by Ethel Rolt Wheeler.
As published in Behind the Veil (David Nutt; 1906)
She drifted through the woods like a faded leaf. The world was lit with the faint, golden radiance of autumn. A dim cinnamon flame, like the fire in marble, crept through the arches of the bracken, that were lifted beyond the tree-stems: the leaves of the beeches, losing the sap that had made them luminous screens to the sun, now burned with a pale light of their own. The soul of the year, half-freed from the bondage of material things, seemed delicately poised for flight: in the woods the sky-spaces opened wider and wider. As yet there had been no tussle with the elements, no pangs of dissolution; and the exquisite moment of acquiescence lingered.
Dr. Fraser leaned against a beech-trunk, and looked impatiently up the glade. He was a man about thirty-five,
rugged in figure and countenance. His face showed that determination which is based on a profound knowledge of the certainties of Science. His present eagerness, and a certain softness of emotion, sat strangely upon him.
Presently he saw her approaching down the vista of dead leaves. She wore a brown holland dress—the day was very warm—and a drooping hat of brown straw. She came swiftly, but there was languor in her movements.
'Onora!' They clasped hands.
Holding her two hands, he looked down into her face. A chill went to his heart. Was this indeed the woman he had wooed in the spring,—this thin, faded creature? Surely some illusion of autumn must be infecting his seeing; his eyes, filled with the colour of withering gold, must be transferring to her, qualities which belonged instead to the landscape and the season. It was impossible that all her fresh beauty should have waned, in so short a time, to this frail sweetness.
She led him to a spot where the trees gave a sparse shade, and where there was a view of the open. Her dress rustled and crackled over the leaves. They sat down under a beech-tree, and Onora threw off her hat. Under the flitting leaf-shadows, the doctor fancied he saw threads of silver in her hair of clouded gold.
'Dear, tell me,—have you been ill?' he asked.
'You find me different?' she said gravely, 'do I look ill, Oliver?'
'A little pale, a little tired,' he replied. In point of fact, she did not look ill. Her eyes retained their vivid blue—the same colour as this autumn sky; her flesh had the delicate hue and contour of health, though it was wanting in the richer tones, but she looked unaccountably worn—she looked almost old.
'Do you mind that I am changed?' she asked.
'I want you as I have always known you,' said Dr. Fraser, 'I mind, of course, if you have been lonely—anxious.'
'Oliver, I did not think you would notice so soon. ... Perhaps I ought to have told you in the spring, only I fancied that love might turn the current of my existence into the normal direction.' She began toying with the fallen beech-leaves, and then looked out over the undulating bracken. 'The year is fading,' she said.
'What can you mean, Onora? Surely your love for me is not altering, is not growing cold?'
'No, no, indeed no. It is the one real thing, the one unmistakable reality. Only my blood runs more feebly at this season than at any other; my life wanes, a little, with the life of the leaves.'
'You find it more difficult to love me in autumn than in spring?'
'How can I explain it to you, Oliver? I am sensitive, strangely sensitive, to the influences of the earth: spring, summer, autumn, and winter go to the very roots of my being. In every year I experience youth, and maturity, and age.'
'Dear, you have lived too much alone, in too close contact with Nature,' said the doctor, a little uneasily, 'these are the fancies born of brooding in solitude.'
'But you yourself see how the autumn works in me,' said the girl, 'only my eyes keep young—the rest of me fades like a leaf; and I can show you white hairs that I found last winter. In winter I am quite old, my face is pinched—even wrinkled. But then winter—this is the compensation, Oliver, for you as well, I think—winter is the most spiritual moment of my life. There are no leaves, no earthly screens, to keep away the sense of the surrounding sky. I feel clothed, more than at other times, with sunlight and starlight and moonlight.'
'Dear, this is a poetical statement, not a physical fact,' began the doctor.
'It is a physical fact, Oliver, capable, I believe, of scientific explanation,' said Onora. 'I have inherited from both sides a rare sensitiveness that subdues my body to the seasons. My mother was a peasant,—for centuries her ancestors had lived in close communion with the earth, which had yielded its intimate secrets to their dumb keeping. My father was a poet,—a great poet, as you know—and there is something of him in me, though, like my mother, I have no words. Then from my earliest years he gave me loving and peculiar insight into the ways of Nature: I feel that the Earth-Mother has entered in an unusual degree into my parentage, and has given me a right beyond others to claim kinship with all these lovely things of the world.'
'If your hypothesis were true,' said the doctor, 'do you realise that your case would stand as a reversion to a primitive type, and that you would be retrogressing to a point in the evolution of humanity that has long been overpassed?'
'You have yet to prove,' said Onora smiling, 'that the ancient peoples who lived close to Nature were not wiser and happier than ourselves.'
