Over life's edge

Chapter I Joy

Low tide. Far out, a gleaming line of darkest blue against the warm azure of the sky. Here under the foot firm brown sand turned golden in the sunshine. Broad plains of it on every side, stretching away on the one hand to where the little white waves curl on the rim of the sea, and on the other to the foot of the cliffs, up to the threshold of those huge caverns — fit banqueting halls for Gods and Titans — which are the glory of this rocky coast. Before the eye, far as it can pierce the distance, stretch these wondrous sands, their beauty enhanced by the great ridges of black and pinnacled rock extending from the land, like arms, towards the sea. Huge fragments of the same rock lie scattered over the shining golden floor, looking like the forgotten toys of the giants who inhabit the caves. And at the base of all these rocks, what pools ! Clear as crystal, green as an emerald, with blue shadows in their ripples, they

I lie embedded in their rounded sandy hollows, gleaming, shimmering, throwing up golden lights to the rock above them. Some of these pools are small and isolated, lying close under the rocks, sombre and green and dark. Others extend into a great chain of lakes connected by restless glittering streams, and lie out in the open boldly reflecting the blue of the sunny sky, and filled with rippling, wavering lights as the breeze plays over them. And so the vista goes on mile after mile, the glorious general scheme ever the same — towering cliffs of the land, bright blue band of the sea, and between, wide swept floor of sand, ahead endless promontories in fainter and fainter lines of blue, the same scheme, but with countless variations of detail: no jagged peak, no carved edge of rock alike, each gleaming pool a different shape, a different tint.

There was no sound of Man. The sparkling air was serene and unshattered by the hideous human voice, or horrid tramp of the human foot. It was filled with the enchanting melody of the distant sea, the joyous cry of the white-winged gull, and the soft notes of the larks singing over the land. From the cliff edge where the velvety green verdure falls over the rim, and the cliff face shews warmly yellow and sandy, came the call of the choughs, for countless thousands of them have their homes there, and the sea gulls, whether planing smoothly in the tranquil air or standing at the edge of the cool fresh pools, made a vision of loveliness with

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their snowy breasts, and heads, and the tender blue-grey tints upon their wings.

It was early morning, and there seemed a sense of radiant activity everywhere! a sparkle in the sunlight, a freshness In the little breeze, a gaiety In the dancing air that belongs to the morning alone.

And through this brilliant harmony of light, colour and song, wending its way round rock and pool, passed a solitary silent figure. It was a man’s figure, and as such would have rather spoiled the dazzling picture, had not the gulls circled round him closely, and unafraid, as though they said, “We know this is a friend,” and a friend indeed he was, for Dudley Grant was an artist, with all the artist’s creative ability, and the artist’s love for all created things. He walked now with the w^hlte wings dipping and wheeling all about him, following the gay freedom of their movements with sad and longing eyes. For he was a prisoner, chained and bound, and oppressed, and burdened as most wretched human beings are, and his soul was lost in a black desolatlofl and a melancholy wrapped him round that the lovely brilliance of the scene all about him could not dispel.

As he walked now, as his eyes travelled over sunlit pool, and seaweed-covered rock, he was filled with an inexpressible longing, a hunger so wild and Intense, a craving so fierce, that it dominated, practically obliterated, every other emotion. There was one thought in his brain, one cry in his heart, one hopeless desire, tearing like a wild animal through his whole system, ravaging and destroying it. He stopped suddenly in his walk beside one of the green salt pools, and with the point of his stick traced slowly with lingering affectionate touches on the sand, the name VIOLET CRESS- WELL.

The white gulls circled close over his head as he wrote, and rose with soft cries into the air. To the man’s ears they echoed VIOLET CRESS- WELL, in the sunlight, and VIOLET CRESS- WELL called the birds from the cliffs’ edge and gave it up to the larks singing in the blue sky, and they dropped it again softly to his ears. And one face swam before him, and round him, on the satin surface of the sand, on the black rocks, against the golden cliff, her face that he should never see again except in this way, conjured up by the futile agony and madness in his brain. “VIOLET CRESSWELL,” he murmured to himself, when he had finished the scroll upon the ground. “She is near, she is near,” cried the gulls, and he stared up at them blankly, for Violet was lost to him for ever, gone from him over life’s edge, and he could leap from that edge after her into the unknown, but she could never climb back again into this little world to him. Violet, the one being round whose image all the inner life of his soul twined and clung as a creeping plant twines round a pillar, lives while it stands and is crushed in its fall. Many women in succession capture the impulses s.

