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Page 60
XXIX
The time that I spent in the valley home with Cynthia is the most
difficult to describe of all my wanderings; because, indeed, there is
nothing to describe. We were always together. Sometimes we wandered high
up among the woods, and came out on the bleak mountain-heads. Sometimes
we sat within and talked; and by a curious provision there were
phenomena there that were more like changes of weather, and interchange
of day and night, than at any other place in the heavenly country.
Sometimes the whole valley would be shrouded with mists, sometimes it
would be grey and overcast, sometimes the light was clear and radiant,
but through it all there beat a pulse of light and darkness; and I do
not know which was the more desirable--the hours when we walked in the
forests, with the wind moving softly in the leaves overhead like a
falling sea, or those calm and silent nights when we seemed to sleep and
dream, or when, if I waked, I could hear Cynthia's breath coming and
going evenly as the breath of a tired child. It seemed like the essence
of human passion, the end that lovers desire, and discern faintly behind
and beyond the accidents of sense and contact, like the sounding of a
sweet chord, without satiety or fever of the sense.
I learnt many strange and beautiful secrets of the human heart in those
days: what the dreams of womanhood are--how wholly different from the
dreams of man, in which there is always a combative element. The soul of
Cynthia was like a silent cleft among the hills, which waits, in its own
still content, until the horn of the shepherd winds the notes of a chord
in the valley below; and then the cleft makes answer and returns an airy
echo, blending the notes into a harmony of dulcet utterance. And she
too, I doubt not, learnt something from my soul, which was eager and
inventive enough, but restless and fugitive of purpose. And then there
came a further joy to us. That which is fatherly and motherly in the
world below is not a thing that is lost in heaven; and just as the love
of man and woman can draw down and imprison a soul in a body of flesh,
so in heaven the dear intention of one soul to another brings about a
yearning, which grows day by day in intensity, for some further outlet
of love and care.
It was one quiet misty morning that, as we sat together in tranquil
talk, we heard faltering steps within our garden. We had seen, let me
say, very little of the other inhabitants of our valley. We had
sometimes seen a pair of figures wandering at a distance, and we had
even met neighbours and exchanged a greeting. But the valley had no
social life of its own, and no one ever seemed, so far as we knew, to
enter any other dwelling, though they met in quiet friendliness. Cynthia
went to the door and opened it; then she darted out, and, just when I
was about to follow, she returned, leading by the hand a tiny child, who
looked at us with an air of perfect contentment and simplicity.
"Where on earth has this enchanting baby sprung from?" said Cynthia,
seating the child upon her lap, and beginning to talk to it in a
strangely unintelligible language, which the child appeared to
understand perfectly.
I laughed. "Out of our two hearts, perhaps," I said. At which Cynthia
blushed, and said that I did not understand or care for children. She
added that men's only idea about children was to think how much they
could teach them.
"Yes," I said, "we will begin lessons to-morrow, and go on to the Latin
Grammar very shortly."
At which Cynthia folded the child in her arms, to defend it, and
reassured it in a sentence which is far too silly to set down here.
I think that sometimes on earth the arrival of a first child is a very
trying time for a wedded pair. The husband is apt to find his wife's
love almost withdrawn from him, and to see her nourishing all kinds of
jealousies and vague ambitions for her child. Paternity is apt to be a
very bewildered and often rather dramatic emotion. But it was not so
with us. The child seemed the very thing we had been needing without
knowing it. It was a constant source of interest and delight; and in
spite of Cynthia's attempts to keep it ignorant and even fatuous, it did
develop a very charming intelligence, or rather, as I soon saw, began to
perceive what it already knew. It soon overwhelmed us with questions,
and used to patter about the garden with me, airing all sorts of
delicious and absurd fancies. But, for all that, it did seem to make an
end of the first utter closeness of our love. Cynthia after this seldom
went far afield, and I ranged the hills and woods alone; but it was all
absurdly and continuously happy, though I began to wonder how long it
could last, and whether my faculties and energies, such as they were,
could continue thus unused. And I had, too, in my mind that other scene
which I had beheld, of how the boy was withdrawn from the two old people
in the other valley. Was it always thus, I wondered? Was it so, that
souls were drawn upwards in ceaseless pilgrimage, loving and passing on,
and leaving in the hearts of those who stayed behind a longing
unassuaged, which was presently to draw them onwards from the peace
which they loved perhaps too well?
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