THE GLAMOUR-LAND
He follows on for ever, when all your chase is done,He follows after shadows, the King of Ireland’s son.——(?)
He follows on for ever, when all your chase is done,He follows after shadows, the King of Ireland’s son.——(?)
He follows on for ever, when all your chase is done,He follows after shadows, the King of Ireland’s son.——(?)
He follows on for ever, when all your chase is done,
He follows after shadows, the King of Ireland’s son.
——(?)
Inthe late autumn snow had fallen; it lay unmelted on the highest of the hills; it often lay there when on lower ground not even a light frost crisped the earth. But now it was very cold, and the trees were glittering with hoar-frost and delicate spikes of ice. The sea ran far inland and made a salt-water lake, almost land-locked. Blue was the key-colour of the place. The sky glowed blue and cloudless; the smooth water was gentian blue; seawards there was a huge bar of sand and shingle, heaped high, and running almost the whole way across the arm of the inrushing sea; therefore whether the tide was high or low the waves broke and leaped and swirled on it, so that the sea looked like a great lake, land-locked on three sides, and bounded on the fourth by a tossing, spouting, milk-white cataract of foam, as the great breakers raged and tumbled over the bar of sand. There were no vague tones nor shadowy outlines; the blue and white were vivid, brilliant. Blue sea—blue sky—blue shadows on the white hills; white snow, white frost on leafless boughs, white foam aglitter in the sun. Blue—blue—blue—and unspeakably blue the shining wells of the sky, into which one might send one’s thought forth in quest of Truth, and return anon bewildered and without booty, for the whole Truth was never yet gleaned from without nor yet from another man. White were the sea-gulls feeding on the foreshore; only a little seaweed-plastered jetty was rich brown and amber yellow; crouched at the foot of the jetty sheltered from the keen wind were some children who added a touch or two of red to the picture, for one of the girls wore a crimson coat and one of the boys a scarlet woollen cap.
These children were telling stories, and it was the red-capped boy’s turn. He was not a very popular teller of tales; yet he gripped his hearers because he wove the stories of the things which he knew in his heart, and not of the things he had heard.
Now the other boys told of pirates and brigands, whether they had practical experience of them or not; for which reason one only of their number knew what he was talking about; he afterwards became a great writer, for he drew upon the bank of knowledge, though how he came by the knowledge he could not tell. His swashbucklers and sea-wolves breathed the breath of life; and people who spent their time in wearily wrestling with office work and household accounts found them very refreshing company.
Redcap stood in the middle of the circle; the frosty wind fluttered his flaxen curls beneath his scarlet headgear. He was telling tales of Glamour-Land, the customs of which country he knew well; the group listened. The boys were not wholly absorbed; the girls who are generally quick to hear the Songs of the Glamour were the more interested. When the speaker ended his tale the girl in the crimson coat drew a long breath and gave her verdict “Lovely.” The tale-teller did not heed her; he was one of those people who care nothing for the breath of fame and praise. He who understood pirates so well nodded approvingly. Throughout his life this boy knew good work when he saw it, because his own was so good. One of the boys offered criticism.
“It’s all beastly rot,” he said with the simple directness of boyhood. “There isn’t any such place.”
Redcap crushed him with swift scorn.
“That’s all you know about it,” he said. “That place I tell you about is real, and this place isn’t; this place”—he waved his arms patronisingly at the sky and sea—“is an evil enchantment of the Black Witch; one of these days the Wise Queen will snuff her and her enchantment out—puff! like that!”
He snapped his fingers; the listeners looked uneasy and momentarily doubted the stability of the earth.
The boy who had criticised repeated his former remark: “It’s all rot.” Inwardly he hoped the Wise Queen would not snuff out the enchantment before tea time; for he knew there were hot cakes, and he could not honestly view them as evil enchantments. But where did the red-capped boy get his ideas about the relative reality of the seen and unseen?
Eight years after, that boy’s father died; his mother married again, and thereafter great trouble and poverty fell upon a family that had hitherto been happy and prosperous. This boy, then a lad of eighteen, given to great dreams and visions of the Glamour-Land, was torn away from all he loved and hoped for and dreamed of; he was sent to work at dull drudgery for a weekly pittance in a house of business in London. There, sick for the sights and sounds of Glamour-Land, he nearly broke down both mentally and physically. He was poor, friendless, proud, and unsociable; but that was nothing. If he could have had one daily glimpse of the Glamour Country, one note of its songs, he could have borne the rest. He fenced himself about with a wall of practical cheeriness and hard-headed common-sense and lived inside it in a hell of his own. In a narrow black street the child of the blue land, of sea, and wide distances lived and suffered for five dreadful years; then he chanced to find a room over some offices which looked upon the river, and suffered a little less. He began to earn more money; he was promoted. He did his work very well; he was to be depended upon; he was steady, alert, and “on the spot,” said his employers. He was thoroughly practical. Once some reference was made to his prospects by a man who was his superior in the business house where he was employed. This man told him he was bound to get on; it was “rare to see a young fellow so steady, and with his heart in his business.” The young man (he was then twenty-three) laughed a little laugh that was as chill and dreary as the wuther of the north wind in frozen rushes by a bleak ice-coated mountain tarn.
