The Blessing of Pan Page 8

  And the little band that had gathered to break the pipes and to overcome the strangeness they brought to Wolding, planned now whose bull they should take for the long flat stone. And most were for going at once, and getting a bull that they all knew where to find, and leading him up and sacrificing him there to the dim immortals they knew not, on the long flat stone in the dark when none could see what they did. Till Willie Latten, speaking loudly and clearly above their hushed debating, said: “That’s not the time to sacrifice a bull.”

  And each one felt in his heart that it should be done at dawn.

  But this they could not do, when the world was awake. They could even be seen from a road. Thus they spoke in low tones awhile, the future more full of mystery than they had ever felt it before.

  Then they danced again to the skirl of the reed pipes, that rose slowly loud out of the murmuring notes that were only hinting strange tunes; and louder still they grew and stranger still, till it almost felt as though some hidden piper, of no mortal fabric, but made out of hills and woods, lurked behind Tommy Duffin.

  And suddenly a splendour seemed to go out of the stars, as though they could not hold the night much longer. And at that the dancers slipped away through the wood, while the pipes sent a softer air through the fading night, and Lily crept alone to the long flat stone.

  Now there had been no paganism in Wolding since St. Ethelbruda’s time.

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE MARCH OF THE OLD FOLK

  IN the hint of light before dawn, in the darkness of night, the lads and girls that had danced came back to the village before even one early candle gilded a window, before any birds were astir. And the houses to which they came were stiller than night itself, seeming among all the sounds that strayed in the dark of the valley to stand as chilling monuments to silence. Within them creaks and echoes seemed to rise up all together, in protest against the intrusion upon this hour; but no one in any house waited up so late, and those that returned all reached their beds unseen. Then all the blackbirds burst into sudden song.

  But when the morning came that the birds had foretold, and grew broad and awakened men, then none that had danced escaped questions; and few could give answers that appeased their elders at all. There is always a gap between the generations: the old have forgotten so much and the young have yet to learn. Sometimes quiet ages pass, and nothing pushes aside the little bridges that custom throws across time from one to the next generation: sometimes come ages when tumultuous changes widen all the gaps, and the little bridges fall in. Such a change was come now, not to the age, which was little concerned with that out-of-the-way valley, but to the little village of Wolding.

  At first there had only gone to the hill to hear the strange music girls, I will not say young enough for romance, for that may hold them long after rheumatism has settled in for good, but young enough to act upon it; and now there had gone the lads that were young enough to look for a fight and to make their plans by a camp-fire. None of the older folk had gone by night to the hill to hear the pipes playing; and now with their thoughts on the village and the quiet ways that had made it, and the orderly thoughts that ruled it, and the old folk that had left it, and the tales that had gathered about it like clambering plants over porches, they questioned those whose thoughts were away with the voices of night, with a small wind whispering to branches, with the wild things of the wood, and with a melody ringing clear down the ages so far that it touched the sleep of the Old Stones of Wolding, and received from their ancient silence an answer it understood. The gap between generations had widened all of a sudden.

  Nor were the older folk ignorant, as their children supposed. They too had heard the pipes, they too had felt a strange lure in them; but what they guessed was too wild and too fantastic, above all too madly at variance with the way of life to which they had long settled, and so they put the guess deliberately away; soberly, rationally and rightly, as they would have said themselves; and so it remained a suspicion to excite them but was not knowledge to guide them. By the light of this suspicion they were all questioning their children.

  That was the situation that was troubling Wolding that day. Knots of young men, all come from cheerless homes, gathered now and then to discuss in low voices what should be done. But even Willie Latten had no plan. It was one thing to plan with an excitement before him, which between them all with camp-fire and secrecy they had worked up into an adventure; but it was another thing to be the leader of a romantic band again, after all he endured that morning, when all his poor excuses one by one were forced to unequal battle against logic.

  “Lily,” said Mrs. Airland. “I thought I missed you last evening.”

  “Did you, Mum?” said Lily.

