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This text has been proofread but is not guaranteed to be free from errors. Corrections to the original text have been left in place.
Title: Development. A Novel by W. Bryher with a Preface by
	    Amy Lowell, an electronic edition
Author: Bryher, Annie Winifred Ellerman
Publisher: The Macmillan Company
Place published: 
Date: 1920
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Bryher, W. [Annie Winifred Ellerman]DEVELOPMENT: A NOVEL BY W. BRYHER
WITH A PREFACE BY AMY LOWELLNEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANYCONTENTSBOOK I 
EPIC CHILDHOOD
CHAPTER I 
THE AGE OF DISCOVERY. . .3
CHAPTER II
HISTORY. . .16
CHAPTER III
HIEROGLYPHICS. . .26
CHAPTER IV
TRUANT WITH ADVENTURE. . .41
CHAPTER V 
ALMOND-BLOSSOM. . .55 
CHAPTER VI
APRIL. . .62BOOK II BONDAGE
CHAPTER I
TRAGIC REALITY. . .77
CHAPTER II
A CAPTIVE YEAR. . .95BOOK III TRANSITION
CHAPTER I
MIRAGE. . .123
CHAPTER II
"VERS LIBRE" . . .135
CHAPTER III
BARRIERS. . .143
CHAPTER IV
SALT WATER. . .155
CHAPTER V
THE COLOUR OF WORDS. . .163
CHAPTER VI
VISUAL IMAGINATION. . .180PREFACE
BY AMY LOWELLTHIS is a singular book; in many ways, a remarkable book. To any one interested in the reasons why of personality (as I confess myself to be), it cannot fail to provoke attention. The autobiographic novel has an illustrious ancestry, the autobiography masquerading as novel is almost as numerous a clan. Is Development the granddaughter of Jane Eyre or of Obermann? If the former, Nancy is a finely conceived character - study; if the latter, we are face to face with a young lady the least to be said of whom is that she is unlike anybody else.This is the record of the growth--not yet of a soul, that may come--but of a mind. Through a series of deft touches, we see a small, lonely, imaginative child gradually evolving into an artist. From the first page in which the little girl of four is sitting in a box which "was really a boat," to the last chapter of aphorisms--chippings of the artistic egg--slowly, very slowly, the character is built up for us. A strange, contradictory character, supersensitive to a certain set of impressions, quite cold to others; a character overweighted on one side, leaning heavily to a bias, and yet always with the desire to stand upright, to fill the empty places, to tread clearly and evenly, to see the world as a whole. Little by little the girl realizes her 1imitations, strains against them--pitifully inadequate struggle for so gifted a being in an environment where her subtle psychological needs are evidently but vaguely understood. And yet, is that true, after all? For the result has certainly been the creation in Nancy of all sorts of intuitions and understandings, of a delicate colour sense, of a rare perception of the possibilities in words. I think I have never met or read of any one with a keener or more conscious realization of the various beauty of words. They are to her what pigment is to the painter, what tone is to the musician. To most people, even to most authors, words are chiefly symbols; to Nancy, they have an essence of their own, a vibration in themselves quite apart from their connotations. Nancy is evidently a writer born. "When I am older I will write a book" is the burden of her childhood's years. At nine years old she starts her first literary venture. Her mind 1S filled with the clash and clamour of Pope's Iliad, augmented by a boy's story-book of the second Punic War. She falls in love with Carthage, and so she begins her story: "Hanno was a Carthaginian boy. He was nine years old. He was very glad because he was going on his first campaign." Nothing precocious happily, for precociousness in nine cases out of ten ends in abortion. Her hopes are beyond her power of expression. The later Nancy records this episode with charming humour, particularly the end where the little girl, lying awake, suddenly remembers that she has forgotten to mention Carthage itself, and creeps out of bed to add to her one accomplished paragraph: "Carthage was a great city.Nancy speaks of her childhood as "epic," and so indeed her imaginings undoubtedly made it. The family were in the habit of spending their winters abroad, and Nancy is taken to Italy, Sicily, Egypt, Spain. She develops a thirst for history, undoubtedly fostered by the long hours spent in museums. At first she rebels at these, and her mind wanders away to a puppy she has seen on the steps or to the donkey she has ridden the day before. But at last her curiosity betrays her, history books make armour and pottery comprehensible; she learns of the past not only through books, but through a series of object lessons. "Fairy Tales delighted her but little," she records; fact is the thing which charms. It is always the actual which stirs her, even if the actual be written in the past tense. Always, from beginning to end, her creative power moves about the real. Here are a few examples of her gift for words playing upon a thing actually seen:"A clock had long ago struck ten in the clear Scillonian air. The black stems of scattered masts were lit by gold buds.""The air was filled with a sudden richness, the scent of slumbering grass.""Sunset carved the eastern islands out of grape-blue darkness with a gold knife."She speaks of waves as "dented blue or curved racing green"; says of the Scillies that "untouched by any spirit of historical antiquity they breathed freshness; as though, a bubble on the lips of the sea, each had been blown to  reality that morning." The two poems in the book are fine, imaginative studies in the creation of atmosphere, in that power of understanding the essence of places which is the author's especial excellence.But the epic childhood is suddenly broken. Nancy is sent to school. She resented this bitterly; in fact, the author is at no pains to hide the fact that she still resents it. And yet it is evident that this brooding child needed human contact if ever mortal did. One can imagine the bewildered family cudgelling their brains as to what to do with this hypersensitive, bookish, lonely little person. School was not a success. She set herself to hate it, and did so most successfully. And yet it did something for her. For the first time in the volume, persons, not mere shadows, walk through her pages. The head mistress, Miss Sampson, is excellently drawn. Her speech to the Sixth Form on the occasion of the "row" is one of the best things in the book; and later, when lecturing the school on the necessity of keeping things in their places, she breaks off to ask, "Has any one seen my fountain-pen? I have mislaid it for two days," Nancy for the first time makes use of irony, just the touch needed to balance her emphasis of beauty, the touch which marks the novelist.Irony once discovered, Nancy does not spare herself. With relentless analysis, she says, "The indifference of others assured Nancy in her belief she was a poet; expression broke to lines of echoed verse and worse thought." She calls herself "a child of eighteen," and such she appears really to have been. For all her critical faculty, evidenced in the chapter "The Colour of Words," she seems incapable of growing up. The book is indeed development, but the end is not on the last page, that is to come, perhaps In the next volume promised, perhaps in others not yet written.The "echoed verse and worse thought" are published, which proves the family to have been more sympathetic than wise, and Nancy's irony plays cheerfully about the ineptitudes of reviewers. But most delightful of all is the portrait of Mrs. North, who, after turning over thc leaves of the precious volume, but reading nothing, lays it aside with the confident dictum: "Child, you will be a great poet.  Mrs. North is a real joy as she flutters through a scene or two. Admirable the picture of her at a schoolgirl tea, where "she rushed up" to a group of her guests, "a plate in each hand, knelt on one knee before them, and chattered."If Nancy's childhood was epic, the chapter "Salt Water" is lyric. Here the artist has full play, and we feel that Nancy is at last coming into her own.The chapter on "Vers Libre" is only partly concerned with that all-absorbing topic. It is really the reaction of Nancy's first contact with the moderns, in this case the masters of modern French poetry. The criticism is often most trenchant; it is no immature child who says of Régnier: "His prose had all the quality of poetry, was often more emotional than his verse." This is art; this she understands. But it is a child again writing of Fielding who can speak of its being "amusing" to read of Amelia. Amusement is scarcely an intelligent emotion to experience before the stark and terrible tragedy of which that sad lady is the heroine.Indeed our author, or her puppet, is a baffling and intriguing personality. As a little girl, "she was sure that if she hoped enough she would turn into a boy," and the fact that the transformation has not taken place seems to be a strange and ever-present grief to her. Much of her energy is taken up in warring against the pricks of place, sex, and opportunity. In a sort of vague insight, she realizes that expression will free her spirit, but the wide ranges of creative imagination are denied her. She cannot make through the power of vision. "It was intolerable to write of any mood she had not personally experienced" is the keynote and the barrier of her artistic impulse, but to it we owe this illuminating bit of autobiography. How will she plan her literary future? Poet, novelist, critic--she has the potentialities of all three. Which will she be at pains to develop? An unusual young person, whether she be heroine or merely author, and one whose farther steps every reader of this book will wish to follow. No better study of the growth of an artist's mind has been written, I think; it is all here, all the helps and all the hindrances. Whether as novel or fact, the book is a true record of a talent gradually breaking into flower, of a life slowly growing into cognizance of itself and of that which it was created absolutely to do.BOOK I  EPIC CHILDHOOD"The world is yet unspoiled for you."H. D.CHAPTER ITHE AGE OF DISCOVERYIADVENTURE and the salt edges of the sea beat against the window clamorous through the rain.Nancy was sitting in a box at the edge of the nursery table, listening to the Swiss Family Robinson being read to her aloud. The box was really a boat, and by the exercise of some imagination, the uncompromising squareness of its edges rounded into a tub, and helped by the noisy swirl of raindrops against the glass, there was no difficulty in believing that the distant chair (which was land) could scarcely be attained. The wind caught words and drowned them in ts vehemence. Outside was hurricane.It was fun to play; it was fun to hear of strange islands, buffaloes, boys slashing a path through sugar-canes; but the morning was wistful with the half-expressed desire, "If only I could have lived in an age when something happened."Her rightful inheritance, the world of venturing story-books, was dead. Her days passed unpleasantly free from danger. True, when she was fourteen she would run away and be a sailor, but that was ten years distant; it was so long to wait that sailing ships might be then, as she had heard them say, "extinct."She could never remember a time she had not wanted to go to sea. Waves, dented blue or curved racing green, the fishing ships that moved bird-like across the water, seemed all that was left of a time when stowaways went to sea, climbed masts, rode through forests and tramped over the mountains in far places, or hunted for seals and whales. She grew tired of play, tired of listening to mere words. Would nothing ever happen any more?The door flung open. Amid quick sentences and ensuing tumult Nancy was thrust into her outdoor clothes, into an old cap worn only on wet days, and taken, bewildered, breathless, to the actual edge of the sea." Wreck." Lip to lip against the masterful wind scattered the alarm. Already the lifeboat waited to be launched; crowds filled the desola- tion of the beach. The blue asphalt of the front was flooded with puddles, but for once all were too excited to blame Nancy if she splashed in them. The sea was a wide mass of luminous metal, faint silver here and there where a flickering light caught it, or a grey hollow revealing the tumult underneath; and beyond the clamorous horizon, sailors, actual sailors, even now prepared to launch their boats, and were in real danger of never reaching shore.It seemed a page from a story-book that Nancy watched instead of read. That with her own eyes she could see peril and preparations for rescue had all the texture of an imaginary dream. Hail and spray rapidly beat a sense of salt reality into her thought till, exultant with discovery that wildness was yet alive and might be hers, she hurried joyously along the beach to be lifted up to see the men in cork belts and sou'westers ready to begin their voyage. A parting of the waves, a vivid shout, and the lifeboat slid into the water, vanishing in the hollows, or flung, a struggling fish, upright against a roll of wave. Gusts of wind caught Nancy as they turned towards home, lifting her till she wondered if she would blow away, like the toy vessels children sailed and lost in summer-time. The savage rain stung her eye- lids and blent with wind and sea and sky in an immense and thundering force, but she did not care, roughness was beauty to her, adventure had returned.Next morning oranges heaped gold among the rank sea-grass or rolled from broken barrels on the wreckage in the sand.IIStorm ever remained a profound association of infancy, storm and a longing to run away. There were days when she desired utter uncontrollable freedom so much that she had to escape from sight, were it but to hide at the bottom of the garden till the fit had passed, days she longed to be a boy and go to sea. This was not to be traced to any strictness, she had more liberty than most children; it was simply a touch of natural wildness the restraint of later years was never to eradicate.Her one regret was that she was a girl. Never having played with any boys, she imagined them wonderful creatures, welded of her favourite heroes and her own fancy, ever seeking adventures, making them, if they were not ready to their hand, and, of course, wiser than any grown-up people. She tried to forget, to escape any reference to being a girl, her knowledge of them being confined to one book read by accident, an impression they liked clothes and were afraid of getting dirty. She was sure if she hoped enough she would turn into a boy.Her days were spent in the garden, on the beach, or in the lanes, picking wild flowers or blackberries, or playing at "exploration," her favourite game. Before she was five she taught herself to read, picking it up as she turned the pages; weaving her own romances round each picture, till the reins of the real stuffed donkey mounted on rockers threatened to hang in idleness, forgotten.Fairy tales delighted her but little. Unconsciously she cared for nothing but what had actually happened, or what was possible to happen. The long walks, when, to make up for play, her father told her of foreign places with magical names, outrivalled in enchantment any legendary fables. Best of all she loved the hours when, ranging the contents of her Noah's ark carefully, two by two, upon the floor, her mother spoke of gondolas and palaces and streets where girls let down a basket from the upper windows to draw up lettuces or carrots, of a city ruined by molten lava ages and ages ago, and of a museum there where lay the bread baked, the lamp used, the day of its destruction, now crusted to hard metal with the volcanic liquid, which Nancy herself would see some day, when she was just a little bigger. Spring evenings when she came in with spoil of early primroses, she would hear of sharp snowy peaks above the resinous pine forests, gentian, and wild Alpine roses. Thus, to Nancy travel grew wonderful as a book, an inevitable thing, her proper heritage.Infancy is the real period of exploration, but discoveries crowded so thickly upon Nancy that she ceased to think of them as such; in fact, when in years to come she remembered childhood, unconsciousness was the only word that was any adequate picture of the first fourteen years of her life. Yet the white and tenuous roots, desire of expression, love of freedom, a wish to go to sea, forming the base of her individuality, were already very deep. The days, the little days before they changed to the larger radiance of childhood, passed in happiness, complete with a peace that held no restlessness while month by month flung to her, basketwise, impressions and fresh beauties, sea flowers, the roseal flush clouding the August peaches, a lane heavy with nut or blackberry, March, when the spirit of childhood seemed itself enshrined in the primroses-colour of moonlight--and the soft warm feel of sand, the transparency of seaweed under her bare feet. Her one unrealised desire was possession--like a boy--of a pocket-knife, her one disappointment was the refusal of a live pet monkey; yet there was ever a poignant sadness about these little days, when years later she remembered them, of something for ever lost, of a promise never to be fulfilled.But always truant among her dreams even of ships and sailors was the thought, "When I am older I will write a book." With years curious things seemed to happen, but there was the ring of a boast about this desire, something of the impossibility of a fairy tale, remote in its chance of ever coming true.III"Please may she come and play with me?" The speaker pointed a jam-stained finger at Nancy, peeping in half-frightened amazement between the bars of the gate. Nancy had played but seldom with other children, she was not sure that she wanted to go with the stranger. She heard a whispered consultation, while the child from next door regarded them with impudent eyes."Nancy, run along and play with the little girl, she wants to show you her garden"A little unwillingly she trotted off."What's your name?" asked her companion, licking the jam from her fingers."Nancy.""Mine's Sylvia."She was a strong assertive child, half a head taller than Nancy and bigger in proportion."I've been wanting to play with you for a week. Didn't you hear me call through the hedge yesterday?"Nancy shook her head. Unafraid of any one grown up, she was a bit shy of this infant with her queer rough speech.The friendship lasted a few brief weeks. At first the novelty of a playmate who, unlike a toy elephant, could argue, quarrel, and on occasion fight, prevented much resentment at the way Nancy's carefully cherished animals were scratched and broken. The end came on a summer evening after tea. Nancy possessed a tricycle which she was wont to ride about the garden, but since Sylvia had come, fear the garden beds might be destroyed had forbidden its use. That evening, on promise of behaving quietly, they were allowed to take it up and down the quiet road outside.Sylvia snatched the handle at once."You ride it up and I'll ride it down," suggested Nancy."Right," nodded Sylvia, racing off. Nancy ran behind her to the top of the road, watched her sweep round a little clumsily, up and back a second time."It's my turn now," Nancy interrupted, as Sylvia moved to ride down the road again. Sylvia laughed defiantly."I've got it and I'm going to keep it."It was the injustice that stung Nancy. It was her turn and her tricycle. Furiously she snatched at the handle, at the seat. The tricycle fell over, Sylvia caught at Nancy's hair, blow followed blow, there were yells of anger, both were lost in a whirlwind of waving arms. Soon a crowd collected; the grocer's boy, leaving his parcels, urged them on. Small, but quick and reckless, Nancy danced round her opponent in circles, uttering shouts of triumph, about to knock Sylvia to the ground when some one gripped her collar, gripped Sylvia likewise, and led them both, howling and incoherent, up the road. Nancy's mother, hearing a noise, had feared an accident, had arrived in time to see the ending of the fight. Twenty minutes later Nancy lay dejectedly in a dull and darkened room, a full hour before her proper bedtime, meditating on the injustice of the world. It was not that she minded being led up the road in disgrace so much, she knew she was never punished at home unless she deserved it, but that Sylvia, to whom she had surrendered toys and leadership for all these weeks, should dare to ride away with her tricycle, in defiance of all justice, and that their fight should be stopped just as she would have knocked her down, perplexed her unshaped ideas of morality. She hoped, kicking the bed savagely, that Sylvia also was in a darkened room; there was a savage joy in desiring that Sylvia got no supper. Henceforth, her games should be shared with her toy elephant, a safer and a quieter companion.IVWith seven the age of discovery deepened into childhood. Rumour hinted at a possible journey that winter to Milan and Venice, perhaps the Italian Lakes. Toys grew more and more neglected; even her stuffed animals were laid aside for books. On her birthday she was given a volume of tales from Shakespeare, not Lamb's, but a more elementary picture-book that disputed the right even of the Swiss Family Robinson for chief place in her affections. The elemental tales of the plays, growing even as she grew, passed so utterly within her nature that it was hard to realise, after a few months, there was a time when Viola and Imogen had been unknown. The mere fact of the frequent assuming by the Elizabethan maiden of "the lovely garnish of a boy" captured an imagination eager enough to copy; she was ever impatient of the end where they changed to a girl's attire. Odd bits of the stories would attract her--Pericles finding his armour, smelling of brine and sand; the journey of Imogen to Milford Haven; Caliban snaring sea-mells among the wilder parts of the island. Perhaps a sense of the eternal beauty of the mere names moved her even in infancy; disdaining the other literature of childhood she lived in Illyria, fanciful, yet so vivid, an unimagined reality. Near Christmas-time they went away.VFrom a train brilliant with light they huddled into a gondola, into the violet denseness of a stormy night. A peculiar state of wind and tide had combined that year to flood the great square; St. Mark's shivered with the touch of water, and the wind had a northern keenness about it as they left the station. Nancy's first impression of Venice was that gondolas were uncomfortable things; she could see nothing in the blackness, only the unrestful water stirred in miniature splashes against the bow. Up a canal, through a door, right into the flooded hall of the hotel, and amid a chatter of vivid Italian Nancy was lifted on to dry land, half-way up a staircase piled, as far as the steps were dry, with rescued furniture.Much of this first Italian visit passed into vague remembrance obscured by later and more vivid hours at Naples or at Rome, but the outlines of Venice, boldly carven, never quite passed from thought. St. Mark's was perhaps her first conscious impression of richness. St. Mark's contrasted with Milan, that colder city, seen on the way home. Child-like, it was neither the pictures nor the quaint drawings, the moulded lions nor the gondolas with their long clumsy oars, that attracted Nancy's eyes but the fluttering mass of pigeons in the centre of the square. Every afternoon she would climb the Campanile, making it a game to see how fast she could run up; then, her hands brimming with grain, she lured a flight of metallic wings across to the far edge of the square, watching the soft and eager heads as three or four birds perched on her arms or sought the spilt gold on the pavement. It was a sad day when she turned from this, from the sunshine and the water to the coldness of the North.It was not until the following year she became really intimate with Italy, coming to Rome, to the Forum, where she gathered an antique bit of marble, to Naples crowded with the open life she loved, the aquarium where whole hours were spent watching the sleepy sea-anemones, sea horses, crested as a wave, the feeding of the octopus, and the strange southern iridescent fish darting and shifting in the bubbling water. From this, from days at Capri or at Baia, some weeks at Florence, with enforced confinement to the museum, came near to being an irksome end to her second winter spent abroad.CHAPTER IIHISTORY"I HATE Michel Angelo." The custodian looked shocked, a passing visitor smiled. Nancy stared at the head of the faun with more than a little fear she would surrender to some compelling power in the rough marble, gazing up at her with such inscrutable eyes, but she was tired of Michel Angelo, the name followed them everywhere, besides nobody could explain to her what a faun was. Outside in the sunshine there was a puppy playing, a brown puppy chasing its tail, and though she was aware it must long ago have strayed into one of the dark Florentine streets, an unconquerable hope that it lingered on the steps prompted her to be impatient of each delay. A live puppy held a vastly greater interest for her than a cold statue. "I hate him," she repeated, looking for sympathy to her mother who had delivered her from the tyranny of museums on more than one memorable occasion."We shall only be another half-hour now, and if you are good you shall have a new book this afternoon."Contented with the promise, Nancy was silent. A book was far more exciting than a puppy she could not touch.Museums were cold places, there could be no playing in them. There were statues, many of them broken, all with long uncomprehended names. The shelves were lined with pottery, red or black, and curiously fashioned green bronze lustred with age. Always in answer to her persistent inquiries she was told they were "vases" or "lamps." Even to herself she lacked power to put into words her desire, impetuous to escape into speech, to know who had used these vessels, when and where the shields, the breastplates hanging on the wall, had been worn. What did they eat, what did they wear, how did they live? Childhood is not articulate, so she thought instead of the brown puppy playing in the sunshine, the soft flickering movement of a donkey's ears. To her eyes these carvings were relics of a dead, uninteresting