The statue in the wood

Front matter

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Chapter I

Ona day of late spring or early summer, when the world was younger by some years, a lady of considerable charm, and of an appearance that demands the word ‘fashionable’ for its adequate or even natural qualification, was walking through a wood.

She was not dressed in such a way as a woman of these days would have been dressed for a country walk. She wore, it is probable, many more clothes. She wore silks, moreover; laces. There were forget-me-nots in her hat. She carried a parasol that was somehow elaborate, and she opened and shut it — actions which involved many others — rather frequently. The wood was hers, but she had an air of exploring it. The spirit of discreet adventure was, indeed, so apparent in her looks and her movements, that the observer — if there had been an observer — must have been very dull to whom it would not have been manifest that the winding path she trod, even as the impulse, probably, which had prompted her pursuit of it, was wholly new to her. Her steps were tentative as the steps of one unsure of his ground, but purposeful as those of a pioneer. She looked about her as she walked and stopped often to examine, or perhaps to pick, a flower; or when a branch which must be manipulated blocked her way; or to disentangle a twig or a bramble from skirts which were doing their best, but were wholly unsuitable to their present occupation and environment. As most of these actions entailed the closing of the parasol, which she never failed subsequently to reopen, her progress, whatever her pace, was not quick. She had long hours before her. She was, indeed, in no hurry.

The day was one of exceeding beauty; the wood, sparse where she walked, but thickening on each side of her, was of a beauty that was vaguely, but palpably also, exciting. Spring had merged into summer, but was present still in the anemones and the wild hyacinths at her feet, and in the love-songs of the birds. Every now and then she heard the note of the cuckoo. This will-o’-the-wisp of sounds she could not locate; could not even tell of it sometimes from which direction it came to her. It had its part in the beauty of the day. It was of a piece with the tender green of the leaves. It was of a piece with something that stirred in herself. It had been the note of the cuckoo — another one probably, but possibly even the same, heard from the terrace as she waited for three o’clock and the carriage — that had, as she would have said, ‘unsettled’ her. The carriage had come round as the hour struck. She had sent it away.

Hark! There it was...and there... cuckoo, cuckoo, . . . sweetest (in some sort), as it was most elusive, of all the songs of love! Sweet as love itself, cruel, too, as love, if you associated it with the relentless ways of the singer. Wonderful song — if you could call that a song which had but two notes to its sweet interval — wonderful, seductive, merciless. Briefest of all love’s songs — brief as love. Very symbol, then, of love’s rapture and anguish, of the surpassing, because the passing, ecstasies of love. Sound calculated to disturb you, indeed, if you were thirty, and a woman, — lonely, moreover, without kith or kin to make claim on your affections, — and knew that, with rings on your fingers and bells on your toes, with possessions, that is, houses and lands and menservants and maidservants, carriages and horses, and much else, in modest proportions, perhaps, as possessions go, but proportions more than sufficient to your needs, — you had hitherto somehow missed, or been missed by, the one possession of all. Cuckoo ... cuckoo ... the disturbance, whatever its nature, was divine.

But if she had an air of exploring she had also an air of seeking. She came to a bridle path which cut the wood obliquely, and was plainly uncertain whether to pursue her way as before or to take one of the alternative routes which now offered themselves to her. The straight cuttings, clearer of undergrowth, appealed to her tried clothes — to the parasol which would not there have to be furled and unfurled as on the straggling path she had followed. But she liked her straggling path, liked, too, because they were unfamiliar, the little inconveniences to which it put her, and which pointed the adventure of the day. She looked right, she looked left: green glades; shadowed. Ahead, the . broken, sun-flecked wilderness with its diversions and its obstacles. The charted, the uncharted ways ... Which? She chose — with a vague feeling, perhaps, that what she sought was secret and would be approached, other things being equal, by less rather than more defined ways— the uncharted. She would, as it were, stumble upon what she was seeking. That was her feeling. That was, moreover, in her mood of the strange day, her hope — her Wish even. 7

She knew suddenly that she was enjoying herself greatly. The smell of the woods in her nostrils was like some delicate savour on the palate. She could distinguish some of the ingredients in the pot-pourrt of sweet scents. Sweet-briar at a point was unexpectedly one of them, and she looked about her seeking the source of a fragrance that she connected only with cultivated land. Yes, here was sweet-briar. She plucked a leaf and held it to her nose, inhaling deeply. Smell of the taste of the apple of your dreams! The apple of the poet’s dream — of the Song of Solomon — the apple of solace. Or Eve’s apple — the Forbidden? Either. It was an apple with a taste like the fragrance of sweet-briar that the singer of the Song of Songs had in his mind, she was sure. It was an apple with a taste sharp -and sweet, like the biting-sweet fragrance of sweetbriar, in which the white teeth of Eve met crisply as the morsel slipped pricking into her watering mouth. Where, she thought, as she breathed in the pungent essence and smiled happily to herself, where, in these days, was to be found such an apple as that?

