XIX. Illusions
FEBRUARY 15, 1919. Southwark Street is warehouses and railway bridges, and at its best is not beautiful; but when at night it is a deep chasm through which whirl cataracts of snow, and the paving is sludge, then, if you are at one end of it, the other end is as far away as joy. I was at one end of it, and at the other was my train, due to leave in ten minutes. Yet as there was a strike, there might be no train, and so I could not lose it; I had that consolation while judging that, with more than half a mile of snow and squall intervening from the north-east, I could not do the length of the street in ten minutes. So I surrendered the train which might not run to whoever was able to catch it, and in that instant of renunciation the dark body of a motor lorry skidded to the kerb and stopped beside me. A voice that was as passionless as destiny told me to hop up, if I were going towards the station. The headlong lorry, the sombre masses of thebuildings which were now looming through the diminishing snow, and the winter’s night, roused a vision of another place, much like it, or else the snow and the night made it seem like it, and so my uppermost thought became too personal, unimportant, and curious for converse. All I said, as I took my place beside the steering wheel, was: “It’s a wretched night.” (But I might have been alone in the lorry. There was no immediate answer.) I communed secretly with my memory. Then the voice returned out of the darkness. It startled me. “This corner,” it remarked, “always reminds me of a bit of Armentières.” The voice had answered my thought, and not my words.
The lorry stopped and I got down. I never saw the driver. I do not know whose voice it was; if, indeed, there was with me in that lorry more than a shadow and an impersonal voice.
Yet now the night could do its worst. I had the illusion that I had seen through it. Were these bleak and obdurate circumstances an imposture? They appeared to have me imprisoned helplessly in time and snow; yet I had seen them shaken, and by a mere thought. Did their appearance depend on the way we looked at them? Perhaps it was that. We are compelled by outsidethings to their mould, and are mortified; but occasionally they fail to hide the joke. The laugh becomes ours, and circumstance must submit to the way we see it. If Time playfully imprisons us in a century we would rather have missed, where only the stars are left undisturbed to wink above the doings and noises of Bedlam, and where to miss the last train—supposing it runs at all—is the right end to a perfect day of blizzards and social squalls, what does it matter when we find that the whole of it is shaken by a single idea? Might it not vanish altogether if enough of us could be found to laugh at it? This dream assisted me to some warmth of mind through the rest of the cold night till I arrived on the station platform, after the train had left.
To help further in destroying my faith in the permanence of our affairs and institutions, it then appeared the platform was vacant because my train was not yet in. It was coming in at that moment—or so a porter told me. Our protean enemy took his most fearful form in the War when he became a Hidden Hand. Was this porter an agent of the gods for whose eternal leisure our daily confusion and bad temper make an amusing diversion? Was he one of the malicious familiars who are at work amongst us,disguised, and who playfully set us by the ears with divine traps for boobies? This porter was grinning. He went away with his hand over his mouth, and at that moment a train stopped at the platform. The engine was at the wrong end of it.
One official told me its proper locomotive was at East Grinstead, and that we might not get it. Perhaps its home was there. And yet another official whose face was as mysterious as that of the station clock, which was wearing a paper mask, said that the engine of my train had, in fact, gone. It had gone to Brighton. He did not know why. It had gone alone. I turned vacantly from this bewilderment and saw a man with the sort of golden beard an immortal might have worn standing under a station lamp, and breaking now and then into peals of merriment, occasioned, it seemed to me, by what the first porter was telling him. Then both of them looked towards me, and stopped. If in one more gust of hearty laughter that hollow wilderness of a station had vanished, gloom and dreary echoes and frozen lights, and I had found myself blinking in a surprising sunlight at that fellow in the golden beard, while he continued to laugh at me in another world than this, where hewas revealed for what he was, I was in the mind for placid acceptance. Well, the miraculous transformation was as likely as an engine for that train.
The bearded one approached me. I did not run away. I waited for the next thing. He had a book under his arm, and it is likely that the gods, who have no need to learn the truth, never read books. “If,” he told me, “you want to get to Sheepwash, you had better take this other train. It is going half the way. The engine for the train for Sheepwash can’t be found.”
We both boarded the train for half the journey, and it did not appear to have any other passengers. Yet, reckless of the risks I was taking in travelling alone with a suspected being at such a time—for where might not he and the train go?—I accepted the chance; and as I took my seat and regarded that bright beard, the shadow of my awful doubt became really serious, for it was only this week that I have been readingThe Twilight of the Gods. There was the disintegrating recollection of that book, with its stories of homeless immortals in search of new and more profitable employ; and there had been a bodiless voice in a motor lorry which ignored what I said but spoke instead to an inconsequential memoryof mine that was strictly private; and there was the levity with which uniformed officials treated the essential institutions of civilization. All this gave me the sensation that even the fixed policy of our strong government might, at any moment now, roll up as a scroll.
