0217m
0208m
My neighbour at the breakfast table complained that he had had a bad night. What with the gale and the crash of the seas, and the creaking of the timbers of the ship and the pair in the next cabin—especially the pair in the next cabin.... How they talked! It was two o'clock before they sank into silence. And such revelations! He couldn't help overhearing them. He was alone in his cabin, and what was he to do? He couldn't talk to himself to let them know they were being overheard. And he didn't sing. And he hadn't a cough. And, in short, there was nothing for it but to overhear. And the things he heard—well.... And with a gesture of head, hands, and eyebrows he left it to me to imagine the worst. I suggested that he might cure the trouble by telling the steward to give the couple a hint that the next cabin was occupied. He received the idea as a possible way out of a painful and delicate situation. Strange, he said, it had not occurred to him.
Whether he adopted it I do not know. If I did I should know a very important thing about him. It would give me the clue to the whole man. It would tell me whether he was a willing or an unwilling eavesdropper, and there are few more searching tests of character than this. We are not to be catalogued by what we do in the open. We are all of us proper enough when we walk abroad and play our part in society. It is not our public hearing which reveals the sort of fellows we are. It only indicates the kind of fellows we desire the world to take us to be. We want the world's good opinion, and when we go out we put on our company manners as we put on our best clothes in order to win it. No one would put his ear to a keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the keyhole behind him watching him in the act. The true estimate of your character (and mine) depends on what we should do if we knew there was no keyhole behind us. It depends, not on whether you are chivalrous to some one else's wife in public, but whether you are chivalrous to your own wife in private. The eminent judge who, checking himself in a torrent of abuse of his partner at whist, contritely observed, “I beg your pardon, madam; I thought you were my wife,” did not improve matters. He only lifted the curtain of a rather shabby private cabin. He white-washed himself publicly out of his dirty private pail.
Or, to take another sounding, what happens when you find yourself in the quiet and undisturbed presence of other people's open letters? Perhaps you have accidentally put on your son's jacket and discovered the pockets bulging with letters. Your curiosity is excited: your parental concern is awakened. It is not unnatural to be interested in your own son. It is natural and proper. You can summon up a score of convincing and weighty reasons why you should dip into those letters. You know that all those respectable reasons would become disreputable if you heard young John's step approaching. You know that this very reasonable display of paternal interest would suddenly become a mean act of prying of which you would be ashamed to be thought capable. But young John is miles off—perhaps down in the city, perhaps far away in the country. You are left alone with his letters and your own sense of decency. You can read the letters in perfect safety. If there are secrets in them you can share them. Not a soul will ever find you out. You may be entitled to know those secrets, and young John may be benefited by your knowing them. What do you do in these circumstances? The answer will provide you with a fairly reliable tape measure for your own spiritual contents.
There is no discredit in being curious about the people in the next Cabin. We are all curious about our neighbours. In his fable of “Le Diable Boiteux,” Lesage tells how the devil transported him from one house to another, lifted the roof, and showed what was going on inside, with very surprising and entertaining results. If the devil, in the guise of a very civil gentleman, paid me a call this evening, and offered to do the same for me, offered to spirit me over Hampstead and lift with magic and inaudible touch any roof I fancied, and show me the mysteries and privacies of my neighbours' lives, I hope I should have the decency to thank him and send him away. The amusement would be purchased at too high a price. It might not do my neighbours any harm, but it would do me a lot of harm. For, after all, the important thing is not that we should be able, like the honest blacksmith, to look the whole world in the face, but that we should be able to look ourselves in the face. And it is our private standard of conduct and not our public standard of conduct which gives or denies us that privilege. We are merely counterfeit coin if our respect for the Eleventh Commandment only applies to being found out by other people. It is being found out by ourselves that ought to hurt us.
It is the private cabin side of us that really matters. I could pass a tolerably good examination on my public behaviour. I have never committed a murder, or a burglary. I have never picked a pocket, or forged a cheque. But these things are not evidence of good character. They may only mean that I never had enough honest indignation to commit a murder, nor enough courage to break into a house. They may only mean that I never needed to forge a cheque or pick a pocket. They may only mean that I am afraid of the police. Respect for the law is a testimonial that will not go far in the Valley of Jehosophat. The question that will be asked of me there is not whether I picked my neighbour's lock, but whether I put my ear to his keyhole; not whether I pocketed the bank note he had left on his desk, but whether I read his letters when his back was turned—in short, not whether I had respect for the law, but whether I had respect for myself and the sanctities that are outside the vulgar sphere of the law. It is what went on in my private cabin which will probably be my undoing.