  But there was a light in Lily’s eyes, like a strong sword suddenly drawn, and all at once Mrs. Airland felt too old to fight out the battle of words she had just begun.

  In every other house the girls that had danced drank deep of the misery of that morning.

  So little groups stood in the village street reluctant to go home, telling each other their troubles, their arguments and resentments; and all the while there rose up over them all a feeling as of something about to happen, as though something hidden in the dark of the future, and rushing nearer on the current of Time, oppressed the village with its threatened arrival. Such feelings come to nerves jangled and hearts troubled, and are often no less true than things that are known to hearts not stirred from their natural quiet. For those that went home at the dinner-hour it all began again. And now the afternoon was wearing away, and the white street left so often at this hour alone with the sunlight, and perhaps one donkey rolling in the warm dust, was now all ill at ease; for the quiet of the slanting rays, soft dust and the green of the hill was somehow stirred from its benignant rest by the trouble and irritation of the young men loitering there.

  Tommy Duffin was not in sight and the others spoke of him seldom, because in this trouble that was raging in Wolding between the generations each had his own wrongs and own apprehensions, which seemed matter enough for discussion: no more seemed needed. And if ever his name were mentioned, the same phrase came like its echo: “Tommy Duffin’s catching it.” For they supposed him to be still at Valley Farm, enduring what they had endured.

  Through the quiet of this evening and its vibrating troubles came a man walking calmly, a contrast to the querulousness of the young men and their excitement, a dark figure walking the road that came across the valley: placidly enough he approached, though his eyes were somehow troubled; and they saw it was Anwrel. He called out to none, nor seemed to approach them with any desire to speak; he merely watched them as he trod the road slowly. And here, though he never spoke, they recognised the reproof of the generation on the other side of the gulf from them. As he passed the groups of young men they touched their hats, and he gravely raised a hand to his own broad brim, but he said never a word. Slow though he made his pace he could not have been in their sight for more than a few minutes; and yet they felt his reproof was chilling time and freezing the flight of the moments, and that the mild eyes of the vicar would blame them ever. They knew not how to excuse themselves.

  Yet the strain of those minutes told more heavily upon Anwrel than on any of those young men. He seemed more lonely, more the antagonist of some portentous thing, that, dim though it was, had for him certain outlines of awful clearness, and it seemed that he must fight it quite alone. Yesterday he had hoped after speaking to Farmer Duffin, and had relaxed his resistance to a multitude of anxieties; and then had come that music overnight, and information enough the morning after, enough and to spare, and his anxieties had rushed back on him weakened by his few hours of hope, like raiders coming by night upon soldiers asleep. He hated no man: he could truthfully say that. Yet walking slowly there, with head bent, in that strained silence, his very presence a protest against those that should be his friends, young men of his loved parish, boys he had taught to bat, he felt an anger rising against Tomm
y Duffin who had worked all this confusion, an anger swelling and coming near to the thorny borders of hatred.

  A woman opened a green door, showing a glimpse of a room, and called across the street to one of a group of young men: “Come here at once, Henry. You and your Tommy Duffin!”

  He was not alone in his anger.

  And then, then, there rose up out of the gold and the hush of the evening, a melody flooding the northern end of the hill, a music close at hand, but as remote from Anwrel’s guesses as the literature of the interior of China, or a Lama’s religion, from ours. Once in a cathedral he had heard such music; not that time, but such music. It was long ago, before he had come to Wolding. He remembered the sanctity that filled the aisles, and had floated his feelings far from the fields of Earth: such emotions are felt once: when he went again the music eluded him. And yet it remained with him, gilding his memories, and filling a part of his mind with such traces of grandeur, as sunlight aslant through great windows, and a solemn dimness stirred almost to weeping or laughter by the tremendous traffic of those august echoes. And now, out here upon the open hillside, now music that once again had hold of his heart-strings, and the whole hill turned holy. Against such a feeling what could Anwrel do? He remembered Balaam on his high place, looking towards the Israelites, with Balak standing beside him bidding him curse. So Anwrel felt his duty bidding him, but his heart would have blessed with Balaam. The hill seemed all holy, the tall dog-daisies above the shining grass, the old deep hedge below and the woods above, haunted by dark yews, and the low and golden light in which it was all shining, right up to the shadows now creeping out from the wood.

