Chapter 1

THE FEAST OF
BACCHUS

A Study in Dramatic Atmosphere

BY
ERNEST G. HENHAM

BROWN, LANGHAM & CO., LTD.,
78, New Bond Street, London, W.
1907

CONTENTS

Prelude
Overture
Act I.
Scene I. Satiric
Scene II. Sketch
Scene III. Tragedy
Interlude
Act II.
Scene I. Comedy
Scene II. Mystery
Scene III. Musical Comedy
Entr’acte
Act III.
Scene I. Heroic
Scene II. Pastoral
Scene III. Extravaganza
Scene IV. Sentimental Comedy
Scene V. Pageant
Scene VI. Melodrama
Scene VII. Idyll
Incidental
Act IV.
Scene I. Puppenspiele
Scene II. Lyrical Dithyramb
Scene-Shifting
Act V.
Scene I. Morality
Scene II. Masque
Proscenium
Exode

The Feast of Bacchus

PRELUDE

When an unnatural idea possesses a woman bitterness flows from her
tongue.--_Euripides_.

The silence upon the river was broken by a vivacious voice,--

“My lady, out of the depths of your wisdom define for me the word
asymptote.”

“Spell it,” murmured beauty in laziness, from a heap of pink cushions.

The vivacious voice did so, inaccurately.

“Never heard of the thing,” said indolence.

“Then I must search in the dictionary,” answered vivacity.

A moment later the punt lurched violently, there was a splash of water
under the bank, a nodding of tall rushes; and beauty in pink closed
her pretty eyes and tried to forget she was Maude Juxon, wife of a
rich stockbroker, and mother of a three year old child whom she had
not seen for more than six months.

Some evening clouds were reflected in the smooth river. Swallows
darted to and fro, and fish were splashing after ambrosial gnats. The
atmosphere was languorous. A single jarring note, necessary to make
the surroundings earthly, was supplied by an impatient owl hooting
from an elm before its time. Down to the river sloped the garden of
widowed Mrs. Neill, burning with the flowers of June. The sleepy
occupant of the punt heard far-away the snip of the gardener’s iron
scissors. This, the only, sound of human labour made her more
contented with the lot which had fallen to her in an easy ground.

The punt lurched still more violently and Mrs. Juxon was again
awakened to the troublesome world. Flora Neill, the widow’s only
child, and bosom friend of the little lady in pink, settled herself,
at the other end of the boat, and balanced a drab volume upon her
knees.

“Will you be pleased to refrain from sleep for a few minutes, my
lady?” she asked. “Because I have a desire to talk.”

“Don’t call me my lady,” said Mrs. Juxon irritably. “If you do I will
go to sleep at once. Have you found out what that thing is?”

“I am just going to,” said Flora, who was a tall fair-haired girl,
endowed with more than average good looks, but unmistakably “narrow
atween the eyen,” and possessing a chin which her bluff old uncle, the
vicar of Kingsmore, had described as a walnut-cracker. “Before I begin
you may look into this letter which has just come. And, Maude, I found
mother reading an incoherent epistle from uncle. It appears I am
expected to make my annual appearance at Kingsmore, the week after
next, to criticise pigs and bring the scent of the footlights over the
hay for the benefit of my reverend relative who is about as much at
home in London as you or I would be in Timbuctoo. Here! catch your
letter.” Flora tossed the missive across the punt, and her indolent
friend was sufficiently curious to lift her head and glance at the
handwriting.

“Only from Herbert,” she sighed disappointedly. “What a ridiculous
thing it is to have a husband who writes to you every day! I know
exactly what he says,” she droned, pulling the envelope open.

“When are you coming home? I find the evenings very dull without you.
Couldn’t you have Peggy at home now? I don’t like the idea of her
being farmed out. She isn’t farmed out,” cried Mrs. Juxon indignantly.
“What a nasty objectionable phrase to use! Peggy is with a very good
nurse, who will bring her up much better than I ever should. What is
the good of being a rich woman if you are to be bothered with your
baby? And as for going home--well, I’m quite happy here.”

