XVI THE NEW VILLAGE
Once upon a time there was a village which might have been called The-Way-Certain-Folk-Want-It-Now. That, however, was not its name—it had a proper, map-sounding name. And there every one went to and fro with a fervour and nimbleness which proved him to be skilfully intent upon his own welfare.
The village had simple buildings and white walls, lanes and flowering things and the flow of pure air. But the strange thing about the town was that there each inhabitant lived alone. Every house had but one inmate and he well content. He liked everything that he owned and his taste was all-sufficient and he took his pleasure in his own walls and loved best his own ways. The day was spent in lonely selling or lonely buying, each man pitted against all others, and advantage and disadvantage were never equal, but yet the transactions were dreary, lacking the picturesqueness of unlicensed spoliation. The only greeting which folk exchanged in passing was, "Sir, what do you do for yourself?" There were no assemblings of the people. The town kept itself alive by accretion from without. When one died another appeared and took his place gladly, and also others arrived, like precept added to precept and not like a true flowering. There were no children. And the village common was overgrown and breast-high with weeds. When the day was done every one retired to his own garden and saw his flowers blossoming for him and answering to the stars which came and stood over his head. There was in the town an epidemic of the intensive, only the people thought of it as the normal, for frequently epidemics are so regarded.
In one soul the contagion did not prevail. The soul was the lad Matthew, whose body lived on the town's only hill. When others sat at night in their gardens Matthew was wont to go up an airy path which he had made to the upper spaces and there wander conjecturing about being alive. For this was a detail which he never could take wholly for granted, in the manner in which he had become wonted to door-mats, napkin-rings, oatmeal, and mirrors. Therefore he took his thought some way nearer to the stars, and there he found so much beauty that he longed to fashion it to something, to create of it anew. And as he opened his heart he began to understand that there is some one of whom he was the offspring. As he was companioned by this idea, more and more he longed for things to come nearer. Once, in his walking a hurrying bird brushed his face, grew confused, fluttered at his breast, and as he would have closed it in his hands he found that the bird was gone and his hands were empty, but beneath them his own heart fluttered and throbbed like a thing apart.
One night, so great was the abstraction of the boy, that instead of taking the upper path he fared down into the town. It was a curious way to do—to go walking in the town as if the thing were common property, but then the walls were very high and the gates were fast closed and bound round with creeping things, which grow very quickly. Matthew longed to enter these gardens, and he wondered who lived in the houses and what might be in their hearts.
Amazingly, at the turn of a white wall, a gate was opened and she who had opened it leaned into the night as if she were looking for something. There was a fluttering in the breast of Matthew so that he looked down to see if the bird had come back. But no bird was there. And it smote him that the lady's beauty, and surely her goodness, were great enough so that of them something might be created, as he would fain have created marvels from the sky.
"I would like to make your beauty into something other," he said to her. "I cannot think whether this would be a song or a picture or a vision."
She looked at him with as much pleasure as if he had been an idea of her own.
"Tell me about my beauty," she bade him. "What thing is that?"
"Nay, that will take some while," Matthew said. "If I do that, I must come in your garden."