# Tales Of The Uncanny And Supernatural/The Trod

Tales Of The Uncanny and Supernatural, pg 181
Young Norman was being whirled in one of the newest streamlined expresses towards the north. He leaned back in his first-class Smoker and lit a cigarette. On the rack in front of him was his gun-case with the pair of guns he never willingly allowed out of his sight, his magazine with over a thousand cartridges beside it, and the rest of his luggage, he knew, was safely in the van. He was looking forward to a really good week’s shooting at Greystones, one of the best moors in England.
He realised that he was uncommonly lucky to have been invited at all. Yet a question mark lay in him. Why precisely, he wondered, had he been asked? For one thing, he knew his host. Sir Hiram Digby, very slightly. He had met him once or twice at various shoots in Norfolk, and while he had acquitted himself well when standing near him, he could not honestly think this was the reason for the invitation. There had been too many good shots present, and far better shots, for him to have been specially picked out. There was another reason, he was certain. His thoughts, as he puffed his cigarette reflectively, turned easily enough in another direction⁠—towards Diana Travers, Sir Hiram Digby’s niece.
The wish, he remembered, is often father to the thought, yet he clung to it obstinately, and with lingering enjoyment. It was Diana Travers who had suggested his name; it well might be, it probably was, and the more he thought it over, the more positive he felt. It explained the invitation, at any rate.
A curious thrill of excitement and delight ran through him as memory went backwards and played about her. A curious being, he saw quite unlike the usual run of girls, but curious, in the way that he himself perhaps was curious, for he was just old enough to have discovered that he was curious, standing apart somehow from the young men of his age and station. Well born, rich, sporting and all the rest, he yet did not quite belong to his time in certain ways. He could drink, revel, go wild, enjoy himself with his companions, but up to a point only⁠—when he withdrew unsatisfied. There were “other things” that claimed him with some terrible inner power; and the two could not mix. These other things he could not quite explain even to himself, but to his boon companions⁠—never. Were they things of the spirit? He could not say. Wild, pagan things belonging to an older day? He knew not. They were of unspeakable loveliness and power, drawing him away from ordinary modern life⁠—that he knew. He could not define them to himself, much less speak of them to others.
And then he met Diana Travers and knew, though he did not dare put his discovery into actual words, that she felt something similar.
He came across her first at a dance in town, he remembered, remembering also how bored he had been until the casual introduction, and after it, how happy, enchanted, satisfied. It was assuredly not that he had fallen suddenly in love, nor that she was wildly beautiful⁠—a tall, fair girl with a radiant, yet not lovely face, soft voice, graceful movements⁠—for there were thousands, Norman knew, who excelled her in all these qualities. No, it was not the usual love attack, the mating fever, the herd-instinct that she might be his girl, but the old conviction, rather, that there lay concealed in her the same nameless, mysterious longings that lay also in himself⁠—the terrible and lovely power that drew him from his human kind towards unknown “other things.”
As they stood together on the balcony, where they had escaped from the heat and clamour of the ballroom, he acknowledged to himself, yet without utterance, this overpowering, strange conviction that their fates were in some way linked together. He could not explain it at the time, he could not explain it now⁠—while he thought it over in the railway carriage, and his conscious mind rejected it as imagination. Yet it remained. Their talk, indeed, had been ordinary enough, nor was he conscious of the slightest desire to flirt or make love; it was just that, as the saying is, they “clicked” and that each felt delightfully easy in the other’s company, happy and at home. It was almost, he reflected, as though they shared some rather wonderful deep secret that had no need of words, a secret that lay, indeed, beyond the reach of words altogether.
They had met several times since, and on each occasion he had been aware of the same feeling; and once when he ran across her by chance in the park they walked together for over an hour and she had talked more freely. Talked suddenly about herself, moreover, openly and naturally, as though she knew he would understand. In the open air, it struck him, she was more spontaneous than in the artificial surroundings of walls and furniture. It was not so much that she said anything significant, but rather the voice and manner and gestures that she used.
She had been admitting how she disliked London and all its works, loathing especially the Season with its glittering routine of so-called gaiety, adding that she always longed to get back to Marston, Sir Hiram’s place in Essex. “There are the marshes,” she said, with quiet enthusiasm, “and the sea, and I go with my uncle duck-flighting in the twilight, or in the dawn when the sun comes up like a red ball out of the sea, and the mist over the marshes drifts away⁠ ⁠… and things, you know, may happen.⁠ ⁠…”
He had been watching her movements with admiration as she spoke, thinking the name of huntress was well chosen, and now there was a note of strange passion in her voice that he heard for the first time. Her whole being, moreover, conveyed the sense that he would understand some emotional yearning in her that her actual words omitted.
He stopped and stared at her.
“That’s to be alive,” she added with a laugh that made her eyes shine. “The wind and the rain blowing in your face and the ducks streaming by. You feel yourself part of nature. Gates open, as it were. It was how we were meant to live. I’m sure.”
Such phrases from any other girl must have made him feel shy and embarrassed, from her they were merely natural and true. He had not taken her up, however, beyond confessing that he agreed with her, and the conversation had passed on to other things. Yet the reason he had not become enthusiastic or taken up the little clue she offered, was because his inmost heart knew what she meant.
Her confession, not striking in itself, concealed while it revealed, a whole region of significant, mysterious “other things” best left alone in words. “You and I think alike,” was what she had really said, “You and I share this strange, unearthly longing, only for God’s sake, don’t let us talk about it⁠ ⁠…!”
“A queer girl, anyhow,” he now smiled to himself, as the train rushed northwards, and then asked himself what exactly he knew about her? Very little, practically nothing, beyond that, both parents being dead, she lived with her elderly bachelor uncle and was doing the London Season. “A thoroughbred anyhow,” he told, himself, “lovely as a nymph into the bargain⁠ ⁠…” and his thoughts went dreaming rather foolishly. Then suddenly, as he lit another cigarette, a much more definite thought emerged. It gave him something of a start, for it sprang up abruptly out of his mood of reverie in the way that a true judgment sometimes leaps to recognition in the state between sleeping and waking.
“She knows. Knows about these other lovely and mysterious things that have always haunted me. She has⁠—yes, experienced them. She can explain them to me. She wants to share them with me.⁠ ⁠…”
Norman sat up with a jerk, as though something had scared him. He had been dreaming, these ideas were the phantasmagoria of a dream. Yet his heart, he noticed, was beating rather rapidly, as though a deep inner excitement had touched him in his condition of half-dream.
He looked up at his gun-cases and cartridges in the rack, then shaded his eyes and gazed out of the window. The train was doing at least sixty. The character of the country it rushed through was changing. The hedges of the midlands had gone, and stone walls were beginning to take their place. The country was getting wilder, lonelier, less inhabited. He drew unconsciously a deep breath of satisfaction. He must actually have slept for a considerable time, he realised, for his watch told him that in a few minutes he would reach the junction where he had to change. Bracendale, the local station for Greystones, he remembered, was on a little branch line that wandered away among the hills. And some fifteen minutes later he found himself, luggage and all, in the creaky, grunting train that would land him at Bracendale towards five o’clock. The dusk had fallen when, with great effort apparently, the struggling engine deposited him with his precious guns and cartridges on the deserted platform amid swirling mists a damp wind prepared for his reception. To his considerable relief a car was there to carry him the remaining ten miles to the Lodge, and he was soon comfortably installed among its luxurious rugs for the drive across the hills.
