Thebarren, sterile emotions which Art gives us, though they have the advantage of harmlessness over the emotions of Life itself, that tree of sweet and bitter fruits, bear with them the inherent defects of their unreality; and whereas there is hardly an emotion of Life which does not leave us stronger and more vivified, there is hardly an emotion of Art where one’s senses are stirred, not by actual events of joy or sorrow, but the imagined scenes thereof, which does not leave us flat and unbraced in proportion as the emotion excited has been keen. Love and death, the two greatmotifson which the drama of Life is based, whether they are whispered on the shivering strings, or piped on remote flutes, or thundered with the blast of trumpets and the clash of cymbals, leave us, when such actual experience has touched us, the richer for it, and stronger andmore vivified. But such is not the case in the reflection of experience which Art gives us; vivid it may be—so vivid, indeed, that reality after it seems shadow-like and unreal—but its life is temporary. We thrill with ecstasies that are not really ours; our soul, in its secret place, sickens with sin or withers with renunciations which are not its own; and when the mimic spectacle is over, and we wake from the storms or sunshine of a coloured dream to a gray morning, and have to take up again the dispiriting thread of uneventful hours, it is with an intolerable sense of flatness that we at first look out over the undistinguished landscape of life. For a week, perhaps, or a fortnight, we have agonized with the throes of Titans; monstrous joys and sorrows have been our portion, and for the monstrous we take up again the minute. We have been burning with alien fires and passions not our own: the temptation of Kundry has shaken us; the sorrow of Wotan, as wide as the world and as bitter as the sea, has for the time been ours; we have been laid to sleep on a mountain-top, like Brunehilde, and, like Siegfried, have dreamed in the green shade of woods untilthe voice of Nature has become intelligible, and the twittering of birds articulate through the murmur of the forest. The quintessence of human emotion, in all its terror and beauty, has shaken and enthralled us. Then—then the curtain came down, and we go out again into the real world, which for the time Art has rendered shadow-like, where a hundred petty duties await us, in no way refreshed or strung up for their accomplishment, but impatient, irritated, and bored.
Such, at least, were my own feelings when on a morning I awoke and remembered (what at first seemed incredible) that there was to be no opera that day, and that the curtain was down on the stage at Bayreuth for two years. The little backwater of a town, which on arrival had seemed so instinct with such sweet repose and tranquillity, was insupportable: its tranquillity was the stagnation of decay; its repose a creeping death-trance, with gray nightmare to ride its rest. Instead of finding that the fiery dreams of the last fortnight had gilded its streets and woven themselves into its gardens and trellises, it appeared to me merely the most dismal little sun-baked suburb I hadever seen. A glorious lamp had burned there, but the lamp was quenched, and instead of a reflection of its light lingering there, there was only a smell of oil. But the immediate and vital question was what to do and where to go. I could not imagine myself finding existence tolerable anywhere, and least of all, perhaps, could I imagine myself back in England in my own quiet little house in the country town, since for the time being, at any rate, all the minute pleasures which had built up that delightful life and made it so full of happiness were incomprehensible. Not long ago a quiet morning of work, with glances into the garden to see what new plant had flowered, a game of golf over the breezy down, the face of a friend, the hundred details of my life which I have tried to describe in these pages, were overflowingly sufficient to make me more than content. But now there was exasperation in the very multitude of them. And all the time there were, so to speak, images of glorious brightness shut away in some dark place of my brain. The Valkyries were there and Parsifal, Hans Sachs, mellow and unembittered, looked on the love of others andsmiled, and Walter sang of spring-time, and everywhere was melody.
Here, if you please, is egotismin excelsis, for I solemnly told myself that, instead of going back home like a sober and average person, I was bound—no less—to go somewhere and to do something by which I could the more fully apprehend and crystallize these images; and the grounds on which I put this to myself—that is my only excuse—were genuine. For I believe that one of the main duties of man to God and to himself is to realize beauty and understand it, and that one of his main duties to his neighbour is to produce beauty in some shape or form, moral, mental, or physical—if, indeed, there is any real difference between them. The last fortnight had given me new material; that part of me which is capable in its small way of feeling beauty had been shown wonderful things. If I went back home to the ordinary routine of daily life, I felt that I should not only do my part in it exceedingly ill, but also that the monotony and triviality of it would tarnish and dull the brightness of my new possessions. In other words, I began—a solemnprig—to think about my artistic temperament, and make plans for its well-being. And that confession made—in the hope thatQui s’accuse s’excusein some small degree—the mind-narrative can go on its way. My body—after an effusion of telegrams—sped South to the house of a friend in Capri, where it arrived two days later.
Here in this remote island, separated by a few leagues of sea only from that vividly modern and restless place called Naples, can be recaptured without effort something of the early days of the world, and from the steamer one steps out of all the responsibilities and codes which the stupidity and wickedness of mankind have built up, into paganism and fairyland. The gray walls compounded of priggishness and puritanism (yet knitted together with the mortar of good intentions and morality) with which this civilized century has fortressed itself fall as the walls of Jericho fell at the blast of the trumpet, and there is left sunlight and sea and the beauty of the seven days of creation, which was pronounced by God to be good.
The red, waxlike flowers of the pomegranate arein full bloom, and as evening falls they glow like hot coals over the rough stone walls that bound the path up to Capri, where the green lizards slip in and out. The smell of the vines is in the air, heavy and warm, and once or twice as I walked through the dusky trellises my heart hammered in me, for I knew that but a little more and I should see Dionysus himself, with the vine-leaves in his hair, and delicate hand holding the cup that brimmed with purple; and at noonday often have I all but seen in the briar-decked clefts of rock the great god Pan himself, to the music of whose fluting the whole world dances. Up and down their steep paths, with head erect beneath the wine-jars, walk the maidens of Capri, and something of Aphrodite lives in their wine-painted faces and moulded bosoms; and young Apollo, bare-footed and splashed to the knee in the trodden vats, strips the nut-husks off with his gleaming teeth, and looks at the passer-by with brown soft eye. He has pushed a pomegranate flower behind his ear, and his shirt is open, so that the smooth brown breast is seen. What thoughts fill day by day that gay, lazy Italian brain? He is notreligious, although he goes to Mass most regularly, for from Mass he passes back again to paganism; and he only goes there because he is a child and is vaguely afraid—or would be if he did not go to Mass—of what the priests have told him about a remote bogie—for so God seems to him—who can make him burn in unquenchable fires if he does not. Nor does he weary his mind with any question of morality or code of ethics: the sun is warm to him, or, if the sun be hot, the shade is cool, and the almond fruit is sweet, and the fumes of the fermenting vats mysteriously exciting, and the maiden with whom he is in treaty to wed very fair and loving, and her dowry is good. And for the passer-by he has his bright smile, and the expression of his hope that I have enjoyed my bathe. No, he has not bathed to-day, for the work of the vintage is heavy, and he is paid by the hour. Ah, a cigarette? The signor is too kind. Will not the signor take his pomegranate flower? Indeed the signor will.
