HENRY PAGET-LOWE

A damp, gloomy evening in April it was, just after the close of the
Great War, when Marcia found herself alone with strange thoughts and
wishes; unheard-of yearnings which floated out of the spacious
twentieth-century drawing-room, up the misty deeps of the air, and
Eastward to far olive-groves in Arcady which she had seen only in her
dreams. She had entered the room in abstraction, turned off the glaring
chandeliers, and now reclined on a soft divan by a solitary lamp which
shed over the reading table a green glow as soothing and delicious as
moonlight through the foliage about an antique shrine. Attired simply,
in a low-cut evening dress of black, she appeared outwardly a typical
product of modern civilisation; but tonight she felt the immeasurable
gulf that separated her soul from all her prosaic surroundings. Was it
because of the strange home in which she lived; that abode of coldness
where relations were always strained and the inmates scarcely more than
strangers? Was it that, or was it some greater and less explicable
misplacement in Time and Space, whereby she had been born too late, too
early, or too far away from the haunts of her spirit ever to harmonise
with the unbeautiful things of contemporary reality? To dispel the mood
which was engulfing her more deeply each moment, she took a magazine
from the table and searched for some healing bit of poetry. Poetry had
always relieved her troubled mind better than anything else, though many
things in the poetry she had seen detracted from the influence. Over
parts of even the sublimest verses hung a chill vapour of sterile
ugliness and restraint, like dust on a window-pane through which one
views a magnificent sunset.

Listlessly turning the magazine's pages, as if searching for an elusive
treasure, she suddenly came upon something which dispelled her languor.
An observer could have read her thoughts and told that she had
discovered some image or dream which brought her nearer to her
unattained goal than any image or dream she had seen before. It was only
a bit of _vers libre_, that pitiful compromise of the poet who overleaps
prose yet falls short of the divine melody of numbers; but it had in it
all the unstudied music of a bard who lives and feels, and who gropes
ecstatically for unveiled beauty. Devoid of regularity, it yet had the
wild harmony of winged, spontaneous words; a harmony missing from the
formal, convention-bound verse she had kno