The Golden Arrow

Webb wrote her first novel in a burst of inspiration—in the space of just three weeks—after the she and Henry had returned to Shropshire from coastal Weston-super-Mare. The Golden Arrow (1916) was published when Mary was thirty-five by Constable & Company Ltd. On its surface, this is a simple rural tale of young lovers broken apart, and then made whole through suffering, a crisis of faith, and ultimate reconciliation. Yet, beneath the simple story, Webb wrote on a symbolic level to communicate her vision of the struggle of opposites, and the need for the individual to reconcile polarities into blended components of a whole. The Golden Arrow is based upon an old Shropshire legend in which lovers earn good fortune by finding a mythological arrow—said to bond couples together if found on Palm Sunday on nearby Pontesford Hill. Webb uses the golden arrow of the legend as a metaphor to illustrate that true spiritual love both wounds and heals, and intermingles acute happiness and intense pain.

Webb creates a closely-knit, self-contained world in The Golden Arrow, made real through her poetic imagination and her evocative depiction of the Shropshire borderlands. The Devil’s Chair—an ever-brooding granite mass that portends evil and ill luck—dominates the story. Webb contrasts the peaceful folds of the Wilderhope Range (where shepherds graze their flocks) with the jagged outcroppings of Diafol Mountain (home to the Lostwithin lead mine.)

John Arden, a shepherd, and his practical, sharp-tongued wife Patsy live with their daughter Deborah and son Joe on the slopes of Wilderhope Valley. Eli Huntbatch, a mean-spirited widower who preaches fire and brimstone, lives nearby with his shallow and self-absorbed daughter, Lily. The plot centers on the relationship between sensitive, sweet-tempered Deborah and the dynamic young preacher, Stephen Southernwood, who desires and pursues Deborah. Stephen is an unconventional “free thinker” who now rejects the institutional religion in which he was raised. Stephen abandons his ministry and takes a job as foreman of the Lostwithin mine on Diafol Mountain.

Deborah cares for Stephen with a self-giving love:

Deborah’s love was the sweetest flowering of which humanity is capable, because it was primitive and spiritual. To give—to be with her man— to be so utterly at one that no explanation was ever necessary—to work, laugh, sleep and watch the splendid seasons together, being in other things than sex free and equal, and in sex so mutually generous as to forget self and rights—such was Deborah’s idea of love. This idea, though vague, made her feel glorified and not lowered by giving herself to a lover.

Impulsive, immature, and suspicious of commitment, Stephen convincesa reluctant Deborah to live with him outside of marriage. Deborah risks local censure and moves with Stephen into the cottage he has restored beneath the shadow of the Devil’s Chair. From the start, the massive outcropping casts an ominous shadow on their relationship.

A secondary story revolves around Deborah’s kind but simple brother, Joe Arden. Joe is spiritually incapable of the passionate intensity of his sister’s love for Stephen. He wants to marry Lily Huntbatch and father a brood of children. Lily consents to marry Joe, not because she loves him, but to escape her abusive father. Lily is also attracted by Joe’s physical strength and flattered by his devotion to her. Yet Lily resents Joe’s desire for a large family and dreams of being known as “pretty little Mrs. Joe Arden” with a trim figure and soft hands.

The novel incorporates a loving portrayal of Mary’s late father (George Meredith) as John Arden, the compassionate father, shepherd, and mystic. John tells Stephen Southernwood about the golden arrow:

“It’s an old song, Stephen, and it’s about an old ancient custom . . . And it was said that if two as were walking out found the arrow they’d cling to it fast though it met wound them sore. And it was said that there’d be a charm on ’em, and sorrow, and a vast of joy. And nought could part ’em, neither in the flower of life nor in the brown winrow.”

John Arden acts as the moral center of the novel, around which the interwoven, contrasting stories of the two couples illustrate Webb’s themes of spiritual love (with its requirement for self-sacrifice and suffering) versus profane (selfish and self-centered) love. Many incidents in the novel are designed to illustrate the difference between love and lust, givers and takers, and love and self-interest. To John Arden, God is “The Flockmaster,” a personification of love, whose fold encompasses all. John believes in a love “that gives and asks naught,” neither judging nor denying.

Deborah later persuades Stephen to marry her, not telling him that she is pregnant with their child. Stephen detests the idea of being tied down. On her wedding day, there are no good omens for Deborah’s happiness. The wind rages and the surrounding environs are bleak and unforgiving. Disliking the desolate landscape when winter sets in, and feeling pressured by Deborah’s clinging dependence, Stephen comes to feel that “a blight” has fallen on his love for her. Summer is over, and the symbolic drabness of autumn in the countryside around the cottage depresses Stephen.

He was thinking how dull the country was getting, how forlorn. For the colours were withdrawing with what seemed to him the terrible leisureliness of fatality. They would soon be gone as the willow-wrens were gone from the woods below Lostwithin, as the cuckoos had long been gone from field and hill. The density was gone from the shadows, scent dwindled daily, the stars were like scimitars instead of silver flowers.

Stephen begins to loathe the countryside. His depression increases and (in his agnosticism) he faces the horror of emptiness—negation. Stephen’s dread of nothingness is symbolized by the Devil’s Chair.

Any god—however mutable, however cruel—he thought, would be better than this nullity. Suddenly the whole thing was summed up and symbolized for him in the Devil’s Chair—an empty throne. There it was; no devil, no angel, no god ever was there, ever would be, nothing . . . just vacancy and the insect-like lives of himself and the other millions in the world, all going nowhere for no purpose except extinction. He shuddered at the appalling picture. He could not get the look of the empty throne of black rock from his mind.

Stephen attempts to destroy the Devil’s Chair with explosives, but fails to cause even the slightest damage. He has neither the strength of character to endure his situation, nor the shallowness to be indifferent to it. Stephen abandons Deborah (on the longest night of winter, St. Thomas’ Eve), still unaware that she is carrying their child. Deborah believes the local legend that warns of ghosts collecting around the Devil’s Chair on St. Thomas’ Eve to elect a king. In panic and near-madness, Deborah piles their belongings in a heap and sets the cottage ablaze. In the darkness, Deborah stumbles across to Wilderhope to her parents’ home. She finds her way by the lantern that John Arden has left alight, as a loving beacon on the longest, darkest night of the year. With her father’s patient love and understanding, Deborah eventually returns to health and gives birth.

With the coming of summer (although she is still broken in spirit by Stephen’s betrayal), Deborah begins to find spiritual peace. “. . . [B]ehind light and shadow, under pain and joy she felt a presence—too intangible for materialization into words, too mighty to be expressed by any name of man’s. . . . only a conception as vague and volatile as light or scent . . . She was content with the balance of life as she found it, being dimly aware that the terror and the beauty intermingled in something that was more wonderful than beauty.” At this moment, Stephen returns a changed man. Deborah rebuffs him kindly but firmly. Ultimately, John Arden helps to reunite the young lovers. “His [Stephen’s] love for Deborah made him impregnable to terror, gave him a grasp of truth deeper than reason. He had found the golden arrow, to his own agony and ennobling.”