III
The first morning she spent in the place in the wall, writing him a letter.
"My dear boy," she wrote, "by the time you get this you will be back in the thick of things. If I have given you anything that will help you to go on it's all I want. You must just look on this past month as a holiday snatched from the lap of the gods, and realize, what you're always telling me, that what one's once had one has for always. For there can't be any more, and I'm not even going to write to you. Oh, I feel as though I were failing you in not writing, but I always meant not to, even when you were making plans about it. Letters keep up an atmosphere, and that's better not. Yes, I know what you mean about spiritual meeting. I'm sort of fused with you as I write. I'm not here—or even in the future with you—as you read, for I've pulled the future to me and made it now, now, now, and I'm with you, in the present, as you read this, and I'm drawing your tired head to me, and I feel the very way the thick stuff of your coat arches up under the pressure of my arm. I am you in every bit of me as I write; not yours, but you. But, for the future, in that way only. I felt nothing wrong in all I gave you here, because you needed what I had to give and we were hurting nobody. I'm sure that's the great thing, to hurt nobody, and that includes you and even me. It would be hurting both of us if we were to go on writing because it would keep it all up and we shouldn't be able to meet again just as friends, and if we make the break we shall; we are strong—or weak—enough for that. Richard, let your answer to this be a long one, won't you? Try and tell me everything I shall want to hear in it because it will be all I shall have to live on. Dear child, take care of yourself, don't overwork and don't forget that open windows are the best thing for that throat of yours. Don't let things at home worry you more than you can help, and always remember there's no need to worry about me at all.
"Sophia."
* * * * *
During the time that she was waiting for the answer to her letter Sophia lived at tension, finding relief in the making of her last gift to him—for she wrote him a poem, and in spite of the deliberate placidity of the thing it eased the fierce pressure of her thoughts in the way that only creation can. Sophia was soon to enter on her greatest strength of feeling. Richard felt more intensely at the time than at looking back, when his emotions were stale to him, and he marvelled at the strength they had had; Sophia never knew till the actual hour was past what the depth of her emotion was. Partly this was that in their weeks together the need for calm and clarity on her side was so great, that when with him her being was absorbed in his and so her own feelings had no room for conscious movement until afterwards. There are times, when affairs are at the crest, when, by its intensity, sensation seems numb, but all the while each little thing seen by both inward and outward vision is registered on the mind with peculiar sharpness of edge; only to be realized when the wave of incident has passed, and even then a period of numbness may intervene before realization enters the soul, deep-driven by the intolerance of memory. Sophia was living in that tense numbness now, but through it external things made their potency felt. She grew to know every corner of the little town, and during the day she would wander several times into the cool dim church, to breathe the silence and the peace of it. And "Richard . . ." she prayed, "Richard . . ." She knew of no definite thing to ask for him, she could not pray he might be free, and happiness was an illusion she had learned to dread; she could only turn his name over and over in her mind, lift it up, hold it up and out with all the strength of her will. Still, in spite of this focusing of her life—a focusing that was to grow even more passionate in long, hot London months to come—there was no unity about it, little sights and impulses fraught with value, yet failed to show any coherent reason; some great cord that could bind everything together was still not gathered up.
One afternoon she wandered out of the town by the big gates, and turning to look back at the sweeping wall she saw a narrow path that girdled its base, rising and falling over the rippling flanks of the hill. As she looked at it some dim memory stirred in her—she remembered having read in her childhood that in olden days a man might own as much land as he could encompass in one walk, returning to his starting-point. The root-instinct of enclosure was in the idea, and Sophia had a sudden fancy to make the unconscious town her own by the old method. Without thinking of much beyond the physical act, she started along the little track noting idly yet definitely the look of the stones along the spreading base of the fortifications and the sickles of light made by the sky's reflection on the curving-over grass blades on the other side of the path. She went slowly and when she had half-girdled the town she lay down on a smooth slope, and, locking her hands behind her head, gazed over the fertile plain. On an almond-tree near a nightingale began to sing; against the first pink of sunset she saw his little body as a slightly ruffled blot. She let her mind fill with the song so that it became the accompaniment to her thought, and slowly the first glimpse of comprehension began for her.
First she fell to wondering what the plain would look like seen from above—from the point of view of God. "The human mind, looking from such a standpoint, would have to concentrate on one thing at a time if it wanted to attain any idea but a general vagueness," thought Sophia. "One would have to focus on mountain-ranges, or rivers, or railway-lines. . . ."