He settled back comfortably to enjoy the keen mountain air.
After leaving the station, the car followed a road up a narrow valley for a time; a small beck fell tumbling from the hills on the left, where occasionally dark plantations of fir trooped down to the side of the road; but what struck him chiefly was the air of desolation and loneliness that hung over all the countryside. The landscape seemed to him wilder and less inhabited even than the Scottish Highlands. Not a house, not a croft, was to be seen. A sense of desertion, due partly to the dusk no doubt, hung brooding over everything, as though human influence was not welcomed here, perhaps not possible. Bleak and inhospitable it looked certainly, though for himself this loneliness held a thrill of wild beauty that appealed to him,
A few black-faced sheep strung occasionally across the road, and once they passed a bearded shepherd harrying downhill with his dog. They vanished into the mist like wraiths. It seemed impossible to Norman that the country could be so desolate and uninhabited when he knew that only a few score miles away lay the large manufacturing towns of Lancashire. The car, meanwhile, was steadily climbing up the valley and presently they came to more open country and passed a few scattered farmhouses with an occasional field of oats besides them.
Norman asked the chauffeur if many people lived hereabouts, and the man was clearly delighted to be spoken to.
“No, sir,” he said, “it’s a right desolate spot at the best of times, and I’m glad enough,” he added, “when it’s time for us to go back south again.” It has been a wonderful season for the grouse, and there was every promise of a record year.
Norman noticed an odd thing about the farmhouses they passed, for many of them, if not all, had a large cross carved over the lintel of the doors, and even some of the gates leading from the road into the fields had a smaller cross cut into the top bar. The car’s flashlight picked them out. It reminded him of the shrines and crosses scattered over the countryside in Catholic countries abroad, but seemed a little incongruous in England. He asked the chauffeur if most of the people hereabout were Catholics, and the man’s answer, given with emphasis, touched his curiosity.
“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” was the reply. “In fact, sir, if you ask me, the people round here are about as heathen as you could find in any Christian country.”
Norman drew his attention to the crosses everywhere, asking him how he accounted for them if the inhabitants were heathen, and the man hesitated a moment before replying, as though, glad to talk otherwise, the subject was not wholly to his liking.
“Well, sir,” he said at length, watching the road carefully in front of him, “they don’t tell me much about what they think, counting me for a foreigner like, as I come from the south. But they’re a rum lot to my way of thinking. What I’m told,” he added after a further pause, “is that they carve these crosses to protect themselves.”
“Protect themselves!” exclaimed Norman a little startled. “Protect themselves from⁠—what?”
“Ah, there, sir,” said the man after hesitating again, “that’s more than I can say. I’ve heard of a haunted house before now, but never a haunted countryside. Yet that’s what they believe, I take it. It’s all haunted, sir⁠—everywhere. It’s the devil of a job to get any of them to turn out after dark, as I know well, and even in the daytime they won’t stir far without a crucifix hung round their neck. Even the men won’t.”
The car had put on speed while he spoke and Norman had to ask him to ease up a bit; the man, he felt sure, was prey to a touch of superstitious fear as they raced along the darkening road, yet glad enough to talk, provided he was not laughed at. After his last burst of speech he had drawn a deep breath, as though glad to have got it off his chest.
“What you tell me is most interesting,” Norman commented invitingly. “I’ve come across that sort of thing abroad, but never yet in England. There’s something in it, you know,” he added persuasively, “if we only knew what. I wish I knew the reason, for I’m sure it’s a mistake just to laugh it all away.” He lit a cigarette, handing one also to his companion, and making him slow down while they lighted them. “You’re an observant fellow, I see,” he went on, “and I’ll be bound you’ve come across some queer things. I wish I had your opportunity. It interests me very much.”
“You’re right, sir,” the chauffeur agreed, as they drove on again, “and it can’t be laughed away, not all of it. There’s something about the whole place ’ere that ain’t right, as you might say. It ‘got’ me a bit when I first came ’ere some years ago, but now I’m kind of used to it.”
“I don’t think I should ever get quite used to it,” said Norman, “till I’d got to the bottom of it. Do tell me anything you’ve noticed. I’d like to know⁠—and I’ll keep it to myself.”
Feeling sure the man had interesting things to tell and having now won his confidence, he begged him to drive more slowly; he was afraid they would reach the house before there had been time to tell more, possibly even some personal experiences.
“There’s a funny sort of road, or track rather, you may be seeing out shooting,” the chauffeur went on eagerly enough, yet half nervously. “It leads across the moor, and no man or woman will set foot on it to save their lives, not even in the daytime, let alone at night.”
Norman said eagerly that he would like to see it, asking its whereabouts, but of course the directions only puzzled him.
“You’ll be seeing it, sir, one of these days out shooting and if you watch the natives, you’ll find I’m telling you right.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Norman asked. “Haunted⁠—eh?”
“That’s it, sir,” the man admitted, after a longish pause. “But a queer kind of ’aunting. They do say it’s just too lovely to look at⁠—and keep your senses.”
It was the other’s turn to hesitate, for something in him trembled.
Now, young Norman was aware of two things very clearly: first, that it wasn’t “quite the thing” to pump his host’s employ in this way; second, that what the man told him held an extraordinary almost alarming interest for him. All folklore interested him intensely, legends and local superstitions included. Was this, perhaps a “fairy-ridden” stretch of country, he asked himself? Yet he was not in Ireland, where it would have been natural, but in stolid, matter-of-fact England. The chauffeur was obviously an observant, commonplace southerner, and yet he had become impressed, even a little scared, by what he had noticed. That lay beyond question: the man was relieved to talk to someone who would not laugh at him, while at the same time he was obviously a bit frightened.
A third question rose in his mind as well: this talk of haunted country, of bogies, fairies and the rest, fantastic though it was, perhaps, stirred a queer, yet delicious feeling in him⁠—in his heart, doubtless⁠—that his host’s niece, Diana, had a link with it somewhere. The origin of a deep intuition is hardly discoverable. He made no attempt to probe it. This was Diana’s country, she must know all the chauffeur hinted, and more besides. There must be something in the atmosphere that attracted her. She had been instrumental in making her uncle invite him. She wanted him to come, she wanted him to taste and share things, “other things,” that to her were vital.