0222m
0223m
To-day I am among the demobilised. I have put off the harness of a lifetime and am a person at large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that is told, a rumour on the wind; a memory of far-off things and battles long ago. At this hour I fancy it is getting into its nightly paroxysm. There is the thunder of machinery below, the rattle of linotypes above, the click-click-click of the tape machine, the tapping of telegraph operators, the tinkling of telephones, the ringing of bells for messengers who tarry, reporters coming in with “stories” or without “stories,” leader-writers writing for dear life and wondering whether they will beat the clock and what will happen if they don't, night editors planning their pages as a shopman dresses his shop window, sub-editors breasting the torrent of “flimsies” that flows in from the ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and the other. I hear the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit might hear the murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as a policeman must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the Strand submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his glory departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in the middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the visible embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the strong arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand and the waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was a personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He could stop Sir Gorgius Midas' Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross the street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk to the cook through the area railings without suspicion of impropriety. His cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars of the Constitution, and his truncheon was as indispensable as a field-marshal's baton.
And now he is even as one of the crowd that he had ruled, a saunterer on the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible wayfarer. No longer can he make a pathway through the torrent of the Strand for the nurse-maid to walk across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal converse with ex-Ministers. Even “J. B.,” who has never been known to pass a policeman without a gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who had once lived under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in Piccadilly Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the gates or in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this vanished magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is free, independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions. He can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his hand, but he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or Tooting, or Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look in the shop windows, or turn into the “pictures” or go home to tea. He can light his pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as he pleases. He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a realm where the clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes without stirring his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will not care.
And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock and take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me as my own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager, jostling life until I have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I have heard its chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with the swanking swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of its unceasing life during every hour of the twenty-four—in the afternoon when the pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers are crossing to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the air is shrill with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the tide of the day's life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to work, and the telegraph boys flit from door to door with their tidings of the world's happenings; in the small hours when the great lorries come thundering up the side streets with their mountains of papers and rattle through the sleeping city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the flag of morn in sovereign state floats over the dome of the great Cathedral that looks down so grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. “I see it arl so plainly as I saw et, long ago.” I have worn its paving stones as industriously as Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies as one who had the run of the estate and the freeman's right. I have known itshabituesas familiarly as if they had belonged to my own household, and its multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have drunk the solemn toast with the White-friars o' Friday nights, and taken counsel with the lawyers in the Temple, and wandered in its green and cloistered calm in the hot afternoons, and written thousands of leaders and millions of words on this, that, and the other, wise words and foolish words, and words without any particular quality at all, except that they filled up space, and have had many friendships and fought many battles, winning some and losing others, and have seen the generations go by, and the young fellows grow into old fellows who scan a little severely the new race of ardent boys that come along so gaily to the enchanted street and are doomed to grow old and weary in its service also. And at the end it has come to be a street of ghosts—a street of memories, with faces that I knew lurking in its shadows and peopling its rooms and mingling with the moving pageant that seems like a phantom too.
Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with the rest. Like the Chambered Nautilus, I
... seal up the idle door,
Stretch in my new found home and know the old no more.
I may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape at its wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no more. No more shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual footsteps. No more shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had always “gone out to supper, sir,” or been called to the news-room or sent on an errand. No more shall I cower nightly before that tyrannous clock that ticked so much faster than I wrote. The galley proofs will come down from above like snow, but I shall not con them. The tumults of the world will boil in like the roar of many waters, but I shall not hear them. For I have come into the inheritance of leisure. Time, that has lorded it over me so long, is henceforth my slave, and the future stretches before me like an infinite green pasture in which I can wander till the sun sets. I shall let the legions thunder by while I tend my bees and water my plants, and mark how my celery grows and how the apples ripen.
