Comin' Thro' the Rye (Mathers)/Harvest/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
And lady-smocks all silver white,
And cuckoo buds of yellow hue,
Do paint the meadows with delight."
Spring! The dainty, vely guest has stolen upon us early this year, sweeping away the clinging mists and frosts of the dying winter with her warm, fragrant skirts; touching the sober brown hedges with her fairy wand, until, lo! they have bloomed forth into rarest tapestry of powdery green and downy delicatest spikes of yellow, starring the banks with faint pale primroses and purple-breasted violets, carpeting the woodlands with greyish windflowers and slender blue-bells, that sway all their dainty blossoms with every soft wind that steals about them. She has set all the young leaves waving, the birds singing, and her south wind blowing, and over the pulsing, throbbing, blossoming earth her light feet have skimmed, leaving beauty, life, and gladness everywhere. The poor, the sick, the lonely, the rich, the happy, the sad, love her equally, and welcome her with eager, smiling faces, and out-stretched, loving arms.
She is a rare friend to the poor; to them she means respite from that black, bitter aching of the bones, known as cold. She means soft green food to put between their lips, weary and starved with the broken dry morsels of bread; her fair bountiful blossom brings warmth to their chill bodies. Oh! spring is comforting, spring is faithful, she never yet failed her poor, but comes back to them year by year, ever young and fair and sweet, for she is one over whom time has no power. They look up at her azure ceiling; they look down at her emerald carpet; they take her delicate flowers reverently, gently in their hard, rough hands, and, remembering for one little moment,
The days when were we young,"
feel a softening, ennobling gleam of beauty strike across their rugged hearts, and go back to their toil and labour better, stronger men. The children rolling in the fields, golden with king-cups, forget the winter with all its hardships: in their beautiful to-day yesterday has no place. The poor drudge at her house door looks out at the fields and sky, and gives a tender thought to the time when she and her good man were young, and took a long day's holiday together, and a quick gleam shines athwart her dull, careworn face.
Ay! spring brings a holy, softening influence with her, and jogs the memory of men and women alike to better things and better hopes. And she brings to me no more and no less than green leaves, blue skies, and gay flowers. No delight creeps through me as I see the first early blossom parting the brown earth; no thrill stirs me as the trees, one by one, each after other, don their varied livery. I think I shall soon be like that man of whom it was written that
I would give a year of my life—and that is little enough as I value years just now—to know another such moment as I knew long ago, when Jack and I, searching in earliest spring for wild flowers, came upon the first delicate primrose of the year, nestling in its green leaves. How we stood before it, breathless, entranced, and forbore to put out a hand to pluck it, with some strange, unknown reverence stirring at our hearts that we could not understand, and were only dimly conscious of . . . . I think it must have been our fresh, untried souls that made things, common to us now, so rare and lovely to us then.
Often I shut my eyes, that I may not see the flowers growing so bravely on their stalks. They were here last summer, they will be here next; they are but poor perishable little things, and yet they come back to us every year, unlike those human blossoms that we lay away from our sight with such bitter, passionate tears and cries.
We know that the flowers, pretty, soulless, lovely toys, have no future life; and we do know that our dead will rise again, immortal and incorruptible, to bloom for ever fair and stately in the garden of the Great King. But oh! is not that far away, uprising shadowy, and vague, to the fleshly, eager eyes that would see and know? Here are the flowers, we cry, but where are they? And we fold our empty arms closely above our ravening hearts, that will never be satisfied on this side Jordan's wave. Never, ah! never!
What man or woman mourns his dead in the bitter, ice-bound winter as they do in the tender, warm, passionate spring, when every flower and bud and leaf and bird is quick and living, rioting in life, and praising God each after his kind? All things seem to remember.