world, yet there existed an imperious sensation of a domain passed, as one might pass a garden, ignorant that behind the stone hedges bees swarmed in velvet murmur amid hives, whence the blood of the sun trickled in stalactites of honey and stung the delicate powder silvering the bloom of the violet grapes. Chance put into her hands a key.Among the two or three English books a child might care to have, Nancy chose that afternoon one, by no noted name, that retold to infancy such portion of the Iliad as could be understood by it, with the addition of many earlier and later stories, the fall of Troy, the Amazons, myths of the Greek Gods. She was attracted by the picture on the cover, struggling men in armour resembling that abounding in Italian museums, and carried the book triumphantly away.Ever a quick reader, picture after picture shaped in her mind, never to fade; interest quickened till it flamed, ardent, invincible. Lovelier than the opening petals of the almond, richer than a southern morning, impressions poured into the white and rounded vase of her imagination, clamorous and hot with sweetness. It was her first revelation of the power of literature, of her own power and desire of a richness that could never be satisfied, a new world, or an older one understood at last. She read of Greek children, of their games, their days passed in enviable wildness; of the strengthening of young Achilles on the hearts of lions, the marrow of bears; of fauns and satyrs, music and the Nereids of the sea. Troy pictured itself to her, the ships, the tents on the shore, full of the little details children love, the woollen cloths, the carven bowls, the unyoked horses. She delighted in the combats, the funeral games, especially the wrestling and the chariot race, the burning of the ships, and, supreme moment, the fight over the body of Patroklos. She could see it, feel it, till her days passed in a crashing of bronze, a clatter of sandals, till to have seen the sun-browned body of a warrior catch the light at the corner beneath the heavy perfection of his harness would have surprised her less than the group of guide-equipped tourists plaintively wondering what they ought to admire.Parts there were that appealed to her less strongly than others, the loveliness of Helen, for instance, boys and warriors alone reigning in her fancy, and Paris, whom she heartily despised, but it was the foundation of a knowledge of antiquity never again to be ignored. Marred but by a need of constant reassurance, it was more or less a truthful picture of a distant age, it awoke a dormant interest in history, which became the engrossing passion of her days; history, only another fashion of desiring a complete knowledge of life. Actual existence is too complicated to do more than puzzle a child of eight. Nancy, in fact, was not consciously aware it existed. It is too full of shades and tones; a child desires the crude outline, the hard curve there can be no mistaking, and this history, with store of vivid narrative, epic of flight and battle, offers in abundance to a childhood unconcerned as to why an event happened, which cause was right, content to look merely on a broad whole, or take a side perhaps and follow the conflict with an eager interest.Perfectly willing now to spend the entire day in a museum, provided she could pillage its contents to fit and fill her own imagination, with this book and a companion volume in which she learnt of Odysseus and his travellings, the whole of antiquity seemed to draw aside its veil of years with slow and unreserving movement, and taking its place, with sun and wind and grasses, among the natural emotions of childhood, she herself played in a primitive world.Two books, however rich in impressions, could not content her long. There were gaps in the story, the perpetual and dreaded threat, "Wait till you are older and you will read things for yourself," etc., combined with the incompleteness of her knowledge to keep her in a state of literal hunger for information, until, just following her ninth birthday, she saw in a window Pope's translation of the Iliad. After some stormy minutes, with the derision of several grown-up people ringing in her ears, Nancy having found an unspent shilling in her pocket, bought and carried the book away.Children are ever the best judges of what in literature is most suitable for them, what they can understand. The appeal of much written for infancy is really to adult sensation, while most of Shakespeare, an epic such as the Iliad, the imagination of a child in a radiant and pristine sense no scholar can recapture. Vividness, both in narrative and detail, that is what a child desires. It must be able to see pictures.The heroic couplet does not jar the insensitive ears of a child of nine. Nancy read Pope's translation all day, dreamt of it at night. Troy, represented by a large mud pie, occasionally was taken in the garden, usually on an autumn morning when the gardener made a bonfire, because the smoke was the burning city, and the sparks looked like falling towers from the two steps at the end of the lawn which were the Greek ships putting out to sea. On wet afternoons the chariot of an arm-chair whirled madly to battle, Nancy crouching beneath a picture-book held for buckler that sheltered her from a rain of imaginary arrows. Compelled at last to acknowledge that she had read and re-read the book till she could absorb it no more, another chance discovery taught her Greece and Troy were not the only nations of the ancient world.It was really a boy's book of adventure that drew her enthusiasm to a fresh direction, a tale of the second Punic war and Hannibal's advance on Rome. The fascination of this modern-hearted figure, set, strange contrast to his nobleness, amid the most savage race of a savage antiquity, early eclipsed her delight in even Achilles himself. Achilles was a visionary figure, but Hannibal, he was known to have existed, at nine he had marched on his first campaign. (A hastily procured history-book assured her this was correct.) That at her own actual age had begun a career which, but for the cupidity of an effeminate Carthage, might have changed the story of the world, the audacity of that march through an undiscovered country, across the Alps--the stumbling, dying elephants, a memorial of their passage--almost to the gates of Rome, quickened and ripened a love of history, ever to be of her elemental roots of life.The stories of the Punic wars, of Carthage, were in themselves picturesque. There was a richness in the word mercenaries which appealed to her imagination as she watched in thought Numidian cavalry, wrapt in lion skins and quick as a southern lizard; that primitive artillery, the Iberian slingers; the carved shields of the Carthaginian horse waiting their turn to embark on that voyage whence four years later the remnant returning, exhausted with victories, were to lose their greatest battle beneath the walls that had betrayed them to hunger.Beside Hannibal, fiction or fairy tale was dull as an etching to an eye avid of colour; still, books that treat of Carthaginian life being inaccessible to childhood, to assuage a hunger for literature that should bear at least the name of Hamilkar or of Hanno in its pages the inspiration came to Nancy to write a story for herself.She was balanced on the edge of a sofa that was an elephant advancing with a swaying dignity toward the Alps when the thought took form, but the whole campaign was forgotten while she pondered over the hero's name. A boy must occupy the centre. of the story. To her, Carthaginian girls existed merely in a fabulous way. She would have liked the boy to belong to the Numidian horse, her woolly shawl would have made a magnificent lion-skin, but she did not know a Numidian name. Finally she decided on the Carthaginian cavalry. This took the whole afternoon.Tea was devoted to a meditation as to the accessibility of paper; finally, a new exercise book, intended for her French dictation, appropriated, she began:"Hanno was a Carthaginian boy. He was nine years old. He was very glad because he was going on his first campaign. He had a breastplate and a helmet with plumes and a buckler covered with silver plates. He rolled up a lion-skin and put it behind him on his saddle. He belonged to the Carthaginian horse." This, in Nancy's scrawled handwriting, covered two pages, and was finished just as bedtime came. She felt very proud of herself, though it was slow work and she wanted to get to the Alps. When the light was turned out she began wondering how many days it would take her to get to the battle of Cannae. It had not occurred to her then that a book could be written otherwise than straight through from beginning to end. She remembered suddenly she had forgotten to mention the city in her story. Every one was downstairs, so, with great precaution not to be heard, she crept out of bed and added to her tale in pencil, " Carthage was a great city." Then she jumped quickly into her bed again, into the warm softness of the sheets, and closed her eyes, dreaming.CHAPTER IIIHIEROGLYPHICSHURRIED days in Naples, a sudden decision, watching for the ship in the rifts of sea between the crimson roses, going on board, coming up the first morning to see Stromboli volcanic blue within the distance; storm, leaning on the rail to watch an Arab in scarlet fez spring on deck, first hint of Egypt, these and a confused impression of hieroglyphics, Bedouins, Thotmes, and the desert merged in a vague expectancy as the train left Alexandria. Nancy was bitterly ashamed of herself. She had disgraced her first voyage by seasickness; part of the journey, in fact, she had not enjoyed at all. Her most tolerable hours had been those spent lying on deck, wrapt in a rug, dreaming, with shut eyes, of the adventure and the mystery enshrined for a child in the story of the early Egyptian vessels that rowed tropic seas to Punt.They had wandered out to Italy in early December with the possibility of further voyage before them, Egypt or Sicily. Nancy had hoped for Egypt; Italy was wonderful, but Naples was still Europe, and Egypt meant Africa, crowded, if rumours could be trusted, with camels, vultures, scorpions, and even jackals, up the Nile. To a child the mere word desert was full of fascination. To-day she had landed in this new continent for the first time.Annoyingly oblivious of the importance of the moment, every one brought out papers, went to sleep. The train, reeking of Europe, rattled on. Nancy was thinking of the Zoo, the solemn keeper leading a dromedary with a look of infinite dreariness in its eyes. The guide-book spoke of pelicans--it was hardly to be believed these birds existed wild and uncaged where she, Nancy, might see them. Was it possible the whole country was a myth?Tired of waiting for something to happen, Nancy stared at the plain wishing she had a book to read. The carriage was full of glaring stillness, papers rustled. Another two hours to Cairo. Probably Luxor would turn out to be just the same as Europe she thought impatiently, till out of the midst of the plain of green corn and cotton plant a mud village full of an unmistakable Eastern silence, sprawled by a clump of date palms. A figure or two in fez or turban moved among the doorways. Along the wide road a man, vestured in indigo, preceded a shaggy camel, marching no longer drearily, but with the insolent pride of his position as chief of the desert beasts stamped in the uneven pace. Nancy stared, pressed to the dusty windows, excited, happy, till they passed from sight. Africa, she was in Africa. How difficult to realise she had left Europe at last.As they drove to the hotel a water-carrier, bent beneath the weight of his goatskin, shouted in guttural Arabic among the crowd; veiled women passed, and men with lemon slippers dangling from a pole. Too late to go out that night, she longed impatiently for morning, for the first day of a wonderful three months to which she was to owe the broad foundations of an education few children have the opportunity to obtain.Cairo was stranger than she dared imagine. At first the usual winter rains made the roads impassable with mud; later they dried to a dust of ground ivory. Nancy poured over hieroglyphics and Egyptian history, explored an ostrich farm, went to Heliopolis; most of all she loved it when they walked or drove through the bazaars.Poem of a city, the East is silence, there is no youth, only age and antiquity.The dreams of the city are the stuffs of the merchants, indigo, almond and cinnamon. There is gold for remembrance of Antar, Antar, fingering his weapons, brushing aside the rough camel-skin to gaze at the dust of the desert. Ivory and tulip red, as songs murmured to a lute of ebony when Mamum ruled in Damascus.The speech of the city is colour. In the dusk of the palace of the vendors of carpets, over a screen of ebony, mother o' pearl and ebony, trail of turquoise, trail of silver, a scimitar snaps the darkness. Cordoba to Damascus bent once to the might of the moon-curved steel.The East is silence.Silence of eyes that are impalpable black almonds, silence of silk of cream and of cinnamon, silence of turbans folded, lustrous and heavy as the bloom on white roses. Garrulous and guttural, the water-carriers with their goatskins, rough with hair, bloated with water, the grunt of a camel, shrillness of a seller of scarlet slippers, these are only the ripple and promise of a wind that is asleep for ever. The East is silence.Spoils of Ethiopia, Numidia, Assyria, were heaped, were wasted in the Memphis markets. Now nothing is left of Antar, of Mamum, the marches by night, the defiance, the victories, but crumbling moonlight over the sheath of the scimitar.Rumple the stuffs, there is emptiness, colour, but no singing, only terror crouching by the silence, the inscrutable silence. Thebes and Memphis and Carthage crumbled to a colour, a savour of mightiness, essence of parchment, of amber and cinnamon.The opaque pearl of stillness is shattered by clumsy-vowelled Arabic A sais passes, bronze figure escaped into life, racing in white and impetuous scarlet. Heavily the air re-gathers to a stillness.The East is silence, fear and antiquity.. . . .They had been in Egypt a week. To-day was their first morning in the desert, their first day of real adventure. It was cold driving out to the pyramids, where the donkeys awaited them, but once free from the crowd of begging Egyptians they would ride across the wastes of golden dust to Sakhara, the Step Pyramid, to the ruins of fallen Memphis, and back by train from the neighbouring station. Twenty miles In the saddle--the poetry of the thought of it. Nancy shook the reins of her donkey, quite as big an animal as the pony she was accustomed to ride, with a string of blue and vivid beads round the shaggy white neck. Behind her trotted a young Arab, in an indigo shirt, bare-footed. Now and again the donkey twitched its muscular ears softly, when a fly worried it. A boy's story-book and a couple of histories had filled Nancy with pictures of a world that had been a centre of wisdom and civilisation four thousand years before. Antiquity held no terror for her, only interest; in imagination she lived within it oftener than in this modernity of railway trains and formalities. To her it was a period of unrestrained freedom, a life of riding forth, a lion-skin on the saddle, the picturesqueness of single combat. Half the morning Nancy alternated between a tale of ancient Egypt, in which she was a warrior marching into Asia, under Thotmes, and a struggle to ride her donkey as she would her English pony. She wearied out the young Arab assigned as her attendant by a series of mad gallops. She led the entire party.The desert was so unlike the plain her imagination had pictured. It was not flat, but a sequence of delicate and sloping ridges, and the sand soft and pliable as gold dust slipped from sharp and scattered flints. Four hours after they had passed the Sphinx, the excavations of Sakhara came in sight.Nancy was sorry to dismount. She wanted to ride on and farther till sunset-time, then to sleep in a tent, roughly, to set out again with morning on their journey till, as their dragoman told them, after four months they would come to Tunis or Tripoli. Once in the tomb of Ti, her momentary disappointment vanished. With the ardour of a child for animals, it was the hunt of a herd of gazelles, the return of the quaint Egyptian craft from fowling, the sheep, the geese, and the oxen that attracted her. She explored the tombs, would hardly be prevented from plunging, if only for a few steps, into the subterranean passage, now blocked with shifted sand.They came back by Memphis as the sky flushed red behind the date palms. She would have retarded every minute which drew their ride nearer to a close. Perhaps it was this, or was it simply the desolation of that immense and lonely figure, prone in the deserted grass, with vegetation springing in tropical neglect between the scattered stones? For the first time something of the desolation of antiquity, the actual coldness of ruins, something that was not quite sadness, a feeling alien, fingered her heart. Here had been a centre of wisdom, the regal end of royal Egypt; the spoils, the wealth from Numidia to Circassia had spilt, had wasted on those pavements, and now, she was sitting on a white donkey staring at a wilderness of stones. Donkey boys and dragoman jabbered in unison. There was no vivid freshness of paint, homeliness of Ti among his oxen, nor the impenetrable dignity of the pyramids: it was desolate, an aspect of antiquity, a deadness she could not understand. In the sharp flame of the short dying of the sunlight a train brought them back to the modern city.A fortnight later they left for Luxor by train. Nancy was disappointed at first she was not to go all the way by boat, but the prospect of reaching Thebes in a night's journey consoled her. Thebes--of all Egyptian history nothing had impressed her sailor mind so much as the expedition to Punt, and was not the tomb of Hatasu herself on the other side of the river? Then there was Rameses, the epic of Pentaur, on the great Karnak wall.Her first impression of Luxor was a long line of donkeys ranged at the corner of the ruins, dust and flies. From her point of view the afternoon was wasted seeing the Luxor temple, when she desired to cross the Nile, and reaching the hollows of that ridge of hills, full of strangeness and the dignity of the pyramids, to come at last to Thebes. Luxor temple was dull; she could not love all ruins indiscriminately; and she spent much of the time watching an Arab boy suck length after length of sugar cane--it reminded her of the Swiss Family Robinson, a book now relegated to the forgotten days of babyhood.It might have been an Egyptian boat, relaunched from the museum that morning, in which they crossed the Nile. Half-way, they disembarked, to hurry across an islet of sand. Another row, a scrambling into rough saddles and ahead as usual, Nancy turned for Thebes. Along a path too narrow for galloping, trenches for irrigation on either hand, she came at last to one of the few survivals of the Seven Wonders, the Colossi of Memnon. Emblems in their mystery and in their sadness of the whole realm of Upper and Lower Egypt, life seemed almost to breathe from the stone as it caught hues and diverse lights. What had made the sound, Nancy wondered, the sound at sunrise and at nightfall? Watching them, she had a sense of intrusion, almost of fear."The Tombs of the Kings." It needed no dragoman to point to the temple of Hatasu to assure Nancy they were in ancient Egypt at last; with a turn of the valley they stepped straight into a living antiquity. They ven-tured into passages heavy with the smell of bats. They explored temples, multitudinous tombs. They passed a curved basin where in summer the natives sleep to avoid scorpions, and an Egyptian brought a scorpion for them to see, heavy-looking but venomous, on a bit of broken pottery. Little naked children, balls of chocolate brown, with white and dirty skull-caps, played about a fallen statue. Nancy deciphered one or two of the commonest hieroglyphics, picked up a few words of Arabic. She rebelled when they turned to go back.Days passed quickly in Egypt. As a final pleasure before they left Luxor, Nancy was permitted to ride to Karnak one evening at full moon. The others followed in a carriage a pace or two behind, giving her a sensation of delightful loneliness, almost of danger, as she trotted off through a blackness powdered with moonlight. The moulded figures loomed strangely out of the dark. Karnak had never seemed so immense; never before had she known so much of the age, the peace, the mystery of this land that had lived on the memory of a former greatness when Carthage was a young city and Rome a waste of marshes. They passed the great wall, Rameses in his chariot, on till they could look across the isles of shadowy ruins up to the moon, full and lovely in an inscrutable sky. There was a howling of wild dogs in the distance as they turned away.It was not until the following year Nancy had more than a hurried glimpse of Nubia. They came at once to Cairo, from there direct to Assuan, spending a month on this border of a harder, more barbaric land. Here was none of the soft richness that linked Cairo to the days when the scimitar of a Saracen held dominion from Bagdad to Cordoba, nor the sense of age which placed even modern Luxor back in the beginning of history; but adventure, rides into a desert where the tossed sand was stamped by the footprints of hyaenas, sails along the golden water of the Nile. Perched high above them were great white pelicans, with bills a brighter orange than the rocks, and amid the incessant murmur of the Arab rowers, children, grave as an old temple, gazed at Nancy without a movement in the myriad tiny plaits of their black hair, shining, Nubian-wise, with castor oil. Even the stillness had a new air about it; the mute uneasiness of the bazaars had gone; nor was there a trace of the sleepful heaviness of Thebes. This was the silence of the wilder spaces, Bedouin in its pride."Fire!" They turned hastily half-way to the native town. Had the whole world blown into flame? The opaque river was a hot goldness, the sky blazed with flame, the land was land no longer, but burnt, visibly. Shrill and husky, Arabic and English voices mixed. Children ran, policemen ran, the crowd ran; and over the Roman ruins, the hotel, a mile away, was cut into towers and pinnacles of an ominous red.Nancy had never seen a building burn before. Assuan had assembled in the square in front of the hotel. People whispered and rumoured of the accident. The electric light dynamo had blown up. It was a corner building, and as yet the hotel was untouched. Should a puff of wind arise as sunset came--men shrugged their shoulders, spoke of sleeping in boats upon the Nile, of hiring an Arab house. Nancy watched the violent flames leap from the holes where windows had been. There was no beauty in them, only terror. She was not afraid, but they sullied the spirit of the land--an intrusion, undesired, too cruel to own adventure. The natives chattered helplessly; precious water kindled the burning, rather than assuaged it; in a swift silence flickers crept nearer and nearer the roof of the hotel."Sand!" A rush of white-robed Arabs to the desert; expectancy. With the first bucketful the red sparks were not so vehement; trembling invalids pressed back to the shelter of their rooms, as the immediate danger passed. An even tramp, and a company of soldiers formed a barrier round the enclosure. "Why," Nancy questioned, "are they stationed here?" "To prevent the Nubians from looting the hotel." By the light of a candle in a bottle, with the challenge of the sentries breaking the air beneath her window, Nancy was put to bed.They turned away from the Nile, into the Libyan waste, in the cold air of the early morning. Nancy ever felt speech to be an intrusion when she rode. The even motion, the wide spaces, made her desirous of dream. Refusing to remember this was their last day, she galloped on, always a little in front, the blue beads round her donkey's neck glittering with movement. Three hours passed, and four. They had ridden up a valley, dismounted to see some caves, ovals of dark amid the gold, and were come now to the regular track, marked, half-buried with sand, with camels dead on the march, rigid in a sullen exhaustion that had wrestled with death and expired in victory.Under a high mound of rock and sand they halted to rest the animals. They could ride no farther and return that day. Nancy pleaded to ride just a few feet farther alone, to a clump of camel's food, with rough and tenuous branches. A wild sense of liberty, unfelt before in so intensified a form, filled her heart. Thus had the youth of the world ridden forth. She wished she could gallop away into the waste of gold, away into the strangeness of that mud-built town, a week's journey distant, beyond it till she came at last to an Abyssinian sea. As if in answer to some part of her desire, a dozen Bedouins, tangled black hair streaming to the date-brown fingers pressed firmly on their sword hilts, heavy matchlocks slung upon their camels, moved from without a whirlwind of dust. They surrounded them, yelling in hoarse Arabic; thrusting their hands out for money, the fierceness of the desert in their eyes. A moment or two, and they had turned the corner, bearing their produce up to Assuan, one, lagging a pace behind, matchlock in hand.Adventure is the poetry of life, the richest treasure of childhood. Stirred with the invincible spirit that made Cortez and made Roger, that sent the low Egyptian boats to dare the voyage to Punt, the spirit that has made the sailor and the artist, Nancy moved regretfully away, filled with dream.Beyond the low cave on the horizon a jackal waited, immobile, for the sun to set as they returned. Nancy turned her head to watch it, wistfully conscious of a sense of farewell, in a measure right, for only as an unconscious child was peace for her in the East.In the dust-storm, whirl of flying grit, they turned next day to Cairo, towards home. CHAPTER IVTRUANT WITH ADVENTUREITHE brown ears of Nancy's mule twitched in a slow rhythm. She was jolted upwards at an aggravatingly even pace, ahead, as usual, by some hundred yards. Light was regal about the fretted