Lore of Proserpine

by Maurice Hewlett

  A BOY IN THE WOOD

  I had many bad qualities as a child, of which I need mention onlythree. I was moody, irresolute, and hatefully reserved. Fate hadalready placed me the eldest by three years of a large family. Add tothe eminence thus attained intentions which varied from hour to hour,a will so little in accordance with desire that I had rather give up acherished plan than fight for it, and a secretive faculty equalledonly by the magpie, and you will not wonder when I affirm that I livedalone in a household of a dozen friendly persons. As a set-off andconsolation to myself I had very strongly the power of impersonation.I could be within my own little entity a dozen different people in aday, and live a life thronged with these companions or rivals; and yetthis set me more solitary than ever, for I could never appear in anyone of my characters to anybody else. But alone and apart, what worldsI inhabited! Worlds of fact and worlds of fiction. At nine years old Iknew Nelson's ardour and Wellesley's phlegm; I had Napoleon's egotism,Galahad's purity, Lancelot's passion, Tristram's melancholy. Ireasoned like Socrates and made Phaedo weep; I persuaded like SaintPaul and saw the throng on Mars' Hill sway to my words. I was by turnsDon Juan and Don Quixote, Tom Jones and Mr. Allworthy, Hamlet and hisuncle, young Shandy and his. You will gather that I was a reader. Iwas, and the people of my books stepped out of their pages andinhabited me. Or, to change the figure, I found in every book an opendoor, and went in and dwelt in its world. Thus I lived a thronged andbusy life, a secret life, full of terror, triumph, wonder, franticenterprise, a noble and gallant figure among my peers, while to myparents, brothers and sisters I was an incalculable, fitful creature,often lethargic and often in the sulks. They saw me mooning inidleness and were revolted; or I walked dully the way I was bid andthey despaired of my parts. I could not explain myself to them, stillless justify, having that miserable veil of reserve close over mymouth, like a yashmak. To my father I could not speak, to my mother Idid not; the others, being my juniors all, hardly existed. Who is todeclare the motives of a child's mind? What was the nature of thisreticence? Was it that my real habit was reverie? Was it, as Isuspect, that constitutional timidity made me diffident? I was acoward, I am very sure, for I was always highly imaginative. Was it,finally, that I was dimly conscious of matters which I despaired ofputting clearly? Who can say? And who can tell me now whether I wascursed or blessed? Certainly, if it had been possible to any person mysenior to share with me my daily adventures, I might have conqueredthe cowardice from which I suffered such terrible reverses. But it wasnot. I was the eldest of a large family, and apparently the easiest todeal with of any of it. I was what they call a tractable child, being,in fact, too little interested in the world as it was to resent anyduties cast upon me. It was not so with the others. They werehigh-spirited little creatures, as often in mischief as not, anddemanded much more pains then I ever did. What they demanded they got,what I did not demand I got not: "Lo, here is alle! What shold I moreseye?"

  How it was that, taking no interest in my actual surroundings, Ibecame aware of unusual things behind them I cannot understand. It isvery difficult to differentiate between what I imagined and what Iactually perceived. It was a favourite string of my poor father'splaintive lyre that I had no eyes. He was a great walker, a poet, anda student of nature. Every Sunday of his life he took me and mybrother for a long tramp over the country, the intense spiritualfatigue of which exercise I should never be able to describe. I have asinking of the heart, even now, when I recall our setting out.Intolerable labour! I saw nothing and said nothing. I did nothing butplug one dull foot after the other. I felt like some chained slavegoing to the hulks, and can well imagine that my companions must havebeen very much aware of it. My brother, whose nature was much happierthan mine, who dreamed much less and observed much more, was the lifeof these woeful excursions. Without him I don't think that my fathercould have endured them. At any rate, he never did. I amazed,irritated, and confounded him at most times, but in nothing more thanmy apathy to what enchanted him.[1] The birds, the flowers, the trees,the waters did not exist for me in my youth. The world for me wasuninhabited, a great empty cage. People passed us, or stood at theirdoorways watching us, but I never saw them. If by chance I descriedsomebody coming whom it would be necessary to salute, or to whom Imight have to speak, I turned aside to avoid them. I was not only shyto a fault, as a diffident child must be, but the world of senseeither did not exist for me or was thrust upon me to my discomfort.And yet all the while, as I moved or sat, I was surrounded by a streamof being, of infinite constituents, aware of them to this extent thatI could converse with them without sight or speech. I knew they werethere, I knew them singing, whispering, screaming. They filled myunderstanding not my senses. I did not see them but I felt them. Iknew not what they said or sang, but had always the general sense oftheir thronging neighbourhood.

  [Footnote 1: And me also when I was enabled at a later day to perceivethem. I am thankful to remember and record for my own comfort thatthat day came not too late for my enchantment to overtake his andproceed in company.]