And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old book, or in the chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one from the great noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall tell him a tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in his orchard when there came to him from the distant capital two envoys, bearing an urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place in the Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely to their plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of water, took a spongeand washed out his ears.
0228m
0229m
When I awoke this morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the valley and the beech woods glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and heard the ducks clamouring for their breakfast, and felt all the kindly intimacies of life coming back in a flood for the new day, I felt, as the Americans say, “good.” Waking up is always—given a clear conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy faculty of sleep—a joyous experience. It has the pleasing excitement with which the tuning up of the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the symphony affects you. It is like starting out for a new adventure, or coming into an unexpected inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling suddenly upon some author whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes to your heart like a brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden and beautiful and full of promise.
But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is now that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does not diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into the future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking to each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over, that the years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining and the birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going forth to their labour until the evening without fear and without hate. As the day advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find it is very much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment when you step over the threshold of sleep into the living world the revelation is simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed. The devil is dead. The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the earth. You recall the far different emotions of a few brief months ago when the morning sun woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling of the birds seemed pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the paper spoiled your breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the Kaiser. Poor wretch, he is waking, too, probably about this time and wondering what will happen to him before nightfall, wondering where he will spend the miserable remnant of his days, wondering whether his great ancestor's habit of carrying a dose of poison was not after all a practice worth thinking about. He wanted the whole, earth, and now he is discovering that he is entitled to just six feet of it—the same as the lowliest peasant in his land. “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests,” but there is neither hole nor nest where he will be welcome. There is not much joy for him in waking to a new day.
But perhaps he doesn't wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has “murdered Sleep,” and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose a crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to enter the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease of life after our present lease had run out and were told that we could nominate our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor an earldom, nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my childhood when I thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin man, eternally perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a basket on my head and shouting “Muffins,” in the ears of a delighted populace. I loved muffins and I loved bells, and here was a man who had those joys about him all day long and every day. But now my ambitions are more restrained. I would no more wish to be born a muffin man than a poet or an Archbishop. The first gift I should ask would be something modest. It would be the faculty of sleeping eight solid hours every night, and waking each morning with the sense of unfathomable and illimitable content with which I opened my eyes to the world to-day.
All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put eating first, “for,” said he, “there is no other pleasure that comes three times a day and lasts an hour each time.” But sleep lasts eight hours. It fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it fills it up with the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom of democracy. “All equal are within the church's gate,” said George Herbert. It may have been so in George Herbert's parish; but it is hardly so in most parishes. It is true of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you enter its portals all discriminations vanish, and Hodge and his master, the prince and the pauper, are alike clothed in the royal purple and inherit the same golden realm. There is more harmony and equality in life than wre are apt to admit. For a good twenty-five years of our seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an agreement that is simply wonderful.
And the joy of waking up is not less generously distributed. What delight is there like throwing off the enchantment of sleep and seeing the sunlight streaming in at the window and hearing the happy jangle of the birds, or looking out on the snow-covered landscape in winter, or the cherry blossom in spring, or the golden fields of harvest time, or (as now) upon the smouldering fires of the autumn woodlands? Perhaps the day will be as thorny and full of disappointments and disillusions as any that have gone before. But no matter. In this wonder of waking there is eternal renewal of the spirit, the inexhaustible promise of the best that is still to come, the joy of the new birth that experience cannot stale nor familiarity make tame.
That singer of our time, who has caught most perfectly the artless note of the birds themselves, has uttered the spirit of joyous waking that all must feel on this exultant morning—
Good morning, Life—and all
Things glad and beautiful.
My pockets nothing hold,
But he that owns the gold,
The Sun, is my great friend—
His spending has no end.
Let us up, brothers, and greet the sun and hear the ringing of the bells. There has not been such royal waking since the world began.
It is an agreeable fancy of some that eternity itself will be a thing of sleep and happy awakenings. It is a cheerful faith that solves a certain perplexity. For however much we cling to the idea of immortality, we can hardly escape an occasional feeling of concern as to how we shall get through it. We shall not “get through it,” of course, but speech is only fashioned for finite things. Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have had a sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror of a dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose love and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this perplexity the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. An eternity of happy awakenings would be a pleasant compromise between being and not being. I can conceive no more agreeable lot through eternity, than
To dream as I may,
And awake when I will,
With the song of the bird,
And the sun on the hill.
