The Witch

by Mary Johnston

Locksley and Maid Marian—’”

sang Joan. She wove as she sang, for there was cotton for weaving, and she had learned of the Indian women and greatly bettered their instruction. She saw garments for them both, hanging from the pegs, lying upon the shelves Aderhold had made. She had traded her skill at many things for needles of bone, for the vegetable dyes that the women used, for various matters that she wanted. She was of all women most fit for such a return to a younger world. Sane and strong and skilled, with the artist arisen from the mere workwoman, she turned back some thousand years, and handled savage life with a creative hand. On all sides latent power came forth. A wise trader, she gathered what she needed; a good teacher, she imparted knowledge as she went, without ostentation, insensibly, with a fine unconsciousness; a worker of the best, she did that which her hand found to do with élan and precision and an assured result upon which to base further results. She lacked not for leisure either, nor for a whimsical, sceptical glance upon her own labours, nor for an ability to let it all slip aside while she sat and brooded upon the open sea.

As for Aderhold, he was and was not the man of the Oak Grange. He was that man freed where he had been bound, fed where he had been starved.

Their domain grew in fitness and beauty. By the time the perfect winter had passed into the languors of spring, and spring into the heats and rains of summer, and summer again into cooler, fairer days, they had achieved about them an Arcadian right simplicity, as far from meagreness as from excess. The large hut, palm-thatched, stood in a well-stocked garden. Great trees gave them shade; a spring of clear water for ever a cooling, trickling sound. Around all they planted a flowering hedge. Within this round sounded the hum of their industries and their own clear voices. Without was the eternal voice of the sea, and in and out and around, the voice of the moving air.

The murmur of the Indian village was likewise there, but it did not come athwart; it travelled equably with the other sounds. They had come to have a fondness for the dwindling village, an affection for this remnant of a remnant of a people. They were poor savages, they had flaws and vices, but save that they were less complex, less intertwined with later offshoots, more plain stalk and plain word, their flaws and vices differed in no great wise from those that might be viewed in France or England. At times the village seemed like a village of children, and then again it might seem very old and somewhat wise. Once or twice they had seen it waver toward a village of beasts, heavily swaying toward the animal only. But Aderhold had seen that happen in France and Italy—they might both think that they had seen it happen in England. On the very morrow it was something more than animal. At times it was something much more—something much higher. And they knew that flaws and vices lurked in themselves also—unplucked-out weeds yet living a slow dark life in the backward-reaching abyss. They understood the village, and they tried to help. They did help, and by slow degrees the village came to change affection with them. As for the old chief, every other day he came to see them.

He was of an enquiring and speculative turn of mind, and it was his wont to bring unsolved questions to the vine-shaded strip of bare earth before the hut, and there, seated on a mat with a few followers squatted around, propound them to the two. To most of the islanders all things, outside the narrowest range, were supernatural. The old man’s scope was wider, and the daring of his scepticism, proportioned to his environment, would have qualified him for a dungeon in most countries that Aderhold knew.... Here upon this island all was as a sketch, a faint model and portent only of what, in seventeenth-century Europe, had become enlarged, filled in and solid. Generically it was the same; it was but a question of degree of intensity and of accretions. These Indians also held for an external deity, so extruded, so external that steps—that intermediaries—must be extruded to cover the extruded space between, to reach the extruded Ear and Mind. Moreover, they did not maintain this a flowing process, but continually let the extrusions of remote ancestors dam the stream. They had idols whom certainly not even the old chief might with impunity criticize. They had “Thou shalts” and “Thou shalt nots” which were wise and might long remain so, and those which had been wise and were now meaningless, colourless, making neither for much good nor much harm, and those which might once have been wise but were now hurtful, and those which never had been wise and grew in folly. They had notions, dim, not as yet fearfully positive, of a future life of reward or punishment, where they would do without limit or term—throughout eternity, indeed—that which, Indians upon this island, they most liked to do in this present moment, or would suffer, alike for ever, just those pains which at present they acutely disliked. They placed great merit in belief without question, obedience without discrimination, and a prostrate attitude. They had extruded Authority. Nothing had a proper motion of its own, but everything was moved by something else. The disclaimer of responsibility, of generic lot and part, was general. The disinclination to examine premises was supreme. They had found their despot in Inertia.

But the old chief was exceptional. He was wary and paid respect to taboos. That done, he loved to talk. He brought to Aderhold questions such as, at the dawn of philosophy, an intelligent barbarian might have put to Thales or Anaximander. Aderhold answered as simply and well as he might; where he could not answer, said so. Now and then the more active-minded of the old man’s escort brought queries. Joan also listened and questioned. Aderhold, answering, taught in terms of natural science and a general ethic—very simply, for that, here, was the only way....

But when the old chief and his followers had gone away from the vine-clad porch, and the murmur of the village came faintly across the evening, when, their day’s labour done, they went down to the sea, to the coral ledge or crescent of pale sand, and lay there by the blue, unending water; or when, night having fallen, they rested in the moonlight on the black-and-white chequered ground beneath the palms, they spoke more fully, shared more completely the inner worlds. Love could not rest with them in the physical. Freedom, dilation, redoubling, rapid and powerful vibration, energy, colour, music, all mounted from the denser to the rarer universe. Their minds interfused, there came moments when their spirits might seem one iridescent orb. They were one, ... only the next instant to be exquisitely different ... then to approach and blend again. At such times they spoke in low tones, with slow, rounded words, of the deepest waters where their souls drank of which they had knowledge, or they spoke not at all, having no need to.... At other times they talked of the past and the future and the whole round world. Steadily they learned of each other: Joan much from Aderhold, Aderhold much from Joan.

They had lived here a year—they had lived here more than a year. When they had lived here two years, when they, no more than the Indians about them, watched the horizon for any ship, when they had ceased to dream of separation, change, and disaster, when it was fully home, with the sweetness and fragrance of home—then was born their child.

Joan lay upon the clean, woven mats in the bright moonlight. Aderhold put the babe in her arms, then stretched himself beside them. Her grey eyes opened upon him. “Gilbert—Gilbert—I love you so—”