SOMETHING of the primeval savage blood still beats in us, we must suppose, else why is it that we, effete inhabitants of London, who love the closeness and proximity of our fellow-men so much, feel no less keenly the rapture of being miles and miles away from railways and the folk who travel on them? How quick, too, is the transition from one mood to another, so that while a week or two ago we rushed insanely, it may be, but with extraordinary pleasure, from party to party, jabbering with childlike delight to myriad acquaintances, face to face on a blocked staircase, or in the drawing-room unwillingly silent while somebody sang, we now take the same childlike pleasure in long days of solitude. But we may take our solitude in pairs, in company with a friend who for the time being is no friend at all, but a bitter (and, it is to be hoped, disappointed) golfer, or wemay lie out all day in the heather with a silent stalker, or, as has been my fortunate lot for the last ten days, may spend long hours, with a sandwich and a fishing-rod and a gillie, in angling over coffee-coloured streams or windswept lochs.
The oldest inhabitants never remember anything like this summer, but they are bad evidence, because their memories are probably very defective owing to their age; but, what is more convincing, younger people, whose memories are less impaired, never remember anything like it. So there has been little of the coffee-coloured streams for me personally, but, instead, long quiet days by this wonderful loch, supposed to hold trout of fabulous dimensions, which, as far as I can make out, nobody has ever caught, though every one agrees that they are there. Then came a wonderful day, with more than trout-wonder in it.
I came up here to this remote lodge alone, for the trio of us usually go our own ways in holiday time. Legs, in any case, had to go to Germany to learn that classic and guttural tongue, and Helen and I always make visitingarrangements independently of each other, unless we are both bidden to a house to which we both want to go. But it stands to reason, so it seemed to us, that husband and wife probably do not have the same friends, and it is as absurd for her to stay at a house because the host is a great friend of mine as it is for me to stay at a house because the hostess is a great friend of hers. Coincidences sometimes happen, in which we both go together. Otherwise we make our own arrangements. I cannot bear some of her friends; she finds it almost impossible to tolerate some of mine. And with shouts of laughter we agree to differ. Then in September or October the trio will come together again, and will all talk at once, describing simultaneously, while nobody listens, our delightful adventures.
I started from the lodge that morning after an early breakfast, the gillie having already gone on with lunch, and what we hoped would be the apparatus of death; for, the first time during this last week, it was a soft and cloudy morning, with a warm wind from the south-west, sufficient even in this cup of the hills,where the lodge stands, to set the trees tossing their branches, and to strip the red ripe rowanberries from their stalks. Upon the unsheltered tops, then, where lay the dark-coloured loch with its fabled inhabitants, there should be ripple enough for fishing purposes. I walked unencumbered but for the field-glasses I always carry; for nothing, during periods of waiting or in the half-hour that follows the sandwich, is so fascinating as to spy out the busy animal life on these empty moors, or find some three or four miles away two or three little human specks moving very gently up the hillside after the deer, or sitting there patiently till some untoward affair, suspicious hinds, or a foul wind are lulled into inactivity.
But first I had a mile of pine-wood to climb, up steep, slippery, needle-strewn paths, with bracken already yellowing on each side, making a sea of russet and green, while from overhead, in the thick arching boughs, there came, as it were, the noise of an aerial sea, the hiss of ripples on a sandy shore as the wind whistled through the stiff springy foliage. Now and then a rabbit scuttled through the ferns, andonce I saw quite close at hand a roe-deer with flicking ears and startled eyes, that, as it caught sight of me, gave me one shy look of the woodland, and then galloped off, cutting its way through the tall bracken. The path sometimes led by the side of the stream that came out of the loch to which I was bound, but the dryness of the summer had hushed its voice, and it but trickled down the ways it was wont to prance along in spring. Here and there a tree of the tamer woodland, a beech, or stripling elm, grew among the primeval firs, but it looked as if it had wandered here by mistake, had strayed, a member of some later civilization, into a settlement peopled by those of the older world.
And as I walked something of the same feeling of strangeness, of having gone back to the earlier ages of the world, came over me also. Like the lost beech, there were none of my kind here, and I felt, though in an immeasurably greater degree, what one feels when one stands in the valley of the tombs of the Egyptian Kings. But all round me here were things far more ancient than they. Æons before Pharaoh oppressed the children of promise there stoodhere on this hillside the ancestors in direct line of this woodland. The knowledge of the dawn of the world, when it was still but a little time since God had bidden the green things to live upon the earth, had been transmitted to these citizens of the hillside, and to them time had been but a little thing, and a thousand ages were but as yesterday.
As I ascended farther and more remotely into the heart of the wood, a sort of eager tremor, a desire to see that which I knew was there, and which must be so overpowering in its immensity, began to grow on me. Wild silent life bubbled and hummed round me; eyes watched me from beneath the fern, and looked down on me from the over-arching fans of the pines; ears were pricked at my footstep; strange wild smiles broadened into a laugh at the intruder, at this child of immeasurably later ages. Sometimes it seemed to me as if this ancient consciousness of the woods was scornful and contemptuous, so that I quickened my pace and longed to get out of this dark room; at other moments, and truer ones, I knew better, knowing that I, too, was ofit all, a manifestation of life, a piece of the pine-woods and brother of the bracken.
There is no myth that grew so close to the heart of things as the story of Pan, for it implies the central fact of all, the one fact that is so indisputably true, that all the perverted ingenuity of man has been unable to split into various creeds about it. For Pan is All, and to see Pan or to hear him playing on his pipes means to have the whole truth of the world and the stars, and Him who, as if by a twisting thumb and finger, set them endlessly spinning through infinite Space, suddenly made manifest. Flesh and blood, as the saying is, could not stand that, and there must be a bursting of the mortal envelope. Yet that, indisputably also, is but the cracking of the chrysalis. How we shall stand, weak-eyed still and quivering, when transported from the dusk in which we have lived this little life, into the full radiance of the eternal day! How shall our eyes gain strength and our wings expansion and completeness, when the sun of which we have seen but the reflection and image is revealed! That is to see Pan. It killed the mortal body ofPsyche—the soul—when she saw him on the hill-top by the river, and heard the notes of his reed float down to her; but she and every soul who has burst the flimsy barrier of death into life joins in his music, and every day makes it the more compelling. Drop by drop the ocean of life, made up of the lives that have been, rises in the bowl in which God dips His hands. He touches every drop.
The wood in front had grown thin, and I was nearly out on the open heather of the hills. Just here the path crossed the stream bed; a great grey cliff of rock was above me, in which a pattern of lichens had found crevices for their roots; the pine-trees waved solemnly overhead; the miracle of running water, perhaps the greatest miracle of all, chuckled and eddied as it slid into the brown pool. And quite seriously I waited to see Pan. The ferns would be pushed aside, and the merry face would smile at me (for Pan, though he kills you, is kind), and he would put his pipes to his lips, and the world, as I had hitherto seen it, would swim away from me. And just before he putshis pipes to his mouth, I hope I shall say: ‘Yes, begin; I am ready!’ Or shall I stop my ears, and shut my eyes to him? I hope not. But the fern waved only, and the water ran, and ... and I was going a-fishing.