Off we went. My fellow-traveller was silent, though he was smiling at something which was not in the carriage, to my knowledge. When he spoke, his eyes were not fixed on me. He looked into the air, and talked to whatever it was he saw. He pointed a finger at the light of the city lying beyond and below our carriage window. “All they’ve built,” he said, “stands only on a few odd notions. Now they’re changing their notions, so down comes everything with a run. And don’t they look surprised and pained!” (I felt like an eavesdropper, and thought I’d better show him I was present.) I apologized for overhearing him. He nodded shortly, a little condescendingly. “We’ve acceptedthat”—he poked his stick towards where stood our Imperial city in the night—“as if it came by itself. We never knew our city was like that just because we never saw it in any other light. Now we’re upset to find the magic-lantern picture is fading. Got to put up with it, though.” His book had been onthe seat. It fell to the floor, and I picked it up and handed it to him. It wasThe Twilight of the Gods.
If I could have remembered at that moment one of the simple dodges for averting the evil eye I should have used it. The laughing malice of that book had so confused me for some days that I had begun to feel that even St. Paul’s, a blue bubble floating over London on the stream of Time, might vanish, as bubbles will. The Hidden Hand, I began to believe, had something in it.
I intrigued a serious interview with my fellow-passenger, hoping to find evidence; and then the train stopped finally, six miles from home. At that very instant of time the train which we had previously rejected because it had no engine chose to run express through the station where we stood.
XX. Figure-Heads
MARCH 1, 1919. When the car got to the Board of Trade Office, which is opposite the old chapel of ease where the crews of John Company’s ships “used to worship,” as a local history tells us, I saw Uncle Dave by the kerb, with time apparently on his hands. I got down.
He told me old Jackson is dead. Jackson was a mast and block maker, but his fame was the excellence of his figure-heads. It is many years since old Jackson made one, but if it is doubted that he was an artist, there is a shop near where he once lived which still displays three of his images, the size of life, reputed to have been conjured from baulks of timber with an ax. I remember Jackson. He rarely answered you when you questioned him about those ships to which he had given personality and eyes that looked sleeplessly overseas from their prows. He regarded you, and only his whiskers moved insilent indifference (he chewed), as though you were wasting the time of a man and an artist. Those images of his were all of women. He would make no figure-head for a ship bearing the name of a man, though it were that of a Greek hero. And, of course, you dare not even think of the trousered legs of a modern man stuck each side of a ship’s prow, boots and all; but the drapery of a woman flows with grace there. She would look indeed its vigilant guardian spirit. It would be pleasing to write of some of the more famous of those idols, as I remember them in repose, above the quays of the docks.
Here we were joined by some young men who knew Uncle Dave. They were looking for a ship. But Uncle continued to tell me of the merits of his friend the maker of figure-heads. A stoker became a trifle irritated. “Well, what’s the good of ’em, anyway?” he interjected. “Lumber, I call ’em. They can’t be carried on straight stems, and clipper-bows aren’t wanted these days, wasting good metal. Why, even Thompson’s White Star liners have chucked that sort of truck. They’re not built like it now. What’s the good of figger-’eds?”
This youth’s casual blasphemy in the presenceof Uncle Dave (who once was bo’sun of a China clipper), extolling as he did his age of mere machines against the virtues of an age when ships were expected to look good as well as do good things, made us shrink in anticipation of the storm. For Uncle Dave has a habit of listening to a talk about ships in a deliberate and contemptuous silence, with nothing to show of his inward heat but a baleful light in the eye. He does not like steamers. He does not think steamer-men are seamen. He declares they can never be seamen. And now we waited, dreading that his anger, when it burst, would be quite incoherent with force. There was really something of hatred in his look as he gazed at the youngster, his mouth a little open, his hand holding his trembling pipe just away from his mouth, which had forgotten it. The old sailor bent forward, screwing his eyes at this young man as though trying to believe it was real.