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and senses of a man during his life. There is never more than one, and generally not that who holds an absolute rule over all his mental organisation.

But she had done so, and he knew now, four years after her death, that he was chained to this gnawing agony for the rest of his life. If four years had not lessened that agony by one single point he recognised that the passing over of time held no healing power for him. The man sentenced to imprisonment for life when the grey prison walls close round him, the man who knows himself in the grip of a fatal and progressive disease, may feel somewhat as he felt, something of the hopeless, grim despair which he felt, standing free, young, strong, upon that radiant shore, in the dawning light of the early summer day.

After a few seconds, he threw himself full length upon the sunny sand, and put his head down on the words, so delicately traced, closing his eyes to shut in the biting scalding tears that forced their way between the lids. “Why is it,” he thought, “that the human being always make such a tangled mass of pain out of his span of life? The animals, except where oppressed by man, live joyous, free, unshackled lives, but man never, no matter what his gifts, what his powers, misery and servitude dog his footsteps to the grave.” His thoughts travelled backwards through the years, back to rosy stretches of existence, behind him, when life had been dear and sweet, and every hour had rainbow-tinted wings.

He was now thirty-five, and his mind sped back to his eager strenuous youth, days of fierce, lonely study in his college days, his triumphs at Christchurch, and then the glorious awakening to the fact that he had a special gift: that without effort his hand could draw and paint as the common hand cannot, that his eye could see divine glories In what was mere stone and dust to the common eye. And his determination to follow the road Fate indicated to him had been Instant and unshakable, and had been followed by those brilliant years of study and work, and travel In Italy and France, Egypt, Athens and Constantinople. Oh, those wonderful days for ever past, of wild enthusiasm for the beauty of the world, days when his heart w^as fresh and young and sang of Itself for simple joy in being alive! A golden thread had run through all his life, for Violet was living then, and his love for her had bound all his other joys together. He was like one carrying fruits and flowers in a golden thread basket. His thoughts leapt to the first meeting with her. As a boy of thirteen he had one day In careless play upon the staircase burst into her bedroom in his parents’ house, where she was staying, and saw her — a child of seven — seated on the floor, surrounded by a sea of written sheets of foolscap paper. She had looked up at him gravely. “Don’t walk on them,” she said merely, “they are a

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story,” and then bent her head again, and continued writing. He had very gently entered and closed the door behind him, and then seated himself also on the floor, and picked up a sheet and read, and read, and read. It was but a child’s story, but that Intensity that afterwards made her famous, gripped him, and held him there reading till all the sheets were read.

‘‘Do you like it?” she had asked him smiling. She looked like a little fairy, slight and golden-haired, sitting in the midst of her magic web of words.

“I think it is a wonderful story,” he had answered simply. “What makes you write it?”

“Somebody sitting beside me makes me write it,” she had answered, and the boy nodded gravely. He understood. Only that morning he had been translating Anacreon’s ode in which the poet calls his Muse to him and embraces her, and he realised now that the “somebody sitting beside” his little golden-haired friend was her Muse, and as inexorable as Anacreon’s. Then another scene rushed into his memory, the day when Violet, then herself thirteen, had come to him with a finished manuscript, and told him with laughing eyes, how it had been accepted by a London publisher, who had not the faintest idea with whom he was dealing, who wrote to her always, Dear Sir, and who, she had accidentally heard, considered the manuscript “the work of a polished man of the world of fifty.” And the wonder of that manuscript! He remembered how all the force of it had appealed to him, how he had realized that the name of this child before him would soon be known all over the world, and in seven years from that time, seven years of hard fighting against the insensate jealousy and fury that genius always arouses in the less gifted herd, she had more than fulfilled his prophecy. He saw her again float before his mental vision as she was at twenty, in the dawn of her success, in the full triumph of her powers over the ears of men. He had found her just dressed for a dance, a shimmering vision of white and gold, and she had laughed at him, not mockingly, but sweetly and gently and consolingly, for he had come hot with anger, and mad with Indignation, from his club, where he had heard her abused and defamed, and after pouring out some of the least atrocious of the stories circulated about her, he had begged her to marry him, that he might protect her name from such infamies, and her laughing answer came back to his ears, “Why, Dudley, what does it matter what they say? You remember Horace’s line, ‘Alunt, quid aiunt? Alantl’ One can’t expect all the fun and all the money that comes from being celebrated without some disadvantage I People must express their hate and envy somehow. Just think! What they would like to do would be to burn my books in the market place, and then drag me out and blind and maim me, and tear me to pieces with red hot pincers, but fortunately as I

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live in a moderately civilised time and place, they can’t do that, so they retire to their clubs, and talk scandal about me instead, which I don’t mind a bit, so why should you? It amuses them, and doesn’t hurt me,”

‘‘It might.”

