He nodded at me, pointing to a chair, and I stumbled towards it, conscious for the first time of an overpowering exhaustion. My blood beat through my temples very thin and far away, but with frightful rapidity, and something sang in my ears like the whistle of a distant train. Then I became conscious that the butler had put a glass of brandy into my hand, and I drank it.
‘The cart will be round in ten minutes, sir,’ he said.
‘But Dr. Carlton?’ I asked.
‘Rode off a couple of minutes ago, sir. I should sit still, sir, if I were you.’
It can hardly have been an hour from the time the telegram first came to when the cart with me inside it drew up at Margery’s house. Against the porch leaned my bicycle, the lamp still burning, and lights, I saw, were burning in her bedroom directly over the door. Standing on achair inside the hall was Dr. Carlton’s hat and a small black bag; on the floor close by was the pink sheet of the telegram, which I must have dropped when I ran upstairs. Even then I remember clinging in some desperate, dazed fashion to the hope that it was all a dream, and that the telegram would prove to be some trivial absurdity, and I picked it up and read it again.
Then I sat down and waited.
From time to time there was some muffled sound of footsteps and movement above, then silence again, then more steps. Then I heard a door open above, and a droning voice which I knew to be Margery’s speaking in level, meaningless tones. Then the doctor’s voice said sharply:
‘Yes, it is in my bag. Bring it all upstairs if you don’t understand.’
With the bag in my hand, I met the servant hurrying downstairs, sobbing in a helpless manner. She took the bag from me without a word, and went up again. And step by step, after I had heard the door close, I moved to the top of the stairs and sat there. Below, the clock in the hall beat out metallic minutes, and once the hour—twelve only—struck. Through the fanlight above the front-door I could see the lamps of the doctor’s dogcart; three or four times they moved away, and after a minute or so returned again to the same spot. At intervals that terrible droning voice came from Margery’s room.
How long these things lasted I cannot say, but it must have been less than two hours, for I knew the hall clock struck once only. Then the droning voice ceased altogether, and in its place came short, incisive sentences in a man’s voice, the purport of which, of course, I could not hear. Then came the cry of a child, and I knew that in the midst of death we are in life.
Then, as if I had been drawn by cords, I crept nearer and nearer to the door of the room, and the crying of the child still sounded—the cry of Dick’s child. And Dick? Oh, Dick! if your brave, blithe spirit in the paradise of God, now free of its habitation of flesh, keeps watch, as it surely must, over those it loves, come here, come here, where there is so sore a need of you and your comforting. Speak to her through that frail tabernacle of time and space; comfort the soulyou love, if the laws of your world permit it. Come!
* * * * *
Later in that long night Dr. Carlton told me all he could tell. The child had been born, and it lived. There was no reason why it should not live, for it was quite healthy, though it had been born before its time. About Margery he could not say. She had not rallied satisfactorily. She had been perfectly conscious for a time after the birth of the child, but with her consciousness had returned the knowledge of her husband’s death, and she had relapsed again into a semi-comatose state. He proposed to wait, visiting her from time to time, till he could feel more happy about her.
Twice before the dawn broke I tried to go to bed, and as many times I crept downstairs again to where Dr. Carlton sat in the drawing-room, his genial, florid face looking more anxious and troubled each time he returned from a visit upstairs. Then, just as morning broke in thin red lines on the horizon, I heard his voice call to me, and I went upstairs. He beckoned to me to come in.
Margery was lying in bed, propped up on pillows, and her eyes were closed. I sat by the bedside and waited. They had taken the baby away, and only her mother knelt there, with her eyes fixed on Margery’s face. Suddenly she raised her head a little, opened her eyes, and saw me.
‘Thank you,’ she said—‘thank you for being here, Jack. Dick is waiting for me. Yes, Dick!’
She raised herself a little more, and seemed to struggle for breath.
‘Is it morning?’ she said. ‘Let in the morning.’
And even as I pulled the curtains aside and raised the blinds there dawned on her the Everlasting Day.
I havetold you about the May of three years ago, and the June of two years ago, because those two months are so dedicated in my mind to what happened then, that, while the months are running, I cannot free myself from them and live in the present year. Have you not certain such dates in your year—days on which you live, not on the day that is now passing, but on a certain day in some year long past? There is a foolish proverb that says that those people are happy who have no history. In other words, it is better to be a cow than a man. I cannot see it. But if it will not bore you, and if, in fact, my May and June are ever so little human to you, I will tell you quite shortly a little more of them. If, on the other hand, this does bore you, leave out the next four pages.
Believe me, death is not so terrible; what isterrible is the thought that it is so. But learn how false that thought is, and death will not terrify you. For what lies behind? God and He who died for us. And if I am wrong, if it is not so, nothing whatever seems to me to matter, and we can look on death as on a flea-bite. But believing, as I do, that beyond death—even as on this side of it—is God, when lives have ended, as those of Margery and Dick, so utterly without reproach, when two souls have been so splendidly human as they were, it seems that God must have been knowing what He was about when He allowed that bullet—blindly illogical as it may seem to us—to end her life as surely as it ended his. I can understand the existence of a lifelong regret and bitternessif a thing had not been well done, if a man died from obvious carelessness of any kind, or from weak persistence in a bad habit. Then one might say, ‘If it had been otherwise!’ But he had done his duty, and his duty implied death. And his death—I only grope dimly after what I believe to be true—implied hers. Does this seem to you a stoical, unhuman view? Ah! believe me, it is not so. It would have beenvery easy for one who loved them both to take another point of view, and find life dull, objectless, without interest or merriment. But—but would that have been better? Would it have been better to have turned aside from all other things, saying ‘I cannot,’ rather than to have steadfastly said ‘I can,’ until—well, until one could? Some day I know, on that day when Slam’s kitten stands between earth and heaven in the midst of the four pines, and Slam says, ‘Oh, it is nice!’ there will meet me one who died on the African uplands, and one on whose grave the sweet-peas are yearly odorous; and we shall know each other, and God will look on the greeting we give each other, well pleased. How that will be I cannot guess; I am only sure that it will be so. Atheists and dyspeptics (the two are much the same) may laugh, and if they enjoy their laugh so much the better for them.
