Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 361
“It seems to get farther and farther,” Mr. Sorrell said suddenly. The Lady Dionissia did not speak, but she looked up into his face with a great and confiding love.
“Farther and farther!” Mr. Sorrell repeated; “it goes back; it disappears. Do you know what is happening to me? I am becoming one of you. I can’t get back into what was my past — into what is your future. I can’t get back into it.”
“Surely that is very well,” the Lady Dionissia said slowly. Her voice had very deep chords; it was one of those sounds which give an idea that they express the thoughts of a very honest and simple heart, like the baying of a mastiff.
“I don’t want to get back into my past,” Mr. Sorrell said. “I wonder now that I could ever have lived it. It appears little and grey and cold and unimportant. I don’t know what could have kept me going then, for there was no you in all the world.”
The Lady Dionissia looked at him with a deepening love, but she said nothing. The owl, turning at the bottom of the field, floated slowly back, ghostlike amidst the mists along the dark shadows of the wood side, searching for such small mice and frogs as the evening called to their avocations in the grasses.
“I don’t want to get back to it,” Mr. Sorrell said, “but I can’t even get back to that frame of mind. I used to be what we called a good business man. Now I don’t care. I don’t care for anything but walking in the fields and talking to you.”
“Surely that, too, is well,” the Lady Dionissia repeated.
“Surely it is pleasant,” Mr. Sorrell said, “but I cannot see that it is well, and pleasantness is not the whole of life?”
“Is it not?” the Lady Dionissia asked wonderingly. “No, surely not,” Mr. Sorrell answered. “Are there not such things as duties, ambitions, and responsibilities?”
“I do not know what these things are,” she answered. “In the spring the moles come out of the woods and the little birds sing, and we walk in the gardens and take what pleasure we can. And then comes the winter, and shuts us up in our castles so that it is not so pleasant; but with jongleurs and ballad-singers we pass the time as well as we may. And what is there to do?”
“Ah, it is just that that is so fatal,” Mr. Sorrell said agitatedly. “It is just that that I am slipping into. You dress me up in these scarlet clothes, and I take a pleasure in it; you ride a-hawking, and it seems to me the whole end of life when your tassel strikes down a heron or a daw. But I ought to be up and doing. I ought to be — I ought to have been master of the world by now.”
“And how would it help you?” the Lady Dionissia asked. “You are my master and my lord. You are bright and glorious — what more should you ask?”
“Oh, no, I am nothing,” Mr. Sorrell answered in a deep dejection. “I am entirely useless, and there is nothing I can do well. Even that prophesying for the Dean was nothing. I am so ignorant. Of history I am ignorant — I hardly know the names of kings, and nothing of what they did....”
“Oh, peace,” the Lady Dionissia said; “my mind still trembles at the wonders you unfolded. What could be more miraculous than the flying of men through the air, or their rushing faster than the flight of swallows beneath the ground?”
“All that is nothing,” Mr. Sorrell said. “Do you not understand how it only proves my ignorance, and how useless I have been? I ought to know how to do all these things. But I know nothing. Don’t you understand, I have been so in the habit of having all these things done for me that I am useless as the grub in the honeycomb that the bees feed. It is no use my saying that I can do nothing because I have not the materials — that is an idle excuse. We might fit out ships to go to the end of the world to get rubber; but even if we did that I do not know where rubber comes from, nor if I knew should I know-from what tree rubber is procured. Or if I had the rubber should I know what to do with it. And it is a condemnation of a whole civilisation. There was not, of the men I knew, one who knew any of these things. There was not one of them who knew that a beefsteak comes from an ox. Or if he had known that it did, and if he had possessed an ox, he would not have been able to kill that ox. Or if he had been able to kill the ox, he would not have known how to cut the steak or to cook it or to make a fire or to light it when it was made. I do not believe that a single man that I knew would have been able to black his own boots.”
