“So very little money really suffices for health, contentment, and harmless pleasure!” he thought. “The secret of our growing social mischief does not lie with the natural order of created things, but solely with ourselves. We will not set any reasonable limit to our desires. If we would, we might live longer and be far happier!”
He stretched out his limbs easefully, and dropped into a reclining posture. The tree he had chosen to rest under was a mighty elm, whose broad branches, thick with leaves, formed a deep green canopy through which the sunbeams filtered in flecks and darts of gold. A constant twittering of birds resounded within this dome of foliage, and a thrush whistled melodious phrases from one of the highest boughs. At his feet was spread a carpet of long soft moss, interspersed with wild thyme and groups of delicate harebells, and the rippling of a tiny stream into a hollow cavity of stones made pleasant and soothing music. Charmed with the tranquillity and loveliness of his surroundings, he determined to stay here for a couple of hours, reading, and perhaps sleeping, before resuming his journey. He had in his pocket a shilling edition of Keats’s poems which he had bought in Bristol by way of a silent companion to his thoughts, and he took it out and opened it now, reading and re-reading some of the lines most dear and familiar to him, when, as a boy, he had elected this poet, so wickedly done to death ere his prime by commonplace critics, as one of his chief favourites among the highest Singers. And his lips, half-murmuring, followed the verse which tells of that
“untrodden region of the mind,
Where branchëd thoughts, new-grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind;
Far, far around shall these dark clustered trees,
Fledge the wild ridgëd mountains steep by steep,
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness,
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreathed trellis of a working brain,
With buds and bells and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,
Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same;
And there shall be for thee all soft delight,
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!”
A slight sigh escaped him.
“How perfect is that stanza!” he said. “How I used to believe in all it suggested! And how, when I was a young man, my heart was like that ‘casement ope at night, to let the warm Love in!’ But Love never came, — only a spurious will-o’-the-wisp imitation of Love. I wonder if many people in this world are not equally deceived with myself in their conceptions of this divine passion? All the poets and romancists may be wrong, — and Lucy Sorrel, with her hard materialism encasing her youth like a suit of steel armour, may be right. Boys and girls ‘love,’ so they say, — men and women ‘love’ and marry — and with marriage, the wondrous light that led them on and dazzled them, seems, in nine cases out of ten, to suddenly expire! Taking myself as an example, I cannot say that actual marriage made me happy. It was a great disillusion; a keen disappointment. The birth of my sons certainly gave me some pleasure as well as latent hope, for as little children they were lovable and lovely; but as boys — as men — what bitterness they brought me! Were they the heirs of Love? Nay! — surely Love never generated such callous hearts! They were the double reflex of their mother’s nature, grasping all and giving nothing. Is there no such virtue on earth as pure unselfish Love? — love that gives itself freely, unasked, without hope of advantage or reward — and without any personal motive lurking behind its offered tenderness?”
He turned over the pages of the book he held, with a vague idea that some consoling answer to his thoughts would flash out in a stray line or stanza, like a beacon lighting up the darkness of a troubled sea. But no such cheering word met his eyes. Keats is essentially the poet of the young, and for the old he has no comfort. Sensuous, passionate, and almost cloying in the excessive sweetness of his amorous muse, he offers no support to the wearied spirit, — no sense of strength or renewal to the fagged brain. He does not grapple with the hard problems of life; and his mellifluous murmurings of delicious fantasies have no place in the poignant griefs and keen regrets of those who have passed the meridian of earthly hopes, and who see the shadows of the long night closing in. And David Helmsley realised this all suddenly, with something of a pang.
“I am too old for Keats,” he said in a half-whisper to the leafy branches that bowed their weight of soft green shelteringly over him. “Too old! Too old for a poet in whose imaginative work I vised to take such deep delight. There is something strange in this, for I cherished a belief that fine poetry would fit every time and every age, and that no matter how heavy the burden of years might be, I should always be able to forget myself and my sorrows in a poet’s immortal creations. But I have left Keats behind me. He was with me in the sunshine, — he does not follow me into the shade.”
A cloud of melancholy darkened his worn features, and he slowly closed the book. He felt that it was from henceforth a sealed letter. For him the half-sad, half-scornful musings of Omar Khayyám were more fitting, such as the lines that run thus: —
“Fair wheel of heaven, silvered with many a star,
Whose sickly arrows strike us from afar,
Never a purpose to my soul was dear,
But heaven crashed down my little dream to mar.
