The Sundered Streams: The History of a Memory That Had No Full Stops

by Reginald Farrer

When Kingston Darnley woke, the clouds had broken. Overhead was the clear vault of stars; beneath, a vast flocculent sea of milky whiteness. Already the eastern air was lightening with the first green tremors of dawn, and the warm calm of the night was giving place to the keen freshness of a new day.

Kingston could rest no longer. He rose, and wandered to and fro across the summit, thinking out the situation in which he had become involved. A force too great for his resistance had swept him into its dominion; so much was certain. The force was hateful, paradoxical, inexplicable. But its grip was at his throat, and no struggles could extricate him. The whole face of the world had suddenly changed; hidden things had been made clear, and things which had once been thought precious and sufficient were now shown in the light of this strange sunrise to be altogether false and valueless. No reluctance, no blinking of facts, no well-meant pretences, could alter the fact that life had suddenly opened out before him, enormous, passionate, in all its scope, and that, in the revelation the mountains of bygone days were dwarfed to molehills.

But these changes ruled only in the secret places of the heart. There remained the practical aspect of things. In the depths of his soul he now carried with him a knowledge of what was highest and most glorious in life, but that knowledge must for ever be buried in the depths. His own rash action, in the days before he had understood, before he had been awaked, had put it eternally beyond his power to stretch out his hands openly, and seize the happiness that his soul had found. Chains of diamond might bind him now and for ever to this second self that he had discovered; but chains of his own making, of his own riveting, made him prisoner to another life, in the lower world of daily existence. In the clear cold of the dawn the heats and tempests of his brain seemed to grow calm; he saw more and more clearly into the future and its possibilities; passion and its stress had given way to a cooler appraisement of circumstances. His nature, emotional rather than sensual, helped him to regain his balance. It was on the spiritual, transcendental side of his feelings that he dwelt.

This love of his for Isabel, this love which came from outside, which had nothing to do with moral or æsthetic approval—it should be a thing altogether high and holy. To keep it clear of contamination, to sanctify it by restricting it to the loftiest regions of life—this was the task that lay before him. The task might be difficult. Isabel might try to increase the difficulty of it. But he would gather strength from the very difficulty of his position, the very intensity of his passion, which, by the sheer weight of it, must lay so great a responsibility upon him as his soul must needs rise to bear. For the heavier the weight, the easier it is to endure; the soul braces itself sternly, deliberately, to the labour, and carries off the burden of a crushing load more triumphantly than the straws which daily life and little desires impose—the straws which seem of no account, and for which, therefore, the soul makes no preparation, stiffens no muscles to sustain. Against a lapse Kingston felt himself defended as much by the solemn ecstasy with which he had come to accept the fact of his passion as by his sense of the redoubled duty which it made him owe to the other life that he had innocently involved.

Tragic affection possessed him as he thought of Gundred;—Gundred, giving her all—that all which now appeared so little; Gundred, whose greatest gift had now become inadequate, yet must never be slighted or discarded. In a moment he saw the vast distance that now separated him from his wife. Had they ever, in reality, been close together? Now, without conscious treachery on either hand, time had removed them very far away from each other. He understood what impulse it was that had lately been making him try to pull her back into his life, and realized how completely she had passed out of it. There was no fault in her—at least, no other fault than a limitation of nature. How he himself could have escaped the penalty of his own character he could not see. The crisis of remorse was passing. He had committed no deliberate sin against his wife. What had come about had come about through no volition of his. If he loved Isabel that love was something outside himself—something that he could not kill, though he might duly cage it and control it. To cage it and control it accordingly was all that remained for him to do. Infidelity, treachery, adultery of the flesh would be an unpardonable treason to his love and his loyalty; the adultery of the heart is a thing instinctive, inevitable, committed sooner or later by many blameless men and women. This, the most important of human treasons, stands for ever beyond the reach of human restraint. No judge can analyze it, no jury weigh it; it can be valued by no damages, absolved by no divorce. The marriage of heart with heart is a matter outside the reach of law; the world and its laws are only concerned with external and visible manifestations. Let the outward life be clean and seemly; but nothing can govern the impulses of the inner secret life. Its movements can only be prevented from reacting shamefully on daily demeanour; they can never be measured, foretold, forbidden. Kingston knew that his heart was faithless to his wife—knew that, in reality, it had never been pledged to her at all. Her heart to his, perhaps; but he had pledged her nothing, he found, but his approval, his affection, his respect. All the more reason, then, that, having bought so much of her, and for coin so innocently false, he should pay his debt to the uttermost farthing in the only money he had to pay. Respect, affection, approval, all that he had pledged and promised—these should be paid without grudge or chicane, and the very completeness and honesty of these tributes must atone as far as possible for the cruel fact that he had no more to give her. In the fullness of his tribute to Gundred he must find at once the redemption of his own self-respect, the safeguarding of her happiness, and the glorification of this love of his, that might sink so low, and might be made to rise so high.

