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A LIST OF THE STORIES OF MICHAEL WOOD

THE HOUSE OF PEACE

THE DOUBLE ROAD (shortly)

Published by Longmans, Green & Co.

THE SAINT AND THE OUTLAW

THE KING PREDESTINATE

Published by The Theosophical Publishing Society.

THE RIDDLE Published by Rebman Ltd.

THE FIRE OF THE ROSE

THE GARMENT OF GOD

THE SECRET OF THE CHILD

Published by The St. Mâhel Workshop.

THE WILLOW WEAVER AND SEVEN OTHER TALES BY MICHAEL WOOD

NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & CO. MCMXVI

PREFACE

“Dost thou feel the soil of thy soul stirred by tender thoughts? Disturb it not with speech but let it work in quietness and secrecy.”

These few stories of Michael Wood are here reprinted with the consent but not at the suggestion of the author. To those who understand, the appeal is diverse but unmistakable; the delicate description of our Mother Earth, the sense of the invisible, the value of the things that count, the scorn of a good deal that is conventional, ordinary, and admitted, are here writ plain for those, who, in the French phrase, have the seeing ear and the hearing eye. At a time when much that is ingrained in us is thrown into a crucible of fire, and elemental doubts and certainties have taken its place, such attempts to pierce through veils may be welcomed, and with a little book a little appeal is made.

If justification were further needed it is twofold. First, the stories do not by any means stand alone; and half a dozen names might be quoted of writers who, to-day, in the short story, persistently turn aside to listen to the obstinate questionings which will not, for all our din, be stilled; but secondly, the Editor, to whom the privilege of collecting these stories has been entrusted, has had for some time the rare experience of trying them with the living voice on audiences large and small. The response has never in any case been doubtful, though it might be difficult or impertinent to analyse such a lifting of conventional veils. Partly in the hope of passing on an experience like this, and partly with the wish that Michael Wood’s other published work might be more widely known, the Editor commends to other story-tellers these diamonds from a mystic mine.

Thanks are given to the Manager of the Theosophical Review for permission to reprint the stories in this volume.

September 1915.

THE WILLOW WEAVER

“I shall give you twenty-four hours to vanish in, Campion,” said the elder and superior to the younger and inferior. “I can’t do more for you than that. Let me tell you very few men in my position would do as much.”

He held his finger up impressively.

“It is for the sake of your father that I do this. You ought to be grateful. Twenty-four hours in which to vanish! Of course you must carefully choose the method of vanishing. Under the circumstances I know the way I should take were I in your shoes, but I hesitate to advise you to take it.”

The last sentence was in the man’s mind, not on his tongue; it produced the most effect because the whole gist of his speech was contained in it, and it was the point about which he was (half unconsciously) anxious. A respectable citizen can hardly suggest to a lad fifteen years his junior that he shall take his own life; it would be difficult, though rather easier, to say to a man of equal age, “Under your circumstances I should blow my brains out”—and Campion was so young. It might become known, too, that such advice had been given; then people would question the adviser’s motives, and what would become of that valuable business asset his respectability; he had foolishly risked it a little already, but that was not known to people whose opinion mattered. It would take wing with the soul of the young man, and his income might even suffer in consequence. Besides he would not like to remember he had advised suicide as a course of action; of course it did not matter if he only thought how conveniently it might smooth the state of affairs.

There were reasons why he did not want this young man, the only child of a very poor and respectable widow, to stand in the dock and have all the circumstances which led to his standing there sifted publicly by a painstaking gentleman intent on obtaining for his client if not acquittal at any rate as light a sentence as possible. The young sinner’s immediate superior was not his own master; his employer was uncompromising and old fashioned in his views. He was a man who practised no form of dishonesty or immorality that might not be decently practised by people of honest and moral repute. He would be hard on Ralph Campion on general business principles, but he would be much harder on one whose years and standing should be a guarantee for his good behaviour and influence over others if the conduct of such an one did not stand the test of public scrutiny. And the personal element would come in, for this man was not only the employer of Ralph Campion’s superior but also his father-in-law, and there was his wife’s attitude to be remembered besides that of her father; all this