Day by day this sunny and innocent paganism gets more possession of me, and day by day the beauty of that which I saw at Bayreuthglows more brightly. Yesterday, about evening, a sudden summer squall came storming over from Posillippo, gleaming with lightning and riotous with thunder, and to me it was Wotan who steered from the north. On Monte Solaro the Valkyries awaited his coming, and when the whistling winds had passed away over our heads, while the house shuddered, and the moon again rose in a velvet sky with stars swarming thick round her, I knew that on the mountain-top Brunehilde slept within a ring of fire, waiting for the man who should claim her with his kiss. But the morning again to-day was very clear and hot, and instead of going up Mount Solaro, as I had intended, I went, as usual, down to the Bagno, a white pebbly beach with pockets of sand to lie on. I took with me a basket of figs and a flask of wine stoppered with vine-leaves, and my friend took a book which we often read and a straw case of cigarettes. And together we swam through the chrysoprase of sunlit sea far out to a brown, seaweed-covered rock. The water was very deep round it, and fathoms down something shone very brightly with wavering, subaqueous gleam, and,half laughing at myself, I dived and dived—for I knew it was the Rhinegold that shone there—until I could dive no more. Yet still I could not get deep enough. Then, having rested, we swam back, and lay on pockets of hot sand, and drank from the leaf-stoppered bottle, and ate the purple of the figs; and my friend read in the book which he had brought, beginning at the seventh chapter, and to this effect:
‘Did I seriously believe that that contemplation of God which is the prime duty laid on us by religion must, or even could, legitimately give us any touch of sadness of whatever kind, I would throw religion away as heedlessly as I throw away the end of a smoked-out cigarette, for I have no use for it. Yet although on every side, and most of all in every pulpit, I see the lamentable Puritan jowl, and hear the lamentable Puritan whine, which bids me look with horror on the sin of the world and with sorrow on its sufferings, I do not for a moment believe that this impious gabble is the result of religion, but rather of grossest irreligion, on the part of its exponents. For me, I know that the contemplation of God is my duty, and ifI make it my whole and absorbing duty I cannot go very far astray. For above all things is God love, and above all things is He beauty, and the love which engirdles Him joins without break to the human love which it is our duty always to give and take, giving with both hands and taking by the armful. So, too, His beauty joins without break to the beauty of all He has made, and in the golden hair of women and in the rose-petal, in the smooth swift limbs of youth and in the faceted diamond, in the curve of a girl’s lips and in the rose-flushed clouds, in the blue chalice of the sky of morning, equally and everywhere must we look for and absorb the beauty which is implanted there.
‘It is here that Christianity, with its mournful, man-invented morality, has gone so far astray from its Founder that many Christians turn from beauty as if beauty was evil, instead of ever seeking it and worshipping it, find it where they will, until the dross of their gross minds is burned up in that fine fire. Hence, too, sprang—by “hence,” I mean from impious Puritanism—such phrases as the “temptations and dangers of physical beauty,” whereas to the man whose mind is set on God itis by and through beauty that the uttermost death-stroke is dealt to the writhing earthworm of carnalism. For the truth is that no beauty of soul, and no completeness, was ever framed on the mutilation or starvation of self, and at the Last Day the gray and pallid ascetic will find that what he thought was virtue, and what he taught as self-control, was sheer darkness of soul and purblind vision.
‘It is this that must be cast away. We are people that sit in darkness, content that our religion should make us sad, and as such we have a lesson humbly to learn from paganism, and in particular from the paganism of the Greeks, whose hierarchy of gods were enthroned in brightness, and the name thereof was Beauty. And that Beauty, the search of which to them was worship and prayer and praise, they found everywhere: in the sunlight and the blue dome of heaven; in the crisp, curly acanthus leaf which they set to twine about the capitals of their marble-hewn columns and on the necks of the vases of the dead; in the radiance of jewels and in the tragedies of heroes; and above all in the beauty of the human form. Disfigured and astraytheir worship often went, and it wore strange garbs, but through all its sin and its misconceptions, its thousand errors and distortions, we can see gleaming, deep below, the bright shining of its truth. And this, to my mind, gleams less brightly in the sadder worship of to-day.
‘For I doubt very much whether anybody is in the least benefited by the actual sorrow or repentance of anyone, though no doubt such—especially to sour and brooding natures—is necessary. But the best repentance, if one has sufficient vitality, will be momentary, a fiery sword-thrust, which will leave no ache or throb behind. It is better, I dare say, that a man should suffer the fires of remorse for years rather than that he should not suffer them at all, but I think that the man who is capable of throwing his remorse off and starting fresh and unwounded is the more Godlike creature, for the reason that it is infinitely better to be happy and smiling than to go frowning through the world. For sin is seldom born of a happy impulse, stare as you may, unless from a happy impulse which has been, so to speak, shut up in the dark and has gone putrid.
‘And here in this divine place’ (the book I am quoting from was written at Athens), ‘where beauty is thrown broadcast over all one sees, and happiness is so easy, it seems to me to follow as a corollary that things which a Northern and gloomy people consider wrong are less wrong. For supposing in foggy London every shopkeeper tried to cheat one, one would say that the middle class was going to the dogs. Quite so—it would be. But the middle class is not in the least going to the dogs here. Why not? For a variety of reasons: partly because there is more sun here and no fog, and because the Parthenon is near at hand. Ah, yes, indeed it is so: Gaiety covers a multitude of sins, and while they are covered, Beauty blots them out.
‘O beautiful God of this beautiful world, let me make somebody laugh to-day. Amen.’
At that point I laughed.
‘So his prayer is heard,’ said my friend. ‘Have you eaten all the figs while I have been reading?’
‘Yes; but don’t be unhappy. Remember it is your duty to be happy. You may have the last cigarette. No—we’ll toss for it.’
‘I’ll be shot if we do!’ said he.
‘Well, I’ll cut it in half.’
‘So that neither of us gets any,’ said he. ‘Give it me;’ and he very rudely snatched at it. Here ensued a scuffle, and, the bowels of the cigarette being scattered about the beach, neither of us got any, and the occasion gave rise to moral reflections. Also immoral ones. Then peace and plenty descended in the shape of a friend also coming down to bathe with a supply of fresh tobacco, and the sun was warm again and the sea blue. Then my friend (whom I must call Toby, because he objects to his real name being known, saying that I am certain to keep all the beautiful remarks for myself and give him all the idiocy) held forth:
‘The man is shallow,’ he said; ‘it is only a gospel of surfaces he preaches, and you think it profound merely because he loads it with grave words. I have done for years exactly what he preaches: I have succeeded in being always happy and usually gay, and I spend my whole life in looking for what I consider beautiful. Yet what did you call me last night? A second-hand sensualist, I think.’
‘Very likely. That is because you are not strenuous. Your pursuit of beauty must be passionate, and the pursuit must be an act of worship. Your pursuit of beauty is not an act of worship; it is more like sucking sweets.’
Toby laughed loudly and idiotically.