She lay imagining it, seeing how the shining network of railroads formed a web over the roundness of the world; thinking how it would seem to this poised mind a mere web and nothing more. A meaningless web; instead of thousands of roads each leading to a different destination and intent on its own business. But if the mind, as well as the point of vision, were that of a god, then each line would be fraught with its individuality—and not merely because each led somewhere; there was more to it than that—Sophia struggled towards it. . . . A different time had seen the making of each railroad, different men worked at the making of them, men with souls which had thought and felt as they laid the steel ribbons on which other souls would be rushed along without guessing anything of the thoughts and feelings. And yet, surely those emotions could not die. . . . Perhaps, one evening, a workman, straightening his back and drawing his hand over his wet forehead, had looked towards the sunset, and in the vague irrational way some scenes are registered on the mind for always, that aspect of sky and darkening hedge against it would stay in his memory, oddly mixed with the feel of the wet drops on his hand and the easing of the muscles across his back, to be recalled by any similar moment for the rest of his life. If so, how steeped with humanity those few yards of steel would be! And, apart from the emotions connected with it by the sense of sight, what an important part the railroad must play to the men and their wives and children to whom it meant food and fire! And then, the lines finished, each train going over them would pile the human associations thicker yet, heaping up all the feelings, according to their intensity, of the people in the trains. A god, looking down, instead of merely seeing the network of steel, would see as well all the human emotions still clinging to the places where they were lived—a mystical web woven over tangible things, growing deeper with the years. "Which," said Sophia, the first gleam of personal light flashing through her, "is why walking round a place makes it yours if you do it for that. My seeing of this path will be here always, I'm making a belt of consciousness round the town. It's my city! My city set upon a hill!"
She scrambled to her feet and for a moment leant her cheek against the rough stone of the wall, then she went on round the town and in at the great gate.
That evening she sat in Beata's garden, finishing her poem to Richard. Elate as she was, she still had no hint of what her discovery meant, or of how the garden would bring the final revelation to her, but even then she felt the soothing influence that held it and her as she wrote out her poem. It went to him without a title, but for herself she headed it:
To the Forbidden Lover
That time I gave you half-a-moon of days
In the dear Southern land of many moods
She lured us up among her hill-ringed ways
Far from the ordered gardens, far from where,
Sacring the sky, the Christs hang on their roods.
We saw the sea-grey slopes of olive-trees
Blown foamy-pale, from the cloud-ridden air
Fell the swift shadows on those leafy seas.
To lakes of hardened lava we would come,
Scarred, as by whirlpools, with cold crater-rings
Or packed in furrows, like mammoth slugs grown numb
At some disaster of creation's dawn—
A burnt-out lunar landscape of dead things.
And there some kindlier whim of path would show
Rocks that might echo to a piping Faun,
Or hide a huntress nymph with spear and bow.
Pan-haunted is that valley where we lay
(Lay, till lulled senses slid into a dream)
Watching sun-wrought reflections of ripples play
And break in shining scales through that green pool,
Deepest of seven strung on a ribbon of stream
That seven times wings the air in curving flight.
And from the gleaming arc blew spray to cool
Lids that were rosy films against the light.
A hut with fluted roof we found one morn,
A fairy-story hut; an empty shrine
Haply once dear to comrades less forlorn,
For on the walls were names of lover-folk.
And there we ate our bread and drank our wine,
A Sacrament of Fellowship; only dregs
We poured to envious gods, and laughing broke
Thrush-like, against a stone, our brown-shelled eggs.
Dearest that castle set in sun and winds
Remote as though upon Olympus hung,
Yet with a human tang that drew our minds
To gentle restful things; an open door,
Warm hearths, silk-curtained beds, and shutters flung
Wing-wide to let us watch the stars pulsating.
Now through closed slats their light must bar the floor
And on the hearth the ash be grey with waiting.
And when for daily troubles you make dole
(Now that the miles have set you far away)
Then to our little castle come in soul.
There, where the two girl-children thought us wed,
There, surely, I need never say you nay;
But, where the hollow curves between the breast
And rounded shoulder, draw your weary head,
And, when the day's lid droops, there give you rest.
The weakness of you I can hold to me,
For since at the world's door the babes unborn
Must vainly beat for us; oh, I will be
A Virgin-Mother to the child in you. . . .
And comradeship is good when sweetly sworn,
Being no less tender for its commonplace
And for its lack of fetters no less true—
Take what you may, my dear, and with good grace.
It was Sophia's first and only love-letter, and she sent it when she got back to England, as a summons to that friendship in which she could have given as richly as in love; and for which, although he had planned it so eagerly, he had too much knack of passion and too little depth of feeling.