“I don’t know why boots should be black,” the Lady Dionissia said. “I myself have never seen any black boots, and it would be a very ugly colour.”
“Yet I here stand useless” Mr. Sorrell said with deep bitterness. “I know nothing of my own arts.
I said I was going to set out to conquer the world, yet I should not even know how to form a limited company. And of your arts I know nothing — I cannot fight, I cannot tilt at the ring, I cannot shoot with the bow, my muscles are too slack to let me take part in any manly exercise. Of the laws of the chase I know nothing. I cannot tell the roedeer from the fallow; if I can tell a daw from a dove it is all that I can do, and I cannot tell a cushat from a turtle, except when you are there to point out the difference. And I am the man that is going to take you from your life of splendour with nothing but my arm to rely upon. My arm is no stronger than a reed in a thatch, and my brain is more useless than an empty pot with the wind whistling in it.”
“It is not grateful to God,” the Lady Dionissia said, “so to speak, when God has given you such powers, and if I did not love you I should think it evil of you to speak in this way. For you have healed many hundreds of the sick; and you have ridded this whole countryside of robbers, and even miraculously you have cured the hens and chickens of the Convent of St. Radigund.”
“Oh, heaven!” Mr. Sorrell said, “what is all this? It was not I that put down the robbers, it was their superstitious fears. It was not I that cured these cripples and the sick. There was no miracle about it; it is what we used to call natural suggestion. Haven’t you heard of Lourdes? I tell you all these people were not really ill. It was what they believed. They thought they were ill, and the sight of the cross cured them.”
The Lady Dionissia rose from her hillock where she had been sitting with her chin upon her hands and her elbows upon her knees, raptly listening to him. In the gathering dusk she came very close to him, her face near to his, and her eyes gazing into his eyes. Her voice was more deep than ever when she spoke.
“Almost you make me enraged with you,” she said, “almost you make me desire to shun you. For what you have spoken is a very damnable blasphemy. Here have the dear God and the blessed angels of God and God’s Mother been pouring down, through your agency, great blessings upon poor and miserable persons. Joy and solace and peace and comfort have been given in abundance in place of agony and anguish and cares and solicitudes. And these splendid and comfortable miracles of God and of the blessed angels of God and of the Mother of God, you, a poor sinful man — for every man, no matter how glorious he be, is poor and sinful before the face of Almighty God that sent His Son to be our comforter — you poor sinful man, who are privileged to be the agent of these most gentle and splendid doings, you cry out upon your fate, and refuse to put your trust in God for what in the future shall happen to you and me. I am a woman, and should be the more timorous part of us two who stand here. Oh, take courage, take courage! For what God has done, God again will do, so you deny Him not.”
Her voice had grown deeper and deeper, and she seemed to wave a little back into the shadows of the evening, as if in her anger she were denying herself to him. A great wave of passion came over him, and he stretched out his arms.
“Oh! have pity! Oh! have pity and do not deny yourself to me,” he said. “Remember what strange things all these are. Though I have many times tried to explain myself to you, I have never been able to explain, so strange it all is,”
She came closer to him, and set her two hands upon his shoulders.
“Ah, what is all this of explaining and explaining that you will always desire to be doing,” she said almost despairingly. “Many hours of unhappiness it has caused me. Do I ask from whence you came? No, no! All I ask is that you should take me whither you go. When I first set eyes upon you I knew that I loved you, and what more is there to ask or to say? You are like no other man that I have seen, nor do I believe that ever there was before a man so gentle and so good, so true or with such great gifts. I think there was never such another man since Christ was, and that it is a miracle of the little angels of God that you should love me who am nothing, or very little. And each night when I go to sleep I am afraid of the waking; so precious a thing is this love that I dread to find it a dream. But I wake, and I find it is no dream, so that I have all that I ask.”