These thoughts flashed across him with an elaboration of detail impossible to describe. That the wish was, again, father to the thoughts, doubtless operated, yet the conviction persistently remained and the intuitive flash provided, apparently, inspiration, so that he plied the chauffeur with further questions that produced valuable results. He referred even to the Little People, the Fairies, without exciting contempt or laughter⁠—with the result that the man gave him finally a somewhat dangerous confidence. Solemnly warning his passenger that “Sir Hiram mustn’t hear of it” or he’d lose his job, the man described a remarkable incident that had happened, so to speak, under his own eyes. Sir Hiram’s sister was lost on the moors some years ago and was never found⁠ ⁠… and the local talk and belief had it that she had been “carried off.” Yet not carried off against her will: she had wanted to go.
“Would that be Mrs. Travers?” Norman asked.
“That’s who it was, sir, exactly, seeing as how you know the family. And it was the strangest disappearance that ever came my way,” He gave a slight shudder and, if not quite to his listener’s surprise, suddenly crossed himself.
Diana’s mother!
A pause followed the extraordinary story, and then, for once, Norman used words first spoken (to Horatio) to a man who had never heard them before and received them with appropriate satisfaction.
“Yes, sir,” he went on, “and now he’s got her up here for the first time since it happened years ago⁠—in the very country where her mother was taken⁠—and I’m told his idea is that he ’opes it will put her right⁠—”
“Put her right?”
“I should say⁠—cure her, sir. She’s supposed to have the same⁠—the same⁠—” he fumbled for a word⁠—“unbalance as wot her mother had.” A strange rush of hope and terror swept across Norman’s heart and mind, but he made a great effort and denied them both, so that his companion little guessed this raging storm. Changing the subject as best he could, controlling his voice with difficulty so as to make it sound normal, he asked casually:
“Do other people⁠—I mean, have other people disappeared here?”
“They do say so, sir,” was the reply. “I’ve heard many a tale, though I couldn’t say as I proved anything. Natives, according to the talk, ’ave disappeared, nor no trace of them ever found. Children mostly. But the people round here won’t speak of it and it’s difficult to find out, as they never go to the Police and keep it dark among themselves⁠—”
“Couldn’t they have fallen into potholes, or something like that?” Norman interrupted, to which the man replied that there was only one pothole in the whole district and the danger spot most carefully fenced round. “It’s the place itself, sir,” he added finally with conviction, as though he could tell of a firsthand personal experience if he dared, “it’s the whole country that’s so strange.”
Norman risked the direct question.
“And what you’ve seen yourself, with your own eyes,” he asked, “did it⁠—sort of frighten you? I mean, you observe so carefully that anything you reported would be valuable.”
“Well, sir,” came the reply after a little hesitation, “I can’t say ‘frightened’ exactly, though⁠—if you ask me⁠—I didn’t like it. It made me feel queer all over, and I ain’t a religious man⁠—”
“Do tell me,” Norman pressed, feeling the house was now not far away and time was short. “I shall keep it to myself⁠—and I shall believe you. I’ve had odd experiences myself.”
The man needed no urging, however: he seemed glad to tell his tale.
“It’s not really very much,” he said lowering his voice. “It was like this, you see, sir. The garage and my rooms lie down at an old farmhouse about a quarter-mile from the Lodge, and from my bedroom window I can see across the moor quite a way. It takes in that trail I was speaking of before, and along that track exactly I sometimes saw lights moving in a sort of wavering line. A bit faint, they were, and sort of dancing about and going out and coming on again, and at first I took them for marsh lights⁠—I’ve seen marsh lights down at our marshes at home⁠—marsh gas we call it. That’s what I thought at first, but I know better now.”
“You never went out to examine them closer?”
“No, sir, I did not” came the emphatic reply.
“Or asked any of the natives what they thought?”
The chauffeur gave a curious little laugh; it was a half shy, half embarrassed laugh. Yes, he had once got a native who was willing to say something, but it was only with difficulty that Norman persuaded him to repeat it.
“Well, sir, what he told me”⁠—again that embarrassed little laugh⁠—“the words he used were ‘It was the Gay People changing their hunting grounds.’ That’s what he said and crossed himself as he said it. They always changed their grounds at what he called the Equinox.”
“The Gay People⁠ ⁠… the Equinox.⁠ ⁠…”
The odd phrases were not new to Norman, but he heard them now as though for the first time, they had meaning. The equinox, the solstice, he knew naturally what the words meant, but the “Gay People” belonged to some inner phantasmagoria of his own he had hitherto thought of only imaginatively. It pertained, that is, to some private “imaginative creed” he believed in when he had been reading Yeats, James Stephens A.E., or when he was trying to write poetry of his own.
Now, side by side with this burly chauffeur from the sceptical South, he came up against it⁠—bang. And he admitted frankly to himself, it gave him a half-incredible thrill of wonder, delight and passion.
“The Gay People,” he repeated, half to himself, half to the driver. “The fellow called them that?”
“That’s wot he called them,” repeated the matter-of-fact chauffeur. “And they were passing,” he added, almost defiantly, as though he expected to be called a liar and deserved it, “passing in a stream of dancing lights along the Trod.”
“The Trod,” murmured Norman under his breath.
“The Trod,” repeated the man in a whisper, “that track I spoke of⁠—” and the car swerved, as though the touch on the wheel was unsteady for a second, though it instantly recovered itself as they swung into the drive.
The Lodge flew past, carrying a cross, Norman noticed, like all the other buildings; and a few minutes later the grey stone shooting-box, small and unpretentious, came in sight, Diana herself was on the step to welcome him, to his great delight.
“What a picture,” he thought, as he saw her in her tweeds, her retriever beside her, the hall lamp blazing on her goiden hair, one hand shading her eyes. Radiant, intoxicating, delicious, unearthly⁠—he could not find the words⁠—and he knew in that sudden instant that he loved her far beyond all that language could express. The dark background of the gray stone building, with the dim, mysterious moors behind, was exactly right. She stood there, framed in the wonder of two worlds⁠—his girl!
Yet her reception chilled him to the bone. Excited, bubbling over, as he was, his words of pleasure ready to tumble about each other, his heart primed with fairy tales and wonder, she had nothing to say except that⁠—tea was waiting, and that she hoped he had had a good journey. Response to his own inner convulsions there was none: she was polite, genial, cordial even, but beyond that⁠—nothing. They exchanged commonplaces and she mentioned that the grouse were plentiful, that her uncle had got some of the best “guns” in England⁠—which pleased his vanity for a moment⁠—and that she hoped he would enjoy himself.
His leaden reaction left him speechless. He felt convicted of boyish, idiotic fantasy.
“I asked particularly for you to come,” she admitted frankly, as they crossed the hall. “I had an idea somehow you’d like to be here.”
He thanked her, but betrayed nothing of his first delight now chilled and rendered voiceless.
“It’s your sort of country,” she added, turning towards him with a swish of her skirts. “At least, I think it is.”
“If you like it,” he returned quietly, “I certainly shall like it too.”
She stopped a moment and looked hard at him. “But of course I like it,” she said with conviction. “And it’s much lovelier than those Essex marshes.”
