Chapter 3

But you--you are opposing it. You are its enemy.”

Reed dropped his pipe and planted each hand firmly upon his knees.

“I’m an ignorant man from your point of view,” he said in a grating
voice. “I can’t write or talk about busy bees forgetting their daily
toil and feathered tribes hanging their drooping wings, and I’ll be
hanged if I want to. I can go better than that, Professor. Put you and
me down in the world to live by wits, and I would build up a business,
while you would sink to the poor-house. Ignorance? Well, maybe. Have
you ever heard of a millionaire who could read Greek? I don’t follow
you in your talk about dreams and warnings, and if you will excuse my
saying so I don’t intend to listen to any more of it. If you have any
suggestion to make about the property I’ll be glad to listen. But when
you say that a man can’t live on his own place because it has taken a
dislike to him--well, Professor. It’s moonshine.”

“Explain to me one thing,” Dr. Berry urged.

“Tell me how it was when I came upon you in the garden yesterday
evening you were as different from your present self as my house is
different from the Strath?”

Reed stirred uncomfortably. That question rankled.

“If we were sitting in that garden now,” impressed the rector, taking
his mild revenge, “and I were to read you those lines of Alcman, which
you despise, you would listen eagerly. Explain why your mood should be
different there?”

“Maybe it is you that change,” suggested the other unamiably.

“Come into the garden with me now.”

But Reed declined emphatically.

“You and I have got to be friends, Professor,” he went on with
attempted heartiness. “You’re the parson and I’m the squire, and it
seems there is no one handy to act as peacemaker. We had better not
quarrel, and if we are not going to quarrel we must agree to differ.”

“I have done my duty,” said the rector quietly.

“I had to warn you that if you insist upon opposing the Strath you
will be made to suffer. If you refuse to be persuaded I cannot help
you.”

Reed stretched out for the bottle and helped himself generously.

“How in the name of common sense can I be made to suffer?” he
muttered; but there was in his voice for the first time a definite
note of awe.

“There will come upon you the last punishment which can befall any
man,” Dr. Berry answered.

“The Strath will destroy you.”

Then he removed his hat and wiped his forehead; and walked slowly into
the house.

Scene II.--SKETCH

He sette not his benefice to hire,
And lette his shepe acombred in the mire,
And ran unto London, unto Seint Poules,
To seken him a chanterie for soules,
Or with a brotherhede to be withold;
But dwelt at home, and kepte wel his fold.--_Chaucer_.

Dr. Berry never learnt whether any phenomena occurred within or around
the Manor of Thorlund immediately subsequent to that evening when he
had been constrained to issue his warnings, because Reed came no more
to the rectory. The scholar reasoned that it was not any feeling of
indignation which kept the so called master of the Strath away; nor
was it fear lest he might be compelled to listen to more ominous
forebodings; it was, more probably, shame at defeat.

The gate which admitted from the churchyard was open to the rector no
longer; but every day he passed along the front, both at morning and
evening, anxious to see if the work of demolition had been commenced,
and from each of these walks he returned with the same triumphant
smile. Not a tuft of grass had been mown, nor had the axe been laid at
the root of any of the elms; not a bush had been removed, not a flower
or weed uprooted. The garden remained unaltered in all outward
essentials, except that a pathway had become beaten out from the iron
gates to the bridge across the moat.

When the rector questioned sexton or shepherd he learnt what he might
have guessed, namely that the owner hardly ever left the place; that
he had given up searching for men to work there; that he lived alone,
attending to his own requirements in colonial fashion; that his
baggage had been brought from the distant station across the hills and
taken by the carrier into the house; and the tradesmen of the small
market town seven miles away had been instructed to call for orders
not more than once a week.

“Will he also become a dreamer?” the scholar wondered, as he gazed
longingly upon the old grey wall. “Can it be possible for the Strath
to give him a soul and take him to itself as it received me? Will his
poultry farming become poetry making after all?”

He laughed sleepily at the quaint idea and approaching the oak door
turned the handle and pushed timidly. He had done so every evening
since Reed had left him, hoping rather than expecting to feel the
barrier yield. It was the same then as upon other nights; the door was
locked.

During the tension of that long week, when the garden was closed to
him, Dr. Berry for the first time realised the loneliness of the
Thorlund valley.

His single churchwarden, a peasant farmer who signed his name with
difficulty and without legibility, had his dwelling place almost a
mile from the church. The nearest gentlefolk lived four miles away at
Kingsmore across the white road of the downs. The only houses in the
valley were the rectory and the Strath. Half ruined barns, standing in
a disused yard which sloped towards a pond where sheep were sometimes
scoured, hedges, grass-roads, and a triangular green where a
whipping-post was preserved, comprised the remainder of the hamlet. In
such a place the talented Greek scholar had been content to pass his
time upon earth.

