As for my school-mates, though I had very little to say to them, or they to me, I used to watch them very closely, and, as I have said, came to weave them into my dreams. Some figured as heroes, some as magnanimous allies, some as malignant enemies, some who struck me as beautiful received of me the kind of idolatry, the insensate self-surrender which creatures of my sort have always offered up to beauty of any sort. I remember T——e, a very shapely and distinguished youth. I worshipped him as a god, and have seen him since—alas! I remember B—— also, a tall, lean, loose-limbed young man. He was a great cricketer, a good-natured, sleepy giant, perfectly stupid (I am sure) but with marks of breed about him which I could not possibly mistake. Him, too, I enthroned upon my temple-frieze; he would have figured there as Meleager had I been a few years older. As it was, he rode a blazoned charger, all black, and feutred his lance with the Knights of King Arthur's court. Then there was H——n, a good-looking, good-natured boy, and T——r, another. Many and many a day did they ride forth with me adventuring—that is, spiritually they did so; physically speaking, I had no scot or lot with them. We were in plate armour, visored and beplumed. We slung our storied shields behind us; we had our spears at rest; we laughed, told tales, sang as we went through the glades of the forest, down the rutted charcoal-burner's track, and came to the black mere, where there lay a barge with oars among the reeds. I can see, now, H——n throw up his head, bared to the sky and slanting sun. He had thick and dark curly hair and a very white neck. His name of chivalry was Sagramor. T——r was of stouter build and less salient humour. He was Bors, a brother of Lancelot's. I, who was moody, here as in waking life, was Tristram, more often Tramtris.
Of other more sinister figures I remember two. R——s, who bullied me until I was provoked at last into facing him; a greedy, pale, lecherous boy, graceless, a liar, but extremely clever. I had a horror of him which endures now. If he, as I have, had a dweller in the deeps of him, his must have been a satyr. I cannot doubt it now. Disastrous ally for mortal man! Vice sat upon his face like a grease; vice made his fingers quick. He had a lickorous tongue and a taste for sweet things which even then made me sick. So repulsive was he to me, so impressed upon my fancy, that it was curious he did not haunt my inner life. But I never met him there. No shape of his ever encountered me in the wilds and solitary places. In the manifest world he afflicted me to an extent which the rogue-fairy in the wood could never have approached. Perhaps it was that all my being was forearmed against him, and that I fought him off. At any rate he never trespassed in my preserves.
The other was R——d, a bleared and diseased creature, a thing of pity and terror to the wholesome, one of those outcasts of the world which every school has to know and reckon with. A furtive, nail-bitten, pick-nose wretch with an unholy hunger for ink, earth-worms and the like. What terrible tenant do the likes of these carry about with them! He, too, haunted me, but not fearfully; but he, too, I now understand too well, was haunted and ridden to doom. I pitied him, tried to be kind to him, tried to treat him as the human thing which in some sort he was. I discovered that when he was interested he forgot his loathsome cravings, and became almost lovable. I went home with him once, to a mean house in ——. He took me into the backyard and showed me his treasury—half a dozen rabbits, as many guinea-pigs, and a raven with a bald head. He was all kindness to these prisoners, fondled them with hands and voice, spoke a kind of inarticulate baby language to them, and gave them pet names. He forgot his misery, his poverty—I remember that he never had a handkerchief and always wanted one, that his jacket-sleeves were near his elbow, and that his wrist bones were red and broken. But now there shone a clear light in his eye; he could face the world as he spoke to me of the habits of his friends. We got upon some sort of terms by these means, and I always had a kind of affection for poor R——d. In a sense we were both outcasts, and might have warmed the world for each other. If I had not been so entirely absorbed in my private life as to grudge any moment of it unnecessarily spent I should have asked him home. But boys are exorbitant in their own affairs, and I had no time to spare him.
