The Secrets of Dr. Taverner (21 page)

For a while she lay quiet, and then suddenly she sprang up,
and flinging out her hands like one diving, was off like an arrow
in the wind.

"Quick, after her!" cried Taverner, starting me off with a
blow on the shoulder, and like a flash I too was speeding down
the heather paths.

But oh, the difference from our last run. Though Diana still
ran like a deer, my limbs were of lead. Life seemed without
savour, as if there would never again be any zest in it. Only my
sense of duty kept my labouring limbs at work, and presently
even that proved ineffective. I dropped further and further
behind, no second wind came to ease my labouring lungs, and
the figure ahead, bounding on feet of the wind, was lost among
the heather.

I dropped to the ground gasping, run off my feet in the first
burst. As I lay helpless in the heather, my heart pounding in my
throat, I seemed to see a great streaming procession like an
undisciplined army, passing across the sky. Ragged banners
flapped and waved, wild, discordant, but maddening music
broke here and there from the motley rout. Furry snouts on
human faces, clawed paws on human limbs, green, vine-like hair
falling over flashing eyes that gleamed as green, and here and
there, half-frightened but half-fascinated human faces, some
hanging back though lured along, others giving themselves up to
the flight in a wild abandonment of glamour.

I awoke to find Taverner bending over me.

"Thank God," he said, "your eyes are still human."

No Diana appeared next day, and whether Taverner was
anxious or not, he would not reveal.

"She will come back to be fed," was all he would vouchsafe.

The following day there was still no sign of her, and I was
becoming very uneasy, for the nights were bitter though the days
were warm, when, as we sat by the office fire after "lights out,"
a faint scratching was heard at the window. Taverner
immediately rose and opened it, and in slipped Diana, and sank
in a heap on the hearth at my feet. But it was not me she turned
to, as in my embarrassment I had expected, but the fire. Taverner
and I meant nothing to her.

Taverner returned to his chair, and in silence we watched her.
Puck's tunic, soaked and tagged and stained out of all
recognition, seemed the only possible clothing for the strange,
wild, unhuman figure at our feet. Presently she sat up and ran
her hands through matted hair, now steaming in the heat, and
seeing me through the thatch, showed white teeth and pink
tongue in her strange elfin smile, and with a quick birdlike
movement, rubbed her head against my knee. After which token
of recognition she returned to her enjoyment of the fire.

Taverner rose and quietly left the room. I hardly dared to
breathe lest I should break the spell that kept our visitor quiet,
and she should do something embarrassing or uncanny; but I
need not have troubled. I meant no more to her than the rest of
the furniture.

Taverner returned with a laden tray, and Diana's eyes
gleamed. She looked much more human eating with a knife and
fork. I had expected her to tear her food with her teeth, but
ingrained habit remained.

"Diana," said Taverner, after the completion of her meal.

She smiled.

"Aren't you going to say thank you?"

She smiled again, and with her quick, birdlike movement,
rubbed her head against his knee as she had done against mine,
but she did not speak. He stretched out his hand, and began to
smooth and stroke the tangled mass of her hair. She snuggled
down at his feet, enjoying the caress and the warmth, and
presently there arose a low crooning of contentment, very like
the purr of a cat.

"We have done it this time!" said Taverner. After a while,
however, Diana seemed to wake up. Her animal needs being
satisfied, the human part of her began to reassert itself.

She twisted round, and resting her elbow on Taverner's knee
looked up into his face.

"I came back because I was hungry," she said. Taverner
smiled and continued to smooth her hair. "But I shall go away
again," she added with a touch of defiance.

"You shall come and go as you please," said Taverner.
"There will be food when you want it and the doors will never
be locked."

This seemed to please her, and she became more com-
municative, evidently wishing to share with us the experience
through which she had passed and to receive our wonder and
sympathy. That was the human side of her.

"I saw Them," she said.

"We felt Them," said Taverner. "But we did not see Them."

"No," replied Diana. "You would not. But then you see They
are my people. I have always belonged to Them but I did not
know it, and now They have found me. I shall go back," she
repeated again with conviction.

"Were you cold?" asked Taverner.

"No, only hungry," she replied.

Taverner had her belongings removed to a room on the.
ground floor, whose window, opening on to the shrubbery,
permitted her to come and go freely and unobserved.' She never
slept there, however, but came each night after "lights out" to
the office window. We admitted her, fed her, and after basking
for a while in the warmth of the hearth, she slipped out again
into the night. Weather made no difference to her; out into the
wildest gale she went unflinchingly and returned unharmed.
Sometimes she would talk to us in her clipped childish
sentences, trying to convey to us something of what she saw, but
for the most part she kept silence.