  I enlarge upon this because I think it justifies me in adding that,observing so little, what I did observe with my bodily eyes mustalmost certainly have been observable. But now let the reader judge.

  The first time I ever saw a creature which was really outside ordinaryexperience was in the late autumn of my twelfth year. My brother, nextin age to me, was nine, my eldest sister eight. We three had been outwalking with our mother, and were now returning at dusk to our teathrough a wood which covered the top of a chalk down. I remembervividly the scene. The carpet of drenched leaves under bare branches,the thin spear-like shafts of the underwood, the grey lights between,the pale frosty sky overhead with the sickle moon low down in it. Iremember, too, various sensations, such as the sudden chill whichaffected me as the crimson globe of the sun disappeared; and againhow, when we emerged from the wood, I was enheartened by the sight ofthe village shrouded under chimney smoke and by the one or twotwinkling lights dotted here and there about the dim wolds.

  In the wood it was already twilight and very damp. Perhaps I had beentired, more likely bored--as I always was when I was not beingsomebody else. I remember that I had found the path interminable. Ihad been silent, as I mostly was, while the other two had chatteredand played about our mother; and when presently I stayed behind for apurpose I remember that I made no effort to catch them up. I knew theway perfectly, of course, and had no fear of the dark. Oddly enough Ihad no fear of that. I was far less imaginative in the night than inthe day. Besides that, by the time I was ready to go after them I hadmuch else to think of.

  I must have been looking at him for some time before I made out thathe was there. So you may peer into a thicket a hundred times and seenothing, and then a trick of the light or a flutter of the mood andyou see creatures where you had been sure was nothing. As childrenwill, I had stayed longer than I need, looking and wondering into thewood, not observing but yet absorbing the effects of the lights andshades. The trees were sapling chestnuts if I am not mistaken, Spanishchestnuts, and used for hop-poles in those parts. Their leaves decaygradually, the fleshy part, so to speak, dropping away from thearticulation till at last bleached skeleton leaves remain and flickerat every sigh of the wind. The ground was densely carpeted with otherleaves in the same state, or about to become so. The silver grey wascross-hatched by the purple lines of the serried stems, and as theview receded this dipped into blue and there lost itself. It was veryquiet--a windless fall of the light. To-day I should find it mostbeautiful; and even then, I suspect, I felt its beauty without knowingit to be so. Looking into it all without realising it, I presently andgradually did realise something else: a shape, a creature, a thing ofform and pressure--not a wraith, not, I am quite certain, a trick ofthe senses.

  It was under a clump of the chestnut stems, kneeling and sitting onits heels, and it was watching me with the bright, quick eyes of amouse. If I were to say that my first thought was of some peering andwaiting animal, I should go on to qualify t
he thought by reference tothe creature's eyes. They were eyes which, like all animals', couldonly express one thing at a time. They expressed now attention, theclosest: not fear, not surprise, not apprehension of anything that Imight be meditating against their peace, but simply minute attention.The absence of fear, no doubt, marked their owner off from the animalsof common acquaintance; but the fact that they did not at the sametime express the being itself showed him to be different from ourhuman breed. For whatever else the human pair of eyes may reveal, itreveals the looker.

  The eyes of this creature revealed nothing of itself except that itwas watching me narrowly. I could not even be sure of its sex, thoughI believe it to have been a male, and shall hereafter treat of it assuch. I could see that he was young; I thought about my own age. Hewas very pale, without being at all sickly--indeed, health and vigourand extreme vivacity were implicit in every line and expressed inevery act; he was clear-skinned, but almost colourless. The shadowunder his chin, I remember, was bluish. His eyes were round, when notnarrowed by that closeness of his scrutiny of me, and though probablybrown, showed to be all black, with pupil indistinguishable from iris.The effect upon me was of black, vivid black, unintelligenteyes--which see intensely but cannot translate. His hair was dense andrather long. It covered his ears and touched his shoulders. It waspushed from his forehead sideways in a thick, in a solid fold, as ifit had been the corner of a frieze cape thrown back. It was dark hair,but not black; his neck was very thin. I don't know how he wasdressed--I never noticed such things; but in colour he must have beeninconspicuous, since I had been looking at him for a good time withoutseeing him at all. A sleeveless tunic, I think, which may have beenbrown, or grey, or silver-white. I don't know. But his knees werebare--that I remember; and his arms were bare from the shoulder.

  I standing, he squatting on his heels, the pair of us looked full atone another. I was not frightened, no more was he. I was excited, andfull of interest; so, I think, was he. My heart beat double time. ThenI saw, with a curious excitement, that between his knees he held arabbit, and that with his left hand he had it by the throat. Now, whatis extraordinary to me about this discovery is that there was nothingshocking in it.