Remembering her first description of those Essex marshes, he thought of a hundred answers, but before the right one came to him he found himself in the drawing-room chatting to his hostess. Lady Digby. The rest of the house-party were still out on the moor.
“Diana will show you the garden before the darkness comes,” Lady Digby suggested presently. “It’s quite a pretty view.”
The “pretty view” thrilled Norman with its wild beauty, for the moor beyond stretched right down to the sea at Saltbeck, and in the other direction the hills ran away, fold upon fold, into a dim blue distance. The Lodge and its garden seemed an oasis in a wilderness of primeval loveliness, unkempt and wild as when God first made it. He was aware of its intense, seductive loveliness that appealed to all the strange, unearthly side of him, but at the same time he felt the powerful, enticing human seductiveness of the girl who was showing him round. And the two conflicted violently in his soul. The conflict left him puzzled, distraught, stupid, since first one, then the other, took the upper hand. What saved him from a sudden tumultuous confession of his imagined passion, probably, was the girl’s calm, almost cold, indifference. Obviously without response, she felt nothing of the tumult that possessed him.
Exchanging commonplaces, they admired the “pretty view” together, then turned back in due course to the house. “I catch their voices,” remarked Diana. “Let’s go in and hear all about it and how many birds they got.” And it was on the door of the French window that she suddenly amazed⁠—and, truth to tell⁠—almost frightened him.
“Dick,” she said using his first name, to his utter bewilderment and delight, and grasping his hand tightly in both of her own, “I may need your help,” She spoke with a fiery intensity. Her eyes went blazing suddenly. “It was here, you know, that mother⁠—went. And I think⁠—I’m certain of it⁠—they’re after me, too. And I don’t know which is right⁠—to go or to stay. All this”⁠—she swept her arm to include the house, the chattering room, the garden⁠— “is such rubbish⁠—cheap, nasty, worthless. The other is so satisfying⁠—its eternal loveliness, and yet⁠—” her voice dropped to a whisper⁠— “soulless, without hope or future. You may help me.” Her eyes turned upon him with a sudden amazing fire. “That’s why I asked you here.”
She kissed him on the eyes⁠—an impersonal, passionless kiss, and the next minute they were in the room, crowded, with the “guns” from a large shooting brake which had just arrived.
How Norman staggered in among the noisy throng and played his part as a fellow guest, he never understood. He managed it somehow, while in his heart sang the wild music of the Irish Fairy’s enticing whisper: “I kiss you and the world begins to fade.” A queer feeling came to him that he was going lost to life as he knew it, that Diana with her sweet passionless kiss had sealed his fate, that the known world must fade and die because she knew the way to another, lovelier region where nothing could ever pass or die because it was literally everlasting⁠—the state of evolution belonging to fairyland, the land of the deathless Gay People.⁠ ⁠…
Sir Hiram welcomed him cordially, then introduced him to the others, upon which followed the usual description by the guns of the day’s sport. They drank their whiskies and sodas, in due course they went up to dress for dinner, but after dinner there was no carousing, for their host bundled them all off to an early bed. The next day they were going to shoot the best beat on the moor and clear eyes and steady hands were important. The two drives for which Greystones was celebrated were to be taken⁠—Telegraph Hill and Silvermine⁠—both well known wherever shooting men congregated so that anticipation and excitement were understandable. An early bed was a small price to pay and Norman, keen and eager as any of them, was glad enough to get to his room when the others trooped upstairs. To be included as a crack shot among all these famous guns was, naturally, a great event to him. He longed to justify himself.
Yet his heart was heavy and dissatisfied, a strange uneasiness gnawed at him despite all his efforts to think only of the morrow’s thrill. For Diana had not come down to dinner, nor had he set eyes on her the whole evening. His polite enquiry about her was met by his host’s cheery laugh: “Oh, she’s all right, Norman, thank ’ee; she keeps to herself a bit when a shoot’s on. Shooting, you see, ain’t her line exactly, but she may come out with us tomorrow.” He brushed her tastes aside. “Try and persuade her, if you can. The air’ll do her good.”
Once in his room, his thoughts and emotions tried in vain to sort themselves out satisfactorily: there was a strange confusion in his mind, an uneasy sense of excitement that was half delight, half fearful anticipation, yet anticipation of he knew not exactly what. That sudden use of his familiar first name, the extraordinary kiss, establishing an unprepared intimacy, deep if passionless, had left him the entire evening in a state of hungry expectancy with nerves on edge. If only she had made an appearance at dinner, if only he could have had a further word with her I He wondered how he would ever get to sleep with this inner turmoil in his brain, and if he slept badly he would shoot badly.
It was this reflection about shooting badly that convinced him abruptly that his sudden “love” was not of the ordinary accepted kind; had he been humanly “in love,” no consideration of that sort could have entered his head for a moment. His queer uneasiness, half mixed with delight as it was, increased. The tie was surely of another sort.
Turning out the electric light, he looked from his window across the moor, wondering if he might see the strange lights the chauffeur had told him about. He saw only the dim carpet of the rolling moorland fading into darkness where a moon hid behind fleecy, drifting clouds. A soft, sweet, fragrant air went past him; there was a murmur of falling water. It was intoxicating; he drew in a deep delicious breath. For a second he imagined a golden-haired Diana, with flying hair and flaming eyes pursuing her lost mother midway between the silvery clouds and shadowy moor⁠ ⁠… then turned back into his room and flooded it with light⁠ ⁠… in which instant he saw something concrete lying on his pillow⁠—a scrap of paper⁠—no, an envelope. He tore it open.
“Always wear this when you go out. I wear one too. They cannot come up with you unless you wish, if you wear it. Mother ⁠…”
The word “mother,” full of imaginative suggestion, was crossed out; the signature was “Diana.” With a faint musical tinkle, a little silver crucifix slipped from the pencilled note and fell to the floor.
As Norman stood beside the bed with the note in his hand, and before he stooped to recover the crucifix, there fell upon him with an amazing certainty the eerie conviction that all this had happened before. As a rule this odd sensation is too fleeting to be retained for analysis; yet he held it now for several seconds without effort. Startled, he saw quite clearly that it was not passing in ordinary time, but somewhere outside ordinary time as he knew it. It has happened “before” because it was happening “always.” He had caught it in the act.
For a flashing instant he understood; the crucifix symbolised security among known conditions, and if he held to it he would be protected, mentally and spiritually, against a terrific draw into unknown conditions. It meant no more than that⁠—a support to the mind.
That antagonistic “draw” of terrific power, involved the nameless, secret yearnings of his fundamental nature. Diana, aware of this inner conflict, shared the terror and the joy. Her mother, whence she derived the opportunity, had yielded⁠—and had disappeared from life as humans know it. Diana herself was nuw tempted and afraid. She asked his help. Both he and she together, in some condition outside ordinary time, had met this conflict many times already. He had experienced all this before⁠—the incident of the crucifix, its appeal for help, the delight, the joy, the fear involved. And even as he realised all this, the strange, eerie sensation vanished and was gone, as though it never had been. It became unseizable, lost beyond recapture. It left him with a sensation of loss, of cold, of isolation, a realization of homelessness, yet of intense attraction towards a world unrealised.