Was it not Wilfred Scawen Blunt who contemplated an eternity in which, once in a hundred years, he would wake and say, “Are you there, beloved?” and hear the reply, “Yes, beloved, I am here,” and with that sweet assurance lapse into another century of forgetfulness? The tenderness and beauty of the idea were effectually desecrated by Alfred Austin, whom some one in a jest made Poet Laureate. “For my part,” he said, “I should like to wake once in a hundred years and hear news of another victory for the British Empire.” It would not be easy to invent a more perfect contrast between the feeling of a poet and the simulated passion of a professional patriot. He did not really think that, of course. He was simply a timid, amiable little man who thought it was heroic and patriotic to think that. He had so habituated his tiny talent to strutting about in the grotesque disguise of a swashbuckler that it had lost all touch with the primal emotions of poetry. Forgive me for intruding him upon the theme. The happy awakenings of eternity must outsoar the shadow of our night, its slayings and its vulgar patriotisms. If they do not do that, it will be better to sleep on.
0235m
0236m
Aweekly paper has been asking well-known people what books they re-read. The most pathetic reply made to the inquiry is that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “I seldom re-read now,” says that unhappy man. “Time is so short and literature so vast and unexplored.” What a desolating picture! It is like saying, “I never meet my old friends now. Time is so short and there are so many strangers I have not yet shaken hands with.” I see the poor man, hot and breathless, scurrying over the “vast and unexplored” fields of literature, shaking hands and saying, “How d'ye do?” to everybody he meets and reaching the end of his journey, impoverished and pitiable, like the peasant in Tolstoi's “How much land does a man need?”
I rejoice to say that I have no passion for shaking hands with strangers. I do not yearn for vast unexplored regions. I take the North Pole and the South, the Sahara and the Karoo for granted. As Johnson said of the Giant's Causeway, I should like to see them, but I should not liketo goto see them. And so with books. Time is so short that I have none to spare for keeping abreast with the circulating library. I could almost say with the Frenchman that when I see that a new book is published I read an old one. I am always in the rearward of the fashion, and a book has to weather the storms of its maiden voyage before I embark on it. When it has proved itself seaworthy I will go aboard; but meanwhile the old ships are good enough for me. I know the captain and the crew, the fare I shall get and the port I shall make and the companionship I shall have by the way.
Look at this row of fellows in front of me as I write—Boswell, “The Bible in Spain,” Pepys, Horace, “Elia,” Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, “Travels with a Donkey,” Plutarch, Thucydides, Wordsworth, “The Early Life of Charles James Fox,”
“Under the Greenwood Tree,” and so on. Do not call them books.
Camerado, this is no book.
Who touches this, touches a man,
as Walt Whitman said of his own “Leaves of Grass.” They are not books. They are my friends. They are the splendid wayfarers I have met on my pilgrimage, and they are going on with me to the end. It was worth making the great adventure of life to find such company. Come revolutions and bereavements, come storm and tempest, come war or peace, gain or loss—these friends shall endure through all the vicissitudes of the journey. The friends of the flesh fall away, grow cold, are estranged, die, but these friends of the spirit are not touched with mortality. They were not born for death, no hungry generations tread them down, and with their immortal wisdom and laughter they give us the password to the eternal. You can no more exhaust them than you can exhaust the sunrise or the sunset, the joyous melody of Mozart or Scarlatti, the cool serenity of Velasquez or any other thing of beauty. They are a part of ourselves, and through their noble fellowship we are made freemen of the kingdoms of the mind—
... rich as the oozy bottom of the deep
In sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
We do not say we have read these books: we say that we live in communion with these spirits.
I am not one who wants that communion to be too exclusive. When my old friend Peter Lane shook the dust of Fleet Street off his feet for ever and went down into the country he took Horace with him, and there he sits in his garden listening to an enchantment that never grows stale. It is a way Horace has. He takes men captive, as Falstaff took Bardolph captive. They cannot see the swallows gathering for their southern flight without thinking that they are going to breathe the air that Horace breathed, and asking them to carry some such message as John Marshall's:
Tell him, bird,
That if there be a Heaven where he is not,
One man at least seeks not admittance there.
