A Passionate Pilgrim

Chapter I

Life is the pursuit, generally the vain pursuit, of happiness. Epigrams, metaphors, philosophies, creeds explain little of its mystery. The theories we form at twenty have exploded at thirty, whilst at forty, unless we happen to be prigs or peda gogues, we have learnt by experience that it is a game or a task governed by no rules save those simple ones deducible from the primal instincts. Complete candour and genteel civilization only obscure the real clue. We are fond of assuring one another that life is made up of compromises and sacrifices, but we never remember that what we invariably compromise and sacrifice is the truth. The most important fact in life, the instinct we call love, has remained unchanged whilst little else in man's equipment has been permanent. His long and weary progress through the ages B has modified the rest; but two thousand years of Christianity, and six hundred years of civiliz ation, have left unimpaired the tremendous energy which gives continuity to the human race.

But we have learnt to drape everything either with silks or euphemisms, and even the primi tive passion has been surrounded with a tangled wire-fencing of hypocrisy. The rash youths and maidens who try to storm love's stronghold, torn and bleeding from the barbs, retreat, forlorn and dejected, to pretend that "after all what they wanted was not good for them," and of this de feated crew I am one. There is, in the career of most of us, a period of translucence when the spirit of romance, shining through the opaque covering of conventionality, illumines the innocent and youthful soul. Our eyes, our ears, our senses, our intelligence, are for a vivid space converted into delicate mechanisms for the encouragement of the sweetest illusions. A day comes when the expanding youth finds in the exult ant song of the thrush, in the dusky odours of a midsummer's night, or in the charm and colour of words, a mystery and an enchantment.

The un happy victim has, he thinks, acquired a new sense. The world is a garden full of beautiful shapes and alluring fancies. " I will," says the ambitious soul, "get me closer to the great heart of Nature. I will learn why the sun shines and the flower blows, and what underlies this mystery stirring at my heart. Why am I happy and expectant?" Why are you restless, oh fluttering heart ? Stay ! who is that moving yonder through the fragrant gloom of the grove ? Is it Artemis, or Aphrodite, or a smooth-flanked, rosy-bosomed nymph ? That figure there under the chequered light is all of these to you. Is not she the embodiment of years of dreaming — the woman whom you love ? Do you know now why the world blooms and the thrush sings, and your heart beats ; why words fail and senses waver, and vague fear fills you lest the spell break ?

What force has shot you up above the earth-clouds ? O white-winged fancies of innocence ! for what are you preparing ? Little you care when she comes to greet you, light of step, with the sunshine that glows in your heart gilding her hair. The flowers scatter new fragrance ; the odorous undergrowth of the wild wood stirs to her step. Yet, when she leaves you at the edge of the wood that hides you from envious eyes, the sun shine fades, the thrush becomes a mere earthly bird, and solitude an aching void with your hungry heart for its centre. To-morrow she will come again, you say, and taking the book you carry as the solace of your fancies, perhaps you read — " Sometimes I see before me flee A silver spirit's form, like thee, O Leonora, and I sit Still watching it, Till by the grated casement's ledge It fades, with such a sigh, as sedge Breathes o'er the breezy streamlet's edge."

Or else — " Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again ! For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day." Later, when the hush of twilight falls on the garden, the woods and the solemn hills, you will watch the pale stars rise with a heart too full even for poetry, and will repeat her name aloud and say, " This is love ! " But the mood changes. The world is dark ; you lie tossing on a sleepless bed, measuring the delights of love and romance by the yard-measure of the practical life to which you are chained. The darkness bristles with questions. " What shall we do ? What will become of us ? How can it end." There are some memories that modesty compels one to record impersonally. Shame for what has gone by fills in the past the place misgiving holds in anticipation.