‘Or eating all the figs,’ said he, and the discussion ended.
It is close on noon, and only the faintest breeze is stirring. The bay is silent and waveless, except that at intervals a ripple falls like the happy sigh of some beautiful basking creature on to the hot, white pebbles of the beach. There, like a living sapphire, lies the dear sea, the thing in this world I love best and understand best, though I do not understand it at all. Never have I seen it so luminous as it is to-day; you would say that the sunlight of centuries had been lit in its depths. Gray rocks run out from the precipitous land, fringed with seaweed, and under the water the seaweed shows purple. A brown-sailed fishing-boat lies becalmed a mile out, and across the bay Naples sparkles white and remote, and only the thin line of smoke streaming upwards fromVesuvius speaks of the fierce and everlasting stir of forces which underlie the world. In the thickets which come down to the water’s edge of this tideless sea there is now no sound of life, though an hour ago they were resonant with the whirring of the cicalas. The lizards have crept out in the stillness and bask on the white stones, as still as if once more Orpheus charmed them; and high above me a hawk, with wings motionless, floats slowly, in seeming sleep, down some breeze in the upper air.
And what if my nameless author is right? What if—this is the upshot—happiness is our first duty? It is certainly not true that if you are good you are happy; but may it not be true that by being happy you are in some degree good? The Puritan interpretation of Christianity has had a fair trial, and, indeed, it seems to have made but a poor job out of it. What is the result of all these sadnesses and renunciations? Nothing but starved lives and unrealized ideals. Such self-denial is touching, beautiful in theory, and based, of course, on Christ’s teaching. But it is based awry if it brings sadness with it, if it sees inbeauty only a lure to lead the soul astray, rather than the signpost which points by no winding road, but a royal highway, straight to God. And that road resounds with praise, and the birds of St. Francis sit in the pleasant boughs of the trees that grow beside it, and the dear saint smiles at them, and says: ‘Sing, my sisters, and praise the Lord.’ And at his bidding they fill their throats with bubbling song, and thank God for their warm feathers and the green habitations He has builded for them. Then St. Francis, so the legend tells us, sits down at table with St. Blaise and others, the friends of St. Francis, and feeds his dear birds, so that they become very strong. That saint is more to my mind than that foolish fellow Stylites, or the dour St. Bernard, who, being plagued with the flies on a hot day, excommunicated them, and they all dropped down dead. For love, joy, and peace are the gifts of the Spirit, but we are too much given to let the joy take care of itself, to check it even, as if salvation was clothed in sackcloth.
Happiness is a home product. We cannot import it into ourselves, nor by multiplying our pleasures can we come one whit nearer to it. But by being dull, by being slow to perceive, or having perceived to receive, we can, and we often do, succeed in closing the doors of our souls to it. Yet, though it comes not from without, nor is it the sum or product of any pleasures, our soul must sit with doors and windows open to catch if it be but one-millionth of the myriad sweet and beautiful things that stir and shine about us, or else, as in the darkness and stagnation of some closed house, dust and airlessness overlay us. For there is nothing in the world, except only that which the sin and folly of man have wrought, which is not wholesome and innocent. It is our grossness which makes things gross, our rebellion which makes us say that in beauty there lurk any seeds or germs that can ripen into or go to form anything that is not beautiful.
‘O world as God has made it, all is beauty,And knowing this is love, and love is duty:What further can be sought for or declared?’
‘O world as God has made it, all is beauty,And knowing this is love, and love is duty:What further can be sought for or declared?’
‘O world as God has made it, all is beauty,And knowing this is love, and love is duty:What further can be sought for or declared?’
* * * * *
Seraphina and Francesco, with outside help when they want it, are the domestic staff of Toby’s house. They are engaged to be married, and, in fact, the marriage is going to come off in three months’ time. Domestically speaking, this is an ideal arrangement, because if Seraphina’s work happens on any day to be heavy (she cooks, though I cannot call her a cook) Francesco delights to help her; while, on the other hand, if her work is light, she lends her aid in the cleaning and embellishment of the house, for thus she is with herpromesso. And in the evening, as often as not, when their work is finished, they stroll and sit in the garden as we do, and with a little encouragement join in our talk, and tell us the strange legends of the saints common to this countryside, or with bated breath speak of the days of the Emperor Tiberius, who still is the bogie of the island, so that a mother even to-day, if a child is troublesome, warns it that Tiberius is coming. High on the eastward end of Capri stand the ruins of one of his palaces; the walls are built to the sheer edge of the precipitous rock, and it was from here that he used to hurl downhis victims when he was satiated with them, flinging them headlong, a glimmer of white limbs that turned over and over in the air till they splashed on the rocks three hundred feet below. Round this crag still hovers some poisonous breath of crime; sudden shrieks are heard of nights, so Francesco says, and shadows pace in the shadows. Here, too, that dark soul used to walk up and down in his corridor of mirrors, so that he could see that none came up behind him with the assassin’s knife; weary of life, he yet clung to it with a maniac force; longing for death, he fenced himself from it with a thousand guards. ‘And on us,’ said Francesco, when he told us of these things, with the poet that lurks in the Italian blood suddenly inspiring his tongue—‘on us, signor, those same stars look down that beheld Tiberius. Yet they do not care.’
In this manner we were sitting in the garden on the evening of the day which I have been speaking of. There had been some smallfestain the town, and Seraphina, to make herself the more comely in her lover’s eyes, had put on, when her kitchen work was over, herfestaclothes, eventhough they would only glimmer for an hour in the dusk, before she went to bed. Her olive skin, flushed with the warm tints of wind and sun, was dusky in the moonlight, and her brown eyes, underneath her thin, straight eyebrows, were big and soft, as if made of velvet. But all the gaiety of the South was set in her laughing mouth, and her teeth were a band of ivory in the red of pomegranate. Her arms were bare above the elbows almost to the shoulder, and beneath the smooth satiny skin, as she moved them in Southern gesticulation at some story she was telling us, I could see the swift and supple play of the muscles. Round us the night was pricked with a thousand remote stars, and the warm, languid air stirred in the bushes and sighed among the vineyards like a lingering caress. Now and then a handful of hot air would be tossed over us from the veranda, where the sun had grilled the flagstones all the afternoon; now and then a breath of coolness—a handful of air that had been shaded all day by the thick vine-leaves—stirred from its place and refreshed us. Below gleamed the lights of Capri, and the murmur of the townstole softly to us, or a gay stanza would be flung into the air from some homeward-going peasant as he passed up the cobbled ways. To the north a great emptiness of gray showed where the Gulf of Naples basked beneath the moon, and high up on the horizon a thin necklace of light lying along the edge of the sea showed the town. This hour of warm night, especially with such a setting, is, to my mind, the most animal of all. In the moon-dusk a thousand subtle scents and hints float round one, not consciously perceived, but exciting to the primeval animal instincts which æons of evolution have not yet eradicated from our nature; and at such an hour the beast within us, prowling, predatory, hot on its slinking errands, is more than ever dominant.
Soon Toby got up, stretching himself.