I suppose I had not gone more than a hundred yards after this pause when execrable events occurred. It seemed as if some dreadful celestial housemaid suddenly woke up, and went on with her work. She shut the window (that is to say, the wind dropped), and began to dust. She dusted all the clouds away, and in ten minutes there was not one left. From horizon to horizon there was a sky positively Egyptian, and an abominable sun shone with hooligan ferocity. And I was going a-fishing! I said what I should not say with such extraordinary distinctness and emphasis that I rapidly took out my field-glass, and swept the untenanted fields of heather to see that there was no one within a mile or two. But I expect the roe-deer heard.
Sandy was waiting for me at the near end of the loch, when I arrived there a quarter ofan hour afterwards. Scotchmen are never cynical, but I should otherwise have suspected him of cynicism when I saw that he had been at pains to set up my rod, and was soaking a length of gut. The brilliance of the sun from the polished and untarnished field of water was a thing to make the eyes dazzle. So I was cynical in turn, and, from pure cynicism and nothing else at all, I put on (for the sake of the curious) an astonishing fly, with a green body bound with silver, and a Zulu. It was a shade too cynical to go out in the boat, for I think Sandy would have seen through that, as it was impossible that any fish should rise at anything in this state of affairs, and I fished from the shore. Fishing at all was an idiotic proceeding, and so the incredible happened. I wish to call attention to the incredibility of it, since it happens to be true.
Here was I, then, on a still and windless morning, with a blazing sun overhead, and a looking-glass loch in which were supposed to be monstrous fish, whose shyness apparently increased in ratio to their weight, for nobodyhad ever seen them before, but had only heard about them second-hand, like ghost-stories. Half a dozen casts carried out a convenient length of line, which fell, so it appeared to me, on the glassy surface of the water like the cane of an angry schoolmaster, resonant and cruel. Then at the end of the cane, where the Zulu was, there came a boil just underneath the looking-glass; my rod bent, and the reel screamed. For one moment I knew, so I thought (for the boil came just as I was preparing to cast again), that I had hooked some stalwart weed, or perhaps a snag of tree-trunk. Then I knew I had hooked a fish. He was clearly insane to have taken a fly at all, but what mattered was that he was a large lunatic. I thought I knew also that this was but the first act of what would turn out to be a tragedy. But the tragedy was not for me.
Again, for the sake of the curious, I will give his weight. He turned the scale at five pounds some six hours later. So I imagine he was about five and a half when he came out of the water with the Zulu in his mouth.He was mad; he turned a fierce Bedlamite eye on me.
I dare say I am more impatient than the true fisherman, but when I have cast my fly upon the waters for three hours without a hint of a rise, I sit down, and do not feel it incumbent on me to rise again unless conditions change. So when, at about two o’clock, nothing further had broken the surface of the loch except the cane of the schoolmaster, I felt, after eating my sandwich, that I was not unlikely, without incurring the contempt of Sandy, to prolong the interval. I wanted also, after my mis-tryst with Pan that morning, vaguely also, after that day of bovine observance of Nature which I had spent a week or two ago in the garden at home, to ‘sit up and take notice.’ Instead of nirvanic contemplation, I wanted to focus all that surrounded me, not to see a stag-beetle advance ten yards, and then go back to the place he advanced from, but to see the activity of it all, to be alert and to collect, not to be lazy and to soak.
Yes; it was a wonderful day. Almostimmediately I spied two little human figures on the adjoining forest creeping, creeping up a steep brae. A mile below I saw their ponies. They moved so slowly that it was only possible to see they moved at all, because they passed out of the field of my glass; the deer I could not find.
Then, after watching them for ten minutes more, I saw they stopped. Stealthy movements went on. Then came the sharp crack of a rifle, but before the report reached me they had both jumped up, and ran into a hollow of the hills, where I lost them. It was like being at sea, and having news twitched out from the receiver of a Marconi apparatus.
But hardly had that drama been played to its curtain when another started. The call of a startled grouse, ‘Come back, come back, come back!’ sounded close at hand, and it was followed by another and yet another. Sandy had remained by the edge of the loch when I climbed this hillock for my lunch, and since then I had been very quiet, so I could not imagine what had caused this commotion on the hill, as the stalkers were not on this beatat all to-day. I could account, in fact, for the movements of any human being that could have disturbed grouse for a mile or two. Then I looked up to the enormous sky, and saw.
Above me, but close, so that I could see the outspread feathers of the wing, was a golden eagle. As I watched I saw he was not vaguely circling, looking out for prey, but employed in his stalk, even as on the other side of the valley ten minutes ago I had watched another stalk. He was sweeping wide circles of the moor, and driving up towards a gully of the hills behind the fowls of the mountain, flying in low and ever narrowing semicircles, so that it must seem to the terrified grouse and black game that huge-winged danger threatened from every quarter but that. Yet still I could not guess what his plan was when he had driven them there.
And then I saw. Straight down from the grey crag of cliff that rose on the west of this gully, into which he had driven the birds, there dropped his mate, savage and hungry, seeking her meat from God. Aha, you grand Mistress Eagle; it is dinner-time!
Merrily and well has the old cock-grouse lived in the heather, lying warm in the sun, and filling himself with the good things of the moorland, but to-day Pan sends him to your table, and in the swift hissing down-rush of your wings he hears his pipes. Pan will play them for you, too, some day, and the grey film will cover over your fierce yellow eye that was wont undazzled to behold the sun in his strength, and the strong hooked beak which gasped for one breath more of the aromatic moorland air will close, and be hungry no more, and the crooked, horny talon will relax, and next year, maybe, I shall find whitened bones on the hillside, and perhaps, crumpled up under them, a feather, an eagle’s feather. But I shall not be so foolish as to say I have found you, for do I imagine that that is all there is of you, that your life, your spirit, has been blown out like a candle? I know better than that.
For, indeed, there is no other explanation possible of the incessant war, the death, the murder, the butchery in which Nature’s fair hands are steeped and stained, except by thisone supposition that the spirit of bird and beast escapes at the moment of death from the splendid sunlit prison of this beautiful world, which has the bright-eyed hours for its bars. Otherwise the world becomes a mere intolerable shambles, viler than Chicago. I at any rate cannot believe otherwise, but should any sceptical reader at this point ask me to sketch out for him the subsequent movements of the wasp he has just squashed in the tongs, or the trout I have just landed, I hasten to assure him that I have not the slightest idea about them. But that does not invalidate the explanation, nor in the least disturb my complete belief in it. I do not know what the weather will be this day year. But I make no manner of doubt that there will be weather of some kind. I only insist that he with his tongs, and I with my Zulu-fly, cannot destroy life. One cannot even destroy matter; how much less, then, the lord and master of matter!