This is not companionship. This is idolatry. I should be sorry to miss the figure of Horace—short and fat, according to Suetonius—in the fields of asphodel, but there are others I shall look for with equal animation and whose footsteps I shall dog with equal industry. Meanwhile, so long as my etheric body, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would say, is imprisoned in the flesh I shall go on reading and re-reading the books in which their spirits live, leaving the vast and unexplored tracts of the desert to those who like deserts.
Acorrespondent asked me the other day to make him out a list of Twelve Books that he ought to read. I declined the task in that form. I did not know what he had read, and I did not know what his tastes or his needs were, and even with that knowledge I should hesitate to prescribe for another. But I compromised with him by prescribing for myself. I assumed that for some offence against D.O.R.A. I was to be cast ashore on a desert island out in the Pacific, where I was to be left in solitude for twelve months, or perhaps never to be called for at all, and that as a mitigation of the penalty I was to be permitted to carry with me twelve books of my own choosing. On what principles should I set about so momentous a choice?
In the first place I decided that they must be books of the inexhaustible kind. Rowland Hill said that “the love of God was like a generous roast of beef—you could cut and come again.” That must be the first quality of my Twelve Books. They must be books that one could go on reading and re-reading as interminably as the old apple-woman in Borrow went on reading “Moll Flanders.” If only her son had known that immortal book, she said, he would never have got transported for life. That was the sort of book I must have with me on my desert island. But my choice would be different from that of the old apple-woman of Old London Bridge. I dismissed all novels from my consideration. Even the best of novels are exhaustible, and if I admitted novels at all my bundle of books would be complete before I had made a start with the essentials, for I should want “Tristram Shandy” and “Tom Jones,” two or three of Scott's, Gogol's “Dead Souls,” “David Copperfield,” “Evan Harrington,” “The Brothers Karamazoff,” “Père Goriot,” “War and Peace,” “The Three Musketeers,” all of Hardy's, “Treasure Island,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “Silas Marner,” “Don Quixote,” the “Cloister and the Hearth,” “Esmond”—no, no, it would never do to include novels. They must be left behind.
The obvious beginning would have been the Bible and Shakespeare, but these had been conceded not as a luxury but as a necessity, and did not come in the scope of my Twelve. History I must have on the grand scale, so that I can carry the story of the past with me into exile. I have no doubt about my first choice here. Thucydides (I) is as easily first among the historians as Sirius is first among the stars. To read him by the lightnings of to-day is to read him with a freshness and understanding that have the excitement of contemporary comment. The gulf of twenty-three centuries is miraculously bridged, and you pass to and fro, as it were, from the mighty European drama of to-day to the mighty drama of ancient Greece, encountering the same emotions and agonies, the same ambitions, the same plots and counter-plots, the same villains, and the same heroes. Yes, Thucydides of course.
And Plutarch (2) almost equally of course. What portrait gallery is there to compare with his? What a mine of legend and anecdote, history and philosophy, wisdom and superstition. I am less clear when I come to the story of Rome. Shall I put in the stately Gibbon, the learned Mommsen, or the lively, almost journalistic Ferrero? It is a hard choice. I shut my eyes and take pot luck. Ferrero (3) is it? Well, I make no complaint. And then I will have those three fat volumes of Motley's, “Rise of the Dutch Republic” (4) put in my boat, please, and—yes, Carlyle's “French Revolution” (5), which is history and drama and poetry and fiction all in one. And, since I must take the story of my own land with me, just throw in Green's “Short History” (6). It is lovable for its serene and gracious temper as much as for its story.
That's as much history as I can afford, for I must leave room for the more personal companions who will talk to me like old friends and keep the fires of human contact ablaze on my solitary isle. First, of course, there is Boswell (7), and next there is Pepys (8), (Wheatley's edition, for there only is the real Samuel revealed “wart and all”). I should like to take “Elia” and that rascal Benvenuto Cellini; but I must limit my personal following to three, and on the whole I think the third place must be reserved for old Montaigne (9), for I could not do without that frank, sagacious, illuminated mind in my little fellowship. Akin to these good fellows I must have the picaresque Borrow to lend the quality of open-air romance to the comradeship, and shutting my eyes once more I choose indifferently from the pile, for I haven't the heart to make a choice between the “Bible in Spain,” “The Romany Rye,” “Lavengro,” and “Wild Wales.” But I rejoice when I find that “Lavengro” (10) is in the boat.