He put his hands upon her shoulders; his arms were outside hers, and in the gleaming twilight they stood gazing into each other’s eyes. From a thicket close at hand there came out the shadowy forms of a vixen with her three cubs. A little moon had got up and was sending feeble gleams on to the grass that was all grey with dew. The vixen and her cubs played together, running round in circles. From the wood there came the sweet scents of damp verdure and of wild lavender. A bat fluttered close round their heads, its wings making a faint buzzing sound, and every now and again came the long call of the restless peewits on the Plains far away.
“Yes, I see nothing else,” he said.
And she answered passionately:
“And what else would you see? Is it that we are merchants who must have goods stored up in our houses where we shall live for the rest of our lives? No, surely I think we are better than that. For there are in the world great plains and wide rivers and woods of a month’s journey in extent. And there are castles and cities, and there are kings and emperors and high adventures. If you would take me to live in such a merchant’s house, surely I would not do it.”
“But would you have us go about the world and not know upon the day where at night we shall lay our heads?” he asked.
“Aye, surely,” she answered, “for what better or gentler life could you ask?”
“But how should we gain our bread?” Mr. Sorrell asked.
“Gentle friend,” she answered, “is it a new thing that a great knight, putting upon himself the garb of a minstrel, and accompanied by a page or two and a few men of arms to give him sufficient state and respect, should journey through the world and sing of the high things of love, or of great adventures in arms? So he goes from castle to castle, and great is his welcome. And so shall you not do? For you have more wonderful things to tell of than any knight ever yet had. And so we should travel through the world, and you shall heal many sick persons. And a king shall give you a castle here, and an emperor shall give you broad lands there. For it should be a very niggardly king or a very miserly emperor that should not do so much. And so we should travel through the great forests and along the broad streams and over the endless plains. And our lives shall be very pleasant and restful, and you shall not ever be sad.”
“But this is all a fable,” Mr. Sorrell said. His voice had fallen low; his resolution was fading away within him. It was as if in that dusk, and before his desire for her and for peace, he were sinking into deep waters and into darkness. He bent his arms a little and she hers, so that they came closer and closer together.
“No, no,” she said, “these are no fables. This is the world as we live in it beneath the starlight and beneath the sun. In the summer the little birds will sing and it will be joyful, and in the winter we shall get us into the great castles. Many knights have done so; many knights shall do this again. It is you that by thinking on things that are beyond the power of man betake yourself into lands all fables, and not worth an old wife’s song that is feeble and cracked in an aged throat.”
With insensible pressure they drew each other closer and closer. The sinking moon went down behind the hills. There remained of her visible only a face that seemed silver in the growing starlight, and the great white hood curiously folded that stood out above her head like an aureole. The world had gone; it was all darkness, all shadows. It seemed extraordinary to Mr. Sorrell that there should be so close to him this woman, with the warm face rendered pale by light of the stars, with the earnest and shadowy eyes and the curiously folded hood all white. It seemed to him odd, it seemed to him unthinkable; and yet he felt upon his face the breath from her lips. The breath from her lips was sweet like the breath of cows that have come out of the clover fields. It was inexplicable that she should be there and he; it was inexplicable that his will should be surrendering before hers. For he felt that he was surrendering, as if he were sinking down between the myriads of stars into unknown spaces.
Their knees trembled so that they sank down on to the wet short grass. Their arms were about each other, and in his she was a heavy weight.
“Before you came,” she said, “there was nothing in the whole world. Surely the little birds did not sing; surely the sun did not shine.”
“There was no sweetness in the world before I came here to you,” he answered, and he did not know with whose voice he spoke, or from what world his thoughts came. “The light of the moon was a pale thing, and the voice of the little larks said nothing in my ears.”
“All my life I have waited for you,” she answered.
“I have come down to you through centuries,” came from his lips; “all the men of my past are like a few phantoms. It is as if they walked upon shrivelled leaves in an autumn wood. There is only you in all the world.”
“In all the world there is only you,” she repeated.
