‘Turns into Yellow Gold His Salt Green Streams’

Katherine Swallow was secretly praying that the young man, whose dark eyes kept stealing to her across the table, would not like her too much. And why should he, indeed? She was no pink-­and-­white beauty. There was no gold in her hair.

She was a thin, brown girl whose hair refused to curl, whose eyes, one grey, the other brown, gave her such a peculiar look that gentlemen looked askance at her. Or so she had always fancied.

The afternoon sun shed a greenish light through the thick bottle-­glass of the window-­panes. His head was outlined against this luminous background, beyond which—a blur of young gold, a blur of white—the poplars in the garden and a snowy pear-­tree bore witness to the spring.

He had a pale triangular face, with somewhat irregular features, and eyes so dark that it seemed as if he must have a smoky vision; as if pale and delicate colours would be imperceptible to orbs so black.

One could not tell from that Puckish, enigmatical face whether he were a likeable person (and by a likeable person, she meant one to whom she could talk without being thought a queer fish, whose laughter would never shock her, but chime with her own). But the long pointed chin that jutted over his ruff disquieted her.

She had guessed what matters were afoot when her mother had commanded her that morning to wear her new satin gown, since Sir Colin Knowles was bidden to dinner. They were making yet another effort to get her a husband.

She was nineteen years old and her maidenhood a reproach. But since there was something curst in her nature which refused to accept the values of her elders and betters, the cause of her mother’s chagrin, her father’s displeasure, was to her a secret satisfaction. She had nothing of the allure that had betrayed her sister. Dance—poor, lovely Dance! who had been constrained to become a bride at the age of fifteen and had been sharing a great four-­poster bed these two years past with a strange bearded gentleman. Dance had written her privily—‘I had thought Love was a winged Sperrit, but ’tis of all things the most carnal. A mighty queer business.’

Katherine had burned the little smudged letter to ashes in her candle-­flame and had thanked the Lord for her different eyes, her angular body, for everything that made her an unpalatable morsel for the sweet tooth of neighbouring squires. She liked them not!

Sometimes she thought that she had antennae as delicate as an insect’s to warn her of peril. As if she had touched his mind with invisible feelers, she knew that this strange young man was not listening to her father’s talk, that he was answering him only with the tip of his tongue, as it were, while his thoughts were occupied with the girl across the table—herself.

‘You are not what other men would choose; but I am a perverse fellow. An’t please you, I would consider your points.’

And if by some strange chance he were to take a fancy to the oddity she was, neither he nor her father would brook a denial. That masterful chin told her that he was a man who got what he wanted.

Katherine’s cheeks grew hot. The smell of food and wine was overpowering. The table was in disarray, the pewter tankards set awry amid a litter of broken bread and spilt salt. There were grease spots on the polished oak round the great baron of beef that Master Swallow had lately carved. He had drunk too much canary, and was quoting Ovid to impress the young man, his eyes suffused with the tears of immoderate laughter and a knowing look on his face, as if he thought that they were secure in their secret masculine world from feminine compulsion . . . Sir Colin was laughing, too, but it was the laughter of politeness and had a hollow sound. He was not at the moment interested in bawdy talk.

Mistress Swallow sat facing her husband with an array of sweetmeats before her, withdrawn into her shell, following some private train of thought. Now and again she raked her red pyramid of hair with a jewelled forefinger, cleared her throat, or heaved her bosom within its restricting corselet. One could tell by her little sniff when she was belatedly scoring an imaginary point against one of her gossips—probably Lady Ashbee, who had just married off her sixth daughter—or perhaps recollecting an actual triumph in a battle of words. Yes, she lived in a private, bustling, fussy world of her own, which bore but little resemblance, Katherine suspected, to reality.

Now and again she emerged from her shell to press more food on the guest in a false Court voice, to bring her daughter to his notice with some counterfeit word of praise for her singing, her housewifery, or other virtue. She had big ears weighed down with pearls, cold little pale-­green eyes and small short-­fingered hands that could deal a ringing box on the ear of an offender. Katherine remembered one such blow that had drawn blood with a clawed ring.

‘Who would bid,’ she said, angrily, ‘for such a bag of tricks!’

But Katherine had a trick or two of which they knew nothing. She could muffle herself in a cloak of insensibility and exist within it like a chrysalis in its cocoon, refusing all contact with a world that had become too unpleasant to bear. At other times, when nothing occurred to disturb the even tenor of the days and life seemed on the surface no more than a matter of eating and sleeping and the performance of trivial household duties, she could find ecstasy in ways never suspected by those about her. In scribbling, for instance.