I think I have never been in a house where absurd gaiety—the gaiety of friends, of health, of outdoor spirits—was so rampant as here;and she whose house it was, and who was leader of the ludicrous, was she, as you may have guessed, who in June had asked me to come here for the last time. That evening when I got home I found her sitting out in the garden enjoying the last half-hour of sunset, and she beckoned to me across the lawn.
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘I have caught the original trout. He had gone mad from old age and riotous living, and came to the fly when the sun was brightest and the winds were dead.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t use such beautiful language,’ she said. ‘How much does he weigh?’
‘About a ton. He has gone to be weighed now.’
‘And anything else?’
‘Not a fin. No more bites, as somebody said last night. I chattered with rage.’
‘You did; and what have you been thinking about?’ she asked.
‘Pan chiefly. No, to be honest, I think I have thought about the fish most. But Pan next!’
She turned rather slowly on her longwicker-couch, the tired aching body for the moment usurping the use of her eyes.
‘Ah, don’t let us talk,’ I said; ‘you are tired and suffering.’
At that she laughed.
‘All the more reason for thinking about something less inferior than one’s own health,’ she said. ‘What cowards we are nowadays! Why, our forebears in Elizabeth’s time used to go smiling to the rack for the sake of some small difference of dogma, and we snivel when we have the opportunity of showing, by our contempt for pain, the truth of things that matter much more. If bravery in the abstract and cheerfulness are not worth being brave and cheerful for, I don’t know what is. In any case, what conclusion did you come to about Pan? Oddly enough, I have been thinking of him, too. Let’s compare notes, and see if we mean the same person.’
I told her more or less what I have already written down on the subject, and at the end she nodded at me with the quick eager gesture that was so characteristic of her.
‘Hurrah!’ she said. ‘I have guessed the same. So perhaps our guesses are right. But I put it to myself rather more personally, and, though it sounds conceited, so much more vividly than you. That is only natural, you know; Pan concerns me much more immediately than he concerns you, we hope. And another image of him suggested itself to me, which appeals to me more than your figure of the ferns being pushed aside, and the hand with the pipes in it being raised to the smiling lips. Listen!’
The sun had dropped behind the big trees to the west of the lawn, leaving us in shadow, though it still shone on the hills to the east of the house. But evening was coming without any chill or whisper of autumn in it, and in this northern latitude nights were short in August. It was as if she already saw dawn.
‘Jim and I and our children,’ she said, ‘and you and all my friends are shipwrecked, or so it would seem to anyone who did not understand, on a little rock surrounded by infinite sea. Every one alive in the world is there, too, as a matter of fact, but our friends somehow are sobig to us, and strangers and acquaintances so small in comparison, that all that really is seen by us is our own immediate circle. Huge thumping seas surround our rock, and, for some occult reason, we all have to sit exactly where we are, while the waves rush up, and every moment sweep somebody away. We can’t move our places, and go higher up on the rock, and we have to sit and look at the big waves, we poor shipwrecked people (so a man who does not understand would say), and know that this wave or the next will wash us off. That is the ignorant view of the situation, and the most pessimistic, so we will answer it at once.
‘Even if it was right, what then? Supposing we were shipwrecked, and all round us was the howling sea of death, would it not be much better, until the wave swept us off, to make the best of it, to talk, and laugh, and be pleasant with our friends, instead of looking with terror-stricken eyes at the hungry sea? How much nicer even for ourselves to be amused and talk a little while, instead of being frightened, and how much nicer for our friends when we are swept off, as we all certainly shall be, to know thatbefore we were swept off we were moderately cheerful, and picked up bits of seaweed, and played with shells! I say nothing of the moral aspect of it all, because if you once bring that in there is no question any more about the matter, since in one case we are brave, and in the other merely cowardly. But given that we are shipwrecked, that the sea of hungry death surrounds us, and will soon pick us off, how much better, on the lowest possible view of the affair, to play about, to be kind and gentle, even if to-morrow there will be an end of us, utterly and for ever!
‘Yes, I am using beautiful language too. But I am talking of beautiful things.
‘Well, that view is the silliest and most incomprehensible possible. How did we get on this absurd rock, if only death surrounds us? Did we come from death into life? That is impossible, since scientifically you can’t produce life out of dead things. Or did some ship founder on the sea of death, and did we swim to shore, where we shall live until a wave sweeps us off again? That is possible; but, then, what was that ship on which we once were passengers,that for a time anyhow, until it foundered, if it did founder, rode over these waves? That is a serious question, but there is only one answer to it. The ship must have been life in some form. But the image does not seem convincing, does it?
‘What is left, then? Only this, that the sea which surrounds us on our little rock is not death at all, but life. Just as some day without doubt a wave will sweep us off our rock again, so there is no doubt that once a wave of that sea put us on the rock where you and I now are. If there is a wreck at all, it is a land-wreck, a wreck that puts us on shore. From the great sea of life we have been washed up for a little moment on to our little rock. Soon we shall be received back into life again!
‘In the interval, though in a new sense we are wrecked, how interesting is our rock, and how full of dear people, and pink shells, and divine things of the sea that life, not death, casts up round us, and nourishes by the spent water of its waves! How utterly idiotic it would be not to collect them eagerly, these little bits, for when we go back into life we shall seethe forests from which they come, the sapphire caves in which they really dwell. A little bit of life, that grouse that the eagles ate, was cast up close to you to-day. I shall particularly ask, when the wave takes me off again, where it came from. And I shall go and see the place. And certainly I shall see Mistress Eagle come back.’
Courage, huge, natural courage like this, absolutely unassumed, absolutely instinctive, may have one of two effects on the beholder of it. It may make him weep for the admiration of it, or it may make him laugh out of joyousness of heart for the same admiration. At least I laughed.
‘Oh, be sure to show me the place when I come,’ I said. ‘I am certain that Mistress Eagle will have a nice house.’
‘They all have,’ she said. ‘There are many mansions.’
She looked at me in silence a moment.
‘But I was not so certain of all these things when first I knew that I was so soon to see them all,’ she said. ‘At first, though I was never exactly frightened, I was dazed andstunned. I saw nothing clearly. I must use another image for that, and say that days passed as one sees the landscape pass through a railway-carriage window which is blurred by rain. I could see nothing clearly; it was all dim and rain-streaked. But then, without any conscious effort on my part, except perhaps a little exercise of patience, we passed—the train and I—out of the scud again, and soon the glass cleared, and I saw the green valleys and the sunny hillside just as they had always been.’
Again she paused.
‘I have not told you anything of importance yet,’ she said; ‘all I have said is really quite obvious. But this now——
‘You think of Pan as the smiling face that peeps from the fern, the presence that assures all suffering things that he is kind when he pipes to them, even though the sound means death. But surely that is no more than a sort of pagan mythical aspect of him. I always think that he suffers too, that every pain which he seems to inflict is only the reflection of the pain in his own universal heart, although he still smiles. It is from the cross that He smiles at us all.’