“When you don’t care for anything you have to do, one thing comes as easy as another,” he said. “Besides you can ‘give your mind’ to heaps of things. If you like a piece of work it is hard to pull away from it to something else; but if one is much like another to you, and all equally dull, then, if you’ve a decent amount of self-control you can do them all fairly effectively.”
While his superior was trying to understand his extraordinary sentiments, he said “Good-night, sir,” and went out. He walked back to his room.
This befell just before he found the room overlooking the river; it was a sultry, ill-smelling summer night; the straight line of the houses rose before him in their terrible hideousness. There was a little church in the street in which they sang anthems. A choir practice was going on. He could hear the voices plainly:
“By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Zion. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.”
The man hid his face in his hands and sighed; his heart was sick with great longing and intolerable weariness.
“God!” he said. “Let me go mad with memory rather than forget.”
Yet after all it seemed undesirable to go mad, therefore he rose and went to a little cheap club; the members were many of them “thoughtful people” with “views”; most of their views were theoretically partly true, and practically partly false and wholly impossible to carry out; it was not always possible to put one’s finger on the flaw in them. The members of that club talked a great deal; a man was talking very earnestly when he who desired to remember entered there. He was a reformer, and willing to make any personal sacrifice to further his regenerative views. He said:
“A wider charity is what men need. That is the root of the matter.”
“Nothing has been so fruitful a cause of pauperisation,” said a red-haired man who was listening for the sole purpose of disagreeing with him. This man was the type of person who can never extend his views beyond the meaning which he has decided to apply to a word.
“I do not mean Charity in that sense. I mean rather Love, which I have heard is Wisdom in activity, that which perceives a common basis of life. This is Wisdom, this is Love, this is Charity.”
“Statistics prove,” began the man, who while the other spoke had been thinking of his own views as to the meaning of charity.
“Statistics have no more to do with Charity than they have with Truth. They are the worst form of lying extant. Charity, in my sense, is the deepest of all wisdom. Faith, Hope, Charity, these three—and the greatest of these is Charity.”
Then another voice uplifted itself.
“I think St. Paul was wrong there,” it said. “The greatest of these is Faith.”
It was the young man from the north.
“Faith! What do you mean by faith?”
“The sense of the unseen, and the trust in it,” said he who used to tell the stories of the Glamour-Land. “The man who never loses the sense of that which he does not see, can move the world. All the force side of nature is allied with him. It is the unseen that is the motive power everywhere. The man who in an east-end slum, a city office, a factory, a gambling hell, a music hall, or in the trivial round of society can realise that, has allied himself with the sun and the sea, with the wind and the light, with the Power that lies behind all and causes the whole to be.”
Having thus spoken he wandered out as he had wandered in.
“That’s a queer young fellow,” said the red-haired man, “I think he’s cracked.”
“No,” said one of the listeners, “I think not. He’s a practical chap; quiet, solid, steady-going fellow, and no fool. A good man of business too. I’ve never seen him taken like that before.”
He spoke as though he was the victim of some malady. If this was the case it did not assert itself again. The man worked on steadily and rose in the estimation of his employers, who were very sober, business-like people. When he had been nearly twenty years in London he met the boy who told the pirate stories by the blue sea. The boy was now a man and he told his stories to a wider public; he was married to the girl who wore the crimson coat. He recognised his former brother of the craft, and was very kind and glad to see him; he asked him to his house and insisted on his coming there. He saw, what no one in his guest’s world saw, that such prosperity as was his was not the full measure of that which the promise of his youth once seemed to deserve. He asked him why he had toiled in a London office; why he had ceased to tell the tales of Glamour-Land, of the Wise Queen, and the Black Witch. The other was silent awhile. At last he said: “I couldn’t. That part of me is dead, and buried by the sea up yonder.”
His host said no more at the time; he referred to it once again, very carefully and tactfully.
“No,” said his guest. “I told you I couldn’t. First, because my mind is like a hollow pipe, for other people’s thoughts to blow through. Secondly, because I don’t properly know any of the things I used to know when I was young.”
He talked a while longer; then he rose, said good-bye, and never returned to that house again. He went back to the room which overlooked the river; for fifteen years he had lived therein. He sat by the window and muttered to himself:
“They that wasted us required of us mirth; saying: Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”
It was the hour between light and darkness; the river was clear silvery greyish blue, and the light struck down into it like daggers of quivering pallid fire; the bridge showed threadlike arches of vague darkness through the blue mist; little busy tugs sped up the water-way, dragging long, thin, black barges; a big waggon piled high with gleaming yellow straw creaked along the bank, coming townwards from the country. There was the half-light that brings out a thousand shifting tints; lights began to dot the shore and the boats lying at anchor.