Having devoured in secret all the books in her father’s library, merry and lewd tales and some so pranked with conceits that she grew impatient with the authors and called them foppish and strutting fellows who marred God’s truth with antics, and others which so stank of the charnel-­house that she refused to read further, she had been thrown back on herself, and had discovered that she was a kind of spider and could spin out of herself the web of dreams. She needed but her quill and inkhorn and the bundle of yellowish paper she had chanced upon in an old chest. But she was not content for long to spin easily and lightly out of her brain. It was as if with the persistent scratching of her quill, she had scratched her way through to some deeper place, the existence of which she had never suspected.

Whatever it might be, that mysterious reservoir of dreams, she knew that when she got through to it, things happened that were out of her control. The characters in her tales became alive and spoke with voices she could hear as clearly as those of real persons. They had thoughts separate from her own which she could not always fathom, and they acted as she had not foreseen they would act.

When the writing fit was on her, she lived a kind of double existence—one upon the surface of the earth and the other somewhere beyond space and time. She stole what she valued from the surface life to embalm in the other—golden and silver poplars dancing in the wind; the first star of evening, that shines in the green of the west when the rosy islands have faded to ashes; the smell of the earth after rain.

‘I have writ that which no man hath ever writ. For Woman is Water that catcheth the reflections of things. She is Air that stealeth odours sweet from bud and herb. But Man is Earth and Fire.’ So she scribbled on a margin, thinking that when poets spoke of flowers it was to compare them to the beauties of a mistress and never for the flower’s sweet sake. Not one of them, it seemed, so loved a rose that it made a rose of his heart.

And seizing a fresh sheet, she dipped her quill and tried her hand at poetry—

Shall I to a rose my love compare,

Who is but flesh and bone?

He hath no charm to take the air.

With breath of petals blown.

When I to his heart my sorrows take

What comfort shall I find?

He hath no dew my thirst to slake,

No honey for my mind . . .

He is but a man as others are,

For worms predestined meat.

But tryst keep I with dusk’s green star

And go on wingèd feet.

Oh, dear! what stuff! And she had inked her fingers and spoiled a fair sheet. If she were a man, poetry, she supposed, would have dripped from her pen as naturally as rain from a cloud. So far as she knew, letters were a purely masculine accomplishment. Dance had written that many of the young men who visited at her house in London wrote sonnets and odes which were handed round from one to another, and that one of them, ‘a very personable young gentleman, who hath a Spanish cast of countenance, hath writ a satire on London Town that is much talked of . . . but it hath no loves or doves, nor other sweet rhymes, and falleth harshly on my little ears.’

‘Little ears.’ That was just like Dance who was aware of all her good points and tender towards them—though she had small cause to be, since thanks to them the elderly Master Challinor had cast covetous eyes on her, and got her against her will.

Now that her old pedagogue was dead, there was no one in all the world, thought Katherine, to whom she would dare to show her writings. He had taught her Latin and many other things, and was responsible, perhaps, for some of her queerness. He used to say that she was the best pupil he ever had—except one. And that was a boy long ago at the Grammar School, no scholar, but a born understander, one that could give you back what you told him with something added of his own, something that turned plain fact into cold magic. The Lord knew how! ‘ ’Twas as if dry-­as-­dust had been dipped in a moonbeam. God ’ild him, I fear he hath come to a bad end.’

It was thanks to her old pedagogue that Katherine knew more Latin than her father suspected. She was afraid that her crimson cheeks would give her away to those appraising dark eyes across the table and was glad when Master Swallow began to talk of his recent visit to Court and the Queen’s Majesty.

‘And did you kiss her hand, father?’ she asked, breaking the silence that had been imposed upon her.

‘I kissed her diamonds, poppet. Her sainted flesh was not for these unworthy lips. God’s grace, you could not see so much as a knuckle for gems. Even her teeth are pearls of the rarer kind—for they are black. Ha, ha, ha.’

‘And you, sir, you have been often at Court?’ asked Mistress Swallow.

‘But half-­a-­dozen times in all. I am no courtier, save by necessity. I have but lately returned, you know, from the Low Countries to claim my patrimony. But London hath me in a thrall. I saw a play at the Rose the other night so charmed me that I am yet a little bewitched. It was a piece about fairies, gossamer stuff but very well knit. There was a line in it—I know not why, it seems to me the most beautiful I have ever heard . . .’

He dropped his voice as he said the last words, as if he half regretted speaking of a matter that was too intimate.

And suddenly it seemed to Katherine that something wonderful had happened—as if she had seen a falling star drop soundlessly down the steeps of space. Their eyes met again across the table, and this time, for some strange reason, they exchanged a smile—a fleeting, secret smile that was like a signal between two spies from some far country.

Mrs. Swallow rose at this moment, and Sir Colin sprang to his feet to open the door for the ladies. His long thin hand on the latch, with a deep scar across the knuckles, caught Katherine’s eye, and she felt an almost irresistible impulse to touch it with her own. Whence came that queer unwarrantable desire, she knew not. It took her completely by surprise and disquieted her.