“You would rush into matrimony and motherhood, my child,” said the
fair-haired girl, who was not more than four years Maude’s junior. “I
warned you, and now--”

“I’m driving my husband to drink, prophetess,” laughed the pink lady.

“Or to some other woman.”

Mrs. Juxon tore the letter into fragments which she snowed daintily
over the water with a tiny white hand.

“I couldn’t have worked for my living,” she said. “And nice men are
poor. What’s that you are reading?”

“An asymptote,” read Flora, “is a line which approaches nearer and
nearer to a given curve, but does not meet it within a finite
distance. It is an astronomical phrase. Now do you know what an
asymptote is, Maude?”

“It is a line,” recited the pink lady, in her frivolous way,
“which--which does something or other to a curve.”

“Don’t worry that little head,” said the maiden. “I won’t ask you to
repeat the definition. I wanted to see if you would be personal. My
dear, I have been called an asymptote, and no longer ago than
yesterday.”

“I can’t think out things,” said Maude pettishly. “It makes my head
ache. Who ever called you that thing? I can’t pronounce it.”

“I overheard the compliment,” Flora answered. “So I went up to the
culprit, a wicked old clergyman who dabbles in astronomy, and demanded
an explanation. He laughed, and said, ‘It is a mathematical way of
calling a lady a flirt.’”

“Do explain,” said a voice which suggested slumber.

“I will, if you listen,” said Flora. “Are you awake, Maude?”

“I will be, if it is not going to be too hard,” said the pink lady.

“It is quite easy,” said Flora. Then she began to read,--

“The asymptote is more than a mere scientific expression. It is a term
which may be applied to many of Eve’s daughters. The human asymptote
has her being amongst us both in country and in town. The observer is
made to feel her presence, as she may be seen approaching nearer and
nearer the man who is her given curve for the time being, he prepared
to respond to the influence, and she equally determined never to meet
him until they reach infinity together. She is no beautiful figure,
despite all her surface charms. Her blood never responds to the
natural call of sex. But admiration is to her as the breath of life,
and she will beguile as wantonly as any of the Sirens of old. Equipped
with a ready brain, which has never been dulled by the mastery of
love, her power of seduction is complete. She throws down a cold heart
and a scheming brain to challenge a true nature and real affection.
But so soon as the human curve leaps out of hyperbola to meet his
asymptote repulsion assuredly must follow.

“Our asymptote may be graceless, but she is never a fool. She knows
indeed all that a girl can know. She has opened all the books of
dangerous knowledge and loves to indulge in unrestrained speech. She
will discuss the tenderest relations flippantly, because they are
nothing to her. She will converse upon matrimonial matters with the
carelessness of the child blowing soap bubbles. She passes through
life lonely, though to an outsider she may appear the centre of a
crowd. She is happy enough to all outward seeming, and finds a vast
deal to interest her. She is not often dangerous, because when all is
said she remains little more than a rattle, and if she marries at all
it is late in life, and then not because she has met her curve--for
that is scientifically impossible--but rather because she finds she
must have a man of her own to plague. When thus settled she may still,
if the fates be kind, happen upon some foolish youth ready to play the
curve to her asymptote. One does not pity her; but a sigh may well be
spared for her husband.”

Flora gazed thoughtfully along the river, her mouth determined, and a
strong light in her eyes. Her companion, who was by this time wide
awake, had no imagination; but she could not help feeling that behind
that face there was a will which might carry its owner rather too far.

“Are you really like that?” Maude demanded, nodding in the direction
of the book of knowledge.

Flora nodded seriously.

“Then I think you are a wicked person,” said Mrs. Juxon virtuously.

“My dear little Maude! Do you really believe what I have just read?”
laughed the fair-haired girl. “It is rubbish. It’s a fairy-tale
written, as a warning for very young men, by some snuffy old
philosopher who never found a woman with whom he could agree. You
needn’t stare at me with those big blue baby eyes. I am a far better
girl than you will ever be. I don’t meet my curves, but you have
become hopelessly entangled in yours.”

“I am not an--I can’t pronounce it,” protested the pink lady. “It’s
nonsense to rail against matrimony. A girl without money must either
earn her own living, which is altogether disgusting and impossible, or
she must marry.”