And now the wood thickened. The path which she thought of as uncharted, because, in comparison with the formal cutting of the others, it was so illdefined, became obscure and obscurer still. Presently, was this a path at all? Had she lost that semblance of a path which had guided her steps hitherto? And at what moment? The wood had become a maze. Was she, too, lost?

She had closed her parasol. Here in the thickness of the wood she had no need for it. She was in a - green twilight — the twilight of many trees. Not the religious care of the most delicate complexion in the world would demand the use of a sunshade here. The wood was its own sunshade and hers.

The ground was now a little damp. Soft mosses carpeted its unevennesses. Little fleckings of sunlight dappled or damascened them with gold. Where such a filtering of light struck the bark of a tree a snail, it chanced, had left a glittering, glistening trail. She took notice of such small things as might serve her for landmarks, if, presently, she should find that she was, indeed, lost. She should, like the children in the fairy story, have brought white pebbles with her to strew as she walked. |

Silence now. In the heart of the wood no birds sang. Yet comparative silence only —or silence which was not silence at all, but a thing made up of innumerable small sounds. In it she heard her own footsteps, the cracking of twigs under her feet, the rustling of leaves as her skirts brushed them, the silken rustle of her skirts themselves. These sounds were magnified. Crackle, crackle, swish, swish: they pointed her loneliness.

She stood still to listen, and they ceased. The wood, nay, the world, seemed to her empty. Did no one use the wood? Were there no cottages in it or on the outskirts of it? Was there no right of way through its leafy fastnesses? It was her own wood, but she did not know. She knew the keeper’s house, because a road which she often took upon her drives led you to that. But that was not here. She knew —as Lady Bountiful rather than chatelaine — the cottages of many of the workmen on the estate, woodmen, hedgers and ditchers, and the like. But not any of these were in the neighbourhood in which she now found herself. Found herself? Found? That was not quite the word. That was not the word at all. No human habitations were here. No footfall but her own broke, or seemed like to break, the silence. She was alone in the wood. She was — but very delightfully, very excitingly — lost. It had wanted but this, she thought, to complete her adventure.

Well, whatever happened, she had only to walk long enough in any direction to come out — somewhere. ee

It was as she stood hesitating that she heard, suddenly and just ahead of her, the voice of the deceiver. She started at the sound and moved forward. The tangle of the wood was thickest here. Things that had been cut had grown up. A bramble caught her dress and tore it. She freed herself with difficulty. But to do so she had to take off her gloves, and the bramble, baulked of its prey, revenged itself. When at length she was really free, not one only of the hands sparkling with their many rings was bleeding, but both of them.

Should she have taken warning and turned back? She was half minded to turn, but the thing which had barred her progress, now swaying like the sword that turned this way and that, guarding Eden, blocked her retreat. Besides, under her momentary misgiving, she knew that she meant to go on. Deep down in her heart she knew . . . and just then, close, close at hand, the cuckoo’s voice again calling, callhee aa.e

The bramble, disregarded, swayed to stillness.

Chapter II

THE clearing, cut as it seemed in the very heart of the wood, was as an island — an island set in a sea of leaves. Out of this sea, after battlement with its leafy waves, she suddenly emerged. It was like getting to land. That was why she thought of the clearing as an island.

She was a little breathless now. In her excitement she forgot the smarting of her hands till she saw that two large drops had gathered, one on each. Her handkerchief — a filmy thing of gossamer — was tucked, luckily, into the bodice of her dress; thus she was able to make use of it, and with its aid, after a patient minute or two during which the beads formed and re-formed, to stanch the minute crimson flows which threatened damage to her silks and laces. By the sight of the crimson stains upon the white she was reminded again of a fairy story. It wanted but the black of ebony for the infant of the queen’s desire to be conjured up before her. Snow, ebony, and blood — it was to be compact of these, was it not, the child of the young queen’s dreams?

She did not follow up the thought. It was, indeed, hardly a thought. It lay only behind her other thoughts — under the excitement which held her and which caused her heart to beat and her eyes consciously to shine. She stepped into the open.