The rector found himself using that past tense unconsciously while he
mourned for his lost Eden. After thirty years of a strange sleep he
felt stirring within him a desire for more breadth and motion and some
human sympathy. The small voice of the world was calling him; the
natural human passions, long latent and drugged by the influence which
had dominated his life, struggled to reach the surface. The sluggish
calm had been disturbed by expulsion from the garden. He had entered
there to dream; and now that the gate was closed he became conscious
of the thorns and thistles of the world.

This restless mood grew upon the scholar as the days passed, the long
dry days of midsummer when the spirit of comedy prevailed around him.
His belief in the ultimate triumph of destiny was as deeply-rooted as
that of any ancient Greek. The Strath had long ago suggested to him
the theatre with its rites and mysteries and the open stage where
characters came and went, speaking their messages through either the
comic or the tragic mask. He himself represented the chorus, and had
merely played his part of exarchus in warning Reed. He did not require
to turn to his Aeschylus, or to his Sophocles, to learn the fate of
that man who thinks himself strong enough to fight destiny. Reed’s
fate was fixed, as assuredly as Agamemnon was doomed to death when he
returned to his palace in Argos. But destiny must strike with mortal
weapons; and it was impossible to believe that any human instrument in
the neighbourhood of sleepy Thorlund could be so wrought upon as to
strike the fatal blow.

Although the scholar had never been a sociable being, he felt it a
relief when Mr. Price, vicar and squire of Kingsmore, rode over on the
Saturday and invited himself to lunch. This reverend neighbour was a
simple-minded man of seventy, bow-legged with much riding, hearty in
manner, an excellent judge of beasts, and somewhat of a connoisseur in
wine. He would shout a jest at every rustic, and touch his
disreputable hat to every dame in his village, address his labourers
as equals, and throw coppers to the children who passed him as he
rode. He had long ago forgotten what little learning he had acquired;
and it was to be feared that, good man though he was, his farming
interests were not infrequently placed in front of his spiritual
duties. He could indicate all the good points in a horse at a glance;
but it might be doubted whether he could have quoted verbatim any one
of the thirty-nine articles.

“Good-day to you, Berry,” he shouted in his hearty manner, as he
crossed the rectory lawn while his dogs hunted the scholar’s cat into
the shrubberies. “I was saying to myself this morning that it was a
long time since I had eaten roast beef at your table, and as I know
you have a sirloin on Saturdays I thought I would ride over and help
with the under-cut. So the owner of the manor has turned up at last.
My village is full of families with his name. The place was a swamp
originally, I’m told, and they say the name came into existence on
account of the number of reeds which grew there. Any truth in that, do
you think? I believe in tradition. It’s the only thing I do believe in
nowadays. If your squire turns out to be connected with our Reeds, as
they say he is, I’m afraid he won’t be much of an acquisition.”

“He is connected,” said Dr. Berry. “However you may be able to agree
with him better than I can ever hope to do,” he went on with
unintentional maladroitness. “He has actually proposed to me a plan
for altering the Strath and breeding poultry there.”

“God bless my soul,” exclaimed his brother cleric, pushing an end of
his soiled white tie beneath his collar. “There’s no money to be made
out of poultry in this part of the world. I can’t dispose of mine so
as to cover expenses. He should go in for pigs. I’ll call on him after
luncheon, and tell him there’s money to be made in pigs. I have some
good sows for sale.”

“Pigs!” murmured Dr. Berry in anguish. “Pigs at the Strath!”

“They ought to do well,” said the farmer-vicar of Kingsmore. “There’s
plenty of grass at the manor, and pigs do well on grass. Ah, you’re
afraid of the smell. But pigs don’t smell, if they are properly kept.
We will call on Mr. Reed this afternoon. I am very anxious to see the
inside of the place.”

“I cannot accompany you,” said the rector of Thorlund a trifle coldly.
“Mr. Reed and I have not made any considerable advance towards
friendship.”

“That won’t do,” said the other, shaking his head seriously. “You must
pull it off with your squire, even if you do have to lower yourself a
bit. You and he are alone here, and when two men are cast upon a
desert island they can’t afford to quarrel. Now I’m quite prepared to
call on Mr. Reed, and be friendly, though he is distantly connected, I
suspect, with my head-carter. Every man is a vote, as my dear uncle,
who was member for this division under Lord Derby’s administration,
used to say; by which he meant, I fancy, that every man can do you
either good or harm, and you may as well earn the good at the
sacrifice of a little pride. But look here, Berry. For the hundredth
time I want to know whether things are as they should be at the
manor?”