The birds cry, "We are calling him, we are calling him!" The leaves rustle and whisper, "Where is he, where?" The flowers murmur, as they shake their bells, "He used to pass this way." Every tiny blade of grass, every trill of the black-bird, brings the past quivering before us—the days when we had our beloved, and could look in his face, and put out our hands to touch him, that we seek to bridge and cannot, with a bitter, yearning pain that is the intenser by reason of its impotence. To some people forgetfulness comes naturally and unconsciously; day by day memory softly detaches first one link, then another; in the bustle and moving to and fro in the vigorous, working-day world, the lost or the parted from gradually become vague, impalpable receding shadows, dear still but indistinct; unlike that first horrible sense of loss that was theirs when their darlings were snatched suddenly from their side, and, whereas a minute before they had been face to face with them, now they were not; the full minute ago, the empty present standing side by side in bare and shocking contrast. Who that remembers has not a hurt anger at the quickness with which mortals forget? Do not our dead and absent ones seem to cry to us out of the darkness, "Speak for us, for we cannot speak for ourselves"? It is the noisy, selfish, living, and present people, who fill our ears with common, everyday talk, and shoulder the memory of those others away. "The proud contempt of spirits risen," has been grandly sung; with more truth and less beauty has it been said, that "a live dog is better than a dead lion." If any one doubts the fact, let him go to the funeral of a man who is not followed by any heavy-hearted relation or friend, and yet who is better a hundred-fold than the men who walk behind him. Through the mourners' regret may be detected a faint though certain under-current of self-complacency, as who should say, "Yes, there lies So-and-So, dead. He was a clever fellow. In life he made some stir; but his race is over, his day is done, his place in the world is empty, and he has no longer a voice in anything. He cannot avenge his injuries or punish the man who assails his memory; he is no longer to be flattered, feared, or regarded; he is simply—nil. Let us thank God that we are upstanding, cake-eating, wine-drinking, vigorous men, able to walk about the earth, speak our minds, have a voice in the world's affairs, and hold our own against anybody, instead of being reduced to a helpless log like that." These men never put their thoughts into words; they are, indeed, scarcely conscious of them, but they are there.
I wonder why I am thinking so regretfully to-day of those poor voiceless, eyeless dead people? I have my dead, it is true, though they are not lying under the grass, but deep down in my heart. God has not yet come to the names of any of my people or the few strangers that I love.
There is some one of whom I always think as dead, though I know that he is numbered among the living. Only by thinking of him thus can I keep the high wall standing between us from falling and crushing beneath it my hard-won, icy composure. If I ever thought of him as living, breathing, sleeping, laughing, sorrowing, I could not bear my lot: every common sight and sound and act would send my thoughts leaping towards him; and since I cannot forget, I will not think. I will not stand in a fair garden and, lifting my eyes, behold him—far away, indeed, but still like unto me; subject as I am to God's sun and rain and snow and heat—rather do I set my feet on a barren shore, where no living thing can come; where I can look north, south, east, and west, and see not one speck of aught to break the dull grey monotony. But I did not come out to think dismal thoughts. . . . The world looks very fair this morning, like a great, softly splendid emerald set about with sparkling precious stones. The
Like sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery."
speckle the meadows and banks, exquisitely pure and delicate, in their first robe of thousand, thousand shades of green and yellow; so young and fresh are the leaves yet that they look as though a rough hand would brush the bloom from their surface. The light quivers and plays hide-and-seek with them, the shadows dance on the grass, as though they were tripping a measure to music from unseen fairies, the bees and waters mingle in a low symphony, bearing up the exulting song of the birds, who sing not because they are bid, or because they have anything in particular to say, but because they are happy—their little bodies are full of rapture, and it overflows in their voices. Down here in the woodland, the earth is carpeted with pale azure blue-bells, that seem but a reflection of the sky overhead; and among them spring the wind-flowers swaying their pinkish white heads with every passing breeze; the celandine glistens like gold in the sunlight, and the frail stitchwort, pearliest of beauties, opens her snow-white breast to the soft air; the lords and ladies, stiff and tall, overlook all the little woodland flowers, like a proud king and queen set to watch over the revels of the humbler folk.
A clash of bells rings out across the fields, and I lift my hands to my ears, trembling violently. Since a certain Christmas morning, three years and more ago, the sound of those bells has been to me like the touch of a coarse hand on an unhealed wound, and I have to hear them so often. All through that desperate brain fever I had, they jangled and pealed through my head; bells, bells, bells, that almost rang me out of this world and into the next.
I take my hands away from my ears; shall I not have to listen to the sound through all the years of my life? and think to myself how like wedding bells they sound. There is a mad, exulting hurry in their peal, as though they could not utter themselves for joy, and yet no one is likely to be married at four of the clock in the afternoon. Poe's weird verses always come into my mind when I listen to bells. I wonder could any other man have caught their meaning so perfectly, and written it down so faithfully? That is a great gift to have not only a beautiful idea but to clothe it in the right words.
As I listen, my thoughts go back to that day, just three years ago, when I looked in the glass and saw my hair just beginning to grow in short thick locks over my head; it has almost all come back to me now, but it is not so long as it used to be. When I began to get about, I made up a chignon out of all that had been cut off, and used to put it on over my short curls, but I was always losing it, and at last Pepper found it and worried it to bits, and there was an end of my first unlawful adornment. I wonder if I look that popular object of ridicule, a blighted being, as I sit under the oak tree in my smart print gown, with all the flowers creeping about my feet and the bonny blue sky over my head. I pull back my sleeve and look at my arm; it is not very fat, but it is not lean, and my fingers have dimples in them still—decidedly, grief has not altogether made a wreck and a ruin of me. That is the beauty of never having been particularly handsome; when there is so little to lose, the difference is not perceptible.