‘Mail-day to-morrow,’ he said, ‘and I have two letters to write. Just get me some paper and envelopes, Francesco; there were none this morning.’
Francesco jumped up.
‘Eh, signor, I forgot,’ he said; ‘there are none in the house. I will run over to Capri; the shopsare still open. Two minutes only;’ and he vaulted over the wall into the road.
Toby strolled towards the house.
‘Are you coming in?’ he said to me over his shoulder.
‘Yes, in ten minutes,’ I answered, and he disappeared.
Seraphina rose also, resting her weight for a moment on her arm.
‘It is good beneath the stars in the evening, is it not?’ she said. ‘I must go in. Happy dreams, signor!’
‘No; tell me one more story about Tiberius,’ I said.
She laughed.
‘Surely the signor is like a child,’ she said: ‘he is so fond of stories. Will he not tell me an English story for a change?’
‘About what?’
‘About yourself or your friends—about your customs in England. I like the ways of English folk;’ and she sat down again close to me, eager-eyed, with smiling mouth.
Suddenly it seemed to me that the whole spiritof all I saw and felt was changed. The soft, innocent Southern night was alive with voices. No longer did a child sit by me, but a woman—dark-eyed like a stag, intoxicating to the sense. Passion and desire, those headlong twins, rushed down on me, with arms intertwined and purple-stained mouth, chanting with a meaning that was new to me, ‘All is beauty, and knowing this is love; and love——’ There she sat, exquisite, trembling between girlhood and womanhood, the eternal riddle of life, to solve which men have gladly died, and lightly dismissed honour, like a stale piece of unlikely gossip. But——
‘It is mail-day to-morrow,’ I said, and I heard how unsteady was my voice; ‘I also have letters to write.’
She rose at once.
‘Good-night, signor,’ she said, and turned to go to the house.
As she got further on her way, I think I would have given all I had for her to turn back again, so that I might say—well, nothing particular,but just let her guess, no more, that—— But she did not turn.
So, then, what of my gospel about beauty? It remains exactly where it was, true, I believe, in every respect. Only in me, at any rate, there lurks the beast. To-night he growled and pulled at his chain.
I amcome back again to the level uneventfulness of these pleasant days with a great sense of having ‘come home’ continually with me. This little stuccoed house with its little garden has become to me myangulus terræ; the deep vibration of ‘home,’ incommunicable, and to many unmeaning, is here; I can no longer imagine myself permanently anywhere else. All day long I continually find, as it were, intimate glances: the line of the downs, a group of trees, or a corner of my own room catches my eye as one catches the eye of a friend across a roomful of acquaintances. That glance says nothing in particular—it only means ‘I am I, you are you’—but it is only between friends that such a glance can ever pass; soul beckons to soul with gesture invisible to others, and a smile answers it, for it is friends who are our anchor in this swift-rushing stream of daysand years: secure there, though time eddies in froth and flying spray about our bows, it does not whirl us away, straw and flotsam, down the racing flood. And above us, when we look up from our anchorage through the flying wrack of storm-cloud and torn fringes of wind-swept vapour, there glimmer the steadfast and immutable stars.
I left Capri, as you will have guessed, somewhat in a hurry; in fact, I firmly and speedily ran away as hard as I could. All September, so I see now, I had been living in the flimsiest paradise of a fool. I had thought it was possible to detach one’s self so utterly from the joys and frailties of the human race that one could take any liberties one chose, look at and live in beauty, and cease to be man. Then suddenly the flesh twitched me, and like the flowers of Klingsor’s garden my sexless paradise fell in red ruin of autumn leaf about my ears. For me, anyhow, such a paradise was not possible, and I had—only just—the sense to see that it was better to live decently and dully than—otherwise.
So I took ship at Naples and came home by sea,for why one should shut one’s self up in a grilling box of scarlet velvet and grind along a steel path to the din of rolling wheels, when the divine waterways are at the door, is more than I ever could imagine. Two moments of the voyage I shall never forget.
Out in the Bay of Biscay we had a couple of days of heavy gale, the wind blowing from the west like a solid thing. The sea, which till then had been calm, gradually began to get up. There was no sun, and from a gray and infinite flatness it grew streaked and wrinkled. Then the wrinkles began to amalgamate, every two or three wrinkles turning themselves into one definite furrow, and the streaks formed themselves into sprayed wave-caps. When I went to bed the ship was still fairly steady, but full of wandering creaks and groans, and clothes hanging up on my cabin walls whispered against the woodwork and oscillated backwards and forwards. During the night, however, we began to pitch and roll in earnest, and, waking once, I heard the scream of the screw whirling impotently out of water, and the jar of straining wood and rivets. All nextday the riot of the skies and din of the seas grew greater, until, coming on to deck after dinner, one had to dash at suitable moments over the open to gain handhold before the next lurch. Eventually I found a corner sheltered from the wind behind the smoking-room, and sat there with the gale thundering madly above my head and yelling and thrumming in the quivering rigging. The sky was quite clear and cloudless, and though there was no moon the stars made a gray twilight overhead. As the ship laboured on with reeling gait, the mast near above me would strike wildly right and left through a hundred stars, scoring a black line through the Pleiades and the Bear. For a moment Orion’s belt would be framed between the yard-arms, the next it would plunge out of sight behind me. Then Cassiopeia’s chair would waver over the bulwarks, tremulously perched, and in a second, as if it was roped to some celestial swing, would soar high to the zenith. Then the bulwarks themselves would rise a black blot into the sky; the next moment they reeled giddily downwards, and at my feet almost there raced by huge dimnesses of gray sea and flying foam withveiled and luminous specks of phosphorescent light glimmering like marine glow-worms.
Then suddenly from the deck below came a cry I have heard only once, ‘Man overboard!’ and in a moment—coming, it seemed, from nowhere—the deck was alive with hurrying figures. The thump of the screw grew slow and ceased, women screamed, and from a big chest near me three sailors got out a flare-buoy—a wooden frame with a light attached to it. In a few seconds it was lit and flung overboard, and flaring high it rose and fell, a veritable dance of death, among the hills and valleys of the sea. It was impossible at the pace we were going to reverse the engines at once, for the strain would have endangered the lives of all on the ship; but gradually as we slowed down this was done, and the churned water from the screws hissed past us. The buoy was already far behind us, but gradually we got nearer to it, and a boat was launched with infinite difficulty and danger, and we lay there, the ship’s company hanging on the lee bulwarks while it put out into the night and the storm. There we waited, rolling and bowing to the wavesfor an hour maybe, watching the flare and the light from the boat now riding high against the horizon, now completely vanishing in the trough of some wave. Then the flare burned out, and the boat returned. The search had been fruitless. And slowly the thump of the screw worked its way to its accustomed speed. The identity of the man was established, an entry was made, and we went on again ever faster through the yellow twilight of the stars and the big, pitiless sea.