‘‘I don’t see how it can, when there’s not a shadow of foundation for any of it. I suppose if I were really doing anything underhand, I should be annoyed, but it’s all so obviously silly as it is. Don’t you believe in ‘Magna est Veritas’?” and he had answered, ‘‘I am not sure about its ‘prevailing.’ I think scandal does that.” Again her ready laugh! ‘‘Well, let it then as long as I have the ‘Mens conscia recti.’ Come, you believe in that?”

‘‘Not as much as I believe in your marrying me.” And then her voice, quite serious now in its softness,

‘‘Listen, Dudley, I shall never marry. All the power of loving I have is centred in my Mother. She is everything in the world to me. Beyond her, I care for nothing except my Art; I feel I could never love any man. Something seems tO' hold me from it. Possibly it is the Spirit of my Muse, which wants to keep me to herself, working for her all my life ! I like men to love me — perhaps that is wrong — I don’t know — but I can never give them anything In return.”

Five brilliant years, which had brought her more and more of wealth and fame, passed in lo OVER LIFE’S EDGE

swift visions before his mental gaze, years when she had been the sunshine of his life to him, the inspiration of his pictures, the hourly companion of his thoughts, the aim and hope of his future.

And then lastly came that awful recollection of the day he had entered the house of mourning, and saw her, the former incarnation of life’s joy, as one carved in stone. She was in black. She spoke to him quite calmly. In that icy stillness and composure, there was something that chilled his inner being.

He tried to console her. She drew him gently to the window, then turned and faced the light herself.

“Look In my eyes,” she said merely, and he had looked and drawn back In horror. The expression in them of die most frightful pain, of an agony beyond all expression, met his gaze.

“Is not the look in them dreadful?” she asked. “I cannot face It in the looking-glass myself, I turn away from It. Now having seen that Impress, you know what I must be suffering. Cease to* talk of any consolation, any further life for me, it is over. Go away and think of me as one dead,” and so, after much futile talk with her, he had been obliged to leave her, for his own duty called him. The war had just broken out, and with numbers of his fellow artists, he was in the first line of those who rushed to the colours. Oh, how the horror of that never effaceable afternoon swept over

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him, when on returning from offering himself for the army, he had been slowly walking back to his rooms through the dusty, hazy close of a London August day, thinking with agonised pity and sorrow of her. He could see still in fancy the little newsboy as he rushed past him, calling out, “Death of a popular authoress.” The gripping pain that had rushed through his heart as he had heard, transfixed it again now. A few steps further had brought him to a newsagent, and there facing him on the board of the contents’ bill, the black type standing out alone on the otherwise blank white sheet, were the words, “Death of Violet Cresswell.”

As that vision rose before him, the old terrifying pain they had first stabbed him with, came upon him again : intolerable, unsoftened, un-dulled by all the horrors of four years of war, and he unclosed his eyes, and started up to walk, to outwalk — ah, how vain the endeavour ! — the clinging misery of his soul.

He was not insensible of the beauty round him. An artist, however deep his grief or any other emotion, still always retains a certain consciousness of the effects of light and atmosphere: he can never become wholly blind and deaf to the call of beauty. As he walked on, the gentle blue of sky and sea, the dancing sunlight, and soft caressing air, wooed all his senses. After a time, when he had wound his way amongst rocks, and successfully steered round the edges of the diamond-clear pools, he found himself face to face with a more difficult obstacle — one of the great rocky ridges that run down from the land far into the sea. He paused here, and looked up at its steep jagged sides. The gulls wheeled round his head, in flashing circles, calling and screaming to him in different notes. It seemed as if they rather enjoyed the joke of his being arrested in his walk. “What will you do now?” they seemed to cry to him. “We can fly, we can fly! promontories are nothing to us! but you, poor human crawler on the earth, what will you do? Will you climb it, or will you swim round it? Swim, swim, swim,” they all seemed to clamour in chorus, coming down quite near him, then they all rose up, a beautiful shining, whirling pyramid into the blue, laughing. For the gull has a note that exactly resembles the human laugh. A quiet rather sardonic little laugh, that is quite startling on a lonely beach. It makes you think, when you hear it suddenly, that there must be some horrible human being near you, the next minute it comes again, and you look up to see with relief that it is only a glorious white sea bird, sailing majestically over your head, and laughing at your Inferiority.

