Michael Wood

“ Blot out their sin!
Let Life begin!
Christina Rossetti. The wind was blowing through the heather, singing softly from the distant sea. The tiny tinkling sound of the purple bells was like faint music of faery.
They lay on an ancient barrow—three men on a summer holiday by the southern sea.
One was a thin, nervous-looking man, who knew much of the purlieus of the “primrose path,” wherein he strayed to gather up its wreckage and mend it if he might, by the power of a God in whom he said he did not believe. ”

“ He flung himself on the heap of willow withies, and hid his face from her.
“I know it,” he sobbed. “Do you think you need to tell me that? I was going to kill myself when you talked to me of my mother. And what more can I do? What more can I do?”
“You can turn the tide by the waving of your hand,” said she. “You can stay the flight of the earth through space; or you can kill yourself. Behold! the one is as possible as either of the others. Will you mend the broken heart in the hill cottage by the way of the black canal? Will you wipe out the shame of a soul by the death of a body?” ”

“ The stream of tales ran dry.
“What’s become of all your fine stories, Dennis?” said one of the circle mockingly; one who knew of the little tragedy enacted a month ago. “I’m afraid I’ve spoilt the flow of Dennis’s genius,” said March, and the laugh rippled round the circle at the expense of the young seer. Is this world so purely joyous that we should forget our heavenly heritage if our brethren did not try now and then to give us a little pain, even though it be a tongue stab to make us less contented with our earthly bliss? It would seem that there be many who think so. ”

“ Fletewode listened awhile, picked up the verses, dropped them, half raised his hands to his head, let them fall, and sat still. His limbs grew numb and heavy, then they vanished from his consciousness; all his life seemed to be focussed to one point, with a great eagerness and yearning, for what he knew not.
The room faded from his sight. Petals of wild cherry blossom, like faery cups fashioned from snowflakes, were flying through the air; the green of the beeches was like living flame; the wood was full of keen strong life. The birds were building ”

“ And I think I should miss the forest if I went away. I haven’t any other reason—that I know of.”
L’ENVOI
Power of the wave and the light,
Power of the wind and the dawn,
Fanned by the strength of thy breath
Man’s soul is born.
Power of the song of the lark,
Power of the gold of the corn,
By perfume and silence and speech
Man’s soul is born.
Power of the whispering rain,
Power of the day when it dies,
By magic of sunset and dusk
Man’s soul doth rise!
Power of the stars and the night,
When singing and sighing shall cease
By the unknown span of thy rest
Man’s soul knows peace! ”

“ She is angel and man, woman and child, beast and bird, sky and cloud and flower, song of bird, dew, sunshine and rain, wind and water, snow and frost, tree and stream, priests’ chant and sacred writ, learning and holy rites. She is the Sacred Mirror of God, in Whom are all things visible and invisible. They who toil in Her service worship and praise Her, and of Her the Holy Child is born in every human heart. ”

“ So this boy, Fletewode Garth, lived in the quiet old vicarage house, surrounded by the beech woods and the meadows, and dreamed, and wrote, and read such books as his father possessed, which were less numerous than well chosen. His father, the gentlest, simplest, most unworldly of men, never speculated as to his boy’s future. Nor did the lad himself dream, as yet, of giving his thoughts to the world; of fame to be or money making he never thought at all. ”

“ Who was to be expected to turn aside from the press of life to see whether this shabbily dressed young man, who couched all manner of wild, mystical thoughts of God and humanity and nature in melodious verse, that made one think of the murmur of the wind through a perfumed wood on a June night—who was to take much trouble, I say, to see whether there was any truth in the words, or genius in the soul, of such a country lad as this? ”

“ The power of the woman was upon him; meek and dazed as a tired babe he lay upon the twisted withies; he heard the sound of the twigs as she twisted them in and out in her weaving. He could neither move nor speak; he wondered dreamily whether he lay in a trance or swoon, or whether this was death, and thus the problem of his vanishing was solved without effort of his own. He felt either the light cold touch of her finger tip or the touch of a willow withy between his brows. Suddenly, how and when he did not know, he saw that other country of which the Willow-weaver spake ”