  And then came Tommy Duffin over the slope, playing his pipes of reed, playing like Apollo fresh from his golden home and stirred by the first feel of the earthly grasses under and over his unsandalled feet. Not a word said the vicar.

  A hush was now over the clusters of young men; over the whole street. A cock crew a long way off; a dog barked and was silent. In the deep hush Tommy Duffin came to the road, and walked down the village street still playing his pipes. The young men turned as he passed, and followed in silence; two children playing looked up and followed too, a decorum suddenly stilling their mirth and their leapings. And then a door opened, a green door of a small cottage, which somehow Anwrel remembered ever after, and a man appeared in the doorway, one older than Anwrel, standing very upright and stiff, with eyes fixed; he moved rather jerkily forward and joined the rest, and went down the village street after the music. And a woman, who had stayed to put a few things neatly away, came through the doorway after him. She came less uncouthly out of the little house than the man before her had come. She seemed going to something that comes by no choice of ours and is not to be criticized or resisted. However it be, she went; and kept pace with the younger steps, though with quicker breathing.

  Another door opened, and quite an old woman came out of her house with a stick, old Mrs. Alkins whom one so seldom saw out-of-doors. She joined the rest, and another door opened and out came Mrs. Erceval, a widow this fifteen years; and then door after door. Skegland came out of his shop where one got the groceries ever since Anwrel could remember; then Latten, the carpenter, Willie Latten’s father, and Mrs. Latten with him. And Hibbuts that had been sexton for the last thirty years, yes, Hibbuts, too.

  It was the old people going, the quiet respectable folk, the very pillars of the little parish. Had Anwrel seen the painted wooden props, that held up the porches and were the homes of clematis, suddenly stride away, he would not have been more aghast.

  And then, coming t’ wards him from the house at the end of the hill, a lady like Mrs. Airland, only with a light in her face as though years had fallen away, with loneliness and fads and a touch of asthma; she came by him walking fast. Good gracious, it was Mrs. Airland.

  The vicar stood there in the road, never speaking or moving, only staring after that departing procession. The sound of footsteps was fading, and a stillness settling over all the village, through which the notes of that music drifted yet. The sound seemed to turn to the right and go up the hill, and still the vicar stood listening. Why not go too? Why not go over the hill to the grey old stones, and hear that golden music beat against their ancient silence? There would be no perplexities amongst their calm, no weariness in the hold of that splendid music. Why not go too?

  Yet if he went, who would stay? What would be left if he went? And in the end duty held him.

  When that was decided the time had gone over the hill; and an old man stood alone, a little weary, very cold, and in tears.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  ANYTHING MIGHT COME UP OUT OF THE PAST

  THE light had gone out of the valley and off the hills when the vicar walked back through the village, as solitary a figure as you could imagine. Light still touched floating clouds, indeed the sky was full of it, but not a leaf flashed in Wolding, not a wall shone. It was a time of day when a man disappointed and troubled might brood long. And not a greeting came to lift Anwrel out of his broodings. They seemed all to have gone to the hill.

  Through the village he went alone and came to his side of the valley, past the last silent house; when he saw a woman coming towards him, hurrying down the hill. One at least had not gone. Then he saw it was Mrs. Tichener. And he saw too that her hurrying was a simple and honest hurrying, to be home in her cottage before it got any later, with the packet of butter in paper that she was carrying. He hardly saw her until she was quite close, his eyes on the road and his thoughts in the midst of his broodings.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Tichener,” he said.

  “Good evening, sir,” said she. “I hope you’re well, sir.”

  “Yes, yes, thank you,” he answered.

  He was always well. To him the question seemed scarcely worth asking. To her perhaps he looked a weary figure, barely convalescent after some illness or accident. Indeed he would have looked so to anyone that could have seen him then.

  “Butter?” asked the vicar, pointing to the small white parcel.

  “Yes, sir,” she answered. “I’ve been up to Drover’s to buy some. You never know what they put in it in the shops.”

  “You don’t indeed,” said the vicar.

  She looked down the road, thinking how late it was growing. But the vicar did not move.

  “Mrs. Tichener,” he said after a while, “they’re all going away after Tommy Duffin.”

  “With those pipes of his,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Yes,” said the vicar. “There isn’t a soul in the village.”

  “Aren’t there, sir?” she said.

  “Mrs. Tichener,” he said, “what do you make of it?”

  So direct an appeal moved her: perhaps the appeal was more in his voice than his words, or perhaps in his woe-begone face. Had it not moved her she would have lagged a little behind whatever the vicar said. Had he been mysterious she would have been less mysterious, had he turned towards wonder her words would have fared less far from the practical. For her mind was full of old tales and fabulous fancies, and all manner of little scraps of ancient wisdom, that had come to her from longer ago than the earliest tapestries in the oldest and luckiest families; and she knew that the vicar’s education, that he had got when he was at Cambridge, was a light that could shrivel them up were they to be brought out to the glare of it. “Exposing her ignorance” was the phrase that she and her old friends would have been likely to use, had she told all she knew to the vicar. So there was a kind of shrine in her memory where she guarded things that had the appearance of being holy, and that might be a little ridiculous. But now a pity, where she suddenly saw the need of it, moved her to talk more freely, as emulation had moved her the day the vicar came back from Brighton.

  “What do I make of it, sir?” she said. “Why I think it’s that there Reverend Davidson.”

  “Yes,” said the vicar thoughtfully.

  “I think it’s him all the time, sir.”

  “Yes. But how?” said
the vicar.

  “Well, sir,” she said, “it’s like this tome: there’s an awful lot in the past; there must have been a dreadful lot of things happening that we’ve never heard about, since they first began. Well, sir, it’s like something green coming bubbling up out of a deep well; you don’t know where it’s come from. Anything might come up out of the past like that.”

  “Good Lord,” thought the vicar, driven homeward to Wolding by the metaphor, rather than carried out towards the infinite, “what awful water she must have been drinking.”

  “I hope you don’t see things like that in your well,” he said to her.

  “Oh, the well’s all right,” she replied, “and so is the past, but anything might come up out of it.”

  “Yes, yes,” the vicar muttered. “We can only see the surface, and a little way down of course. But do you think,” he added louder, “that things like this could have come to us from the past?”

  “Why, sir,” she said, “you’d know more than me, with your learning and all that. I don’t know what goings on they mayn’t have had time for.”

  “Who?” said the vicar. “Whom do you mean?”

  “Anybody, sir,” she said, “in all the long time things have been happening.”

  “The Greeks had some such legend,” he said. “But I thought it was all dead. I thought it was all dead.”

  She saw then that it was comfort he needed more than anything stored in her wisdom.

  “But it will all sink back again one day, sir,” she said. “It will all sink back.”

  He wished her good evening then, and went gravely on.

  Night overtook the slow steps of the vicar as he went up the hill to his house, and he saw pale clouds streaming upwards out of the East, and all the splendour of moonrise evident underneath them, though the woods and the hill upon his side of the valley would for some while hide from him any sight of the moon. He had come to mistrust such nights, not knowing how much the silver radiance with its faint touch of pale gold might inspire Tommy Duffin: he only knew that the moon had her ancient place in all pagan rites that he had heard of, and that it even presided over madness. He was therefore in no mood to admire the splendour of the light on the clouds from the moonrise, but only dreaded what fancies might come from it. Then he entered the house, and there was Augusta reading, a welcome sight, a new world to him. There at last was someone who would never go over that hill, never find any lure in that nonsensical music.