To escape from her thoughts she went out into the garden and watched for a while the gardener trimming the knots, which made a pattern like an Eastern carpet below the terrace. Soon the white pear tree in the kitchen garden beckoned her away. A starling whistled out of its drifts of snow, his body glistening like dark shot-­silk in the April sunlight. There was a warm, delicious scent of wallflowers. Grey and silver herbs; the weather-­stained roof of the barn that had a purplish bloom like ripe plums; young heart-­shaped poplar-­leaves that are never still, but dance with every air that blows; she drew them consciously into her mind and stored them away. Beyond the gate in the nut-­hedge, a ploughed field, delicate, fawn-­coloured and ribbed like corduroy, stretched down to the wood.

She glanced back at the house with its twisted chimneys. A puff of blue smoke spread fanwise against the sky . . . a deeper, softer blue than the clear turquoise to which it mounted. One of the panes of the library window was flashing like a diamond. In that rather musty room with its black-­lettered tomes, its great carved mantel from which the bust of Julius Cæsar looked into space, its green-­leaved tapestry of Angers, her father was probably at this moment closeted with the guest—twitting him, perhaps, with nods and winks and gusts of wheezy laughter, because there was no mistress yet for the great house at Wyvernhoe which Sir Colin had just inherited.

‘Pest!’ said Katherine, aloud, ‘I will not think on’t.’ And turning her back on the house, she picked up her sprigged petticoats and climbed over the gate.

The wood was waiting, green and cool and secret, with a strange intensity, as of having been abandoned in haste by some supernatural being. She seemed to hear a sighing—‘Hush . . . sh . . . sh!’ whispered from tree to tree, through the undergrowth and down the glades as her skirts rustled over the mast of last year’s dead leaves.

The wood held its breath lest a mortal should surprise its ghostly visitant; a blackbird frantically uttered its warning; a pheasant rose with a clatter of wings, and rabbits bolted for cover.

In a clearing there was a golden willow-­palm, set about with nests of primroses. Oh, God, what beauty! She went down on her knees and began to gather the primroses, heaping them in her lap. There is something very delicate and touching about the scent of a primrose. It is like the compassion of a robin, that will suddenly burst into a wild, sweet stave when your heart is breaking. Flower and bird, they seem to be telling you—‘My all is but a thimbleful, but what I have, I give you.’

But when one was dying, thought Katherine, it might be that one would forget the passions and the glories and remember of Life only some minute consolation, such as these.

A brook gurgled somewhere out of sight. When she had made a bunch of the primroses, encircled them with soft furry leaves and bound them with a ribbon from her sleeve, she went to look for the brook.

And suddenly in the next clearing she came upon a man seated on the trunk of a fallen tree.

At the first glance, she thought Sir Colin must have got here before her; for he was dressed in a suit of black and had the air of a city man.

But it was not Sir Colin.

Having been brought up to mistrust profoundly strange gallants, and solemnly admonished never to walk abroad un­attended Katherine turned to flee, caught her foot in a root, and fell sprawling all her length.

‘Pest!’ said the stranger, in a startled tone of voice. ‘You have scattered my thoughts, madam, to all the airs of April.’

He rose and picked her up.

‘Lord, what a mess!’ he said, in a pleasant voice, that had a country burr in it, and producing a handkerchief, he proceeded to wipe the mud off her skirts.

He was a thickset fellow, large-­eyed as a hare, with a high forehead and little gold rings in his ears.

‘I crave your pardon, sir, I fear you have spoiled your kerchief. As for your thoughts, you must e’en whistle them back again,’ said Katherine, suddenly light-­hearted, and ashamed of her momentary panic. This man wouldn’t hurt a fly.

‘You must have green thoughts,’ she went on, with her little tinkling laugh, ‘who use so green a closet. I had thought myself alone in this wood.’

‘And were frighted to come on mortal grossness, where you had a tryst with some winged thing. Is it not so?’

‘Perhaps,’ said she. ‘Indeed, methought I heard the rustle of feathered heels. But you came to study, sir, and I disturb you.’ For her eye had fallen on an inkhorn balanced precariously on the fallen log, and a quarto sheet covered with a black, spidery script was lying at her feet. He stooped to pick up the sheet and stowed it away in his pocket.

‘The mischief is done, madam,’ he said. ‘But blame not yourself. You have as much right to this wood as I; though I doubt we are both interlopers.’

‘I came here to find peace,’ she said. ‘Oh, my primroses, they are all muddied o’er.’

‘We will wash them in the brook. And my kerchief, too. See, they are restored to their pristine beauty, and the kerchief will be dry anon.’ He hung it on an alder twig.