I was a year at —— before I got so far with any schoolfellow of mine there; but just about the time of my visit to R——d I fell in with another boy, called Harkness, who, for some reason of his own, desired my closer acquaintance and got as much of it as I was able to give to anybody, and a good deal more than he deserved or I was the better of. He, too, was a day-boy, whose people lived in a suburb of the town which lay upon my road. We scraped acquaintance by occasionally travelling together so much of the way as he had to traverse; from this point onward all the advances were his. I had no liking for him, and, in fact, some of his customs shocked me. But he was older than I, very friendly, and very interesting. He evidently liked me; he asked me to tea with him; he used to wait for me, going and returning. I had no means of refusing his acquaintance, and did not; but I got no good out of him.
As he was older, so he was much more competent. Not so much vicious as curious and enterprising, he knew a great many things which I only guessed at, and could do much—or said that he could—which I only dreamed about. He put a good deal of heart into my instruction, and left me finally with my lesson learned. I never saw nor heard of him after I left the school. We did not correspond, and he left no mark upon me of any kind. The lesson learned, I used the knowledge certainly; but it did not take me into the region which he knew best. His grove of philosophy was close to the school, in K—— Park, which is a fine enclosure of forest trees, glades, brake-fern and deer. Here, in complete solitude, for we never saw a soul, my sentimental education was begun by this self-appointed professor. As I remember, he was a good-looking lad enough, with a round and merry face, high colour, bright eyes, a moist and laughing mouth. Had he known the way in he would have been at home in the Garden of Priapus, where perhaps he is now. He was hardy in address, a ready speaker, rather eloquent upon the theme that he loved, and I dare say he may have been as fortunate as he said, or very nearly. Certainly what he had to tell me of love and women opened my understanding. I believe that I envied him his ease of attainment more than what he said he had attained. I might have been stimulated by his adventures to be adventurous on my own account, but I never was, neither at that time nor at any other. I am quite certain that never in my life have I gone forth conquering and to conquer in affairs of the heart. You need to be a Casanova—which Harkness was in his little way—and I have had no aptitude for the part. But as I said just now I absorbed his teachings and made use of them. So far as he gave me food for reflection I ate it, and assimilated it in my own manner. Neither by him nor by any person far more considerable than himself has my imagination been moved in the direction of the mover of it. Let great poet, great musician, great painter stir me ever so deeply, I have never been able to follow him an inch. I was excited by pictures to see new pictures of my own, by poems to make poems—of my own, not of theirs. In these, no doubt, were elements of theirs; there was a borrowed something, a quality, an accent, a spirit of attack. But the forms were mine, and the setting always so. All my life I have used other men's art and wisdom as a spring-board. I suppose every poet can say the same. This was to be the use to me of the lessons of the precocious, affectionate, and philoprogenitive Harkness.
I remember very well one golden summer evening when he and I lay talking under a great oak—he expounding and I plucking at the grass as I listened, or let my mind go free—how, quite suddenly, the mesh he was weaving about my groping mind parted in the midst and showed me for an appreciable moment a possibility of something—it was no more—which he could never have seen.
