Green Fire: A Romance

by William Sharp

That Annaik who loved the forest so passing well, and in whom the green fire of life flamed consumingly, should no longer be alive to rejoice in the glory of spring, now once again everywhere involving the brown earth and the purple branches, was an almost unrealizable thing. To walk in that cypress alley once more; to cross that open glade with its single hawthorn; to move in the dark green shadow of that yew close; to do this and remember all that Annaik had suffered, and that now she lay quiet and beyond all pain or joy to touch her, was to Alan a thought almost too poignant to be borne.

It was with an effort he answered Ynys when she spoke, and it was in silence that they entered the house which was now their home, and where—years ago, as it seemed—they had been young and happy.

But that night he sat alone for a time in the little room in the tower which rose from the east wing of Kerival—the room he had fitted up as an observatory, similar, on a smaller scale, to that in the Tour de l'Ile where he had so deeply studied the mystery of the starry world. Here he had dreamed many dreams, and here he dreamed yet another.

For out of his thoughts about Annaik and Ynys arose a fuller, a deeper conception of Womanhood. How well he remembered a legend that Ynys had told him on Rona: a legend of a fair spirit which goes to and fro upon the world, the Weaver of Tears. He loves the pathways of sorrow. His voice is low and sweet, with a sound like the bubbling of waters in that fount whence the rainbows rise. His eyes are in quiet places, and in the dumb pain of animals as in the agony of the human brain: but most he is found, oftenest are the dewy traces of his feet, in the heart of woman.

Tears, tears! They are not the saltest tears which are on the lids of those who weep. Fierce tears there are, hot founts of pain in the mind of many a man, that are never shed, but slowly crystallize in furrows on brow and face, and in deep weariness in the eyes; fierce tears, unquenchable, in the heart of many a woman, whose brave eyes look fearlessly at life; whose dauntless courage goes forth daily to die, but never to be vanquished.

In truth the Weaver of Tears abides in the heart of Woman. O Mother of Pity, of Love, of deep Compassion! with thee it is to yearn forever for the ideal human; to bring the spiritual love into fusion with human desire; endlessly to strive, endlessly to fail; always to hope in spite of disillusion; to love unswervingly against all baffling and misunderstanding, and even forgetfulness! O Woman, whose eyes are always stretched out to her erring children, whose heart is big enough to cover all the little children in the world, and suffer with their sufferings, and joy with their joys! Woman, whose other divine names are Strength and Patience, who is no girl, no Virgin, because she has drunk too deeply of the fount of Life to be very young or very joyful. Upon her lips is the shadowy kiss of death; in her eyes is the shadow of birth. She is the veiled interpreter of the two mysteries. Yet what joyousness like hers, when she wills; because of her unwavering hope, her inexhaustible fount of love?

So it was that, just as Alan had long recognized as a deep truth how the spiritual nature of man has been revealed to humanity in many divine incarnations, so he had come to believe that the spiritual nature of woman has been revealed in the many Marys, sisters of the Beloved, who have had the keys of the soul and the heart in their unconscious keeping. In this exquisite truth he knew a fresh and vivid hope. Was it all a dream that Ynys had dreamed, far away among the sea arcades of Rona? Had the Herdsman, the Shepherd of Souls, indeed revealed to her that a child was to be born who would be one of the redeemers of the world? A Woman Saviour, who would come near to all of us, because in her heart would be the blind tears of the child, and the bitter tears of the man, and the patient tears of the woman; who would be the Compassionate One, with no end or aim but compassion—with no doctrine to teach, no way to show, but only deep, wonderful, beautiful, inalienable, unquenchable compassion?

For, in truth, there is the divine, eternal feminine counterpart to the divine, eternal male, and both are needed to explain the mystery of the dual Spirit within us—the mystery of the Two in One, so infinitely stranger and more wonderful than that triune life which the blind teachers of the blind have made a rock of stumbling and offence out of a truth clear and obvious as noon.

We speak of Mother Nature, but we do not discern the living truth behind our words. How few of us have the vision of this great brooding Mother, whose garment is the earth and sea, whose head is pillowed among the stars; she who, with Death and Sleep as her familiar shapes, soothes and rests all the weariness of the world, from the waning leaf to the beating pulse; from the brief span of a human heart to the furrowing of granite brows by the uninterrupted sun, the hounds of rain and wind, and the untrammelled airs of heaven.