* * * * *
So I am living now on the outskirts of the town where Margery and Dick lived together for one month of their lives, and on this morning of the 1st of July I know that May and June have ended,and go back to the ordinary little daily affairs I had been telling you about up till the end of April. Many great little things have happened, and the extraordinary conduct of the Jackmanni which the cat from next door once disinterred seems to me to claim the first attention. It had been planted against a warm south-westerly wall; it had been pampered like an only child; for yards round the soil had been enriched; its dead leaves were diligently picked off. I really did all I could to make it happy. But instead of being happy, it sulked. It did not die—that would have been a regrettable incident, but, anyhow, a proper decisive line of conduct—but it sulked. It grew a little for a week, and put out several leaves; then it couldn’t be bothered, and the leaves withered again. Then it sent out a long tendril across the gravel path instead of climbing up the stick that led to the house-wall. I coaxed that tendril gently back, gave it an alternative route to the house-wall, but nothing would please it. Finally I tied it to the alternative route. So it died.
I was willing to give the thing every facilityfor behaving itself, so I transplanted it to a different place, where it got less sun and more wind. Also I tried watering it less. For a week it appreciated this enormously, and set about growing in earnest. Then one morning, I suppose, it got bored again, and began to wither slowly from the top downwards.
Now, I could not spend my life in moving one absurd Jackmanni from place to place, though I have no doubt that if I had done so, taken it to stay in other houses, given it champagne one day, coffee the next, and perhaps some fish or pudding on the third, it would have flourished. But I was tired of being kind, and towards the end of May I took it up for the third and last time, planted it on a north wall, where it never saw the sun and was starved by a thick growth of ivy. It was further shaded by an apple-tree growing about a yard from it. Then for a month I carefully refrained from looking in its direction; it had no water, no attention, and was put in the most undesirable situation. To-day I see it has leapt across to the apple-tree, up which it is diligently climbing, and clusters of purple budsare showing among its green leaves. Certainly severity is needed when you deal with Jackmanni.
To-day, on this 1st of July, a hot day full of the odours of complete summer, I sat for an hour in the big wooden shelter that now stands finished on my strip of lawn, and squared accounts. It happens to be my birthday, and I am thirty years old—no less—and as I added up profit and loss I was horribly puzzled how to make my affairs balance. For if one sits down by one’s self, with no conceivable object in the world but to see how one stands, it is probable that one is moderately honest with one’s self, for to be otherwise would be like cheating at Patience, one of the few forms of villainy which has never in the least tempted me. With regard to the big item on one page, ‘What good have you done?’ and on the other, ‘What harm have you done?’ I am bound to say I did not much concern myself, for to add up, even for one’s own information, on what rare occasions one has behaved decently is a priggishness of which, so I humbly trust, I am incapable; while to add up all the harm one has done wouldrequire a great deal of time, and would be productive of no good result whatever when it was added. For, short of being wicked, the next worst way of wasting time is to devote one’s time to thinking how wicked one has been. To repent in a horror of wickedness and a burning fire of contrition is one thing; to sit down in cold blood and count missed opportunities is another. The one is on certain occasions, as when one passionately desires to break an evil habit, inevitable and salutary, but to sit at ease in Hell is worse than sitting at ease in Zion.
No, it was not with the big item that I concerned myself. I wanted to see what cash I had in hand, rather than examine the main account—the bank-book of credit or deficit. Where was the small cash of thirty years, in fine—and God in His mercy give me a big loan. Indeed I do not wish to be profane, nor in intention am I. No doubt it would have been better to have felt an agony of contrition for all the bad things I had done, and for all the good things I had left undone. Daily I have thoughts which for no sum mentionable would I reveal to anyone whoserespect I in the smallest degree desired to retain; daily and hourly I make some sort of brute of myself, not necessarily in deed, but anyhow in thought. Daily I say to myself, ‘If only there were not some kind of decency to be observed, social or moral, what an excellent time I could have! If only the Ten Commandments—hang them!—did not awake some glimmer of reflection in this muddy pool of my soul, I should——’ Anyone may fill in the rest according to his own shortcomings. In the same way, on the credit side, I believe I should be a better man if I lived on the bare necessities of life, and gave the rest to deserving charities. I had no earthly business, for instance, to buy the charming table at which I am writing, when that which I spent on it would have fed a starving family for months. Even the Jackmanni, which has cost me a week’s work, what with transplanting and cat-squirting, would, irrespective of this, have given several meals to a penniless man, for it was big when I bought it. All this, in my meditation, I took for granted. I did not concern myself with radical changes in my nature. I did not repent of the table and theJackmanni, nor of the dinner I ordered, nor of the wine I have drunk, nor of the hours I have spent in mere amusement. In the main it was not in the least an edifying performance; I accepted the general lines of myself as being what they were. What, in fact, I wished to examine was not my nature, but my policy, and to this effect:
Two great things have happened to me—the one a great joy, the other a great sorrow. The great joy was when Margery thanked me with her dying breath, though Dick’s name came after. The great sorrow was when she died. Had she lived—though I do not for a moment believe I should ever have been her husband, nor do I believe I should ever have asked her to be my wife—I should have had some sort of mission, some constant pursuit, namely, to see that she was as happy as it was in my power to make her. Had I been a telegraph-boy, I should have done well if I had delivered my telegrams without loitering; had Margery lived, I should have done well to have given my life to that. But she did not live, and I am too old to be a telegraph-boy.But I have had a great joy, and it is great because she did not know how hardly it was earned. And that is my record. That is the sum earned, and the credit already given is thirty years. It does not look at all promising when the addition comes.
Hesitatingly, as I sat in the shelter, I put down another item to the sum earned, which is this: I still have a childlike pleasure in little things; I can play soldiers with absorbing zest; I can imagine that I am a white man in tropical forests, who has to get through with tricks that presuppose an almost pitiable stupidity on the part of my enemies; I can devote quite as much energy to the flowering of a nasturtium as Mr. Pierpont Morgan finds it necessary to give to the formation of a company with a capital of £30,000,000. That, with all deference to financiers, is an advantage. My nasturtium, in fact, implies as much energy as his colossal schemes, and it does not hurt anybody, except perhaps the nasturtium. Meantime, it unloads me of my force, and, considering what harm force can do, it is a great saving of suffering to expend itharmlessly. If I was richer, I would have a string quartet attached to this villa, and I would spend my force in devising programmes, and reconciling the second fiddle and the viola. But I am not, and the string quartet has not yet to be engaged. I know whom I shall have, and I shall be much disappointed if they have made other engagements.
