But there was a keener, swifter life in the wood than that of opening leaf and building bird. He had always felt its throbbing, but now it waxed perceptible to sight; it flowed like living light through the boles of the trees; they seemed to grow translucent; it thrilled in the air; through the shining vistas of the beechen woods, the gods and dryads of old legends came trooping; and the elfin peoples of the flowers and air, of the water and the moss-decked rock, made good sport in the flitting lights and shadows.
He cast himself, so it seemed, in the old hollow filled with the dead crisp beech leaves; their faint pungent smell and the delicate odour of the opening leaves were all about him in this strange old-new world. About him a presence wove itself; an unreal, most-real, compelling power, without him and within. He felt the pulsing of a stronger life smite upon his. And then, even as when he was a child, the inner and the outer world alike flowed away from him, the great sky seemed to stoop to him in a blinding flood of living light and wrap him round, and “there was neither speech nor language,” only light—light—light—and again more light and keener life.
The next day Mr. Scottie received a note which was left at his door. Out of it dropped a ten-shilling piece. On a sheet of paper was written:
“I can’t do it, I’ve torn them up. To every man his work and his line, this isn’t mine. I must do the work they mean me to do. If you say: ‘Who are they?’ I do not know. If through some fault of mine, or of the world’s, I fail to do as I am meant to do, then let me go. There’s no point in a man’s keeping his body alive by making his brain grind out work for which it wasn’t built. Better work with one’s hands than that, till the hour strikes. That is what I shall try now, and wait results.”
Mr. Scottie was greatly concerned, because his protégé had, as he phrased it, “gone dotty,” and, being as kindly a creature as ever pursued the tasks appointed for him by his past, he took pains to find Fletewode. But Fletewode and his MSS. were gone.
A week later the gardener of a well-to-do literary man, a minor poet, received a shock. Within his master’s grounds was a little clump of beech trees; they grew far away from Fletewode’s old home, but they were fine trees, all bravely decked in their spring green, and at their feet grew bluebells. The gardener found a dead man lying face downwards in a bluebell patch, and beside him was a great bundle of papers tied up in a scarlet and white handkerchief. The gardener gave the alarm; he carried the bundle to his master, and the dead man was laid in the harness room in the stables. There was no clue at all as to the identity of the man; the doctor discovered he had died of heart failure. The minor poet looked through the papers; he said at the inquest there was no clue in the bundle as to who the man was, there were only a few unimportant documents; he would pay the expenses of the poor young fellow’s funeral.
Now the minor poet was an ambitious man, well known in the literary world. His ambitions were larger than his power of performance. He was well known among men of letters as a very good critic of other people’s work. The day of the funeral he sat alone and trembled in the throes of temptation. He did not understand the subtle mystic thought of the poems in the bundle, but he saw their marvellous beauty of expression. He appreciated keenly the lovely lilt and melody of the lines which seemed to ring out from the heart of a fairy haunted wood. The minor poet was not a very righteous man. Three beautiful little books emanated from his pen point, they were finally bound in white vellum and tied chastely with blue ribbons. Those books were widely read. The critics greatly praised the versatility of the minor poet, who had never written anything of that kind before; also they warned him—friendly-wise—against a tendency to mysticism, which ever saps the judgment and emasculates the intellect. The minor poet said he would never fall again into that snare, and indeed he never did so. The thoughts enshrined within those poems struck strongly on the consciousness of four readers only. One was a foreign writer of romance, the second was a great preacher, the third a musician, and the fourth a man of science to whom the world harkened when he spake. And the thought of these four men, and through them the thought of the world, was coloured for all time to come by the work of the minor poet; men who had not heeded that of Fletewode Garth, heard his voice gladly. Thus the wheel that none can stay rolled on, and the world, through the heart failure of Fletewode, and the ambition of an unrighteous man, received the message which it would not receive by other means. For the hour had struck upon the clock of time when it was fit that it should hear, therefore its ears were opened.
But the problem for the wise is this: When sheaves are garnered what shall be the minor poet’s share in the reaping?