“Suppose she shrinks from the idea, as you would from a cold bath on a
winter’s morning?”

“Flora, a girl must marry if she wants comfort and liberty. Of course
it’s silly to marry for love. That doesn’t last long after marriage
anyhow. You may say what you like, but matrimony will always be a
girl’s one aim in life, besides it is nice and proper. Really,” little
Mrs. Juxon concluded, “I am quite clever this evening.”

“Your wisdom has not supplied you with an answer to my question,”
Flora went on. “It’s true I shrink from the thought of matrimony, but
I won’t be called an incomplete woman, though I have my one little
antipathy. I cannot touch or smell a rose. But that’s a matter of
temperament. In other things I am as complete as you are. I love
admiration, but what girl does not? Perhaps my blood is a little bit
cold, but then men and women no longer meet only on the ground of sex.
Thank Heaven for that. I really think that in time I might love--in a
spiritual sense.”

“Men don’t appreciate that kind of love,” said Mrs. Juxon decisively.

“Because they have never been properly educated. We shall train them
to higher things in time. Why, Maude, the spiritual union is the
perfect state. We are not animals, to increase and multiply, at this
stage of the world’s history. We are nervous sympathetic beings, and
love properly developed should be a reaching out of the soul for
larger and wider sympathies. And a man will hold and squeeze a girl,
and call her idiotic names, if she will let him. Call that spiritual
love! The state of the man and woman in the garden was the sympathy I
crave for.”

“And they fell from it at once,” cried the other joyously.

“Because they were ignorant. The world is older now and we are wiser.
We shall advance to platonic marriage. Matrimony, as it exists to-day,
deadens the sympathies. The state of the soul which demands a perfect
union cannot under present circumstances be attained. In your case, my
dear, nature, after attaining her end, has snatched away the veil
which hid the coarse reality, and you know you don’t love your
husband. As a matter of fact you never did love him.”

“Herbert has always been good to me,” argued the pink lady. “And he is
so well off that I should have been very silly if I had refused him.
Mother assured me love would come after marriage. It didn’t, but that
is not my fault. I am quite a model wife; I don’t quarrel with my
husband, I let him kiss me sometimes, and I never interfere with his
business. When he gives a dinner he shows me off with ridiculous
pride. And when he is unreasonable I come away and visit my friends,
while he writes every day for me to go back. You see it is not a bad
marriage.”

“What has the soul got to do with it?” demanded Flora.

“Nothing,” Mrs. Juxon laughed lazily. “This little body is quite
enough for me. I don’t worry about souls or sympathies.”

“The sympathies will not be ignored,” the fair-haired girl threatened.
“If you are married without love some state of the soul will assert
itself. That is always the punishment for a marriage of convenience.”

“I won’t sit here and be persecuted,” said Mrs. Juxon with some
spirit. But, while she rebelled, her face became sad and her eyes full
of thought; because she could not help recalling the memory of one in
particular with whom she had once experienced, as she thought, that
state of the soul, and in whose arms she had cried to say farewell.
“Why have you such a rooted objection to matrimony?” she went on
quickly.

“Because it is abominable and tyrannic,” said Flora. “Because the
wretched girl becomes completely absorbed by her husband, if she gives
herself up to him entirely as she is supposed to do. She has not even
her identity left. She is compelled to think as the inferior half of
somebody else’s mind. She actually grows to resemble her husband in
face and manner. The man takes everything from her, not only her name
and her individuality, but her health and her beauty--”

“Flora, I won’t listen. You are horrid and coarse. You’ll be saying it
is wicked to have children next.”

“It is sometimes,” the out-spoken young woman retorted. “You remember
what a beauty Gertrude Norton was, and how everyone used to rave over
her?”

“Yes,” admitted the stockbroker’s wife.

“She has been married only three years, but who would rave over her
now? Nobody would call her even nice-looking. Only a few seasons ago
she won a tennis championship, or something equally good, and she
would think nothing of cycling fifty miles or more in one day. Now she
is the mother of twins, and a confirmed invalid. She is a model wife,
I daresay, and a perfect pattern of motherhood, but her dancing days
and her tennis playing are over. And she is not twenty-five.”

