The Spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in
her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide- eyed and
watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the beholders.
[Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father's arm, was given in marriage.
What, people said, could have been more fitting? And, they added,
how beautiful she looked!]
As summer neared, as the evenings lengthened, there came to the
wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations
of the strangest kind—of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the
wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of cliff, sea, cloud, and sky brought
purposely together to assemble outwardly the scattered parts of the vision
within. In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy
water, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted,
and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every
gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to
declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness
prevails, order rules; or to resist the extraordinary stimulus to
range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of
intensity, remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues,
something alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard, bright, like
a diamond in the sand, which would render the possessor secure.
Moreover, softened and acquiescent, the spring with her bees humming
and gnats dancing threw her cloak about her, veiled her eyes, averted
her head, and among passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed
to have taken upon her a knowledge of the sorrows of mankind.
[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth,
which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said,
had promised so well.]
And now in the heat of summer the wind sent its spies about the
house again. Flies wove a web in the sunny rooms; weeds that had
grown close to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window
pane. When darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid
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itself with such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern,
came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding
gently as if it laid its caress and lingered steathily and looked and
came lovingly again. But in the very lull of this loving caress, as the long
stroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent asunder; another fold of the
shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed. Through the short summer
nights and the long summer days, when the empty rooms seemed to
murmur with the echoes of the fields and the hum of flies, the long
streamer waved gently, swayed aimlessly; while the sun so striped and
barred the rooms and filled them with yellow haze that Mrs McNab,
when she broke in and lurched about, dusting, sweeping, looked like a
tropical fish oaring its way through sun-lanced waters.
But slumber and sleep though it might there came later in the summer
ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt,
which, with their repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and
cracked the tea-cups. Now and again some glass tinkled in the cupboard
as if a giant voice had shrieked so loud in its agony that tumblers stood
inside a cupboard vibrated too. Then again silence fell; and then, night
after night, and sometimes in plain mid-day when the roses were bright
and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there seemed to drop into
this silence, this indifference, this integrity, the thud of something falling.
[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in
France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was
instantaneous.]
At that season those who had gone down to pace the beach and ask of
the sea and sky what message they reported or what vision they affirmed
had to consider among the usual tokens of divine bounty—the
sunset on the sea, the pallor of dawn, the moon rising, fishing-boats
against the moon, and children making mud pies or pelting each other
with handfuls of grass, something out of harmony with this jocundity
and this serenity. There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured
ship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain upon the bland
surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath.
This intrusion into a scene calculated to stir the most sublime reflections
and lead to the most comfortable conclusions stayed their pacing. It was
difficult blandly to overlook them; to abolish their significance in the
landscape; to continue, as one walked by the sea, to marvel how beauty
outside mirrored beauty within.
Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what
he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, his meanness,
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and his torture. That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in
solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror,
and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence
when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing yet
loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to pace the
beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was
broken.
[Mr Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which
had an unexpected success. The war, people said, had revived their interest
in poetry.]
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