'The thing is self-evident, Onora. Freedom is the first stage of all progress. We have triumphed over Nature,—subdued her, made ourselves independent of her smiles and frowns, shaken off the trammels of the seasons. It is only in detachment that thought can take shape, only in detachment that we can attain the undreamed heights of Science and Philosophy. Why should you pride yourself on the weight of chain that drags you to the earth?'
'I believe that in the earth is the only wisdom,' murmured Onora, 'I am sure that in the earth is the only happiness. I am no materialist, Oliver; but to-day, when all the ancient heavens are crumbling around us, I recognise the heaven beyond all these imaginings in the daily glory of the world—the woods, and the fields, and the skies. Does this seem to you fanciful, foolish?'
'That you should find joy in Nature, that you should discover the spiritual behind the material, this I can well understand; but not that you should be willing to abnegate your personality to the stray impulses of the moment,—not that you should choose to submit yourself to the caprice of the seasons.'
'You speak as if the matter were under my control. Oliver, Oliver,—you won't let it make any difference to our love? You loved me in the spring—surely it was not only the spring in me you loved?'
'Dear, I loved you—the you that still exists under all these hallucinations.'
'Hallucinations!'
'I must attribute these fancies to a powerful imagination working in solitude. There are many instances of imagination working on the physical medium.'
'When spring comes, I shall be young again, Oliver, fresh as when you first knew me. ... It has always happened. I see you dread the fact that every year I must grow old. ...'
'It is unnatural, Onora, abnormal.'
'And rather than have me abnormal, you would believe me—not quite sane?'
'I simply believe that the poetical impulse carries you a little too far.'
'I had dreamed myself privileged, blessed beyond others,' murmured Onora, 'I have known such great peace, such
happiness.'
'Don't think me hard, unsympathetic. My daily experience in cases of hysteria makes me perhaps over-emphasise the importance of perfect balance, of the divine average. I have always been impatient of mysteries. Dear, it is your own sweet personality that is precious to me: I cannot reconcile myself to these metamorphoses which transform you into a species of hamadryad, or wood-nymph. I feel that it requires only an effort of will to free yourself from the chains that bind you to the earth, that separate us.'
'I am neither a hamadryad nor a wood-nymph, Oliver. I am a woman—a woman who loves you.'
She laid her hand upon his arm. The doctor was startled by the thrill of passion in her voice. The character of the day had changed.
The sky was filled with hurrying clouds, and from between them a fierce storm-light travelled over the landscape. The sweep of languorous radiance sharpened into colour-contrasts, deep indigo in shadow, and rust-brown in light. The bracken turned from cinnamon to bronze, the beech-leaves from yellow to copper. Suddenly, a tide of sunset-red flooded land and sky. The world, no longer submissive, was summoning its last vitality to fling a bold defiance at Death, whose wings could already be heard rustling in the far tree-tops.
Onora sprang up, flushed with a fire that did not seem of the sunset. The red glow was in her hair. Her eyes had lost their clear morning blue, and were shadowed by dusky flame; a splendour of determination characterised her expression, and the voice that had sounded so thin, rang out in clear, low notes.
'I love you, I love you!' she cried, 'I will break my bonds, as you call them,—will do even this, if only so I may reach you. But you are sure, Oliver, sure that you would have me ordinary, like other women? You are sure that I shall lose nothing in your eyes, by shutting off from myself the fountainhead of all beauty?'
'It is you that are beautiful, Onora. The fountainhead is in yourself,' exclaimed the doctor. 'I ask nothing extreme; but—yes—I would have you as other women. At present the world of Nature absorbs too much of you; the fields and the sky are my too powerful rivals. I want you to be mine, mine alone. Oh, I am not all selfish: it is partly for your sake.'
'I love you, Oliver; this is the strongest thing in me,' said Onora, 'what need of more words? Meet me to-morrow here at twelve o'clock. ... No, dear; I must do what has to be done alone. There is peasant-blood in me, remember, and hereditary knowledge of certain rites, which you would call superstitions.'
'Oh, I shall be glad when all this is laid aside, when we can meet on common ground!' exclaimed the doctor, a little impatiently.
'You will not have to wait long ... to-morrow, at twelve o'clock.'
