Book II
Chapter I The Seeds
In late summer a strong breeze swept the Moor, hummed over the heather, and sang in the chinks and crannies of the tors; while at earth-level thin rags and tatters of mist, soaked with sunshine, raced beneath the blue. Now they swallowed a hill in one transitory sweep of light; now they dislimned in pearly tentacles and vanished magically, swept away by the riotous breezes; now moisture again became visible, and grew and gathered and laughed, and made a silver-grey home for rainbows. Beneath was hot sunshine, the light of the ling, the wild pant and gasp of great fitful zephyr, as he raced and roared along the lower planes of earth and sky; above, free of the fret and tumult, there sailed, in the upper chambers of the air, golden billows of cloud, rounded, massed and gleaming, with their aerial foundations levelled into long true lines by the rush of the western wind beneath them. Other air currents they knew and obeyed, and as they travelled upon their proper way, like a moving world, their peaks and promontories swelled and waned, spread and arose, billowed into new continents, craned and tottered into new golden pinnacles that drew their glory from the gates of the sun. To the sun, indeed, and above him—to the very zenith where he had climbed at noon—the scattered cloud armies swept and ascended; and their progress, viewed from earth, was majestic as the journey of remote stars, compared with the rapid frolics of the Mother o’ Mist beneath.
A man and a woman appeared together on the high ground above Bear Down, and surveyed the tremendous valleys where Teign’s course swept to distant Whiddon and vanished in the gorges of Fingle. There, gleaming across that land of ragged deer park and wild heathery precipices crowned with fir, a rainbow spanned the river’s channels, and the transparent splendour of it bathed the distance with liquid colour, softened by many a mile of moist air to the melting and misty delicacy of opal.
“How flat the bow looks from this height,” said the man.
“Fancy noting the shape with your eyes full of the colour!” answered the woman.
He started and laughed.
“How curiously like poor Christopher Yeoland you said that, Honor. And how like him to say it.”
Myles and his wife were just returning from payment of a visit. They had now been married a few months, and, with the recent past, there had lifted off the head of the husband a load of anxiety. He looked younger and his forehead seemed more open; he felt younger by a decade of years, and his face only clouded at secret moments with one daily care. Despite his whole-hearted and unconcealed joy he went in fear, for there were vague suspicions in his head that the happiness of his heart was too great. He believed that never, within human experience, had any man approached so perilously near to absolute contentment as he did then. Thus in his very happiness lay his alarm. As a reasonable being, he knew that human life never makes enduring progress upon such fairy lines, and he searched his horizon for the inevitable clouds. But none appeared to his sight. Every letter he opened, every day that he awakened, he expected, and even vaguely hoped for reverses to balance his life, for minor troubles to order his existence more nearly with his experience. He had been quite content to meet those usual slings and arrows ranged against every man along the highway side of his pilgrimage; and tribulation of a sort had made him feel safer in the citadel of his good fortune. Indeed, he could conceive of no shaft capable of serious penetration in his case, so that it spared the lives of himself and his wife. Now the balance was set one way, and Providence blessed the pair with full measure, pressed down and running over. All succeeded on their land; all prospered in their homestead; all went well with their hearts. On sleepless nights Stapledon fancied he heard a kind, ghostly watchman cry out as much under the stars; and hearing, he would turn and thank the God he did not know and sleep again.
“Gone!” said Honor, looking out where the rainbow died and the gleam of it was swept out of being by the sturdy wind.
“So quickly; yet it spoke a true word before the wind scattered it; told us so many things that only a rainbow can. It is everlasting, because it is true. There’s a beauty in absolute stark truth, Honor.”
“Is there? Then the multiplication table’s beautiful, dear love. If a rainbow teaches me anything, it is what a short-lived matter beauty must be—beauty and happiness and all that makes life worth living.”
“But our rainbow is not built upon the mist.”
“Don’t think about the roots of it. So you are satisfied, leave them alone. To analyse happiness is worse and more foolish, I should think, than hunting for rainbow gold itself.”
“I don’t know. What is the happiness worth that won’t stand analysis? All the same, I understand you very well. I believe there is nothing like prosperity and such a love of life as I feel now to make a man a coward. Anybody can be brave when he’s got everything to win and nothing to lose; but it takes a big man to look ahead without a quickened pulse when he’s at the top of his desire, when he knows in the heart of him that he’s living through the happiest, best, most perfect days the earth can offer. Remember that to me this earth is all. I know of nothing whatever in me or anybody else that merits or justifies an eternity. So I cling to every moment of my life, and of yours. I’m a miser of minutes; I let the hours go with regret; I grudge the night-time spent in unconsciousness; I delight to wake early and look at you asleep and know you are mine, and that you love to be mine.”