An older hand interposed. “Ah, come away now! I’ve heard chaps make game of figger-’eds, an’ call ’em superstition. But I say let such things alone. I know things that’s happened to funny fellows through making game of figger-’eds. There was theBarbadian Lass. She was a brigantine.She used to run to Trinidad. There was something queer about her figger-’ed. It was a half-breed woman. She was smiling. She had bare breasts, and she used to wear earrings. Her chaps used to keep a spare pair for her in a box. She was always fresh and bright, but I’ve heard say she was never painted—no, not since the day the ship was launched. She kept like that. And one day young Belfast MacCormick slipped a tar-brush over her dial. Said it was idolatry. And what happened to him? You answer me that!”
“Yes, I know,” broke in one of us. “But you can’t say it was along of that tar-brush...”
“You young chaps ain’t got no sense,” here interrupted Uncle, his voice evidently under control, but shaky. “I’d like to know where you were brought up. You learn it all wrong at them schools of yours, and you never get it right afterwards. You learn about the guts of engines and ’lectricity, and you mix it up with the tales your grandmothers told you, and you get nothing straight. What you’ve got is all science and superstition. And then you wonder why you make a mess of it. Listen! It don’t matter what you do to a figger-’ed, if you’re fool enoughto spoil it. It’s having it that matters. It’s something to go by, and a ship you’re glad to work in.”
He turned on the stoker. There was astonishment and pity in his glance. “Look at you. In and out of a ship, and you forget her name when you’ve signed off. You don’t care the leavings in a Dago’s mess-kit for any ship you work in, if you can get a bit out of her and skip early.”
“That’s me, Uncle,” muttered the stoker.
“Can you remember names, like some of us remember theMermus, theBlackadder, and theTitania? Not you. Your ships haven’t got names, properly speaking. They’re just a run out and home again for you, and a row about the money and the grub.”
“Sure to be a row about the grub,” murmured the stoker.
“What are ships nowadays?” he went on, raising a shaking index finger. “Are they ships at all? They’re run by companies on the make, and worked by factory hands who curse their own house-flags. It’s a dirty game, I call it. Things are all wrong. I can’t make them out. You fellers take no pride in your work, and you’ve got no work to take pride in. You don’t knowwho you work for or what, and your ships got no names. They might be damned goods vans. No good in a figger-’ed! Then I’ll tell you this. Then I’ll tell you this.You’llget no good till you learn better, my lad.”
XXI. Economics
MARCH 22, 1919. There is an astonishing number of books on what is called Reconstruction in the new publications of this spring. Reconstruction seems to be as easy as conscription or destruction. We have only to change our mind, and there we are, as though nothing had happened. It is the greatest wonder of the human brain that its own accommodating ratiocination never affords it any amusement. We use reason only to make convincing disguises for our desires and appetites. Perhaps it is fear of the wrath to come that is partly responsible for the clamour of the economists and sociologists in the publishers’ announcements, almost drowning there the drone of the cataract of new novels. But it is too late now. The wrath will come. After mischievously bungling with the magic which imprisoned the Djinn, we may wish we had not done it; but once he is out there isnothing for it but to be surprised and sorry. The lid is off; and it is useless for the clever reconstructionists to press in upon us with their little screw-drivers, chattering eagerly about locks and hinges. When the crafty but ignorant Russian generals and courtiers got from the Czar the order for mobilizing the armies, and issued it, they did not know it, but that was when they released Lenin. And who on earth can now inveigle that terrific portent safely under lid and lock again?
XXII. Old Sunlight
APRIL 5, 1919. I find the first signs of this spring, now the War is over, almost unbelievable. I have watched this advent with astonishment, as though it were a phantom. The feeling is the same as when waking from an ugly dream, and seeing in doubt the familiar objects in a morning light. They seem steadfast. Are they real, or is the dream? The morning works slowly through the mind to take the place of the night. Its brightness and tranquillity do not seem right. And is it not surprising to find the spring has come again to this world? The almond tree might be an untimely, thoughtless, and happy stranger. What does it want with us? That spiritual and tinted fire with which its life burns touches and kindles no responsive and volatile essence in us. I passed a hedge-bank which looked south and was reviving. There were crumbs and nuggets of chalk in it, and they were as remarkable to me this yearas though I had once seen those flecks of white showing through the herbage of another planet. That crumbling earth with the grey matting of old grass was as warm to the touch as though some inner virtue had grown, all unsuspected by us, in the heart of this glacial ball. I picked up a lump of chalk with its cold greenish shadows, and powdered it in my fingers, wondering why it looked so suddenly bright. It confirmed my existence. Its smell was better than any news I have heard of late.
I saw suddenly the gleaming coast of a continent of dark cloud, and the blue ocean into which it jutted its headlands; memory had suddenly returned. At that moment the sun touched my hand. All this was what we used to know in a previous life. When I got home I took downSelborne. Two photographs fell out of it, and when I picked them up—they were those of a young amateur and were yellow with age—spring really began to penetrate the bark. But it was not the spring of this year.