After he had seen her to the gate of the Manor House, the doctor paced for a considerable time the twilight woods. It irked him that he could not disentangle a clear image of Onora from the three distinct impressions she had left upon his mind. The picture that had dwelt with him all the summer, of a creature of exquisite possibilities, of radiant promise, could not be reconciled with the woman of to-day, either in her mood of languid quietude, or in her accession of passionate splendour. And as he pondered over these later manifestations, he came slowly to realise the fulness and range of an exceptional temperament—a temperament capable of vibrating to every variety of emotion. It was her naive joy in life, her buoyancy of spirit, that had drawn him to her in the spring: then she had captivated his fancy, but now the depth and richness of her nature began to work upon the more virile stuff of his being. This woman of strong and delicate maturity made appeal to a higher man than the girl had been able to touch; and the doctor felt exalted in the thought that it was love for him that had wrought this change in her. The correspondence of her mood with the mood of the year, was probably no more than one of those curious coincidences, of which life is so full: intensely sensitive, intensely imaginative, she attributed to her body experiences which were only of the mind. The doctor could not for a moment admit the possibility that this winter should see her old, and the following spring make her young again. Love had come to her in the spring, and had ripened her personality by the time of autumn; but had she loved first in autumn, spring would have brought maturity. That she should hold herself free of the seasons was greatly to be desired, else they might impose all manner of fanciful complications upon their wedded life; and the doctor ardently hoped that her foolish 'rites' might prompt the initial effort of will necessary to cast off this imagined tyranny.
The next morning was misty and dank. The leaves on the ground lay formless in moisture; the leaves on the trees huddled shapeless in the wet fog. The doctor shuddered lest Onora also should pass under the sway of this chill autumn mood. At the first glance he was partially reassured. She looked almost as young as she had looked in the spring. But she seemed to lack spirit, and came droopingly towards him.
She held up her face to be kissed. The expression was diffident, appealing. There had always been a glamour
about their former meetings, a glamour which had persisted even under yesterday's first shock of disappointment. To-day a painful sense of the commonplace overmastered his emotion at seeing her.
'Are you pleased with me, dearest? are you satisfied?' she whispered anxiously.
'Always, always,' said the doctor, marvelling at the difficulty of speaking with conviction. For she had grown young again for him, young as by miracle, yet not young as when he had first known her. Then she had been young with the poetry, the sentiment of youth; now she was young only through lack of years.
'Oliver, beloved, you have taken away from me all my old supports,' said Onora. 'Dear, I have only you now,—only you. Your love is my whole life, everything. Tell me that you love me, give me something to cling to, I feel so weak, so helpless.'
'I love you, Onora,' murmured the doctor. Where was her old charm, the magic of her loveliness? He looked down at the pretty graceful creature clinging to his arm with agitated insistence. All that was individual, the grip of independence, the vigour of personality, had gone; and instead there was left a colourless entity, sweet and good and gentle, no doubt, but with no initiative, no impulse to development, a thing to be shaped by circumstance, by environment, by any stronger will that chose to mould it.
'Oliver, speak to me, give me your assurances.'
'Dear, what need have we of vows and protestations?' said the doctor miserably, 'have we not always understood ... without words?'
'It is different now,—different, different now!' said Onora; 'yesterday I had the great Mother-Earth to lean on. I drew strength from the character of the day. Your love was an episode, oh! the central episode, the great episode, in the glorious procession of the year. Now you have emptied my life of everything but you. Oliver, it is terrible, it is terrible!'
'Why terrible, Onora?'
'It makes your responsibility too great'
The doctor shuddered. He knew he could never fill the void he had made, especially now, when he had only pity to give. 'I was never one to shirk responsibility, you know,' he said, 'the more so when it is of my own creating. Indeed, you distress yourself unnecessarily. ...'
'Oh, it is not right for women to love overmuch!' cried Onora, 'our roots should be in the heaven or in the earth, not in the heart of a fellow-creature. We women have need of some other anchorage than a man's love.'
'Dear, calm yourself: these doubts and fears are strangers to you.'
'I was not less human, I was not less worthy of you, when the seasons flowed in my veins,—when I had kinship with the beauty and joy of earth. But if it is love you want, all there is of me is love for you. So be satisfied,—be satisfied.'
The doctor suppressed a groan as he thought of the vigour and glory of personality that might have been his, and that through his own fault seemed gone for ever.
'But, Onora, it is not possible that in one short night you should have cut yourself from Nature so absolutely, so effectively.'
'Don't say it was a mistake. Yes, yes,—it is done. I have reached that higher point in the evolution of the race, I have thrown off the trammels of the seasons. I am become a shadow to myself, without blood or substance. And oh, you look so differently upon me! Yet I am as you said you would have me, like other women. ...'
'You are yourself, that is enough for me,' said the doctor bravely, 'and in time you may grow sensitive again to the beauty of the world, sensitive to the invigorating influences, from which, ignorantly and selfishly, I tore you.'
Onora shook her head. Then she looked up at him with a wistful smile. 'Perhaps,' she said, 'if some day I should be drawn very close to the great forces of Death, of Birth—who knows?—I might again enter into the spirit of the Earth, which is peace and happiness. ...'
And in the anticipation of this possibility, the doctor was able for one moment to forget the glorious goddess he had lost, in the gentle, insignificant woman at his side.