THE ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ has indeed been a close bosom friend of the maturing sun, and for the last three days before Legs went back to his crammer in town, he, Helen, and I spent a prostrated existence. Heat that in July invigorates, is utterly intolerable if it occurs at the end of September, just as the crisp winter day, which would be so welcome in January, descending to the earth as it usually does in June, produces merely amazed horror at the weather, and probably a cold. The superficial view that we suffer because we are improperly clad for these climatic surprises (a view that Helen put forward the other night) is beside the point. During these days, if I was improperly clad, it was only because I has so little on. In fact, only ten minutes before she had said as much.
The state of Legs’ affections, I am bound to add, aggravated the sultriness of the weather, and made me feel exactly 350 (three hundred and fifty) years old. To take it at its best, he was embarked on a violent flirtation with a dreadful girl; to take it at its worst, he was falling in love with her. She is the daughter of a neighbouring minute squire, who owns three turnip-fields, and calls it shooting. Legs shot over it the other day, and after walking over the whole estate twice, got back to The Grange in time for lunch. This was before I returned from Scotland, or I should have tried to prevent it. Probably I should not have succeeded.
The neighbouring squire’s name is Ampthump. I know quite well that it is not his fault, but that, wedded to what he is and a German wife, makes me unable to like him. His wife makes incredible quantities of jam, which, again, is an innocent pursuit; and Charlotte, the daughter, talks German to Legs, who I wish was more like Goethe. The whole family, in fact, as may have been already perceived, appear to me to be simply intolerable.
The attachment also has already led toequivocation on the part of Legs. He pretends that he talks to Charlotte because it is so good for his German. He knows that it is not so, and I know it is not so, and I think he knows that I know it is not so. But it really looks at the moment that unless they marry each other there will be a broken or, at any rate, a cracked heart. I only hope it will not be Legs’. I don’t care the least what happens to Charlotte’s heart. It may, however, be only a flirtation, in which case there probably will not even be a crack. Legs will wake up one morning, and after handling some precious withered flowers will wonder what on earth they ever meant to him, and throw them in the fire. Or Charlotte will do something equally desperate. That is my hope; my fear is that they are falling in love with each other.
This narrative, it should be understood, is the gist of what I have been saying fragmentarily to Helen. She considers it a cynical view, which alarms me, since I hold the creed that all cynics are properly and irretrievably damned. To-night Legs went to bed early, with dishevelled hair, a wakeful eye, and a gale of sighs, and I cameupstairs to talk to Helen about it all while she brushed her hair.
‘You are quite ridiculous about it,’ she said. ‘Because you happen not to like the Ampses (we have agreed on that abbreviation), you think that they are unlovable. Legs has proved the contrary. Besides, what on earth does her name matter, if she is going to change it?’
I groaned intentionally, and in a graveyard manner.
‘Do you mean that you think Legs is in love with her?’ I asked.
‘Yes; at least, I hope so. He had a long talk with me to-day. He said he felt it was time he settled down. What a darling! Just twenty! I wish I was.’
Most of this was irrelevant. I tried to pick out pieces that were not.
‘Of course, her name doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Her name might be—— Well, you can’t do worse than Ampthump, and it does happen to be exactly that. But her face is like a ham——’
‘That is superficial,’ said Helen. ‘Beside, it isn’t. It’s oval.’
‘So is a ham. And she’s a prig. Ampthump! Good Lord!’
I am afraid I shouted this, because she said: ‘Hush! Legs will hear.’
‘Not he. Or if he does, he will think it is only the wind whispering the beloved name.’
‘Yes, but you didn’t whisper it. Oh, do take the brush. You made me send my maid away, so you must do it yourself. I can’t brush from here, because my arms are in front.’
Now in my heart I pity everybody who has not seen Helen with her hair down. All such folk, in all their millions, lead impoverished existences. There is a wave in it that is like the big unbroken billows which succeed a storm, when the clouds have passed and the sun shines. It is lit from within, even as they seem to be irradiated from the depths. Those billows must go over a sandy foreshore, for they are yellow, and the sun—I know not how—must be foggy, for there is a little red light in them. And brushing, as I did now, I held my hand over them, and the hair rose to it with a tiny cracking sound. Her hair came to my hand, lifted towards it that unminted gold that framed herface, and covered her ears. And for a little while it was no wonder that I forgot about Legs and his Charlotte.
I suppose every one knows the sensation of being lost. You can be lost all by yourself, as I was once, as I have said, in the western desert of Egypt, on which occasion the bray of a donkey was to me the trumpet of the Seraphin. That was a dreadful experience, since it implied being out of touch with life. But I should be glad to know if there is anything the world holds which is more enraptured than the sense of being lost with one other person, to feel the world swim away, and be dissolved, so that you and the comrade you are with are quite alone. To feel that there is no existence except the existence of her who is lost with you.... It was Helen’s hair.
‘That’s the world’s side; there’s the wonder!’ That lover understood. Everyone saw Helen’s hair.
‘“But the best is when I glide from out them,Cross a step or two of dubious moonshine,Come out on the other side....”’
‘“But the best is when I glide from out them,Cross a step or two of dubious moonshine,Come out on the other side....”’
‘“But the best is when I glide from out them,Cross a step or two of dubious moonshine,Come out on the other side....”’
I never could quote correctly. The point is that the beloved has another face, the face she turns to her lover. No one else sees it; it is ‘blind to Keats, him even.’
A moment ago I thought that no one but me must see Helen’s hair. Now let them all see it, the waves of the sunlit sea, not breaking, unless the break be where I put my hand an inch above them.
‘Thanks, dear,’ she said soon. ‘You brush it much better than my maid. Now shall we talk for five minutes? Then I must go to bed.’
I had hideous accumulations of various fag-ends of work to do, and at the end of the five minutes, or it might be ten, I went downstairs again, to begin at any rate this dreadful patchwork of odds and ends. It was still, I was almost sorry to observe, only just eleven, and since I had with both eyes open deliberately and firmly wasted all the hours of the day, my uneasy Conscience told me that I had better, if it was to have the ease it craved, not think of leaving my chair for a couple of hours at least. I argued this point with it, and lost someminutes, for I told it that it was extremely bad for me to work at night; that it took more out of one than work in the day; that work done under these circumstances was never good work; that doctors recommended one never to work at night, but go peacefully to bed before the evening fever—whatever that might be—set in. Then there ensued a short spirited dialogue.
‘Most sensible,’ said Conscience. ‘Give me your word that you will get up at six to-morrow, then, and work for two hours before breakfast, and you have my leave to go to bed now.’
‘But I shan’t wake at six,’ said I, ‘and the servants have gone to bed.’
‘I will wake you,’ said Conscience. (Conscience is quite capable of the odious feat.)