Has any man ever made a com plete confession of his vanities, weaknesses, and follies ? Is not the temptation to drape them pictur esquely greater than that innate love of truth, of which man exaggerates the strength in order to increase his own sense of dignity ? No one whom the world respects despises himself. At best he affects a picturesque unworthiness for an approval which he secretly deems inadequate. But philosophy, originally intended to simplify life, has ended in obstructing its healthy development, with sophistries and contradictions. Every man, be he a Solon or a Solomon, dwells in the centre of a purely personal circle. His unit of measure, the line drawn to the circumference, has no other test than the experience of his own individual emotions. Thus an unexciting level of dulness on the part of the moralist is frequently associated with considerable popularity, because commonplace minds delight in commonplace estimates.

I have in my mind's eyes my father, than whom no man ever trained his two children more carefully. Something satisfactory is expected to issue from the nursery of a country rectory. The sons should construe the classic authors decently and play cricket by instinct ; the daughters should be faultless administrators of parish trifles, blessed with a distinct taste for being bored. My father, the Reverend Wilfred Blake, was Rector of Kelverton. My mother died when I was six years old, and my sister Dorothea four. A Cornish Pengelley, her genealogical tree went back to the Celtic contemporaries of Hengist and Horsa. The strain she introduced into our blood must have greatly improved the breed. The lyrical tendency, traceable in my habit of mind, which has coloured my actions, I am persuaded not un picturesquely, may be due to atavisms inherited from famous Cornish chiefs, who only missed im mortality because they lacked historians.

At least the thought is a pleasing one. My father was an exceedingly worthy man, and it is not for his son to criticize him harshly. He was, as he frequently hinted, a scholar and a gentleman. Evidence of his scholarship still remains in the edition of Horace which he edited. With a keener sense of humour he might have made, perhaps, a more attractive commentator, but then how often humour misleads us ! What is socially more dangerous than to see a joke where none was intended, and which therefore ought to be non existent ? When I remember the many agonies of smothered laughter with which this obtrusive sense smote my father's son, I can hardly regret that he was spared a conflict for which his sacred calling unfitted him. But as in these unpretentious annals I intend to sacrifice all things to the truth, even my own dignity, I will confess that he was not incapable of having bored my mother.

Kelverton Rectory was a charming old par sonage, standing in gardens and orchards planted in the Middle Ages, and a fit home for nurturing a dreamer. A mile or two to the south a long line of treeless hills rises where great herds of black faced sheep graze, and where the Roman legionaries have left numerous traces of their military presence, unless my father's antiquarian researches have de ceived me. Kelverton was a scattered parish, and until agricultural depression descended on our happy fields, the living, which was in the gift of my father's patron and college friend, the late Lord Oakton, was a good one. Lord Oakton was my godfather. He gave me his name, a silver mug, the promise of his future patronage, and a sove reign and a friendly word whenever he came to the rectory. " This," my father used to say on these occasions, " is your godson Oakton."

" Dear me ! how the lad grows, Blake," his lordship would reply. Here my father, in a voice faintly suggesting discouragement, would observe that I resembled my late mother. And then invariably my aristo cratic sponsor closed the discussion with some flattering allusion to my good looks. The Blakes were, I may say are, a handsome family. My sister was a lovely child, and became a beautiful woman, whilst I shared the physical advantages which we inherited from both sides of the family. Looking back, through the long years on that boyish life at Kelverton, I sigh to remember how happy it was before I was sent out into the world of school and college with a scanty purse and fiery appetite for pleasure, to kick against the pricks. The silver Kelver flowed by the bottom of our paddock, to form below the bridge the bathing pool where the village lads and I learnt to swim.

O little stream, babbling over smooth boulders and golden sands, I have filched the sleeping trout from your waters, I have sat like the idle rustic of the Latin verse, aimlessly watching your gliding wave, or weaving dreams of fruitless things, of fair womanly shapes with tender eyes and voices, and rosy beckoning arms. O little stream ! it was by your waters that my real life first began, and that an innocent heart, sending the warm blood tingling through my veins one hot August after noon, filled my brain with a cloud of emotions whose shadow haunts it still. It was when I was entering on my eighteenth year that my recollections first became vivid, and I commenced the diary on which this simple and uneventful story is based. Till then they are merely pleasant but dim impressions of a hungry, o active boy, who, although he loved cricket, despised not learning.