The second moment was next morning. The wind had gone down, though the sea still ran high, and all heaven and earth were one incredible blue. A sun of transcendent brilliance flamed overhead, and not a cloud flecked the huge azure dome. Below the great translucent waves were at play in jovial boisterousness; the blue monsters flung themselves against the black side of the ship and were shattered into a cloud of dazzling white, which as it rose into the air was momently iridescent with rainbow—a high-day of delight. About eleven of the morning a sudden whisper and rumour ran round the ship, and by degreesthe sequel of that tragic hour last night was made known. The wife of the man who had fallen overboard the night before was with child, and the shock had brought on a premature delivery, and she had died. But the child lived, and in all probability would do well. So June had its tale repeated again, and when the weighted shroud slid into that ocean of brightness, wavered subaqueously and disappeared, I could have sworn for a moment that a sudden waft of the smell of sweet-peas pierced the pungency of the sea.
So both lie there in the depths of the unquiet Bay, though leagues apart. Will those two poor tabernacles of mortality, I cannot but wonder, find some subtle mode of telegraphy in their green sea-caves, and speak to each other, or go to each other across the ooze of the depths, moved by some thresh of current? Or will they have to wait there patiently in their crystal tombs till the sea gives up its dead, and they float up as the chrysalis of the dragon-fly floats up through the water, to find that the new heaven and the new earth are fair at the dawning of the supreme day? Such was the incident of my home-coming: inthe midst of life there was death, and in the midst of death, life. It is always so.
The long, dark evenings are beginning, but day after day unclouded October weather, with its brisk air and its exquisite clarity and luminousness, prevails. It reminds one of nothing in the world so much as a boy’s soprano; nothing else in the world gives one the sense of such absolute perfection and purity of vehicle—the one expressed in terms of light, the other of sound. And as the boy’s voice rises and fills the great spaces of some sunlit cathedral, so this light pervades these aisles of yellowing trees and spaces of swelling downland. About each there is the same piercing, pervading quality; about each there is an utter absence of all passion or emotion. A woman’s voice, it seems to me, is like the mature light of summer, broad, full of feeling, full of the tenderness of sex. But in this October weather you have mere brightness; in the air there is a certain chill, which gives the precision that the warm, flower-blurred light of summer lacks. It promises nothing like the languors and brightnesses ofspring, it gives no fulfilment like the noons of summer; it is just itself—exquisite, meaningless, and at times horribly sad. For the year has turned; we have had our bright and our beautiful times, and they are over, and soon will be the season of long, dark evenings; and the blear-eyed peerings of the remote sun through the fogs of November. In the winter, too, there is something of the hibernating spirit about us; we dream and doze, and vitality sometimes burns a little low, and age looks over our shoulder, and we tend to be possessed with the Spirit of the falling leaf.
Now, the Spirit of the falling leaf is a most unprofitable demon. To dwell on the thought of decay and age and death cannot, I believe, be salutary for anybody.Pereunt et imputantur.That motto, surely, was written by an atheist and an idiot. For, in the first place, the hours that go so swiftly by do not perish—each hour that passes goes to form the present; what we did or were then is exactly that which makes us what we are now. And if we are to seriously give our minds to the contemplation of what is written up against us in the ledger-book of the hours that havepassed, we shall, if we have any conscience at all, only secure for ourselves paralysis in the future. No decently-minded man, if he dwells on his missed opportunities with any honesty, can possibly raise his head again. A lively repentance sets its face steadily forwards, never backwards.
This Spirit of the falling leaf is my especial foe, and I detest him with all the fervour of familiarity. Every autumn he whispers to me, ‘Look at the trees from which the yellow leaves are falling slowly, slowly, but steadily. Soon they will be quite bare; their summer is over, a year is gone. But they will renew their youth in the spring, the green buds will burst again, and June will laugh among the revivified branches, and the birds will again make there a melodious habitation. But no spring will renew you; each year you are older; your spring is past, and your summer days will not come again.’ And I turn cold.
Now, though the Spirit of the falling leaf may speak the truth, that is one of the truths which it is our duty steadily to ignore. What is past is past; but to-day, at any rate, lies in front of us; to-day is our immediate and vital concern, and ifwe are fortunate enough to live till to-morrow, to-morrow will be our vital concern. No, to talk with the Spirit of the falling leaf is to invite paralysis of the soul. It is wise to guard against such paralysis by that simple antidote which is within the reach of everybody, and its name is Work.
‘How well I know what I mean to doWhen the long dark autumn evenings come!’
‘How well I know what I mean to doWhen the long dark autumn evenings come!’
‘How well I know what I mean to doWhen the long dark autumn evenings come!’
There speaks the healthful man. Browning set himself to read Greek, prose, he tells us, not poetry now, for he was old. Yet so green and full of immortal youth were his years, that in his reverie, dwelling on the past, no falling-leaf dirge comes to his lips, but the passionate lyric rapture of love relived. But the point just now is that when the autumn evenings were near he gave himself a task, set himself to do something, opened a bottle of the only real tonic the world contains, which is work. And most of us certainly need that tonic more in winter than in summer. In summer the mere fact that we sit at the great banquet of the spectacle of sun andflowers and green things is royal entertainment. But the year turns, the lights burn lower, and we have to employ ourselves; but, like children in the dark, we quake at the gathering shadows.
What one sets one’s self to do matters nothing in comparison of the main point, namely, that we set ourselves to do something, for any employment, so long as it is not harmful, is essentially good. Many of us have our ordinary work to do, which takes most of the day now days are short. In the summer, perhaps, we were accustomed, when the day’s work was over, to be out-of-doors; but now, in these lengthening nights, we have to seek our employment inside. The great thing, then, is to do something definite, and to do it seriously. To read the whole of Shakespeare before next March is one employment that recommends itself to me, but supposing the choice was made for me by another, who told me that bridge was to be my winter employment, I should be quite content. But in that case I should try very hard to get rid by March of the fatal indecision which prompts one sometimes to make spades, sometimes no trumps, out of practically the same hand. I should try toestablish once and for all the best suit to play if my partner doubles no trumps. I should try to find out definitely what chance of success certain heavy finesses have, and act accordingly, and I should consider that I had wasted my winter if by next March I had not improved out of recognition. But what I hope I should not do would be to play slackly, for in that case one might as well talk to the Spirit of the falling leaf at once.
Meantime October is to me personally the month when I am most beset by this spirit, for October is full of the sweet and tender memories of certain people, very near to me, who are dead. Two days in particular stand out, of which one was spent on the sea on my return from Naples, and the other, October 27, will be here in a few days. On that day the psalm for the evening, you will remember, is ‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion.’ It was the anthem, you know, in Winchester Cathedral on the night when Henry Esmond returned, when his ‘dear mistress’ looked up and saw the sunshine round his head as they sang ‘bringing their sheaves with them.’ And she came to him and blessed him.