How often, like another tortoise, has the mind come out of its winter to sun itself in the new warmth of a long-gone Selborne April? Did Gilbert White imagine he was bequeathing light to us? Of course not. He lived quietly in theobscure place where he was born, and did not try to improve or influence anybody. It seems he had no wish to be a great leader, or a great thinker, or a great orator. The example of Chatham did not fire him. He was friendly with his neighbours, but went about his business. When he died there did not appear to be any reason whatever to keep him in memory. He had harmed no man. He left us without having improved gunpowder. Could a man have done less?
Think of the events which were stirring men while he was noting the coming and going of swallows. While he lived, Clive began the conquest of India, and Canada was taken from the French. White heard the news that our American colonists had turned Bolshevik because of the traditional skill of the administrators of other people’s affairs at Whitehall. The world appears to have been as full then of important uproar as it is to-day. I suppose the younger Pitt, “the youngest man ever appointed Prime Minister,” had never heard of White. But Gilbert does not seem to have heard ofhim; nor of Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, nor of the inventor of the steam engine. “But I can show you some specimens of my new mice,” he remarks on March 30, 1768.That was the year in which the great Pitt resigned. His new mice!
Yet for all the stirring affairs and inventions of his exciting time, with war making and breaking empires, and the foundations of this country’s wealth and power being nobly laid, it would not be easy to show that we to-day are any the happier. Our own War was inherent in the inventions of mechanical cotton-spinning and the steam-engine—the need to compel foreign markets to buy the goods we made beyond our own needs. We know now what were the seeds the active and clever fellows of Gilbert’s day were sowing for us. We were present at the harvesting. Why did not those august people, absorbed in the momentous deeds which have made history so sonorous, the powder shaking out of their wigs with the awful gravity of their labours (while all the world wondered), just stop doing such consequential things, and accept Gilbert’s invitation to go and listen to him about those new mice? The mice might have saved us, and the opportunity was lost.
Looking back at those times, of all the thunderous events which then loosened excited tongues, caused by high-minded men of action expertly conjuring crisis after crisis while their docile followersscrambled out of one sublime trouble into another, heated and exhausted, but still gaping with obedience and respect, we can see that nothing remains but the burial parties, whose work is yet uncompleted in France. What good does persist out of those days is the light in which Gilbert’s tortoise sunned itself. It is a light which has not gone out. And it makes us wonder, not how much of our work in these years will survive to win the gratitude of those who will follow us, but just what it is they will be grateful for. Where is it, and what happy man is doing it? And what are we thinking of him? Do we even know his name?
XXIII. Ruskin
APRIL 19, 1919. Some good people have been celebrating Ruskin, whose centenary it is. And to-day a little friend of mine left her school books so that I might wonder what they were when I saw them on my table. One of them wasThe Crown of Wild Olive. It put me in a reminiscent mood. I looked at Ruskin’s works on my shelves, and tried to recall how long it was since they interested me. Nevertheless, I would not part with them. In my youth Ruskin’s works were only for the wealthy, and I remember that my purchase of those volumes was an act of temerity, and even of sacrifice. And who but an ingrate would find fault with Ruskin, or would treat him lightly? With courage and eloquence he denounced dishonesty in the days when it was not supposed that cheating could be wrong if it were successful. He did that when minds were so dark that people blinked with surprise at a light which showed asa social iniquity naked children crawling with chains about them in the galleries of coal-mines. Was it really wrong to make children do that? Or was Ruskin only an impossible idealist? They were the happy years, radiant with the certain knowledge of the British that the Holy Grail would be recognized immediately it was seen, for over it would be proudly floating the confirmatory Union Jack. We had not even begun to suspect that our morals, manners, and laws were fairly poor compared with the standards of the Mohawks and Mohicans whom our settlers had displaced in America a century before. And Ruskin told that Victorian society it had an ugly mind, and did ugly things. When Ruskin said so, with considerable emotion, Thackeray was so hurt that he answered as would any clever editor to-day about a contribution which convinced him that it would make readers angry; he told Ruskin it would never do. Thackeray’s readers, of course, were assured they were the best people, and that worldly cynic did well to reject Ruskin, and preserve theCornhill Magazine.
