A REAPING

BY E. F. BENSON

THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN
AND NEW YORK

TO
LADY EVELYN LISTER

C O N T E N T S

A REAPING

JUNE

OF all subjects under or over the sun, there is none perhaps, even including bimetallism, or the lengthy description of golf-links which one has never seen, so utterly below possible zones of interest as that of health. Health, of course, matters quite enormously to the individual, but nobody with good health ever gives two thoughts (far less one word) to the subject. Nobody, in fact, begins to think about health until his own begins to be inferior. But, then, as if that was not bad enough, he at once clubs and belabours his unhappy friends with its inferiority. It becomes to him the one affair of absorbing importance. Emperors may be assassinated, Governments may crumble, it may even be 92 degrees in the shade, but he recks nothing of those colossal things. He ate strawberries yesterday, and has had a bilious headache almost ever since. And the world ceases to revolve round the sun, and the moon is turned to blood, or ashes—I forget which.

But the real invalid, just like the man who enjoys real health, never talks about such matters. It is only to the amateur in disease that they are of the smallest interest. The man who is well never thinks about his health, and certainly never mentions it; to the man who is really ill some divine sense of irresponsibility is given. He brushes it aside, just as one brushes aside any innate inability; with common courage—how lavishly is beautiful gift given to whomever really needs it—he makes the best of other things.

These poignant though obvious reflections are the outcome of what occurred this evening. I sat between two friends at dinner, both of them people in whom one’s heart rejoices. But one of them is obsessed just now with this devil of health-seeking. The other has long ago given up the notion of seeking for health at all, for it is not for her. She faces incurable with gaiety. So I have to record two conversations, the worse first.

‘Oh, I always have ten minutes’ deep-breathing every morning. It is the only way I can get enough air. You have to lie on your back, you know, and stop one nostril with your finger, while you breathe in slowly through the other; and you should do it near an open window. There is no fear of catching cold, or if you do I can send you a wonderful prescription.... Then you breathe out through the other nostril. I wish you would try it; it makes the whole difference. No, thanks, caviare is poison to me!’

‘Well, so is arsenic to me,’ I said. ‘But why say so?’

(It did not sound quite so brusque as it looks when written down, and native modesty prevents my explaining how abjectly patient I had been up till then.)

Then there came the reshifting of conversation, and we started again, with change of partners.

‘I do hope you will come to see us again in August,’ said the quiet, pleasant voice. ‘I shall go up to Scotland at the end of the month. Your beloved river should be in order: there has been heaps of rain.’

But I could not help asking another question.

‘Ah, then they let you go there?’ I said.

She laughed gently.

‘No, that is just what they don’t do,’ she said. ‘But I am going. What does it matter if one hastens it by a few weeks? I am going to shorten it probably by a few weeks, but instead of having six tiresome months on board a yacht, I am going to have rather fewer months among all the things I love. Oh, Dick quite agrees with me. Do let’s talk about something more interesting. Did you hear “Tristan” the other night? No? Richter conducted. He is such a splendid Isolde! There is no one to approach him!’

There, there was the glory of it! And how that little tiny joke about Richter touched the heart! Here on one side was a woman dying, and she knew it, but the wonder and the pleasure of the world was intensely hers. There, on the other, was the excellent Mrs. Armstrong. She could not think about the opera or anything else except her absurd deep-breathing and her ridiculous liver. Nobody else did; nobody cared. Even now I could hear her explaining to her left-hand neighbour that next to deep-breathing, the really important thing is to drink a glass of water in the middle of the morning. Slowly, of course, in sips. And she proceeded to describe what the water did. Well, I suppose I am old-fashioned, but I could no more think of discussing these intimate matters at the dinner-table than I should think of performing my toilet there. Besides—and this is perhaps the most unanswerable objection to doing so—besides being slightly disgusting, it is so immensely dull!

However, on the other side there was a topic as entrancing as the other was tedious, and in two minutes my other neighbour and I were deep in the fascinating inquiry as to how far a conductor—a supreme conductor—identified himself with the characters of the opera. Certainly the phrase ‘Richter is such a splendid Isolde’ was an alluring theme, and by degrees it spread round the corner of the table (we were sitting close to it), and was taken up opposite, when a member of the Purcell Society gave vent to the highly interesting observation that the conductor had practically nothing to do with the singers, and was no more than a sort of visible metronome put there for the guidance of the orchestra. It was impossible not to retort that the last performance of the Purcell Society completely confirmed the truth of that view of the conductor. Indeed, the chorus hardly thought of him even as a metronome. Or else, perhaps, they were deaf, which would account for their sinking a tone and a half; in fact there were flowers of speech on the subject.