Dolly says that if I had more colour I should look exactly as I did three years ago, and I believe that she and mother both think that I am beginning to get over it. Well, I live, it is true, and sleep, eat, drink, laugh even, much as I used to do, but I am like a body of which one half is paralyzed, while the other retains its vigour; the inevitable, every-day, common side is quick and capable; the other—God and my own heart only know about that. I never was one to keep up a running complaint about anything: when I was glad or sorry, I always made a great noise over it and had done with it; so in the fortnight that preceded my illness I think I exhausted all power of active suffering, and that for the rest of my life I can only endure passively.
I do not believe in any healthy man or woman dying for love, unless they set themselves deliberately to do so. They must be either very vicious or very weak, for it is a little-minded nature that, possessing many good gifts, counts life as stale and worthless because the one thing he desires is withheld from him. Shame and disgrace may well kill, and do, but mere suffering never; the human heart must have something more than simple pain before it breaks. Folks do die of broken hearts must assuredly; or rather, it should be said, that a morbid and sinful indulgence in the luxury of grief, a dogged resolution to contemplate no subject save that of his own misery, causes remembrance to become a disease; the mind and heart consume themselves in unvarying regrets, the powers of both mind and body fall into disuse and gradually, but surely, the silver bowl is broken at the fountain.
It is considered a poetical thing enough to die for love; surely men know by this me how infinitely easier a thing it is than to live for love? The man who takes up his burden and bears it bravely has my honour, but he who lies down, and lets the waters of adversity swirl over his head, has my hearty contempt. Every man and woman too has work to do; the time for rest comes surely enough to all; let us wear out, I say, not rust out. And so I have tried, yes, from the very beginning, not to make my trouble a misery to those about me. I ask no pity and, what is better still, no one ever offers me any. I make just as much hurry to be down in time for prayers as ever I did in my life; I still love that unlawful ten minutes in bed after being called, that has cost me so dear on many a terrible occasion; still, with a dexterity acquired by long practice, work at the rusty pump of daily conversation at the family table. I feel snubbed and miserable when the governor calls me by the time-honoured title of a dummy, and distinctly indignant when he apostrophizes me as a peacock, when my tail does not even touch the ground, and though I am growing as old as the hills, I have never yet relieved my feelings by making a good face at him to his face.
I can still see the absurd side of things as quickly as the sad, though for the matter of that the one frequently suggests the other. Now and then I feel a desperate distaste for my bright-coloured dresses and insouciant ways, and lean severely towards sackcloth and ashes, while as to lamentation I doubt not I could lift up my voice in a dolorous howl with the best. These luxuries being denied me, I am garbed like any other Christian, and my voice is seldom raised in anything more distracted than a bellow across country after one of the boys.
I wonder if I shall live to be an old woman? Perhaps, and take to flirting in my old age, like Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, and the rest. Until the other day I never knew that Antony's goddess was thirty years old when she fell in love with him; that Helen of Troy was forty when she eloped with Paris, sixty when she returned to her long-suffering husband. Madame Récamier was reckoned the most beautiful woman in Europe from the age of thirty-eight to fifty-three, Aspasia ruled royally from the age of thirty-six to that of sixty, and ever so many more of them; and to my thinking it is a miracle, with all these frisky matrons on record, that our mothers and grandmothers don't cast about their eyes among the neighbouring squires for a Paris, an Antony, or anything else with a presentable name.
What silly thoughts I have fallen upon! I look at my watch; six o'clock; more than time for me to go home. I pick up my hat, almost as shabby and quite as unbecoming as the one I used to wear at the old trysting-place—that trysting-place that I have never passed, never looked at since that Christmas morning. In our rambles at papa's heels, if he has gone that way I have dropped bebind and struck across the fields by another path. My way back to the house lies very near it; from a hedge that I shall pass I can see it quite plainly, but I never have any wish to see it. I should even like an earthquake to come and swallow up the spot that has such bitter-sweet memories. I leave the woodland, thinking how pretty it is, and that I will bring Dolly with me to-morrow, and go along the narrow lane that leads homeward, and, coming to the place from whence the field of rye is visible with the old stone stile, some over-mastering impulse impels me to climb the bank and look over. I part the boughs, and see standing, with arms folded on the top of the stone, Paul Vasher, looking out at the tender green and fresh spring beauty of field and meadow and wood.