“Ruskin,” it says in the introduction toThe Crown of Wild Olivewhich my little friend reads at school, “is certainly one of the greatest masters of English prose.” That has often been declared.But is he? Or is our tribute to Ruskin only a show of gratitude to one who revealed to us the unpleasant character of our national habits when contrasted with a standard for gentlemen? It ought not to have required much eloquence to convince us that Widnes is unlovely; the smell of it should have been enough. It is curious that we needed festoons of chromatic sentences to warn us that cruelty to children, even when profit can be made of it, is not right. But I fear some people really enjoy remorseful sobbing. It is half the fun of doing wrong. Yet I would ask in humility—for it is a fearful thing to doubt Ruskin, the literary divinity of so many right-thinking people—whether English children who are learning the right way to use their language, and the noblest ideas to express, should run the risk of having Ruskin’s example set before them by softhearted teachers? I think that a parent who knew a child of his, on a certain day, was to take the example of Ruskin as a prose stylist on the subject of war, would do well, on moral and æsthetic grounds, to keep his child away from school on that day to practise a little roller-skating. For humility and gratitude should not blind us to the fact that few writers in English of Ruskin’s reputation have ever considered such a rosy cloud ofrhetoric as is his lecture on war, in which a reasonable shape no sooner looms than it is lost again, to be worth preserving. The subject of war is of importance, inflammable humanity being what it is, and the results of war being what we know; and the quality of the critical attention we give to so great a matter is unfortunately clear when we regard the list of distinguished critics of letters who have accepted, apparently without difficulty, as great prose, Ruskin’s heedless rush of words upon it. Perhaps his language appears noble because the rhythmic pour of its sentences lulls reason into a comfortable and benignant sleepiness.
I remember the solemn voice of a lecturer on English literature, years ago, moving me to buyThe Crown of Wild Olive. Such obvious ignorance as I knew mine to be could not be tolerated. Whatever I went without, it could not be that book. I put it in my hold-all when, as was my duty, I went for my training with the artillery volunteers. I read in camp the essay on war, when bombardiers no longer claimed my attention, and the knightly words of sergeant instructors were taking a needed rest. I pondered over that essay, and concluded that though plainly I was very young and very wrong to feel puzzledand even derisive over English prose which fascinated a learned lecturer into solemnity, yet I would sooner learn to make imitation flowers of wool than read that essay to a critical audience, especially if I had written it myself.
Ruskin, in fact, with no more experience of war than a bishop’s wife, did not know what he was talking about. Throughout the essay, too, he is in two minds. One is that of a gentleman who knows that war is the same phenomenon, artistically, ethically, and socially, as a public-house riot with broken bottles caused by a dispute over one of those fundamental principles which are often challenged in such a place. Those riots are natural enough. They are caused by the nature of man. They continue to happen, for it has taken the Church longer to improve our manners than it has taken stock-raisers to improve the milking qualities of kine. And Ruskin’s other mind is still in the comical Tennysonian stage about war, dwelling with awe on swords and shields, glory, honour, patriotism, courage, spurs, pennants, and tearful but resolute ladies who wave their handkerchiefs in the intervals of sobbing over their “loved ones.”
He calls war “noble play.” He scorns cricket. As for his “style” and his “thought”: “I use,”says Ruskin, “in such a question, the test which I have adopted, of the connexion of war with other arts, and I reflect how, as a sculptor, I should feel if I were asked to design a monument for Westminster Abbey, with a carving of a bat at one end and a ball at the other. It may be there remains in me only a savage Gothic prejudice; but I had rather carve it with a shield at one end and a sword at the other.”
I cannot tell whether Ruskin reflected so because of a savage Gothic prejudice, but I am certain he wrote like that moved by what we feel—the feeling goes deeper into time even than the Goths—about the victim for sacrifice. We must justify that sacrifice, and so we give it a ceremonial ritual and dignity. Otherwise, I think, Ruskin would not have suggested the shield and sword as the symbolic decorations. He felt instinctively and because of a long-accepted tradition that those antique symbols were the only way to hide the ugly look of the truth. For certainly he could have used a ball at one end—a cannon-ball—and a mortar at the other. Just as we might use an aerial torpedo at one end, and the image of a mutilated child at the other; or a gas cylinder at one end, and a gas-mask at the other. But the artist is not going to be deprived of hisromance through a touch of the actual, any more than the lady with the handkerchief can be expected to forego her anguished sob over her hero as he goes forth to battle.