might affect his reputation, his business prospects, and his domestic life very seriously. He felt kindly to Ralph Campion. There was the whole point. The affair began with the kindly impulse of a rather coarse man of the world who had “married well” from his point of view and prospered socially and financially by so doing; prosperous himself, he saw no prosperity of any type other than that which he pursued and had pursued since he was Campion’s age. Therefore he was kindly according to his own lights. His moral code had nothing to do with his inner convictions; he had no convictions as to the nature of righteousness. His morality was to “get on,” and it was a tremendous bulwark against obvious criminality. His twelve-year-old son was “backward and delicate,” to quote the scholastic advertisements; he sent him to Ralph Campion’s father for tuition because the little vicarage stood in a bracing air. He liked and vaguely honoured his boy’s tutor—irrationally indeed, for he had certainly not “got on” from the standpoint of

the financier. When the man died he obtained for his son, young Campion, that position of trust which he had betrayed. The boy was then nineteen; it was three years ago. The patron did more; still moved by kindliness he took a great deal of notice of his young subordinate. He liked the lad; he confided in him to some extent, increasingly so when he found him to be rather silent; he liked his refinement, at which he laughed—liking it despite his laughter, as coarse people sometimes do like a quality they do not possess. He gave him worldly precepts whereby he might in the future prosper in business. He chaffed him gaily concerning the young ladies of the neighbourhood, pointing out matrimonial prizes which he might have some chance of winning. He showed him a side of life he would probably have passed by unheeded; in so doing (here was the crux) he showed him a side of his own life that was not generally known. His protégé became in some respects his tool, in some his victim. He found out that betrayal of trust before others did so because he knew which man

to suspect, because he knew the circumstances that might cause him to be specially tempted. The story was rather vulgar—sordid—common. From coarse kindliness to selfishness, from selfishness by way of fear to that which was in thought—murder. But yet he liked the boy, and he was sorry for him.

“You mustn’t suppose I think you a blackguard, Ralph,” he said. “In my private capacity, not as your business head, you know, we’re as good friends as ever, my boy. I know how things go, bless your life! I know how one gets let in for what one never meant to do at the start. That’s one pull a man has who isn’t always all that I suppose he ought to be. He knows from his own experience that whatever he may do he has really heaps of good points; and he applies that reasoning to other people when they don’t go quite straight, you know. But if you’re here when Mr. Warrener comes back I shall have you arrested. I must. I don’t know this now, you understand.”

The young man drew lines in the ashes of the hearth with a small brass poker. He did not look in the least the sort of person from whom one would expect a criminal to be made; he had what some people would call a “nice face”—comely to look upon, refined, rather sensitive, grave; by no means weak nor yet unintellectual. He looked as though he could think; he looked as though he could love; and he looked as though he could be ashamed of himself and admit the fact both to himself and to other people. These are good signs. He was as white as a sheet, and for the moment he seemed to be stunned rather than repentant.

“If,” he said slowly, speaking quietly and unemotionally, “if I do not vanish, but stay here and pay the penalty—I’ve behaved very badly, and I’m willing to pay it—will you let bygones be bygones—afterwards?”

“Bless my soul, Ralph Campion, you must be a raving ass! It is the ‘penalty’ as you call it, that counts. It is not the thing in itself so much. I don’t for a moment suppose you to be much worse than most other young fellows. I should think you’re better than most.”

“I hoped when you’d paid a debt you were given a receipt, and there was an end of the matter.”

“My good fellow! You’re old enough and you’ve seen enough to know that things aren’t done that way in this world. I say I don’t think you in the least a worse, or perhaps a more dishonest man than I am myself; not the least! But—excuse my bluntness—it’s the prison that sticks, it’s not the sin.”