I had inherited enough of my father's classical tastes to win me a scholarship at Burchester, where three generations of Blakes have cut their names into the hard oak of the Sixth Form-room, without, however, imprinting their personality visibly on the elastic surface of life without the grey stone cloisters. One sultry August afternoon in my life stands out above all other boyish records. Beyond the southern hills the clouds were gathering, but over pastoral Kelverton the sun blazed in a sky dimly blue. The country-side basked drowsily in the noontide, the cattle stood knee-deep in the water, clouds of gnats dancing between their horns like thin wreaths of grey smoke, whilst I, in flannel clothes, lay on the tree-fringed banks of the Kelver, with a vacant mind unconsciously gathering im pressions.

The ripe grey-green grasses on the bank above me scarcely quivered in the stillness ; the Kelver rippling on by its flowery banks alone broke the sultry silence which it cooled. As I lay concealed in the thick undergrowth, through the boughs, leaves, and flowering fennel across the stream, I saw a tall, slight girl in a grey dress carrying a book. She found a shady seat on a grassy promontory, where the stream deepened into a quiet pool. Then I grew con scious that a mysterious interest stirred the somnolent afternoon. A dusky sunbeam passing through the flickering leaves fell on her bright brown hair. One bare hand supported her cheek ; the other turned the pages. After a while she closed the book, and rising, stood for a moment thoughtfully on the bank. Near her was the heavy plank used by the farm-labourers as a movable bridge.

Usually it stretched from one smooth flat boulder to another, leaving a foot of water on either side. But on that day it had been removed on my side, and before a passage across was possible, the plank required readjustment. Coming to the edge of the water, she tried unsuccessfully to raise it, but the task was beyond her strength. It was then that the spirit moved me. Hurrying to the spot, full of daring shyness, I said : " Let me help you." She looked at me across the rippling stream, without blushing, and said, " Thank you — it is heavy." But I raised the plank and fixed it carefully on the boulder. " It is firm now," said I Then she stept across, and accepted the hand I gave her to climb the steep bank. Her hand was soft and white. " Thank you very much," she said. And then the spell fell on me.

Her grey eyes were soft, luminous, and light-reflecting ; her lips red and curved. She carried her graceful head, A PASSIONATE PILGRIM I thought, and still think, like a goddess. Her beauty dazzled and bewildered me. But lo ! she dropped her book. Picking it up to restore it to her, I read Shelley's Poetical Works. Then, under a pretence of smoothing the leaves, I glanced at the title-page, and read " Sylvia Carr." The book seemed a bond of sympathy between us, for I read Shelley too. Then, with a little friendly bow, she left me, and I watched her until her figure was lost in the folds of the uncut corn through which her path lay. After a wrapt space, I too walked home, trying to realize what had happened, whilst a small voice within me whispered, " Sylvia Carr, Sylvia Carr ! " I looked at the world around me for the change.

The poppies in the corn, the waving harvest-fields, the luxuriant summertide, the black swifts cutting aerial figures in the blue, could not answer my question. Something within me seemed to have expanded. Words and remembered verses sud denly found new meanings, and I walked home with my head in a golden cloud.

Chapter II

The memory is a strange and capricious recorder of past impressions. How well I remember waking with a delightful start on the morning after my meeting with Sylvia Carr ! The garden was full of twittering life, and a robin, with his plaintive treble pipe the only coherent songster of the late summer, was weaving an invisible film of soft melancholy over the dark yew-trees. " At last," I said to myself, " I am a man." It was then fashionable at Burchester for the Sixth to keep diaries. To possess one with a lock and key was regarded as evidence of a refined understanding. So far the idle days had left small record in mine, but now I felt a desire to empty my heart into its pages. Turning to "August 9," I wrote: "To-day I met Sylvia Carr on the banks of the Kelver," but this cold state ment of a radiant incident seemed ridiculously inadequate, so beneath it I inscribed the first verse of Shelley's " Hymn to Asia."