We saw that in our Great War. The ancient appeal of the patriots rushed us away from reason with “last stands,” and the shot-riddled banners wavering in the engulfing waves of barbarians, till an irresistible cavalry charge scattered the hordes. All this replaced the plumes, the shining armour, and the chivalrous knights. Ruskin, however, was a subtle improvement even on the last stand with the shot-riddled banner. He anticipated those who have been most popular because they made our War entrancing and endurable. He went to the heart of the matter. He knew that the audience which would the more readily agree with him when he made an emotional case for the ennobling nature of war would be mainly of reclused women. He addressed them. So did, of late, some of our most successful writers on war. They, like Ruskin, made their appeal to that type of mind which obtains a real satisfaction, a sensuous pleasure, from contemplating the unseen sufferings of the young and vicarious victim sobbing, and feeling noble and enduring.
XXIV. The Reward of Virtue
MAY 9, 1919. The Treaty of Peace is published. Compared with what the innocent in 1915 called the “objects of the War,” this treaty is as the aims of Captain Morgan’s ruffians to those of the Twelve Apostles. The truth is, some time ago the Versailles drama fell to the level of an overworked newspaper story which shrewd editors saw was past its day. Those headlines, Humiliate the Hun, Hang the Kaiser, and Make Germany Pay, had become no more interesting than a copy of last week’sMorning Mischiefin a horse-pond. The subject was old and wet. Because five months ago we thoughtfully elected men of the counting-house to the work of governing the State, of late we have been too indignant over the cost and difficulty of living to spare a thought for the beauty of Peace; that is why we are now examining the clauses of the famous Treaty with about as much care for what they may mean to us as if they concernedthe movements of the Asteroids. A year ago the German attacks seemed near to making guns the deciding voice in the affairs of unhappy humanity. On the chill and overcast spring morning when the Treaty was published, it was significant that those very few men to whom we could go for courage a year ago were the only people dismayed by the terms of the Peace Treaty. And the timid, who once went to those stout hearts for assurance—to have, as the soldiers used to say, their cold feet massaged—were the bright and cheerful souls. It was ominous. Yet those careless and happy hearts are not so trying to me as the amiable but otherwise sensible men who were sure our statesmen would not betray the dead, and who are incredulous over the Treaty now they see what it clearly intends to convey. They cannot believe that the War, which they thought began as a war of liberation, a struggle of Europe to free itself from the intolerable bonds of its past, continues in the Peace Treaty as a force malignantly deflected to the support of the very evils out of which August, 1914, arose. Then did they imagine the well-meaning leopard would oblige by changing his spots if spoken to kindly while he was eating the baby?
XXV. Great Statesmen
MAY, 31, 1919. What is wrong with our statesmen? I think the answer is simple. Success in a political career can be understood by all of us. It attracts the attention which applauds the owner of a Derby winner, or the Bishop who began as a poor, industrious, but tactful child. John the Baptist failed to attract the publicity he desired; and Christ drew it as a criminal, for the religious and political leaders of his day recognized what his teaching would lead to as easily as would any magistrate to-day who had before him a carpenter accused of persuading soldiers that killing is murder. Politicians move on the level of the common intelligence, and compete there with each other in charging the ignorance of the commonalty with emotion. A politician need be no more than something between a curate and a card-sharper. If he knows anything of the arts, of history, of economics, or of science, he had betterforget it, or else use it as a forestaller would a knowledge of the time when prices should be raised. A confident man with a blood-shot voice and a gift for repartee is sure to make a success of politics, especially if he is not too particular. This did not matter once, perhaps, when politics merely afforded excitement for taverns and a career for the avid and meddlesome. The country was prosperous, and so it was difficult to do it serious harm.
But to-day, just when we must have the leading of moral, judicious, and well-informed minds, or perish, we have only our statesmen. It never occurs to the crowd that its business would be more successfully transacted by a chance group, say of headmasters of elementary schools, than by the statesmen who, at Versailles recently, dared not face the shocking realities because these could not be squared with a Treaty which had to frame the figments of the hustings. The trouble with our statesmen is that they have been concerned hitherto merely to attend to the machinery, running freely and with little friction, of industrial society. They did not create that machinery. They but took it over. They knew nothing of the principles which motived it. Our statesmen were only practical politicians andbusiness men. They held in contempt the fine abstract theories of physics, mechanics, and dynamics. It was safe for them to do so. The machinery went on running, apparently of its own volition. All went well until the War. Now the propeller-shaft of industrial society is fractured, our ship is wallowing in the trough of the seas, and the men who should put things right for us do not even know that it is the main shaft on which they should concentrate. They are irritating the passengers by changing the cabins, confiscating luggage, insisting on higher fares, cutting down the rations, and instructing the sailors in the goose-step; but the ship has no way on her, and the sound of breakers grows louder from a sombre, precipitous, and unknown coast.
