The Court of the King, and Other Studies

by Margaret Benson

II

“The luminous

Star-inwrought, beautiful

Folds of the Veil.”

Many have written of the journey down to the dark river; few have told of the road backward from the river’s brink; a road of sudden ecstasies and sordid pitfalls.

For the radiance lay over the earth when he turned his face to it again. Nothing was ever sweeter than the sight of palm leaves against the blue upon the banks of the Nile. As the shores streamed past, with the rosy hills and yellow lights above them, winged feluccas furling sail, or sweeping like birds across the blue, with the roaring of the swiftness of their motion, he could lie and look—weary with rapture—watching the figures sprung from the old Palestinian story—a rugged Peter wrapping his fisher’s cloak about him, or urging his fellows “I go a-fishing.” But slowly, imperceptibly, the walls of the world closed in again; the sun beat pitilessly down; the heavens were brass, the earth iron. Now and again they would open out at the sight of the sapphire sparkle of the Mediterranean, or the deep, green growth under blossoming orchards of France. The wind became the life-giving breath of the spirit, and the soul would “beat” against “mortal bars,” seeing infinite power, infinite possibility, lying but just beyond the frail partition; a touch, and he might glide from the mountain side down over the trees that slept in the noonday of the valley; a hand on the eyes, and they would see to the truth that lies beneath form and colour of earthly things; a finger on the ear, and he would hear the very meaning of the wind and of the trickle of the stream—the gift of tongues would be an imaginably natural incident.

Yet next day, at some trifling ailment, death and its terrors compass him about, and the man shakes as with ague under the fear of it and shame of cowardice. Or he wakes every morning seemingly refreshed, only to fall by midday into a gulf of blackness and mistrust, sordid, not tragic, not dignified; and he sits tongue-tied, seeing a sneer in every smile, marvelling that men do not see the loathsomeness and terror that lie around them, but walk unconcerned among the dangers that encompass. Then again life returns in full flood, and the fears and the terrors are as the fabric of a dream.

A long, strange way, full of inexplicable joys and sorrows, hopes and fears—a far longer path to travel in the spirit than that by which he came “out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt,” to the cool airs and sweet quiet of an old English country house in wooded downs touched by the freshness of the sea. There in the south, after the first bound towards health, life had stood still; the parched, sapless land could yield dry, clear air, sharp bright sunlight, but no refreshment of health and of spirit, nothing that could be compared to the misty mornings, and soft dewy evenings of a mild English spring. There the spring brings no refreshment; March reaps her harvest and the palm leaves hang dry and yellowish: here all life was stirring after the winter sleep, and earth was striving in her own finite way to make all things new. It was long since he had seen an English spring, and the eye could not be satisfied with gazing.

He first noticed it when, looking on the wintry copses, he saw that a thin ripple of life had run over the ground; among brown stalks and withered leaves so slight a flush of green that you could hardly say, “It is here” or “It is there,” nor surely know the change was worked to the outer eye or noted by the reanimate perception. Then the fine veil of skeleton branches against the sky, through, under, beyond which he could see the blue downs of the coast, thickened, and they warmed in colour; till the brown of the elm became purple, and the brown of the beeches red, and the willow golden: then the elm burst into its little purple rosettes but the others stayed. And now crept out those little silvery creatures which the children call palms; like little downy animals, so sweet, so comfortable that the child must half believe they are alive. Early in April the clumps of crocus in the turf, purple and yellow, were dying, but the daffodils were beginning to take their place, strewing the rough grass with flowers of milky gold. A week later the snake-heads were drawing themselves out of the turf, with head curved downwards like a swan preening its breast; primroses were waking in the lanes, the larch was hanging “rosy plumelets,” the silver leaf buds of the apple were out, and the flower of the peach.