From the dense shade in which we lay there stretched out an avenue of timber trees, whereunder the bracken, breast high, had been cut to make a ride. Upon this bracken, and upon this smooth channel in the midst the late sun streamed toward us, a soft wash of gold. Behind all this the sky, pale to whiteness immediately overhead, deepened to the splendid orange of the sunset. Each tree cast his shadow upon his neighbour, so that only the topmost branches burned in the light. Over and above us floated the drowsy hum of the insect world; rarely we heard the moaning of a wood-dove, more rarely still the stirring of deer hidden in the thicket shade. This was a magical evening, primed with wonders, in the glamour of which Master Harkness could find nothing better for him to rehearse than the progress of his amours with his mother's housemaid. Yet something of the evening glow, something of the opulence of summer smouldered in his words. He painted his mistress with the colour of the sunset, he borrowed of it burnt gold to deck her clay. He hymned the whiteness of her neck, her slender waist, her whispers, the kisses of her mouth. The scamp was luxuriating in his own imaginings or reminiscences, much less of a lover and far more of a rhapsodist than he suspected. As such his pæan of precocious love stirred my senses and fired my imagination, but not in the direction of his own. For the glow which he cast upon his affair was a borrowed one. He had dipped without knowing into the languid glory of the evening, which like a pool of wealth lay ready to my hand also. I gave him faint attention from the first. After he had started my thoughts he might sing rapture after rapture of his young and ardent sense. For me the spirit of a world not his whispered, "A te convien tenere altro viaggio," and little as I knew it, in my vague exploration of that scene of beauty, of those scarcely stirring, stilly burning trees, of that shimmering-fronded fern, of that misty splendour, I was hunting for the soul of it all, for the informing spirit of it all. Harkness's erotics gave ardour to my search, but no clew. I lost him, left him behind, and never found him again. He fell into the Garden of Priapus, I doubt. As for me, I believed that I was now looking upon a Dryad. I was looking certainly at a spirit informed. A being, irradiate and quivering with life and joy of life, stood dipt to the breast in the brake; stood so, bathing in the light; stood so, preening herself like a pigeon on the roof-edge, and saw me and took no heed.
She had appeared, or had been manifest to me, quite suddenly. At one moment I saw the avenue of lit green, at another she was dipt in it. I could describe her now, at this distance of time—a radiant young female thing, fiercely favoured, smiling with a fierce joy, with a gleam of fierce light in her narrowed eyes. Upon her body and face was the hue of the sun's red beam; her hair, loose and fanned out behind her head, was of the colour of natural silk, but diaphanous as well as burnished, so that while the surfaces glittered like spun glass the deeps of it were translucent and showed the fire behind. Her garment was thin and grey, and it clung to her like a bark, seemed to grow upon her as a creeping stone-weed grows. Harkness would have admired the audacity of her shape, as I did; but I found nothing provocative in it. As well might a boy have enamoured himself of a slim tree as of that unearthly shaft of beauty.
I said that she preened herself; the word is inexact. She rather stood bathing in the light, motionless but for the lifting of her face into it that she might dip, or for the bending of her head that the warmth behind her might strike upon the nape of her neck. Those were all her movements, slowly rehearsed, and again and again rehearsed. With each of them she thrilled anew; she thrilled and glowed responsive to the play of the light. I don't know whether she saw me, though it seemed to me that our looks had encountered. If her eyes had taken me in I should have known it, I think; and if I had known it I should have quailed and looked at her no more. So shamefaced was I, so self-conscious, that I can be positive about that; for far from avoiding her I watched her intently, studied her in all her parts, and found out some curious things.
Looking at her beside the oaks, for instance, whence she must have emanated, I could judge why it was that I had not seen her come out. Her colouring was precisely that of her background. Her garment, smock or frock or vest as you will, was grey-green like the oak stems, her whites were those of the sky-gleams, her roses those of the sun's rays. The maze of her hair could hardly be told from the photosphere. I tested this simply and summarily. Shutting my eyes for a second, when I opened them she was gone. Shutting them again and opening, there she was, sunning herself, breathing deep and long, watching her own beauties as the light played with them. I tried this many times and it did not fail me. I could, with her assistance, bring her upon my retina or take her off it, as if I had worked a shutter across my eyes. But as I watched her so I got very excited. Her business was so mysterious, her pleasure in it so absorbing; she was visible and yet secret; I was visible, and yet she could be ignorant of it. I got the same throbbing sort of interest out of her as many and many a time I have got since out of watching other wild creatures at their affairs, crouching hidden where they could not discern me by any of their senses. Few things enthral me more than that—and here I had my first taste of it. I remember that my heart beat, I remember that I trembled. Nothing could have torn me from the spot but what precisely did, an alien intervention. The besotted Harkness stopped short in his recital and asked me what I was staring at.