The scholar smiled somewhat feebly as he replied, “Is it possible that
everything should be in order with a house that has stood deserted for
a century?”

“You know what I mean,” said Mr. Price. “I have asked you many a time
if the place is haunted, and I have never been satisfied with your
answers. I believe in haunted houses, because I once owned a farm
which was troubled by a tiresome old woman in a plaid shawl and a poke
bonnet, and I had to pull the house down to get rid of her. You have
always declared that the manor is free from anything of that sort; but
I think there must be something you have kept from me.”

“Come indoors,” said the doctor. “It is hot out here, and dinner will
soon be ready. I will tell you what I know about the Strath.”

The old gentleman followed his reverend brother into the study, and
seating himself beside the window listened to what he had to say, his
white head on one side, and his eyes blinking incredulously.

“Berry,” he said gravely, when his mind had been sufficiently
perplexed. “If this is what our progress has brought us to I am glad I
am nearly seventy-one. I have always said that the world is going
ahead too fast. When I was a boy we lived very much the same as they
did a couple of thousand years before, and then in just fifty years
the whole world changed. First came steam, and after it the telegraph
and electricity, and now we have reached a stage when we can send a
message from one end of the earth to the other in about the time it
takes to write it, and hear the voices of dead men speaking out of
phonographs, and we are talking of travelling a hundred miles in the
hour, and there is no hell and very little fear of death nowadays,
and--God bless my soul! we can’t even have a respectable ghost, but
our old houses are to be haunted for the future by this electricity
and magnetism; and they say messages are coming from people who are
dead and ought to be decently at rest, and we are learning something
about the next stage of existence, and a future state can be proved,
we are told, not through the Bible, which was good enough for everyone
in my young days, but by certain phases of human consciousness which
I refuse to believe in and don’t profess to understand, and--I’m very
glad I shan’t live much longer.”

“There is surely nothing much older than the idea of a house permeated
with some essence of mystery,” the scholar continued quietly. “Read
again your Greek drama, and refresh your memory by the references of
Aeschylus to the palace of Argos, whence odours issued like the breath
of graves. There you have a house, haunted, to use your word, like the
Strath by an inexplicable and invisible presence working its influence
upon the affairs of men.”

“You go beyond me,” said Mr. Price perplexedly. “I never could
translate Aeschylus, and the only way I got through at Oxford was by
learning the crib by heart and getting the selection right by luck. I
always thought it a waste of time to learn Greek, and I think so
still. Give a boy a good commercial education. Teach him French and
German, and elementary science, and American methods. Give him a
chance to make his way in the world.”

“And deprive him of the finest literature of all time, and the
knowledge of human nature as it is revealed to us through the
classics,” added the scholar quietly. “Is that fair?”

“Bah,” said Mr. Price. “There are always translations if they are
wanted, and there are Shakspere and our grand old Bible.”

“Shakspere could only model his tragedies upon the Greek drama,” the
scholar protested. “All that he could do was to clothe the old
thoughts with his own unrivalled speech and introduce additional
characters and scenic effects. The dark thread of influence runs
through all his tragedies. We know from the outset that Lear must die,
that Hamlet must fail, that Othello must fall through his frightful
error. As for the Bible permit me, with all reverence, to say that
much of its early lore is apocryphal, and much more of later date
derived from the thinkers and writers of ancient Greece. You talk of
sustaining your student with stagnant water taken far from the
fountain head.”

“I never could argue with you,” said Mr. Price sadly. “You swim right
away, while I sink like a stone. Though I am an old-fashioned
Englishman I do my best to be modern. I have recently bought a
mechanical foster-mother to rear my poultry, I have stocked my farm
with American implements, and now I’m seriously thinking of employing
gramaphones to frighten the pigeons from my peas. It’s no use trying
to fight progress, as the savage who charged a locomotive discovered,
and destiny, or whatever you call the thing that is haunting the
manor, will find that out. This Reed comes from America. If I were a
betting man, I would lay you what you like that he will improve the
place according to his plans, and clear away that atmosphere which you
say has settled over it. The Strath wants a thunderstorm to freshen
its air, and I wouldn’t mind wagering that the American will play the
part of thunderstorm to perfection.”

“If I were a betting man, to borrow your expression, I would take
you,” rejoined Dr. Berry with a strained smile. “But now let us go and
eat our beef.”

“Talking of thunder-storms,” said the squarson of Kingsmore, as he
followed his host into the dining-room. “I am reminded that the glass
was falling very rapidly when I left home, so I shall pay my call upon
friend Reed and get away as quickly as possible.”

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.