For happiness consists not in getting a thing, but in hoping that one may get it. With satisfaction walks surfeit; but to keep your ambition steadily a little ahead of your possibilities is to be constantly eager. There is nothing in the world which, if I got, would make me happy. There are a million things in the world which the desire to get and the hope of getting make me happy. And it is this which a man sets out to seek when he falls in love, which is the best form of happiness devised in the world at large, and, thank God! the commonest. If man or woman knewallof the man or woman each sought, would either be content? On the contrary, the world would be full of spinsters and bachelors. It isbecauseone is not certain,becausethere are ‘silver lightsand darks undreamed of,’ that man seeks woman and woman man as the ultimate possible happiness. And for the same reason one plays silly games of croquet or bridge.
To want, to want! Do you know Blake’s picture of the two little men setting up a ladder on a bare headland towards a crescent moon. ‘I want, I want!’ is what the artist wrote beneath. The two little men wanted—they put a puny ladder up towards—the moon. That is the genius of the man, for through all the bad drawing and faulty perspective the ‘I want, I want!’ is clamorous. Others have attained. God help them!
Oh, I stretch out unsatisfied arms beyond the limits of the world! Whatever I get becomes in the getting of it dross. It is not dross really; it is the fact of my having got it which makes it dross to me. It is mine, therefore it is no use. Let the Great Bear tumble down from heaven, and let me find seven stars lying in my hand: what use are they when they are there? Cast them out—give them to a beggar, and make plans for Sirius. Of all the heartaches, that ofAlexander when he sighed for new worlds to conquer is the most human. Yet the typhoid conquered him by Tigris. And his ambition was that of all of us in our degree. The man who has bought an empire or won it wishes for more empire, and the spinster who has seen her canary hatch out one egg, and eat the other, says: ‘Oh that there had been two young ones!’ Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ And because this preacher is not wise, but knows what is the matter with himself and many others, he gives these lamentable reflections on his thirtieth birthday.
Pray, then, that you may continue to want, not that you may continue to get; for the getting in a manner comes of its own accord, and it is the ability to want that we must keep alive. We may feel quite certain that the world is big enough; there are plenty of things to want if only we have the power of wanting. For wanting means just this—thecapacity of growth. To want no longer, means that one is old—old not only in years (indeed, such an old age may come to an unbearded lad, in which case we laugh, and say, ‘Look at that cynic of twenty’), but old infibre, inelastic, set, rigid. Nor does it, I think, much matter what one wants—again I beg the patient reader to remember that I am not talking of the great spiritual needs—as long as it is not harmful. But for any sake try to be keen about something.
At this point my reflections, to tell the truth, touched me somewhat on the raw, for what have I wanted every day for the last two years? That which I cannot get—Margery. And yet how shall I say that I cannot get her, when, if I knew all, I might know that these silent daily longings of mine have brought me, perhaps, a little nearer to that dear spirit, that without them I should have been a little more ill-tempered, a little nastier, than I am. Anyhow, I want to want. For I do not yet acquiesce, I cannot yet believe, that the world holds nothing for me but that. Here am I walking along this road of life. All down it I meet every day new faces, new people, new factors. One sees but a few yards ahead; then there is a corner, and round that corner will come others, looking like myself for that which their soul needs. Oh, hurrying footsteps, coming evernearer, is there not one among you all that will stop when you reach me, and go no further in your quest? Is there not one which shall, while still a great way off, strike on my ear as distinct and utterly different from all others—one which I recognise, though I have never yet seen her to whom that step belongs. Among these miles of eager human eyes, shall not some day mine eyes seek other eyes, and find there that which has been predestined for me by God? O Margery, my dear friend, how you will welcome her (should I find her), for her sake and for mine, when we meet in the everlasting habitations!
Another train of birthday reflections led to this conclusion: ‘Give up the pursuit of anything which seems to you of doubtful gain.’ For there are so many indisputably good and real pursuits in the world, that it cannot possibly be worth while pursuing what may not be wholly good, and may possibly be not wholly real. Here I have a certain small right to speak, for in the last year I have given up something which seemed to me of possibly doubtful gain, and I have found that it was a wise step. That which I have given up issingularly known as ‘the world.’ I once thought that it was a good thing to see hundreds of people, to multiply acquaintances, to be able to say, ‘Charming party! —— was there, and ——, and ——,’ naming people who really concerned me as little as I really concerned them; telling myself—even then, I think, I had some secret notion of conscience-salving—that to live in the bubble and roar of the world was stimulating. So no doubt it is, but a stimulant is not necessarily healthy. Thus it seemed to me (one can only speak for one’s self) to come under the head of ‘doubtful gain.’ But it is a quite certain gain to study the habits of the ill-content Jackmanni—I am sorry for introducing that again, but I cannot get over it—it is a quite certain gain to read a good book; to try to learn the Fugues and Preludes—provided, of course, the incidental pain to others is not more than they should be reasonably asked to bear; to be in the open air, and, above all, to do your work, whatever it is. If you have none, get some. It hardly matters at all what it is, so long as it is harmless. But merely to go from dinner to danceis a doubtful gain. You would do better—at least, I should—to talk to a friend for half an hour, and then, if you wish for the crowd merely, as I often do, walk for ten minutes up and down Piccadilly. For if that does not give you the food you want, you may be sure you will not find it anywhere else.