That immortal scene has in my own mind got so intertwined with my own memories of the 27th of October that I cannot disentangle them. Twice, I remember, I saw Margery again after a long absence on the 27th, and with the tender memory of one who is dead there always wreathes itself the other association of the return of someone beloved. Dimly, as if the future would fulfil some dream of years ago, I picture some great joy coming to me on that day. I think that on that day I shall return from some captivity, and find that my life has been but a dream in the light of what shall be; that I shall have a joyful reaping—God knows what or how—for certain seed I have sown in tears; that some empty granary in my heart shall be made full of golden grain.
September was a month of ‘mellow fruitfulness’ in England, and I have returned to find my garden gone rampant. Somehow growth in autumn is utterly unlike summer growth in its wild opulence, as if the dear plants knew that it was nearly time for them to go to bed, but were determined to have one great romp first. A huge nasturtium, like a boisterous schoolboy, has sprungon to a Gloire de Dijon and is wrestling with it. A canariensis which I thought was finished has played hide-and-seek all over the trellis of the shelter until it met a wandering eccremocarpus, which it instantly embraced like a long-lost brother, and the sunshine of the flowers of the one is mixed with the orange trumpet of the other. Phloxes are still in flower, sunflowers have topped the garden wall, and the beautiful sylvestris is vigorous with pale leaf and snowy flower. But—only fancy—that vile Jackmanni is dead. Quite dead. God forgive it for a senseless fool.
These golden October days! Every morning I stray out before breakfast, sometimes only into the garden, sometimes as far as the water-meadows, to find the same glorious return of day. This morning the least pallor of hoar-frost was on the grass, and the clean smell of the morning was more exquisite than all the perfumes of Arabia. A tall chestnut had grown very suddenly yellow—how delightful if our hair turned brilliant gold (it does sometimes) when we grew old!—and the leaves were dropping one by one, without twist orturn, in the calm air, till a heap of unminted gold lay underneath the tree. Every now and then there was a thump on the grass, and the green rind of the chestnut fruit, split by the blow, jerked out its smooth and glossy globes. The chalk-streams flowing through the meadows were full and brimming, streams of living water, and the luxuriant grasses, grown to their longest, swam and dabbled in the flawless crystal. How good it was to breathe the chill of the morning, to look across the emerald of the meadows to the red town in the hollow, full of clustering roofs, over which the mists lay thin and level, pricked by the gray towers and solemn steeples which show golden in the clearness of the upper air! Then back to breakfast, and to this long quiet morning of work by the open window, interrupted only by the rapturous contemplation of a man in the road trying to drive a tandem. The leaders thought otherwise and went in different directions.
* * * * *
To-day is the 26th, and the march of these golden days has been suddenly interrupted. Last night I awoke to hear a great wind rattling at thepanes, and snoring and fluting in the chimneys; and this morning, instead of the yellow sunshine, I find a gray and tattered sky of low storm-clouds, and sheets of driving rain flung against the windows. The flowers in the garden cower beneath the stinging lashes of water, and weep their petals silently away. A tree was blown down in the night not far from the house—an elm growing in a hedgerow—and a cruel gaping wound of torn earth has opened, with the fibres of the root like tortured and exposed nerves standing out into the air. For thirty yards round the field is littered with the pitiful debris—torn branches, bunches of leaf, even a couple of bird’s-nests. For it, poor soul! autumn has been the end of life, and spring will not build it anew.
All day the streaming heavens weep their violent and blinding tears, and the loud gale fills me with vague and intolerable apprehension. Like a lost soul it moans round the corners of the house, and through the cracks of the closed windows it whistles in descending and ascending chromatic scale. Now and then there comes a lull, but again it breaks out in a hooting maniacchorus, as if Bedlam were loose. The tattoo of the rain on the glass joins in the hurly-burly, and the swish and gurgle of the water down the roof-pipes lends a chuckling evil accompaniment. It is intolerable; there is the pain of hell and a certain hellish glee in this scream and riot. It is as if some lost soul cried aloud from its agony, yet exulted in its disobedience to God’s law. ‘Punish me, punish me!’ it seems to say; ‘never will I repent. It was You who made me, You who let my path on earth be hedged about with snare and temptation, and when I fall into the pits You have allowed to be digged, You say that I have sinned, and for that sin I burn in the fires of hell. But are You more at Your ease on the golden throne before the crystal sea? You will forgive me if I repent? A thousand thanks. But I will never repent, and I will never forgive You.’
Hell is loose, and swarms round me. The poor souls whom the Will of God caused to be made—have they not a right to resent their birth, if they are born to pain only and hopeless struggling? And if for a while they forget the evil plight into which they by no fault of theirshave been born, by tasting pleasures which a code—to them merely arbitrary—has labelled sinful, by what justice shall they be punished? Human justice at least would be less merciless. Is it just to make a frail thing like a man, place him in the midst of temptation, and then punish him because he falls? Supposing I buy a doll at a toy shop, and place it insecurely on the edge of a table and it falls off, is it just that I should then whip it? Or go a step further, and grant that I can endow that doll with consciousness,so that it has an existence separate from mine—may I whip it then? Is it not the most elementary justice that I should respect the free-will with which I have endowed it? But if it has a consciousness which is yet not separate from mine, then I punish myself if I punish it for transgressing laws which are of my own making. I, in fact, have transgressed my own laws. In that case I had better repeal them.
Now, possession of the devil is a very real thing, and though I hold that in the majority of cases—they occur to each one of us every day—the best thing to do is to run away if you possibly can, not stop and argue, there areoccasions, and this seemed to me to be one, where you cannot run away, for you are with your back to the wall, and have to fight. So I fought, and I am glad to be able to say that the devil was sorry he spoke. For, as always, he is a very shallow fellow, and though with his loud words—the gale to help him outside—he had seemed very convincing for the moment, I think I never heard a sorrier argument than his. He suggests, so I take it, the repeal of all moral laws: the binding force of them is to vanish. What will happen then? The child crossing the street will be driven over by the first carriage, and left to lie there with broken limbs till the next ends its torture. I shall go out of my house to-morrow and be clubbed by two men, who will rob me, who in turn will be clubbed and robbed by three. In ten days—I wager my immortal soul on this—the kingdoms of the world will be entirely in the hands of a dozen men, all strong, all fearing each other, and desiring to get rid of each other. For reasons of self-preservation they will sign a contract that they will not kill, injure, or rob each other. Moral law has therefore begun again, forit is necessary for the preservation of human life. Next day they will sign another contract to protect their women and children, and before the year is out they will have found it necessary to have in force every human moral law that exists to-day. If it were not so, those laws could never have existed. Once more the spirit of good triumphs over the spirit of evil. God does not punish us; it is our own punishment which we inflict on ourselves each time that we, in ever so slight a degree, do anything which tends towards that chaos which must exist without morality.
* * * * *
The gale has blown itself tired, and now, as I stand on the doorstep about midnight, looking out, an extraordinary peace prevails. The moon is high in heaven, bare of clouds, and the air is utterly calm and windless. It seemed to me impossible only a few hours ago that so serene a tranquillity should succeed the wild riot of to-day. And steadfast remain the stars; they have not, as seemed almost inevitable, been blown, like those heaps of dead leaves, about the floor of the skies, so that one quarter was bare, while in another thePleiades had been blown against the Twins, and Orion sat on Cassiopeia’s chair.