“ Blue was the key-colour of the place. The sky glowed blue and cloudless; the smooth water was gentian blue; seawards there was a huge bar of sand and shingle, heaped high, and running almost the whole way across the arm of the inrushing sea; therefore whether the tide was high or low the waves broke and leaped and swirled on it, so that the sea looked like a great lake, land-locked on three sides, and bounded on the fourth by a tossing, spouting, milk-white cataract of foam, as the great breakers raged and tumbled over the bar of sand. ”

“ Into the silence of his soul there broke many voices speaking as one voice and they spoke after this manner:
“When we who guard the Songs of the Glamour will that they shall be sung, they are sung. They ring through the world, though none know whence they sound, nor the manner of their sounding. Some say they come from here, and some from there. And it is nothing to us whether our singers be kings or slaves, saints or sinners, fools or sages, men or women, for it is we who sing through their lips, and it is the world that hears when the time is ripe. ”

“ On a bough a blue tit hung head downwards, and beneath the bough, half hidden in a crisp bed of last year’s leaves, lay a child who watched the tit with half-shut eyes, and shook with a delight he did not understand, which was akin to pain. A queer, lonely, shy child, lying in a wood, trembling with a force which was trying to express itself through him. ”

“ March was an obstinate thick-headed man, and he was very angry indeed. The vials of his righteous wrath descended on the luckless seer, who was utterly broken and unnerved in consequence. Perry also was very angry though not with the helpless little victim of March’s dull wits. When three days after the child’s punishment a drowned sailor was actually washed up at the Head, Perry boldly avowed his belief in the visions of Dennis. March was as angry with Perry as it was possible for him to be with his idolised only son. ”

“ The turf sweet with the breath of wild thyme, and studded with pale yellow rock rose, crept well-nigh to the water’s edge. Here a hundred years ago the sea had claimed tribute of the earth, and a big landslip rent the bosom of the patient mother. Half a mile of cliff had fallen, and in the chasm thus made, now filled full with greenery and prodigal growth of fern, bramble, and berry, a long white house stood sun-bathed and creeper-clad. ”

“ The next day he asked for and obtained a holiday and started northwards.
It was evening when he arrived; he went to a little inn, and after dinner he walked to the jetty and stood upon it looking at the water leaping on the bar, and the glowing line of the sun-bathed hills. He looked and he looked and he looked, and behold! there was nothing there which he desired. The hunger of twenty years was for something which this beauty recalled to him—nothing more. The Glamour-Land was not here. ”

“ Child of so many prayers, of such vain hopes, of so many innocent womanly ambitions never now to be fulfilled, is it not an evil thing that the loving unwise heart in that hill cottage should break through you? Is it not an evil thing in the eyes of a Willow-weaver that one crooked twig should make the whole weaving awry? ”

“ She, the hearts of men, and their souls and bodies; She, the Holy Cave, the consecrated Manger wherein the Babe is cradled; She is the Mother of the Sacred Humanity whereby we enter the mystery of the Godhead. She, then is Nature and Beauty, the Power of God, the Builder of all Forms, the Mother of all Tales. Those sing of Her and praise Her who love to worship God as Divine Form rather than as hidden all-sustaining Life. ”

“ Colour that speaks the tongue of the gods when thought falls dead and the sound of speech is mere hollowness.
When the colour faded big purple clouds began to drift up over the pale yellow sky until it was all a wonderful thick purple-blue darkness in which sounds were both clear and muffled; faraway sounds were clear, and sounds close at hand were muffled and eerie; pale milk-grey lights began to slide through the darkness. ”