Dudley did not hesitate long. He decided to take the gull’s advice : he had put on that morning his swimming suit before he had dressed, thinking he would take a swim somewhere along

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the shore. He undressed now, the gulls continuing to laugh and scream round him, left all his clothes on a high rock, and went down towards the sea.

It was a perfect day, and perfect water for swimming, and his mental misery seemed to drop from him as he stretched out his limbs, and took long easy strokes into the blue. He swam side by side with the head land, and then past it some distance, then turned and swam back towards the shore. As he approached the promontory from the sea, he was surprised at the breadth of it at the end, and swimming closer he saw there was one of those great caverns In it that he had noted In his walk. They always interested him deeply, and he swam up quickly towards it to explore. When he was within about 500 feet of the headland, he became aware that shelving rock stretched out far from Its foot, and looking down now, through the azure clearness of the water, he could see below him all sorts of points and ridges, and the waving of pink and many coloured seaweeds. Eddies and currents began to pull and draw upon him, and he could realise how lonely and unvisited this cavern would always be by reason of the dangers set about its approach. Ships and boats would give the headland a wide berth fearing the hidden rocks about its base. The swimmer on the surface was almost equally menaced by the whirlpool draw of the water, especially at the outgoing of the tide.

Dudley, finding the undertow exhausting him more and more, as he neared the cliff, swam out and away to the East, then turned and came back at a sharp angle to his former course, and nearer the shore. He found an easier tract of water here, though varying currents pulled and dragged upon him as he came close over the hidden reef.

He was really glad when his feet could touch the solid rock, and a few strokes more brought him just below the entrance of the cave. He stopped swimming, climbed up the rock face, and then on dry sand walked into the cavern.

How very beautiful it was, he thought, looking up to the fine curve of the arched roof above him, which, in its deep glowing red tints, looked as if formed of polished porphyry, ridges of dark green, and gleaming white veins of quartz here and there added to the appearance of richness, a lovely growth of the rare fern asplenium marenum grew over all the highest part, and the whole interior sides and roof, drenched with the salt sea spray, glistened and gleamed in the wavering lights flung into it from the eddying sunlit waters without. The floor was quite level, and of the finest white and sparkling sand, and round the sides, as If carved purposely by nature as seats, were Innumerable shelves, and niches, and flat slabs of rocks, while almost in the centre stood one rock alone, like a huge writing table of a giant, or sacrificial altar of some ancient race. Flat-topped, and about 1 2 feet long, by ten feet broad.

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and three feet high, It seemed to complete the furnishing of the cavern, and suggest it as a dwelling place.

Dudley looked about him with delight, his eyes piercing further and further Into the shaded recesses of the cave, as they recovered from the dazzle of the water, and the sun outside. He walked further In towards the very back, and then stopped suddenly, for there on one of the flat ledges projecting from the side, he saw something that resembled a great sea gull. A mass of delicate grey and snow white feathers rested on the rock, and with thoughts of the Albatross in his mind, he went forward very gently so as not to startle the resting bird. Suddenly with a movement so quick his eye could not follow it, the mass of feathers gathered itself together. There was a spring to the ground, and then a human form, a woman’s form, stood before him. Bare rosy feet on the white sand, a skirt of gulls’ feathers, a tunic of gulls’ feathers, bare gleaming arms, glinting waves of shining hair, and the face of Violet Cresswell looking out at him from the uncertain shadows of the cave.

Dudley almost reeled backward, like a man blinded suddenly, but only for an instant, the next, the unutterable, the overpowering joy, ran wildly through him. She was alive! Clear knowledge seemed pouring through him. He was awake, it was no dream, no hallucination. It was reality, glorious reality. The icy fetters of that awful sori6 row he had been frozen into for four years broke, snapped, and fell before him. He rushed forward with open arms, “Violet,” and the triumphant cry rang through the cave, and out, over the dancing water beyond. A little laugh — Violet’s laugh, “Dudley! Just think of our meeting here,” and she stretched out one beautiful round arm, and rosy hand. He clasped it and back on his mind fell another meeting, so like it, yet so widely different. A luncheon given by Violet at Claridge’s, in 'the gay happy years, when neither she nor he knew what sorrow was. Just so had she met him, just so the poise of the figure and of the outstretched hand. Her dress, some fluffy white and shimmering stuff, had been similar to this; face, eyes, lips curved in a smile, the same. Only the details of shoes on the feet, and hair pulled up on the head, differed from the picture he saw before him now. “Oh, Violet, Violet,” was all he could gasp through his suffocating happiness, and then he fell on the sand, and kissed her little bare feet over and over again in an ecstasy of joy.

