“You can turn the tide by the waving of your hand,” said she. “You can stay the flight of the earth through space; or you can kill yourself. Behold! the one is as possible as either of the others. Will you mend the broken heart in the hill cottage by the way of the black canal? Will you wipe out the shame of a soul by the death of a body?”
He moaned, and thrust his fingers through his hair, clutching and twisting it.
“Be wiser, child,” she said. “My words are harsh, my thought is gentle towards you. I said I, the Willow-weaver, would be your mother to-night. What do you see from my hut door, child?”
He raised himself obediently from the withies and told her what he saw.
“And yet there is more to be seen here,” she said. “Because there is more I spoke to you harshly, pointing out the ill you had wrought. For I knew that here, even here in this very spot, there is another country whereof you are native born, and wherein you live. Therefore, son of that good mother of whom you and I know, lie at peace upon these withies, cut from the floating island in this lake whereon we look; I shall sing you a cradle song that you may sleep. When you wake the Child’s Song shall never wholly leave your ears on this side of that death you sought but now, and you shall break your heart and brain with longing after it in vain. This, for the sake of that good mother, is the Willow-weaver’s mercy to you; and you shall find that men, too, have mercy on those who hear in broken snatches the Child’s Song.”
The power of the woman was upon him; meek and dazed as a tired babe he lay upon the twisted withies; he heard the sound of the twigs as she twisted them in and out in her weaving. He could neither move nor speak; he wondered dreamily whether he lay in a trance or swoon, or whether this was death, and thus the problem of his vanishing was solved without effort of his own. He felt either the light cold touch of her finger tip or the touch of a willow withy between his brows. Suddenly, how and when he did not know, he saw that other country of which the Willow-weaver spake; he had not moved from the spot; he felt sure his body lay on the willow withies in the hut by the canal. He knew it lay there with a burden of sin and folly, of ignorance, shame, and remorse; but they belonged to the place of their brooding, and he, reaching forth in order that he might know, knew them as apart from himself, like a school task learned well or ill, with praise or the rod for its reward. He saw the other country, and this was the fashion of that which he thought he saw. Whether he saw it as it was is another matter.
On every side lay the broad shining levels of a lake of silver, he did not know whether it was water, or silver fire that had no heat, but was still and cool as the hour before a summer sunrise. He saw no shores nor any boundary set to it; as far as his eyes, or some other sense than sight, would suffer him to perceive, the waters lay. From the lake rose a many-petalled pink blossom; about each petal quivered a delicate fringe of many-coloured flame, and at the heart of the fiery flower that sprang from the water’s breast was music. As he saw these things his life passed into them; or else they were the body of his life. Thereupon a certain knowledge came to him, but it was knowledge the man was never able to tell to any one, not even to himself. He heard a high clear voice singing, so he afterwards remembered, but whether it was the Cradle Song of the Willow-weaver, or the speech of the wordless music at the blossom’s heart, he could not tell.
It is my belief (I who tell these things) that the words, and indeed the whole matter, were by no manner of means such as are here recorded. He told me the words he heard were something like to these, but he admitted they were not really like them either in sound or sense. This is what he crooned in the day that came after, when men said his mother-wit had been stolen by the Folk of Peace:
Thou mak’st thy cry to me, thou mak’st thy plea,
I watch the waters of a changeless sea.