‘But I can’t work before breakfast,’ I said. ‘It makes me feel’—I could not think of the word for the moment—‘oh yes, faint.’
‘Well, feel faint, then,’ said Conscience.
‘But I would sooner not; it implies weakness of the heart.’
‘Not to do your work implies weakness of character.’
‘Shut up,’ said I, ‘and let me begin, then.’
And I could swear that my Conscience gave a self-satisfied chuckle.
For an hour I waded wearily, knee-deep only, so to speak, in work, like a man who wants to swim, but has to trudge out over level sands. Most people, I fancy, even the laziest of us, like working, when we get up to our necks, or, better even, out of our depths, in it, but the wading is weary work. The worst of it was that the fact that I had to wade so far was entirely my own fault, for the whole of the last week I had never taken the trouble to finish up any one job, and now there waited for me several bills to pay, since a few mornings ago I had sat down to pay bills, and had paid them all except two or three; several letters to write, all of which had to begin either falsely (i.e., ‘I have just found your letter of the 17th) or apologetically (i.e.‘I haven’t answered your letter before because——’). Then there was a half-corrected proof of an unfinished article, badly written originally, and, what is more, written without conviction. It was on a subject that did not particularly interest me, and I had only written it because the misguided editor of a magazine had offered me £25 for it,and I very much wished to buy a seal-top spoon which cost exactly that sum, and which I knew perfectly well I had no right to buy. So, saying to myself that I would write this article (which I should not otherwise have done), I had bought it, and here was the dismal price that I had to pay for it—namely, that this wretched article was a piece of literary dishonesty. I had to fudge and vamp over it, trying to conceal the nakedness of the land by ornamental expressions. That was brought home to me now. It was all bad cheap stuff, and though most of us are continually turning out bad cheap stuff, not knowing it is bad and cheap, such manufactures become criminal when we do know it. As long as work is honest from the workman’s point of view, it is only his misfortune when he does not know its valuelessness; but when he does know its valuelessness, he sins by intention, and is a forger. I was one, and by my forgery I had bought a seal-top that was not. I thought that when I tacitly agreed to work for two hours to-night, my tiresome Conscience would put its head under its wing, and leave me alone; but I found now that it was broad awake again, and chirping like a canary.
‘What are you going to do?’ it chirped. ‘Are you going to send out a rotten forgery which everybody who knows anything will detect? or are you going to tear it up, and be left with a purchase that you know you can’t really afford? Remember that you must get a new dining-room carpet too; you promised Helen you would. Chirp, chirp, chirp!’
I am bound to say that this enraged me.
‘What’s the use of making that row?’ I said. ‘It’s you, Conscience, who has to settle.’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ said Conscience. ‘It’s your fault; you wouldn’t listen to me when I told you that you had no right to accept £25 for your dreadful article.’
‘You didn’t say it so loud, then,’ said I.
‘No, but you heard all right,’ said Conscience.
‘I hardly heard,’ said I. ‘You spoke so indistinctly.’
‘Yes, but you did hear,’ it chirped, with a sort of devilish cheerfulness. ‘You knew quite well what I meant. Now you suffer for it. Hurrah!’
I wonder if I am cursed in this matter of Conscience beyond the majority of mankind. Often and often (I will swear to this in the House ofLords if necessary) my Conscience is hardly audible at all at the time when I do anything which I ought not to do, or omit to do anything which I ought. To continue the simile of the canary, which really fits the case, when the actual choice comes, it is as if the canary had a thick green-baize cover round its cage, and only hoarse and muffled notes reach me. Very often, indeed, I am sorry to say, I don’t attend to them, or say it is only the cat, and in consequence do what I should not. Then the moment it is done the baize cover is whisked off, and the infernal and cheerful chirping, or so it sounds, succeeds to the wrong choice or the weak omission. And the burden of the chirping is always the same.
‘I told you so; I told you so. Now you are in a mess! What are you going to do now? Chirp, chirp, chirp!’
And a hurricane of dry and deafening notes follows.
I sat there with this column of stupid twaddle in my hands, and Conscience watched me with its bright bird-like eye. Much as I like birds,I hate their eyes, because they remind me of Conscience. They are beady and absolutely unsympathetic, frightfully quick to see, and without a particle of pity in them. Conscience never pities one at all; it is the foe that is of a man’s household. It always gloats over one’s mistakes, and things that are more than mistakes, and only says:
‘Here comes the master with the whip. A new lash, I see, this time. And what a thin shirt you have got on!’
Nor, when the whipping is over, does Conscience sympathize.
‘I told you so; I told you so,’ it says. ‘No, there is no soothing ointment of any kind in the house. I ate it all up. Wasn’t that a beautiful new lash?’
Well, I tore that dreadful nonsense up, and wrote another apologetic letter. I am getting quite good at them. But to-morrow—this is what makes Conscience mad—I shall tell Helen about it. The telling is not pleasant; it never is. But as soon as Helen knows, Conscience has simply to retire. It does not understand why itsuddenly becomes so unimportant, and that gives it a fit of impotent rage. Nor do I quite understand, though I am nearer to the explanation than Conscience is. But she understands. At least, I suppose so, or else she would not be able to put the green-baize cover on again.
And then, what with apologetic letters, and the drawing of two or three cheques, and the stupid attempts, in this matter of the dishonest article, to produce something out of nothing, by covering up the nothingness by more ornamental expressions, and the eventual destruction of it all, I found that the two hours were gone, and that I had kept my promise to the idiotic canary. It had ceased chirping from experience when I told it I was going to confess to Helen.
The night was intensely hot, and through the long open windows of the room in which I had been working no breeze entered. Though September had but a quarter more of its course to run, it was like some sultry July midnight, portending storm, for when I went out to take the night-breath the sky was thickly overcast, so that no direct ray either of moonlight or of starshine, came earthwards. The serrated outline of the elms at the end of the lawn was scarce distinguishable against the scape of the clouds, and the low land of the water-meadows was blanketed in a mist that was only just visible by its whiteness against the black blot of the hills behind. Fifi, who had very sensibly decided to sleep on the veranda, did not stir when I came out, though I heard the instinctive thump of her short tail on the tiles, the natural politeness of the dear dog, though she really could not stand on ceremony with me to the length of getting up. So, maliciously, I am afraid, since I thought this slightly cavalier conduct, I said ‘Puss,’ though there was no Puss of any sort, as far as I was aware. But my malice was again thwarted, for Fifi just tapped again with her tail, in courteous recognition of a stale old joke, just to show that she appreciated my intention, but she made not the smallest further effort towards activity.
