II.
The library at Five Elms was very small. Emilius used it as a smoking-room; but it was lined with books. Where the rows of shelves met the shutter cases a fold of window-curtain overlapped their ends.
On the fifth shelf, covered by the curtain, she found the four volumes of Shelley's Poetical Works, half-bound in marble-paper and black leather. She had passed them scores of times in her hunt for something to read. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Percy Bysshe—what a silly name. She had thought of him as she thought of Allison's History of Europe in seventeen volumes, and the poems of Cornwall and Leigh Hunt. Books you wouldn't read if you were on a desert island.
There was something about Shelley in Byron's Life and Letters. Something she had read and forgotten, that persisted, struggled to make itself remembered.
Shelley's Pantheism.
The pages of Shelley were very clean; they stuck together lightly at the edges, like the pages of the Encyclopaedia at "Pantheism" and "Spinoza." Whatever their secret was, you would have to find it for yourself.
Table of Contents—Poems written in 1816—"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." She read that first.
"Sudden thy shadow fell on me:—
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!"
It had happened to Shelley, too. He knew how you felt when it happened. (Only you didn't shriek.) It was a real thing, then, that did happen to people.
She read the "Ode to a Skylark," the "Ode to the West Wind" and
"Adonais."
All her secret happiness was there. Shelley knew about the queerness of the sharp white light, and the sudden stillness, when the grey of the fields turns to violet: the clear, hard stillness that covers the excited throb-throbbing of the light.
"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity"—
Colours were more beautiful than white radiance. But that was because of the light. The more light there was in them the more beautiful they were; it was their real life.
One afternoon Mr. Propart called. He came into the library to borrow a book.
"And what are you so deep in?" he said.
"Shelley."
"Shelley? Shelley?" He looked at her. A kind, considering look. She liked his grey face with its tired keenness. She thought he was going to say something interesting about Shelley; but he only smiled his thin, drooping smile; and presently he went away with his book.
Next morning the Shelleys were not in their place behind the curtain.
Somebody had moved them to the top shelf. Catty brought the step-ladder.
In the evening they were gone. Mr. Propart must have borrowed them.