A rogue's tragedy

by Bernard Capes

But his part, while he played it, was Love’s part. It was when he realised this most that the palpable world became a shadow, the solid ground a cloud, the sun and moon and hills but figments of a rapture of Love’s dream. It was then that he stepped exalted, knowing his fair succession—knowing of whom he was born and for what reason. He had been accredited Love’s representative.

So the man felt it here, walking on air. The mountains were more real to him than the rock he stood on. He dealt in dreams’ paradoxes. “I have never lived till now,” he said.

There was a little wind abroad which fluted in the pines, making sharp notes of their fragrance. One’s ears and nose were always at a conflict in the matter, whether to claim music for perfume or perfume for music. It was the same as to the battle between sun and snow, which fought to a compromise on the terms of chilly warmth or glowing coldness. Yet the name was of no importance in the bracing sweetness of the atmosphere they contrived together. One could not breathe there and think of breathing as a condition of life. The temperature was the temperature of a neutral ground between earth and heaven—of a present unreality and a real distance.

The two had just issued in company from a hillside chapel, a little lonely ark stranded on a shelf of rock hung up in a pine thicket, with rills of water tinkling all about it like the last streaks of a receded flood. They had sent forth their unreturning dove, and had followed it to find their phantasm of a new world budding in green islands from a lake of mist. Their feet seemed to sink in eternity. Only the bright heavens above them were actual.

A butterfly, like a flake of stained glass blown from the robe of the Christ in the little painted window within, came wafted after them as they emerged. From a loophole in the presbytery above, the face of the old sacristan leered out secretly, and, marking their going, grinned and apostrophised it in a fit of silent laughter. “You sha’n’t have him; you sha’n’t have him!” thought he, like the very sacristan of St Anne’s Chapel under the Hinne Mountain, of whom children read. Then they vanished in the mist, going upwards, and he sat down to chuckle.

As they ascended, the vapour sank beneath their feet, or was rolled away like bales to topple over the precipices. It had all been clear enough, bright palpable fact, before they entered the chapel. The swift change was nothing surprising in these resting-places of the clouds. Yet it seemed to them as if, returning to their world, they found it transformed beyond all precedent. But then, was not their rapture beyond all precedent? None had ever before loved as they loved—and that was true, because there is no such thing as a stereotype in Nature.

The whistle of a marmot straight ahead on a boulder startled them suddenly as into a self-consciousness of guilt. They saw an atom of mist cleave and close to the red flick of him as he vanished, and then the phantoms of mountains looking in upon them above the place where he had sat. It was like a priestly summons to love’s shrift. They stopped, as by one consent, and stood in scarlet confusion to falter out their confessions.

First love, I think, must reveal itself to fervent Catholics, as these two were, in a more poignant form than to most others. The wonder of it, as a divine absolution for shamefaced thoughts, as a divine authorisation of those thoughts’ indulgence to a natural end, must thrill their most sacred traditions of virginity to the marrow. Then they must first realise, on its human merits, the sacrifice of the Christ who died that men might live. They have worshipped the transubstantiation apart; now they are bidden to an intimate share in it.

That, perhaps, was why this man and woman were justified in feeling their state an ecstasy unparalleled. Love to them was a transubstantiation, such as no heterodox soul could ever know. They, to whom flesh had been a shame, were authorised, in a moment, of nakedness; they were surrendered, for their faith, to the paradise of mortal raptures. Henceforth, dear incarnations of a dream, they believed they owed themselves to flesh—while they trod on air.

Young god and goddess certainly they looked, poised on their misty Ida. The man was cream-pink of face, sunny of hair, blue and a thought prominent of eye. A fervour of soul perpetually flurried his cheek, flushing or paling it in flying moods. He had the air and appearance of an eager evangelist who had a little outgrown his spiritual strength. He would sometimes overbalance on self-exaltation, and pitch into an abyss of depression. He was tall and well-moulded as a whole; but his hips were unduly feminine. His colour, too, erred on the feminine side of prettiness. But he looked, all in all, a fit bright mate for the happy figure beside him.