* * * * *
The morning of the 27th was of the same pellucid serenity as the midnight before. The trees were much barer than they had been twenty-four hours before, and the inimitable tracery of the branches against the sky was outlined with the precision of the South. The sun was extraordinarily warm, and I sat out for an hour in the morning to the chuckling of birds in the bushes and an unread paper. Then in the afternoon I went to the cathedral for the evening service.
* * * * *
It has happened. For years past, as you know, I have felt certain it would happen on this day, and when it happened I knew it could not have been otherwise. Thus:
The service was at half-past three, and I got to the cathedral, I suppose, some five minutes before it began, and was given a stall on the south side. Through the windows behind me the sun streamed low—nearly level—for it was not far from its setting, and I lived over again a certain October 27,years ago, when I got home too late, and knew that one of the sweetest and dearest souls that ever lived on earth had gone home. It was just such a day as this, bright and unclouded, and even then, on the day itself, I felt it wholly impossible to be sad. It was all right with the world, then as always, and God, as always, was in His heaven. We walked all together—those of us who were left—through the woods, and it was right and meet that the sun shone, and that we recalled and spoke of her merriness, and were ourselves merry with the memory. Then my two strange meetings with Margery, also on this day, intertwined themselves with the other: it was a day of home-coming.
At this point I became aware that I could not have been attending to the service, for automatically, with the rest of the congregation, I rose from my knees for the Psalms. No chant was played over, but a long pedal note from the organ vibrated in the carved stalls, and at the first chord the choir began. And they sang, ‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, then were we like unto them that dreamed.’ I did not need toopen the big Prayer-Book, and for the first time I looked up.
Opposite me stood—Margery. And the sunlight was round her head.
It could not be Margery, for she is dead. Only when I looked up my brain said ‘Margery.’
Whenthe service was over, I waited by the west front watching the congregation stream out of the gray gloom inside into the primrose-coloured lights of sunset. There were two big collies sitting patiently side by side on the edge of the grass, looking with liquid, eager eyes at the people coming out. Suddenly two tails began to thump ecstatically, but neither dog moved. It was She—I think I knew from their eagerness it could be none else. With a smile lurking in her eyes, she walked to them, and from where I was I could hear her say, ‘Dear angels! come along,’ and two tawny streaks fled over the grass.
I waited a little, then followed her. She turned southwards out of the Close, over the bridge, below which the big trout lie, and into the path through the water-meadows, the two tawny streaks cuttingfigures like a swallow’s flight up and down the road, running at top speed just for the joy of the life that was in them. And once clear of the town, she looked furtively round, saw only one wayfarer a hundred yards behind, and ran too. The wayfarer quickened his pace, ready to drop into a sedate walk if she looked round. Then on the edge of the water she found a stick, and, whistling to the dogs, threw it clean across the river, and a double plunge and splash of flying spray followed it. Then the streaks swam back, each holding an end of the beloved stick, dropped it at her feet, and, one on each side of her, shook themselves, so that she was between the waters, and I heard a faint scream of dismay and then a laugh. My house stands in the road close beyond the end of the meadows, but she went on, and still I followed, past the group of labourers’ cottages, where lights were already springing up beneath the dark thatch, and out on to the main-road. And at that moment I guessed where she would go. Yes, to that house—no other—the house where Margery lived, the house which was the scene of my dark dreams in August last.The collies rudely pushed their way in before her, after the manner of their impulsive kind, and the door was shut.
I was dining that evening with some people in the town, and met there an old friend of mine who lives a mile or two from here, who has usually some fault to find with me. She had this evening.
‘You are a perfect disgrace,’ she said. ‘We consider you an old inhabitant of the town, and yet when new and charming people come you cannot find the civility even to leave a card.’
‘I am sorry,’ said I penitently. ‘Who are they? You know, I have been away.’
‘Well, they are coming here to-night,’ she said.
‘My dear lady,whoare coming here to-night?’
Then the door opened, and they came, father and daughter.
This afternoon I went up the dark road of my dreams to call. She had said they would not be in till nearly six, and it was already deep dusk when I reached the house, which stood a black blot against the gray sky. But the window over the porch was lit and open, and the blind drawndown over it, and from inside came a voice singing. I was admitted, but the hall was dark, and as the servant was feeling for the button of the electric light, a step passed along the passage at the head of the stairs and began to descend, and it was a step that caught my ear with a strangely familiar sound. Then halfway down, even at the moment the light was turned up, it paused, and a voice said, ‘Oh! is there somebody?’ and in the sudden blaze I saw her, and the passages were dark no longer.
‘Ah, it’s you,’ she said; ‘how nice of you to come! Oh, I’ve left the dogs shut up. Please go into the drawing-room; I’ll be there in a moment.’
So I turned up the hall, to the right, and through the little sitting-room into the drawing-room beyond. She came in a moment afterwards.
‘How did you know where the drawing-room was?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it the most inconveniently built house you ever saw?’
‘The most,’ said I; ‘but I know it well. There was a great friend ofmine who used to live here——’
She looked up suddenly.
‘Dick, do you mean,’ she asked, ‘who was killed in South Africa? He was a distant cousin of mine.’
‘Then his wife was, too?’ said I.
‘Yes, I believe so. Why?’
‘It partly accounts for it.’
‘Accounts for what?’ she said.
‘That you are absolutely the living image of her.’
She laughed again.
‘Oh dear! it is a terrible responsibility to be like an old acquaintance of somebody’s. I shall have to live up to her. I do hope she wasn’t very nice. It will be so difficult for me if she was.’
‘She and Dick were the greatest friends I ever had,’ said I.
Those beautiful gray eyes grew serious.
‘Ah, how dreadful for you!’ she said. ‘It was all very sudden, was it not? The child, too!’
‘Yes, very sudden. I had been dining with her here, and she had gone upstairs when the telegram came. She heard the ring, and leanedover the banisters above the hall, and knew. Then the child was born. She died just at day-break next morning. She asked me, I remember, to pull up the blind, and said, “Let in the morning.” That was all.’
‘Ah, poor thing—poor thing!’ she said. Then she looked up at me: ‘Poor thing!’ she repeated.
The tea was brought in, and before many minutes her father came in also. They are coming to lunch to-morrow.
That night I was out to dinner, but came home early and sat for a long time in front of the fire, with work calling on me to do it, but simply incapable. What a strange, inexplicable coincidence it all is! How I long for, and dread, and love, and fear, the thought of these days that are coming! Surely this is meant to mean something! Think of the millions of little events and decisions which have gone to make up this particular conjuncture. Is it possible that they were all done in haphazard? Or is it another teasing problem that has been set me on the curious chequer-board of life, ending in my checkmate? just a piece of ingenious manœuvring of the pieces, all leading tonothing? I cannot believe that. Yet if it is not that, if love is the answer to it all....