Another most fascinating hobby, though I expect it is extremely easy to give too much time to it, is the pursuit of health. Certainly it is more easy of accomplishment to most people than the pursuit of happiness, and the one, to a very large extent, implies the other. For the pursuers of happiness, for the most part, are Hedonists. They think—and herein err very greatly—that to multiply pleasure tends to make one happy. In point of fact, it does nothing of the kind, for pleasures are to some extent obtainable by most people, whereas happiness is almost completely a matter of temperament. And the happy temperament cannot possibly have anything to do with pleasures. No amount of pleasure will foster it at all; whereas, if you have got the happy temperament, almost everything by that mysteriousalchemy is turned into pleasure—even as a rose-tree turns that which its root-fibres suck from the earth into blossom. And certainly health is a great help to happiness, for to be well—really well—makes ‘the mere living,’ as Browning says, a joy, and at times it seems enough to be alive. For which would you rather be—a bilious man, with all the pleasures of the world at his disposal, or well, with ‘the book of verses underneath the bough,’ and a thrush, maybe, singing of what should be above you?
Keenness of perception, in fact, I soberly believe to be the greatest cause of happiness (and so, necessarily, of pleasure, since happiness turns the most trivial incidents and sensations of the moment into pleasure) that is within our reach. And so inextricably is the mind and soul bound up with the body, that—apart from great spiritual enthusiasm or ecstasy—this keenness of perception can scarcely be reached except through a certain cleanly healthiness. In fact, it presupposes a temperament of almost divine serenity to enjoy a day on which one has influenza; whereas there is a sort of health, which is probably within the reachof most people, in which, from the heightened keenness of perception it brings with it, the smallest things are causes of joy or laughter.
This may sound a mere vain piece of optimism, but the truth of the matter is that three-quarters of the world are not nearly so well as they can and should be. Almost everybody, in fact, is greedy and lazy, and laziness and greed are more certain progenitors of discontent than any other ancestors I can think of. To eat rather more than one wants, to drink rather more than one should, is to feel disinclined for one’s work or one’s pleasure. And to be disinclined for a thing means, with most of us, to miss the pleasure of the doing. But to be inclined for work or pleasure implies that we find a nugget of happiness therein, for it is this alchemy of inclination which turns trivial incidents to gold, for the keenness turns the dross of mere achievement into happiness.
It is thus that the happy temperament may most readily be cultivated by those who have not naturally got it. Some have it, a royal birthright, worth more to its possessor than the piled crowns of the Great Powers; but by others ithas to be cultivated. And to cultivate keenness of perception by means of health is the simplest and most practicable method. And the organ in which ill-health mainly resides is, to put the matter frankly, the liver, because, as a rule, we eat and drink too much, avoid air as if it was strychnine, and do not take enough exercise. Thus my prescription is worth trying: Eat and drink less, open your windows more, and, if your work permits of it, be out-of-doors more. It may, of course, be easily possible that, to do your work properly, you have to sit in a stuffy room, and neglect your health somewhat; if so, let your health take care of itself by all means, and get through with your work. But short of that, let your health receive the attention it deserves. It is a very sound investment, and will yield you excellent returns.
Dear God, in spite of May and June, how happy You allow me to be! How You have allowed me, in consideration of my foolishness, to find in life so much happiness! To-day, for instance, a golden sun was swung in a blue sky when I awoke, and only half-dressed I breakfasted in this shelter in the garden where I am writingnow. Three yards off was the Jackmanni with its purple buds, a little beyond a Crimson Rambler climbing up an apple-tree. On the grass stood two green tubs briming with nasturtiums; up the garden bed ran the row of sweet-peas. All breakfast-time a thrush sat on the apple-bough and sang the song that can never be learned, and which no one ever taught it. Then, still out-of-doors, I sat and worked, and about twelve came a great bunch of lilac from a neighbour. Lunch-time brought two friends, and after lunch we hit little silly golfballs over the great back of the down with matchless enthusiasm. And now I sit here again, as evening is beginning to fall, and the birds which were mute in the heat of the day are tuning up for evensong; again the thrush is on the apple-bough, and an occasional silver flute of a note tells me that mating-time is not yet over with the nightingales. The bees still hunt in the drowsy and closing flowers, and swifts still race with shrill whistlings through the divided air, but every moment the stillness of evening gains on the beautiful noises of life, like a waveless tide creeping up the wrinkled sand of the sea-shore.Already the sun is low, and soon the lengthening shadows will cease to be shadows, and the velvet blue of the night will darken in the turquoise-coloured skies. Already the night-flowering stocks and the tobacco-plant are opening, and, as they open, spread sweet webs of incense, low-lying from their heaviness, over the grass, and the pale moths begin to hover over the flowers. Dusk comes, and its cool benediction rests and recuperates the day—wearied earth, and it and its little inhabitants rest with bowed heads a moment, like some child at its mother’s knee, drinking in quiet. The pause has come, day is over, it is not yet quite time to sleep; be still, then, cease to move or worry or think. Lie open to the air and the stars, let your life pause, breathe deep, make no effort, and the thrush and the stars and the green things will communicate with that which is within you by direct ways.
Then as dusk deepens into night thought comes back; but thought, too, is driven inwards, going home to roost, and for a little while, as I walk in this dewy grass by the sweet-peas, Margery will be leaning on my arm, talking to me of the daysthat were—talking, too, in a way I do not yet fully understand, of the days that will be. Outside on the road I can hear unknown footsteps passing up and down, and every now and then she seems to say to me, ‘Hush! Listen!’ But the steps pass on. It is not yet.
I donot think that I have hitherto mentioned that, since I came here in the spring, the house in which Dick and Margery spent those few weeks together before he went out to South Africa has stood untenanted, and often during the past months I have wandered slowly by it, noting with a sort of pleasure, I think, that at any rate no one I knew lived there. The feeling was, I am aware, utterly unreasonable, but it was of the same childish and instinctive kind as that which prompts us to put away and not use, or at least not let others use, some little object which has been in any way closely connected with someone who is dead, whom we have loved. I do not think this feeling is in the least defensible, for it implies that we cut the dead off in ever so small a degree from the living, and thus tend to keep alive the sting of death. For in that the deadhave once been intertwined with our ordinary workaday lives, it is altogether a false sentiment which makes us separate them now, if we believe at all, as I do most fully, that they still are about and around us. All the same, it was with a certain surprise and shock that I saw early in August that the signboard that the house was to let was taken down, and that a few days later a furniture-van was drawn up at the door. In fact, this very natural and reasonable event disturbed me to a degree which I was totally unable to understand. It seemed dreadful, somehow, that others should be at home there (it never occurred to me at the time that it was highly unlikely that the house had stood vacant for two years), so wholly was it consecrated in my mind to those two. At the same time I realized my utter unreasonableness about the matter, and, instead of trying to combat it, attempted to take a shorter cut, and dismiss it as far as I could from the range of my conscious thoughts. Yet for weeks it lurked there in the shade, and as the weeks went on, though I never consciously dwelt on the thought, yet somehow the thought seemed to grow there in the dusk ofmy mind, until I knew that all my subconscious brain was full of it. More especially I desired to remain in ignorance of who the intruders—for so I thought of them—were. As long as they remained utterly vague and unknown, I could feel no definite and incarnated resentment, but if once they were visualized I felt that the growth in the shadow might peer out with poisonous leaves into the sunlight of active and conscious thought.