Never a bird within my sad heart sings
But heaven a flaming stone of thunder flings;
O valiant wheel! O most courageous heaven,
To leave me lonely with the broken wings!”
tinging pain, as of tears that rose but would not fall, troubled his eyes. He passed his hand across them, and leaned back against the sturdy trunk of the elm which served him for the moment as a protecting haven of rest. The gentle murmur of the bees among the clover, the soft subdued twittering of the birds, and the laughing ripple of the little stream hard by, all combined to make one sweet monotone of sound which lulled his senses to a drowsiness that gradually deepened into slumber. He made a pathetic figure enough, lying fast asleep there among the wilderness of green, — a frail and apparently very poor old man, adrift and homeless, without a friend in the world. The sun sank, and a crimson after-glow spread across the horizon from west to east, the rich colours flung up from the centre of the golden orb merging by slow degrees into that pure pearl-grey which marks the long and lovely summer twilight of English skies. The air was very still, not so much as the rumble of a distant cart wheel disturbing the silence. Presently, however, the slow shuffle of hesitating footsteps sounded through the muffling thickness of the dust, and a man made his appearance on the top of the little rising where the lane climbed up into a curve of wild-rose hedge and honeysuckle which almost hid the actual road from view. He was not a prepossessing object in the landscape; short and squat, unkempt and dirty, and clad in rough garments which were almost past hanging together, he looked about as uncouth and ugly a customer as one might expect to meet anywhere on a lonely road at nightfall. He carried a large basket on his back, seemingly full of weeds, — the rope which supported it was tied across his chest, and he clasped this rope with both hands crossed in the middle, after the fashion of a praying monk. Smoking a short black pipe, he trudged along, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground with steady and almost surly persistence, till arriving at the tree where Helmsley lay, he paused, and lifting his head stared long and curiously at the sleeping man. Then, unclasping his hands, he lowered his basket to the ground and set it down. Stealthily creeping close up to Helmsley’s side, he examined the prone figure from head to foot with quick and eager scrutiny. Spying the little volume of Keats on the grass where it had dropped from the slumberer’s relaxed hand, he took it up gingerly, turning over its pages with grimy thumb a
nd finger.
“Portry!” he ejaculated. “Glory be good to me! ‘E’s a reg’ler noddy none-such! An’ measly old enuff to know better!”
He threw the book on the grass again with a sniff of contempt. At that moment Helmsley stirred, and opening his eyes fixed them full and inquiringly on the lowering face above him.
“‘Ullo, gaffer! Woke up, ‘ave yer?” said the man gruffly. “Off yer lay?”
Helmsley raised himself on one elbow, looking a trifle dazed.
“Off my what?” he murmured. “I didn’t quite hear you —— ?”
“Oh come, stow that!” said the man. “You dunno what I’m talkin’ about; that’s plain as a pike. You aint used to the road! Where d’ye come from?”
“I’ve walked from Bristol,” he answered— “And you’re quite right, — I’m not used to the road.”
The man looked at him and his hard face softened. Pushing back his tattered cap from his brows he showed his features more openly, and a smile, half shrewd, half kindly, made them suddenly pleasant.
“Av coorse you’re not!” he declared. “Glory be good to me! I’ve tramped this bit o’ road for years, an’ never come across such a poor old chuckle-headed gammer as you sleepin’ under a tree afore! Readin’ portry an’ droppin’ to by-by over it! The larst man as iver I saw a’ readin’ portry was what they called a ‘Serious Sunday’ man, an’ ‘e’s doin’ time now in Portland.”
Helmsley smiled. He was amused; — his “adventures,” he thought, were beginning. To be called “a poor old chuckle-headed gammer” was a new and almost delightful experience.
“Portland’s an oncommon friendly place,” went on his uninvited companion. “Once they gits ye, they likes ye to stop. ‘Taint like the fash’nable quality what says to their friends: ‘Do-ee come an’ stay wi’ me, loveys!’ wishin’ all the while as they wouldn’t. Portland takes ye willin’, whether ye likes it or not, an’ keeps ye so fond that ye can’t git away nohow. Oncommon ‘ospitable Portland be!”
And he broke into a harsh laugh. Then he glanced at Helmsley again with a more confiding and favourable eye.
“Ye seems a ‘spectable sort,” he said. “What’s wrong wi’ ye? Out o’ work?”
Helmsley nodded.
“Turned off, eh? Too old?”
“That’s about it!” he answered.
“Well, ye do look a bit of a shivery-shake, — a kind o’ not-long-for-this-world,” said the man. “Howsomiver, we’se be all ‘elpless an’ ‘omeless soon, for the Lord hisself don’t stop a man growin’ old, an’ under the new ways o’ the world, it’s a reg’lar crime to run past forty. I’m sixty, an’ I gits my livin’ my own way, axin’ nobody for the kind permission. That’s my fortin!”