ridges, the luminous air lived; morning, jocund and defiant, leapt on the snowy points of Monte Rosa. The mountains sloped in vivid line against a gentian sky. It was no hour to waste upon a saddle; sun caught her to a hot rebellion: it was a day of movement--wild, imperious.Zermatt was hidden by the pines. The slowness grew unbearable; the minutes should not waste in unprotesting acquiescence to a dull command "sit still." Not wilfully, but impelled by a touch of immortal madness, desire of liberty too large for childish passion, Nancy slipped from off her mule and raced, unheeding, up the hills.Pursuit was impossible. It was hard enough to move even slowly over the stones. Only the agility of ten, seeing no danger, careless of the way, clambered in natural recklessness up the short grass slope, vanished beyond a corner, running, scrambling, climbing towards the far horizon. People called her, spoke to her. She was unafraid, but held her way in silence, up and on towards the orient ridge.A calmer day she would have stayed to pluck the mountain pansies or gather the rich bell gentian, blue as an Arab tile; this hour even the rarer Alpine roses, colour of sunrise breathed on the snows of the Dent Blanche, tempted her in vain. Preedom: she wanted freedom. Alone, truant with adventure she ran on, seeking an immortality for which she would never know a name.Terror a time might ever come when liberty would cease forbade her to return. Before a savage wildness the mountains had unloosed, unconscious childhood bowed assenting head. Exultant-hearted, a full hour before the rest could come, the Schwartz See with its purple blackness, its daisies and its gentian, spread before her eager feet. Nancy burst on, past the lake, past the hotel, past the staring people, beyond the mountain pinks, till lion-wise, in crevice of sharp blue and splintered violet, the "Glacier of the Lion" sprang upon her startled sight.Nancy stopped, ashamed, bewildered, by the inscrutable ice. Two men had climbed it once--climbed it, losing an ice axe on the way. Dazed by the impenetrable pinnacles, dumbly she told herself the story, twice and then again. Courage, of which a child has daily need, is ever the virtue dearest to its heart. Her own impetuous morning became but mockery beside the huge boulders, the smooth ledges; her path to an immortal freedom was barred by the crystal snow.Never had the edges of the Matterhorn curved so sharply in a noon all blue and gold. The hour of her recapture was at hand. Not yet had come the time when she might put forth strength in conflict with the mountain. Not yet, but it would come. One day should hold adventure captive within her hands.IIWorn steel--dull indeed beside the damascened gold and silver mail of the Spanish kings, but conqueror was written on the blade, and Cortez himself had swung it, the very night, perchance, when, Aztec grappling Spaniard on the dark and turbulent causeway, a trembling civilisation slipped from victory through the endurance of his will. Truly by that sword had Mexico been won.All the enthusiasm of her eleven years Nancy lavished on the weapon. The treasuries of Spain were as dust beside its glory; old and unread books beside that conquest, perilous, 1mpossible, the seizing of a land, if ever one were seized, by one sword, one brain: the treachery, the sieges, the defiance. Hernando Cortez, "El Conquistador," and the sea breathed through his spirit.The wildness of his youth answered her impatience of authority. With Agathokles he linked himself in the burning of the ships, with Hannibal in the audacity of his marches, with Roger in his daring. That his expedition meant the ruin of an empire, the destruction of a wealth of learning, was not for a child's vision. For Nancy Cortez spelt Spain; he was another in the long line of leaders who, raising their land to history, were rewarded with dishonour.Nancy looked round the armoury, perhaps the richest in the world, wishing she could have borne mail. Her ears were alert for the rustle of steel; she longed to feel the weight of a sword, to wield the curious battle-axe hanging so near her head, to fasten a hauberk about her of linked and twisting metal. Spanish sunlight smote the dark aside and flickered, rapier-pointed, the blazoned breast-plates to a golden iridescence. In that one room was shut the Middle Age.Egypt had served as preparation for the study of the Saracens; it seemed a natural sequence the following winter should be spent in Spain. But Madrid was dark with a repression that was one side of the mediaeval centuries, and cold with biting wind. The insistent note of tragedy in the story of the land even a child found it difficult to escape. Could anything be gloomier than the Escurial, repellent lines set in a savage plain? Interest apart, the day there had been one trenchant dreariness, an explanation of the destruction of wealth and knowledge, the ruin of Mexico, Peru and Granada, by the rigid might of this Iberian power. Toledo, bright as were its streets, held much of the temper of its own weapons, thrust in a sheath and uneasy in captivity. Even the sword of Cortez, as she looked at it, seemed to point away from the North, harsh with gold and sand, to the clearer cities of an Andalusian South.IIIA single lamp swung windily amid a desolate platform. The train which had left them at Cordoba at half-past four on a December morning, jolted on. Into a blackness broken but by rain, Nancy gazed sleepily through the window of the cab. It seemed hours before they arrived at the hotel.Their footsteps sounded harshly in the silence, as they followed the one attendant along the stone corridors into a large room, cold and lit by just a charcoal pan, three-legged and mediaeval. Nancy sat in the biggest chair in a state of delightful sleepiness that rejected sleep for dream. They might have been sitting in some old Spanish palace with a slit for window and the steel cap of a man-at-arms glittering in the shadows of the door. The hours were passing when to pretend to be of the bodyguard of Hannibal contented her; she wished she could have followed Cortez but she needed to be herself a leader; she wanted to know and feel the actual deeds. Somehow it seemed impossible that she could ever grow up like the ordinary people she saw in England, afraid of storm, with repressed voices, such restricted lives. No; when she was older, according to her childish phrase, something would happen, something must happen, that would make these present days but a promise of adventure beside its wonder and its wildness.Names--Toledo, Seville, Cordoba, each a mediaeval parchment--trailed dreams across her mind. In her imagination she donned mail; she could almost feel the weight of her sword; the dead embers in the charcoal pan became a beacon; she was tramping towards it through unexplored regions as she dropped asleep.A space of elfin arches, leaf-bent, curving flower-wise, or moulded in crescent upon crescent of Arabian richness, pure in colour as the bloom of coral or a drifted shell, the Mosque at Cordoba, born of six centuries of Moorish rule beneath a softer sky, held an indefinite trace of the desert, of the date palms, foreign to Cordoban eyes. Not beggars, but some Arab scribe, royal in vesture of amber or of indigo, should have kept the outer steps. The absent lances, palm leaves in a golden air, of the Saracenic warriors, made poor the stone-paved streets.The day was history. The fascination of all foreign places, elusive and impalpable, that drove a thousand Spaniards to dare a western sea, was heavy in the orange trees, splintered with crystal rain. The drifting tangerines mocked with a light derision trailing lemons carved of an early moon.Unwillingly they took the southern train. For all its fretted glory the Alhambra was so desolate, beside Seville, flaming with orange and with scarlet. There was a sensation, almost of terror, of a pitiful appeal in the Court of the Lions, in the thin columns straight as tulip stems, its sculptured fountain, with no peace, only a hard expectancy of tragic event to be, even the gipsies dwelling Neolithic-wise in caves could not eradicate. Algeciras brought a welcome wildness with its herds of palmetto, of narcissus, and the dark cork forests that sloped towards the sea. Unshaken from her Italian allegiance, Nancy left, one January morning, for Algiers.IVWater swirled beneath the train, ominous cracks threatened the embankment. On either hand were no longer the desert spaces, but a pressure of floods, here smooth, here twisted to a whirlpool of no definite colour, and crashing like a battle-axe towards the perilous rails. "C'est dangereux, mais c'est dangereux." Up and down the crowded corridor rushed an anxious French attendant. "We're likely to be stranded here all night," a man was heard to mutter, and the two old ladies in the next compartment dropped their knitting and sat rigid with a terror they were half ashamed to show. Every one collected at the windows. Nancy turned with contemptuous voice and excited eyes: "It's the funniest desert I've ever seen; it's flooded."Algeria had been one long disappointment. Algiers had greeted them with snow. Nancy hated cold. It was appalling in its newness, its air of French formality. Nothing had happened; there had been nothing to see; only the amusement of watching the anchored ships lined along an entirely modern harbour; the glimpse of savage monkeys along a Barbary gorge.El Kantara had been passed, and in place of Libyan mystery they had steamed into this avalanche of water, exciting, yes, but never the Sahara. From an earthen bank a waterfall beat the window with a shower of crystal spikes. "We shall be the last lot through for a week," echoed down the corridor. The floods died in a rushing turbulence three feet deep as they jolted into the station.Biskra looked annoyingly European. Out of the night and raging wind a crowd of negroes burst upon the luggage. The carriages swayed in the uneven mud as they drove to the hotel. "The wall has been blown in; the wall has been blown in," every one was shouting, and residents and newcomers filled the passage and gazed at the heaped debris of what had been a bedroom, the unstable eastern architecture cracked and shattered by the storm.Biskra was just a parody of Egypt. Nothing could change the palms, but the streets held an air of French intrusion, the East had lost its dignity, camels stepped sullenly and not with a Libyan pride. Nancy was glad when, by way of Constantine and Bone, they came to Orient Tunis.VSlanting trails of rain blurred the windows, but Nancy's eyes, eager for Carthage, would not be reconciled to the limits of the carriage. For three years--a whole age in childhood--she had hungered for sight of the city, she had sworn allegiance to Hannibal in her thought. Iberian slingers had kept her from her play, Numidian cavalry, rough with gold-dust and a doubled lion-skin, had galloped across her dreams. Period after period from Phoenician settlement to Roman burning passed through her mind, too young to read aught but the strength and splendour of the story. The mercenaries, Hanno the voyager, the last siege, were too epic not to impress their wonder on any childhood happy with knowledge not only of history but of the actual South. She stared out of the window, hopeful that the impossible might happen, that antiquity would return. She wanted the war elephants to sway over the rough stones, to see the spears of heavily armed Gauls, steel leaves erect in a thicket of branches, to watch and watch till the mist broke and out of it moved the dark horses, the purple and the silver of the Carthaginian horse.The carriage stopped.They scrambled out, not into a noon of amber warmth with the sea, the Carthaginian sea, a space of hyacinth at the horizon, but into a darkness of mud, a greyishness that held no violet about it, set with a few bleak stones. Nancy looked about her for the city. Not even the name of Hannibal met her eyes.Rain fell, a quiverful of silver arrows shot by a damp wind. Guides spoke, proffering their services. "Carthage, the ruins of Carthage!" And the sea crashed and the storm with the clanging of heavy bronze.This was the end of the conquest of the Alps, Trebia, Lake Trasimene. Clay lamps in a cold museum, and the voyage of Hanno forgotten. Coins, fragments of stone, scattered as the mercenaries, and no Hamilcar to rally them. A hunched Tunisian in alien clothing and Punic cruelty, Punic greatness, hidden with earth, colder than the sea.The wind, insolent conqueror, whirled over desolate Carthage. Remembering the glory of Hannibal, the beauty of the city he spent himself to save, Nancy was caught by a strange desire to cry.VINancy opened joyously the pages of the Shakespeare she had just been given and wondered where to begin. Troilus and Cressida sounded exciting; Achilles, Ajax, Hector, these were familiar names. But who was Pandarus? and why did Troilus come so eagerly from war? Cressida was a girl, no fighter, and therefore unimportant, but the strange guise of her favourite Greeks was too hard for infancy, and she missed the swirl and vigour of the Iliad battle-scenes. After a hasty glance she turned to another play. Perhaps because of Egypt, perhaps because of the chance music of a single line, she began the final acts of Antony and Cleopatra.Here was real fighting. Cleopatra's spirit was worthy of a boy; Antony, who threatened disappointment, died in armour. She read on eagerly; this was an adventure.Even thus early her ears were alive to the keen beauty of word and thought. The pages seemed to burn with colour before her eyes. Lifted above all that, by her very immaturity she could but crudely understand, she was conscious of an exultation felt but once or twice before only, the knowledge these pages guarded an immortality as strong as the rich antiquity she knew; an explanation of greatness that effaced the desolate memory of the few stones left of the city that had nurtured Hannibal and betrayed him.Give me my robe, put on my crown! I haveImmortal longings in me: Now no moreThe juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip:-- Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. --Methinks I hear Antony call: I see him rouse himself To praise my noble act: I hear him mock The luck of Caesar, which the gods give menTo excuse their after wrath: Husband, I come; Now to that name my courage prove my title! I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life.These thoughts were powerful as a sea-wind; here was the flame, here was the wildness of the desert, keen as ever she had known it on those venturing Egyptian mornings, alive, calling her in words. This was the spirit that had taught Hannibal to conquer; in this spirit he had accepted death. But more than the fierceness of it, it held loveliness.O eastern star!All of Egypt, sombre, beautiful Egypt, was in that line. Here was adventure safe from scorn and from desolation.She need not sorrow for Carthage any more.CHAPTER V
		  ALMOND-BLOSSOMA DELICATE foam of almond-blossom shimmered the naked earth, fell lightly on Nancy's hair, was blown, with what wind there was, to make of ruined Naxos a newer city of living petals. A herd of brown and shaggy goats passed under a geranium hedge, a spear's length high. A sea of lazuli beat in from Greece below the arching boughs.Nancy watched the water, watched the almond trees, wishing she might wait, here in Sicily, for Spring. The influence of the past Italy and Egypt had embedded so deeply in her nature, had grown with these months spent in Palermo, Akragas, Syracuse. Here was antiquity; here was also the Middle Age. It was not only the fantastic carts, gaudy with saint or armoured knight, that held an air about the rude drawing as of a land emerging from the ages of barbarism, nor the peasant, brigand-eyed, his rough sheepskin trousers shaggier than the Sardinian donkey he crouched on; but the whole atmosphere, under the outer skin of railway and tramcar' was vivid with the days of both Dionysius and Roger, the cultivation of olive tree or almond that had proceeded undisturbed amid the clashing of aliens, Greek and Carthaginian, Saracen and Norman, fighting for the dominion of a land yielding alone to the Greek islands in richness or in beauty. The place slept. At Solunto, at Syracuse, antiquity could claim pre-eminence, but at Monreale the spirit of the Middle Age was enshrined in blurred line and magnificence of mosaic. Here, in this land of wild geranium and growth of fennel, of temples fashioned of the spirit that led Agathokles to Carthage, palace of moulded pillar, lazuli and marble, she could swing at will from a confused mediaevalism to the clearer beauty of an earlier but not so primitive age.Her companion had been Freeman's own abridged version of his larger history, and much of the magical enthusiasm poetry was afterwards to kindle lived for her now in mere words, with association of loveliness or heroic deed, the Carthaginian war, Agathokles and the burning of the ships, the quarries of Syra-cuse; or the name alone of a place, Concha del Oro, shell of gold, that brought the sea to mingle with almond and with lemon blossom, Palermo or Euryalus, now vivid with anemones.From earliest remembrance certain phrases, names especially of places or of persons, were never free from an association of colour, fashioned of a tone, written in it; and as she grew, this feeling developed, unconsciously expanding until her whole vocabulary became a palette of colours, luminous gold, a flushed rose, tones neither sapphire nor violet, but the shade of southern water; Ionian-blue she called it, coming later to Greece, and white, with all the delicacy and fragileness of thin foam, or a heavier shimmer merging to the cream bloom of a rose petal. This, to her, was perfectly natural. She marvelled no one ever exclaimed, "I love the gold of magical!" or "What a wonderful white Sicily is!" just as so many murmured "What a magnificent crimson the painter has caught in that fold of drapery!" but with the capacity of a child for silence, spoke of it but once or twice, and the incredulous glances taking it for play, passed unnoticed. She assumed it was common to every one, if she wondered at all that it was never mentioned; supposed it was too ordinary, too usual though to her it was an added interest, an added beauty in her life.Travelling has much in common with adventure, and all these days of surely an epic childhood seemed immortal to Nancy, even the hours spent moving from place to place. Her imagination, sensitive to all impressions of the 1oveliness and the legends ready to her hand, found time to ponder as the train jerked on, to assimilate what crowded street and ruined building had heaped there in profusion, effacing all that held no importance from her memory, in preparation for the new atmosphere of another city. Besides, in Sicily, as in Spain, trains are not obsessed by any desire of speed, and in the long hours as they passed through brigand-rumoured mountains or above a sea of dark green foliage lit with sun-round oranges or the paler moon-lemons, or as they moved along a coast of waves blue as dark hyacinths, something of the spirit of the land unconsciously became absorbed within her thought.All this tranquil winter spent so near the olive trees she had turned more and more from tales to accredited history, and her first conscious inspiration had taken shape. With the impetuousness, the ignorance, perhaps, of twelve, accepting no impossibilities, she fashioned, vaguely, it was true, but decisively the vision of an immense history of Sicily, which would become almost the history of the Mediterranean, from the beginnings of Egypt, through Phoenicia, Greece and Carthage, to the end of Saracen and Norman, the gradual dying of the Middle Age. It was not alone to be a history. All the life of the time, the customs, the armour, especially the trade, would be depicted, the tiny details she missed in the longest histories, all that she wanted to know and was told she was "too young to understand." She would labour to make it perfect, to make it beautiful, till it became the very epic of the South, till all could read in one volume the knowledge she was seeking in books, in fragments, in pictures, in stones, in the whole of the land itself. At this time a historian usurped, to her, the place that excavators and Egyptologists formerly had held. It seemed a way to keep, to touch the immortality of a greatness impossible to escape, in the ruins of Akragas or at Naxos, that heap of fallen stones, beautiful yet in its loveliness as the light caught the snows of Etna, burning behind it. In sleep she could have traced the map of Sicily. All imaginary things, memory of the Iliad, even, faded before the audacity of Agathokles, leading his defeated troops across the stretch of water, perilous with storm, up to the very walls of almost victorious Carthage, setting the sand aflame with firing of the ships, missing by how little the conquest of Northern Africa itself.As for Duke Roger, better than any romance were the fragments she could collect of his story: the castle, perched among the roughness of the hills, the almost careless seizing of an island, where all the Southern nations in turn disputed for mastery. Undisturbed by the complexities of history, her imagination was free to absorb the entire force of the direct narrative, unfettered by moralities, by any weighing of issues. The subtler shades of the hesitation of the Athenians had as yet no meaning for her. With a natural intolerance of indecision Nikias was pitilessly condemned.Besides this growing consciousness of the power of history, the actual poetry of the island; the tenderness of the colours, so unlike Egypt or the hard glare of light and shadow in Spain, exerted its influence in a way unfelt before. A conscious perception of loveliness possessed her imagination for the first time. Natural surroundings are the greater part of the moulding of childhood, and when the sun is the sun of Naples or Girgenti, when the seas are hot with thought of Greece, with echo of Africa, when instead of bleak wind and barren marsh there is lemon flower and almond-blossom, something of the clamorous richness of the South must pass into one's very being never to be eradicated.The ruins on the opposite hill, grey and arrogant as rain, held Nancy's eyes. The sky, transparent as an almond petal, flushed with night. Wind stirred; the spirit of antiquity, strong with loveliness, lived, touched her in its breath. The immortality of the land spoke. Naxos was immortal, so were the almond petals, and it was these she wanted, these--Greek Sicily, an old beautiful freedom, not the Sicily of the Normans, not the Middle Age.The sharp colours softened; she grew afraid for them, angered the wild darkness should rob from her the day. It was unbearable the passion and the triumph of this moment should perish with the sun, dreams might tremble in their transience but not reality, not life. And desperately, as she fought for it, as the hills turned ominous with greyness, remembrance of the book she was to fashion drove fear back. To be wise was to possess Sicily for ever.Childhood had spoken farewell to the South.CHAPTER VIAPRIL"WHAT is a pterodactyl?" The family sighed. Unexpected questions in an imperious voice were ever an ominous sign. Nancy's habit of reading anything from a time-table to a dictionary was responsible for a great deal of miscellaneous knowledge, but nobody knew where her interest would lead her next. A visitor, unwitting of the consequences, had left on the table a magazine containing some account of a recent discovery of prehistoric animals. This Nancy had found and read.A mere explanation that a pterodactyl was a kind of flying reptile belonging to the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods was insufficient. Nancy wanted to know what it ate, what it looked like, when the Jurassic period was. The article presupposed a certain knowledge, could only be a hint to her of an unexpected world, made more delightful by its very diffi-culties, possible of reach but through some volume of research. Admitting no impossibilities, the undaunted enthusiasm of thirteen spoke firmly: "There must be something written on the subject, and I am going to read it."A couple of elementary text-books appeared within a few days and were rapidly learnt by heart; the real authorities followed. For almost a year and a half she pored over skeletons, ranging from dinosaur to man, from the gigantic tree ferns to the chipped and polished flints of the Neolithic Age. That the volumes she desired were so expensive it took months of waiting and persistent appeal before they were given her, merely quickened her enthusiasm. Hitherto, the beginnings of history had been dulled by obscurity; Carthage, Phoenicia, had risen from a myth. Palaeontology offered her a firm foundation; it completed history. Besides, were not the stories of many of the discoveries a romance in themselves? She wrote a tale, nine pages long, of a boy of the Palaeolithic period; she copied drawings of mastodon and dinosaur; she wished, secretly, she could have had an iguanodon as a pet.Interest lost much of its unconsciousness. For the first time it demanded expression; into her rough drawings she poured crudely of the spirit that she felt' Once or twice that mythical time "when I'm big" had seemed a little nearer, or rather another period was in sight when she would start her work, whatever it might be. A palaeontologist, perhaps; and yet, interesting as fossils were, there was something about them, a slight and cramping aridness, as though her imagination was being squeezed into a dark hole, too small for its bursting wings. There was something in her that could not be poured into the minutest tracing of a browsing triceratops. At this psychological moment her father gave her a volume of tales of the great artists, their real lives.It had never occurred to Nancy that art had an actual existence. She had touched statues, she had seen pictures, she had no idea how they were made; like books, they were fashioned of mystery. She had supposed the artist a child; then, with a single day, a painter. The intervening period of apprenticeship she had ignored. Much more than the actual pictures, the lives of these men appealed to her, how they learnt and fought and conquered. As history had made her in some sort a historian, palaeontology