I have tried to put incoherency coherently, and I feel I am drawing with definite outline that which was necessarily ill-defined; but in no other way, except by words of definite meaning, can one indicate any impression, however mist-like. Let me, then, say at once that what I have said is overstated in the sense that if one tries to draw the actual phantoms of a nightmare they are overstated, because to state them at all is to lose the pervading vagueness, for hard outline. On the other hand, again, what I have written down is, I think, understated, since I try in vain to convey by words the vague and abiding disquiet I felt at the thought of the owner of the furniture-van that unloaded at the door. Only, as I have said,this all lurked in the shadow, and though it grew, yet by persistent refusal to think directly of it, and by persistently endeavouring to continue in ignorance of whom the new tenants were, the dark growth never emerged into sunlight.
But it seems a curious irony of fate that so soon after I have written about the road to happiness this phantasmal and unreal ghost should ‘arise to poison joy.’ This, at any rate, is not exaggerated language, for the thought of the house tenanted once more lay like a shadow over my spirits. I was wholly unable (or at any rate I thought I was, which comes to the same thing) to banish the shadow from my mind, and it haunted both waking and sleeping thoughts with a dull never-ceasing weight. I, who hardly ever dream, and then only of astounding and mirthful adventure, groped nightly about ill-lit passages, which I believed to be passages in that house, in intolerable apprehension.
Sometimes, so it seemed to me, certain rooms were vividly lit inside, and through cracks below the door, or through the chink of the door ajar, I saw that there were bright lights inside the rooms,which yet cast no filtering illumination into the passages through which I had to feel my way. At other times the whole house was wrapped in a misty obscurity, which was not the light of early morning nor yet the dusk of falling night, but something almost palpable to the touch; it was as if the gray veil of the future brushed across my eyes, some unseen hand stirring it, as if to lift it away, and in my dreams my eyes would strain into the darkness for the light that should show me what agencies moved about me.
These dreams, which were very persistent and occurred in dim sequence many times during the night, always opened in the same way. On falling asleep I passed straight into the nebulous atmosphere I have tried to describe, and was walking up to Margery’s house. For the darkness, I never could see more of it than its square shape, a blot against the blotted sky; the door was always open, and the groping in the passages began. I was conscious always of many presences close round me, but the dusk hid them, and into the lighted rooms I never could enter, for it was somehow forbidden. Then one night an entirelynew dream came, sandwiched between the dreams of dusk, and in that I was going along the road to the house, not wrapped in obscurity, but in brilliant sunshine. Birds trilled in the bushes, flowers of extraordinary brilliance grew in the hedgerows, and I thought with an upleap of exultation that the passages would be blind no longer. Then I turned the corner and came on the house, and though I knew it was the right one, yet it had changed almost beyond recognition. The steps that led to the front-door were cracked and moss-ridden; the creepers had so grown that they hung in curtains over the windows; an indescribable air of age had passed over it. But the room over the front-door—Margery’s room—was untouched by the gray hand of Time: the walls were still smooth, and it seemed to me the bricks newly-pointed; the creepers were cut back from the window, which was wide open, and from inside came a voice singing. It sang a song that Margery always loved, and though the voice was like hers, yet it was not quite like.
It was with the wildest hopes and expectations that I entered the house, but once again, thoughall was bright outside, the passages were dark. But I groped my way upstairs, and saw that the door of Margery’s room stood open, and there, framed in the misty obscurity, stood a figure that must be hers. Line for line it repeated that form I knew so well; the slight bend of the neck, the outward sweep of the shoulders, were all hers. And in the darkness I gazed and gazed, for the veil seemed to brush upwards against my eyes, but it did not lift, and in an agony I cried out, ‘Margery, Margery, is it you?’ And my own voice, I suppose, awoke me, for I found myself seated up in bed, and the night outside was still very dark and hot, and I heard the hissing of steady rain on the shrubs.
So I lay down again, and must have gone to sleep immediately, for, without conscious pause, I was back in the dark passages as usual. But once again on that same night a new factor appeared in my dreams, for the presences, though still invisible, were inaudible no longer, and their footsteps passed about and around me very close. For a long time I listened, but heard none that concerned me; but at last there came one which I knew to be Dick’s,and with it went another that was Margery’s, and they passed near me and went out—I suppose to the garden. It never occurred to me to follow, for I was outside their lives somehow, and if we came near each other it was that they came near to me. After that the steps of many strangers passed and repassed, and then once more I heard Margery’s footstep alone. But when it came close I knew it was not Margery’s, but like it, as the singing voice was like hers. Then slowly, as at the hint of dawn, the dim passages began to grow bright, and I looked to see where Margery was. But the brightness as it grew showed me only the walls and furniture of my own room, and through the open window came in the pale light of early day, as the morning breeze flapped the blind.
Now, by this time the dreams of the dark passages had lasted about a week, and the days betwixt the nights had been full of a corresponding depression; for by night it was the darkness that troubled me, and by day the shadow of the new folk who were coming to live there. Then came that night which I have described, and simultaneously both the dream of the dark passages andthe depression by day ceased entirely and altogether. I went back at once to the dreamless nights to which I was accustomed, and my days were once more a mosaic of happy hours. But the heaviness of those days and the ill-defined fear of those nights was so blackening to the spirit that at the time I soberly thought that some madness had begun to lay its finger on my brain; and now that I no longer fear that, I find myself wondering what could have induced this melancholy. The weather, it is true, was extremely hot and depressing, and for the whole week it is also true I was working against time at a piece of work I did not wish to do. Before I had been a day at it, I knew that it was distasteful; before I had been two at it, I felt sure it was not worth while to do it at all.