XXVI. Joy
JULY 19, 1919. It has come. This is the great day of the English. Many have doubted whether we should ever have it, for faith had been weak and the mind weary while the enemy was still fixed in his fanatic resolution. But here it is, half my window-blind already bright with its first light. To-day we celebrate our return to peace, to an earth made the fairer for children, fit for the habitation of free men, safe for quiet folk ... the day that once had seemed as remote as truth, as inaccessible as good fortune; a day, so we used to think in France, more distant even than those incredible years of the past that were undervalued by us, when we were happy in our ignorance of the glory men could distil from misery and filth; when we had not guessed what wealth could be got from the needs of a public anxious for its life; nor that sleeping children could be bombed in a noble cause. Yes, it had seemed to us evenfarther off than our memories of the happy past. Yet here it is, its coffee-cups tinkling below, and I welcome its early shafts of gold like the fortune they are. The fortune seems innocent and unaware of its nature. It does not know what it means to us. I had often been with soldier friends across the water when with mock rapture they had planned an itinerary for this day. They spoke of it where their surroundings made the thought of secure leisure or unremarkable toil only a painful reminder of what was beatific, but might never be. This day had not come to them. But it had come to me.
I was luckier than they. Yet when luck comes to us, does it ever look quite as we had imagined it when it was not ours? I lift the curtain on this luck, and look out. From an upper window of the house opposite the national emblem of the American Republic is hanging like an apron. Next door to it a man is decorating his windowsills with fairy lamps, and from his demeanour he might be devising a taboo against evil. I see no other sign that the new and better place of our planet was being acknowledged. The street is as the milkman and the postman have always known it on a quiet morning.
A cock crowed. It was then I knew that,though the morning was like all good sunrises, which are the same for the unjust and the righteous, I, somehow, was different. Chanticleer was quite near, but his confident and defiant voice, I recognized with a start, was a call from some other morning. It was the remembered voice of life at sunrise, as old as the jungle, alert, glad, and brave. Then why did it not sound as if it were meant for me? Why did it not accord, as once it did, with the coming of a new day, when the renewed and waiting earth was veritably waiting for us? Yet the morning seemed the same, its sounds the familiar confidences, its light the virgin innocence of a right beginning. Was this new light ours? While looking at it I thought that perhaps there is another light, an aura of something early and rare, which, once it is doused, cannot be re-kindled, even by the sun which rises to shine on a great victory.
I began to feel that this early confusion of thought, over even so plain a cause for joy as morning, might be a private hint that it would be as hard to tell the truth about peace as it used to be about battle. And how difficult it is to tell the truth about war, and even how improper, some of us know. For what a base traitor even truth may be to good patriots, when she insiststhat her mirror cannot help reflecting what is there! Why should the best instincts of loyal folk be thus embarrassed? If they do not wish to know what is there, when that is what it is like, is it right, is it gentlemanly, to show them?
How easy it would be to write of peace in the Capital, where the old highways have been decorated for many kings, marshals, and admirals, and the flags have been hung for victories since England first bore arms. So why should one be dubious of a few unimportant suburban byways, where the truth is plain, and is not charged with many emotions through the presence of an emperor and his statesmen and soldiers, all of them great, all of them ready for our superlatives to add to their splendour?
But perhaps the more you know of a place, the greater is your perplexity. That old vicarage wall, lower down my street, is merely attractive in the sun of Peace Day. A stranger, if he noticed it, might at the most admire its warm tones, and the tufts of hawkweed and snapdragon which are scattered on its ledges. But from this same window, on a winter morning, when affairs were urgent in France, I have seen youth assembled by that wall. Youth was silent. There was only a sergeant’s voice in all the street. Ithink I hear now the diminishing trampling of quick feet marching away; and see a boy’s face as he turned near the top of the rise to wave his hand. But look now, and say where are the shades on a bright morning!
I went out, a dutiful citizen, to celebrate. No joy can be truthfully reported till just this side of the High Street, where there were three girls with linked arms dancing in lax and cheerful oblivion, one of them quite drunk. Near them stood a cart with a man, a woman, and a monkey in it. The superior animals were clothed in red, white, and blue, and the monkey was wearing a Union Jack for a ruff. The ape was humping himself on the tail-board, and from his expression he might have been wondering how long all this would last. His gay companions were rosily chanting that if they caught some one bending it would be of no advantage to him. The main thoroughfare was sanded, and was waiting for the official procession. Quiet citizens were strolling about with their children, and what they were thinking is as great a mystery as what the populace at Memphis thought when the completion of the Great Pyramid was celebrated by the order of Cheops. In a room of an upper storey near the town hall a choir was singing the HallelujahChorus, and below, on the pavement, a hospital nurse, in a red wig, stood gravely listening, swaying to and fro, holding her skirts high, so that we saw beneath the broad slacks of an able seaman.