“It’s a great deal of happiness for two people, Myles.”
“So much that I fear, and, fearing, dim my happiness, and then blame myself for such folly.”
“The rainy day will come. You are like poor, dear Cramphorn, who scents mystery in the open faces of flowers, suspects a tragedy at crossing of knives or spilling of salt; sees Fate busy breeding trouble if a foot but slips on a threshold. How he can have one happy moment I don’t know. He told me yesterday that circumstances led him to suspect the end of the world by a thunder-planet before very long. And he said it would be just Endicott luck if the crash came before the crops were gathered, for our roots were a record this year.”
“His daughters bother him a good deal.”
“Yes; I do hope I may never have a daughter, Myles. It sounds unkind, but I don’t like girls. My personal experience of the only girl I ever knew intimately, inclines me against them—Honor Endicott, I mean.”
“Then we disagree,” he said, and his eyes softened.
“Fancy, we actually differ, and differ by as much as the difference between a boy and a girl! I would like a girl for head of the family. I’ve known it work best so.”
Honor did not answer.
While her husband had renewed his youth under the conditions of & happy marriage, the same could hardly be said for her. She was well and content, but more thoughtful. Her eyes twinkled into laughing stars less often than of old. She made others laugh, but seldom laughed with them as she had laughed with Christopher Yeoland. In the note of her voice a sadder music, that had wakened at her first love’s death, remained.
Yet she was peacefully happy and quietly alive to the blessing of such a husband. Her temperament found him a daily meal of bread and butter—nourishing, pleasant to a healthy appetite, easy to digest. But, while he had feared for his happiness, she had already asked herself if his consistent stability would ever pall. She knew him so thoroughly, and wished that it was not so. It exasperated her in secret to realise that she could foretell to a nicety his speech and action under all possible circumstances. There were no unsuspected crannies and surprises in him. Surprises had ever been the jewels of Honor’s life, and she believed that she might dig into the very heart’s core of this man and never find one.
“He seems to be gold all through,” she thought once. “Yet I wish he was patchy for the sake of the excitement.”
But Myles by no means wearied his wife in these halcyon hours. She was very proud of him and his strength, sobriety, common sense. She enjoyed testing these qualities, and did so every day of the week, for she was a creature of surprises herself, and appreciated juxtaposition of moods as an epicure desires contrary flavours. She never found him wanting. He was as patient as the high Moor; and she believed that she might as easily anger Cosdon Beacon as her husband. He ambled by her side along the pathway of life like a happy elephant. If ever they differed, it was only upon the question of Honor’s own share in the conduct of the farm. Formerly she had been energetic enough, and even resented the man’s kindly, though clumsy attempts to relieve her; since marriage, however, she appeared well content to let him do all; and this had not mattered, in the opinion of Myles, while Honor found fresh interests and occupations to fill those hours formerly devoted to her affairs. But she did not do so; she spent much time to poor purpose; she developed a passing whim for finer feathers than had fledged her pretty body as a maiden; she began buying dresses that cost a ten-pound note apiece. These rags and tags Myles cared nothing for, but dutifully accompanied to church and upon such little visits of ceremony as the present. Then he grew uncomfortable and mentioned the trifle to Mark Endicott, only to hear the old man laugh.
“’Tis a whim,” he said; “just one blind alley on the road towards happiness that every woman likes to probe if she can; and some live in it, and, to their dying day, get no forwarder than frocks. But she won’t. Praise the new frill-de-dills when she dons them. Please God there’s a time coming when she’ll spend money to a better end, and fill her empty time with thoughts of a small thing sprung from her own flesh. No latest fashions in a baby’s first gear, I believe. They don’t change; no more do grave clothes.”
Man and wife walked homeward beside tall, tangled hedges, full of ripeness and the manifold delicate workmanship and wrought filigrane of seed-vessels that follow upon the flowers. Honor was in worldly vein, for she had now come from calling upon folks whose purse was deeper than her own; but Myles found the immediate medley of the hedgerow a familiar feast, and prattled from his simple heart about what he saw there.
“You hear so often that it’s a cheerless hour which sees the summer flowers dying, but I don’t think so, do you, sweetheart? Look at the harvest of the hedges in its little capsules and goblets and a thousand quaint things! But you’ve noticed all this. You notice everything. Take the dainty cups, with turned rims, of the campions; and the broadswords or horse-shoes of the peas-blossomed things; and the cones of the foxgloves and the shining balls of starry stitchworts; and the daggers of herb Robert; and the bluebell’s triple treasure-house; and the violet’s; and the wood-sorrel, that shoots its grain into space; and the flying seeds of dandelions and clematis. And the scarlet fruits—the adder’s meat, iris, the hips and aglets, bryony and nightshade; and the dark berries of privets and madders and wayfaring-tree and dogwood; and then the mast of oak and beech and chestnut—it is endless; and all such fine finished work!”