He stooped, picked up the small silver crucifix, reread the pencilled note letter by letter, kissed the paper that her hand had touched, then sat down on the bed and smiled with a sudden gush of human relief and happiness. The eerie sensation had gone its way beyond recovery. That Diana had thought about him was all that mattered. This little superstition about wearing the crucifix was sweet and touching, and of course he would wear the thing against his heart. And see that she came out tomorrow with him too! His relief was sincere. Now he could sleep. And tomorrow he might not shoot too badly. But before he climbed into bed, he looked in his diary to find out when the equinox was due, and found to his astonishment that it was on the 23rd of September, and that tonight was the 21st! The discovery gave him something of a turn, but he soon fell asleep with the letter against his cheek and the little silver crucifix hung round his neck.
He woke next morning when he was called to find the sun streaming into his room, promising perfect shooting weather. In broad daylight the normal reactions followed as they usually do; the incidents of the day before now seemed slightly ridiculous⁠—his talk with Diana, the crucifix, the chauffeur’s fairytales above all. He had stumbled upon a nest of hysterical delusions, born of a mysterious disappearance many years ago. It was natural, he thought, as he shaved himself, that his host disliked all reference to the subject and its aftermath. For all that, as he went down to breakfast, he felt secretly comforted that he had hung the little silver crucifix round his neck. No one, at any rate, he reflected, could see it.
He had done full justice to the well stocked sideboard and was just finishing his coffee when Diana came into the empty room, and his mind, now charged with the prosaic prospects of the coming shoot, acknowledged a shock. Fact and imagination clashed. The girl was white and drawn. Before he could rise to greet her, she came straight across to the chair beside him.
“Dick,” she began at once, “have you got it on?”
He produced the crucifix after a moment’s fumbling.
“Of course I have,” he said. “You asked me to wear it.” Remembering the hesitation in his bedroom, he felt rather foolish. He felt foolish, anyhow, wearing a superstitious crucifix on a day’s shooting.
Her next words dispelled the feeling of incongruity.
“I was out early,” she said in a tense, low voice, “and I heard mother’s voice calling me on the moor. It was unmistakeable. Close in my ear, then far away. I was with the dog and the dog heard it too and ran for shelter. His hair was up.”
“What did you hear?” Norman asked gently, taking her hand.
“My pet name⁠—’Dis,’ ” she told him, “the name only mother used.”
“What words did you hear?” he asked, trembling in spite of himself.
“Quite distinctly⁠—in that distant muffled voice⁠—I heard her call: ‘Come to me, Dis, oh, come to me quickly!’”
For a moment Norman made no answer. He felt her hand trembling in his. Then he turned and looked straight into her eyes.
“Did you want to go?” he asked.
There was a pause before she replied. “Dick,” she said, “when I heard that voice, nothing else in the world seemed to matter⁠—!” at which moment her uncle’s figure, bursting in through the door, shouted that the cars were ready and waiting, and the conversation came to an abrupt end.
This abrupt interruption at the moment of deepest interest left Norman, as may be imagined, excusably and dreadfully disturbed. A word from his host on this particular shooting party was, of course, a command. He dared not keep these great “guns” waiting. Diana, too, shot out as though a bullet had hit her. But her last words went on ringing in his ears, in his heart as well:
“Nothing else in the world seemed to matter.” He understood in his deepest being what she meant. There was a “call” away from human things, a call into some unimaginable state of bliss no words described, and she had heard it, heard it in her mother’s voice⁠—the strongest tie humanity knows. Her mother, having left the world, sent back a message.
Norman, trembling unaccountably, hurried to fetch his gun and join the car, and Diana, obeying the orders of her uncle, was shoved into the Ford with her retriever. She had just time to whisper to him “Keep off the Trod⁠—don’t put a foot on it,” and the two cars whisked off and separated them.
The “shoot” took place, nevertheless, ordinarily, so far as Norman was concerned, for the hunter’s passion was too strong in him to be smothered. If his mind was mystical, his body was primitive. He was by nature a hunter before the Lord. The imaginative, mystical view of life, as with peasants and woodsmen, lay deep below. The first birds put an end to all reflection. He was soon too busy to bother about anything else but firing as fast as he could and changing his guns swiftly and smoothly. Breaking through this practical excitement, none the less, flashed swift, haunting thoughts and fancies⁠—Diana’s face and voice and eyes, her mother’s supernatural call, his own secret yearnings, and, above all, her warning about the Trod. Both sides of his mixed nature operated furiously. Apparently, he shot well, but how he managed it, heaven only knew.
The drive in due course was over and the pickup completed. Sir Hiram came over and asked if he would mind taking the outside butt at the next drive.
“You see,” he explained courteously, “I always ask the youngest of the party to take the outside, as it’s a devil of a walk for the old ’uns. Probably,” he added, “you’ll get more shooting than anyone, as the birds slip away over yonder butt down a little gully. So you’ll find it worth the extra swot!”
Norman and his loader set off on their long tramp, while the rest of the guns made their way down to the road where the cars would carry them as far as the track allowed. After nearly a mile’s detour Norman was puzzled by his loader striking across the heather instead of following the obvious path. He himself, naturally, kept to the smooth track. He had not gone ten yards along the track before the loader’s startled voice shouted at him:
“For the love, of God, sir, come off! You’re walking on the Trod!”
“It’s a good path,” cried Norman. “What’s wrong with it?”
The man eyed him a moment. “It’s the Trod, sir,” he said gravely, as though that were enough. “We don’t walk on it⁠—not at this time o’ year especially.” He crossed himself. “Come off it, sir, into the heather.”
The two men stood facing one another for a minute.
“If you don’t believe me, sir, just watch them sheep,” said the man in a voice full of excitement and emotion. “You’ll see they won’t put foot on it. Nor any other animal either.”
Norman watched a band of black-faced sheep move hesitatingly down the moorland slope. He was impatient to get on, half angry. For the moment he had forgotten all about Diana’s warning. Fuming and annoyed, he watched. To his amazement, the little band of black-faced sheep, on reaching the obvious path, jumped clear over it. They jumped the Trod. Not one of them would touch it. It was an astonishing sight. Each animal leapt across, as though the Trod might burn or injure them. They went their way across the rough heather and disappeared from sight.
Norman, remembering the warning uncomfortably, paused and lit a cigarette.
“That’s odd,” he said. “It’s the easiest way.”
“Maybe,” replied the loader. “But the easiest way may not be the best⁠—or safest.”
“The safest?”
“I’ve got children of me own,” said the loader.
It was a significant statement. It made Norman reflect a moment.
“Safest,” he repeated, remembering all he had heard, yet longing eagerly to hear more. “You mean, children especially are in danger? Young folks⁠—eh?⁠—is that it?” A moment later, he added, “I can quite believe it, you know, it’s a queer bit of country⁠—to my way of thinking.”