The statue stood in the exact centre of the clearing, which was a circle. From this circle four paths, cut in the wood, radiated like the spokes of a wheel. Three of them she found later were dummies — blind alleys leading nowhither. The fourth led into the bridle path which she had passed upon her way. This fourth, faced by the statue which looked down the long, narrow length of it, was the approach proper to the circle, and on each side of it was a stone seat. In the mouth of each of the other three, using it, indeed, as the niche which in point of fact it was, stood a terminal.

Why had she never been here before? — hardly even known of it? Only to chance words, the expansive excuse of a new maid the evening before, did she owe a realization of its existence.

‘Lost ourselves in the wood, ’m, me and Alice, on our walk, being strange both of us to the country after London. Or else I see now I ought to have waited for one of the others as did know her way, but being Alice’s afternoon out and she wanting to see ititoo wa?

“Very well, Branton, very well, don’t let it occur again.”

‘““No, ’m, indeed. Nor it would n’t have occurred now, except for the difficulty of finding it — being hidden like. Sort of secret as they all said of it. I’m sure I’m very sorry. When I saw the time I said to Alice, ‘Whatever will my lady say and company to dinner and me with her hair to dress and not so much as a pair of stockings laid out on the bed!’”’

‘Hidden like.’ ‘Secret as they all said of it.’ Hidden. Secret. And, ‘They said of it.’ They talked of it, then? Dim memories had stirred as she submitted herself to the competent hands of the belated maid. What was it? What was this spot that they talked of — that newcomers wanted to see? She did not remember that her husband had ever spoken of it to her. But she had heard passing allusions to it. A guest had spoken of it, or oneof the tenants, or some one in the village. It belonged in a way to the youth of her husband — to the long, strange bachelor days of the old man whom she had married, but whom, in the nine years of her married life, she had never known. Oh, yes, she had heard of it — vaguely even formed a conception of it, so that, from time to time, she had said to herself that some day she must see it. But that day, till this day, had never come. They were comparatively little at Redmayne. There was the house in Curzon Street. There was Clanguthrie, which her husband had bought for the fishing and which she later had sold. And, for the last eighteen months of her husband’s life, there had been the fruitless chase of lost health, abroad. Since his death, two years ago, this was the first occasion on which she had made a stay of any length in her country home.

So had it come that she had not seen it, and so, for the very indefiniteness of her knowledge of it, had it come also that, at the back of her mind, mystery all unconsciously had already associated itself with what her eyes were now beholding for the first time.

Her eyes? More than her eyes. Yes, more, certainly, than her eyes. All her senses seemed to be implicated in the feelings she was experiencing. Was there, indeed, some magic in the spot — in the circle itself, in the grouping of the three satyrs round the statue? Benevolent satyrs, as she saw when she came to examine them. No, it was not evil that was in this place. But something was in it. It was as if, as she stepped into the circle, she had come into the range of a spell or an enchantment, or, more aptly, perhaps, within the radius of activities and of influences which elsewhere had been impotent, or, at all events, undiscernible. Once over the border, an invisible philtre had been put to her lips, invisible hands ministering, and she had drunk! The mystic fumes of the potion had mounted, were mounting, not obscuring her thoughts, or confusing them, but rather clearing them, causing them to be crystal clear so that her mind rejoiced in itself, as, suddenly, she knew that her body, under the ridiculous trappings of ridiculous clothes, felt itself to be rejoicing. She had never before been so acutely conscious of herself. She had a sense of herself as the mother, her child at the breast, has sense of herself; or as a child of itself when, rosy, healthy, new-wakened, perhaps, from sleep, it watches intently, curiously, the movements of the dimpled hands and feet which it has come gradually to recognize as under its own control.

What was this place? What did it signify? To what god was it consecrated? What the mystic incense which went up from its unseen altars?

She had been standing just within the circle where she had emerged from the wood. Now she moved forward — tentatively, deprecatingly even, as if, despite the welcome which the place had given her, and of the sincerity of which she could have no doubt, she yet felt that she was in some sort a trespasser here, or at most a guest, who, privileged, perhaps, must yet go warily. Her hosts here were as the shy, friendly, unknowable things of the fields and the woods. Their confidence had to be justified. They were elusive; they were unaccountable; they could be — it seemed a disloyalty to know it howsoever deep in your heart! — even treacherous. But if they really trusted you they liked you.