So she was half asleep, and all the world, this dear, blessed world, which is so full of merriness and simple, innocent pleasure, despite the fulminations of fashionable priests, wasquite asleep, not stirring, scarcely breathing, just sleeping, sleeping. It was not yet the hour when, just before the hold of the night begins to tremble and be weakened in the sky, all living things wake for a moment—that mysterious moment, when sheep take a bite of grass and cows twitch their grave ears, and horses stand up for a minute before they settle down to the light morning sleep which dissolves with day, and when even indoors, if you sleep with a dog in your room, and happen yourself to be awake, you will hear a stretching of limbs on your bed or on the carpet, and a long sigh breathed into the blankets. Plants and flowers, so I truly believe, feel the same thing; and though there may be no wind perceptible to you if you are abroad, as sometimes I am, at that hour, you will hear, just at the moment when cattle move and sheep take their bite of grass, a stir go through the trees, and a hushed whisper lisp in the flower-beds. At that moment, too (you need not credit this, though it is absolutely true), though it has rained all night till then, and will rain thereafter, steadily, soakingly till morning, the rain ceases, as suddenly as if a tap was turned off. Time and again I have tested that.
But, as I have said, that mysterious moment was not due yet. It was still two hours short of it, and everything was still asleep. Even in the last minute or two Fifi had fallen fast asleep, too, after I had sat down in a wicker chair on the veranda, for when I called her there was no tap of response. To-night, too, the sleep of the world seemed to me (feeling it as one does by that sixth sense, which still exists dormant in us, and is most awake at night) to be extraordinarily deep. It was the sleep of a world that was very tired with this long hot summer. There seemed no pulse stirring in it at all, as you may find it stir in the light sleep in which Nature indulges in June, or still more in the dark, wet nights of spring, when the secret boiling up of life begins again from hidden root to budding tendril, so that if you lay your ear to the trunk of a tree it seems that the effervescence of the young year is audible, and sings within it, even as the telegraph poles are resonant with the wind that hums in the wires. Nor could I hear, when I rose and walked across the lawn, even though the dew was heavy on the grass, the hiss of startled worms,withdrawing from the approaching footfall. Black, too, and lifeless, was the oblong of the house except where the lights burned in the room in which I had been trying to be honest. The long herbaceous hedge was black, the lawn was black, Helen’s windows and Legs’ were black.
I went back to the seat I had just left, and lit a cigarette, meaning to go upstairs to bed when I had smoked it. Fifi still lay motionless, though generally any excursion into the garden at any time of day or night sets her scampering. And then, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, for nothing was further from my thoughts, I became aware that, though the physical world was asleep, there was some enormous stir and activity going on in the occult world which surrounds and permeates us. Yet that is perhaps a wrong expression, for the same activity and stir always goes on in that unsleeping realm; and I must express it more accurately by saying that the part of me which was able to perceive it was suddenly quickened. It is possible, of course, since I confess to being able to go to sleep whenever I choose,and often without delay, when I do not, that at that moment I fell asleep. But whether I fell asleep or not, does not make the slightest difference, for there was clearly some part of my brain awake, and it made my eyes think that they saw, and my ears think that they heard, that which immediately followed.
As far as I am aware, in any case, I sat down again in a rather creaky basket-chair and lit a cigarette. The match with which I lit it, I threw on to the gravel path in front of me, and, since I required it no further, it proceeded to burn prosperously. By its light I could see Fifi with her nose between her paws. I saw, also, that my shoe-lace was untied.
And then I heard my name called from the garden, in a voice that was perfectly familiar to me, though for the moment I could not say, so elusive is the ear, whose voice it was that called. It was not Helen’s, it was not Legs’, it was not ... and then I remembered whose voice it was. It called me by name, once only, in the voice that had said, ‘It is from the cross that He smiles at us all.’
I do not think I was frightened, but simplyfor the purely personal reason, that to me there was nothing to be frightened at. The match still burned on the gravel path, so short had been the measurement of this in the world of time, and I could still see Fifi’s nose buried between her paws. Then she raised it, looked out into the garden with terrified scrutinizing eyes, focussing them on something, invisible to me, and gave one long howl. But there was no moon. It was at something else she howled.
Then, I confess, as if some bomb had burst within me, terror flooded my whole mind, submerging it, and I sprang up. Simultaneously I heard a sort of strangled scream from the room above, and the scurry of unshod feet overhead. Next moment the sound of an opening door came to my ears, and a quick stumbling tread on the stairs. I ran indoors, and reached the door leading from my room into the hall, just as the handle was seized and shaken by someone on the other side of it, and Legs burst into the room, his hair all tumbled and erect, and his face wearing such a mask of terror that for the moment I recognized him only because it must be he.
‘Who is that in the garden?’ he said. ‘Someone in white, who looked up at my window? And Fifi howled at her.’
This would never do. Nerves, terror are the most infectious things in the world, and unless I took steps, there would, I knew, be standing here two babbling lunatics.
‘I was dozing in the veranda,’ I said, ‘and Fifi woke me by howling. She woke you, too! Legs, don’t be an ass! Pull yourself together. If there had been anything, I should have seen it.’
Legs was as white as a sheet. The whiteness somehow showed through his freckled sun-tanned skin. He was swaying to and fro on his feet, as if he would fall, and I put my arm around him, and deposited him in a chair. Then I poured out a wineglassful of neat whisky.
‘Don’t speak another word till you have drunk that,’ I said. ‘Then I shall count ten slowly, and then you may speak.’
Fifi had followed me in, and sat close to the door whimpering. With my heart in my mouth and a perspiring forehead, I went across to thewindow as I counted, shut and locked it, and pulled down the blind.
‘Nine, ten,’ I said.
A little colour had begun to come back to Leg’s face. He had drunk the whisky, a beverage which he detested, like water, and the frozen fear of his eyes was less biting. And then, as suddenly as it had come on, my terror left me. Whatever it was that I had heard, whatever it was that Legs had seen and Fifi perceived, there was nothing to terrify. Besides, within myself, now that the cowardly disorder of my nerves had passed, I believed I knew what it was that had made its presence so strangely perceived by us all. The mortal suffering of a dear friend was over. Already I was ashamed of having told Legs that I had been asleep and had neither seen nor heard anything.
‘Legs, I lied just now,’ I said. ‘I heard my name called from the garden in Margaret’s voice.’
‘You mean she is dead?’ asked he gently. ‘The last accounts had been better, I thought.’
‘I’m sure she is.’
Then for a moment, like a sudden squall, the white terror passed over Legs’ face again.
‘It was not her I saw,’ he said hoarsely; ‘it was Death. I thought she had come for me. Fifi saw her too.’
I sat down on the arm of his chair.
‘Yes, old boy,’ I said, ‘I think that you and Fifi both saw some manifestation of what I heard. But there is nothing to be frightened at. But how was it you were at your window? You had gone to bed hours ago.’
‘I know, but I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and sat by the window.’
We sat there for some time after that, and by degrees Legs recovered from his collapse, and soon, instead of terror, mere sleepiness invaded his face. Once or twice he stifled a yawn, and at length he got up.
‘I am dead sleepy,’ he said. ‘I think I shall go to bed.’