She listened or half listened; then spoke, when he stopped to draw breath.
“Poor Christo used to say that he saw Autumn as a dear, soft, plump-breasted, brown woman sitting on a throne of sunset colours—sitting there smiling and counting all the little cones and purses and pods with her soft hazel eyes, until falling leaves hid her from his sight in a rain of scarlet and gold and amber, under crystalline blue hazes. And sometimes he saw her in the corn, with the round moon shining on her face, while she lingered lovingly in the silver, and the ripe grain bent to kiss her feet and stay her progress. And sometimes”—she broke off suddenly. “You have an eye like a lynx for detail, Myles. Nothing escapes you. It is very wonderful to me.”
He was pleased.
“I love detail, I think—detail in work and play. Yet Yeoland taught me more than he learned from me. The seeds are symbols of everlasting things, of life being renewed—deathless.”
Honor yawned, but bent her head so that he should not see the involuntary expression of weariness. Believing that he had her attention, he prosed on.
“For my part I often think of the first sowing, and picture the Everlasting, like a husbandman, setting forth to scatter the new-born, mother-naked earth with immortal grain.”
“And I suppose the slugs came as a natural consequence; or d’you think Providence only had the happy thought to torment poor Adam with prickles and thorns and green flies and caterpillars and clothes after he’d made that unfortunate effort to enlarge his mind?”
Myles started.
“Don’t, Honor love! You should not take these things so. But I’m sorry; I thought I was interesting you.”
“So you were; and those heavy, brick-red curtains of Mrs. Maybridge were interesting me still more. I don’t know whether I liked them or hated them.”
“Well, decide, and I’ll write to Exeter for a pair if they please you. Where you’ll put them I don’t know.”
“More do I, dearest. That’s why I think I must have a pair—to puzzle me. Nothing ever puzzles me now. I’ve read all the riddles in my world.”
“How wise! Yet I know what you mean. I often feel life’s got nothing left that is better than what it has brought. We want a hard winter to brace us—with anxiety, too, and perhaps a loss here and there. So much honey is demoralising.”
She looked at him with curiosity.
“Are you really as happy as all that? I didn’t know any human being could be; I didn’t think it possible to conscious intelligence. That’s why I never quite grasped the perfect happiness of the angels—unless they’re all grown-up children. Nobody who has trodden this poor, sad old world will ever be quite happy again even in heaven. To have been a man or woman once is to know the shadow of sorrow for all eternity.”
But he was thinking of her question, and heard no more. It came like a seed—like some air-borne, invisible, flying spore of the wild fern—touched his heart, found food there, and promised to rise by alternative generation to an unrest of like pattern with the mother-plant in Honor’s own heart.
“You’re not as happy as I am then?” he asked, with a sudden concern in his voice. “D’you mean that? You must mean it, for you wonder at the height of my happiness, as though it was beyond your dreams.”
“I’m very, very happy indeed, dear one—happier than I thought I could be, Myles—happier by far than I deserve to be.”
But the seed was sown, and he grew silent. In his egotism the possibility of any ill at the root of his new world, of a worm in the bud of his opening rose, had never struck him. His eyes had roamed around the horizons of life; now there fell a little shadow upon him from a cloud clean overhead. He banished it resolutely and laughed at himself. Yet from that time forward it occasionally reappeared. Henceforth unconsciously he forgot somewhat his own prosperity of mind in attempting to perfect Honor’s. He laboured like a giant to bring her measure of full peace. Her days of light and laughter were his also; while when transitory emotions brought a chill to her manner, a cloud to her eyes, he similarly suffered. The wide distinctions in their nature he neither allowed for nor appreciated. Concerning women he knew nothing save this one, and all the obvious, radical differences of essence and nature, he explained to himself as necessary differences of sex.
Man and wife proceeded together homeward, and Honor, acutely conscious of having raised a ripple upon the smooth sea of his content, entered with vigour into her husband’s conversation, chimed with his enthusiasm, and plucked seeds and berries that he might name them. Without after-showing of the bitter she had set to his lips, Myles serenely returned to the hedgerow harvests; and so they passed downward together towards the farm, while the sky darkened and pavilions of the coming rain loomed large and larger.
“Just in time,” said the man. “I heard Teign’s cry this morning; but bad weather is not going to last, I think.”
Yet the day closed in drearily, after set of sun. The wind fell at that hour and backed south of west; the mist increased and merged into the density of rain; the rain smothered up the gloaming with a steady, persistent downpour.