Let us watch her, as they perhaps watched her — if they had any existence outside her imagination and our own! She was tall for those days; beautifully made, one could see, and might further guess, under the protuberances and redundancies of the absurd yet becoming clothes. She looked less incongruous than might be supposed, for the fashions of the early seventies echoed grotesquely some of those of eighteenth-century France, and the spirit of the place was the spirit of the Fétes Galantes and the Fétes Champétres of the court painters. Just such a setting as this of the clearing in the wood, with its statue and its three smiling satyrs, and its carved stone seats with the crumbling rams’ heads and garlands of flowers, have the dallyings of their lords and ladies. Her incongruities were for the wood; here, making the tour of the circle and pausing be-, fore each of the terminals as she came to it, she fitted into the picture, and by her polite artificialities even completed it. One might see her, then, as a symbol of that which directly enough, at the time when such pictures were painted, had been making for destruction and the horrors of the guillotine! One might see her thus, if one chose so to see her, and, dismissing her, miss her altogether. The seeds of rebellion were in herself. They put forth their first shoots, perhaps, as we watch her.

Wonder was in her eyes. She, like the benevolent satyrs, was smiling. Her smile was lit at theirs maybe. They smiled down on her, yet smiled past her at—or, as it were, to—the statue. They might have been pointing her to the statue, or pointing the statue to her. ‘‘Turn,’”’ they may have been saying toher. “‘Turn. See what is behind you.”’ She had an air of saying to them — through her smile, perhaps, using it as a vehicle for those words she did not speak — that she would not turn yet. It was evident that she did not mean to turn — to let herself turn — yet. Orthey may have been saying to the statue, “‘Turn, you. See what has come into the Girdle i ,.)"

The statue did not make sign or answer. He had waited. He could wait.

Yes, it must have been deliberately that she did not turn. Each of the satyrs had her attention. She pulled the strangling bindweed from about the throat of one; using a bit of stick, cleared the dirt of years from the graven features of another; unbound the eyes of the third, which ivy, partially blinding, threatened to blind completely. She ministered to each.

The wood was encroaching everywhere — reclaiming as a possession what had been reclaimed from itself. The deep niches — paths as and though they appeared to be — were choked with branches and undergrowth; the path, down which the statue looked, choked too. There was a straggle and a tangle of undergrowth in the clearing. What had been turf, maybe, in its day, was now a jungle of weeds and tall grasses. Hemlock was here and campion, ragwort and briony, sorrel, wild garlic. There were brambles, too (sweet-briar amongst them — again sweet-briar), which caught at her skirts, like the brambles in the thicknesses of the wood itself. Little trees had planted themselves. Some day, the wood had promised itself, there should be nothing but the overgrown carved stone to show that a clearing had ever been here at all. Circle, statues, seats, all were to have been swallowed up in the green sea of leaves.

She had left the third satyr now — him of the halfbandaged eyes which she had set free — and threaded her way to the opening of the path between the two stone seats. She examined each of these before she turned. They were both flaky, weather-stained, battered, but their carvings were fine and were little broken. They had come from Italy, it was probable. She swept the litter of sticks and leaves and refuse of the wood from them, and ran her fingers over the garlands caressingly. She appeared to minister to the carved seats as she had ministered to the carved satyrs. She looked as a woman looks when she is visiting a grave that has been long neglected and does it what little temporary services are in her power. Was she, perhaps, visiting a grave? Was this spot the strange memorial of her strange husband? It was, as she had supposed, closely associated with him. It was, perhaps, his most fitting monument. But you do not visit graves with joy, with softly flushed cheeks, with excitement, an adventur- Ous air.

She turned slowly. She was standing now in the exact middle of the path which faced the statue.

Afterwards she asked herself whether any of the events of that afternoon had happened at all? Did the placé itself exist? Was the whole thing, her pilgrimage, the walk through the wood, the swaying briar barring her way, the sudden clearing, the stone seats, the three guardian satyrs, the very statue — was this, were these a dream? If so, who should tell her the interpretation of it?

No dream. Did she not in her mind’s eye already see the place swept and garnished? Not altered. Not a thing should be, as we say, touched! But (like the neglected grave, perhaps) the spot should be‘cleared, cleaned, set in order. Would turf flourish in the heart of a wood, so nearly under trees? No dream, you see, when she could busy her mind with such thoughts and intentions. She had a dozen projects.

Yet, so passing strange it all seemed when she looked back! What had possessed her? Not that she regretted. The experience had been wonderful, awakening. Had the statue really the qualities with which she had accredited it? Only thus could she BCOIUIITs>,;.