I love to be with her, and since that afternoon in the cathedral I have thought of nothing but her. But love her? I know it is not that—yet. It is, that, by this curious trick which Nature has played, I feel—I am cheated into feeling—that Margery is here with me again. It is as if there had been made an image of Margery, like in every respect, not only in externals, in voice, appearance, gesture, but in the deeper things as well—in her gaiety, her tenderness, and in that quick sympathy which sprang into being at the moment the call was made. Yet God never makes facsimiles; she, too, is a living soul, of her own identity, and none other’s. Or—the wildest impossibilities riot in my brain to-night—is this some wraith of my Margery—Dick’s Margery—sent, God knows from where, to comfort me or to drive me insane? Was there in my love for Margery, after she was Dick’s wife, something which was evil, which kept suggesting, ‘If this had been otherwise—if Dick died?’... Yes, there was that. Day after day there was that. I tried to fight it—indeed I tried.But I did not conquer it for a whole year. But in June, on the last evening of all, when she spoke to me in the garden of the dear event that was coming, it dropped dead, or so I hoped and believed. Yet for a whole year I let it live: is God going to punish me for that by these cruel means? To make me love again, and again go hungry?
It cannot be; again and again I tell myself it cannot be. But so I told myself when the telegram of Dick’s death came, and in spite of all my telling it was true, and the tears of the whole world could not wash out a word of it. But if once more I am to go unrequited, I do not see how I can bear it. It would be wiser to see no more of this incarnation of Margery. At present I love seeing her, because—because that pressed and withered flower I always carry with me has, so to speak, blushed again with the hues of life, and a living fragrance breathes from it. But Helen—I think I have not mentioned her name before—this incarnation of Margery, is also a living woman, with an identity of her own. How if from loving her of whom she so sweetly and poignantly remindsme I pass to loving the woman herself? And if she does not care?
No, I will see her no more. My life is my own, and I will not risk that great stake again. I know the unutterable sweetness of loving. I know, too, the unutterable emptiness of love unrequited, even though from her who loved me not I had such a wealth of tender and womanly affection. I know also how good the world is, how full and brimming with things that are lovely and of good report. For two years, in spite of what went before, God knows how much happiness I have been allowed to enjoy, how rich I have been, levying my tax of joy on all created things, finding music in all the strings of human emotions except one only—love, definite love for one woman. It is strange if I cannot be content without it. True, often and often I have felt, and shall feel again, that this would crown all the rest; but if I again do my part in it, let myself love this girl, and nothing comes of it, how well I know with what a sense of dejection and impotence I shall have to begin again from the beginning, picking up the scattered pieces of the structure known as ‘I,’ fitting them together till some sort of coherent entity, a person of some kind, again pursues some sort of reasonable way through the world! And I distrust my own power of picking myself up again; I am afraid that this time I should let the pieces lie about, shrug shoulders at them, and drift, fossilize, vegetate, what you will.
Bitterness as black as sin and salt as the Dead Sea rises in my throat. What would I not give to see a mother with her child—my child—at her breast? How unspeakably I long for that! Was it my fault that Margery loved Dick, not me? Very good, it was my fault. I have borne the punishment, and I bear it now, and I shall always bear it; and I will try to avoid the possibility of being punished for another such fault.
So I fall back again on my life of little things. I will read the whole of Shakespeare through by next March; I will know a little more about gardening by next spring; I will try to keep my temper; I will try to do a little honest work at a book I am engaged on; I will try, dancing here with the rest of the human race, like a swarm offlies in the sunlight, or, if you will, like worms in the dust, not to sting and wriggle; and I will try not to behave again as I behaved this morning, in this manner, to wit:
A small boy ‘does’ the shoes, boots, and knives of this establishment. He is blessed with sky-scraping spirits and a piercing whistle. He likes taking the boots up to my bedroom, because he slides down the banisters afterwards. I have frequently told him not to. This morning he whistled so loudly and continuously that I told myself it disturbed me, though, as a matter of fact, it did not, and I knew it. But without effort almost I worked myself into a fume of nagging ill-temper over it. Shortly after I heard him taking the boots up to my bedroom, and deliberately, like a spy, went to the door of the room where I was working, and held it ajar so that I might catch him sliding down the banisters. I was gorgeously successful, stood before him as he landed at the bottom with a face of April, and looked at him with an odious and baleful countenance till April fled. I wrung from him the admission that he had often been told not to dothis, and assured him that if he could not remember it was perfectly easy for me to find someone who could. Then I went back to work again with a sort of fiendish pleasure at having spoiled somebody’s happiness, though it was only a boot-boy’s. There was no more whistling from downstairs, and I congratulated myself on having secured tranquillity also at one fell swoop.
But after awhile the fiend within me, satiated, I suppose, by its brilliant achievement, dozed a little, and I felt simply sick at heart. Here was the worm in the dust stinging in its tiny, infinitesimal way, but with what infinity of malice! I would have given a great deal to have heard that shrill, unmelodious whistle strike up again, but it did not. Dead silence all morning. Then at lunch—coals of fire on my head—the knives winked with resplendence and cut like razors. Yet by the silly nature of things I cannot go into the boot-place and say I am sorry. I had told him again and again not to slide down the banisters—I had indeed. But if he does not whistle to-morrow morning I shall have to raise his wages.
That is another thing, then, I propose to cease doing by next March—that is to say, to cease transgressing against the supreme and perfect law of kindness and gentleness. I do not mean that I will have any sliding down the banisters, for I will not; but, on the other hand, I will not have myself, especially in little things, behaving like a cross-grained fiend. I could have stopped the banisters business without that, while, on the other hand, it would have been infinitely better all round that he should have continued to slide down the banister from morn till eve, than that I should have wished and intended (and succeeded therein) to spoil a child’s happiness, if only for a morning, though it was in consequence of a direct act of disobedience, which I am perfectly right in resenting. And this is the supreme and perfect law of kindness.
It seems as if these golden days of sparkling sunshine and nights of clear frost will never end, but rise and still rise as out of some great well of light. Never do I remember such a November—windless, exquisite, so that the glory of scarletleaf, usually so swiftly gone and evanescent, scattered into ruin by an hour’s wind, still flames in this long-drawn sunset of the year. Prey as I always am to the exaltations and depressions of the weather, it seems to me that I am living in some fairy story, as if the wicked witch who squirts the fogs and damps over the world was dead, and the good fairy of clear skies, though she cannot put the clock of the months back to summer, had allowed the seasons to stand still at this beautiful moment, to make up to us a little for all that we have suffered at the hands of the wicked witch. Everything has paused, and in those affairs which chiefly concern me there is a pause too—exquisite, golden. How the pause will end I cannot tell—in sounding ruin of rain, or the bursting of spring instead of the clasp of winter. All I know is that before long I shall find that the pause is over, and on that day I shall be sitting in fallen darkness, idly fingering in the palpable dusk the broken fragments of myself that lie round me; or even in this November I shall go out into the fields and find that, instead of the icy hand of winter gripping them, it will bespring instead. For the winter will be passed, and the flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing birds is come. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.