a palaeontologist, so with this book came the thought, "If those men could paint such pictures, why could not you?" Nancy seized a pencil, swift as a tide between a narrow strait the passion seized her; from that hour she splashed everywhere with paint. Pictures flung themselves in headlong riot through her mind; straightway from a few words she could see the little street crowded with water-sellers and their lemons, the painted carts, all the South she knew. There was nothing she saw but she wanted to draw it; nothing she knew but she wished to form it to a painting. It seemed so wonderful that the most irksome detail could be made living, that there was no need to seek adventures; the most trivial incidents of her own ordinary life could be a treasury richer than any guessed at in her dreams. She wished to live in the past no longer. Before a week had gone she decided she would be a great artist. True, there were difficulties. She could not draw a straight line, but in her mind she could see wonderful pictures complete to the tiniest detail. All the artists she read about overcame obstacles, so why could not she? And of each story Nancy felt a picture might be made; she longed to pour her own enthusiasm into line of head or body, to create the world of her dreams. But her faces looked mere lumps of paint, and she could not capture even an illusion of movement in the limbs of animal or warrior. Most of the artists had started by learning to draw. Coming to London that winter, Nancy was granted after much entreaty a course of lessons.The South of France had spoilt travelling for her, with two winters of Nice and the monotonous dullness of Paris. Paris meant long walks looking at the shops. She hated shops; and Nice, though they moved from snowstorms into sunshine, meant restrictions, no excitement, nothing to do. It was a land of formalities, and rather than face a third winter there Nancy had enjoyed the novelty of staying at home, too absorbed in drawing to miss even Naples or Syracuse. On a March morning, a bundle of paints under her arm, she came for her first lesson.It was the usual art class; casts hung round the wall, plaster crumbling to the floor in a white dust from some of them, a sick-looking greyhound lay on the platform, and six or seven girls sat talking in front of easels. As the door opened they all bent to their work in seeming enthusiasm, though the one or two farthest away managed to glance up to see the cause of the interruption. Nancy was given a stool and an easel in front of a cast of the head of a bloodhound and told to make a quick drawing of its outline.As soon as Mr. Baker left the room she started drawing. To her amazement most of the others stopped and began chattering on any subject but art. Nobody took any notice of her, for which she was grateful, and after her first hurried glance round she never raised her head until Mr. Baker came up later. He looked at her drawing, pointed out the worst faults, then tore it in two and told her to start afresh. Nancy was there for six weeks. The smell of the place, the daubs of paint scattered everywhere, the brushes on the floor, the broken bits of charcoal were joys to her, for she felt among them as though she were beginning at last. The other pupils surprised her; except when Mr. Baker was in the room they never worked. Her imagination had pictured them far too intent to utter a sound, except a few words of grateful thanks to their teacher occasionally, or perhaps criticism of each other's work, yet she heard them discuss art but once.All the time that Nancy sat drawing outlines of a greyhound her head was filled with dreams of the time when she would be a great artist, the time when she would know other artists, have utter freedom and be able to talk about art all day long if she wished. Going home along the grey streets she would smile at the people she passed and think, "You cannot love the sun as much as I do."Proud as she was of studying at a real Art School, she looked on the other students in a pitying way, firmly convinced painting meant more to her than to any one.To crown her joy an artist whom her parents knew was asked to tea. Nancy had heard of his pictures, but had hardly dared hope to meet him. To her delight he sat down near her and began talking to the others of the early Italian painters. Nancy listened eagerly; she felt he was wise and very kind. Presently he went upstairs, was taken to the schoolroom, where Nancy had put out her masterpiece, a large canvas of a basset hound, hoping it would attract his attention. Afraid he would not notice, and again afraid he would, Nancy waited by the door. He came in, walked round, and said, "What a nice airy room this is." Her father pointed out the basset hound, saying Nancy had painted it, so he walked round the table. "Yes, you can see it has got a head from here; she has not got a bad sense of colour, but the drawing is all wrong."Nancy was far too disappointed to say anything, and all the way downstairs he would talk about some book of travel he happened to see in her bookshelf. As soon as he had gone she rushed upstairs to examine her treasure. He might be a great artist, but she was sure he had not bothered to look at it properly just because she was young. There was hidden genius in it. The legs were unsteady but the head was beautiful. Many painters had not encouraged beginners, whose work had later been recognised as great. Nancy felt this must be one of the discouragements to be faced at the start. Perhaps the background was a trifle dark; out came her paints, and she set to work again, more convinced than ever that she had in her the making of a great artist.Fourteen is old to retain the fancies of childhood, but Nancy had no schoolfellows to laugh them away. Yet a change was stealing over her; she began to know she saw only the outside of things, to weary of it, and wonder what lay beyond. Childhood was ready to slip from her for ever, had she but known it, waiting just a touch to lift its wings. However she loved painting, books, her constant companions, would not be denied. History lessened in interest as desire for expression increased; instead, it was natural to turn to poetry. Sheer enthusiasm for anything rhymed carried her through the Dunciad, though the heroic couplet was but harsh music even to her inexperienced ears. Tennyson she tried and hated, Keats was too weak to satisfy her. Art had lit her imagination but not filled it, she could not mould the fancies that panted to escape. Lonely, not for playfellows, but for some one to share her dreams, a wet April morning sent her to search the library, sent her to a worn book on the middle shelf: The Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, by William Hazlitt. Was it the hint of history which made her take it down, some innate interest in the old cover which made her carry it upstairs? There was a sense of richness in the paper as she turned the leaves, as lines obscure in meaning, strong in music, ebbed into her head. Nancy had come to her own land at last.She had wanted to find the world. It opened to her in the Illyrian loveliness of the great Elizabethans, teaching her with one hour what life could mean, her own power. Bellario was not raised so "high in thought" as she, meeting with Orlando Friscobaldo, the Duchess of Malfi, Endimion for the first time. The stories conquered her imagination as their music captured her thought. To read some scenes was to taste immortality; to watch the death of Vittoria Corombona, the meeting of Hippolito with "old, mad Orlando," or to listen to the mockery of Bosola until all pride, all courage broke in the one reply,"I am Duchess of Malfi still."Palamon and Arcite made "almost wanton" with their captivity because they were together; Caesar bending towards the body of his enemy to call him "conqueror"; the strong, true phrase of Hazlitt, "It is something worth living for to write or even read such poetry as this is or to know that it has been written, or that there have been subjects on which to write it"; this made adventure, this was life. She was to be loyal to drawing yet a few days longer, but in her mind she knew books were stronger than paint. Into the intimate  presence of poetry she passed, mute with delight, offering with her opening youth of the same love Endimion swore to Cynthia, "Whom have I wondered at but thee?"As she walked down the grey street that evening a professed knight of literature, two passing muttered, "How ugly the roads are." Ugly, could anything be ugly? Nancy wondered. And as if in answer to her challenge the street put forth new beauty, an April sunset fringed the edges of the roofs with gold, transforming them into towers, turrets, and a thousand fanciful shapes; the lamps just lit glimmered like a line of newly blossomed daffodils; the distance was dark with night, an intense blue, full of mysteries. Midway an insolent scarlet pillar-box flung its colour through the blackness, answering Nancy's spirit,--she felt she could dare the world.As soon as the light was put out and she was alone she travelled each night to a new land. It was more magical than riding with Roger, or sailing with Cortez, because there was mingled with it the slightest touch of reality. She could never be a sailor, she could never be a boy, but she could be an artist, she could be a writer. It was a strange exultant region; she feared if she breathed it might vanish, if she moved she might wake and find it gone, yet every morning she woke to a fresh treasury of knowledge, of things to do and to learn. True, there were inexplicable mysteries, truths that seemed covered with a haze of carnation and faint gold, delicate as a moth's wing when she approached them; but she was content to lie there dreaming, knowing now and then the haze would lift and something more would be added to her knowledge. She was full of an overwhelming gratitude that such a gift was allowed her. All life seemed hers to do what she would with it; obstacles were as nothing if she could express something of what she saw, something of what she felt. The equal of all workers, for had she not begun her work, these few exultant hours were to be a beacon in the bitter days that followed; vision of a loveliness never quite to pass.People marvelled at her strange silence. "What is the matter with you?" they would ask, smiling. Inarticulate, Nancy desired more and more to be left alone with her dreams. Although in actual knowledge ahead of most girls of her age, possessing at fifteen the intellect of a woman of twenty, her feelings were those of a child of seven, truant with imagination, unmingled with reality."We are going back to the country and on Saturday you are going to Downwood School, as a day girl. You shall go and see Miss Sampson to-morrow. She will be very kind to you, and you are sure to enjoy school very much."Nancy could not realise at first what the words meant. Something in the tone of the voice made her uneasy. "But I want to go back to the Art School," she faltered."Not just for the present, perhaps you can go when you are a bit older."An ominous fear was stealing over her; still her head, full of plans and hope, could not understand. At last the truth in all its shattering agony burst upon her.The nightmare of the following days drew to a close. She waited in sickening dread the beginning of the term. She had desired reality--it came, in a numbing, tragic blankness. From the delicate bloom of peach the spirit of childhood flushed to the tenderness of a wild rose, it was ready to be one with dream. Unconsciously she clung to its wings, but the hurricane of life was abroad with desolation, trenchant with destruction that a later June might blossom. April, April, no use to call April; at the first touch of sordidness the spirit of childhood, amorous of dream, passed, in a flight away.BOOK II  BONDAGE"Young? why do youMake youth stand for an imputation?"THOMAS MIDDLETON.CHAPTER I TRAGIC REALITYSATURDAY morning.May, in mockery, painted the skies her most radiant blue, the sun set the bees humming in the ivy, and all along the garden path golden-hearted tulips lifted their exultant scarlet heads--but nothing might comfort her. She walked out silently, though inwardly she raged like a caged animal, shaken with that wild anger which only children feel, suddenly deprived of their freedom for some reason they cannot understand. At nine o'clock she was left at Downwood. It was one of the coldest, bleakest places she had seen, with open windows, worn-out carpets, and a mass of white paint inside, and outside a long weedy lawn and a few flower-pots. Her first impression was the incessant noise. Girls seemed everywhere, all in white blouses and blue skirts, their hair tied back with an enormous bow. Miss Sampson met her, took her into the library, and told her to wait. Books with torn covers lined the room, and Miss Sampson's little black dog lay in the only arm-chair. Nancy walked over to it and waited, instinctively feeling that a dog was better than being alone with a lot of noisy girls. Never, never would she speak to any one of them, for she knew that was the reason she was snatched from her dreams and freedom and sent to school. Dreams! At the bare thought of them blind impotent rage swept over her, the rage that only children feel, utterly helpless, dragged down by gigantic forces they cannot understand. Vaguely she wondered if this was what loneliness meant. Through the window the hills shone in the sun, and all the happy afternoons she had spent up there among the bee orchids came back to her. Why had she never realised her happiness then?Miss Sampson came in and called her; whatever she had to face she would meet as Hannibal would have wished, so, flinging her head back, she followed her into the school hall.A good many girls sat writing at small desks. All who dared stared at her. "Sit down, dear," said Miss Sampson, pointing to a vacant desk, "and write me a nice essay on the Sea Power of the Age of Elizabeth."Fresh from Hakluyt, Nancy began pages on the subject as soon as Miss Sampson left the room, but after a minute all the girls turned on her."What's your name?" asked the girl next to her."Nancy," she answered involuntarily."How old are you?""Fifteen.""Where were you at school last?" This from the back row.It was too much, the reality of school burst too miserably upon her. Nancy drew herself together with all the dignity and defiance she possessed and burst out with "I have never been to school before; I do not approve of schools, and I do not intend to remain here."Nobody answered, but some one in the back row muttered to her neighbour "Funny fish." Odious expression. Nancy wrote on, till presently the oldest girl there turned round and asked her, quite kindly, if she had travelled much."I know Europe pretty well," Nancy answered, unsuspectingly falling into the trap, unaware that this truthful answer would label her as conceited and extraordinary until she left the school. If one has travelled it is the rule 
at school apparently never to mention it. All the girls questioned Nancy at once, but she refused to answer, saying she wished to get on with her essay, and applied herself to the English seamen with enthusiasm. She longed for solitude, anything to free her from being questioned by this rabble. After a time a bell rang and most of the girls left. Nancy wrote on, and a mistress began giving a class at the other end of the room. Against her will Nancy listened. She had heard so much about classes, yet she had never seen one; she was interested in spite of herself, until she suddenly realised that she also would be taught in a class, she, who two short weeks before had scorned the world in the glory of her new-discovered life. Another bell rang, they trooped out and she was left alone. Nancy hoped she would be forgotten, for a moment she even dreamed of climbing through the open window and running away, but stopped in time, remembering she would not know where to go. After a few minutes Miss Sampson returned and called her. "Lessons always finish at eleven o'clock on Saturdays, so you may go home now. I will introduce you to Marjorie, and she will show you the way out; remember you must be here punctually on Monday."Nancy followed her guide through a medley of girls to the back of the house. "There is the gate," she said and hurried away, glad to be rid of Nancy.She might not even use the front entrance, but must keep to the school door. It was typical of the whole existence, Nancy reflected bitterly, but at least she was free till Monday, free for thirty-six whole hours.She hurried home and begged, implored to be taken away. There was a vague hope something might happen which would prevent her from going back, and Monday seemed very distant; she thought she had never realised what a long time a day really was before. Whatever happened they could not take her dreams away, and in them she tried to forget the coming reality. That evening she sat in her room, full of a fierce delight that her thoughts were her own, hoping, wondering. She realised this was an end of painting; besides, she knew and felt so much now beyond her power of expression in paint. How should she draw the despair of the morning? These and a hundred other thoughts rushed through her, the sharp burden of her inarticulate emotion forced itself to expression. Taking up pen and paper she began a poem. No one but herself could understand it when it was finished, but in her eyes it was wonderful. Time after time she read it, feeling when she showed it, all would realise she was a poet, the absurdity of sending her to school. Perhaps there would be apologies for the torture of the morning? With the terror of school taken away, how she would appreciate home and the hills; if it were possible even her dreams would seem lovelier. For an hour she thought of the excitement there would be when the verses were shown, and came down feeling writers and painters were the most wonderful people in the world. After dinner, sweet with anticipation of expected triumph, she showed the poem. To please her, all made valiant effort to understand it. Nobody was impressed. Months later Nancy herself was to laugh at the crudeness of the verses; at the time she only raged, raged, raged like a wild animal, the last hope of escape vanished, full of fears and feelings she could not understand. Till she went to bed she was silent, then Hannibal himself could not have soothed her. Sunday passed, all too quickly. She felt incapable of making any effort to save herself; nothing made any difference. It was the blank horror of waking on Monday that was so terrible. She tried to make the walk to Downwood last as long as possible, but it seemed only a minute before Miss Sampson met her, and said, "I am going to put you in the Fourth Form, so you will begin nicely in the middle of the school.""I won't stay here long," Nancy answered defiantly.Miss Sampson wisely took no notice and led her to the Fourth, a room next the School Hall, and gave her a seat between two other new girls. The carpet on the floor was very worn, there were three rows of battered ink-stained desks, two photographs of Rome, and an open bookcase. The door opened, a mistress came in, put some books on the desk in front of her, and Nancy's first day began.The lesson was French. One by one, beginning from the back of the room, each stumbled through a paragraph of a simple book, pausing, to her amazement, to inquire the meaning of every other word. Nancy's relations had told her so often how she would miss her lack of formal education if ever she were sent to school, she had imagined the classes would require a constant concentration of all her knowledge. As it was, she felt free to watch the form while Mademoiselle chalked explanations on the blackboard. Nancy had never been so near girls of her own age before. For the first time the spirit of the crowd--an oppressed thing in turn oppressing, judge of outward aspect only, blind to the finer shades, with the strength of the sloth, the ferocity of a brute--weighed her and weighed her distrustfully. The glare of many faces, weary and uniform in expression, was about her, pressed her down. Surely this was the feeling out of which was born the many-headed dragon of myth? From the mire of crushed individuality and dream, surrendered as the price of a comfortable mediocrity, she could discern the eyes lifted in a piteous helplessness, an unconscious hunger of loveliness, with the brooding heaviness of dinosaur or mastodon. Pity--that was a gift of the future; for the moment, as the class ended, Nancy rose with the rest in the same spirit that an Athenian follower of Nikias, learned in art, faced the ruder Syracuse who had enslaved him, his body compelled to obedience, his soul freer than ever.The morning was a nightmare. Nancy was given books, lessons, one or two girls spoke to her, but for the most part she was left alone. Lunch was a new ordeal. Being a day-girl, she had no set place, but was left standing helplessly in a corner, until a mistress made room for her at the edge of a table. Then came a walk, two by two. A girl of nine or ten was made to walk with Nancy. She stood away from the others until they were ready to start, then they walked silently up the hill. She did not know what to say to the small child, and as soon as they left the road and were allowed to walk as they liked, the infant ran on and joined another group Nancy walked alone with her hands in her pockets, pretending she was a boy. At six she was free to go home, but as she was leaving, Miss Sampson called her and gave her a straw hat with a school hatband. Nancy carried the badge of servitude home under her coat. It was a fitting end to the day.The week dragged on, lessons began at nine, in the afternoon there were games or a walk, then preparation until supper. Rumours concerning her travels had spread, how, she knew not, before her arrival. Her utter ignorance of school convention set every girl in turn either to question or to jeer. Their language was peculiar, for a long time she could not understand the slang they used. Irritated rather than afraid, for each she had an answer, stinging and defiant. The first days over, most dubbed her "queer" and left her alone.It was the afternoon she dreaded most. At the beginning of the second week they forced her to play tennis. She could not play and hated games. The school method of making her an enthusiast was to put three children from the Second Form, who made fun of her, and herself into a court, where if a ball were hit it must go into the bushes. There they had to play or rather knock the ball about for two whole hours and a quarter without stopping. The agony of those wasted hours. Now and again a mistress (watching no child should rest from a game they knew not how to play) would shout from the terrace, "Run, Nancy, run, do you expect the ball to come to you?" Then the whole school would turn on her with a shrill unanimous laughter. In the distance the chimney-pots of home peered about the trees, and old ladies passing said one to another, "How happy the dear girls look."The games mistress quarrelled with Nancy from the start. She was pretty and knew it, half the school adored her, and she lived on flattery. For her sake games, however dull, became the fashion. Nancy refused both to adore or to admit the supremacy of games--result, trouble--and resented drill keenly. If it had been real drill even, it might have been tolerated, but to parade the School Hall every morning doing the same absurd antics while Miss Andrews praised her favourite adherents was intolerable. Lunch, also, was a dreaded hour, for having no set place she wandered from table to table, having to submit to the usual questioning from a different girl each day. She spent the minutes looking forward to the evenings and to Saturday and Sunday, when she tried to forget the miseries and humiliations of the week.To add to her troubles Miss Sampson insisted on her joining the Downwood drawing and sketching classes, though she wished to keep her art free from any taint of school. Rebellion seemed vain, and by this time she had become as much of a machine as was possible to her, for she tried not to think at Downwood. It hurt too much. All the other girls at the class were older than she was, and drew according to the convention of Mrs. Marks, the visiting art mistress to several schools. The lessons were given on a Friday, and there was a great rush to get ready and a long journey by 'bus, train, and on foot before the fields were reached where painting was to begin. Nobody took any notice of Nancy, for which she was grateful, but the smell of the paints alone brought back the Art Class, a time that seemed to have faded into a distance, remote as the beginning of history, though in reality but a few short weeks before."Now you, Nancy, can sit here and draw the cows grazing over there," said Mrs. Marks in a fussy voice, when she had settled all the others at their work after a little gossip with each. Although the work was quite unsuited to her capacity for drawing Nancy selected one, a lovely brown-red colour with white spots, and began. Unhappily cows are not in the habit of standing still, and before long the entire class was convulsed with laughter while she chased the cow. Every time she sat down the cow moved on. All the way back in the train the class made fun of her, miserably huddled in the corner covered with paint acquired in the chase, even with yellow streaks of it on her face, and when she got back to the school girls came rushing up, asking if she were trying to paint a tiger. For days reference was made to it whenever she appeared; for some of the girls had heard, although Nancy had said nothing, that she had been at an art school and wished to be an artist. They had expected a genius and were disappointed. In an ordinary way Nancy would probably have laughed herself, but she was hardly in a mood by this time to be made fun of, especially over art. The feelings she was obliged to keep pent up within her during the day turned to a sullen hatred of the school, the girls, and their absurd conventions. The whole week she dreaded Friday, but happily they went to another field to paint. As she left Downwood hurriedly after they returned, Miss Sampson called her back. "I want you to stay and have tea with me to-day." Nancy obeyed as if it were an order