‘You are not frightened any longer, are you?’ I asked.
Legs looked at me out of drooping eyelids, and he seemed puzzled.
‘Frightened? What about?’ he said. ‘Good-night.’
I was very late down next morning, and found that Helen and Legs had nearly finished breakfast. As I came in he jumped up.
‘Ah, here he is!’ he cried. ‘Now, did you sit up very late last night?’
When he asked that I began to have some suspicion of what was coming next.
‘Yes, very. Why?’
‘Well, were you talking to yourself? Helen and I both woke in the night, and heard talking in your room. I had had some dream that frightened me, and I nearly came downstairs for human companionship.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I was too sleepy. But—were you talking?’
‘No. You were dreaming. So was Helen. I may have groaned now and then over proofs, but not more than that.’
Legs nodded at Helen.
‘I told you it was ghosts,’ he said.
‘And you heard voices too?’ I asked Helen.
‘Yes; at least, I thought so. But I was very sleepy. I thought also I heard Fifi howl.’
So, you see, there is no corroboration of my story, and if I dreamed it at all, or made it up, there is no one to whom I can appeal for confirmation of its verity. But there is just this little bit of evidence—namely, that though Legs had finished breakfast, he went on drinking cup after cup of tea. When Helen left us he explained this to me.
‘I woke with a mouth like a lime-kiln,’ he said—‘just as if I had been drinking that dreadful whisky of yours. I drank most of my jug, too, and they had to bring me more water to wash in.’
What happened last night, then, had been wiped clean off Legs’ brain again. Whatever it was that he had seen, that which made him stumble white-faced downstairs, had gone. But an hour or two later, while we were out playing croquet in the garden, some faint echo of it, I think, crossed him again. A telegram was brought out for me, which contained what I knew it would contain, and I handed it to himwhen I had read it. Then we went quietly indoors.
Just as we got into my room again, he said:
‘How odd that sensation is of feeling that something has happened before! When you handed me the telegram, I felt I knew what was in it. And during the last week she had been rather better, had she not?’
THE business of the dining-room carpet (a case of conscience makes the whole world kin, so I confidently return to this matter) was settled more beautifully than I had thought possible. I told Helen all about it, and she said:
‘Thank goodness you tore the thing up! Dear, youaresuch a silly ass! There’s nothing whatever more to be said. You are, aren’t you?’
‘There’s nothing more to be said, I believe you remarked.’
‘Well, you may just say “Yes,”’ said she.
So I said ‘Yes.’ It was a variant of the woman’s last word, spoken by a man instead.
‘There, now we’ll go and quarrel about the rose-garden,’ said she.
We went and quarrelled. She was flushed with triumph over making me say ‘Yes,’ and in consequence I got my way about several disputed points, which to-day the darling thinks she chose herself.
The rose-garden is a design of unparalleled audacity, and when it grows up, it will be nothing short of stupendous. For between us Helen and I are territorial magnates, and beyond this house and garden, which are hers, I am owner of two fields, and limitless possibilities. I bought them a year ago, in a sudden flush of extravagance, and for six months we maintained there (at staggering loss) a poultry-yard in one corner and a cow over the rest. The original design, of course, was to make a sound investment in land, which, in addition to the fathomless pleasure of owning it, would keep us in butter, eggs, chickens to eat (not to mention, as I hasten to do, savouries of chicken liver on toast), and possibly beef. If one considers the question closely, it is difficult to see how a cow can (1) give milk, and (2) give beef; but Helen, in visionary enthusiasm, said we should have oxen as well, and why not pigs in the farther corner? I did not at once see why not, and I bought the two fields with the same unconcern as I should have bought a boxof matches, which yield so sure an enjoyment in the matter of lighting cigarettes.
Then we both began to learn that, though we might be gardeners, we were not farmers. The poultry-yard was (mistakenly, no doubt) erected at the corner of the field nearest the house, and morning after morning we were awakened at dead and timeless hours. Helen said that when a hen made a long clucking noise, it meant she had laid an egg, and that, till the thing became incredible, consoled me. For if she was right, it was clear that hens laid invisible eggs, or that they were doing tiresome conjuring tricks, and that the long-drawn crow meant, ‘I have laid an egg, but see if you can find it. I am the mother of this disappearing egg.’ We usually were not able to do so, but sometimes an egg was found in a hedge, or in a ditch, which when found was totally uneatable, except by the Chinese. Personally, I believe that by some unhappy mischance we had bought celibate and barren poultry, whose customs drove us daily nearer Bedlam; in fact, it the pig that was our hellebore.
The pig was not a pig, but a sow. She wentmad, too—or so I must believe—jumped the pigsty in the opposite corner, made a bee-line for the poultry-yard, went through our beautiful wire-fencing as if it had been a paper hoop in a circus, and ate two hens. The cock beat a masterly retreat, and was never heard of again. The other four hens followed him. And the sow, dripping with gore, lay down in the hen-house and slept. Almost before she woke, she was sold for a song.
Then the cow came. I do not wish to libel her, but I think I may safely say that she was milkless and excitable, and had a wild eye. She roamed over my fields (mine, I had bought them) as if they were her own. Had not Legs been so agile and swift, she might have tossed him. As it was, she ran into the brick wall at the lower end of the garden, and made her nose bleed. As far as I know, that was the only liquor that she parted with. She was probably mad also, for she used to low in the middle of the night, when all proper cows are fast asleep. Asleep or awake, however, now she makes her fantasias elsewhere. I almost hope she is dead, for it requires a larger optimism than I possess tobelieve that she will ever become a proper cow, for she was more of a steed for Mazeppa. Perhaps she was a horse after all, a horned horse. I wish we had thought of that at the time. As it was, we sold her at outrageous loss, as a cow. And with her we parted with any idea of keeping farmyard animals for purposes of gain. Perhaps we were not serious enough about it, and the animals saw that.
Through last spring and summer the fields rested after this invasion of outrageous animals, and about the middle of May it struck Helen and me simultaneously that we were going to have a crop of hay. That was delightful, and much less harassing than hens. Hay would not wake one at timeless hours, nor would it go mad, and have to be sold at a quarter of the price we gave for it, since we gave nothing for it at all. It was the pound of tea thrown in with the fields we had bought, or theTimesnewspaper thrown in with your subscription to that extraordinary library.
From this there was born the scheme of giving a haymaking party, to which we originallyplanned to ask everybody we knew, amended that to asking all the children we knew, and afterwards (this was Helen’s amendment) decided not to ask anybody at all, partly because children were so serious, but chiefly because there might not be enough hay to go round. We neither of us knew how many square yards of hay it was reasonable to supply to each person, and it would be dreadful if there was not enough. Either Helen or I, or both of us, would have to go without, and it was safer to give the haymaking party to each other. We were in town all May, and the first half of June, but had left word with the gardener to send us a postcard when the hay was ready. The weather throughout these weeks was gloriously sunny, and in our mind’s eye we saw the crop growing taller and thicker with each blazing day.