A sitting figure of a youth — a slave, perhaps — leaning slightly forward, his legs drawn up, the left foot advanced a little beyond the other, the hands clasped lightly round the right knee. That was all. But—for her as she had seen it in those strange moments of clear sight —that does not begin to tell of the beauty which the unknown sculptor had found in the pose and captured in the enduring marble. What in the pose? What of haunting, hurting, loveliness? Calm was there, patience, knowledge, but under these, and yet somehow informing them, something which she could not define — something which may have made for knowledge, but did not make for peace. It was as if on the calm of the relaxed limbs and the steadfast patience of the waiting features the sculptor had left record of his own unrest. Across the centuries he had sent his message, and she, Philistine as she was and even knew herself to be, had somehow received, nay, been able to receive, it. She had a sudden inkling of what the search for beauty might mean and as immediate a knowledge that nowhere is it written that those who hunger and thirst after beauty shall be filled. With her joy in the unknown artist’s work was a stab at her heart for his wounds. Only out of hissuffering could this joy which she felt in the contemplation of his achievement have come to her. The joy had increased as she looked. Presently his suffering did not matter. There are persons in whom the ecstasy produced by the contemplation of beauty holds elements of despair. She was not of those. She could look and rejoice — exult. She was absolved by her very Philistinism from participation in any artist’s pain — as completely, perhaps, as the youth who had sat for this one and whose form and features had been destined to transmit his message. But the message had its part, too, in affecting her. Pity was transmuted to a baser emotion. A momentary jealousy stirred in her.

She need not have been jealous. The artist; giving, breathing life into dead stone, had robbed her of nothing. The emotion was not prolonged. It passed, indeed, in a sharp pang that was like the stab at her heart which had preceded it, and she was in key again with the smiling day and the smiling place. Even the youth seemed to smile in his calm. She could have fancied that his smile was for her — that he had been waiting for her, looking always down the long, narrow avenue, telling himself that one day, one day — she would come...

Eleven years fell from her as she stood there. She was nineteen again. He was her own age — a year older, perhaps — yes, twenty. A year older that he might have the male’s rightful authority. She had married at nineteen the courtly, polished, handsome old man who had been her husband but not her mate. Old? Nineteen calls sixty old. Why had she married him? Five out of ten of the girls she knew would have married him; more: not one, perhaps, of her bridesmaids but envied her her greyhaired, upright bridegroom. He was like something fashioned of steel — as burnished, as cold. Was he cold?

No matter. He was old and youth goes to youth. If she had known! She did know suddenly. Her pulses were again the pulses of a girl. Her skin the fine rose-petal skin of a young girl. A flush was on her cheeks. Her eyes were shining.

She moved forward like one sleep-walking and laid her face against the stone face. Youth to youth. The stone, on which the sun had been shining, was warm.

Her eyes filled with tears.

Chapter III

SOMETHING had happened to Ann Forrester the day she walked in the wood. She went out one woman, she came back another. So, at least, it seemed to herself. It surprised her that others did not appear to notice any change — anything different even in her aspect. She half believed herself to have been, and still, in some sort, to be, bewitched. How else could she explain her amazing conduct? What she had done was so unlike her. Never in her life had she yielded to strange impulses. It might almost be said that never in her life had strange impulses beset her. Orthodox was a word of those days: she was orthodox.

Yet the change which she was conscious of in herself she did not wholly deprecate. She had been bound; she was free. Impossible not to experience some relief at deliverance even from restraints imperfectly realized. Was she free? She could only have said that she felt herself free. Had there been restraints? If not, why this sense of freedom? Which was only to argue in a circle as Branton her maid might have argued, or Mrs. Piper in the housekeeper’s room.

She certainly saw things newly. Her boudoir — which she even called her boudoir — suddenly displeased her. She had been delighted with it up to then, secretly preferring it to the beautiful Adam drawing-room which she had always found too austere for her taste. Now she saw her own satinpanelled room as vulgar. All that she had admired in it lost its charm. There was too much of everything; too much blue satin, too many sunk buttons in the elaborate upholstery of chairs and sofas, too much gold, too many curves, too many photographs and photograph frames. There was a portrait in crayons on porcelain of herself which had been her | special pleasure — in evening dress, a fan, a bouquet, white kid gloves. As strange an impulse, surely, as that to which she had so strangely yielded in the wood, sent her hand to the china knob of the bell beside the fireplace.

A footman answered her ring.

‘‘Ask Mrs. Piper to be good enough to come to me.”’

Mrs. Piper appeared in the course of a few minutes.