But how extraordinary a thing (taking the view, that is to say, that a conductor conceivably does more than beat time) is this transference of emotion, so that first of all Wagner, by means of merely black notes and words on white paper, can inspire the conductor with that tragedy of love which years ago, he wove out of the sunlight and lagoons of Venice; that, secondly, the conductor can enter into that mysterious and mystical union with his band and his singers, and reflect his own mood on them so strongly that from throat or strings or wailing of flutes they give us, who sit and listen, what the conductor bade them read into the music, so that all, bassoons and double-bass, flutes and strings, trumpets and oboes and horns, become the spiritual mirror of his emotion. By means of that little baton, by the beckoning of his fingers, he pulls out from them the music which is in his own soul, makes it communicable to them. Indeed, we need not go to the Society for Psychical Research for experiments in thought-transference, for here is an instance of it (unless, indeed, we take the view of this member of the Purcell Society) far more magical, far further uplifted out of the sphere of things which we think we can explain. For the mere degrees of loud or soft, mere alterations in tempo, are, of course, less than the ABC of the conductor’s office. His real work, the exercise of his real power, lies remote from, though doubtless connected with them. And of that we can explain nothing whatever. He obsesses every member of his orchestra so that by a motion of his hand he gets the same quality of tone from every member of it. For apart from the mere loudness and the mere time of any passage, there are probably an infinite number of ways of playing each note. Yet at his bidding every single member of the band plays it the same way. It is his thought they all make audible with a hundred instruments which have all one tone; else, how does that unity reach us sitting in our stalls?

That is the eternal mystery of music, which alone of the arts deals with its materials direct. It is not an imitation of sound, but sound itself, the employment of the actual waves of air that are the whistle of the wind, and the crash of breakers, and the love-song of nightingales. All other branches of art deal only second-hand; they but give us an imitation of what they wish to represent. The pictorial artist can do no more than lay a splash of pigment from a leaden tube on to his canvas when he wishes to speak to us of sunlight; he can only touch an eye with a reflection in its corner to show grief, or take a little from the size of the pupil to produce in us who look the feeling of terror that contracts it. Similarly, too, the sculptor has to render the soft swell of a woman’s bosom in marble, as if it was on marble a man would pillow his head. It is all a translation, a rendering in another material, of the image that fills us with love or pity, or the open-air intoxication of an April morning. But the musician works first-hand; the intangible waves of air, not a representation of them, are his material. It is not with a pigment of sound, so to speak, that the violins shiver, or the trumpets tell us that the gods are entering Valhalla. Music deals with sound itself, with the whisper that went round the formless void when God said, ‘Let there be light,’ with all that makes this delicate orchestra of the world, no copy of it, no translation of it, but it itself.

And for the time being, while the curtain is up, the control of these forces, their wail and their triumph, belongs to the conductor. He gives them birth in the strings and the wind; he by the movement of a hand makes them express all that sound expressed to the magician who first mapped them on his paper. Indeed, he does more; he interprets them through his own personality, giving them, as it were, an extra dip in the bath of life, so that their colours are more brilliant, more vital of hue. Or is the member of the Purcell Society right, and is the man who gives us this wonderful Isolde only a metronome?

It is often said that the deaf are far more lonely, far more remotely sundered from the world we know, than are the blind. It is impossible to imagine that this should not be so, for it is not only the sounds that we know we hear, but the sounds of which for the most part we are unconscious, that form the link between us and external things. It commonly happens, as in the dark, that we are cut off from all exercise of the eyes, and yet at such moments we have not been very conscious of loneliness. But it is rare that we are cut off from all sound, and the loneliness of that isolation is indescribable. It happened to me once in the golden desert to the west of Luxor, above the limestone cliffs that rise from the valley where the Kings of Egypt lie entombed.