I can have only one poet, but that makes the choice easy. If I could have had half a dozen the choice would have been hard; but when it is Wordsworth (11)contra mundum, I have no doubt. He is the man who will “soothe and heal and bless.” My last selection shall be given to a work of travel and adventure. I reduce the area of choice to Hakluyt's “Voyages” and the “Voyage of the Beagle,” and while I am balancing their claims the “Beagle” (12) slips out of my hand into the boat. My library is complete. And so, spread the sails to the wind and away for the Pacific.
0243m
The snow has gone from the landscape and the sun, at the hour of setting, has got round to the wood that crowns the hill on the other side of the valley. Soon it will set on the slope of the hill and then down on the plain. Then we shall know that spring has come. Two days ago a blackbird, from the paddock below the orchard, added his golden baritone to the tenor of the thrush who had been shouting good news from the beech tree across the road for weeks past. I don't know why the thrush should glimpse the dawn of the year before the blackbird, unless it is that his habit of choosing the topmost branches of the tree gives him a better view of the world than that which the golden-throated fellow gets on the lower branches that he always affects. It may be the same habit of living in the top storey that accounts for the early activity of the rooks. They are noisy neighbours, but never so noisy as in these late February days, when they are breaking up into families and quarrelling over their slatternly household arrangements in the topmost branches of the elm trees. They are comic ruffians who wash all their dirty linen in public, and seem almost as disorderly and bad-tempered as the human family itself. If they had only a little of our ingenuity in mutual slaughter there would be no need for my friend the farmer to light bonfires underneath the trees in order to drive the female from the eggs and save his crops.
A much more amiable little fellow, the great tit, has just added his modest assurance that spring is coming. He is not much of a singer, but he is good hearing to anyone whose thoughts are turning to his garden and the pests that lurk therein for the undoing of his toil. The tit is as industrious a worker in the garden as the starling, and, unlike the starling, he has no taste for my cherries. A pair of blue tits have been observed to carry a caterpillar to their nest, on an average every two minutes for the greater part of the day. That is the sort of bird that deserves encouragement—a bird that loves caterpillars and does not love cherries. There are very few creatures with so clean a record. So hang out the cocoanut as a sign of goodwill.
And yet, as I write, I am reminded that in this imperfect world where no unmixed blessing is vouchsafed to us, even the tit does not escape the general law of qualified beneficence. For an hour past I have been agreeably aware of the proximity of a great tit who, from a hedge below the orchard, has been singing his little see-saw song with unremitting industry. Now behold him. There he goes flitting and pirouetting with that innocent grace which, as he skips in and out of the hedge just in front of you, suggests that he is inviting you to a game of hide-and-seek. But not now. Now he is revealing the evil that dwells in the best of us. Now he reminds us that he too is a part of that nature which feeds so relentlessly on itself. See him over the hives, glancing about in his own erratic way and taking his bearings. Then, certain that the coast is clear, he nips down and taps upon one of the hives with his beak. He skips away to await results. The trick succeeds; the doorkeeper of the hive comes out to enquire into the disturbance, and down swoops the great tit and away he flies with his capture. An artful fellow in spite of his air of innocence.