“Her husband is very fond of her,” said Mrs. Juxon pathetically.

“I know a man who says he is very fond of me,” replied the fair-haired
girl. “But I do not intend to spoil my life while I retain my senses.”

“He wouldn’t be fond of you if he could hear you now. I declare,”
shivered the little lady, “I’m getting quite afraid of you. I wonder
what you really think of me. Am I falling off at all, Flora?”

“Horribly,” said the girl, rising and swaying the punt. “It is nearly
dinner time and it is getting chilly. Let us go in.”

“I am beginning to feel not only cold but old,” said the pink lady, as
she gathered in her skirts to step ashore. “But I cannot be ugly.
Whatever may happen I cannot be ugly. It is heavenly to feel upon
coming into a drawing-room that men cannot take their eyes off you.
What is the secret of preserving beauty, Flora?”

“You must be spiritual,” said Miss Neill.

“I have Peggy,” murmured Mrs. Juxon, as she stepped upon the bank with
her studied daintiness of motion. “I really have done my duty as a
wife and a mother.”

“Do you hear the owl?” exclaimed Flora, as they walked away from the
lazy river.

“Yes, the beast!” replied Maude spitefully. “I am always superstitious
when I hear owls!”

OVERTURE

Inasmuch as Nature tells us there are Gods, and we know, by reason,
what they must be like, so, with the consent of all rational beings,
we believe souls to endure everlastingly; where, however, these
spirits exist, and what they are like, we must discover by
investigation.--_Cicero_.

The reverend Doctor Berry concluded to his satisfaction the single
paragraph which was the result of a morning’s thought, wiped his pen,
fingered the sheet of manuscript tenderly, and placed it carefully in
a drawer of his desk, then rose and walked across to the open window.

The sun was setting upon beech woods, and a deep haze flecked with
dust and white butterflies shimmered across a strip of garden, bright
with poppies and cornflowers, which divided the rectory from the
churchyard; the main portion of the garden stretched away behind the
house, down a slope which ended in an orchard where a stream ran
bounding the glebe in that direction. A crumbling wall, completely
covered with ivy, marked the line where the consecrated ground ended;
on the rectory side grew docks and nettles and red sorrels among the
altar-tombs and mossy slabs, with here and there a black yew striking
its roots deeply into the resting places of the dead. An unfrequented
road passed beside the church, to become a mere cart-track upon the
downs, where the white-thorn was being shed like snow and the shadows
of the beech wood were lengthening fast.

“It is a glorious evening,” the rector whispered, “I will go and walk
in the garden of the Strath.”

Taking a great key from an oak bracket he walked out of his study,
placed a straw hat upon his silvered hair, and stepped into the
glories of the failing day.

The ecclesiastical parish of Thorlund, scarcely worthy of being
dignified by the title of hamlet, consisted of a wooded valley watered
by a stream. Far down and buried amid elms were tiny church and
parsonage; and hard by rose the inexplicable house, its garden
surrounded by a time-worn wall, known to all as the Strath. A few
cottages upon the Kingsmore road were passing into an advanced stage
of decay. A few in a more habitable state were dotted singly, or in
pairs, beside the grass by-paths or upon the lower ridges of the
downs. The entire parish was moribund. Nothing flourished except the
trees and strong-scented wayside weeds. No dignitary of the church had
entered the valley for hard upon a century. A deadening influence
prevailed over the church, pastor, and people. There were not thirty
adults in the parish all told, and the nearest school was at Kingsmore
four miles distant across the downs. A few peasant farmers clung to
the chalky slopes because they lacked the means to go. The labourers
were agricultural machines; the wives went out to work afield beside
their husbands; and by day the sun smote across an altogether deserted
prospect, where a lone cat slept on the dusty green, and a caged
blackbird listened sadly and silently to its free brethren singing in
the weird garden of the Strath.