" Life of life ! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them; And thy smiles before they dwindle Make the cold air fire ; then screen them In those looks, where whoso gazes Faints, entangled in their mazes." Having thus relieved my emotions, as it were by proxy, I dressed and went to cool my newly born passion in the Kelver. Ah ! I can even now as I write feel the limpid waters biting my neck, and hear the faint hissing of the current round the boulders. Above was the pure morning sky, below the silver pool reflecting the birch-fringed banks and the fleecy clouds. " Where have you been, Oakton ? " asked my father, when I arrived just too late for family prayers. " Bathing," said I. " I hoped you were reading before breakfast," said he. " I always used to." He was rather fond of " hoping " that I did things which he had been accustomed to do, at what, delusive memory told him, was my age.

" I must beg," he added, " that you will not absent yourself from prayers." Then my sister helped me to scrambled eggs. " Remember you must get a leaving scholarship, Oakton, or you cannot go to the University," said my father, eyeing me critically. Then he went out through the open window to consult with the gardener about the chrysanthemum beds. My sister looked placid and pretty and well regulated, but scarcely in my eyes an ideal con fidante for a love story. " I say, Dorothea ! " I began, but then shied at my subject and said, " pass the strawberry-jam." But when she had handed it to me, it became merely a succulent embarrassment. The joys of eating and drinking seemed con temptible now, fit only for lower form-boys, and totally unsuited for a man ! Still I helped myself with moderation, and then inquired whether she had ever read Shelley.

" The atheist poet who was drowned ? " she said ; " I have read the extracts given in the Treasury of English Song!' Dorothea's splendid correctness trespassed some times on the fringe of female priggishness. But I was burning to talk of Sylvia Carr, and Shelley's poems seemed a dignified route to the subject. " I had an odd adventure yesterday," I said. " Where, Oakton ? " " Down by the Kelver, near Ilbert's Farm, where the plank crosses the stream. I saw a girl — a lady reading a book." "What was she wearing?" asked Dorothea, becoming saintly interested. " A sort of soft grey dress, brown shoes and stockings and a straw hat." This description left my sister unimpressed. " Was she pretty ? " she asked. " Lovely ! " " Who was she ? " " I don't know, but I discovered her name. She wanted to cross the stream, but she couldn't move the plank, so of course I helped her.

She dropped the book she was reading. It was Shelley. In picking it up, I accidentally — quite accidentally — read her name." "What was it? " Sylvia Carr." " The daughter of the new dissenting minister who has come to Kelverbridge. I know her by sight ; she isn't bad-looking." Something turned cold within me. I had in herited the traditional feeling of clerical contempt for dissenters of whom my father spoke — though only, I trust, in the bosom of his own family — as theological impostors. Dorothea, of course, shared his sentiments. Perhaps she saw the look of bleak disappointment, and desired to put my hope out of its misery, for she added : " The Carrs are not the sort of people we can know." " Miss Carr is the most beautiful — far the most beautiful — girl I have ever seen," said I, with the intention of suggesting that beauty so transcendent A PASSIONATE PILGRIM lowered all barriers, and possibly of snubbing Dorothea, who was held to be the belle of Kelverton.

" She is rather dressy for her station," said Dorothea, who had only put her hair " up " three months ago. Then in the armoury of my wit I sought a swift epigram to crush her, but finding none, asked her where the Carrs lived. " In the white house on the Kelverbridge Road," she said. " A pokey little place !" This was the first cold water poured on my hot passion. It threw back the douche in a burst of angry steam. " There is no reason to scowl at me," said Dorothea, observing the effect of her words. " I was thinking what a precocious little cat you are, Dorothea. Because Miss Carr has the misfortune to have a dissenting minister for a father, you talk of her as though she were a house maid." " You had better call on her family to express your sympathy," she answered derisively, and went to join my father on the lawn.