rather than an honour. Miss Sampson tried to be very kind to her, and something in her encouraging way of speaking made Nancy hope wildly for a moment that she might be sympathetic. She could not bring herself to say much, but murmured some incoherent words about her love of Art--surely she would understand."I think you are much too young to study art seriously, dear," Miss Sampson answered. "Won't you have a piece of cake?"To Nancy it seemed as though the whole world had conspired to crush every hope and aspiration out of her. The last few weeks had dulled her into a machine, but that one sentence roused every passion of her nature. Instead of slinking home ashamed and with her head down she strode out of the gate, defiant, with more of her own spirit than she had felt since the day she went to school. The more people discouraged her the more enthusiastic she would become. She went home singing to herself a little song, "They can't take my thoughts from me, and my dreams are my own." But when night came, defiance faded with the sun, and alone in the silence she hungered for a childhood that had for ever gone.After a week or two, even Saturdays were denied her. To accustom her to school ways of thought Miss Sampson arranged she should take a girl home with her to tea. Nancy refused to ask any one, so Miss Sampson called Eleanor, a girl in her own form, with wavy hair and a worried expression, and told her to get ready. Nancy often wondered afterwards who was the more unhappy as they walked down the hill together. She was torn between determination to say nothing and some instinctive feeling that she ought to be polite, for it was not Eleanor's fault she was with her. Eleanor, in fact, was very nervous, and would never have come if she could have avoided it. They walked home, and at last Nancy asked her if she liked dogs."I have got one at home," she replied."I want one," said Nancy, and relapsed into half-timid, half-defiant silence.It was a painful afternoon. To Nancy it seemed almost a desecration of home that a schoolgirl should set foot inside the garden. She had nothing to say, for she was averse to speaking of art before a stranger, and Eleanor, willing enough to talk of the conventional interests of Downwood, was bewildered by the inscrutable silence of this alien child, who had no hesitation in opposing Miss Sampson herself. Both were very relieved when Eleanor got back to the Downwood gate. It had been a dismal experiment.Half-term drew near. Nancy hardly cared what happened now, except for occasional gusts of rebellious rage. She never spoke if she could avoid it, and though perhaps by nature the other girls did not mean to be unkind, all made fun of her; particularly of her reading, of her thirst for knowledge, which refused to be bound by the conventional limits of acquiring marks. She interrupted classes to argue a point of view; generally she was "queer." When they provoked her beyond bearing, she would compose long verses of defiance and contempt in French, turn and hurl them at her tormentors, who slunk off, abashed and alarmed by the strange sounds, like a herd of savages. A habit of standing with folded arms earned her the name of "Napoleon." One morning she arrived more rebellious than usual to find they had to go to some missionary service at church."I think I have to walk with you; we always walk to church in age," she heard a girl say to her as they clustered outside the back gate, and, turning, saw Doreen, one of the other new girls who sat next her in class. She liked her boyish face and her laughter much more than the rest of the girls, whom she dubbed the "Pack," but kept her rule of silence until Doreen asked her where she lived. Her voice was kind and rich with a quaint accent, so Nancy smiled back and asked her where she came from."Penzance," she answered; "do you know Cornwall at all?" Penzance, the Cornish sound of the name reminded Nancy of summer days amid the brown rocks and blue open water, of watching the fishing smacks roll to sea, her vanished freedom. She smiled at Doreen and said, "I know Penzance and South Cornwall quite well."All the way to church and back they talked of sailing, animals, and Cornish things. Now Nancy knew why she liked her voice so much with its slight Cornish accent. Doreen told her of the Scillies where she spent each summer, of fishing and her love of the sea "She is a sailor, not silly like the others," thought Nancy. Suddenly brave as they turned the corner by the school, she looked up at her; "Will you come to tea with me on Saturday?" she asked.The term dragged to an end. Prize Day passed, the holidays, and with them the hope she might never go back, approached. Miss Sampson allowed her to leave a day earlier than the others; being a day-girl she had no packing to do. A girl passing as this permission was given, said to her afterwards, "You are lucky, I envy you."There was nothing to be said, only Nancy hoped the girl would never feel as she felt. It was a lesson to her not to envy other people."Everybody hates it their first term," said a young mistress, flattering herself that a few stock sentences scattered here and there showed her interest in the girls. "I am never coming back," Nancy retorted fiercely, and went in search of Doreen to say good-bye. She hoped she would see Doreen again even if she left. Perhaps in the holidays she would write some great poem, then of course there could be no question of her going back to Downwood, and when it was published and everybody recognised her genius, she would come up to the school and take Doreen out, because she had never laughed at her, and all the other girls would be sorry they had jeered at her drawings. Filled with these pleasing thoughts she found Doreen, got her address, and said good-bye. Miss Sampson met her as she got her hat, kissed her, and told her she had done very well for a first term. Unreconciled and unhappy, Nancy walked out of the front door with her head up and hurried home, to lock her hat, all that could remind her of school, away in a cupboard out of sight. The curious sensation of impotence came over her again. "I can't go back, I can't go back," she kept repeating to herself, ashamed of school, of its narrowness, its pettiness, its taunts.Out of the tragic reality towards her banished dreams she came to her beloved books, where for a time there was forgetfulness.CHAPTER IIA CAPTIVE YEARIWASTE. The dreary voice of a mistress made the French she read a mockery. Eyes, dulled and unquestioning, followed unnecessary explanations on the blackboard; scribbled notes, copied rules, to which they would never refer. Not a girl was idle, joyfully idle; not a mind was interested; not a thought was alert. The class was heavy with an air that numbed all eagerness. Outside the sun shone. No one cared.Nancy gave up the presence of listening, ashamed that she was there. She had been sent as a boarder with the autumn term, as resentful as ever of captivity. It was the arid monotony of school that was so terrible; there could be no expansion, no growth. It was not so much that the same subject was taught at
the same hour each day as the lack of interest in the teaching, the dreary wastes of their so-called education. The wisdom of school parlance showed a different face, withered, resentful of her scholars to that learning, denied of Fortunatus, who, twin with beauty, Nancy followed in pursuit.Every hour at Downwood was arranged with mechanical regularity. A bell woke the girls in the morning, another summoned them to breakfast, prayers, and a lecture on their faults. They filed into the dining-room two by two, each bowing and saying "Bon jour" to Miss Sampson, who scrutinised them from the staircase, till Nancy shook with fear that she might laugh at the solemn line of nervous bobbing heads and muttered salutations. Lessons, games, and preparation made up the day, followed at seven by supper. Even then they were not free, but unless they had singing class or were sent to their form rooms to talk broken French and German, which happened once a week, they were herded together in the drawing-room and forced to do fancywork in silence. Privacy or free time was unknown. Sunday was a blankness of reiterated church and hymns.The general ignorance of the girls appalled Nancy. They had not heard of the Thirty Years' War, the French Revolution to them was a mere name, outside of England modern Europe just a myth. Yet it was a school that prided itself upon intellectual achievement; in examinations they had always had success. But it was these very examinations that were the ruin of true learning, that instilled in the minds of these children for ever a certain narrowness, wearying them of knowledge. School that was (as Miss Sampson told them daily from the platform) "a preparation for life" made mockery of life."You will translate ten lines of Britannicus, beginning at the top of page 18. The books must be in by Thursday." The mistress rose.Stung to madness Nancy looked down the long line of wasted paper, wasted effort, wasted lives.IISicily and Egypt had been poor training for an English winter, for the rigorous severities inseparable from school. Trying to those reared among it, nobody there understood the physical torture it was to her to stand about the draughty corridors to answer to her name, to sit in a classroom frozen to an immobility thatmade the thought of moving torment, while a westerly gale blew in through the cracks of ill-fitting windows. The thickest jersey could not prevent this sensation of an unrelieved and sunless bleakness with no refuge of warmth anywhere except at night in bed."Good-night, girls." The shrill voice of Miss Evesham, a snapping off of light, the closing and opening of doors, drew nearer down the corridor. Nancy thrust her book hurriedly away, waited a little timorously the resented intrusion, shivered as a hurricane and the sharp lines of a stiff blouse blew through the door together, and with eyes wide open in the darkness listened till the heavy tread resounding on the crumbling plaster passed the three steps and away into the distance. Secure from interference Nancy stole out of bed, and began, with due care for silence, the preparations which insured some measure of warmth against the Arctic night, spreading her coats and garments, nestwise, till she could slide back beneath the blankets, and taste the luxury of warmness for the first time since waking. The day was at an end. Life might begin.It was cold lying there in the darkness, trying to forget the poverty of the day in thought. Only an hour to dream and the shadow of waking never absent from the minutes; mornings barren of knowledge, barren of joy. She was sick for warmth, for a little physical loveliness; her intellect expanding preyed on her, starved and desirous of learning. Soon, nature intervening, she would sleep, forget (save for overwhelming moments of a poignant sweetness when homesickness for her own land, her South of almond blossom, came over her) the realisation of a mournful present, empty where all had been so full. Made of a sudden so poor she turned increasingly to poetry, become a sanctuary against the onslaughts of thc day. It was to the Elizabethans, the fragments that she knew of them, that she came perhaps most frequently; to the sentence, quoted of Hazlitt from Philaster, "'Tis not a life. 'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away." The thought of life as a fragment of epic infancy seemed to her fashioned of the essence of that beauty which is also truth, a strict reality; and then the plaintive sadness "thrown away" taking a tinge of her present feeling as the ruins of her own childhood seemed to smoulder behind her, useless, crushed.One by one she saw her companions of the classroom, remembered some fragment of theiridle chatter, some desire expressed in the day. Their nights were not lit by the music of Beaumont or of Webster; for them there was no oblivion in books. To Nancy it seemed terrible that they had no sweetness, neither a reserve of strength to lighten the burden of intolerable days or galling rule. Helpless as a herd of deer they huddled together at injustice, staring with frightened eyes, with muttered words. True, they had mocked her, had denied she would ever write; in spite of this, resentful as ever that she had come to Downwood, Nancy at her loneliest moments pitied them the poverty of their monotonous restricted thought.IIIThe holidays came again but Nancy was too unsettled for any work. Until her term of bondage was at end, even at home she felt the taint of school breathe on all old desires. She longed for solitude with an almost passionate intentness; desirous of expression she became more inarticulate than ever. With neither new nor old for company she fretted in an idleness she might not fill, turning as often as she could to books, the one refuge that never yet had failed her.101The Elizabethans led her to Spenser, to the Faerie Queene. Making no attempt to read from cover to cover she explored the six books, choosing adventures that seemed to her of interest, neglecting the rest. She could not help identifying herself with Sir Calidore and Downwood with the Blatant Beast, nor, as she read, was her heart barren of hope that this present monster by her might be recaptured, and if not imprisoned, deprived at least of its sting.Marlowe was explored, Webster only in fragments, for the strength of the seventeenth century Downwood mistranslated "coarseness" and therefore banished half literature from its shelves.But school had robbed her of unconsciousness and some refuge was inevitable against the pressure of existence; something to dull its sharpness, some life that was not life. Elizabethan vitality became too strong for this period of silence; she dared not live in that world for long together at Downwood; reading the plays existence ceased, the reaction of awakening was too acute. She needed sheer dreamfulness and found it in the tales, half truth, half myth, of a romantic forgotten world.102She detected at once the essential falseness in Mallory, plunged into earlier ages to turn with Sir Gawain on adventures, to come with him to the hall of Bernlak de Hautdesert, to follow him through the snow till he met the Green Knight. A summer voyage to Norway and Denmark led her to translations of Vigfusson, the quaint Icelandic history of the "Burnt Nyal" saga, the Laxdale stories, English Beowulf, and Havelock the Dane. She read fragments of the Roman de la Rose; she was captured at once by the Earthly Paradise of William Morris, by his earlier poetry and his prose.The boyhood of Michael, one long imagining even as she had dreamed, Rhodope, strong, her face set to seaward, Jehane in the moonlight, a land of forests, poplar, and red apple, cool water slipping about a carven boat, had just that note of a fanciful or rather a past reality that fitted this period of sundering, of transition between her infancy and youth. The temper of Morris fitted hers, his poems full of movement and colour, blent with the magic of history to make "a strange tale of an empty day." Even drill was tolerable when one was "east of the sun and west of the moon." Would that she also could ride
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through the summer weather, ride with hands roughened by a sword hilt, actually to win or be defeated instead of this interminable waiting--actual combat instead of the unceasing mental struggle against the sordidness of school. The remembrance of past Aprils might be crushed, but the spirit that drove Goldilocks forth from the farm, in his holiday scarlet raiment, saved her from sliding into any silent acquiescence of the customs of the girls. "Swerve to the left and out at his head," therein lay her desire.IVThe one break in the intense monotony of school were its quarrels. "Landmarks of each term," as Doreen called them, they were disturbances born of the spirit of the school, petty happenings magnified to tragic events. Technically, until it had come before Miss Sampson, no incident could claim to be a "row," between girls it was just a "quarrel," or, when the "ladies of the staff" were involved, a "fuss."The term had begun badly, with storm and weather impossible for even the dreary crawl two by two down the front. A feeling of unrest spread from form to form. The excitement of Half Term passed. Sunday ended with hurricane of wind and hail.The Sixth was ever a cheerless room; opening on to the garden, gusts of wind blew up and under the ugly linoleum. The hills were hidden by a mist of grey lines. Cold, fugitive raindrops battered the cracks of the door.Disturbance was not unusual in the Sixth. The dozen girls it contained formed separate parties of twos and threes. Oblivious of the angry voices, Nancy sat down to read.She had scarcely turned a page before she realised that this was no ordinary happening, but a big, possibly a historic occasion. The history of Downwood was written in its "rows." The head girl, an embodiment of pitiless monotony, colourless and hard, was ominously full of the "welfare of the school." She was not a good head girl and knew it. She had no individual character but was heavy with hypocrisy. Downwood rightly regarded her of no account. Stung by her own impotence and near to leaving, the moment was ripe for a convulsive attempt to show the power that slipped so easily into the fingers of younger, more vigorous girls. It had fallen to Lydia to provide an opportunity.Lydia refined the sentimentality of a school-girl to the quintessence of unneeded emotion. She had a weak heavy face like an elephant mourning for its trunk, and three pocket-handkerchiefs. She was already hysterical.It took Nancy some moments to unravel the excitement. Lydia's friend of the moment was a girl in the Lower Fifth. She had been ill, had missed a history class. Permission had been given for Lydia to help her prepare the missed lesson. They had been found on the ledge when they should have been at drill, working at it. The head girl had ordered them to drill, they had refused. In a fit of anger she had gone to Miss Sampson. Such seemed to be the substance of the story.Conscious now the moment of anger was past that such action had merely shown her weakness, the head girl was trying, savagely, to recover a measure of dignity by an address copied from Miss Sampson's speech at the beginning of each term. About two girls listened to her. Lydia was enjoying herself. It was an understood thing nobody was reported for missing drill, and with the injustice she had risen from obscurity to being the momentary heroine of half the Upper School. She took out a fourth pocket-handkerchief and sobbed violently. Girls who the day before had passed her unnoticed, flattered and consoled her. The stately Sixth threatened to rival the Third in noise. "Anyhow," as Nancy remarked during a lull, "what is the good of going to drill with Pussy?" Pussy was the nickname she had given to the Games Mistress, who walked both with the airs and with the footstep of a cat. The name had become popular at Downwood, and to Nancy's annoyance she found herself famous for a chance remark instead of the epic she believed would make her immortal.The head girl looked up, growing angrier each minute. "If you are not careful I shall report you as well." Veritable battle raged. The noises fell to a sudden silence as the door opened unexpectedly."Miss Sampson wishes the Sixth Form to go to her in the drawing-room."Recklessness died away as they crowded up the stairs. The drawing-room was the court of justice where offenders were tried. Out of the windows a mass of short trees, rank foliage that never obscured the hills, and hedges heavy in their trimness, were visible. The room was hung with prints, crowded with cushions, removed by the head girl whenever the schoolgirls occupied the chairs. The air was full of a pitiful striving after beauty, most barren of success, and on a week-day was never without the sound of music, practiced by girls lifeless and uninspired. Miss Sampson entered, already wearied by the two other rows she had settled that morning."Sit down, girls." The invitation was unwelcome, for it meant a long lecture and the rare half-hour of leisure the wet weather had brought would be lost."I am grieved," began Miss Sampson earnestly, "I am grieved that it should be necessary for me to treat the Sixth Form as I would the Lower School. If some child from the Third is reported to me her foolishness is excusable, but I look to you in the higher forms to set an example to the rest." There was an audible sob from Lydia. "Why do you go to drill?" Miss Sampson tapped the ground impatiently with her foot, aware how triumphantly she impressed her knowledge and her power upon the girls. "Because it is good for us," stammered the girl nearest to her. "Partly." No answer was perfect for Miss Sampson until her own explanation was added. "Drill teaches you not only to be obedient and erect in body but to be erect in mind as well. I want every Downwood girl, both in  her holidays and in the term, to look up not only literally but in her lessons, above all in her friendships. . . ."From frequent repetitions Nancy knew the speech by heart. She dared not look out of the window, but it was safe enough to think if one fixed one's eyes on the pattern in the carpet. She dreamed regretfully of the book she had been reading before Miss Sampson summoned them, no school book but one out of her own store."To bear disappointments with a smile, to be cheerful and contented no matter what the circumstances. . . . "Miss Sampson's eyes grew as weary as her voice. But Nancy was murmuring to herself Joyously, triumphantly:Hence all you vain delights,As short as are the nightsWherein you spend your folly!There's nought in this life sweet,If man were wise to see't,But only melancholy;0 sweetest melancholy!Yes, pain was better than contentment if it meant poetry. (In her heart she believed poetry meant joy.) Better solitude than to share a lifeless acquiescence, the colourless dreams of this multitude about her; better to bear their mockery than accept what passed for pleasure with these girls. These lines of Fletcher's brought her strength each time she repeated them, denial as they were of all that Downwood taught."Before you go I will say one word to you about opportunity. . . ." It was an exquisite pleasure to Miss Sampson to define the word. Nancy smiled. She passed her days desiring the chance that the school denied. "Work." "You come to school to learn." Vague phrases floated past her ears. She wanted knowledge, loved it, longed for it. But Downwood had nothing to teach her, only the books she discovered and read for herself. "Opportunity." The irony of it all. Her mind drifted back to Fletcher--How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,First saw the boy Endimion, from whose eyesShe took eternal fire that never dies; How she conveyed him sofly in a sleep, His temples bound with poppy, to the steepHead of old Latmus, where she stoops each night,Gilding the mountains with her brother's light, To kiss her sweetest.School could not last for ever and with freedom must come loveliness, some realisation of this Elizabethan beauty, even in a modern world.Downwood broke upon her thoughts."For life," Miss Sampson said, "is only a continuation of school." Dull faces answered this with silence. There was no movement, no revolt. Nancy stared at the faces, stared at the room, pierced by a subtle fear. What if the books had lied, what if this were the truth, suppose there was no escape?Dumb with fear she rose as the others rose. Miss Sampson kissed each solemnly as they passed.VThe hot sun smote the geraniums by the gravel path until they seemed to fade. Only a noise of bees in the ivy and a scratching of pens marred the unbroken stillness. Through the open windows Nancy stared over the bent heads of her companions to the hills, immense and quivering in the luminous heat. In an hour a bell would break the silence, there would be turmoil, shouting, a herding into the garden, but for the moment there was forgetfulness; antiquity had returned."C'etait a Megara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d'Hamilcar."A stab of pain--the unwilling grief of an exile--pointed the familiar names. Sick for an old happiness Nancy dared not speak of childhood, yet was it ever absent from her thought? Hope was no longer fresh with dawn; she lived on the memory of her former dreams. All day, from rising until sleeping, she kept a difficult way among the rules she hated, turned as if up a river, ignorant of the shallows, while her heart hungered for the sea. And out of this alien world to a new loneliness, Salammbô had summoned her with its subtle words.Her own memories of the South crumbled their colour into the richness of each phrase. This was reality--the leaders in their bronze greaves, "sous un voile de pourpre à franges d'or," the feasting in the garden--rather than the broken inkpots, the battered desks. And each word was pain because she was so far from Carthage, and each word was joy because it restored her to a forceful world that was not sordid as the school was sordid, nor weak as these girls were weak.In the light of flames and torches and unsheathed steel Salammbô pleaded with the Mercenaries in all the dialects of the South.The fetters of her present bondage were broken as she dreamed, but it was bitter to read instead of feel, to imagine only where her life had been so rich. School would pass, liberty would come, but would it restore her to a life wilder than the torches, sweeter than carved ivory and frail Tyrian glass? What would her freedom bring?Dawn rose over Carthage. Not daring to read more Nancy put the book away.A bell rang. Flying plaits and shrill voices surged into tumult to the lawn. "Why are you not in the garden?" Nancy looked up stupidly. Outside the younger girls were already at drill. Round and round the dull tread of fifty rubber soles beat the grey asphalt, up and down they marched in futility of aimless movement, the head girl in front, her head up like a pyramid no rain shall soften, no sun shall kindle to burning. A rush of girls swept Nancy outside on to the path. Her dream snaps.It was Downwood that was a lie.VI"The last term." There was a gasp of relief whenever it was mentioned, even from those who would be sentimental the last day and cry. Every window in the School Hall was open to let in the sunshine. There was a general air of Saturday, a day of fussy trifles, about the impatient girls. Nancy listened to the whispered plans around her, vaguely curious as to what passed for happiness in the minds of her companions, but the talk never reached beyond the transient interests of holidays and school. Miss Sampson rushed in late, as was her custom. Prayers over, she came a little forward, an ominous sign."I have already spoken twice this term about the cloakroom being left in disorder. I want every Downwood girl to be punctual and tidy, to have a place for everything. Will the two girls nearest the door fetch the basket of shoes I have collected and give them to Miss Andrews for distribution? If another pair is found out of place this term, sweets will be stopped for a week. You are given a place in which to put your shoes, it is pure laziness not to keep them there." A pause. "Have any of you seen my fountain pen? I have mislaid it for two days."Miss Sampson gave out the letters while the basket was being fetched. Nancy watched the smaller girls go up for them very pitifully, knowing they had four or five years' imprisonment before them. The narrowness of school weighed heavily upon her. What was Miss Sampson but a tyrant, well-meaning, yes, but holding arbitrary rules, and with a body-guard, the mistresses, who carried out her laws and her commands in no impartial spirit? The first quality a child appreciates is justice, but in a school there can be no appeal. Downwood was a dust-heap of dead individualities. The girls filed out, face after listless face. It was unbearable to think that these would leave and others take their place, to be ground to the same pattern by the same machine, and nobody moved, nothing was done to alter or to improve. Could not people see that teaching was an art and an inspiration, not the mere matter of a useless degree? It was a wonder there was any childhood left.Even the "ladies of the staff," what were they but overgrown schoolgirls, living so long at school that they became school, their minds bounded by its restrictions, fettered by its jealousies, unable to lift beyond the boundaries of each term? Like the girls they had their lights put out, only an hour later. They had to be in to meals. The girls went home, but if they left they merely changed from the tyranny of one school to that of another, they neither grew up nor lived. Nancy, staring out of the window of the classroom, beheld the tragedy of it all; tragedy of the underpaid mistress grown old and cast aside for youth and a modern degree, tragedy of the sensitive child whose slightest slip from accepted custom met with a cruel derision, tragedy of the eager intellect denied expansion, tragedy of the brain forced and exhausted for the credit of the school. Eyes amorous of beauty, hearts desirous of freedom,--all crushed, stamped into acquiescence to the pattern of the school.This was Education. This was what people worshipped.VIIPrize Day came with its artificial absurdities that seemed to Nancy more incongruous than ever. The morning was a nightmare of clamour and fretful orders, distribution of red carnations, the "school flower." Why they had a school flower, what it represented, not even the "ladies of the staff," to whom Nancy appealed for information, knew. The head girl came round with a basket and doled them out, collecting threepence in exchange. Then they were forgotten for another year."When the bell rings after the distribution, every girl will pick up her own chair and march with it straight to the School Hall." Over and over Miss Evesham reiterated the order, as though by mere force of repetition she could prevent mistakes. For this one hour she lived; measuring her life by Prize Days, the other months of the year were preparation. Seeking a disordered flower, a badly tied bow, her eyes moved up and down the lines, with that mixture of hard anxiety and kindliness an enthusiast displays to his machine; should the parts get out of order they must be petted or scolded till they work again, each form moulded to its stereotyped pattern. In Miss Evesham's vision there was no room for any excrescences of individuality.Row on row of girls, dressed in white, with the absurd carnation, trooped across the lawn. Nancy wanted to scream with laughter at the stupidity of it all, at the anxious mistresses and parents herded in front, looking so obviously unhappy. The platform, with its flowers, the staff; the table of prizes, reminded her of a prehistoric gathering of a tribe to pronounce justice. A hot sense of shame came over her that she was here, and helpless, in the midst of such inanity.Eleanor, forgetful of the dreariness of the terms, thought in a sentimental misery, evoked by the occasion, of all these faces, that she as a schoolgirl would never see again. Actually, the names of many of the babies were unknown to her, but sentiment obliterates such matters, and, for the moment, Eleanor was near weeping that even the wooden chair would never be hers any more.Doreen hoped the distribution would not take long. It was an episode of dullness; Miss Evesham worried at the long speech. All the girls had filed in correctly. It was marching out they got so careless; last year there had been three mistakes. Waiting was so trying. They were always so slow to see the signal to get up. The prizes on the table dwindled. From her place in the centre of the platform Miss Sampson hoped the girls had made a good impression.The table was empty of books, the bell rang, the girls stood up. Frantic signs; they filed up the steps, one long line of moving chairs, past Miss Evesham, a smile on her lips for the watching parents, hardness in her eyes for the two girls already at fault. Her life might have depended on the way they kept in line. Nancy gave a wicked flourish to her chair as she passed. Two more days, then freedom. Helpless with mirth, she regained the Sixth. A small girl passed, visibly excited. Uneven groups of parents moved into the School Hall. A squeak of violins announced the concert had begun. Nancy picked a Milton out of the row of battered school books; she needed something impersonal and very cold, some abstract contemplation to restore the dignity of life within her mind.VIIIThe last night came! Nancy piled her books in a heap in the dining-room, a leaving custom which reduced many of the girls to tears. Even Eleanor, now the actual moment had come, forgot the discomforts, the narrowness, the walks, and needed consolation; besides, it was a tradition to be gloomy the last day. A little group of the elder girls hung together, besought mistresses to write to them, whom, a week before, they had hoped never to see again. They were afraid. School had taught them, had bound their thoughts by rules, had manufactured dreams for them, had given them a language. They had surrendered their individuality. Now they were leaving and Downwood offered in exchange an invitation to next  Prize Day and a Latin motto no one understood.Actual liberation would come only with the morrow, but as the lights snapped out, with her mind already almost free of school, Nancy went to bed. Had she gained anything by her stay at Downwood, was it utter waste of these two years? As regards knowledge, yes. She had come speaking French and German fluently, with a good accent. Much of this she had forgotten, and the insane rule which compelled eighty girls (many of whom knew scarcely a dozen words of a foreign language) to speak French all day had ruined all trace of accent by force of constant hearing of the English words with French terminations which this rule produced. She had read books--in the time she was supposed to be doing something else--but not as many as she would have read at home. She was disgusted with the sordid pettiness of school life, at the narrow hypocrisies among the girls. She could not help feeling Downwood must be relieved to be rid of her, of her disturbing theories, her lack of reverence for authority. School had wasted two years of her life. There was a touch of bitterness about even the hours of the last night.She woke up happily and hurried down to breakfast. The school hat was packed in her case. She and Eleanor were leaving a little earlier than the others; they said good-bye and fought their way through the crowd at the library door. Miss Sampson was kissing Eleanor, near to weeping, then she turned. Nancy stared into the eyes that could control her life no longer, a little sorrowful for all the years wasted on a bad system and a wrong ideal."Good-bye, Miss Sampson." "Good-bye, Nancy." The girls, helpless and afraid of homecoming, with no beginning of term to steady them, huddled in the passage. Nancy looked at them for the first time with an immense pity. There was no beauty in their lives. Then she strode down the hill without once turning her head.BOOK III  TRANSITIONBut beauty is set apart, beauty is cast by the sea, a barren rock, beauty is set about with wrecks of ships, upon our coast, death keeps the shallows--death waitsclutching toward us from the deeps."H. D.CHAPTER 1MIRAGEINANCY leaned on the rail, watching the horizon, eager for Syracuse. It was too late for almond-blossom, but there was snow on Etna and the South itself to welcome her--the South, after six years.The past few months had been a space of disillusion. Childhood had shivered into a thousand pieces that May morning she had entered school, and instead of starting afresh Nancy had wasted time trying to find and fit together the broken pieces. She seemed to have slipped back a whole age. The wonder and imagination she had treasured were gone and knowledge had not come to fill their place. She had lost her early facility of writing verse; become critical, nothing she attempted satisfied her. That she would have had to lose her childhood some time never occurred to Nancy. In the usual way she would have lost it imperceptibly; as it was, she could date it back to the violent shock of school, and had not learnt enough to know that this was a period through which it was inevitable for her to pass. At Downwood she had shut herself up in a world of her own, away from taunts and all unpleasant thoughts, and there this refuge of silence had been a necessity, but she could not, with leaving school, revert to infancy, and the friends, the life she had dreamed seemed mythical as ever though the months of bondage had passed. With the growing realisation that to escape from one prison might not mean to have the world at her own disposal, she yielded herself more and more to the true intimacy of books, beyond the limits of childish experience, painfully groping a way to a harder knowledge.Adventure half forgotten, Nancy had left England with no enthusiasm, nine months after her return from school. She could not care at first, but as the familiar names slipped by, the familiar colours, the hills that she had last seen dusty with almond-blossom; a mirage of her childhood drew perilously close, and as night came, in southern loveliness, in a blue that shamed the waves that curve on delicate curve moved ever towards the shore, her heart beat quicker for even the hint in wind and sea that they were near the home of her early dreams.IIAmid the rattle of anchor chains, people frantically inquiring if Eryx were a general, or trying to mend their ignorance of Gylippus by a five minutes' perusal of the guide-book, noise, shouting, late one April afternoon Nancy landed at Syracuse. To her it was no strange place to stare, to wonder at, and leave; it was home, the haunt of her childhood, to be taken simply and quite naturally. School had robbed her of happiness; the South would give it back to her. Rich with memories she moved forward with the throng towards the centre of the town."Of course you could not appreciate or remember the South when you were here before, you were too young."The stinging words Nancy was impotent to refute rang in her ears. Appreciate! She had had the South in her heart ever since she was seven. Remember! Why, she could take them to the very corner of the ruined amphitheatre where ten years before she had rebuilt the whole city with a bit of mosaic and a few pieces of marble, while they, for all their guide-books, could not picture a single building. At every step another impression of a crowded childhood greeted her. She turned from the look in their eyes. "I made you," the South taunted, "and what have you brought me?" A few lines of verse, dreams--was that all the six years had wrought? Oh, those wasted years at Downwood, the desecration, the shame of school.She was bitterly homesick for her childhood. She felt sundered from it as though it were whole ages away, as though she could never have been the child she remembered playing with heroes in a heroic land. There were the familiar orange trees, but the dreams themselves had vanished for ever. Sometimes under the almond boughs one would brush her cheek, but they were hers no longer and there was nothing to take their place. "You were too young to understand," they told her, while she thought of a far-away figure that had been Carthaginian, Syracusan, and Greek by turn on that very hillside, and raged that she could not bring other children to learn of beauty in the same dream way, instead of being flung into the ignorant atmosphere of school, to ape the narrow thought of a schoolgirl of sixteen."How fascinating this atmosphere is," chattered the girl at her side. "I love those little green shutters and those babies; how typical they are of the South." (She never looked at children at home.) "Nancy, you don't realise how wonderfully romantic it all is. I don't believe you appreciate travelling at all."Nancy, lose in dreams, was silent, and suddenly round the curve of the road came a herd of shaggy goats, sweeping her back ten years. To her they had always been a part of Sicily, one of her earliest memories. Her companion shrank back shivering as they passed."What a desecration! Get away from them; they spoil the atmosphere.""They are the South," Nancy answered simply.IIIChildhood had failed her, the South had failed her; what was left? Infancy (unwitting of companionship) school had rendered impossible of recapture, but reality offered only a friendship of harsh chattering, unconsidered mirth. Her hope, her dreams, shaped to a definite longing for something to fill her loneliness, give her knowledge; to a thought that only a book of her own making would admit her to the friendships she desired. She grew each week more desirous of silence, natural, when what to her was joy, a riotous sweetness, became meaningless words, uncomprehended emotions, to the girls about her, for whom Corfu, history, metre, were chaotic obscurity, "interesting," but out of their way. The indifference of others assured Nancy in her belief she was a poet; expression broke to lines of echoed verse and worse thought.A poppy sail burned on an umber ship, the golden oars of a Greek rower were birds on a space of silver; pansies, rich with dream and purple, were truant about the shore. In dangerous and defiant ridges visible Albanian hills curved scimitar-wise in the blue May morning. An eager strength breathing about the air brought renewal of her old wish to go to sea. Greece was a tranquillity, an interlude of loveliness, which made her eyes afraid. Poems breathed among the darkness of the cypress trees; the islands drifting out to sea were magical as song. For the moment she lost trust in the future; ahead of this present all was obscure. Bewilderment slipped gradu-ally away; childhood was not so poignant in its memories. But glad as her eyes were with beauty, the spirit of the South was fugitive, a mirage that never waited for her soul.From Corcyra, rich with scarlet poppy, pointed cypress, they came to Delphi, austere and desolate in a precipice above the silver olive trees; to Delos, where in an ivory stillness broken statues kept a pristine splendour above Ionian water, crushed to a blue of porcelain, the porcelain that hid the grass with fragments, quiet as the banded lizards, inscrutable as the sun. Athens was explored and Aegina on the hill where, between the magical leaves, waves were a ragged violet as they climbed the slope. Rhodes was denied her, it was too far south; but before they turned northwards and home the approach of June found them anchored one morning in the bay of Crete.IVA noisy throng threatened the silence of the tiny room, one blazoned volume of Minoan centuries. The heft of a broken dagger, the rough pottery of a rounded vase, held no speech intelligible to their eyes. Crete was a place to see, forget, or associate with the warm-ness of the day, some happening of the journey. One or two would have lingered; travellers, to whom the spirit of antiquity was not utterly inaudible. They were dragged away by the clamour of the crowd. Happy with a knowledge rent from map and history book, Nancy paused alone before the pictured life of Crete.Minoan civilisation held her with vivid interest. Had not the islands been the home of sailors? Had not the Cretan ships linked Mycenae and further Greece with Egypt, with the East? Her early knowledge of the Nile, of Phoenician history, helped her to spell from painted vase and moulded weapon the tale of the rise of Knossos, the sack of the palace, conquest, the end of the island dominion. Why had she no friend with full knowledge of the early history of the South? Mycenaean discoveries were not more wonderful than this.The last straggler vanished. Solitary, before the frescoes of the bull ring and the Cupbearer, Nancy recovered antiquity.Knossos was not desolate, but vivid with life and heat. Tall scarlet poppies grew by the narrow, path. Peasants in mediaeval jerkins flung the umber earth aside with their spades, in warm heaps. An April noon at Carthage had seemed the heart of stillness, but here the place burned. One could see the luminous quiver of the air."Let's hurry and get on board again. I know I shall get sunstroke." The throng murmured, querulous with heat.Nancy strode deliberately into the hottest sunlight, drinking a life too strong that flamed her soul to wildness, flushed her with dripping gold. Earth was warm, the air was warm; she was mad with the colour and the light. The woods called her, and the hills; strength was abroad in them, and in strength was happiness. Oh to strip herself free of fear, to escape; to know the darkness of the boughs, the broken warmth of poppies. Life waited for her in the hills, no mirage, but truth, eager for her to call, eager to be held. "Come, Nancy; you are keeping everybody." Escape--but could recapture be eluded? The throng clambered into their carriages. "Come, Nancy." She turned, an unwilling prisoner to civilisation.VGive me freedom in your woods, Knossos of the sea; the loveliness of flowers, the loveliness of honey.You were beautiful as snow that lifts, a white narcissus, on Mount Ida. O frail shell, stained with dawn, you were lovely as the moon.Sun wrought you and foam, the crushed hearts of crocuses--rhythms of gold light across a marble of white lilies.Watcher of the woods, watcher of the sea, Life, wild as an iris bud, crusted your jars with dreams.The youths knew your strength, Knossos of the sea; the hot edges of hill above the cypress boughs.The wild goats on the grass slope stiffened with fear, leapt upward. The bronze head of a javelin smashed on a grey rock. Loose stones, scarred earth--was a spear, the wind, as swift as a Cretan? Wild flight, wild limbs--the hunters passed. Girls loved you for beauty, Crete, heavy with orchards; for the pool of violets, dark as sleep, crushed by their sun-browned limbs. Noon blossomed in your hands, spilled in cups of gold and onyx; your nights were ivory petals carved of dawn on a white rose. You were a wild pear amorous of sunrise: were you not afraid to give of your loveliness to the North?Could you have kept your dreams for the wood cyclamen; could you have lost them in the reeds, Knossos, you had lived.But the North snaps the agate hilts of your daggers with a touch. Their eyes hardened with evil as they lifted the gold jars. While your merchants traded with far isles they cried "To Crete." The waves were shrill with the invading oars of darkened ships. O sea flower, where was the wind that it left their sails unrent? Surf of Crete, where was your strength that their anchors tore the sand!For the last time, Knossos, you were beautiful with sleep. The wood gave no warning: you were abandoned by the moon. A twig cracked in the darkness. The watchers laughed: "Some hunter has lost his way from the hills." A torch flashed: "It is a beacon to guide in the fisher ships." They poised their spears in the shelter of the orchards. The archers crept forward. A wild goat, stiff with a sudden arrow, Knossos woke.You shattered under their javelins, Crete of the open water, as under a heavy sandal crush the coral-tinted shells. Your loveliness was sullied by no fear. Death was swift. The stem of your beauty snaps. Life wept to watch you perish by the sea. Torches fired the wood. The spearsmen clutched gold. Sun-coloured porcelain splintered into dust. Fragments of onyx, fragments of agate, littered the torn earth. The sharp scent of burning cypresses was sweeter to the archers than reaped grass. Bough of wild pear, you were smitten by the wind. You were desolate, as Carthage shall be desolate, and Troy. In far islands they hung your daggers on the wall; they poured wine from your honey-tinted jars. In far islands loveliness trembled into leaf, bitter with seed from your dreams.Give me freedom in your woods, Knossos of the sea; I know Life rests with the wind, not an arrow's length from your hills. For here is a wild hive plundered of its honey; here are thin poppies dead with the pressure of his limbs. I am all wildness: where the shade dusts the hollows with black mulberries, let me thrust my hands in the earth and feel your strength. Your spirit is not perished from the woodland nor from the parched cliffs.Knossos of the scarlet poppies, Knossos of the sea, bring me to the ledges where Life rests.CHAPTER II"VERS LIBRE""I WANT to read Verhaeren." Nancy was finishing a French lesson in a vain attempt to recapture the accent lost at school. To an enthusiastic admirer of the Elizabethans with their richness and their freedom, the perpetual Alexandrine was wearying in its monotony. Quite by chance she had just read an article hinting at some new form, at "vers libre," with vague mention of Verhaeren, de Régnier and others. "Vers libre!" The very words seemed full of possibilities.Madame exhaled horror, petrified and rigid with it--no dragon could have turned her more successfully to stone. "Young girls cannot read Verhaeren." She shivered as though something secret and terrifying had been revealed to her."Why not?" inquired Nancy, unabashed. She had not known Madame so careful of her morals before."Les Flamandes.""But why not?" she persisted. "Les Flamandes." Nancy had no intention of yielding."I could not be responsible if you read it.""But he wrote other books. I could read those."The agitated eyes made last appeal. "He has no ideals. I will bring you a nice book of Francois Coppée; he is poetic, and you like poetry."' I hate Coppée. I want Verhaeren.""You cannot read Verhaeren." Horror was breaking into rage. "He writes 'vers libre.'" "That is what I want to study."Perhaps Madame knew that if Nancy wished a thing she usually fought till she got it; perhaps she thought to give her first Les Villes tentaculaires, one of the most difficult of modern books for a child of eighteen to understand, would be to turn her against this hated, this perturbing "vers libre" for ever. Two days later Les Villes tentaculaires arrived.True it was that Nancy could not understand it at first. It was the spirit of Verhaeren rather than his actual poems that she loved. Here was something strong, new, impetuous, with much of the vigour of the sea winds he praised, something answering to impalpable sensations she felt herself, undeveloped, but assuredly there. Reading him, adventures seemed possible after all. She demanded more of Verhaeren, more of "vers libre.""Tout la mer va vers la ville."Much as she loved the past, Nancy could not help seeing loveliness in modernity as well. She had always felt an inexplicable beauty in the side of trade that is poetry; in the docks with their hint of wind and vigorous sea. The dirtiest collier took on regal colour in her sailor heart; sleep never came so eagerly as on a boat, or in a train shaken by the powerful rhythm of the engine, and it was this precise spirit that breathed through Verhaeren; like the Elizabethans, he treated things grandly. With him there could be no quiescence, no tranquillity; he got hold of one, forced one to follow. Others sang for themselves; he sang for humanity.Perhaps it was his power of making poetry out of anything, perhaps it was that, in a slighter way, Nancy could not escape the vision of the pitiful waste of earth; or was it because they shared belief in a confident future? but Verhaeren, and through him other modern French poets, gave her a sensation of reality as contrasted with utter vision and utter dream, the one word which had never before entered her vocabulary--Life. They gifted her with discontent. She looked towards actual fulfilment of her hopes.At least her days were spent in the company of poets, if actual speech were ever to be rare. Mallarmé was difficult; it was hard to read meaning into his music, though in a subtle way--as a wind threatens the plum-blue tranquillity of night, then perishes unawakened--she was conscious of his influence. Henri de Régnier with his cadences, vital and breathing of the resin of forest branches and the salt petals of sea flowers, haunted her mind for days.Rhyme had already begun to grate harshly on an ear that daily grew more sensitive to curve of rhythm or subtlety of phrase. Words were, of themselves, loveliness; of themselves, colour. But it was the modernity of many of these writers, their fondness of experiment, that made them not alone a technical revelation but brought a new and vital element of wideness into her vision. Swept away by the vividness of the poems, from books that led her outwards to the world, fretting against the narrowness that jarred on either hand, she longed to pull the universe to pieces and build it up again in her own way. With all her training grounded in the past, her feelings beat their wings towards the future.Development placed Nancy far in front of school companions. She saw while they were wondering, but it was hard to be a discoverer and have no one to echo her enthusiasm. Her thought became derision, her vitality a wretched violence, without a friend. She wanted speech, constant association, with minds that possessed all the vigour and the wideness of this poetry. Surely the immensity of her appreciation should gain them for a friend? But there were only schoolgirls to chatter of Downwood and their newer classes, they, and to tramp the windy streets and catch hint of Verhaeren, an answering audacity, in the storm, in the hail.Oh to be a boy and have the world. What was the use of existence to a woman, what compensation could there be for loss of freedom? It maddened her to think that as a boy she could have gone to sea, shaped her own experience. A man has liberty, the disposal of his life so largely in his hands, but a girl--she had no wish to write books woven of pretty pictures seen from a narrow window; roughness and adventure, these formed her desire. To possess the intellect, the hopes, the ambitions of a man, unsoftened by any feminine attribute, to have these sheathed in convention, impossible to break without hurt to those she had no wish to hurt, to feel so thoroughly unlike a girl--this was the tragedy.She was shaken by a craving for colour, for friendship; for something to still the hunger of her starving brain and fill it with expression. Perhaps it was experience she needed--she wanted to live, but knew not how to start. She tried reasoning, patience, to be calm; but the sudden sight of a wild-rose sky, a line of a poem, a single dream, and all the foundations of her citadel of reason crumbled into foam. Stung with the thousand trifles of an ordinary day, choked with her own inarticulate verse taut on a thread of wavering hope, she trusted the absolute certainty behind her doubts that all these differing elements would mingle in her making, shape her eventual writing, be absorbed and form her mind.Rain, sharp silver slanting lines beating down the street, crystal breaking a dull transparence of wet slate. The grey and flooded road mirrored the separate trees, an etching on the water. There might be ever an illusion of freedom in the hurricane and knowledge; there was always knowledge. Flaubert, de Régnier,  Verhaeren, lines, thoughts, vitality, surged through her in a single enthusiasm. Oh, that she might help to part the universe from narrowness, to pour beauty and a splendid tolerance within the reach of all. To them nothing was impossible. Surely to personal liberty she might at last attain.The park was deserted; long silver lines of rain hung on the branches, a forest of icicles. Cold drops trickled down her collar, a wet draggling skirt made impediment at each step. Would she were out in a boy's suit, free and joyous and careless as a boy is.A wilder wind snowed the ground with leaves. An orange leaf bounded by, a runaway hoop, rolling over and over the wet gravel. They made a tapestry of brown and scarlet on the water; they drifted on the slanting gale. "Le vent." Mightily shouting, it burst between the trees. The glorious vigour of the forces of the world thundered through the hurricane. Knowledge: there was always knowledge. Wisdom spelt conquest. She would force everything into her brain, absorb it and pour it back in riches to the earth. Tempestuous conflict there might be, but sometime, sometime, freedom should be hers. "Le vent." Rhythm of rain and beating wind. Whatever might befall, space, storm and air kept for ever immortality.Night was near. The reflected lamps shone, distant crocuses waving in the Serpentine as the wind blew lightly across the surface of the black and shimmering water. She turned towards the darkness of the streets. The lamps hung lemon-wise between a silver mist; light fell in lemon ripples on the sombre pavement. She passed into a tranquil blankness of warm light, uneasy in its silence.The years must bring her freedom and achievement.CHAPTER IIIBARRIERSHER book had come. Nancy turned the pages without excitement, almost without interest. Weary of having her ambitions treated as a passing whim, weary for friendship; she had arranged for the best of her verses to be published at her own expense. They had seemed so beautiful when she sent the manuscript away, but in the months that had elapsed before it returned to her, a bound and printed volume, the vital impulses of "vers libre " had discovered and cut away much of the stagnation, due to Downwood, from her mind. She saw now that her rhythms were but echoes, that her thoughts had no strength. And here was a newspaper praising some of the verses; how dull it was and false.Was this all that life meant? A veritable wresting of expression from a soul not yet articulate; even with printing the conscious-ness of failure. Were the years to fill only with fresh hopes, the making of one book to be succeeded by another book, each inevitable with disillusion? Was it true what people told her, that she sought a reality that had never known existence?She closed the volume. Another hope had gone.Everybody wanted to read Nancy's verses; nobody wanted to buy them. Older people smiled at her as though she were a spoilt child given a new toy, and watched to see her tire of it. Reviews came; they were read in a quiet, impersonal way.Monday brought "It is somewhat of a disappointment that the South should have inspired such aimless versifying. The author should remember that the light of the celestial flame needs no aid of coloured glass. Possibly the sense of rhythm may one day win a place among the minorities." Tuesday retaliated with "This tiny book of verse contains more of the true gold of poetry than many a weightier and more pretentious volume. Unlike much modern verse, all that is attempted is well within the scope of the poet, and some of the smaller poems are exquisite, clearly-cut gems. The rich-worded pictures are finer than mere description, and have behind them much of the haunting quality of true song. Wednesday stated that it was "a gathering of bright and cheery verse." (Whoever had written that had either never troubled to read the verses through, or had given her the notice intended for somebody else.) "There is much tunefulness in this little book," or "Many charming lines occur among these verse," became the stereotyped opening for those too lazy or unwilling to condemn. One detected the influence of Tennyson, whom she hated; another, trace of Arnold and Poe, whom she had never read.The longest verses in the volume she had based on the wish, felt so often, to escape into roughness; to feel the sharp sand crunch, frost-wise, between the soft dust never fingered by the sea and the smooth wet surface covered by the tide; to be free and out on the open water, and the realisation that this would mean cessation of intellectual growth, that poetry might be lived there but never written. In her verse she had traced this in an imaginary poet. Two critics solemnly ascribed it as an ode to --, a writer of whom she had never even heard.Letters came. "Ever so many thanks, dear, for your book of pretty verses, which I shall always treasure. In the future, doubtless, you will do better work, but there is just one point," etc. "I think the verses are simply charming" was a variant on "Thank you so much for your charming book of verse." All ended with paragraphs of advice that, followed, would have ensured her complete silence; existence took its way precisely as before, except that people coming to the house felt bound to inquire "Have you written anything lately?" and to add hastily they were afraid they did not understand poetry.Months passed; Nancy was tormented by a desire for expression keener than ever and the sense that until she had some knowledge of actual life she would write nothing that was vital, nothing that was true. Better silence than to sit weaving into words pretty echoes of her favourite poets or her own immature dreams, untested of reality. Yet had she been a boy it would have been so easy to obtain experience; it was this accident of being a girl that doubled her difficulties, dragged her back at every step.Sometime she would be free, sometime opportunity would come and she would assert her right to freedom; meantime there was nothing but to read and dream and tramp miles in the rain and the wind, longing for liberty.To speak to other girls seemed as unreal to her as ever; she felt it was better to be alone as regards intimate friendship than to wear gloves every day and be polite. It was not only that none of them cared for literature or history or that she was, as people called her, "shy"; it was rather the dread, so deep a root of her nature, of the insincerity of such meetings, of her inability to see life from the accepted point of view. Then to go out meant her best clothes, and in them she felt as awkward as a child trying to make mud pies in a clean pinafore. So she was forced to dream in silence, to seize a hint of adventure sailing among the Scillonian islands, or on a rare expedition alone with Eleanor to a mountain cottage in Wales. But to live roughly for a few weeks only made the return to civilisation seem more incongruous; made it harder to understand the strangers she was forced to meet occasionally, full of an existence she ignored."And so, dear child, you paint." Nancy was startled from meditation by the restless remark. "No; I write." "Wonderful! After dinner you must show me your book. Is it a novel?" "No; poems." "How interesting. What a magnificent picture that is in the corner," and Mrs. North turned her head to the other side of the table with a swift rush that threatened to shake her hair, of a wonderful unnatural red, from just the precision of artificiality she affected.The book was fetched. Mrs. North turned the pages with the rapid motion so characteristic of her, reading not a word."Wonderful, dear child, wonderful!" Her eye caught the name, inscribed beneath the verses, of the place where Nancy had written them."Palermo," Mrs. North chattered. "Palermo. A charming place. I once spent a winter there. I met such nice people at the hotel." She laid the book aside. "Child, you will be a great poet, and we have need of poets. Oh, what a beautiful vase that is!" She jumped up and rushed round the drawing-room, murmuring before each ornament, "Wonderful, too wonderful!"Nancy resented her intrusion. Outside, the experience of meeting her might have been amusing, but there was no place for her abbreviations, her sharp rushes in the quietness of the room. Roughness Nancy could pardon, but insincerity jarred her spirit; it was an evil thing.Mrs. North leaned from the tapestry chair. "This house is too wonderful. You know, I always say to my friends, if I could live in a beautiful room I should never feel wicked any more." Sighing, her eyes hinted how inexpressibly wicked she was.Nancy turned away, looked to the figure poised on a cream shell, white and beautiful above the rose and ivory of the lit room, looked, eager for silence. Would the evening never end? "I adore the country," Mrs. North was murmuring as she rose to leave. Nancy knew that meant some uncomfortable seaside hotel. "You must come and see my daughter to-morrow. Just a schoolroom tea, dear child; but you won't mind, will you?"Nancy stared helplessly, unable to think of an excuse before Mrs. North had left the room.Confident the following afternoon that it was only "a schoolroom tea," quite unafraid, Nancy rang the bell. To her horror she was shown into a room full of people, girls predominating, all with an air of mingled indifference and restraint. For a moment the old feeling of first entering Downwood came back to her, but before she had time to think she was sitting on a sofa nearly buried in cushions between two girls, one fair, one dark, and both equally uninteresting. The room was one of those comfortless places supposed to be furnished in an artistic style with nothing cheerful about it, peculiar chairs, and a bookcase full of sentimental novels. Every one moved and spoke with such exaggerated politeness that they seemed to ooze artificiality. Nancy shivered miserably in her corner. How absurd it all was.At length the fair girl leaned forward and murmured to the dark one, "I have just come from a lecture on some French poets.""How interesting, Miss Chester," the other replied; and Nancy, supposing she had better say something, and hoping the girl was not as dull as she looked, turned and asked, "Are you fond of French poetry?"Miss Chester, placing her arms and legs with slow expressionless movement in another carefully chosen position, smiled at her. "No; are you?""Yes.""How splendid!"There was an awkward silence. Mrs. North, a plate of cakes in each hand, rushed up, knelt on one knee before them, and chattered. Nancy supposed it must be the latest fashionable attitude, for the position was repeated before each group in the room."And did you like Wales, dear?" Mrs. North was back in front of them again. "I think it was too brave of you to go up there all alone."There was a look of interest in Miss Chester's eyes."It was great fun," Nancy answered."How well you look, dear. Climbing must be good for the complexion," and Mrs. North was away on another of her rushes. "Do you live in Wales?" asked Miss Chester."No. A friend had a cottage there among the mountains and I stayed with her.""How splendid! I suppose you knew a lot of people?" This from the dark girl."No; we were quite alone.""Wasn't it very dull?""No; it was so wild. We were right among the hills, and we climbed a bit.""But what did you do there when it rained?" Miss Chester was as interested as her languid movements would allow."Put on our oilers.""How splendid!""Didn't you catch cold?" The dark girl was actually curious."Of course not. Besides, there is always such a sense of adventure in the rain.""A friend asked me to her cottage once," sighed the dark girl. "She kept four servants, and I should have enjoyed it for the week-end, but I was not allowed to go."Nancy smiled, incapable of answer. "Still, I'm having a good time, you know." She got as confidential as formality would allow. The good time, as far as Nancy could make out, consisted of a series of interminably dull lunches and teas and in never being allowed outside the house alone."Did you have much trouble with your servants?" Miss Chester interrupted."We did not have any servants." "Oh; you were in an hotel?""No; my friend had a cottage.""But how did you live?" The tone was very bewildered."In the kitchen."Both withdrew as though Nancy were either insane or unfit for their company. They looked at each other. Then Miss Chester's training reasserted itself. "How splendid!"Eager to escape, Nancy rose. "To live on intimate terms with one's frying-pan is a solemn experience," she assured them as she left.Nancy passed from the dreary afternoon into the windy street. It was an hour she jerked herself from dream, hungry to touch reality. It was people she wanted to write about, and people baffled her. Yet she understood them, felt their hearts in some instinctive phrase, surprised in a chance gesture whole strands of their intimate life. Perhaps these monotonous years had blurred the freshness of those with whom she came in contact. They awakened no answering vitality, but spilled black words on white paper, barren and dulled with the dregs of remembered bondage. She looked beyond the lamps to the indigo darkness invading the trees, angrily aware of her need of life to sting her into expression.O to weave all this into a poem, to listen and to learn, until the strange incessant noises, the lemon lamps and the scarlet, blended with darkness and with dream. Outside was so much beauty, and inside--she had by heart what would happen. She dreaded to go indoors, to go up and down the staircase, to wonder how many times she had climbed it, how many times she had come down to emptiness, dreaming the same desire. She remembered when she had at first discovered poetry and had come up softly, hardly daring to move lest in its very fragileness it should vanish; then as it grew clearer she had come up triumphantly because there was so much joy in her heart. Downwood had followed, solitude; and she was no nearer to her wish. Expression to her meant life. She was willing to fail, prepared to fail, but to choke with poems she could not utter was intolerable with anguish. She sought, and could discover no ultimate escape.So the years passed, and hope was hard to keep.CHAPTER IVSALT WATERPOEMS, breathed by the sun into material form, the Scillies rose from the summer depths of blue and iridescent marble. There was little of earth about the islands; even the hills had the curve of a wave; on the western rocks white sand rifted through the grass. The sleepiest July, stirring amid the clover, could never rid the air of a strong and pleasant saltness; while the ice-plants, breaking in flames of rose between the colder stones, had much about them of the sea anemones. A miniature continent, many-regioned, set, circle-wise, about a space of water ever an intimate reflection of the outer tide, each island was so separate, so individual in atmosphere, that an ocean might have divided one from another rather than an iris pool.Untouched by any spirit of historical antiquity they breathed freshness; as though, a bubble on the lips of the sea, each had been blown to reality that morning; so new in colour it was strange they neither drifted nor took flight, seagull-wise, beyond the horizon, yet full of a primaeval oldness as if, with no intervening dream, Phoenician merchants might return to trade and fill the harbour with their anchored ships.Nancy plunged her shrimping net into the sedge, swayed back and forth by the tide as grass is moved with a windy day. Fern-fringed seaweed, glistening with pods, trailed amber about the edges of the rocks. Water whirled past her, stilled into pools; weed and sea flower, strange in shape and colour, hid the shelving sand floor with their roots. In the slow heavy push of the net she came near to the heart of the sea, glad with the very stinging of its salt. Now a crab was lifted, tearing at the mesh with tough brown claws; now shrimps and jelly-fish silted into the bottom of the bag. Gulls, whiter than sea-froth, drifted towards a wave with pointed wings. Spray broke about the further islands. All was movement, all was life.Salt water and the sun began to burn away her silence. She must write; an imperious need of expression was upon her. She was torn from dream only to feel desire flood back upon herself. What was there but her own development she could fit with words, days of epic infancy, childhood broken by a frozen bondage--this solitude of years among her books, with wavering hope for company, it might be ended by adventure? The books she longed to write must still be put aside lest she should mar them with immaturity. It was false to write of emotions her mind had not experienced. She must see, she must know, before creation were possible. Yet it was hard to stay for a future that was so slow of waking; hard to return to Scilly, summer after summer, and mark another year as barren of achievement.Thin sand shifted about her feet as she climbed beyond the shore to the first hollow rough with bracken and a clump of heather. The evening, at least, would bring her a new experience, for if the weather held they would go by moonlight to scratch for lances on Pellistree beach. She emptied her basket on to the nearest rock. It was something to feel the sun, to watch the sea.The lance hooks jangled in the darkness. Nancy followed the others up the road, knowing she was a boy. A clock had long ago struck ten in the clear Scillonian air. The black stems of scattered masts were lit by gold buds. It was an hour of childhood recaptured and fulfilled. The moon was hidden; no one spoke.It was strange to feel the short clover underfoot, to tread on sleeping flowers. Moths were blown from shadow to shadow, white rhythms of orchard petals till their wings touched earth. The sense of night, new; lovely, intangible, made mystery of the hedge. Even the air filled with a sudden richness, the scent of slumbering grass.The whole island seemed to have changed its shape with a single hour. Sleeping birds in the darkness, rocks drifted into the water beyond the open bay. Far in the distance a light flickered and was still over sand colourless in its coldness, neither white nor faded gold, rather tinged as a star struggling between the crinkled edges of a cloud.Nancy stepped over the chill pebbles of the beach, waded along a thread of pools, plunged her lance hook firmly in the sand. Tiny phosphorescent stars were flung burning on to the cold shore, a sudden shiver of silver missed her hands. It was her first adventure with night; a strange, a wonderful experience, full of the mingled dream and reality she desired.A trail of seaweed fell across her feet with sudden warmth. A lance quivered in her sandy fingers; the bay flashed with the silver of leaping fish. The baskets filled. Out on the boulders which kept no thought of earth Nancy touched the freshness of the sea, elemental, sharp as it had been to the fisher folk who, before history, tore shells from the rocks and plunder from the sedge.Her own hands were thick with oil, crusted with salt and sand. The tide turned. Water surged over the crumbling stones. She stood erect, looking seawards for a last time before they left the beach. Gold heart of a white and open rose, the moon rifted the petals of the clouds.Hugh Town was asleep when they returned. The clock struck three in an air heavy with peacefulness. There was no wind; no ripples broke the silence of the waves. Hot with rebellion Nancy opened the window of her room, reluctant to leave night, loved for the first time, eager to touch the darkness, to keep the softness of it near her face.  In an hour dawn would rise; iris morning would chisel the hills with gold. What waste it was to sleep.Even the flowers were too delicate for her mood. She needed to plunge her lips into the salt, to grip tough roots with her hands, rock. Strength, she longed for strength, might of wind, surge of clamorous surf. All the wildness of her spirit night liberated with a touch. She stood; all eagerness, all longing, just to smell tar, to feel rope, not to watch but to battle with the waves. Yet the door was locked; she could only wait at the window, desolate with lost adventure, desolate with a boyishness that might never put to sea, denied the secrets of the wind and dawn a sailor has by heart.Clouds drew over the moon. The islands slept.Sunset carved the eastern islands out of grape-blue darkness with a gold knife. For a last moment, on the rose-red stone-crop of Ganilly, day remembered noon. Black seals dived for fish in a purity of green water left by the sand beneath. The distant mainland and the distant waves deepened with night.Nancy stared out seawards as though adventure waited her at the horizon. She was living a dream near to the immortality she loved. It was evil to think of beauty as tainted by any transience, but wind, if it stilled, passed into another wind, the sea slept and knew not death. Evening was ready to flower above the ridges of the water, drop after drop of honey, light spilled into the foam. Between the islands, almost beyond sight, the swift, beautiful outline of a ship followed the swifter day.The wildness of the hour took Nancy's heart in its strong grasp. She stared at the mainland, rigid with rebellion. Winter, desolate hours she fought to keep even dream; how had she failed that she must face them year after arid year? It was only her ignorance that kept her from expression; always to watch, never to feel. She needed a future that would hold no sting, no bondage; to slip free of the old hours and all their fetters, to kick aside existence and clutch life. What was strength that she should fear it, what was roughness? It was better to know the beauty in bitterness than to freeze into a tranquillity that had turned away from truth.Cold water tossed seawards beyond the black drifters, beyond the harbour wall. Nancy shook the water from her oilskins; spray burst over the bows of the launch. All she had known of liberty, all she had read, lands of wide grass, rough hills, open beaches, the wildness that was freedom, sharpened her desire. With a sudden moment even the islands were too small for her. It was there, out there, she longed to be, out at the horizon--following the wind until her spirit broke beyond morning, in the great hunger for a new world that is the impulse of all discovery.She felt a sailor as they landed on the rough stones of a harbour that was a link between the dark, unconquered life of the drifter cabins and the stone cottages of the dwellers by the shore. Seamen passed up and down, with ropes in their hands or nets; the spirit of the sea about their salt-encrusted clothes. It was a page torn living from some book of old adventure; never free of the smell of fish, of ships, of tar, all the queer sea-scents that pierced Nancy with a strange, a sudden longing for a world she could never know. She looked once to the single scarlet flower the sky lifted above the waves, then turned; angry her joy should be as transient as light, hurt that she might never make achievement of a dream. Yet truth lived, the truth that was adventure, the truth sailors surprised at dawn when morning opened over the far coasts of the world.Why was she born with a boy's heart when she might not go to sea?CHAPTER VTHE COLOUR OF WORDSEVER since Nancy could remember, all words, as she heard or read them, appeared to her as colour. It was as natural as breathing, so thoroughly an element of her mind that it was only by accident she discovered, at fifteen, they were printed symbols to the multitude, and to speak of them as gold or crimson merely provoked derision. It was not until nine years later that she found she was simply a colour hearer and that, while it was not common to every one, as she had at first imagined, it was not confined to the few, but was, in one form or another, fairly prevalent.It was impossible to think of the alphabet as colourless. Often she questioned people, "What do words mean to you; how do you see them?" Yet this was useless; despite proof and reasoning her thought compelled her to credit all minds with this sense of colour audition.Natural objects apart, which kept their actual hue, the initial letter gave the word its colour, but there were exceptions to this rule. Contrary to the French examples in the books she read, vowels were indecisive; it was the consonants that made a page as vivid as a sunset. Seven letters were white, C, G, Q, S, T, O, and U; three of the others were black, D, E, and I. W was crimson; H, M, and Y were various shades of gold and primrose. B changed from raspberry to umber, N was the rich tint of a red squirrel, F and J were a deeper brown. Other letters brought blue, as sharp as a broken wave, as dark as Alpine gentian. R was rose; A and P seemed too weak to be definite and varied with different words, though with names of places or people A was occasionally iris - blue or scarlet.Often the consonants would mingle to form some complex colour, purple or a lazuli dusted over with frost. The wind, blown between the trees, was sharp with blue or silver; surf brought her petals, as she closed her eyes and listened, the white petals of narcissus. Heavy sounds were thick umber or grey; the singing of birds was the transparent surface of a deep, just-rippled pool.Music was no joy to her but an indefinite blur of notes. It retarded thought and offered no emotion in its place. Usually it was some dark shade powdered over with silver, but very high or very clear notes were daffodils, bending from their stems. Swift notes were silver, occasionally blue. It was a curious point that she never cared for green and seldom saw it in a spoken phrase, yet it was visible in music and was slightly irritating in effect.Silence she dreaded; she liked to sleep with sounds waking outside the window. Even work was easier in London with the stir and rumble of traffic just perceptible to her ears. Stillness could have a paralysing effect up her mind; was, of itself, sufficient to bring fear. Not that she disdained quietness, but she liked to have it set about with movement, wind rifting the trees or the distant passage of wheels. Nothing calmed her so much as to lie on a boat and feel the heavy beat of the engines swinging under her limbs. A swift burst of thunder could send her mad for joy.Nancy desired the right of the Elizabethans to forge new words; English grew im-poverished and demanded freshness. She liked to feel the exact colour of an impression had been recaptured in a phrase, but to translate form and motion always by comparison was foolish. It was absurd to dismiss in a score of terms the uncounted lights and shadows visible at dawn, the fragile ridges of the dented hills. There was nothing to express scent; apple blossom in an April evening, tar and salt about a harbour's edge, wild thyme, meadow clover--smell and fragrance had to serve for all. The language of movement spoke to the eyes alone. The circular swing of a wind-touched leaf, the rhythm of a bird's flight, muscles that bent and lifted with each gesture--these were unremembered because they might not be portrayed. Some words possessed a sense of substance. To say "shrill" or "audible" was to feel, in thought, a thin narcissus petal; to speak of "clamorous" or "mulberry" was to touch an apricot ripe with bloom. But more terms were needed to describe actual texture; short, simple words to express the grades between rough and smooth.So much beauty was obscured by an ugly term. Flowers, especially, were gifted with unimaginative titles until it often seemed that the more beautiful the blossom the clumsier was its name. Could any mind sensitive to sound use "geranium" or "begonia," and why must the wallflowers lack a word to bring their reds, the richness of their browns, before the mind? Gillyflower might serve for a bronze petal striped with yellow, but it was too thin, too colourless, for the wilder roots of a steep hillside.Nancy had no care for the origin of a phrase provided that its sound and its meaning were both beautiful. Speech should be strong as a sea wind or delicate as pear blossom; it was the mediocrities of either that jarred. Just to remember some words was to touch a flower: "adventure," a blue so lovely only the rain-flushed petals of the iris offered it to the eyes; "amorous," crimson pressure of a peach against its kernel, bitter with life; "cinnamon," more beautiful than the colour it described; "Illyria," which brought sleep and the dreams of Endimion within its hands. To speak of "ivory " and "orchard" was to touch the wings of beauty; she had a fondness for three syllables, "fugitive," "unpossible," "immortal "; for "honey," which gave her richness; for "almond," which gave her the South. She sought for vivid and original expression of a colour as another might have hunted for a moth or a rare shell. The sudden use of an unexpected word would lighten a whole morning; remembered lines could stab into enthusiasm the most ordinary day.It was the rhythm of words which gave them their emotion. The more sensitive her ears became to the curve and pause of a cadence the less able was Nancy to read rhyme or any definite metre. Syllables had a movement and a spirit of their own; to force them into a crude jingle of regular beats was to mar their loveliness, rob them of life. Certain lines could wake in her moods she seldom otherwise experienced; strange, unconnected phrases which lingered in her mind for no apparent reason. She had only to read or to rememberSalt Cleopatra, soften thy waned lips,and for a brief moment triumph cut her from existence; she was prouder than one to whom a lost battle has promised swift, inevitable death.Some rhythms of themselves brought loneliness, the bitterness of wisdom:Ainsi mourut la fille d'Hamilcar pour avoir touché au manteau de Tanit.To think of this freed a pride in her that was mingled with irony rather than with joy.All courage, all despair broke through this rhythm:Your white flesh covered with saltAs with myrrh and burnt iris;and to cry this cadence:Shall I hurl myself from here,Shall I leap and be nearer you,Shall I drop, beloved, beloved,Ankle against ankle?Would you pity me, O white breast?was to stand (however desolate the day) on a wide beach and to be burnt by light, by the wildness of the sea salt and the wind.Not all writers could free this sense in her, nor was it usually dependent on the meaning of the phrase. Shakespeare, Webster, and Flaubert could madden her with their rhythms; Massinger and Ford left her perfectly unmoved. To read the prose of Lodge, of Lyly, or of Middleton was to lie on grass and wild clover and plunge one's hands deeper and deeper into red earth and sweet herbs.Nancy could find little to interest her in contemporary literature. In France a period of immense richness had passed away, almost before her eyes. The strength, the clarity and truth of half a century of vision had ebbed into the mere cleverness of Romains, the mere brilliancy of Fort. America was hopeful; there was, at least, a sense of vitality abroad, but it was promise, not achievement. England was dull with echoes of just dead age, or too troubled by transition to remember beauty. Nancy read book after book to find they were only lumps of unwrought material, a long preparation for something which never happened, heavy, blunted, barren of definite aim. The "romantic" volumes set out to be wicked, and drowned themselves in a mire of untrue psychology and false emotion. The realists photographed the time, but somehow managed to omit the spirit. There was no mingling of irony with loveliness; the unpleasant truths of existence were blurred with a false perspective or were never faced at all. Discouragement marched in the train of this futility, and from these pages of degenerate weakness Nancy turned with relief to Tom Jones.There was a root of power and firm, exacting observation about Fielding that was very satisfying; he was, contrary to apprehension, the reverse of dull, but, pleasant as the books were to read in a leisurely, haphazard fashion, there clung about them too much of the atmosphere of a century that had never held her captive as antiquity had done. The world Of Joseph Andrews was not a world she envied, and amusing as it might be to read of Sophia or Amelia, their company would have caused her the profoundest irritation.In moods when the impulse for freedom and self-expression was strong upon her Nancy read the Elizabethans. The roots of all things interested her, and Middleton, Lyly, and Marston gave her the inside of an age. To open A Mad World, my Masters, A Fair Quarrel, Eastward Ho, was to step back three centuries and actually enter the Elizabethan world. The side of her nature which resented the impossibilities of Fletcher, however beautiful the poetry, was not disquieted with Moll, the Roaring Girl.It was indeed a mad world she read of, curious mingling of a very ferocity of strength with the "light-colour summer stuff" out of which Euphues, Campaspe, and Rosalynde were fashioned. To listen to Bellario, to meet Orlando Friscobaldo, to watch Endimion waken with the moon, was to breathe the air of adventure, to surprise adventure itself, to plunge into a morning when poetry was common to existence, to be free of this twitterlight of stumbling prose. The mere assuming of a boy's apparel, so favourite a device of the period, enchanted her never-dormant desire of unrestricted freedom. Be a girl and there were always barriers. Nancy liked to dream they were no more when the actual jar of their existence most oppressed her thought. Yet she loved truth too much not to remember the cruel reality of such adventure (pictured in More Dissemblers besides Women) as well as the exultant moments passed with Philaster and Cymbeline.Her intimacy with Bellario and Bellafront, with all that Imogen ever spoke, made friendship in this modern world difficult of achievement. They brought her a wideness of vision strange to this later age; she admitted them to secret imaginings of her own, unbreathed even to dream. Her ears came to recognise in their accents an unrecaptured immortality to need this and sorrow for it should it cease to break her thought.She admired the strength of Wycherley, his clarity and his truth, but with the Restoration a certain heaviness crept into literature; she missed the freshness and vitality of Father Hubbard's Tales or The Anatomy of Wit. All that was strong and beautiful seemed to have died with the Elizabethans, or to exist in this later English only imperfectly and in fragments.Nancy turned to England for her poetry, to France for much of her prose. Almost from infancy she had divided her literary allegiance between the two countries, knowing that a mood which defied translation in the one language might find perfect expression of its beauty in the other. The Alexandrine, the definite French metres, wearied her ears and were tinged with a formality quite alien to the power and richness of the English spirit which had kept a semblance of vers libre alive throughout the centuries, despite Chaucer's betrayal of cadence to a foreign invasion of rhyme. But English prose (the Elizabethans apart) was apt to be heavy, slow of rhythm and emotion, blurred both of vision and of form. The clarity, precision of outline, and psychological mastery which she desired seemed only to be realised in French.It was Flaubert who commanded her enthusiasm; Salammbô that exposed much of her dream of Carthage, Bouvard et Pécuchet with the splendid cruelty of its vision, a cruelty that brought no torment to the nerves. All the richness, all the power of antiquity were in his hands. He was alone. He gave nothing; he expected nothing. His was the pitiless mind of an early leader who would bend the world to his power. It was an accident of circumstance he hewed his way, not by the slaughter of men, the burning of slaves, but by the javelin points of his words.How strong he was--the walls of inscrutable Egypt at speech with the tranquil stars. The mob might howl about him, jackal-wise, but the sand, scratched with their footsteps, only made his silence seem more beautiful. In a time that was a dumbness of rejected beauty Nancy came to him for shelter from an unjust, a brutal, and a bitter world.Yet there were days when Flaubert was too cruel for her, days when to read the Elizabethans was a mockery, and in these moods Remy de Gourment could amuse her thought. It was impossible to be intimate with his books at once. At first Nancy even misunderstood his mind a little; it seemed pure intellect that, unsatisfied and untired, recoiled, ravenous, and devoured his own spirit. Then as she learnt more and read him more she came to understand his bitterness was but the sheath for his pity, for a weariness of knowledge too keen to be ever shared."Rose aux yeux noirs, miroir de ton néant, fais-nous croire au mystère, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.""Marguerite, Balsamine, Amarante, je vous préfère aux plus sérieux enchantements, fleurs trépassées, fleurs de jadis."Crumbled beauty, beauty that was a torment to read, spines of beauty that brought her the disdainful eyes of some imagined Caliph, burdened with orient empires until he crushed them into dust, crying, "Of what worth are these?"--the music of his phrases troubled her almost to weeping. Colour was so subtle in his hands, he spoke of it in a new language; in a line a gesture lived, or the fragrance of the fields, definite and beautiful. He compelled imagination to obedience; he never forgot reality was the calyx of his dream. His prose was poetry; strong as a bough of apple blossom, frail as a wild rose. The wind of his elusive rhythms troubled her emotions until they spilled the pungence of a June meadow about the dreariness of her thought. He understood and did not stab to fresh endurance; the loneliness of his wisdom, too subtle for any sympathy, forgave her the despair of moments she cried out only for peace. Almost alone of poets he offered tenderness, a tenderness wrought of truth that was sweet as a snapt flower.Certainly these French poets stimulated thought. It was not only their wisdom which gave to Nancy a new consciousness of strength, but their courage and their power to see both truth and beauty unmisted by illusion. To read them was a constant lesson in clarity and restraint.Maupassant she admired, but he missed true achievement. He was rigid with a bitterness that had neither the wisdom nor the loveliness of Flaubert to redeem it. One had only to compare the best of his stories with a page of Bouvard et Pécuchet to note the margin between intellect and brain. Yet it was good to feel his coldness cut the mire of this hypocritical existence and bare the essential facts.Huysmans was a disappointment. She read À Rebours only to shrink back from the evil of its weakness. There was no sanity about it, no truth; phrase and thought were blurred and filled her instinctively with dread. À Vau l'Eau was better. It was, at least, uncompromising in its realism--hatred had hardened it--but she was not tempted to any further exploration.Stendhal had no sense of beauty, but he held her mind. There was a curious illusion of reality about his work; it was less a book than a document, some analytical brain editing an unpublished diary that smelt of dust on the front page but was otherwise as vital as the modern hands of its discoverer.Gautier she enjoyed, yet his prose was over ripe with sweetness; rather it was a richness that was unrestrained by thought. She turned to Mademoiselle de Maupin hopeful of boyishness, but the psychology, subtle as it was, had blent with it such unpossible imaginings, the whole seemed a little false. As a poet his rhythms were too rigid for her ears.Rimbaud promised to be interesting, but she could give him no enthusiasm. She was sensitive to Mallarmé, never to Baudelaire.Henri de Régnier's novels satisfied a sense of forceful richness untasted otherwise save in Elizabethan books. Le Bon Plaisir might have been a comedy of Middleton's blent with a modern irony and retold. His prose had all the quality of poetry, was often more emotional than his verse. To read his books was not to see so much as to touch; he evoked the substance of an object, amber, pears, the plum wrought of warm agate M. de Breot chose from the heavy basket. She had her favourite passages: all of La Double Mâitresse, the realisation, in Justin and Jérôme de Pocancy, of the unrelentant brutality of earth, the crust of coarseness and crude colour, the fish scales, the rough soil, that are the elements of strength. Yet, although he expressed the blunt, quick tragedies of the body rather than the protracted, sensitive torment of the nerves, his books were no mere outward portrayal of beauty; under the flesh, burnt with noon, so vivid with life, was a kernel of trenchant analysis and vision.The intervals of her reading Nancy filled with her own manuscript, wrought neither of imagination nor remembered stories but of the one experience she knew, from end to end--herself. Utterly careless of what is misnamed of the multitude "success," she was eager for expression, to frame in words her belief in freedom, her own need of truth. She wished to tear from every language all it might hold of beauty; to fill her imagination with every colour she could wrest from books or life. It was intolerable to write of any mood she had not personally experienced; she fought for knowledge, fought, and groped for it in the dark. Work was difficult in an unbroken isolation which fettered thought and plundered her of dream, yet, sharp as it was to wait for life, there were days she forgot rebellion and was glad of her solitude, the solitude which had taught her the loneliness, the transience, and the loveliness of words.CHAPTER VIVISUAL IMAGINATIONTHERE is existence. There is life. Existence is transient. Life is eternal. Existence begins with birth and ends with death. Life is immortality touched and tasted--the gift of a rare moment. Existence is earth. Life is the root and leaf--flower of dream opening from the calyx of reality.The aim of the artist is expression. The expression of life is art.But no art is possible without freedom; fear and ignorance are the negation of life. To be free is to choose a world and dwell in it uninfluenced by sentiment or circumstance.There is doom of days of fear and emptiness. There is beauty, wise and young and with the eyes of sleep. And between them there is a bridge--the bridge of visual imagination.The eyes look outward on to an actual world, the world of existence. The eyes look inward and see a world as vital and as dear, the world of dream.When the world of existence merges into the world of dream, the eyes look on the world of life.Illusion is to reflect, for the point of a second, the world of dream upon the world of existence. Vision is to project the world of dream beyond the eyes until the actual world is obscured.To dream is to draw pictures across the black curtain of the mind. A thought occurs, a wish, and is immediately translated into a picture. Wish joins wish--picture fits into picture. The result, whether experienced in a sleeping or a waking state, forms a dream.Life is a constant effort to dwell in the actual world familiar to these pictures. Dreams are the hieroglyphics by which the mind expresses its true thoughts.All roots open from childhood--beauty, knowledge, adventure--but they are useless to the artist until they are blended with experience. Experience is personal contact with the elements of life.An artist must be rough to brutality, sensitive as a poppy leaf is to light, for to know the precise moment in which to pass from coarseness into beauty is the root of art. He must be free of the literature of all nations. He must see the same problems, the same thoughts, through the eyes of each different race.The desire of the spirit is immortality. Cessation of growth means cessation of life.Visual imagination is a gift of the child and the artist. It is the root of the creative impulse, the vitality of appreciation, a half of the ingredients of dream. It gives the power to live not one life but many lives, a share in the immortal beauty of the past life of the earth.It is rare to find children who are not able to see "pictures," though with maturity these tend to fade and to disappear. Yet in a few cases their colour deepens with each month, grows hard of outline. They become the shells from which poet or painter pours the eventual expression of his mind.A photograph is the impression formed on the mind of the actual world. A picture is the image traced by imagination or by accident on the brain.The inside of the head seems as a row of cells--a hive, open in the middle and dark. A line of a poem, an adventure, a new thought, opens one cell, many cells, and frees the pictures they contain. The liberated impressions drift across the head.Pictures are of three kinds. Unconscious--when they pass through the mind without conscious effort to evoke or to retain them. Conscious--when by effort of will these pictures are retained and made clear to the point of reality. Visual--when images unconnected with the imagination appear for a moment, vivid with light and movement, as if centred in the lids of the eyes.A figure seen in a conscious picture could be recognised at any future period. A figure seen in an unconscious picture would be definite in outline, but the details (colour of eyes and hair) might not be very clear.Colour and line are dependent in an unconscious picture on association, in a conscious picture on choice.The pictures of a child are usually unconscious or visual. Only an artist of some degree of development has the gift of conscious vision.In actual life thousands of photographs are impressed upon the mind. Some are retained, some are thrown away. During some process of selection (imperfectly understood at present) certain details from many pictures slip back towards the eyes. The result is a visual picture."A bright blue sea beats against an island of brown rocks. Foam is flung high between the sharp points of pinnacles. Sea-birds--gulls and cormorants--fly overhead or perch on the flatter stones. It is no island known in actual life, but the shape is too vivid ever to be forgotten. The sea surges and withdraws again with shrill, incessant movement. The light on the waves is visible as the sun catches them, and again they darken as they surge forward into hollows."Such was an image which occurred after a day had been spent fishing between many small islands. A changing series of impressions had passed before the eyes which had retained at will certain photographs which the mind desired to keep. But of the many rejected impressions some had silted away from forgetfulness and re-lived a moment in the centre of the eyelids.In duration a visual picture comes midway between conscious and unconscious images. It may last from a second to several seconds. It may appear, vanish, and appear again. It is common in childhood and detached both from imagination and from thought. Usually it occurs just before sleep (not invariably), and of all three kinds is by far the most intense in colour and in movement.Unconscious pictures are the images, vague in outline but definite to the mind, that a child sees, turning the pages of a story-book, or that make some line of a picture or a poem the gate to the artist of another world. They are as swift and as natural as breath, and to some minds the inevitable accompaniment of each thought.A conscious picture can last as long as the mind and eyes can endure the rigid concentration. It is the image built by an artist, eager to create a desired world."The sea--blue and intense as a wood hyacinth--sweeps beyond Carthage to the south. A ship moves out of the harbour, her prow pointed toward the sunset, a dark Libyan pulling at the ropes that free her purple sail. A string of camels print the dust with silent footstep; a war elephant with slow, defiant movement strips the leaves from a wayside shrub. Another ship, low in the water with Sicilian grain, breaks into the circle of the bay. A Numidian gallops past toward the date-palms and the desert; the rich African sunlight burns the city to a flame of gold."The mirage of antiquity grows sharp until the body almost feels the sun and the eyes, so hungry for colour in a grey land, are appeased. But the strain across the eyelids is so painful that the image, with a few minutes, is allowed to slip from sight.It is only when a picture is "felt" as well as "seen" that artistic expression results.There are days that are immortal; hours the bird-heart of freedom deigns to shelter an instant in a human mind. That these be untainted of any evil existence--night upon flower--scatters over the memory leaves of [ ]. But let some poem be read or some [ ]ture be achieved. As the light falls they [ ]t out of the darkness--for the wind dies and the sunset; it is only these hours that live.There was existence; there was also life. But in this present time it was hard to capture the reality of dream. Modernity was evil with weakness and repression; a swamp that sucked breath back out of the light. The intellect of modern France had lost its sharpness, exhausted by half a century of expression. What was England but a wallpaper of rigid pattern in art, in education, and in life? It was true a convention of revolt existed, but with the first test the rebels slunk back into the horde. They made an artificiality of freedom. False realities were stamped--pink buds or decayed leaves--upon the acquiescent paper of their minds. Even Downwood, even the schools, were but loose bolts in an engine rusted to breaking point. Fresh paint only made the corruption seem more hideous. And trying to face truth, trying to grasp it, Nancy knew that there was strife about her and ahead of her--a fight, with death as the prize. But she must know and write. She must achieve and express freedom. There must be no pity for an ugly world; pity that was so easy and so wrong. It was better to die for beauty than to exist for lies. And the horde--so ready to stab at any unguarded moment--could not plunder her of Carthage, could not blur the islands from her mind. As long as winds breathed and dawn flowered there was her own South to welcome her, the South itself to answer her "Beauty lives." THE ENDThe author has in preparation a second volume to be entitled Adventure, in which the story of Development will be continued.