“How remote the England of his boyhood must have seemed to him, his eleven brothers, the hills, the hawthorn, the farm-buildings; if he saw them at all, it must have been as at the end of a long avenue. I looked up, out of my window across the sleeping fields, and returned again to the pages yet hot and quivering with life, written in an ill-lighted posada at Cadiz.
“In the same way that, without a descriptive word, he had contrived to give me an unmistakable impression of the Spain of his day, he now gave me a portrait of the dancer, passionate but strangely chaste, scornful of men, but yielding her heart to him while she withheld her body. He gave me a picture also of his own love, flaming suddenly out of a night of indifference, overwhelming him and sweeping aside his reason, determining him to make a wife of the gipsy he would more naturally have desired as a passing love. I was intimate with his intention, yet he never departed from his catalogue of facts and doings; stay, once he departed from it to say, ‘Her head sleek as a berry, her little teeth white as nuts.’ His one description.... I looked across at the little silent heap of garments on my bed, that had clasped the fragile being he revered with so much tenderness.
“‘To the bull-ring with Concha,’ he noted on one occasion. ‘Not to the spectacle, but to the driving in from the corral. Miura bulls, black and small, but agile more than most. They are driven in through the streets in the small hours of morning, together with the tame cattle, by men on horses. These men wear the bolero and high, peaked hat, and carry a long pole armed with an iron point. I would have ridden, but she dissuaded me. We waited on a balcony above a yard. A long wait, but not dreary in such company. There is much shouting when the bulls come, and the yard beneath is filled with fury and bellowing; I would not willingly chance my skin among such angry monsters, but their drivers with skill manœuvre each bull by himself into a separate cell where he is to remain without food or drink until morning. A diverting spectacle, had it not been for the press and the stench of ordures.’
“I have seen that dim yard myself,” said Malory, “chaotic with lashings and tramplings, and pawings and snortings, and the vast animals butt against the woodwork, and their huge forms move confusedly in the limited space. Like Pennistan, I would not care to chance my skin. Concha, who being a Spaniard was bred up to violence, was even a little frightened, ‘clung to me,’ said the diary, ‘and besought me not to leave her. We saw the bulls in their cells from above, by the light of torches. These brands may be thrust down to burn and singe and further enrage the beast,’ but Oliver Pennistan, who had been nurtured on this mild farm among pampered and kindly kine, did not like the sport, so turned away with Concha on his arm and passed through a door into the upper gallery of the arena.
“The vast circle seemed yet vaster by reason of its emptiness. Its ten thousand seats curved round in tiers and tiers and tiers, a gigantic funnel, open to the sky in which sailed a full and placid moon. The arena, ready raked and scattered with whitish sand, gleamed palely below, as if it had been the reflection of the heavenly moon in a pool of water. The great place lay in haunted silence.
“It was here, sitting in a box, that they came to their final agreement. The diary naturally giving me no hint of the words that passed between them, I had to be content with a laconic entry some few days later: ‘Married this morning at the church of S. Pedro.’ I sat on in my room wondering what Oliver Pennistan had made of that surrendered, inviolate soul, the no doubt rather stupid and affected soldier, the scion of English yeomen; I wonder what he made of his wildling, sprung as she was from God knows what parentage; the Moorish Empire and the Holy Land had both surely gone to her making. They roamed Spain together for their honeymoon, and I accompanied them in spirit, seeing her dance, not in public places only, but in their room, for his eyes alone, his hungry love her sweetest applause; dancing in her little shift, and teaching his clumsy hands to clap and his lips to cry ‘Olé!’ I wonder too what the mountebanks of the trade thought of Concha’s husband, who sat through her performance in the hot, boarded theatres of Spanish provincial towns, and would allow no other man near his wife, and who, when one evening she for pure mischief eluded him, only grieved in silence and thought her love was going from him. I wonder most of all what Concha thought of him, his staid insularity, his perpetual talk of home, and his unassailable prejudices?
“As I came to the last pages of the diary, which ended abruptly on the last day of the year in Valladolid, Ruth knocked on my door and said she had come for the clothes. I was so full of the illuminating romance that I pressed her with questions. She was not so much reserved as merely indifferent, but looking at her warm young face in the uncertain candlelight I knew that therein, rather than in her speech, lay the answer to all my queries. I had seen the portraits of Amos Pennistan’s father, and of Rawdon Westmacott’s mother, daguerreotypes which hung, enlarged, on either side of the kitchen dresser, and I knew that in that generation no sign of the Spanish strain had appeared. I looked again at Ruth, at her sleek brown head, her glowing skin, her disdainful poise; looked, and was enlightened. I urged her memory. Could she recall no anecdote, dear to her father when in a mood of comfortable expansion, a family legend of her grandfather’s youth? Yes, she remembered hearing that the children had an uneasy time of it, blows and kisses distributed alternately between them, now hugged to their mother’s breast, now sent reeling across the room.... She had been gay, it seemed, that ancient woman, deliciously gay, light-hearted, generous, full of song, but of sudden and uncertain temper. But she remembered, though it was not worth the telling, that Mrs. Oliver Pennistan, in her sunniest mood, would set her children on hassocks to watch her, their backs against the wall, would take down her hair, which was long and a source of pride to her as to all Spanish women, would take her shawl from the cupboard, and, stripping off her shoes and stockings, would dance for her children, up and down, the sinuous intricacies of an Andalusian dance. I wondered what Oliver Pennistan thought, when, coming in of an evening with the mud from the turnip fields heavy on his boots, he found his wife with hair and fingers flying, dancing to the music of her own voice on the tiled floor of his ancestral kitchen?”
III
“Now,” said Malory, “I scarcely know how to continue my story. I have told you how I went to live with the Pennistans, and I have told you Oliver Pennistan’s Spanish adventure, and the rest lies largely in hours so full of work that no day could drag, but which in words would take five minutes’ reproducing. I have told you already how I loved that simple monotone of life. I had arrived in autumn, an unwise choice for a novice less enthusiastic than myself, for soon the trees were bare of the fruit which had so rejoiced me, bare, too, of the summer leaf, and the working day, which at first had drawn itself out in long, warm, melting evening, now rushed into darkness before work was done, and not into darkness alone, but into chill and wet, so that you might often have seen me going about my work in the cow-sheds with a sack over my shoulders and a hurricane lantern in my hand. I do not pretend that I enjoyed these squally winter nights. They had the effect of dulling my perception, and presently I found myself like the country people whose life I shared, considering the weather merely in its relation to myself; was it wet? then I should be wet; was it a bright, fine day? then I should be dry. My standpoint veered slowly round, like the needle of a compass, from the subjective to the objective. I wish I could say as much for many of my contemporaries. Then in our age as in all great ages, we might find more men living, not merely thinking, their lives.”
In after years I remembered Malory’s words, and wondered whether he had found on the battlefield sufficient signs of the activity he desired.