And he pointed to the basket of weedy stuff which he had just set down. Helmsley looked at it with some curiosity.
“What’s in it?” he asked.
“What’s in it? What’s not in it!” And the man gave a gesture of mingled pride and defiance. “There’s all what the doctors makes their guineas out of with their purr-escriptions, for they can’t purr-escribe no more than is in that there basket without they goes to minerals. An’ minerals is rank poison to ivery ‘uman body. But so far as ‘erbs an’ seeds, an’ precious stalks an’ flowers is savin’ grace for man an’ beast, Matthew Peke’s got ’em all in there. An’ Matthew Peke wouldn’t be the man he is, if he didn’t know where to find ’em better’n any livin’ soul iver born! Ah! — an’ there aint a toad in a hole hoppin’ out between Quantocks an’ Cornwall as hasn’t seen Matthew Peke gatherin’ the blessin’ an’ health o’ the fields at rise o’ sun an’ set o’ moon, spring, summer, autumn, ay, an’ even winter, all the year through!”
Helmsley became interested.
“And you are the man!” he said questioningly— “You are Matthew Peke?”
“I am! An’ proud so ter be! An’ you— ‘ave yer got a name for the arskin’?”
“Why, certainly!” And Helmsley’s pale face flushed. “My name is David.”
“Chrisen name? Surname?”
“Both.”
Matthew Peke shook his head.
“‘Twon’t fadge!” he declared. “It don’t sound right. It’s like th’ owld Bible an’ the Book o’ Kings where there’s nowt but Jews; an’ Jews is the devil to pay wheriver you finds ’em!”
“I’m not a Jew,” said Helmsley, smiling.
“Mebbe not — mebbe not — but yer name’s awsome like it. An’ if ye put it short, like D. David, that’s just Damn David an’ nothin’ plainer. Aint it?”
Helmsley laughed.
“Exactly!” he said— “You’re right! Damn David suits me down to the ground!”
Peke looked at him dubiously, as one who is not quite sure of his man.
“You’re a rum old sort!” he said; “an’ I tell ye what it is — you’re as tired as a dog limpin’ on three legs as has nipped his fourth in a weasel-trap. Wheer are ye goin’ on to?”
“I don’t know,” answered Helmsley— “I’m a stranger to this part of the country. But I mean to tramp it to the nearest village. I slept out in the open yesterday, — I think I’d like a shelter over me to-night.”
“Got any o’ the King’s pictures about ye?” asked Peke.
Helmsley looked, as he felt, bewildered.
“The King’s pictures?” he echoed— “You mean —— ?”
“This!” and Peke drew out of his tattered trouser pocket a dim and blackened sixpence—”’Ere ’e is, as large as life, a bit bald about the top o’ ’is blessed old ‘ead, Glory be good to ’im, but as useful as if all ’is ‘air was still a blowin’ an’ a growin’! Aint that the King’s picture, D. David? Don’t it say ‘Edwardus VII. D. G. Britt.,’ which means Edward the Seventh, thanks be to God Britain? Don’t it?”
“It do!” replied Helmsley emphatically, taking a fantastic pleasure in the bad grammar of his reply. “I’ve got a few more pictures of the same kind,” and he took out two or three loose shillings and pennies— “Can we get a night’s lodging about here for that?”
“Av coorse we can! I’ll take ye to a place where ye’ll be as welcome as the flowers in May with Matt Peke interroducin’ of ye. Two o’ them thank-God Britts in silver will set ye up wi’ a plate o’ wholesome food an’ a clean bed at the ‘Trusty Man.’ It’s a pub, but Miss Tranter what keeps it is an old maid, an’ she’s that proud o’ the only ‘Trusty Man’ she ever ‘ad that she calls it an ‘Otel!”
He grinned good-humouredly at what he considered his own witticism concerning the little weakness of Miss Tranter, and proceeded to shoulder his basket.
“You aint proud, are ye?” he said, as he turned his ferret-brown eyes on Helmsley inquisitively.
Helmsley, who had, quite unconsciously to himself, drawn up his spare figure in his old habitual way of standing very erect, with that composed air of dignity and resolution which those who knew him personally in business were well accustomed to, started at the question.
“Proud!” he exclaimed— “I? What have I to be proud of? I’m the most miserable old fellow in the world, my friend! You may take my word for that! There’s not a soul that cares a button whether I live or die! I’m seventy years of age — out of work, and utterly wretched and friendless! Why the devil should I be proud?”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 656