Thorlund had in common with the world the sun which warmed it, the
moon which ruled its night, the rain which coursed in milky rivulets
down its stony roads, and the storm which broke its beeches and its
elms--but nothing more. It was a peaceful, but not a happy valley. Its
sleep was not a healthy one. Once, no doubt, Thorlund had lived, and
in a sense flourished, then death came, but a spark of vital element
had crept back to the body, diffusing itself throughout its entire
system, and lending to it a semblance of life. It was from the long
abandoned house known as the Strath that this vital and dramatic
element proceeded. Dr. Berry served as the intermediary between the
incomprehensible spirit of the Strath and those human beings who had
their habitations near. He had remained untouched by the noise and
trouble of the world. His life had moved smoothly from the cradle, and
promised so to continue down to the grave. He had always been happier
apart from others, living his own life which consisted in striving to
materialize rather than dispel that atmosphere of mysticism which
gathers around a scholar’s solitary existence. At Oxford he had worked
for classical honours, not for the sake of reputation, but for the
pure love of knowledge; and when at the age of twenty-five he had been
offered the living of Thorlund, which nobody else could be induced to
accept, he had merely asked, “What is the population of the parish?”
The answer, “Fifty at the last census,” which had frightened away
every one else, satisfied him. The stipend of forty-five pounds per
annum was not a serious consideration, as he possessed means of his
own. After passing through the divinity school with his customary
display of polished scholarship, he accepted the “benefice”; and
thirty years had passed him there, as so many uneventful weeks, while
he built up slowly the work which it was his intention to bequeath to
posterity as a justification for his existence, an analysis of the
lyrical poetry of the Aeolians.

A drowsy rustling of foliage was blown with the chalk dust across the
unused road to the parish church, as the scholar made his way through
the churchyard towards an old oak door set into the grey wall, nearly
twenty feet in height, with a coping of tiles the majority of which
time and storm had worked awry. Pushing the key into the antique lock
he opened the door communicating with the churchyard, and immediately
found himself standing in the shadows of the old garden of the Strath.

Neither building nor grounds had been touched by the hand of man for
more than a century. The romantic house, which bore the date 1670
above the arms of an extinct family graven upon a stone let into the
masonry above the hall door, was of no great size; high rather than
wide, and completely enveloped in ivy and other creepers from cellars
to chimney stacks. The garden and orchard comprised six acres, bound
by that great wall which had in no place fallen completely out of
repair. The grass waved like corn along what had once been the drive,
and the iron gates leading from the Kingsmore road were red and glued
together with rust. Through these gates children often peered to catch
glimpses of the sad house through the tangled growths; to watch the
birds and insects sporting as in another and a stranger and more
restless world. No one ever entered there except the rector. That wall
could not be climbed. The old people of the hamlet would stare through
the forbidding gates, and observe to each other that the flowers were
extraordinary that season in the Strath--there were blooms in those
jungles such as they had never seen elsewhere--or that the odour of
the garden was wonderful, or that the Strath was noisy; and when the
latter statement was in their mouths they realised dimly they were
hinting at what they could not understand.

Yet the place had no evil reputation; the reverse rather. Mothers
would quiet fractious children by promising that they should enter the
mysterious garden some day, or threaten that if they were not good
they could never hope to go to the Strath when they died. No wild
stories dealing with phantasms or spirit lights were passed upon the
village green. Not a tongue had ever been so bold as to suggest that
the spiritual world had acquired a perpetual tenancy of the wild old
place. The Strath had simply remained unentered and unused for over a
century. The flowers and weeds fought together, the trees increased,
the bushes spread, fruit formed, ripened, and dropped to rot year
after year. And yet there was something about the place which made it
unlike other deserted houses; something which did not appear to have
its origin in the weedy circlet of water--for the Strath was a moated
grange--nor in the jungle-like garden, nor in the damp and darkened
house itself; but which had its being in the air, and in the clouds
above, and in the wind around.