And thus the first drop of bitterness was infused into my love-story before it was twenty-four hours old, and with it there mingled that ubiquitous element of the ridiculous which later experience has led me to expect in all the affairs of men. In my diary sor August 12, I find inscribed as a record of this conversation : " Dorothea spoke like a beast of Sylvia. Jealousy is at the bottom of it ! " There was a path, leading through the corn-fields, passing at the back of our paddock, which struck the high-road opposite Sylvia's house. This my feet haunted, and the harvesters, now busy* with their sickles, scarcely stopped working to note my frequent coming. At night I used to steal across the fields to watch her house, sometimes I saw her in the garden, and one hot night, whilst my heart thumped like a flail, I watched her brushing her long brown hair by the open windows.

A whole week passed before I spoke to her again. But at last the inevitable moment came. One evening, when the corn stood in sheaves in the twilight and the ghost-moths were flitting along the hedge-rows, I met her face to face, at the narrowest turn of the winding path. The fields were empty ; we were alone in a spell-bound world. " Miss Carr ! " said I ; " Miss Carr ! But finding beyond this no form of articulate speech, I stood in the stubble and looked at her beautiful face. She smiled, and did not resent my audacity. Emboldened I reached coherence. 17 c " You have not been down to the Kelver since I met you." " It is rather far," she said " Not more than a mile from your house." " You know where I live ? " " Yes. I have seen you in the garden, and at the window." " I have seen you pass," she answered.

" I wondered why you stared so much." " Miss Carr, it wasn't idle curiosity ; on my honour it wasn't." " What form of curiosity was it, then ? " " I wanted to see if you were still studying Shelley. I wanted — oh, I don't know what I wanted. Perhaps I thought what a pity it was we could not be friends." " Well, we can't be." " Why not ? " " Because your father is the Rector, and mine is the Congregationalist Minister." " What has that to do with it ? " " Everything." " Even if my father were Archbishop of Canter bury, I should not let it interfere with my right to choose my own friends," said I, heroically. " I must go home now," she said ; " it is late." " Let me walk back with you, Miss Carr. It isn't safe for you alone in these lanes. The harvesters are about." Only to the last stile, then."

" Thank you so much. If you only knew what pleasure it gives me." " I ought not to allow it, Mr. Blake.' "Yes, you ought indeed. It seemed quite dismal in these fields all alone. It is different now." All my timidity had flown ; a voice seemed to speak for me. " Are you going to be a clergyman too ? " she asked, as we walked slowly side by side, by the thick growth of the hedge-row. " I don't know ; perhaps I may be." " I hear it's expected of you." My heart leapt. Evidently she too had made her inquiries. " I shan't decide till I go to Oxford." " I thought you were at Oxford." " No ; I'm at Burchester." " At school ? " " Not exactly at school. I'm in the Sixth." " You don't look like a school-boy," she said. I felt for the down on my upper lip. It was there safe enough, and gave me courage.

"I am 'in' for the leaving scholarship," I explained, " so I have stayed on longer than most fellows." We had reached the limit of the fields. Through the tree-trunks, above the hedge-row, the white house loomed across the thickening twilight. " No further, please," she said. ' When shall I see you again ? " I asked " Never," she answered, " if you are a con scientious young man." " But I must ! Will you — I'm ashamed to ask — but, will you come down to the Kelver where I first met you ? " She laughed. " Isn't it a clandestine appointment, Mr. Blake ? Are we not both expected to set examples to the rival sects at Kelverton ? " " We are free to do what we like. Please come, and give me one pleasant afternoon. If I thought it wrong, I wouldn't ask you." Then she looked at me, and, I think, read on my face the sincerity of my words.

" I will come," she said, "but only because you are a school-boy still." Then she gave me her hand, let it linger, I thought, an imperceptible space, in mine, and stepping over the stile disappeared, leaving me to enjoy the thrilling moment.