I had sat down on the topmost bluff of these cliffs, having tethered my donkey down below, for the way was too steep for him, and for several minutes observed my surroundings with extreme complacency. Below me lay the grey limestone cliffs, but where I sat a wave of the desert had broken, and the immediate foreground was golden sand. Farther away, in all hues of peacock green, lay the strip of cultivated land, and beyond, the steel blue of the ancient and mysterious river. It was early yet in the afternoon, and the sun still high, so that the whole land glittered in this glorious high festival of light and colour. And, looking at the imperishable monuments of that eternal civilization, it seemed that one could not desire a more convincing example of the kindliness of the circling seasons, of the beneficence that overlooked the world from generation to generation, so that man might well say that this treasure-house of the earth was inexhaustible. No breeze of any sort was stirring, but the air, pure, hot, invigorating, was absolutely still. But at that moment I suddenly felt as if something was dreadfully wrong, though I did not at once guess what it was. Then came the thought, the identification of what was wrong: it seemed as if the world was dead; then came the reason for it: it was because there was no sound. For a moment I listened in order to verify this—listened with poised breath and immovable limbs. Yes, I was right: there was no sound of anything at all; for once the ears were deprived of the delicate orchestra that goes up, a hymn of praise, day and night from the earth. It was like a dreadful nightmare.

I first tried coughing, to see if that would be companionable, but that did not do; I coughed, and then silence resumed its reign. I lit a cigarette. I moved, rustled, even got up and walked a little, kicking the pebbles that lay about in the sand. But that was no use, and I perceived where the defect was. I knew I was alive, and could make sounds, but what I wanted was some evidence that something else was alive. But there was none.

Somehow this fact was so disquieting that I sat down again to think about it. In my reasonable mind I knew that absolutely everything was alive, only there was at this moment nothing to tell me so. Not a fly buzzed over the hot sand, not a kite was to be seen wheeling slow as if in sleep, a black speck against the inviolable blue that stretched from horizon to horizon. I was the only thing alive as far as I had evidence. Or supposing—the thought flashed suddenly across me—supposing I, too, was dead? And what was this—this dome of air and the golden sand? Was it hell?

I cannot describe the horror of this. Momentary as was the sensation, it was of a quality, a depth of surcharged panic, which comes to us only in nightmares. I was alone, I was not within touch, in this utter stillness, of any other consciousness, and surely that must be hell, the outer darkness of absolute loneliness, which not even the glorious golden orb swung centre-high in the blue could ever so faintly penetrate. Indeed, it and this iridescent panorama at my feet only added some secret bitter irony to the outer darkness. All the light, the colour, the heat, which one had so loved was there still, but life was arrested, and there was nobody.

Then quite suddenly and unexpectedly the farcical happened, for from some hundred yards away down below the steep cliff up which I had climbed came a long discordant bray from my donkey, who perhaps felt lonely, too. But I have never heard a sound which was to the spirit so overpoweringly sweet. I heard that, and gave a long breath, and shouted, ‘Thank you very much!’ for the whole glory of the noon, which silence had blackened, was instantly restored.

One of the interesting things to which I have alluded, in contrast with the tedium of Mrs. Armstrong’s health, was occurring to-day, for the thermometer had indeed been up in the nineties, a fact which fills all proper-minded people with pride. Our dear, stuffy old London had registered 92 degrees in the shade at Messrs. Negretti and Zambra’s that morning, and I with my own eyes had seen it. It was impossible not to be proud, just as it is impossible not to be proud when one is in a train that is going over seventy miles an hour, a thing that may be timed by the small white quarter-mile posts that are so conveniently established by the side of the line. Once I went in a train that did a mile and a half in seventy-three seconds. I have not got over my elation yet. Or when an extraordinarily vivid flash of lightning occurs, with a congested angry spasm of thunder coming simultaneously with it, are you not sorry for the nerveless soul that does not thrill with personal elation at power made manifest? Or when Madame Melba sings the last long note of the first act of ‘La Bohème’? Or when the organist in King’s College Chapel pulls out the tubas, making the windows to rattle in their leaded panes by the concussion of the astonished air? Or when a perfectly enormous wave rides in from the Atlantic, and is transformed suddenly from the illustrious blue giant into a myriad cascades of snowy white, as, jovially dealing itself its own death, as it were, it is dashed against the brown steadfast rock of the land? Or when Legs (I shall speak of him soon), as he did to-day, sliced his drive very badly at the fourth hole at Woking, and hit the front of the engine of an up-train with extraordinary violence, and thereupon collapsed on the tee in speechless laughter for the sheer joy of the gorgeously improbable feat?