The understanding sympathy won the man’s confidence, as it was meant to do.
“And it’s equinox time, isn’t it?” Norman ventured further.
The man responded quickly enough, finding a “gun” who wouldn’t laugh at him. As with the chauffeur, he was evidently relieved to give some kind of utterance to fears and superstitions he was at heart ashamed of and yet believed in.
“I don’t mind for myself, sir,” he broke out, obviously glad to talk, “for I’m leaving these part as soon as the grouse shooting’s over, but I’ve two little ’uns up here just now, and I want to keep ’em. Too many young ’uns get lost on the moor for my liking. I’m sending ’em tomorrow down to my aunt at Crossways⁠—”
“Good for you,” put in Norman. “It’s the equinox just now, isn’t it? And that’s the dangerous time, they say.”
The loader eyed him cautiously a moment, weighing perhaps his value as a recipient of private fears, beliefs, fancies and the rest, yet deciding finally that Norman was worthy of his confidences.
“That’s what my father always said,” he agreed.
“Your father? It’s always wise to listen to what a father tells,” the other suggested. “No doubt he’d seen something⁠—worth seeing.”
A silence fell between them. Norman felt he had been, perhaps, too eager to draw the man out; yet the loader was reflecting merely. There was something he yearned to tell.
“Worth seeing,” the man repeated, “well⁠—that’s as may be. But not of this world, and wonderful, it certainly was. It put ice into his bones, that’s all I can swear to. And he wasn’t the sort to be fooled easy, let me tell you. It was on his dying bed he told me⁠—and a man doesn’t lie with death in his eyes.”
That Norman was standing idly on this important shoot was sufficient proof of his tremendous interest, and the man beyond question was aware of it.
“In daylight,” Norman asked quietly, assuming the truth of what he hoped to hear.
“It was just at nightfall,” the other said, “and he was coming from a sick friend at a farm beyond the Garage. The doctor had frightened him, I take it, so it was a bit late when he started for home across the moor and, without realising that it was equinox time, he found himself on the Trod before he knew it. And, to his terror, the whole place was lit up, and he saw a column of figures moving down it towards him. They was all bright and lovely, he described ’em, gay and terrible, laughing and singing and crying, and jewels shining in their hair, and⁠—worst of all⁠—he swears he saw young children who had gone lost on the moor years before, and a girl he had loved these twenty years back, no older than when he saw her last, and as gay and happy and laughing as though the passing years was nothing⁠—”
“They called to him?” asked Norman, strangely moved. “They asked him to join them?”
“The girl did,” replied the man. “The girl, he said, with no years to her back, drew him something terrible. ‘Come with us,’ he swears she sang to him, ‘come with us and be happy and young forever,’ and, if my father hadn’t clutched hold of his crucifix in time⁠—my God⁠—he would have gone⁠—”
The loader stopped, embarrassed lest he had told too much.
“If he’d gone, he’d have lost his soul,” put in Norman, guided by a horrible intuition of his own.
“That’s what they say, sir,” agreed the man, obviously relieved.
Simultaneously, they hurried on, Sir Hiram’s practical world breaking in upon this strange interlude. A big Shoot was in progress. They must not be late at their appointed place.
“And where does the Trod start?” Norman asked presently, and the man described the little cave of the Black Waters whence the beck, dark with the peat, ran thence towards the sea across the bleak moors. The scenery provided an admirable setting for the “fairytale” he had just listened to; yet his thoughts, as they ploughed forward through the heather, went back to the lovely, fascinating tale, to the superstitious dream of the “Gay People” changing their “hunting grounds” along that unholy Trod when the Equinox flamed with unearthly blazing, when the human young, unsatisfied with earthly pleasures, might be invited to join another ageless evolution that, if it knew no hope, shared at least an unstained, eternal, happy present. Diana’s temptation, her mother’s incredible disappearance, his own heart-shearing yearnings in the balance to boot, took strange shape as practical possibilities.
The cumulative effect of all he had heard, from chauffeur, loader, and from the girl herself, began, it may be, to operate, since the human mind, especially the imaginative human mind, is ever open to attack along the line of least resistance.
He stumbled on, holding his gun firmly, as though a modern weapon of destruction helped to steady his feet, to say nothing of his mind, now full of seething dreams. They reached the appointed butt. And hardly had they settled themselves in it than the first birds began to come, and all conversation was impossible. This was the celebrated “Silvermine Drive,” and Norman had never in his life seen so many grouse as he now saw. His guns got too hot to hold, yet still the grouse poured over.⁠ ⁠…
The Drive finished in due course, and after a hurried lunch came the equally famous Telegraph Hill Drive, where there were even more birds than before, and when this came to an end Norman found that his shoulder was sore from the recoil and that he had developed a slight gun-headache, so that he was glad enough to climb into the car that took him back to the Lodge and tea. The excitement, naturally had been great, the nervous hope that he had shot well enough to justify his inclusion in the great shoot had also played upon his vitality. He found himself exhausted, and after tea he was relieved to slip up to his bedroom for a quiet hour or two.
Lying comfortably on his sofa with a cigarette, thinking over the fire and fury of the recent hours, his thoughts turned gradually aside to other things. The hunter, it seemed, withdrew; the dreamer, never wholly submerged, reappeared. His mind reviewed the tales he had heard from the chauffeur and the loader, while the story of Diana’s mother, the strange words of the girl herself, took possession of his thoughts. Too weary to be critical, he remembered them. His own natural leaning enforced their possible truth, while fatigue made analysis too difficult to bother about, so that imagination cast its spell of glamour undefied.⁠ ⁠… He burned to know the truth. In the end he made up his mind to creep out the following night and watch the Trod. It would be the night of the equinox. That ought to settle things one way or the other⁠—proof or disproof. Only he must examine it in the daylight first.
It was disturbing at dinner to find that the girl was absent, had in fact, according to Sir Hiram, gone away for a day or so to see an old schoolfriend in a neighbouring town. She would be back, however, for the final shoot, he added, an explanation which Norman interpreted to mean that her uncle had deliberately sent her out of danger. He felt positive he was right. Sir Hiram might scorn such “rubbishy tales,” but he was taking no chances. It was at the equinox that his sister had mysteriously disappeared. The girl was best elsewhere. Nor could all the pleasant compliments about Norman’s good shooting on the two Drives conceal his host’s genuine uneasiness. Diana was “best elsewhere.”
Norman fell asleep with the firm determination that he must explore the Trod next day in good light, making sure of his landmarks and then creep out at night when the household was quiet, and see what happened.
There was no shooting next day. His task was easy. Keepers and dogs went out to pick up any birds that had been left from tlut previous day. After breakfast he slipped off across the waste of heather and soon found it⁠—a deep smooth groove running through occasional hollows where no water lay, nor any faintest track of man or beast upon its soft, black peaty surface. Obviously, it was a track through the deep heather no one⁠—neither man nor animal⁠—used. He again noted the landmarks carefully, and felt sure he could find it again in the darkness⁠ ⁠… and, in due course, the day passed along its normal course, the “guns” after dinner discussed the next day’s beat, and all turned in early in pleasurable anticipation of the shoot to come.