Chapter III

Sylvia Carr met me by the Kelver again and again, converting that glorious August of visionary youth into an indescribable period of ecstatic happiness. But before the month was over the troubles began. Both my father and Mr. Carr were mem bers of the Kelverton School Board, and leaders of the rival parties. The debates were acrimonious, and the friction constant. The Rector felt that a dissenter ought to be as much below him in political weight as he conceived him to be in social standing. The Church party, unfortunately, was weak on the Education Act, and Mr. Carr frequently " put them right " at the Board meetings. On these occasions my father did not always keep his temper, and " A Scene at the Kelverton School- Board " was a not unfrequent head-line in the county paper. It was painful to me to hear Sylvia's father referred to as that " vulgar dissent ing parson Carr," nor was I in a position entitling me to take up his defence.

Sylvia, on her side, regarded the conflict as a battle of frogs and mice, fought in puny regions remote from her interests. Before joining her father at Kelverton she had been a student at a high school for girls at a fashionable watering-place, where the head-mistress held advanced views. Huxley and Darwin were her prophets ; she had learnt to swing the agnostic hammer with the fanatical vigour serious women employ in their intellectual enterprises. She was, moreover, the authoress of a small text-book entitled Evolution for the Young, which some critic declared "ought to be burnt by the public executioner." Sylvia's father, it seems, pleased with his daughter's progress in carnal learning, and the prizes and praise they won her, failed to discover that the doctrines in which she had been brought up were being destroyed by a gradual process of educational erosion.

As the son of a clergyman I made some effort to counteract the influence of the authoress of Evolution for the Young, but discovering that Sylvia was more skilled in " the learning of the Egyptians " than myself, I desisted. Besides, we found little time to discuss these abstruse questions in the excitement of our secret meetings. Some times we met among the thick copses through which the Kelver flows ; at others under the stately fir-trees of Wild Heron's Wood ; or, for a rapturous moment, behind the privet-hedge of her father's garden in the gloom of the warm night. If her father or mine discovered our meetings we both knew there would be an end to them, although we were ashamed openly to admit it ; so we stole behind hedges, lurked in copses, seeking trysting places like conspirators rather than happy lovers, whilst the hundred difficulties obstructing the flow of our affections gave them a delicate aroma and romance, which young people, permitted to kiss at their ease in drawing-rooms, are incapable of under standing.

The wind in the leaves, the ripple ofthe stream, the scent of the honeysuckle, the flicker of the sunshine on the bracken inextricably commingle with the intense memories of that happy August. When we look back to the troubles of early youth, measuring their intensity in the light of later judgment, it is difficult to regard them seriously, because the ridiculous element assumes disproportionate prominence at the expense of the pathetic side. But although the love-story of a sixth-form school-boy must inevitably be regarded as a joke by all save himself, yet I cannot review that soul-shaking early experience with any of the genial philosophy which the accomplished man of the world is believed to feel for the earliest of his youthful follies. Its humiliation and its triumphs still flutter across my emotions, and raise the ghosts of shame and of joy from their uneasy graves.

I cannot remember that my conscience ever opposed any obstacle to these stolen meetings. It has never at any time of my life been a stalwart combatant of my wishes. But nothing can remain undiscovered for long in any family blessed with such a member as Dorothea, who is one of those persons born to " duties." One of them was to keep an eye on me. Encumbered with no weak nesses of her own to wrestle with, she found plenty of leisure and energy to deal with mine. Now, there is an aggressive sort of honesty, ranking only technically with the virtues, because, whilst it is impregnable to temptation, it is dissociated with charity. Of this quality, Dorothea possessed her full share. In my romantic moods she jarred upon me ; she represented the side of life which never permits us to enjoy to-day because of the doubts of to morrow ; she had, of course, fully decided that I must be a credit to the family ; there was no reason, she considered, why I should not (after taking Holy Orders) get a mastership at Bur chester.