Now, being temporarily bored with one’s work is one thing; radical disapproval is another. It may easily happen that, to bring about a situation rightly, several chapters of what seems to one at the time (and very likely is) sorry stuff have to be hammered into shape. Due preparation for the situation has to be made without giving the situation away; only when it comes the reader shouldsay to himself: ‘Of course it must be so; why didn’t I think of it?’ But radical disapproval is a far different matter. It is rank immorality to go on spending time and pains over what is worthless or worse, and that rank immorality I committed. Then, when the work in question, the oppressive weather, and the disordered dreams, which began simultaneously, also ended simultaneously, I felt that it was highly probable that they were all bound up together. Certainly, it is more than possible that they all reacted on each other—that the thunder in the skies led to a general depression that made my immorality sit heavy on me, and induced a gloom by day that was carried over into the night. Again, the fact that I slept in the shadows brought shadows into the day; and the fact that I spent the hours unprofitably, and knew it, predisposed to gloomy visions. At the same time, the persistence of the same dream was curious, and the society that collects nightmares are at liberty to put it on a pin. Such, however, is the record of what happened during the first week of August.
Thereafter ensued three spoilt days, spoilt not by outside agencies, but by fussy stupidity on my part. To the ordinary citizen such spoiling means nothing, for in all probability he will never experience it, and thus to him the trials of these three days are senseless. But given that your household comprises only a plain (very plain) cook, and what would be called in London a ‘general’—though such have no idea of campaign—it will appeal to the minority to know that the question of what one wanted for ten days at Bayreuth, and perhaps a week’s wandering in Germany, was crucial. It was no use saying vaguely—as I suppose one does to a valet—‘I shall be away for ten days; pack’; but seriatim I had to think of all that I should conceivably want. The result was that early on the second day I found that I had packed all the necessaries of life, and had to unpack them all again. This, and the subsequent repacking, took the whole of the third day. Even then, since I had to leave at cockcrow to catch the evening boat to Ostend, there were many things insoluble. Were there baths at Bayreuth, or should I take an indiarubber bath? Were there washerwomen, or should Itake as much linen as there were days?Seigneur, quelle vie!
Now, though I regret these pin-points of indecision, yet I defend them. For if one is going abroad for six months, all that is necessary to do is to put out every stick and button you have in the world, and bid the grand portmanteaux advance. But for ten days or a fortnight surely such equipment is beyond the mark. Therefore one has to select. Here comes in the worst of an imaginative mind. One can easily picture circumstances, even in the course of ten days, in which one will want each single suit of clothes one possesses. For instance, there may quite easily be a cold spell of weather, and therefore it is necessary to take one suit of thick clothes, also to be worn on the night journey. But supposing one gets caught during this cold spell by a sudden storm? The cold spell continues, but the thick clothes are wet. Therefore one must take two suits of thick clothes. However, warm weather is more likely, and there must be at least two suits of flannels. Four suits. Then for emergencies of the social kind one must not be founddefenceless, and some sort of tailed apparatus must come. Five suits. Dress-clothes. Six. Also there is excellent trout-fishing not far from Bayreuth, and I have been particularly told to bring a rod. That entails knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket. Seven suits.
At this point I paused; I was taking seven suits in order to clothe my unworthy body for a space of ten days in a Bavarian village. Yet where was the flaw? Of all things in the world I hate to be away from home, wanting something which I have forgotten to take, and, which is worse, decided not to take. Time was when it was so simple to put in that article, but the opportunity is mine no longer, and I sigh for the undenuded wardrobes.
I scorn to reproduce more of these indecisions; I would sooner reproduce French as spoken in the hot bath, and it will suffice to say that, having spent hours which will never return in process of careful selection, I eventually discarded selection altogether, and filled all the portmanteaux I possess. However, for the future I shall waste no more time in thinking what I shall want on short journeys,for I know I shall end in taking all I have, and it saves trouble to begin with that.
I do not know whether we are all descended from gipsies, but certainly in most people something of the instinct which loves to wander, to make a journey merely for the joy of going, survives. True it is that punctual trains (the South-Eastern, however, has a good deal of admirable romance and uncertainty about it) and well-appointed steamboats, which leave stone-jettied ports at regular and ascertainable times, have sucked much of the unknown from travel, and so robbed this instinct of its fruition, but they cannot quite starve it. Even though you travel in a Pullman car, and sit on plush with your head among voluptuous gildings, and gaze into looking-glasses which show you the country and the telegraph-posts reeling giddily backwards, yet you still travel; and, at any rate, if you are going where you have never been before, something new and unknown waits for you behind the advancing line of the horizon. Thus, the one thing I never need on a journey is a book; it is sufficient entertainment for me merely to look out of the window and see new country—vale and glen or plain and mountain-peak—come up to greet me in endless procession. So swiftly one moves that it is hardly possible to weary of what one sees before it is gone, and every bend in the line may show something admirable. But above all things the headlong passage through the station of a large town delights me. First comes a mile of sordid house-backs built on to the line; then a short tunnel at which the engine screams; then a wider glance of the town, with perhaps a gray cathedral tower watching over it all; then close against the window slanting lines of people, like rain, on the gray, tapering platform, the name of the station hidden, like a plum in a bun from its refreshment-room, in plasters of advertisement; the signal-box with its rows of gleaming semaphores; the mile of sordid house-roofs again; and out into the green fields. Then at a stile giving on to the line there wait a couple of children, whom in all human probability you will never see again, waving their hats at the gay express. For a glimpse only you saw them, but they have their lives in frontof them, fraught with momentousness to themselves at least, and perhaps to others. It is even possible that in years to come the lines of your life may cross theirs—that tragedy or comedy is already weaving the ropes that will bind you together in love or death or laughter. For of all phrases ‘a chance meeting’ is the most illogical. If chance exists at all, nothing exists except chance. Your most careful plan may be spoiled ‘by chance,’ as you will say. Then, your careful plan was chance, too, since chance can wreck it.