  I saw the rabbit's wild and panic-blown eye, I saw the bright whiterim of it, and recognised its little added terror of me even in themidst of its anguish. That must have been the conventional fright of abeast of chase, an instinct to fear rather than an emotion; for ofemotions the poor thing must have been having its fill. It was nottill I saw its mouth horribly open, its lips curled back to show itsshelving teeth that I could have guessed at what it was suffering. Butgradually I apprehended what was being done. Its captor was squeezingits throat. I saw what I had never seen before, and have never seensince, I saw its tongue like a pale pink petal of a flower dart out asthe pressure drove it. Revolting sight as that would have been to me,witnessed in the world, here, in this dark wood, in this outlandpresence, it was nothing but curious. Now, as I watched and wondered,the being, following my eyes' direction, looked down at the huddledthing between his thighs, and just as children squeeze a snap-dragonflower to make it open and shut its mouth, so precisely did he,pressing or releasing the windpipe, cause that poor beast to throwback its lips and dart its dry tongue. He did this many times while hewatched it; and when he looked up at me again, and while he continuedto look at me, I saw that his cruel fingers, as by habit, continuedthe torture, and that in some way he derived pleasure from theperformance--as if it gratified him to be sure that effect wasfollowing on cause inevitably.

  I have never, I believe, been cruel to an animal in my life. I hatedcruelty then as I hate it now. I have always shirked the sight ofanything in pain from my childhood onwards. Yet the fact is that notonly did I nothing to interfere in what I saw going on, but that Iwas deeply interested and absorbed in it. I can only explain that tomyself now, by supposing that I knew then, that the creature in frontof me was not of my own kind, and was not, in fact, outraging any lawof its own being. Is not that possible? May I not have collectedunawares so much out of created nature? I am unable to say: all I amclear about is that here was a thing in the semblance of a boy doingwhat I had never observed a boy do, and what if I ever had observed aboy do, would have flung me into a transport of rage and grief. Here,therefore, was a thing in the semblance of a boy who was no boy atall. So much must have been as certain to me then as it isindisputable now.

  One doesn't, at that age, reason things out; one knows them, and isdumb, though unconvinced, before powerful syllogisms to the contrary.All children are so, confronted by strange phenomena. And yet I hadfacts to go upon if, child as I was, I had been capable of inference.I need only mention one. If this creature had been human, upon seeingthat I was conscious of its behaviour to the rabbit, it would eitherhave stopped the moment it perceived that I did not approve or was notamused, or it would have continued deliberately out of bravado. But itneither stopped nor hardily continued. It watched its experiment withinterest for a little, then, finding me more interesting, did notdiscontinue it, but ceased to watch it. He went on with itmechanically, dreamingly, as if to the excitation of some other sensethan sight, that of feeling, for instance. He went on lasciviously,for the sake of the pleasure so to be had. In other words, beingwithout self-consciousness and ignorant of shame, he must have beennon-human.

  After all, too, it must be owned that I cannot have been confronted bythe appearance for more than a few minutes. Allow me three to have beenspent before I was aware of him, three more will be the outside I canhave passed gazing at him. But I speak of "minutes," of course,referring to my ostensible self, that inert, apathetic child whofollowed its mother, that purblind creature through whose muddy lensesthe pent immortal had been forced to see his familiar in the wood, andperchance to dress in form and body what, for him, needed neither to bevisible. It was this outward self which was now driven by circumstancesto resume command--the command which for "three minutes" by hisreckoning he had relinquished. Both of us, no doubt, had been muchlonger there had we not been interrupted. A woodman, homing from hiswork, came heavily up the path, and like a guilty detected rogue Iturned to run and took my incorruptible with me. Not until I had passedthe man did I think to look back. The partner of my secret was not thento be seen. Out of sight out of mind is the way of children. Out ofmind, then, withdrew my incorruptible. I hurried on, ran, and overtookmy party half-way down the bare hillside. I still remember the feelingof relief with which I swept into the light, felt the cold air on mycheeks, and saw the intimacy of the village open out below me. I amalmost sure that my eyes held tears at the assurance of the sweet,familiar things which I knew and could love. There, literally, were myown people: that which I had left behind must be unlawful because it wasso strange. In the warmth and plenty of the lighted house, by theschoolroom table, before the cosily covered teapot, amid the high talk,the hot toast and the jam, my experience in the dusky wood seemedunreal, lawless, almost too terrible to be remembered--never, never tobe named. It haunted me for many days, and gave rise to curiouswonderings now and then. As I passed the patient, humble beasts ofcommon experience--a carter's team nodding, jingling its brasses, adonkey, patient, humble, hobbled in a paddock, dogs sniffing each other,a cat tucked into a cottage window, I mused doubtfully and often whetherwe had touched the threshold of the heart of their mystery. But for themost part, being constitutionally timid, I was resolute to put theexperience out of mind. When next I chanced to go through the wood thereis no doubt I peered askance to right and left among the trees; but Itook good care not to desert my companions. That which I had seen wasunaccountable, therefore out of bounds. But though I never saw him thereagain I have never forgotten him.