On a sudden the scent of wild thyme smote through the room; there was a hill near his old home that was carpeted with it in summer time; and behold the Glamour-Land he had not seen for twenty years lay below him, in the very heart of the city. It was perhaps the shadowy silver-blue that opened the way; faint vague blue, unlike the gentian glow of the sea-lake, yet reminiscent of it. The room was palpably full of the perfume of wild thyme. The man rose. For ten years he had hungered for the beauty of his old home, and there had been no money to take him there, nor welcome for him had he journeyed thither. For ten years the money had been there and a temperate welcome to boot, but the desire lay, half-dead, numbed with over-long thwarting, weariness, and pain. Now he suddenly realised he could go back if he would. The next day he asked for and obtained a holiday and started northwards.
It was evening when he arrived; he went to a little inn, and after dinner he walked to the jetty and stood upon it looking at the water leaping on the bar, and the glowing line of the sun-bathed hills. He looked and he looked and he looked, and behold! there was nothing there which he desired. The hunger of twenty years was for something which this beauty recalled to him—nothing more. The Glamour-Land was not here. The purple of the darkening sea, the tossing of the water, foaming ghost-white on the great bar, the clear golden light of the hills, woke in him only a great hunger for that of which they made him think; for which they caused him to long; and of what he thought, for what he longed he did not know. It eluded him; it fled before him like a flickering elf-flame, never to be grasped or known.
“How can we sing the Lord’s Song in a strange land?”
He said the words aloud; as a stranger in that country in which he had been born and reared. The next day he went back to London to the room that overlooked the river. He sat alone; he was alone in the house; the offices below were closed; the place was quiet; the roar of London sounded distant, it was like the far-off breaking of the waves on the bar; the river water was lapping against the walls that pent it in. As he walked homewards he had crossed the bridge, and stopped to buy watercress of an old man. This old man was one who, through the ignorance which is the heritage of every man, had, in an hour of that madness which we call sin, become outcast from the rank wherein he was born; now, ill, old, and very poor, he sold watercress, groundsel, and pencils on the bridge by day and slept in a common lodging-house by night. This man was the one soul on earth to whom he who once toldthe tales of Glamour-Land ever spoke of the longing that consumed him. This old man also had a hopeless longing of his own; he desired one hour back of the seventy years that lay behind him; one hour to fashion as he chose, one hour which had darkened and made a hell of forty years. The man from the north stopped and bought cress of him. As he took the cress he spoke. “I used to think I longed for my old home,” he said. “I went back there yesterday after twenty years.”
“What did you find?”
“The country I seek is not there,” answered the other; his voice sounded tired, as though with much journeying of soul and body.
“Ah! you’d better not have gone. It is better to believe there is something which would make you content if you had it.”
“I’d rather know the truth.”
“You are young still,” said the pencil-seller. “If I believed I were young and strong, loved and honoured, I should believe a lie. But I should prefer to believe it.”
“It is probably just as true as your present beliefs about yourself, whatever they may be. Don’t you think so?”
He walked on. Now the cress lay on the table and withered; he sat by the window and listened to the lapping of the tide. For twenty years he believed he knew what he desired, if he had been free to seek it; now he knew otherwise. He did not know where Glamour-Land was, and yet—“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,” he murmured, “may my right hand forget her cunning.”
Into the silence of his soul there broke many voices speaking as one voice and they spoke after this manner:
“When we who guard the Songs of the Glamour will that they shall be sung, they are sung. They ring through the world, though none know whence they sound, nor the manner of their sounding. Some say they come from here, and some from there. And it is nothing to us whether our singers be kings or slaves, saints or sinners, fools or sages, men or women, for it is we who sing through their lips, and it is the world that hears when the time is ripe. We have before this day caused those who were blind, and dumb, and deaf to sing the songs of the Glamour, and some of these never knew they sang. Moreover, you have sung them here in the city’s heart for twenty years and more, while you thought your lips were mute and your heart hungry with desire of Glamour-Land. And because you had nothing for which you longed, you learned to look for nothing your hands could grasp, but to hold all things readily and loose them easily at the appointed hour. Wherefore we, who know how it is with a man’s soul, drew from you the common desires of men as pith is drawn by a shepherd boy from a reed when he would pipe therewith; thereafter we fashioned these your body and soul into a pipe whereon we might pipe the Songs of the Glamour, and the world has heard them. You felt their notes ring through your soul, while your ears were deaf, strain them as you would.”
“And I?” he asked, “am I nothing?”
“Nothing,” they made answer, “nothing—or all that is.”
Whereat he fell to musing on their words, until the lapping water, the roaring city, and the beating of the heart within his body, seemed alike to be but the pulsing of a life that swept outward from the Unknown God of the Worlds.
publication data
TheTemple PressLetchworthEngland