“No, Sir,” said Simcox the sexton, when Dr. Berry questioned him many
years ago. “There ain’t nothing what you wight call gruesome about the
old place that I’ve heard tell on. But it seems to me, Sir, that
sometimes when the sun is bright ’tis wonderful happy in there, and
when the wind is noisy ’tis awful solemn-like. I’ve been cutting that
nettle patch along churchyard wall in summer, and had to stop and
laugh out loud, and all for nought, Sir. And I’ve been sweeping leaves
in autumn under the wall, and felt that miserable I could almost have
cut my throat, or maybe somebody else’s throat, begging your
reverence’s pardon for saying it.”

The young rector nodded his head gravely, and because he had a strong
desire to obtain entrance into the mysterious garden, instituted a
search for its owner. He succeeded in part. A firm of land agents in
the neighbouring town supplied him with the address of a London
lawyer; and when next in the metropolis Mr. Berry, as he then was,
found his way into a stuffy office hard by Goldsmith’s memorial, where
he was received by an old fashioned attorney, who replied in the
affirmative when the rector of Thorlund asked whether he represented
the owner of the Strath. As a result of that interview the rector was
granted permission to enter the garden by the gate from the
churchyard, on the condition that he would not lend the key, which was
given him for that purpose, to others. He also received the
information that the owner was abroad, and that the house was neither
to be sold nor let.

“I will write to the owner, informing him that I have given you
permission to use the garden,” the lawyer had said, as he accompanied
his visitor to the door, “and if he objects you shall hear from me.”

Years went by, but the lawyer never wrote; and Dr. Berry walked in the
garden every day, until the glamour of the place made him its slave;
and after walking there, as along the unknown ways of another world,
his work on Aeolian poetry escaped from the trammels of prose and
became itself poetry, pierced through and through by the strange
lights of romance; and he became still more a recluse; and the present
world went away from him and was shrouded in the mists of unreality.

On many a bright day, when nature was revealed at her best, the poet
would laugh and applaud, and even dance grotesquely along the paths of
the Strath, his feet in time to a music which was in his brain but not
in his ears. Was this mere animal enjoyment of life, or was it
influence? Decidedly the latter. The odour of flowers and the giddy
dance of insects were also controlled by that vital and dramatic
element, to which the scholar could only give the name of comedy, a
happiness tinged slightly with the knowledge of mortality. And when
the day was sad with wind, the opposing note of tragedy was struck
throughout the garden; and that fatality which dominated the Attic
drama, the struggle of terrible human passions in the wind and rain,
the falling of life before unpitying destiny, controlled his sensitive
mind. Dr. Berry had suffered when the elements fought above his head,
blending with the influence, which bade him seek out the man hated by
the immortals and slay him without shame. Then was the knowledge swept
upon the poet that he was an intermediary between seen and unseen, and
thus an agent for the effectual working out of the tragedy of justice.

The influence at work within the high wall which fastened about the
Strath was therefore twofold, that of the sun, and that of the storm;
the former a comedy, elevating if bizarre, tempered by a sentiment
suggesting the presence of melancholy beneath the motley; the latter a
tragedy, wild and extravagant as the passions of a Lear, yet redeemed
from absolute despair by the thread of hope chased through the scheme.
Comedy was in the air that evening, a riotous happiness which
inebriated like wine. Singing noisily, although unconscious of it, Dr.
Berry gambolled towards the house, under the rose bowers, along the
track which his own feet had worn into the semblance of a path, beside
the acacias with their grape-like bunches of bloom bursting into pink
or white. He passed below the sun-dial, which rose altar-like above a
mass of tottering masonry coloured with flowers, through the herb
garden, and on until the jasmine and the honeysuckle wafted their
fragrance at him from the worm-eaten porch. A blackbird flew past
screaming. He looked up, annoyed at the interruption, and straightway
shivered, because he saw the figure of a man standing among the high
grass near the front of the house. Indignation possessed the dreamer’s
mind when he beheld a material presence in his garden. His life had
become so intimately connected with that of the Strath that he was
unable to think of the garden as another man’s property. So, he
reflected, the iron gates had been forced apart at last, and a master
was visiting the bewildered place after the silence of a hundred
years--for the thinker was convinced that the elderly man, standing in
the ripening grass, was the owner--and now the garden was to be his no
longer, and his dreams were to be brought to an end.