“Don’t be silly, Dudley,” she said laughing. “Come down to the mouth of the cave where I can see you better,” and she drew her feet away, and gave him her hand to raise him from the ground. He sprang up and followed her. The lights from the sea struck upon every outline of her feather dress, and tipped with gold the cloud of hair resting on her shoulders.

When they reached to within some yards of the

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entrance she sat down on the soft sparkling sand, and motioned to him to do the same. He obeyed, wondering how it could all be, but too vibrating with intense joy to care. She was alive, alive, he saw her, heard her again. Oh, the joy of it. It seemed to be breaking his brain in its intensity.

Violet leant on one lovely white dimpled arm and looked up at him. Her eyes seemed to have got the blue of the sea in them. They were deeper, richer in colour than ever. Her hair shone marvellously, and was all in close crisp little waving lines about her head. Her cheeks glowed with transparent pink like the inside of a sea-shell.

‘‘How’s the war?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s over.”

“We won, I suppose?”

“Yes. We muddled through.”

“Now, Dudley,” she laughed, her own dear, musical laugh, “I expect I must translate that into we were splendidly victorious, and you are a free artist again, only covered with glory! How many medals?” Dudley looked down and studied the sand.

“Only five and some bars, but, Violet ”

“Yes, I know,” she Interrupted, “I’ll tell you about myself in a minute, but first I want to know about the medals.”

“Well, V.C., D.S.O., M.C., 1914 Star, and Legion of Honour, and they are all your gifts. You see w'hen I heard of your death, I wanted to follow you, and I just tried and tried in the i8 thick of everything, but I couldn’t get killed, I only got a V.C. instead.”

“Good boy,” Violet nodded approvingly. “Well, I tried also my best to leave this world, but Death wouldn’t have me, but flung me back again to Life, and somehow Life without civilisation was not so intolerable, and I stopped in it. How does my house strike you? Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”

“I think it’s glorious,” he answered, following her upward glance to the beautiful arched roof above them, drenched with the salt spray, and glowing rich deep crimson through a net work of golden reflections thrown upward from the dancing water, and from the roof his eyes travelled slowly round the brilliantly-coloured, richly-carved rock walls, and over the soft white sparkling floor.

“Seventy yards long by fifty wide; quite a fine size, isn’t it?” she asked, “and no such carpet as this, nor carving for the walls, nor decorated ceiling, in my little Park Lane house, and I don’t have to pay £1,500 a year for this. Oh, Dudley, you can’t realise what joy and freedom there is In a life like this, the absence of all little things, the absence of all worries, the absence of that eternal dressing, and undressing, and consideration of clothes, that is such an Intolerable burden in all civilised life. You remember how I always used to envy the animal’s life — free from all the curses man makes for himself — well, here I am living it, and I find I was right. There is more joy in it.

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One has the large simple outlines of life, and that wonderful sense of being one with all the great things. When I swim out here far into the ocean and float looking up to the warm blue sky, I seem to be part of it, part of its blueness, part of the wind sweeping over the water, part of the dancing sunlight. I lose myself in contemplation. The sea buoys me up, my body Is full of the joyous feel of It, and of the joy of motion. The sun and the wind caress me, and the gulls scream over me, and hour after hour passes while I float and sport like this in a flood of mental and physical sensations. Then I swim quickly back here, and eat and then curl round and sleep warmly and cosily in my feather nest up there” — she glanced up to the roof, and Dudley’s eyes following hers, saw on a ledge close to the roof, a mass of white feathers piled up along it — “and when I wake the tide is rising and filling the caverns, and the music of It is wonderful. It’s like a thousand voices singing in the greatest and sweetest harmonies you can Imagine, so I have my hour or two of Grand Opera, and then the tide retreats, and I come down and eat again, and then swim out to see the sunset, and again I seem to be lifted up to the sky, and to be a cloud of gold floating In that glory of colour above me. Then later come the moon, and the stars, and the crescendo melody of the incoming tide. So with my mind and all my senses sated with beauty and sweet sound, and joyous motion, fatigue gently steals over me, and I draw up the feathers and sleep. It is as I have always thought, a wondrous life, full of a perfect calm, no worried, wearied brain, no strained eyes, no jangled nerves, no heart aching from the cruelty, the ingratitude, the treachery of one’s fellow creatures, no brain seared by their unkind speeches, no yearning after things beyond one’s reach; nothing but melody, beauty, and peace.”