The whole air, vibrating with cold intensity, was now of a poignant emerald. In the East it grew keener and keener from moment to moment. Beneath, at his feet, through the milky sea of cloud, the heavy presence of the lowlands began to pierce, and grew from mere darkness into dim husky purples. Against the fierce green of the dawn a few clouds stood out fiercely black against the pure sky. The deep abysmal blue of the night was flying westward, retreating, fading, passing. Now it looked wan and worn; the faint stars staled and grew sickly as morning lamps. Slowly, very slowly, the world began to stir, to reveal itself far down in the valleys and distances. Detail had not yet been delivered of chaos, but gradually the separate existence of hill and hollow showed itself in flat masses of obscurity. And then the tones began to change, to grow sharper, more real. In the first dawn outlines had been clear and hard, the blackness dense and without modification. Against the pale horizon moorland and mountain had stood out hard and stark, as if cut from cardboard. Now the haze of atmosphere began to clothe the new-born world in glamour, faint, mysterious, phantasmal. Along the eastern rim of the darkness stretched the swooping profile of Ravensber, like a lion couchant, flushing now, from a thing grey, cold, and dead, to a living mass of opal. Diaphanous, vague, uniform in colour against the pulsing vividness behind, the far-off mountain came nearer, its azure and amethyst grew every moment keener. At its feet the lower hills still lay dim and indistinguishable, but to them also life was returning; and as the great leonine shape above took warmer and warmer shades, from the first vaporous dimness of opaque blue to the splendours of a transparent jewel, so the intervening fells grew deeper in their tones of violet, more solid, more easily discernible among the faint mists in which the dawn had vested them, and from which they now began to separate themselves, while out of the vaporous films of the sky long trails and volumes of cloud were beginning to condense.

Emerald was now passing into topaz, and the rolling masses of distance seemed every moment a shallower, greener blue. For the oldest and most primeval of all colours is blue—that vast, profound sapphire of midnight. But as darkness dies before the advance of dawn, each colour recedes westward as its successor presses hard upon it out of the East. Blue gives place insensibly to green—to green, faint at first and tremulous, then growing swiftly more sharp to its note of greatest pungency. And so, when the lucence of emerald is at its height, it rises abruptly into yellow—a yellow very pure and thin, and coldly pale. Blue has faded out altogether. The air has the vivid transparency of a topaz. Quickly the clear light intensifies itself, and passes on into richer, angrier tones of saffron and flame. Then, last of all, crimson and scarlet appear, final heralds of the approaching day.

Already, very far up in the shrill green of the zenith, a few feathered clouds were growing pink. The Ravensber, now, was of a rosy blue, and the sky behind it thrilled with gold. The air rippled cool with increasing keenness, and the awakening earth seemed to await an imminent summons. Gradually the details of the earth below could be discerned in blocks of uncertain light and shadow. It seemed as if the day were pausing on its road. The golden east grew increasingly golden, and the green overhead grew pale and melted; but to eyes that had watched the swift advance of the earlier stages this tantalizing moment of suspense seemed interminable. The world now was purple and azure; the Ravensber stood out no longer the phantom of a dream. Life was growing plain and plainer. But still the poignant moment hovered indecisively on its way. The path of the sun was barred with streaks of cloud. Ashen grey and violet in the beginning, they had kindled at last through wine colour to an ardent amethyst, and their lower surfaces were edged with rose. As their fluffy masses mounted the sky, their surfaces grew brighter, their purple warmer, till, high overhead, their last faint drifts were now of a uniform glowing pink. Everything was ready for the sun: the earth was clean and fresh from its sleep, the air was vivid and clean and sparkling.

When the last change came, it came with a blinding abruptness after its delay. The fire of the clouds grew swiftly fiercer, their purple turned to molten bronze, their edges broadened, became red, scarlet, flaming. Kingston saw now the exact spot where the sun was to rise. Down in a cleft of the hills, where far-off Ravensber tailed away into the first slopes of Fell End, there lay the heart of the cloud-drift, and there through its sombre curtains, the sun would have to break his way. Crimson and scarlet dominated the world now, throbbing from horizon to horizon. Splashes of infernal sanguine began to streak themselves across the East, growing every moment in number and in violence. The day was hurrying up in a leaping fury of splendour, and the path of the sun was a ladder of flame, leading upwards from the ravelled veil of darkness between the hills. And then, in a moment, the curtain of the clouded East was gashed suddenly and rent asunder: the earth seemed swept by a blast of blood and fire. The sun was up. Another instant, and his awful globe had leapt free of the broken masses of bronze beneath, and was mounting on its tyrannous way through heaven.

Instantly before his glory all rival splendours faded. Scarlet, crimson, gold, and orange paled and died in the glare of his presence. The magical moment was passed. Clouds, mountains, and valleys were mere clouds and mountains and valleys again; the transfiguring radiance was dead. Only the air was still pervaded by the red glow. The world was torn from dreams to reality again. Calm, clear, definite, it lay below, stripped of mystery, a world of men and women, fears and desires, eating and drinking.