The backwaters of life, like the backwaters of streams, have an enormous fascination for me, for both are extraordinarily pleasing to the eye and restful to the mind. The great stream of progress hurries by them, while they revolve gently under shelter in sedate eddies, and sometimes sticks and straws from the stream get flung aside into them, and at once they join that slow, unhurrying circle. Such a backwater is Bayreuth; a tram-line and an advertisement of Sunlight Soap are the only touches of modernity I noticed in the town, for the theatre stands apart from it, a mile away beneath the pine-woods of the pleasant Bavarian hills.But otherwise it is a backwater of the purest type, not ancient and not modern, any more than is a backwater in a stream, but merely existent and unhurrying.
The inhabitants, we must suppose, buy and sell things from each other; some are richer than others, but apparently not much, and none, I should think, are either very rich or very poor. Some also are better-looking than others, but not much; some rather wider-awake, but all seem to have set as a seal on their foreheads a ruminating mediocrity in all points and qualities which the human mind is able to conceive. Apart from the festival, it is impossible to imagine being either very happy or very unhappy in Bayreuth; ‘very,’ in fact, is a word which is without meaning there.
Yet here, by a strange irony of fate, is planted the cult of perhaps the most ‘very’ mind that ever existed, for the brick theatre on the hill-side is the casket which holds that heart of flame and song. Critics have beggared dictionaries to express their feelings about Wagner, and whether it is synonyms for ‘charlatan’ they have searched for, or synonyms for ‘sublime,’ none have yet thoughtof levelling at him the charge of dulness or mediocrity. Indeed, to discuss him at all seems to imply that you are not in that calm frame of mind in which alone can discussion be profitable, and the violence which marks his music and drama seem at once to infect the mind of his critic. Strangest of all, even Tolstoi—who of all great writers seems to be almost utterly devoid of any sense of beauty, though in matters of sordidness and ugliness the skill of his art is worthy to stand by Shakespeare’s—has allowed himself to be drawn into the mad circle, and has given us in his volume on Art a dozen pages which for sheer ineptitude of criticism, complete ignorance of his subject, and utter incompetence to deal with it, must rank for ever with the colossal failures of the world, such as the Panama Canal and the fall of Napoleon. But the calm frame of mind deserts me; discussion is not profitable.
* * * * *
It was after the second act of ‘Parsifal,’ and from the cool darkness of the theatre we streamed silently out into the brilliant sunshine of the late afternoon. The sun was near to its setting, and thewhole plain below us was steeped and stupefied in the level rays. A blue haze of heat-mist lay over the further hills, emphasizing the enlacement of their ridges, which stood out like the muscles of some strong arm.
Above the theatre rose the quiet pine-woods, hardly whispering, so still was the evening, and it was to them that my friend and I turned, for the poisonous enchantment of Klingsor’s garden had to be expelled, and we neither of us cared to join in shrill discussions about the exquisite phrasing of Kundry, since it was the seduction of her phrases that more occupied us. For an hour the evil flowers had bloomed, and that evil was not of the foul sort that makes one turn from it, but of the seemingly innocent welcome of maidens that wear flowers, and of an evil woman who spoke not of evil things, but of sacred things—a mother’s love, and her own love for him who was pure.
So we sat in the pine-woods, and let the fermenting vat of sin lose its effervescence, and waited till the sour-smelling bubbles broke no more on its iridescent surface. And the sun sanktill it touched the hills, and where it touched they changed to semi-transparent amber, and a crescent moon rose in the east, and one bird fluted in the bush. Then the first trumpet from below sounded themotifof the ‘Love-feast,’ and down we went. From the mad fires of the sunset we passed into the cool gloom of the theatre, and the doors were shut, and soon the curtain rose on the last act.
* * * * *
So were the wanderings of Parsifal accomplished, yet he remained still the pure youth who once, in ignorance of suffering, had shot a swan as it circled above a lake, wantonly and without thought. Yet when he saw it dead, then for the first time had pity knocked a little on the door of his heart. Since then had years sped by, and temptations hideous and beautiful and strong and subtle had been ever about his path and about his bed. Yet he was still without guile, nor was there spot or stain on his virgin soul. Albeit he was very weary, and for years had he been very weary, and sometimes he had prayed that he might die, not knowing what he prayed, for the fleshwas weak. But the Sacred Spear which he bore ever with him, that spear which had pierced the side of our Blessed Lord, was his strength and his firm defence, as it had ever been since he had won it from Klingsor the magician, unarmed except for the armour of his pure heart.
So it came about that on the dawning of that day on which our Blessed Lord was crucified his wanderings led him back to that place from which they had started, ere yet he had confounded the sorcerer Klingsor, and in the garden of seduction had resisted the wiles of Kundry, who laughed at our Blessed Lord what time He bore the cross of our redemption to Calvary, and thus henceforth could never weep, but by her laughter lured the souls of men to hell. Weary beyond all speech was he with his wanderings, in which he ever fought against the powers of evil, and he wot not whither he had come, nor that it was the Blessed Friday on which he had come thither, for, in that he did ever his dear Lord’s work, that it was now the day on which He suffered on the cross for our redemption was less to him than the work of salvation which he himself daily accomplished. Nor saw he the brightness of the meadows, nor read the joyous message that Spring wrote on the blossoming hawthorn and on the green places of the earth. For the turning Year had put on her fresh mantle, and like some fair maiden had dressed herself against the coming of her lover. The brooks all down the valley of Monsalvat—for to Monsalvat he was come again—were no more thick or tainted with the melted snows, nor had summer yet made them run low or less melodiously; but they brimmed through the meadows, combing the waving grasses that leaned to them and drank of their coolness, and over their pebbly beds they glanced and sparkled like young things at play. Between the stems of the trees were strown carpets of hyacinths and wind-blossoms, and from thicket to thicket the merry thrush glanced in and out, and filled his throbbing throat and sang of love and of summer. From morn till night did all God’s creatures thank Him for the beautiful days He had given them, and at eve the nightingale made the song which is as old as time and as young as when time itself was young.