At the next full moon, however, she returned bursting with
information. They had had a wonderful dance, in which she had
been allowed to take part. (We knew now why the kitchen-maid,
returning from her evening out, had had hysterics all the way up
the drive, and wound up with something very like a fit in the
servants' hall.) They had been so wonderful that she simply had
to tell us all about it, and in speaking of Them in her limited
vocabulary she used a phrase that another seer of vision had
used: They were the Lordly Ones. More she could not tell us;
words failed her, and she made strange play with her hands as if
moulding a figure in invisible clay. With quick intuition
Taverner gave her pencil and paper, and with lightning rapidity
there appeared before us the nude figure of a winged being,
drawn with amazing vigour and perfect accuracy.

No attempt had ever been made to teach Diana to draw in all
the course of her arduous upbringing --it was considered
sufficient if she achieved the decencies without aspiring to
accomplishments --neither had she had the opportunity of
studying anatomy, yet here was a figure rendered with
marvellous draftsmanship and the minute accuracy of detail that
is only possible in a study from life.

Diana's interest and delight was as great as ours. Here was
indeed a discovery, a way of expression for her cramped and
stifled soul, and in half an hour the office was strewn with
drawings --a whirling snow spirit who seemed to be treading
water; a tree-soul, like a gnarled human torso emerging from the
trunk of a tree and blending with its branches; fairies, demons,
and quaint and engaging animal studies followed each other in
bewildering succession. Finally quite worn out with the tension
and excitement of it, Diana consented to go to bed for the first
time since that strange night of the Vernal Equinox.

Her need of a supply of paper kept Diana at the house, and
her need of an audience made her seek human relationships. The
artist creates not only for the pleasure of creation, but also for
the pleasure of admiration, and Diana, though she might go to
the woods, must needs return to her kind to display her spoils.

With her new-found harmony had come the correlation of
mind and body; the long limbs no longer sprawled, but had the
grace of a deer's. She was as friendly as a puppy where before
she had been morose. But alas, her readiness of response
exposed her to some painful knocks in the world of warped lives
which is a mental home. For a moment she was crushed, and we
feared that she might become again that which she had been, but
she discovered that a means of retaliation as well as of
expression lay in her pencil, and the discovery saved her. She
drew portraits of her persecutors, stark naked (for she never
drew clothes), with the anatomical detail and accuracy of all her
studies, with their usual expression on their faces, but with the
expression of their secret souls in every line of their bodies.
These portraits appeared in conspicuous places as if by magic,
and their effect can be more easily imagined than described.

Diana had found her place in the march of life. She was no
longer the outcast, uncouth and unfriendly. Her spontaneous
elfin gaiety, which she had brought back from the woods, was a
charm in itself; the mouse-coloured hair had taken on a gloss
and gleam of gold, the sallow complexion was nut-brown and
rose-red, but her springing swaying movement, her amazing
vitality, were her chief distinctions.

For she was extraordinarily vital; she drew her life from the
sun and the wind and the earth, and as long as she was allowed
to keep in touch with them, she glowed with an inner light, an
incandescence of the spirit that blazed but did not consume. She
was the most vital thing I have ever seen. The hair of her head
was so charged with electricity that it stood out in a light
cloud-like aureole. The blood glowed under her skin, and if her
hand touched you, sharp magnetic tinglings ran through the bare
flesh.

And this strange vitality was not limited to herself, but
infected everybody in her immediate neighbourhood, and they
reacted to it according to temperament; some would go and sit
near her as by a fire; others went nearly demented. To me she
was lyrical, the wine of life; she went to my head like some
intoxicating drug, I got drunk on her and saw the visions of an
opium dream; without a word spoken, she lured me from my
work, from my duties, from all that was human and civilized, to
follow her out on the moor and commune with the beings whose
orbit she seemed to have entered upon that fatal night of the
Equinox.

I saw that Taverner was worried; he said no word of re-
proach, but silently picked up the threads I dropped; I also knew
that he had cancelled certain engagements and remained at
home. I was untrustworthy, and he dared not leave things to me.
I loathed myself, but I could no more pull myself together than
the drug-taker far gone in morphia.

A form of clairvoyance was growing fast upon me, not the
piercing psychic perceptions of Taverner, who saw straight into
the inner soul of men and things, but a power to perceive the
subtler aspects of matter; I could distinctly see the magnetic
field which surrounds every living thing, and could watch the
changes in its state; presently I began to be aware of the coming
and going of those unseen presences which were the gods that
Diana worshipped. A strong wind, hot sun, or the bare
uncultivated earth, seemed to bring them very near me, and I felt
the great life of the trees. These things fed my soul and
strengthened me as the touch of earth always strengthens any
child of the Earth-mother.