For all these things, so I take it, are evidence of the splendid energy of things in general in which we, each of us, have our share. So that when our train goes very fast, or when thunder cracks very loudly, or when blue waves are turned to smoke, though we are not actually responsible in any way for these encouraging facts, which are dependent on pressure in a boiler, electricity in the air, and a disturbance in mid-Atlantic, yet as by some wireless telegraphy, the energy of them is caught in the receiver of ourselves, and we throb back to it, feeling the pulse of life, which is exactly the same life in boiler and cloud and wave as that pulse in ourselves, which beats at the wrist. Life! Life! Life! All one—all absolutely one!

And to-night, too, though not in any of these particular ways, how it throbs and beats in this hot darkness of June! For a moment I wished I was in the country, to feel the pulse of the woodland and the garden. For the green things of the earth are awake all June; they never sleep day or night; they hold their breath sometimes in the hour before dawn, and they hang their heads sometimes beneath some scurry of summer rain; but day and night their eyes shine; they are growing and living, and are always awake till autumn comes, when they doze, and winter comes, when they sleep sound, day and night alike, dreaming, perhaps, of the spring, when from deep sleep they will slowly awake again, aconites first, and soon after daffodils, and then the buds of the hawthorn, little green squibs of leaf....

But I had not gone a hundred yards from the doors within which I had dined, when the mysterious joy of London summer night smote these thoughts of the country into silence. The whole town was awake, theatres were pouring out into the streets, and boarding the giants of the roadway, the snorting smelling motor-buses, their trotting brothers, and the inferior cabs and hansoms, where one could be alone and not stop on the way, but be taken decorously and dully to one’s destination. There was news, too, in the evening papers—a horrible murder, I think it was, but the nature of the incident mattered very little. It was incident, anyhow; something had happened. And without wishing to know exactly what it was, I felt extraordinarily pleased that something had happened.

The dip of Piccadilly between Devonshire House and Hyde Park was comparatively empty, and a sudden shudder of the mind came across me. I had been sitting next a dear friend, condemned to death. How could I have forgotten that, for forgotten it I had, in this riotous summer of London. Then I knew why I had forgotten it. It was because she had been so superior (an odious word, but there is no other) to it herself. That courage, that passionate interest in the dear things of the world, her contempt (for this time there is no need of another word) of death, had been infectious. To her it was a mere incident of life. ‘Things in general’ were no less real and delightful to her because this incident was coming close, than they were to me, who had not yet, as far as I knew, to look it in the face.

Yet, after all, to any of the others sitting at that table, death, so small an incident to her who had steadfastly regarded it, might in reality be closer than to her. And she exulted in the things of life still: they had lost no interest for her.

I stopped for a moment at the bottom of the hill, as one must when something quite new to oneself strikes one. That was the ideal she had shown. Fearless, undismayed, full of summer. ‘And with God be the rest.’

At Hyde Park Corner a coffee-stall and an ice-cream stall jostled each other. Each had its following. But both at the moment seemed to me to be heretical, and instead I turned into the Park to walk as far as the Alexandra Gate, whence I had to get into Sloane Street.

It was like coming out of the roar of a tunnel into the day again, and one’s eyes (though conversely) had to get accustomed to the dark after the glare and noise of the dear streets. A little wind whispered overhead in the planes; a little odour of moist earth came from Rotten Row. Quiet, solitary figures passed, or figures in pairs, closely linked, but for the most part silent. On benches underneath the trees there were pairs of figures. In Heaven’s name why not? To flirt, to make love, to look into eyes, is an applauded, and rightly applauded, pursuit in sequestered corners, under palms, beneath the eaves of the staircase, with the band blaring from the ball-room just beyond. But it doesn’t seem to strike the fastidious, who write letters to papers about the ‘state’ of the parks, that it is just possible that there are other people in the world who haven’t got ball-rooms and palms, and marble staircases. What are they to do, then? The answer of these letter-writers is deplorably futile, for they talk about indigent marriages! As if you could stop the life of the world by pointing with impious hands towards the Savings Bank! God laughs at it!

But the people who most call attention to the state of the park are those who have sat in the back drawing-room with their ‘gurls,’ while mamma has been Grenadier at the door, and papa has put a handkerchief over his broad face, when he has finished his glass of port after lunch (after lunch!), and smokes his cigar in the dining room. It really is so. Young men and maidens may sit on a plush sofa in the dreadful back drawing-room and behave as young men and maidens should (and if they shouldn’t, they will); and why in the name of all that is decent should they not sit on a bench in the Park and kiss each other? Yet the person who objects to their doing so, and who writes to the papers in consequence, is exactly the man who, in his semi-detached villa at some nameless suburb, draws his handkerchief over his face, and obscenely snores, while Jack, a respectable bank-clerk, kisses Maria in the back drawing-room. Good luck to them all, except to the horrible man who snores and writes to the papers when he is awake! He would be better snoring.