Yet for very weariness did Parsifal reck naught o the spring music, but he only journeyed on, steadfast in the might of the Spear; for he knew that at the appointed time would his Gracious Lord guide his steps back to Monsalvat, his heart enlightened by pity, by which, though he hated sin, he ever loved the sinner. And even on this very morning his perfect work was done, and in naught had he brought shame upon the Holy Spear which shed the precious blood of his dear Lord, and wrought our salvation; and so had God guided him back to the vale of Monsalvat, though as yet he knew not whither he had come. Once, indeed, he had seen a swan wheeling in blue heaven above him, and a faint chord of memory twanged in his heart and was silent again. Yet he had inward peace, which he would not have exchanged for the wealth of the world nor for the wisdom of Solomon, for it was passing knowledge.
Yet, though all Nature held high festival and rejoiced, little did the brethren of the Holy Grail rejoice with her. For King Titurel, who for long years had lived but in the chapel of the Grail, wondrously kept alive by the feast of Love whichour Saviour instituted, was dead, and even on this day was to be his burial. And his son, King Amfortas, was also nigh to death, for the grievousness of the wound wherewith years agone the magician Klingsor had wounded him; for Amfortas had yielded to sin and to sleep, and while he slept in Klingsor’s garden of sorceries the magician had thrust at him with the Sacred Spear, and only by the touch of the Spear could his wound be healed. And as often as Amfortas would essay to unveil to the knights the radiance of the Holy Grail did the wound break out afresh, and thus for long time had they been without that strengthening and refreshing of their souls for the lack of which the King Titurel, starved of that spiritual meat and holy drink, had died.
Very early on this morning came the old knight Gurnemanz from his hermit’s hut nigh the sacred spring to look with dim eyes on the beauty of the dawning springtime; and as he looked on the flowering meadows he heard, so he thought, the cry of some wounded animal. ‘Yet animal,’ said he to himself, ‘it can scarcely be; for what four-footed thing grieves like that?’ Then searched he in thethicket by the spring, and found no animal, but the witch-woman Kundry who for long time had not set foot in the kingdom of the Holy Grail. And something of the spring moved in his old bones, and he said to her, ‘Awake, Kundry, awake! for the winter is over and past, and spring is here.’ Yet she moved not; and when she lay so still he wondered if she were dead, and his soul was sorry for her, since the curse of laughter was still not removed from her. But soon, in answer to his ministrations of pity, she moved and stirred; and when she had come to herself, she got up very quietly, saying only: ‘I serve, I serve.’ Then she busied herself in his hermit’s hut, and fetched fresh water, and plucked rushes for his floor. And he wondered, for he knew not how in the garden of sorceries she had tempted the young lad who came thither, and how he had resisted her wiles, and how from that moment there had entered into her heart the sweet and bitter pain which men call remorse, and which, indeed, is naught else but the voice of our humble Saviour speaking low and lovingly to our hard hearts.
But as Gurnemanz stood and wondered, behold,there drew near a knight clad in armour from head to foot. In his hand he held a spear, and his feet went wearily. Then did Gurnemanz tell him—for he knew not who it was—that this was the holy and peaceful kingdom of the Grail, where none went armed. And the strange knight answered him not, but he put off his armour, and the spear he set upright in the ground, and knelt down in prayer, raising his eyes to it. Then slowly to the old man came recognition, and he knew what spear that was, and he knew him who bore it—Parsifal.
So when Parsifal had prayed, he rose, and told Gurnemanz of his wanderings and of that sacred thing he bore, and how pity had enlightened him, so that he loved the sinner, yet hated the sin. And now to the kingdom of the Grail he had come again. Then, in turn, he heard of the long sorrows of the knights, and how the strength had gone from them now that they no more beheld the Holy Grail, and that for lack of the sight thereof the old King Titurel was dead. And when he heard that, pity for the sin of the world so seized him that he staggered where he stood, and he lay in swoon near the spring. Then didthe old knight Gurnemanz minister to his faintness; and from his hut came Kundry, who knew Parsifal’s helm, and she knew him—that it was he whom she had tempted in Klingsor’s garden. But now he rebuffed her not, and she loosened his armour also, and laid it by; and she washed his feet in the spring, and with the hair of her head she dried them. Then Gurnemanz anointed him on the head, and when she had dried his feet Kundry anointed them also, and he rose, and saw the woman, who she was; and Christ Jesus spoke to his heart, and told him that her redemption was near, for her heart was sorry at last. So with water from the spring he baptized her, and bade her trust in her Redeemer. And as he spoke the ice and the laughter in her breast were melted, and with her hair she made a darkness for her eyes, and she wept.
Then, too, were Parsifal’s eyes opened, and he looked on the beauty of the spring-time, and talked with Gurnemanz awhile, that even on the day on which the Blessed Lord was crucified it was very fit that all Nature should rejoice, because her trespasses were pardoned, and that since thegreat Intercessor Himself pleaded, not the pity of the sacrifice, but the peace which passed understanding, was chiefly shed on the earth.
Yet across the joyous day there now sounded the funeral bells for the King Titurel, and soon the new-anointed King of the Grail took the Sacred Spear and went through the blossoming woods to the chapel of the Grail. There were all the knights assembled; but little gladness was theirs, for they starved for the spiritual meat and holy drink, and for the sight of the Holy Grail, which Amfortas for his wound could not reveal to them. And they cried aloud to him to show them the mystery, and for very agony he could not, but called on them to kill him. Then was brought in for burial the body of Titurel, and for a moment sorrow smote them silent.
And while they were silent there entered one who bore a spear, and there followed him the old knight Gurnemanz and a woman. He went to the couch where Amfortas lay, and with the spear he touched his wound, and the wound was healed. Then turned he to those who bore the curtained Grail and bade them unveil it; and he took theHoly Grail in his hand, and with his other hand he held the Sacred Spear, and the chapel grew dark, and from the Grail shone out the Salutation of the Lord.
But in the darkness the woman Kundry had crept to his feet, and as the radiance from the Grail grew bright she lifted her eyes to it, and her redemption was accomplished, and she died.