“ It was Perry stunned and lifeless lying in a hollow, the mouth of which was hidden by elder bushes with their luscious black berries. It was a narrow rocky crevasse formed by the rending slipping land. Everything about the picture was very clear; on the hill above the hollow was an old pine tree twisted into a strange shape; there was a bent bough on it on which a human form dangled—a dead man hanged by the neck to the bent tree. This was the vision that had driven Dennis to his uncle’s room ”

“ It was the young man from the north.
“Faith! What do you mean by faith?”
“The sense of the unseen, and the trust in it,” said he who used to tell the stories of the Glamour-Land. “The man who never loses the sense of that which he does not see, can move the world. All the force side of nature is allied with him. It is the unseen that is the motive power everywhere. ”

“ One was a foreign writer of romance, the second was a great preacher, the third a musician, and the fourth a man of science to whom the world harkened when he spake. And the thought of these four men, and through them the thought of the world, was coloured for all time to come by the work of the minor poet; men who had not heeded that of Fletewode Garth, heard his voice gladly. Thus the wheel that none can stay rolled on, and the world, through the heart failure of Fletewode, and the ambition of an unrighteous man, received the message which it would not receive by other means. ”

“ It passed; the clouds flew seawards; the sky grew a pale even grey; then a cool, soft wind began to blow. The east grew faint pink, then yellow-grey; then a long line of light quivered over the heather. The new day had come. The birds were stirring and singing; the rabbits hopped out to feed; a stoat darted across the track; and the clang of a cow-bell echoed across the moor.
He found the slowly moving stream he crossed yesterday; there he bathed; then he ate some of the food he had brought with him. Finally he walked down a path of silver-grey sand, skirting a wood of oaks. ”

“ When his mother died and he came to live with his uncle and cousins, he came simply and confidingly as to friends; unsuspicious of the possibility of harshness, inexperienced in aught save tenderness. To be suddenly denounced as an obstinate liar, to be flogged because he saw things which his cousins did not see, not only terrified but stupefied him. He relapsed into bewildered silence, and bent all his small powers of deception to conceal his power of vision. ”

“ Wherefore we, who know how it is with a man’s soul, drew from you the common desires of men as pith is drawn by a shepherd boy from a reed when he would pipe therewith; thereafter we fashioned these your body and soul into a pipe whereon we might pipe the Songs of the Glamour, and the world has heard them. ”

“ Across the waste ground crawled the canal that started in the clean green-brown country; here it ran between a clammy grassless towing path and a brick wall. “Ran” is too jocund a word to describe its action. It crept stickily along, a slimy glaze coating its surface, whereon floated the hairless swollen body of a drowned rat.
Ralph Campion stood at the side of the black canal, and looked at the sheer drop of the brick work. ”

“ His work was bad; it was fatally, irredeemably bad. He crushed the paper in his hands, fell on his knees on the floor, and rested his head on the seat of his one wooden chair. There are some agonies of the soul into which it is sacrilege to pry; this was one of them; we will not try to gauge it.
At last Fletewode stood up, went out, spent his last shilling on a meal, and came back penniless. That was no matter, to-morrow Scottie would give him five, perhaps ten shillings. ”

“ He tried to pray—March was a somewhat conventionally religious man—but he could only groan. In the room above where was the green and yellow curtain the child knelt by the side of the bed shaking from head to foot, the drops of agony standing on his forehead. The soul which was so much older than the little body was wrestling in the throes of a complex passion of love and personal cowardly dread; the poor little ten-year old body could scarcely support the strain.
In the afternoon, two hours after Perry had left, Dennis knelt by the little pool and chanced to look therein. ”

“ Perry, his own son, whom he idolised, was an athlete rather than a scholar, and March was glad of the fact; nevertheless he would have been satisfied with his fragile non-athletic nephew if he had shown signs of studiousness; but the child was not clever; he was backward, lazy, and dreamy; his only talents were a gift for drawing and an eye for colour effects, which were “mere accomplishments” in the eyes of his uncle. Dennis had no other gifts unless his stories presaged a future novelist.
Dennis, on his side, was stunned and terrified by his uncle’s treatment of his powers of vision. ”