With a great rustling there came from the wood a wild sow, but they did not hear it. It looked to right and left with its tiny and fierce eyes. Perceiving no motion, it adventured itself into the little field and went down towards the river. The mists rose up to join with other mists that descended from the skies. The light of the stars was hidden, and in the great stillness the slight gurgling sound of the river among the reeds made itself heard. A heron flying overhead croaked three times. It was answered from a distance by its mate. Because it was already August the last of the nightingales had flown away.
Lying upon his back and looking into the darkness, Mr. Sorrell was aware of sounds and glimpses of sights. It was as if very dimly he saw about him the shadows of walls through which the dark night appeared. Above him the shapes of women, as indistinct as, in the twilight, are the shadows of poplars, seemed to advance and to recede, now from this side, now from that. It was as if they bent over him and whispered solicitously.
But it was as if he could neither see them nor hear what it was that they whispered. And there stole into his nostrils a penetrating perfume. An immense dread swept down on him, the dumb agony of a nightmare. He seemed to be unable to move; his hands were stretched down at his sides as if he were a corpse laid out for burial. Agony was in his heart, on his lips that would not speak, in his throat whose muscles would not act. The perfume overwhelmed him, suffocating, warm, sweet in the throat, sinister and filling him with a mad foreboding. It was the odour of chloroform.
He screamed out loud; great beads of sweat burst out on his forehead. He stretched out his hand like a madman and clutched at her dress.
“Are you there?” he asked: and she answered:
“I am here, beloved of my heart,” and he lifted his face towards hers which was slightly cold with dew and the night.
“It is so well with me,” she whispered; but Mr. Sorrell was full of fears.
CHAPTER III.
THE Lady Blanche d’Enguerrand de Coucy de Stapleford was awaiting the signal to arm herself against the combat. In a new man’s suit of brown leather she appeared less tall than when she was dressed as a woman; but in revenge, her broad shoulders and her flat chest, that was always heaving with emotions of rage, of hot joy or of cold indignation, seemed to be broader by far. And her hips were very broad too, so that she gave the impression of having a massive and heavy trunk, long arms, and rather short legs. Her face was flushed and her eyes very bright; she sat upon a stool and talked of what she would do.
It was in a large pavilion of linen and silk, red and white in great bands, that stood at one end of the lists. From outside, and all around, came the clamour of an intolerable crowd of people that had come together from all over the south parts to see these famous joustings. The lists had been set up in a broad field along the river Wiley about half-way between the castles of Stapleford and of Tamworth. Many that had come to see these adventures had slept the night before on the grass beneath the stars; many more had slept in the courtyards of one or other of the castles, in the stables, or, if they had been able to scrape the permission, in the empty rooms, the cellars, or beneath the gate-ways. And this great crowd of people had very much delayed the preparations, so that it was already noon, though they should have begun at eight o’clock in the morning.
At each end of the lists was a string of people coming and going as if they had been ants revictualling an ant-heap; round the lists themselves the populace spread out over the grass in a huge swarm. Men and women who had brought provender for sale cried out incessantly that here you might have hot pies, ale, furmety, black puddings, metheglin, roasted apples, and the flesh of swine. They spoke English of the South, English of the West, English of the Midlands, French of London, French of Salisbury, and there were several jugglers and players of pipes and tabors of the lower orders who cried out shrilly for pence in the French of France, saying:
“Par pitié! des sols, des deniers!”
Horsemen rode about amongst all this many, and there were a number of shepherds from the Plain, gazing about them stupidly in their long cloaks of blue woollen. They leant upon the shafts of huge crooks, at whose heads there hung leathern bottles filled with mead, and at the foot of each crook was an iron trowel. With this they could dig up fragments of turf which they hurled to immense distances, using their long staves. Thus they could protect their lambs from foxes or themselves from robbers, who gave them a wide berth because they were mostly very poor men and very formidable.