Norman went up to bed with a beating heart, for his plan to slip out of the sleeping house later and explore the moorland with its “haunted Trod,” was not exactly what a host expected of a guest. The absence of Diana, moreover, deliberately planned, added to his deep uneasiness. Her sudden disappearance to visit “an old school friend” was not convincing. Nor had she even left a line of explanation. It came to him that others besides the chauffeur and the loader took these fantastic fairytales seriously. His thoughts flew buzzing like bees outside a beehive.⁠ ⁠…
From his window he looked out upon the night. The moon, in her second quarter, shone brightly at moments, then became hidden behind fleecy clouds. Higlier up, evidently, a raging wind was driving, but below over the moorland a deathly stillness reigned. This stillness touched his nerves, and the dogs, howling in their kennels, added to a sense of superstitious uneasiness in his blood. The deep stillness seemed to hide a busy activity behind the silence. Something was stirring in the night, something out on the moor.
He turned back from the window and saw the lighted room, its cosy comfort, its well-lit luxury, its delicious bed waiting for weary limbs. He hesitated. The two sides of his nature clashed⁠ ⁠… but in the end the strange absence of Diana, her words, her abrupt sensational kiss, her odd silence⁠ ⁠… the quixotic feeling that he might help⁠—these finally decided him.
Changing quickly into his shooting clothes, and making sure that the lights in all the bedroom windows he could see were out, he crept down in stockinged feet to the front door, carrying a pair of tennis shoes in his hand. The front door was unlocked, opening without noise, so that he slipped quietly across the gravel drive on to the grass, and thence, having now put on his shoes, on to the moor beyond.
The house faded behind him, patches of silvery moonlight shone through thin racing clouds, the taste of the night air was intoxicating. How could he ever have hesitated? The wonder and mystery of the wild country side, haunted or otherwise, caught him by the throat. As he climbed the railings leading from the cultivated garden to the moor, there came a faint odd whispering sound behind him, so that he paused and listened for a moment. Was it wind or footsteps? It was neither⁠—merely the flap of his open coat trailing across the fence. Bah! his nerves were jumpy. He laughed⁠—almost laughed aloud, such was the exhilaration in him⁠—and moved on quickly through the weird half lights. And for some reason his spirits rose, his blood went racing; here was an adventure the other side of his nature delighted in, yet this “other side” now took ominously the upper hand.
How primitive, after all, these “shooting parties” were! For men of brains and character, the best that England could produce, to spend all this time and money, hunting as the cavemen hunted! The fox, the deer, the bird⁠—earlier men needed these for food, yet thousands of years later the finest males of the twentieth century⁠—sportsmen all⁠—spent millions on superior weapons, which gave the hunted animal no chance, to bring them down. Not to be a “sportsman” was to be an inferior Englishman⁠ ⁠…! The “sportsman” was the flower of the race. It struck him, not for the first time, as a grim, a cheap, ideal. Was there no other climax of chivalric achievement more desirable?
This flashed across his mind as a hundred times before, while yet he himself, admittedly, was a “sportsman” born. Against it, at the same time, rose some strange glamour of eternal, deathless things that took no account of killing, things that caught his soul away in ecstasy. Fairy tales, of course, were fairy tales, yet they enshrined the undying truths of life and human nature within their golden “nonsense,” catching at the skirts of radiant wonder whispering ageless secrets of the soul, giving hints of ineffable glories that lay outside the normal scales of space and time as accepted by the reasoning mind. And this attitude now rose upon him like a wild ungovernable wind of spring, fragrant, delicious, intoxicating. Fairies, the Little People, the “Gay People” happy dwellers in some nonhuman state⁠ ⁠…
Diana’s mother had disappeared, yearning with secret, surreptitious calls for her daughter to come and join her. The girl herself acknowledged the call and was afraid, while yet her practical, hard-boiled uncle took particular trouble to keep her out of the way. Even for him, typical “sportsman,” the time of the equinox was dangerous. These reflections, tumbling about his mind and heart, flooded Norman’s being, while his yearning and desire for the girl came over him like a flame.
The moor, meanwhile, easy enough to walk on in the daytime, seemed unexpectedly difficult at night, the heather longer, the ground very uneven. He was always putting his legs into little hollows that he could not see, and he was relieved when at last he could make out the loom of the Garage which was one of his landmarks. He knew that he had not much further to go before he reached the Trod,
The turmoil in his mind had been such that he had paid little attention to the occasional slight sounds he heard as though somebody were at his heels, but now, on reaching the Trod, he became uneasily convinced that someone was not far behind him. So certain, indeed, was he of someone else that he let himself down silently into the deep heather and waited.
He listened intently, breathing very softly. The same instant he knew that he was right. Those sounds were not imagination. Footsteps were at his heels. The swish through the heather of a moving body was unmistakeable. He caught distinct footsteps then. The footsteps came to a pause quite near to where he crouched. At which moment exactly, the clouds raced past the moon, letting down a clear space of silvery light, so that he saw the “follower” brilliantly defined.
It was Diana.
“I knew it,” he said half aloud, “I was sure of it long ago,” while his heart, faced with a yearning hope and fear, both half fulfilled, yet gave no leap of relief or pleasure. A shiver ran up and down his spine. Crouching there deep among the heather on the edge of the Trod, he knew more of terror than of happiness. It was all too clear for misunderstanding. She had been drawn irresistibly on the night of the equinox to the danger zone where her mother had so mysteriously “disappeared.”
“I’m here,” he added with a great effort in the same low whisper. “You asked my help. I’m here to meet you⁠ ⁠… dear.⁠ ⁠…”
The words, even if he actually uttered them died on his lips. The girl, he saw, stood still a moment, gazing in a dazed way, as though puzzled by something that obstructed her passage. Like a sleep walker, she stared about her, beautiful as a dream, yet only half conscious of her surroundings. Her eyes shone in the moonlight, her hands were half outstretched, yet not towards himself.
“Diana,” he heard himself crying, “can you see me? Do you see who I am? Don’t you recognize me? I’ve come to help⁠—to save⁠—you!”
It was plain she neither heard nor saw him standing there in front of her. She was aware of an obstructing presence, no more than that. Her glazed, shining eyes looked far beyond him-along the Trod. And a terror clutched him that, unless he quickly did the right thing, she would be lost to him forever.
He sprang to his feet and went towards her, but with the extraordinary sensation that he at once came up against some intervening wall of resistance that made normal movement difficult. It was almost like forcing his way through moving water or a drift of wind, and it was with an effort that he reached her side and stood now close against her.
“Diana!” he cried, “Dis⁠—Dis,” using the name her mother used. “Can’t you see who I am? Don’t you know me? I’ve come to save you⁠—” and he stretched his hands towards her. There was no response; she made no sign.