Then one evening came the memorable postcard:
‘A reddy.’
We flew to the ‘A.’ In the middle of the largest field was a small haycock like a penwiper. One not quite so large and round at thetop, more like a pincushion, was visible in the next field.
It was clear after this that the Powers that Are willed that our fields should not be used for utilitarian purposes. Hence the inception of the rose-garden.
A brick wall (the one against which the insane cow had blooded her nose) bounded the garden. From there the ground declined steeply away into the middle of the larger field, which was cup-shaped, the ground rising on all sides of it. (It was at the centre of the cup, where the sugar is, that the penwiper had been raked together.) To-day a flight of steps made of broken paving-stones—an entrancing material—led down the side of the cup from the garden-gate, and up the opposite slope. Standing where the sugar is, therefore, you saw on every side of you rising ground, which had been terraced, and walks of broken paving-stone, communicating with the two staircases, lay concentrically round. And the Herculean labour which had already occupied us so many rapturous afternoons was to plant the wholecup with rose-trees, so that, standing in the centre, there was nothing visible except sky and roses. That was practically done; and to-day what occupied us was the consideration of the level remainder of the field, of which there was some half acre. It was rough, coarse grass, starred with dandelion, which gave the first hint. We wanted to get rid of the dandelion, and——
At last I got Helen to agree, and I mixed together in a wheelbarrow an infinity of bulbs, and other delectable roots. There were big onion-like daffodils, neat crocuses with an impatient little yellow horn sticking up, fritillary roots, bottle-shaped tulips, the corms of anemones, and the orris of the iris. Then, trowel in hand, each with a bag of bulbs taken haphazard out of the wheelbarrow and with a bag of sand to make a delectable sprouting-place for the roots, we started. Every dandelion encountered was to be dug up with honesty and thoroughness, and where the dandelion had been there was to be planted a bulb taken at random out of the bag. Helen said it would take tenyears. Personally, when I looked, I thought longer, but I did not say so, for I practice reticence on discouraging occasions.
I wonder how many people know the extraordinary delight of doing a thing for oneself, starting from the beginning. I do not say that it gives me the smallest pleasure to black my boots or brush my clothes, since somebody has already made those boots and woven the cloth. But there is nothing more entrancing than to deal first-hand with Nature, to make holes in the earth, and put in them roots, the farthest back that we can go with regard to vegetable life. Rightly or wrongly, it seems to me a pleasure as clean and as elemental as the joy of creation itself. Whether we write a book, or paint a picture, or carve a statue, we, though we do not really create, but only arrange what is in existence already, are going back as far as we can, taking just the root-thoughts and translating them to song or shape. And though we do not really create at all, but only use and arrange, as I have said, the already existing facts of the world, passing them, it may be, through the crucible of the mind, we get quite as near to Nature, if not nearer, when we goa-bulb-planting. The bulbs are our thoughts, our pigments, what you will, and when in spring-time we shall see them making a meadow of Fra Angelico, it will be because we have actually planted these things ourselves that the joy of creation will be ours. Not to do that would be as if an artist laid no brush on the canvas himself, but merely dictated to a dependent where such a colour should be spread. But given that he had a slave so intelligent and so obedient that he could follow to a hair’s-breadth the directions given him, can you imagine the artist feeling the possessive joy of creation in the result, even though it realized the conception to the uttermost? Not I; nor, in the garden, do I care, like that, to see what others have done. It is not sufficient to direct; one has to do it oneself.
I love, too, and cannot conceive not loving, getting hot and dirty over the wrestling with the clean, black earth. A great deal of nonsense is talked about the dignity of labour, but it is chiefly talked by those whose labour lies indoors, who, excellent craftsmen as they may be, go spudding about in the intangible realms of themind. I doubt, indeed, whether any market-gardener has ever spoken of the dignity of labour. We leave that to those who only know it by repute. But I long to put down the manner of the transaction. I do not in the least think it dignified, but it is such fun.
The green had mostly faded from the grass, leaving the meadow, as is always the case in October, far more grey than green. Certain plants, however, were still of varnished brightness, and the dandelion leaf was one. There was no need to pick and choose, and without moving a step, I dug the trowel down into the earth, loosened it all round the vegetable enemy, and lifted it. An ominous muffled snap came from inches down in the earth, which I tried to pretend I had not heard. But one could not cheat the eye also. There, at the bottom of my excavation, was a milky root, showing a danger-signal of white against the brown loam. I had to go deeper yet: the whole of the tap-root must be exhumed. Another dig, another snap, a raw-looking worm recoiled from the trowel, only just in time, and eventually up came the remotestfibre. How good the earth smelt! How reeking with the life of the world! Cold, clammy, rich earth, ever drawn upon by the needs of the Bank of Life, ever renewed by that which life paid back to it. A thousand years had gone to the formation of my trowelful, and a few inches below was the chalk, where a million lives a million years ago had spent themselves on the square inch of it. Slowly, by work of the myriad sea-beasts, this shoulder of chalk was heaved from the sea, the myriad lives became a myriad myriad, and here I had the little lump of chalk borne up on the end of the trowel which told of the labourers of the unnumbered years. Then, in a spoonful of sand, I put the sign, the evidence of another decade of millions on the top of them, and stuck thereon an onion-like daffodil root that was born last year. In a fortnight’s time that child of to-day will have reached downwards, feeling with delicate, pleased touch the sand of a thousand years ago, will delve through the time of the pyramids of Egypt, will draw moisture from the chalk that was old when our computation of time was not yet born, and will blossom next April, feedingits sap on the primeval years. And for what? To make Helen and Legs and me say, ‘Oh, what a beautiful Horsfeldii!’ Then we shall look at the fritillary that prospers a yard away.
The eternal romance of it all! To the right-minded there is nothing that is not a fairy-story. Like children, we crowd round the knees of the wonderful teller of it, and say, ‘Is it true? Is it all true?’ And He can’t tell lies. Sometimes, when we have a sort of moral toothache, we sit apart, and sniff. We say that scientifically we have proved there is no God. So said the fool in his heart. But nowadays the fools write it down in their damned books, and correct the proofs of it, and choose the bindings of it, and read, with gusto, the thoughtful reviews of it. And, God forgive them, they think they are very clever people, if I may be excused for mentioning them at all.
But fairy-stories! How surprising and entrancing are even those which people make up and put in books, while round us every day a fairy-story far more wonderful is being told not only for us to read, but enacted for us to see. It is only familiarity with it which robs us of thesense of its wonder, for imagine, if we could make ourselves ignorant again of what happens to bulbs when we put them in the earth, how the possibilities of flying-machines would grow flat and stale before the opening of the daffodil. For a man’s capacity for happiness is in great measure the same as his capacity for wonder and interest, and considering that there is absolutely nothing round us which does not teem with wonder if only we had the sense to see it, it argues very ill for our——