The young man gave a little start and shiver; the other’s bluntness had suddenly brought the whole position, and its future developments, home to him. It was the difference between theoretic and practical knowledge; his white face grew green-white, his hands became limp, and he laid the poker down. These two people sat in the superior’s country house on the outskirts of a big smoky town. Young Campion was asked there as a guest in order that his host might tell him he knew him to be a criminal. The boy—for he was little more than a boy—went there suffering qualms of conscience bred of gratitude. He knew his host had not quite the influence on his life that—let us say—Campion’s father would have wished to have, but he did not think of excusing his own behaviour on that account. He knew he had been, and was, doing wrong; it worried him, and he was ashamed of accepting the kindness which led his superior to ask him to stay with him from Saturday till Sunday evening. “My wife’s away, staying with her mother,” he said to Ralph

Campion. “I’m alone. You’re looking out of sorts. You’d better come down to me this afternoon; besides, I’ve something to say to you quietly.”

So on Sunday afternoon when Campion was feeling particularly ashamed of himself and very unhappy and perplexed, he said, quietly, what he had to say, and thereby gave his unsuspecting guest a nervous shock which some people may think to be accountable for what followed. That is a matter of opinion, and “thought is free.” As aforesaid, there were reasons, serious reasons more important than the life, death, happiness, or pain of young Ralph Campion, why his ill-doing should not be found out till he was dead and incapable of speech.

It was a damp November day; the land was vivid brown and green—green fields, wet brown earth, brown stubble, brown rushes by a little bluish-brown canal, brown-green boughs with bright brown leaves clinging to them here and there. There had been much rain, the earth was sodden and reeking; there were black, purplish-grey clouds, shot with dull green in the East, and a pale silver-yellow sky in the West. It was early afternoon; the light was clear save where the smoke wreaths of the town brooded in the distance; there was no sunshine.

Ralph Campion looked at the brown-green earth; he did not see it. For the last few minutes his mind swung between two pictures; one of a little wind-swept churchyard where was the grave of an upright man whose name he bore; the other of a wee grey stone house very bleak and trim, standing on a shelterless hillside; therein lived his thin little, meek little old mother, dressed in a scanty black gown and a widow’s cap, reading her Bible at night and praying to God for her only son; she did not pray for her husband because he was dead, and she disliked Popery. At last Ralph Campion’s eyes filled with tears, and he felt it was time to go. Therefore he rose.

“Very well,” he said, “I don’t feel very grateful; but I should be so if you could hush it up when I have vanished, so that my—mother mightn’t know.”

“I shall hush it up if I can.” And no man knew better than he how sincerely he spoke the truth, and how earnestly he regretted it would be impossible to do so. There was no need to tell Ralph it was impossible. “Even if the young idiot were dead it wouldn’t be safe not to come out,” he thought. “But it would be much safer. If Carry and her father got to know what had led up to his playing the fool like this, and how far I’m responsible (though, of course, I’m not really responsible) there’d be the devil to pay.”

Carry was his wife, who was staying with her mother. Aloud he said:

“I’ve ordered the dog-cart for you. The thing to do will be to say good-bye cordially, you see. Then I shan’t know anything till this time to-morrow, when Mr. Warrener comes back.”

“If you don’t mind shaking hands,” said Ralph Campion, listlessly, “of course I don’t.”

So they shook hands, and the host shouted cheerful and jocular good-speed after the parting guest. Campion left the cart half way to the station; he told the groom to drive on and leave his portmanteau in the cloak-room to be called for. He struck straight across the sodden fields, and walked townwards. It was ten miles to the town; his boots were clogged with dank clay when he reached the first houses on the outskirts. They were hideous little brick boxes in an unmade road leading nowhere.

Beyond them lay a patch of flat, foul, betrampled, houseless, roadless, grassless ground. It was an expanse of thick sticky mud; on it stood pools of dirty water, held by the clay from sinking into the earth; old bricks (why are ancient broken bricks so peculiarly sordid and depressing in appearance?) and bent rusty tin cans. Over the whole brooded a raw, poisonous, yellow-black fog. Across the waste ground crawled the canal that started in the clean green-brown country; here it ran between a clammy grassless towing path and a brick wall. “Ran” is too jocund a word to describe its action. It crept stickily along, a slimy glaze coating its surface, whereon floated the hairless swollen body of a drowned rat.