“I’ve come to lead you back⁠—to lead you home⁠—for God’s sake, answer me, look into my eyes!”
She turned her head in his direction, as though to look into his face, but her eyes went past him towards the moonlit moor beyond. He noticed only, while she stared with those unseeing eyes, that her left hand fumbled weakly at a tiny crucifix that hung on a thin silver chain about her neck. He put out his hand and seized her by the arm, but the instant he touched her he found himself suddenly powerless to move. There came this strange arrest. And at the same instant, the whole Trod became startlingly lit up with a kind of unearthly radiance, and a strange greenish light shone upon the track right across the moor beyond where they stood. A deep terror for himself as well as for her rose over him simultaneously. It came to him, with a shock of ice, that his own soul as well as hers, lay in sudden danger.
His eyes turned irresistibly towards the Trod, so strangely shining in the night. Though his hand still touched the girl, his mind was caught away in phantasmal possibilities. For two passions seized and fought within him: the fierce desire to possess her in the world of men and women, or to go with her headlong, recklessly, and share some ineffable ecstasy of happiness beyond the familiar world where ordinary time and space held sway. Her own nature already held the key and knew the danger.⁠ ⁠… His whole being rocked.
The two incompatible passions gored the very heart in him. In a flash he realized his alternative⁠—the dreary desolation of human progress with its grinding future, the joy and glory of a soulless happiness that reason denied and yet the heart welcomed as an ultimate truth. These two!
Yet of what value and meaning could she ever be to him as wife and mother if she were now drawn away⁠—away to where her mother now eternally passed her golden, timeless life? How could he face this daily exile of her soul, this hourly isolation, this rape of her normal being his earthly nature held so dear and precious? While⁠—should he save her, keeping her safe against the human hearth⁠—how should he hold her to him, he himself tainted with the golden poison⁠ ⁠… ?
Norman saw both sides with remorseless clarity in that swift instant while the Trod took on its shining radiance. His reasoning mind, he knew, had sunk away; his heart, wildly beating, was uppermost. With a supreme effort he kept his touch upon Diana’s arm. His fingers clutched at the rough tweed of her sleeve. His entire being seemed rapt in some incredible ecstasy. He stood, he stared, he wondered, lost in an ineffable dream of beauty. One link only with the normal he held to like a vice⁠—his touch upon her rough tweed sleeve, and, in his fading memory, the picture of a crucifix her weakening fingers weakly fumbled.
Figures were now moving fast and furious along the Trod; he could see them approaching from the distance. It was an inspiring, an intoxicating vision, and yet quite credible, with no foolish phantasmagoria of any childish sort. He saw everything as plainly as though he watched a parade in Whitehall, or a procession at some southern Battle of Flowers. Yet lovely, happy, radiant⁠—and irresistibly enticing. As the figures came nearer, the light increased, so that it was obvious they emanated light of their own against the dark moorland. Nor were the individual figures particularly striking, least of all sensational. They seemed “natural,” yet natural only because they were true and justified.
In the lead, as they drew nearer, Norman saw a tall dark man riding a white horse, close behind him a fair shining woman in a green dress, her long, golden hair falling to her waist. On her head he saw a circlet of gold in which was set a red stone that shone and glowed like burning flame. Beside her was another woman, dark and beautiful, with white stones sparkling in her hair as diamonds or crystals sparkle. It was a gorgeous and a radiant sight. Their faces shone with the ecstasy of youth. In some indescribable way they all spread happiness and joy about them, their eyes blazing with a peace and beneficence he had never seen in any human eyes.
These passed, and more and more poured by, some riding, some walking, young and old and children, men with hunting spears and unstrung bows, the youthful figures with harps and lyres, and one and all making friendly gestures of invitation to come and join them, as they flowed past silently. Silently, yes, silently, without a sound of footsteps or of rustling heather, silently along the illuminated Trod, and yet, silent though their passing was, there came to him an impression of singing, laughter, even an air of dancing. Such figures, he realized, could not move without rhythm, rhythm of sound and gesture, for it was as essential to them as breathing. Happy, radiant, gay they were, free forever from the grinding effort and struggle of the world’s strenuous evolutionary battles⁠—free, if soulless. The “Gay People” as the natives called them. And the sight wrenched at the deepest roots of his own mixed being. To go with them and share their soulless bliss forever⁠ ⁠… or to stay and face the grim battle of Humanity’s terrific⁠—noble, yes⁠—but almost hopeless, evolution?
That he was torn in two seemed an understatement. The pain seared and burned him in his very vitals. Diana, the girl, drew him as with some power of the stars themselves, and his hand still felt the tweed of her cloth beneath his fingers. His mind and heart, his nerves, his straining muscles, seemed fused in a fury of contradictions and acceptances. The glorious procession flowed streaming by, as though the stars had touched the common moorland earth, dripping their lavish gold in quiet glory⁠—when suddenly Diana wrenched herself away and ran headlong towards them.
A golden-haired woman, he saw, had stepped out of the actual Trod, and had come to a halt directly in front of where he stood. Radiant and wonderful, she stood for a moment poised.
“Dis⁠ ⁠… Dis⁠ ⁠…” he heard in tones like music. “Come⁠ ⁠… come to me. Come and join us! The way is always open. There are no regrets⁠ ⁠…!”
The girl was half way to her mother before he could break the awful spell that held him motionless. But the rough cloth of her sleeve held clutched between his fingers, and with it the broken chain that caught her little cruciiix. The silver cross swung and dangled a moment, then dropped among the heather.
It was as he stooped frantically to recover it that Fate played that strange, unusual card she keeps in reserve for moments when the world seems lost; for, as he fell, his own chain and crucifix, to which he had not once given a thought, flicked up and caught him on the lip. Thinking it was a broken edge of torn heather that stung him into pain, he dashed it aside⁠—only to find it was the foolish metal symbol Diana had made him promise to wear, in his own safety. It was the sharp stab of pain, not the superstitious mental reaction, that roused immediate action in him.
In a second he was on his feet again, and a second later he had overtaken the striding girl and had both arms possessingly round her figure. An instant afterwards his lips were on her own, her head and shoulders torn backwards against his breast.
“Dis!” he cried wildly, “we must stay here together! You belong to me! I hold you tight⁠—forever⁠ ⁠… here!”
What else he cried he hardly knows. He felt her weight sink back into his arms. It seems he carried her. He felt her convulsive weeping sobs against his heart. Her arms clung tightly round him.
In the distance he saw the line of moving figures die fading off into the enveloping moorland, dipping down into the curving dimness. Clouds raced back across the moon. There was no sound, the wind lay still, no tumbling beck was audible, the peewits slept.
Putting his own coat about her, he carried her home⁠ ⁠… and in due course he married her; he married Diana, he married Dis as well, a queer, lovely girl, but a girl without a soul, almost without a mind⁠—a girl as commonplace as the radiant nonentity pictured with shining teeth on the cover of a popular magazine⁠—a standardized creature whose essence had “gone elsewhere.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1951, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 72 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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