There is no affectation of innocence about that robust fellow the starling. He is almost as candid a ruffian as the rook, and three months hence I shall hate him with an intensity that would match Caligula's “Oh, that the Romans had only one neck!” For then he will come out of the beech woods on the hillside for his great annual spring offensive against my cherry trees, and in two or three days he will leave them an obscene picture of devastation, every twig with its desecrated fruit and the stones left bleaching in the sun. But in these days of February I can be just even to my enemy. I can admit without reserve that he is not all bad any more than the other winsome little fellow is all good. See him on autumn or winter days when he has mobilised his forces for his forages in the fields, and is carrying out those wonderful evolutions in the sky that are such a miracle of order and rhythm. Far off, the cloud approaches like a swirl of dust in the sky, expanding, contracting, changing formation, breaking up into battalions, merging into columns, opening out on a wide front, throwing out flanks and advance guards and rear guards, every complication unravelled in perfect order, every movement as serene and assured as if the whole cloud moved to the beat of some invisible conductor below—a very symphony of the air, in which motion merges into music, until it seems that you are not watching a flight of birds, but listening with the inner ear to great waves of soundless harmony. And then, the overture over, down the cloud descends upon the fields, and the farmers' pests vanish before the invasion. And if you will follow them into the fields you will find infinite tiny holes that they have drilled and from which they have extracted the lurking enemy of the drops, and you will remember that it is to their beneficial activities that we owe the extermination of the May beetle, whose devastations were so menacing a generation ago. And after the flock has broken up and he has paired, and the responsibilities of housekeeping have begun he continues his worthy labours. When spring has come you can see him dart from his nest in the hollow of the tree and make a journey a minute to the neighbouring field, returning each time with a chafer-grub or a wire-worm or some other succulent, but pestiferous morsel for the young and clamorous family at home. That acute observer, Mr G. G. Desmond, says that he has counted eighteen such journeys in fifteen minutes. What matter a few cherries for a fellow of such benignant spirit?
But wait, my dear sir, wait until June brings the ripening cherries and see how much of this magnanimity of February is left.
Sir, I refuse to be intimidated by June or any other consideration. Sufficient unto the day—— And to-day I will think only good of the sturdy fellow in the coat of mail. To-day I will think only of the brave news that is abroad. It has got into the hives. On fine days such as this stray bees sail out for water, bringing the agreeable tidings that all is well within, that the queen bee is laying her eggs, “according to plan,” and that moisture is wanted in the hive. There are a score of hives in the orchard, and they have all weathered the winter and its perils. We saw the traces of one of those perils when the snow still lay on the ground. Around each hive were the footmarks of a mouse. He had come from a neighbouring hedge, visited each hive in turn, found there was no admission and had returned to the hedge no doubt hungrier than he came. Poor little wretch! to be near such riches, lashings of sweetness and great boulders of wax, and not be able to get bite or sup. I see him trotting back through the snow to his hole, a very dejected mouse. Oh, these new-fangled hives that don't give a fellow a chance.
In the garden the news is coming up from below, borne by those unfailing outriders of the spring, the snowdrop and the winter aconite. A modest company; but in their pennons is the assurance of the many-coloured host that is falling unseen into the vast pageant of summer and will fill the woods with the trumpets of the harebell and the wild hyacinth, and make the hedges burst into foam, and the orchard a glory of pink and white, and the ditches heavy with the scent of the meadowsweet, and the fields golden with harvest and the gardens a riot of luxuriant life. I said it was all right, chirps little red waistcoat from the fence—all the winter I've told you that there was a good time coming and now you see for yourself. Look at those flowers. Ain't they real? The philosopher in the red waistcoat is perfectly right. He has kept his end up all through the winter, and has taken us into his fullest confidence. Formerly he never came beyond the kitchen, but this winter when the snow was about he advanced to the parlour where he pottered about like one of the family. Now, however, with the great news outside and the earth full of good things to pick up, he has no time to call.
Even up in the woods that are still gaunt with winter and silent, save for the ringing strokes of the woodcutters in some distant clearing, the message is borne in the wind that comes out of the west at the dawn of the spring, and is as unlike the wind of autumn as the spirit of the sunrise is unlike the spirit of the sunset. It is the lusty breath of life coming back to the dead earth, and making these February days the most thrilling of the year. For in these expanding skies and tremors of life and unsealings of the secret springs of nature all is promise and hope, and nothing is for regret and lament. It is when fulfilment comes that the joy of possession is touched with the shadow of parting. The cherry blossom comes like a wonder and goes like a dream, carrying the spring with it, and the dirge of summer itself is implicit in the scent of the lime trees and the failing note of the cuckoo. But in these days of birth when
“Youth, inexpressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose.”
there is no hint of mortality and no reverted glance. The curtain is rising and the pageant is all before us.