Chapter 2

I do not suppose that many of the admirers of the work of Mary Webb—and
they were a larger multitude during her lifetime than is generally
realized—if asked to express an opinion as to which is the best of her
books, would name _Seven for a Secret_. Yet in its pages what a
tempestuous energy storms through that landscape ‘between the dimpled
lands of England and the gaunt purple steeps of Wales—half in Faery and
half out of it!’ Gillian Lovekin, the farmer’s daughter, may be a fool
from the beginning—a greater fool, indeed, than Mary Webb supposed her
to be—but at least she is a fool to whom we can no more be indifferent
than we can be indifferent to a gale that blows a house down. Not that
Gillian is magnificently ruinous: she is no Helen of Troy. She is petty
even in the magnitude of her ambition—as petty as a parish Hedda
Gabler. She has, when we meet her first, no real ambition, except to be
a greater Gillian Lovekin and to escape from the farm that is too small
a stage for her. If she is intent on learning to sing or to play the
harp, it is not because she wishes to succeed as an artist so much as
because she wishes to triumph over her fellow-creatures. ‘I want,’ she
confesses frankly to her cowman worshipper, ‘to draw tears out of their
eyes and money out of their pockets.’ ‘She wanted,’ we are told, ‘to
make men and women hear her, love her, rue her.’ It is probably a common
enough daydream of egotists of both sexes, and with most of them it
remains a daydream. But Gillian put her egotism into practice, and began
by causing the death of the elderly gentleman who wooed her aunt with
readings from Crabbe and by the end of the story has caused a murder.

The story would have been a sordid one if Mary Webb, with her
imaginative and fantastic gifts, had not exalted it into a tale of the
conflict between light and the powers of darkness in a setting in which
Gillian’s lover’s house is like a refuge of the sun, and the house to
which her husband takes her is a predestined habitation of evil spirits.
Mr. W. B. Yeats once declared, when defending Synge’s ‘Playboy,’ that
art is ‘exaggeration _à propos_,’ and _Seven for a Secret_ is written in
a vein of noble and appropriate exaggeration. Here men are stronger than
common men: they are nature’s giants, as they woo Gillian to the thunder
of hoofs, galloping bareback past her house in a breakneck fury. The
atmosphere of ‘The Mermaid’s Rest,’ Gillian’s home after marriage,
again, is like that of an ogre’s castle, with the beautiful dumb
woman-servant as an imprisoned princess, and the monkey-like, toothless,
hilarious Fringal as a gnome abetting his master in evil. In the dumb
girl and in Fringal it is as though a beautiful and a hideous grotesque
had stepped out of the pages of Hugo into an English landscape. Mary
Webb has in this book created her characters in a high fervour of the
romantic spirit.

This in a novelist is possibly more important than psychology. At least,
when it is present, we are less likely to be critical of an author’s
psychology. We may wonder whether Gillian, at an hour when she was deep
in love with Robert Rideout, would have yielded so easily to Elmer on
the night of the fair at Weeping Cross, but our doubts are lost in the
romance of her subsequent sufferings and salvation—salvation that comes
only after she has drawn the secret of her husband’s past, letter by
letter, from Rwth, the dumb woman, and the secret has cost Rwth her
life. We may not quite believe that Gillian, the egotist, when she
finally found safety in Robert Rideout’s arms, whispered to him: ‘Oh,
Robert! Robert! The powers of darkness have lost their hold, and I’m not
a child of sin any more’; but because of the vehement good faith with
which the fable has been told, we do not quarrel with the author for
putting into Gillian’s mouth a sentence that rounds it off like a moral.

If it is necessary to classify novelists—and we all attempt to do
it—Mary Webb must be put in a class that contains writers so different
as Emily Brontë and Thomas Hardy, for whom the earth is predominantly a
mystery-haunted landscape inhabited by mortals who suffer. To class her
with these writers is not to claim that she is their equal: all that we
need claim is that her work is alive with the fiery genius of sympathy,
pity and awe. There is scarcely a scene in _Seven for a Secret_ that
some touch of poetic observation does not keep alive in the memory. The
characters, as I have suggested, may seem at times a little fabulous,
but with what a poetic intensity of emotion she compels us to believe in
the scenes in which they take part! It is not too much, indeed, to say
that in her writings fiction became a branch of poetry—a flowering
branch that will still give pleasure for many years to come.

ROBERT LYND

_Seven for a Secret_

CHAPTER ONE: _Gillian Lovekin_

ON a certain cold winter evening, in the country that lies between the
dimpled lands of England and the gaunt purple steeps of Wales—half in
Faery and half out of it—the old farm-house that stood in the midst of
the folds and billows of Dysgwlfas-on-the-Wild-Moors glowed with a deep
gem-like lustre in its vast setting of grey and violet. Moorland country
is never colourless. It still keeps, when every heather-bell is
withered, in its large mysterious expanses, a bloom of purple like the
spirit of the heather. Against this background, which lay on every side,
mile on sombre mile, the homestead, with its barns and stacks, held and
refracted every ray of the declining sunlight, and made a comfortable
and pleasant picture beneath the fleecy, low, cinereous sky, which boded
snow. The farm-house was built of fine old mellow sandstone, of that
weatherworn and muted red which takes an indescribable beauty beneath
the level rays of dawn and sunset, as though it irradiated the light
that touched it. It was evening only in the sense in which that word is
used in this border country, which is any time after noon. It was not
yet tea-time, though preparations for tea were going on within. Among
the corn-ricks, which burned under the sun into a memory of the unreaped
August tints of orange and tawny and yellow, redpolls were feasting and
seeking their customary shelter for the night, and one or two
late-lingering mountain linnets kept up their sad little lament of
‘twite-twite-twite’ in the bare blackthorn hedge. Blackbirds began to
think of fluffing their feathers, settling cosily, and drawing up their
eyelids. They ‘craiked’ and scolded in their anxiety to attain each his
secret Nirvana. From the stubble fields, that lay like a small pale coin
on the outspread moor, a flock of starlings came past with a rip of the
air like the tearing of strong silk.