window remained open, and moths and beetles blundered through to bombard the globe of the scholar’s lamp.

It was ten o’clock when the housekeeper knocked as usual at the door, and receiving no answer entered softly with her master’s bedroom candle and a cup of cocoa. Dr. Berry was leaning forward over the table, his face hidden upon his folded arms, a disabled ghost-moth floundering across his left hand. The woman noticed that the muscles of her master’s hands were standing out like cords.

“Your reverence,” she said.

The rector did not stir, and after repeating her call she muttered gently, “He’s been and tired himself again.” Then she turned down the flame of the lamp, drew it further from the sleeper, and retired softly, leaving the door ajar.

The tragedy was over; and the tired exarchus slept.

The next morning it became known about Thorlund and its neighbourhood that the owner of the Strath was dead. The woman who supplied him with milk had discovered the body lying across the threshold, its head towards the garden. Henry Reed had pitted his strength against the Strath; and the influence of the house had triumphed.