Part 15 (1/2)
”Not a bit of it,” said Julian, with a gleam of amus.e.m.e.nt. ”I chose a jolly good one, and she's improved it. You can go some distance with a decent poet, but you can't with your man, Miss Waring. He twiddles up into the sky before you've got your foot on the step.”
”That's a direct challenge,” said Lady Verny. ”I think after dinner we must produce something of Sh.e.l.ley's in contradiction. Can you think of anything solid enough to bear Julian?”
”Yes,” said Stella. ”All the way here in the train I was thinking of one of Sh.e.l.ley's poems. Have you read it--'The Ode to the West Wind'?”
”No,” said Julian, smiling at her; ”but it doesn't sound at all substantial. You started your argument on a cloud, and you finish off with wind. The Lord has delivered you into my hand.”
”Not yet, Julian,” said Lady Verny. ”Wait till you've heard the poem.”
It did not seem in the least surprising to Stella to find herself, half an hour later, sitting in a patch of candle-light, on a high-backed oak chair, saying aloud without effort or self-consciousness Sh.e.l.ley's ”Ode to the West Wind.”
Neither Lady Verny nor Julian ever made a guest feel strange. There was in them both an innate courtesy, which was there to protect the feelings of others. They did not seem to be protecting Stella. They left her alone, but in the act of doing so they set her free from criticism. Lady Verny took up her embroidery, and Julian, sitting in the shadow of an old oak settle, contentedly smoked a cigarette. He did not appear to be watching Stella, but neither her movements nor her expressions escaped him. She was quite different from any one he had seen before. She wore a curious little black dress, too high to be smart, but low enough to set in relief her white, slim throat. She carried her head badly, so that it was difficult to see at first the beauty of the lines from brow to chin.
She had a curious, irregular face, like one of the more playful and less attentive angels in a group round a Botticelli Madonna. She had no color, and all the life of her face was concentrated in her gray, far-seeing eyes. Julian had never seen a pair of eyes in any face so alert and fiery. They were without hardness, and the fire in them melted easily into laughter. But they changed with the tones of her voice, with the rapid words she said, so that to watch them was almost to know before she spoke what her swift spirit meant. Her voice was unfettered music, low, with quick changes of tone and intonation.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Her voice was unfettered music]
Stella was absorbed in her desire to give Julian a sense of Sh.e.l.ley. She wanted to make him see that beyond the world of fact, the ruthless, hampering world of which he was a victim, there was another, finer kingdom where no disabilities existed except those that a free spirit set upon itself.
She was frightened of the sound of her own voice; but after the first verse, the thought and the wild music steadied her. She lost the sense of herself, and even the flickering firelight faded; she felt out once more in the warm, swinging wind, with its call through the senses to the soul. The first two parts of the poem, with their sustained and tremendous imagery, said themselves without effort or restraint. It was while she was in the halcyon third portion of
”The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,”
that it shot through Stella's mind how near she was to the tragic unfolding of a fettered spirit which might be the expression of Julian's own. She dared not stop; the color rushed over her face. By an enormous effort she kept her voice steady and flung into it all the unconsciousness she could muster. He should not dream she thought of him; and yet as she said:
”Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bowed One too like thee--tameless, and swift, and proud.”
it seemed to her that she was the voice of his inner soul stating his bitter secret to the world. A pulse beat in her throat and struggled with her breath, her knees shook under her; but the music of her low, grave voice went on unfalteringly:
”Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.
What if my leaves are falling, like its own!”
Lady Verny laid down her embroidery. Julian had not moved. There was no sound left in the world but Stella's voice.
She moved slowly toward the unconquerable end,
”Oh, Wind, If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”
All the force of her heart throbbed through Sh.e.l.ley's words. They were only words, but they had the universe behind them. n.o.body spoke when she had finished.
She herself was the first to move. She gave a quick, impatient sigh, and threw out her hands with a little gesture of despair.
”I can't give it to you,” she said, ”but it's _there_. Read it for yourself! It's worth breaking laws for; I think it's worth being broken for.”
Julian answered her. He spoke carefully and a little stiffly.
”I don't think I agree with you,” he said. ”Nothing is worth being broken for.”