Ralph Campion stood at the side of the black canal, and looked at the sheer drop of the brick work. This might be a place in which to vanish. Very few of the words he heard that afternoon lingered with him; but the thought fashioned by the reputable citizen who wished that he was dead, pursued him during the ten mile walk, and was with him still. It was the unspoken words which Campion remembered; he knew as well as the other the way in which he must disappear. Oddly enough, it never struck him he might have demanded protection as a price for silence; he did not realise that family and business complications might be the result of evidence elicited by cross-examination; simplicity and generosity clave to him still; perhaps this was why the powers were sorry for him and dealt with him mercifully. The place was lonely; it was growing dusk, there were no barges about; the street was but just finished, the houses were unlet. Only—he could swim. He did not want to live to face public shame, and loneliness, and bitter remorse; this was a man who wanted to live an honourable life,

and leave an honourable name. But though he wished to die his body would struggle for life, and this conviction struck him with fear lest he was not this body which willed otherwise than he; if so, perhaps he could not kill himself. Well! if there was hell on the other side, at any rate there was not prison, and his friends staring at and cutting him. There could not be superior persons amongst lost souls. The thought was momentarily cheering.

His body would struggle to live; perhaps poison would be the better way; but drowning might mean accident or murder, whereas if he bought poison——. He took a silk scarf from his pocket and tried to tie his wrists, but his hands were cold and he was clumsy. He flung his watch, chain, and purse into the water—when his body was found their absence would suggest robbery and murder; he kept a little silver loose in his pocket lest poison should after all prove to be the better way.

Suddenly he noticed what, till now, he had not seen. There was a tumble-down hut within a few paces of where he stood; coming towards it was a woman with a huge bundle on her bowed shoulders. As she drew near he saw she carried willow withies; she was a tall old woman, very poorly clad; her feet were naked, and in spite of her burden she walked with a stately step, as lightly as a girl.

This young man was poor, and a criminal to boot, but he was also a gentleman; when he saw this woman, he, though he was thinking of his sins, his despair, and his coming death, showed to her, half mechanically, what all should show at all times, especially to a woman very old and poor, namely, courtesy and helpfulness.

“Let me carry those to the hut,” he said. “They are surely much too heavy for you.”

“Take them,” she said briefly. He took them; they were indeed very heavy. He threw them on the ground by her door.

“You had better enter my hut,” she said gravely.

Now there was no reason why Ralph Campion should enter her hut; in fact there was every reason why he should not do so. Nevertheless, he went in. It was not very dark there; by no means so dark as the waning light warranted it should be. There were willow withies on the floor; the woman sat on the ground, leaned against the door-post, and began to weave them.

“Do you weave baskets?” said Ralph Campion.

“I do,” she answered. “By some I am called the Willow-weaver.”

“You weave fast.”

“Naturally. I have had much practice.”

She twisted a bent twig as she spoke.

“That twig is crooked,” said Ralph. His behaviour was irrational, but a sudden need of hearing human speech had come upon him; and, besides, he liked her voice, which was soothing, soft and deep, like organ notes in the distance.

“It is so,” she replied.

“Why don’t you throw it away?”

“I throw nothing away. I suffer no waste. I put all my willow twigs to use—crooked or straight.”

“But the crooked ones spoil the shape of your basket.”

“It is true. They spoil the shape of the basket. I shall put a straight one by the side of the crooked. That balances it a little.”

“Still the whole basket is awry.”

“It is so.”

“It is a pity.”

“It is a pity. But it cannot be helped. It will be so till I find nothing and pluck nothing save straight fair-growing withies.”

“Where do you pick them?”

“From the floating island in the lake.”

“I don’t know it. Where is the lake?”

“There,” she answered. She waved her hand towards the waste ground with its slimy clay and broken bricks.

“There! Where?”

“There—there—there—my child!” she answered, smiling gravely, and waving her hand again at the immediate foreground. Campion saw she was subject to hallucinations. She was probably much alone, and certainly very poor. He felt impelled to do what was obviously the very last thing he should have done. He drew out the silk scarf, and his loose silver.