‘ ’Tis of a rare colour,’ said Katherine, and an idea suddenly occurring to her—‘its device of strawberries hath something . . . it maketh of it such a kerchief as would serve in a tale for a love-­token.’ The pupils of her eyes dilated, and she turned to him excitedly. There was something so gentle and understanding in his smile that she was emboldened to proceed, a little breathlessly and with the faint rose-­colour coming and going in her olive cheeks—‘I would have a faithless lover come upon it—oh! long after he had forgot his mistress. And I would have him pierced to the core with the sudden memory of his lost love. Oh! but he should be smitten to the heart, remembering some little trick she had, or a brown freckle on her left eyelid, or what not.’

‘And would he hold her again in his arms, to the sound of marriage-­bells? Would Comedy be your vein?’

‘Ah, no!’ said Katherine. ‘For he would not deserve to have her. Love doth not recover from a wound so deep, and she would have none of him.’

‘Then would she be no true woman, that set her pride so higher than her love.’

‘Think you so? You have studied the nature of woman, sir, that you speak with such an air of authority?’

‘I know not where I got the knowledge, mistress. But it is mine,’ he said. ‘Perhaps my trade hath taught it me.’

‘Your trade? Then you are a writer?’ she asked eagerly.

‘A poor scribbler, madam—a play-­actor by profession.’

‘I like not our modern writers—such as I have read—save only The Defence of Poesie and The Shepheard’s Calendar. But the Eclogues of Virgil please me mightily, for there is much of pastoral in them. If I were a poet, I would write of little unconsidered things . . . of these primroses, for instance, that are so sweet. If there be words so delicate and of such fairy breath to catch their essence.’

He took the bunch from her and put it to his lips.

‘So faint,’ he said, ‘and tender. They know not the heat of the sun. Aye, there are words for them. One has but to reach out one’s hand and take them from the air.’

Something in the words, in the sound of his voice as he uttered them, sent a shiver down her spine, as though an icy finger had touched her.

‘You said you came here to find peace. What troubleth you, child? Come, let us sit upon this log and talk. I know not what wind blew you hither, but I think it was the sweet South that hath the odour of violets.’

‘I would ask you a question. I could ask it of no other in the world. Prithee, tell me, have I a face could take a man’s fancy?’

‘You are no Greekish beauty,’ he said consideringly, his hare’s eyes lingering on her irregular features and tapering chin. ‘But a man might take such a liking to your heretic face, that grows in grace with looking, as to find it one day carved upon his heart—like an intaglio cut into stone. And hath he come, and have you run from him? What kind of man is he that you should fear his love?’

‘I know not. He hath a locked face, to which I have no key. Perhaps he liketh me not. But he looked upon me as if he would draw me down into the darkness of his eyes, only I doubt they are too jetty dark to see a thing so pale. At first I prayed he would not like me overmuch, for I had no mind to lose my freedom. But now—I know not what has come to me, but I fear I am more than half o’erthrown. ’Twas a thing he said—not meant for me. He was talking of a play he had seen—something about fairies. “There was a line in it—I think it is the most beautiful I have ever heard,” he said. Doth it seem a little thing to fall in love for? But ’twas the way he said it . . . as if . . . as if . . . oh, as if a star had flashed and fallen.’

‘And did he speak the line?’ asked the playactor, two little pin-­points of light shining in the pupils of his eyes.

‘No. I cannot think that I shall ever hear it—for now I am sure he liketh me not at all.’

‘I am no soothsayer,’ said the stranger, with his bright, compassionate smile, ‘and yet I dare swear he is thinking on you at this very moment—“So looked she, and so smiled. I am sure she liketh me not at all; and what care I? And yet—the devil take her—she hath the most delicate, sweet face I ever looked on, the most like a flower.” ’

‘You speak the most comfortable words that e’er I heard,’ said Katherine, with a sigh.

The apricot light of sunset shone through the young beech boughs and the shadows beneath the trees were pools of amethyst, and still they talked, the damp breath of dusk bedewing their garments and chilling their hands and feet. It was not until a blackbird, uttering his startled evening cry, flew over their heads that Katherine awoke to reality. Heavens, what a pother, what a hue-­and-­cry there must be at home this very moment!

‘Fare you well, sir. I know not what power you have, but I ne’er unlocked my heart before to mortal creature . . . What must you think of me that have told you . . . oh, I blush to think what I have told you.’

‘God be with, mistress. I know not your name, nor you mine. And your secrets—why, you have dropped them into a well so deep it hath no bottom . . .’

He took her cold, thin hand and kissed it. ‘When I think on you . . . I’ll think on April’s darling flowers . . . and call you Perdita, who art best to me.’ And then, with a sudden change of tone, he added irrelevantly, ‘I would I knew what line it was he liked so much . . .’