The chorus ceased, and in gratitude for the music the nurse embraced a Highland soldier, who was standing near and who was secretly amused, I believe, by the nurse’s trousers. Then we heard the bands of the military procession in the distance, and it was in that moment I saw a young officer I knew, who was out as early as Neuve Chapelle, gazing, like everybody else, in the direction of the martial sounds. Before I could reach him through the press he had turned, and was walking hurriedly down a side street, as though in flight. I could not follow him. I wanted to see the soldiers. My reason was no better than some sentimental emotion; for I saw the original Contemptibles march off for Mons; and was with a battalion of the 9th Division, the first of Kitchener’s men to go into the line; and saw the Derby men come out and begin; and at the last discovered that the conscripts were as good as the rest. Some of the survivors were marching towards me.
But I did not recognize them. Many were elderly men who were displaying proud tunics ofvolunteer regiments as old as Hyde Park Parades by Queen Victoria. One looked then for the sections from the local lodges of the Druids, Oddfellows, Buffaloes, and the He-Goats. There was the band of the local cadets, spontaneous in its enthusiasm, its zest for martial music no different, of course. Just behind these lads a strange figure walked in the procession, a bent and misshapen old man, whose face had no expression but a fixed and hypnotic stare. He was keeping time to the measure of the boys’ music by snapping the spring of a mouse-trap which he held aloft. I could not find him in the program. Was he also drunk? Or was he a terrible jest? Most of our triumphant display followed this figure. If our illusions go, what is left to us? Ah, our memories of the Somme! That young officer who turned away when he saw Triumph approaching acted on a right instinct.
There is a hilltop near us. It looks to other hills over a great space of southern England, and at night on the far promontories of the Downs bonfires were to be lighted. I have no doubt signals flared from them when the Romans were baffled. Again to-night they would signal that the latest enemy had been vanquished.
It was raining gently, and from our own crestthe lower and outer night was void. A touch of distant phosphorescence that waned, and intensified again to a strong white glow, presently gave the void one far and lonely hilltop. A cloud elsewhere appeared out of nothing, and persisted, a lenticular spectre of dull fire. These aerial spectres became a host; some were so far away that they were faint smears of orange, and others so near and great that they pulsed and revealed the shapes of the clouds. It was all impersonal, it was England itself that was reflected, the hills that had awakened. It was the emanation of a worthy tradition, older than ourselves, that was re-kindled and was glowing, and that would be here when we are not. It was so receptive, it was so spacious, that our gravest memories could abide there, as if night were kind to the secrets we dare not voice, and understood folly and remorse, and could protect our better visions, and had sanctuary and consolation for that grief which looks to what might have been, but now can never be.
A spark glittered near, a spark that towered and hovered overhead, and burst into coiling volumes of lurid smoke with a moving heart of flame. Light broke on a neighbouring hill that had been unseen and forgotten; the hill was crowned withfantastic trees that danced, and a wavering tower. From our own valley below there came a vicious tearing that gave me a momentary chill (so sounds a stream of machine-gun lead, going over), and a group of coloured stars expanded over us. Their bright light showed the night reticulated with thin lines of smoke, like veins of calcite in a canopy of black marble. Our immediate country, pallid and tremulous, faded again, but in that brief prospect of a shadow land I glimpsed a road, the presentment of the long road to Bapaume. So the Bapaume road showed at night by inconsequential and unexpected lights. That hill-crest of leaping trees could be the ridge of Loupart with its wood, and Achete in flames beyond. The notion gave me enough of our hill top. I descended from it.
There is a public-house at the foot of the hill, and a lane of harsh noises and a beam of light projected together from its open door across the road. Beyond it I turned into a house, for I knew I should find there an aged and solitary man who would have his own thoughts on such a night as this; for he had a son, and the spectre of the Bapaume road had reminded me where that boy was celebrating whatever peace he knew. His father was not communicative; and what could Isay? He sat, answering me distantly and austerely, and he might have been a bearded sage seeing in retrospect a world he had long known, and who at last had made up his mind about it, though he would not tell me what that was. Outside we could hear revellers approaching. They paused at our door; their feet began to shuffle, and they sang: