When I had been in London a year or two, and the place with its hordes was become less strange and less formidable to me, I began to discover it for myself. Gradually the towering cliffs resolved themselves into houses, and the houses into shrouded holds, each with character and each hiding a mystery. They now stood solitary which had before been an agglutinated mass. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.... I knew one from the other by sight, and had for each a specific sensation of attraction or repulsion, of affection or terror. I read through the shut doors, I saw through the blank windows; not a house upon my daily road but held a drama or promised a tragedy. I had no sense for comedy in those days; life to me, waking life, was always a dreadful thing. And sometimes my bodily eyes had glimpses which confirmed my fancy—unexpected, sudden and vivid flashes behind curtained windows. I once saw two men fighting, shadowed black upon a white blind. I once looked out of a window at the Army and Navy Stores into a mean As with the houses, homes of mystery, so with the men and women one passed; homes, they too, of things hidden yet more deep. The noise of the streets, at first paralysing, died down to a familiar rumble, and the ear began to distinguish voices in the tide. Sounds of crying, calls for help, hailings, laughter, tears, separated themselves and appealed. You heard them, like the cries of the drowning, drifting by you upon a dark tide-way. You could do nothing; a word would have broken the spell. The mask which is always over the face would have covered the tongue or throttled the larynx. You could do nothing but hear. Finally, the passing faces became sometimes penetrable, betrayed by some chance gleam of the eyes, some flicker of the lips, a secret to be shared, or conveyed by a hint some stabbing message out of the deep into the deep. That is what I mean by the soul at the window. Every one of us lives in a guarded house; door shut, windows curtained. Now and then, however, you look up above the street level and catch a glimpse of the scared prisoner inside. He may be a satyr, a fairy, an ape or an angel; he's a prisoner anyhow, who sometimes comes to the window and looks strangely out. You may see him there by chance, saying to himself like Chaucer's Creseyde in the temple, "Ascaunces, Sometimes the walls of the house are transparent, like a frog's foot, and you see the prisoner throbbing and quivering inside. This is rare. Shelley's house must have been a filmy tenement of the kind. With children—if you catch them young enough—it is more common. I remember one whom I used to see nearly every day, the child of poor parents, who kept a green-grocer's shop in Judd Street, Saint Pancras, a still little creature moving about in worlds not recognised. She was slim and small, fair-haired, honey-coloured, her eyes wells of blue. I used to see her standing at the door of the shop, amid baskets of green stuff, crimsoned rhubarb, pyramided dates, and what not. I never saw her dirty or untidy, nor heard her speak, nor saw her laugh. She stood or leaned at the lintel, watching I know not what, but certainly not anything really there, as we say. She appeared to be looking through objects rather than at them. I can describe it no otherwise than that I, or another, crossed her field of vision and was conscious that her eyes met mine and yet did not see me. To me she was instantly remarkable, not for this and not for any beauty she She had a name, a niche in the waking world. Marks, Greengrocer, was the inscription of the shop. She was Elsie Marks. Her father was a stout, florid man of maybe fifty years, with a chin-beard and light-blue eyes. Good-humoured he seemed, and prosperous, something of a ready wit, a respected and respectable man, who stamped his way about the solid ground in a way which defied dreams. If I had been experienced, I should have remarked the mother, but in fact I barely remember her, though I spoke with her one day. She was somewhat heavy and grave, I think, downcast and yet watchful. She did her business efficiently, without enthusiasm, and did not enter into general conversation with her customers. Her husband did that part of the business. Marks was a merry Jew. I bought oranges of her once for the sake of hearing her speak, and while she was serving me the child came into the shop and stood by her. She leaned against her rather than stood, took the woman's disengaged arm and put it round her neck. Looks passed between them; the mother's sharply down, the child's searchingly up. On either side there was pain, as if each tried to read the other. I was very shy with strangers. The more I wanted to get on terms with them the less I was able to do it. I asked the child whether she liked oranges. I asked the child, but the mother answered me, measuring her words. "She likes nothing of ours. It's we that like and she that takes." That was her reply. "I am sure that she likes you at any rate," I said. Her hold on the child tightened, as if to prevent an escape. "She should, since I bore her. But she has much to forgive me." Such a word left me dumb. I was not then able to meet women on such terms. Nor did I then understand her as I do now. Here is another case. There was a slatternly young woman whom I caught, or who caught me, unawares; who suddenly threw open the windows and showed me things I had never dreamed. Opposite the chambers in R—— Buildings where I worked, or was intended to work, and across a wall, there was a row of tenements called, if I remember, Gaylord's Rents. Part mews, part warehouses, and all disreputable, the upper story of it, as it showed itself to me over the wall, held some of the frowsiest of London's horde. Exactly before my eyes was one of the lowest of these hovels, the upper part of a stable, I imagine, since it had, instead of a window, a door, of which half was always shut and half always open, so that light might get in or the tenants lean out to take the air. Here, and so leaning her bare elbows, I saw on most days of the week a slim young woman airing herself—a pale-faced, curling-papered, half-bodiced, unwashed drab of a girl, who would have had shame written across her for any one to read if she had not seemed of all women I have ever seen the least shamefaced. Her brows were as unwritten as a child's, her smile as pure as a seraph's, and her eyes blue, unfaltering and candid. She laughed a greeting, exchanged gossip, did her sewing, watched events, as the case might be, was not conscious of her servitude or anxious to market it. Sometimes she shared her outlook with an old woman—a horrible, greasy go-between, with straggling grey hair and a gin-inflamed face. She chatted with this beldame happily, she cupped her vile old dewlap, or stroked her dishonourable head; sometimes a man in shirt sleeves was with her, treated her familiarly, with rude embraces, with kisses, nudges and leers. She accepted all with good-humour and, really, complete good breeding. She invited nothing, provoked nothing, but resented nothing. It seemed to me as if all these things were indeed nothing to her; that she hardly knew that they were done; as if her soul could render them at their proper worth, transmute them, sherd them off, discard them. It was, then, her surface which took them; what her soul received was a distillation, an essence. Then one night I had all made plain. She entranced me on a summer night of stillness, under a full yellow moon. I was working late, till past ten, past eleven o'clock, and looking out of my open window suddenly was aware of her at hers. The shutter was down, both wings of it, and she stood hovering, seen at full length, above the street. She! Could this be she? It was so indeed—but she was transfigured, illuminated from within; she rayed forth light. The moon shone full upon her, and revealed her pure form from head to foot swathed in filmy blue—a pale green-blue, the colour of ocean water seen from below. Translucent webbery, whatever it was, it showed her beneath it as bare as Venus was when she fared forth unblemished from the sea. Her pale yellow hair was coiled above her head; her face looked mild and radiant with a health few Londoners know. Her head was bent in a considering way; she stood as one who is about to plunge into deep water, and stands hesitating at the shock. Once or twice she turned her face up, to bathe it in the light. I saw that in it which in human faces I had never seen—communion with things hidden from men, secret knowledge shared with secret beings, assurance of power above our hopes. Breathless I watched her, the drab of my daily observation, radiant now; then as I watched she Exactly so she did it. As we may see a pigeon or chough high on the verge of a sea-cliff float out into the blue leagues of the air, and drift motionless and light—or descend to the sea less by gravity than at will—so did she. There was nothing premeditated, there was nothing determined on: mood was immediately translated into ability—she was at will lighter or heavier than the air. It was so done that here was no shock at all—she in herself foreshadowed the power she had. Rather, it would have been strange to me if, irradiated, transplendent as she was, she had not considered her freedom and on the instant indulged it. I accepted her upon her face value without question—I did not run out to spy upon her. Ecce unus fortior me! In this case, being still new to the life into which I was gradually being drawn, it did not for one moment occur to me to start an adventure of my own. I might have accosted the woman, who was, as the saying goes, anybody's familiar; or I might have spied for another excursion of her spirit, and, with all preparation made, have followed her. But I did neither of these things at the time. I saw her next Yet I knew her, withal, as of the fairy-kind, bound to this earth-bondage by some law of the Universe not yet explored; not pitiable because not self-pitying, and (what is more important) not reprehensible because impossible to be bound, as we are, soul to body. I know that now, but did not know it then; and yet—extraordinary thing—I was never shocked by the contrast between her two states of being. This is to me a clear and certain evidence of their reality—just as it is evidence to me that when, at But before I embark upon it I should like to make a large jump forward and finish with the young woman of Gaylord's Rents. It was by accident that I happened upon her at her mysteries, at a later day when I was living in London, in Camden Town. By that time I had developed from a lad of inarticulate mind and unexpressed desires into a sentient and self-conscious being. I was more or less of a man, not only adventurous but bold in the pursuit of adventure. I lived for some two or three years in that sorry quarter of London in complete solitude—"in poverty, total idleness and the pride of literature," like Doctor Johnson, for though I wrote little I read much, and though I wrote little I was most conscious that I was about to write much. It was a period of brooding, of mewing my youth, and whatever facility of imagination and expression I have since attained I owe very much to my hermitage in Albert Street. If I walked in those days it was by night. London at night is a very different place from the town of business and pleasure of ordinary acquaintance. During the day I fulfilled my allotted hours at the desk; but immediately they were over I returned to my lodgings, got out my books, and sat enthralled until somewhere near midnight. But then, instead of going to bed, I was called by the night, and forth I sallied all agog. I walked the city, the embankment, skirted the parks, unless I were so fortunate as to slip in before gate-shutting. Often I was able to remain in Kensington Gardens till the opening hour. Highgate and its woods, Parliament Hill with its splendid panorama of twinkling beacons and its noble tent of stars, were great fields for me. Hampstead Heath, Wimbledon, even Richmond and Bushey have known me at their most secret hour. Such experiences as I have had of the preternatural will find their place in this book, but not their chronological place, for the simple reason that, as I kept no diary, I cannot remember in what order of time they befell me. But it was on the southern slope of Parliament Hill that I came again upon the fairy-woman of Gaylord's Rents. I was there at midnight, a mild radiant night of late April. There were sheep at graze there, for though it was darkish under the three-quarter moon, I became aware, gradually, that a woman stood among the sheep. She had not been there when I first saw them, I am sure; nor did I see her approach them or enter their school. Yet there she was in the midst of them, seen now by me as she had evidently been seen for some time by the dog, seen, I suppose, by the sheep—at any rate she stood in the midst of them, as I say, with her hand actually upon the shoulder of one of them—but not feared or doubted by any soul of us. The dog was vividly interested, but did not budge; the sheep went on feeding; I stood bolt upright, watching. I knew her the moment I saw her. She was the exquisitely formed, slim and glowing creature I had seen before, when she launched herself into the night as a God of Homer—Hermes or Thetis—launched out from Olympus' top into the sea—"ἐξ αἰθέρος ἔμπεσε πόντῳ," and words fail me to describe the perfection of her being, a radiant simulacrum of our own, the inconscient self-sufficiency, the buoyancy After a while of this quivering suspense she gave a low call, a long mellow and tremulous cry which, gentle as it was, startled by its suddenness, as the unexpected call of a water-fowl out of the reeds of a pond makes the heart jump toward the throat. It was like some bird's call, but I know of no bird's with which to get a close comparison. It had the soft quality, soft yet piercing, of a redshank's, but it shuddered like an owl's. And she held it on as an owl does. But it was very musical, soft and open-throated, and carried far. It was answered from a distance, first by a single voice; but then another took it up, and another; and then another. Slowly so the soft night was filled with musical cries which quavered about me as fitfully as fire-flies gleam and glance in all quarters of a garden of olive-trees. It was enchantment to the ear, a ravishing sound; but it was my eyes which claimed me now, for soon I saw them coming from all quarters. Or rather, I saw them there, for I can't say definitely that I saw any How can I be particular about them? They were of both sexes—that was put beyond doubt; they were garbed as the first of them in something translucent and grey. It had been quite easy in the lamplight to see the bare form of the woman whom I first saw in Gaylord's Rents. It was plain to me that her companions were in the same kind of dress. I don't think they had girdles; I think their arms and legs were bare. I should describe the garment as a sleeveless smock to the knees, or perhaps, more justly, as a sack of silky gauze with a hole for the head and two for the arms. That was the effect of it. It hung straight and took the folds natural to it. It was so light that it clung closely to the body where it met the air. What it was made of I have no notion; but it was transparent or nearly so. I am pretty sure that its own colour was grey. They greeted each other; they flitted about from group to group greeting; and they greeted by touch They began to play very soon with a zest for mere But it was a mad business under the cloudy moon. It had a dream-like element of riot and wild triumph. I suppose I must have been there for two or three hours, during all which time their swift play was never altogether stopped. There were interludes to be seen, when some three or four grew suddenly tired and fell out. They threw themselves down on the sward and lay panting, beaming, watching the others, or they disappeared into the dark and were lost in the thickets which dot the ground. Then finally I saw the great whirling ring of them form—under what common impulse to frenzy I cannot Later on and in wilder surroundings than this I saw, and shall relate in its place, a dance of Oreads. It differed in detail from this one, but not, I think, in any essential. This was my first experience of the kind. |