THE CALL OF THE HEIGHTS

(A Story)

By Marcella Hardy, B.A. (Hons.) Oxon.

THEY were no longer so very young when they started on the journey. They were no longer in the flush of youth that urges to fantastic romantic deeds; they were old enough to know quite calmly what they wanted, and to do it quietly, with unhurried spontaneity. They were old enough, people said with half-hearted reproach, to have known better.

There had been nothing spectacular in the story of their relationship. It was just one of those attachments that start as in a story-book but so often end in the tragedy of reality. They had come to know each other as workers in a Basic Education Centre where they had come from different parts of the country; they were both already married and with pleasant homes. The same reason had prompted them to join the training centre: they felt that the course would make more useful citizens of them and enable them to work effectively in their own villages. Thus an affection grew between them through forces quite outside any reason, logic, or commonsense; it had grown through the months of broader mutual understanding, of slowly deepening confidence, of increasing mutual respect. This was no romantic attachment, for they had come to value each other in spite of knowing the other’s weaknesses–they knew each other without romantic illusions.

They had become friends, exchanging experiences and hopes, and discussing their thoughts on life and its vagaries. They would discuss their work to which they brought the sincerity of their interest and, from the interplay of their minds, was born a simple philosophy, a wisdom through which they could assess anew the values of life. They had other interests in common, apart from their work at the Centre, for they both loved literature and music. Often, after the day’s work, the inmates of the Centre would sit round him to hear him recite poetry–sometimes improvised as he sat among them–or to hear him read from some favourite book; or they would call upon her to sing to them, sitting hushed as she sang, carried away to higher planes of feeling. It was not long before he was nick-named The Poet, and teased for always seeming to be dreaming of other things; while they nick-named her The Queen, because she always looked, even in a crowd, as though she stood alone.

At the evening gatherings of workers, a place would be kept for The Poet and The Queen, by common consent and an unconscious feeling of fitness; then he would tell her of the poems that had come to during the day while crossing a field or watching the clouds sail over the distant hills, or noticing the splash of a bright wild blossom by road-side. As he chanted his poems, she would feel melodies well up within her, and she would sing his words to them, while the inmates of the Centre laughed happily and declared that they needed no outside entertainment since they had their own provided for them by The Poet and The Queen.

And so it went on until, one day, in an exchanged look, they both knew that they had passed from one realm into the next, that henceforth the bond between them was of a different quality. Henceforth, it would no longer be the plain comradeship of two minds: henceforth, the insistent urge of more acutely tuned senses, the suffusing awareness of emotions would make them continuously conscious of each other as apart from their fellow-workers, continuously conscious that, in the midst of their comrades, they were bound together by different ties. And it was this change of quality in their companionship that also altered the attitude of their surroundings towards themselves. With that exchanged look, they left the story-book and entered reality.

Work nevertheless continued, a constant and comforting as it were denominator: sometimes it was in a song of exhilaration, sometimes against dull oncoming waves of doubt and restlessness stirred by the implications of their changed relations, sometimes in a deep certainty which gave them the confidence to feign indifference and carefree detachment. It had been a common interest in their work which had brought them together, and now they wove the new pattern of their lives across this warp of work; the pattern became a fuller expression of their richer communion–their work became as it were a child to which they dedicated the flower of their ability, their deepest sincerity. Their smallest action, the smallest task accomplished was done with the thought of the other, like an offering of the self in token of gratitude for the affection and respect they bore each other.

While going about his tasks during the day, The Poet would feel rise within him ripples of lyricism, an imagery ever and again inspired and suffused with the vision of the one whom he now sensed was the tangible embodiment of his manhood dreams. Then, in the evenings, under the half-inquisitive, vaguely hostile looks of their fellows, now that the story-book state had been left behind, he would murmur to her fruits of the day’s thoughts, the songs that had risen in his heart during the hours of work. Over her sleep would float the memory of songs offered to her in the tones of his voice.

Yet, at first imperceptibly then gradually more and more imminent, there began to loom over them the tragedy of reality. With its appearance moments of carefree, spontaneous comradeship left for ever, and the consciousness of obligations and exigencies crept over The Poet and The Queen, the consciousness of the anchorage of their own to the lives of others. Excluded from a relationship that as it were formed an island in the midst of the stream of community life, their fellow-workers now regarded the two with a sort of vague resentment, an uneasy envy which turned every exchanged remark between The Poet and the Queen, every moment of conversation into something snatched, something almost unlawfully taken. There could no longer be any mistaking of the disapproval of an understanding, a unity of affection that could blossom as would a wild flower in a hedge, outside the ordered boundaries of the garden. The former innocence of their meetings at the evening gatherings was tarnished: they began to talk together and to look as from behind a veil of indifference, straining all the former spontaneity of their friendship.

The flower that had blossomed in the free sunlight of mutual attraction, that asked nothing but to give of its fragrance and to glow in the response to the charm it shed around, now felt bruised by furtiveness; the flower began to wilt in the breath of insinuation. One day, as they were both at work in different parts of the Centre, they came quite independently to the same determination. “We must go away,” they thought as they worked and, when they at last met in the evening gathering, “We can catch the train on Saturday,” they whispered to each other. To leave everything behind was easy enough, for everything they valued lay within themselves and ahead.

The train took them towards the north, towards the hills. It was a long journey on hard benches surrounded by the swarming of all those to whom the valued is the tangible, to whom a leaving behind is a losing. In their little island of happiness, there were no hard benches for the two, and the swarming to and fro in and out of the carriage, the shouted confidences, the incipient quarrels, the impatient words, the gruff neighbourly kindlinesses, were as a rough sea tumbling and roaring against the shores of their unassailable world. With the end of the train journey they reached the foot of the hills; the last stage of the journey lay ahead and on foot–an ascent to the final heights. As they left the railway carriage and the station, they were freed from the last bonds with what lay behind; as a ripe fruit leaves the branch bearing its own life within itself, so they left the train and the crowds and the station, with everything they valued within themselves and ahead.

The hostelry for pilgrims offered them a space overlooking the river, and here they spent the night. They slept, lulled by the joyous rhythmic and powerful melody of fast speeding waters; and, with the sharp breath of dawn, they woke and bathed in the snow-chilled current. The sun had just topped the hills and pierced the river mists when they returned to the hostelry, where they were summoned to register their names before departure. The Keeper of the hostelry sat behind his ponderous ledger in which had been inscribed generation after generation of pilgrims; there he sat as would some stern Recorder at the Gates of the Hereafter, forehead freshly marked, snow-white clothes forming a hale of irreproachability around him. Thin-nibbed pen poised between hard fingers, the Keeper of the hostelry pored importantly over his pages as the two entered to take their leave.

“You names?” he demanded.

“A poet and his beloved.”

Affronted Dignity looked up, a sharp reproof on his lips; but the reproof was never uttered for it was quite true–there they stood before him a poet and his beloved. The Keeper stared at them and, as he stared, something of the glow that suffused them seemed to touch him like some remembered fragrance; and the Keeper stared, then he shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “Oh, let them go,” he thought, a half-reluctant, half-deprecating concession to his own weakness.

As though sensing the unuttered dismissal, he who had called himself a poet turned to go and took the hand of her who stood beside him. The Keeper of the hostelry gazed after them in silence as they left the dark hall and followed the path leading into the hills.

“Sir, who were those two?” the watchman hobbled up, eyes agog.

The Keeper let his eyes rest on the new empty path leading into the hills.

“A poet and his beloved,” he sighed.

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