The moon had risen and rode high in a star-kirtled heaven, making a diaper of light and shifting shadow below the shade of the many-elbowed planes. Even now, close on midnight, it was extraordinarily hot, and for a little the grass and the trees made me long again for the true country, where the green things on the earth are native, not, as here, outcasts in the desert island of the streets. Yet, when there is, as in London, so large a colony of castaways, extending, you will remember, right down from beyond the Serpentine Bridge to Westminster, so that, except for the crossing at Hyde Park, one may walk on grass for all these solid miles, one hopes that the trees and flowers are tolerably cheerful, and do not sigh much for the wild places away from houses. Never was there a town so full of trees as this, for walk as you may in it, you will, I think, with three exceptions only, never find a street from some point in which you cannot see a tree to remind you of shade at noontide and grassy hollows. But the names of those streets shall not here be stated; they must, however, consider themselves warned.

Then the streets again, crowded still with moving figures, each an entrancing enigma to any passenger whose soul is at all alert, and swift with the passage of those glorious motor-buses, pounding and flashing along on their riotous ways, the very incarnation to me of all that ‘town’ means! I cannot imagine now what London was like without them. It must have been but half alive, half itself. It is impossible to be patient with these curious folk who consider them nuisances, who say (as if anyone denied it) that they both smell and clatter. That is exactly why they are so typical of London; indeed, one is disposed to think that they were not made with hands, but spontaneously generated out of the Spirit of the Town.

And how delightful to observe their elephantine antics if the streets are slippery, when they behave exactly like a drunken man, with appearance still portentously solemn, as if he had heard grave news, but afflicted with strange indecision and uncertainty on questions of the direction in which he intends to walk. I was on one the other day which did the most entrancing things, and had it all to myself, as everybody else got down, not seeming to see that if a motor-bus has been ‘overtaken’ it is far safer to be on it than anywhere else in the street, just as a drunken man may lurch heavily with damage to others, but never hurts himself. It was in Piccadilly, too, a beautiful theatre for its manœuvres. Trouble began as we descended the hill by the Green Park: it had vin gai, and was boisterously cheerful; but it was extraordinarily uncertain about direction, and slewed violently once or twice, so that hansoms started away from our vicinity as rabbits scuttle from you in the brushwood. Then my bus suddenly pulled itself together and walked quite straight for a lamp-post by the kerb. It felt tired, I suppose, and leaned wearily against it, snapping it neatly off with as little effort as it takes to pluck a daisy. Then it hooted, moved gravely on again, and, thinking it was a member of the Junior Athenæum, made straight for the door. But it forgot to lift its feet up to get on to the pavement, and stumbled. Then it saw a sister-bus, backed away from the pavement, and tried to make friends. But the other simply cut it and passed by. So it gave a heavy sigh, and began to mount the hill towards Devonshire House. But it had scarcely gone twenty yards when the behaviour of its sister so smote upon its heart that it could not go on, and turned slowly round in the street to look back at that respectable but uncharitable relation with pathetic and appealing eyes. It might happen to anybody, it seemed to say, ‘to take a drop too much, and you shouldn’t judge too severely.’

This sense of being misunderstood gave it vin triste of the most pronounced kind. I have seldom seen so despondent a drunkard. It moaned and muttered to itself, and I longed to console it. But beneficent Nature came to its aid: laid her cool hand upon its throbbing head, and it slept. I got gently off, feeling, as Mr. Rossetti, I think, says (if it was not he, it was somebody else), that I must step softly, for I was treading on its dreams.

And all this for a penny, which the conductor very obligingly refunded to me, as I had not been taken where I wanted to go!

Sloane Street, and soon my dear house, into which I was towed by my watch-chain. For my latchkey was on the end of it, and, having opened the door, I could not get the latchkey out, and had to step on tiptoe, following the door as it opened. Wild music came from the upstairs, and, having disentangled my key, I ran up, to find Helen and Legs trying with singular ill-success to play the overture to the ‘Meistersingers,’ from a performance of which they had just returned. They took not the slightest notice of my entry.

‘No!’ shouted Legs. ‘One, two; wait for two! Oh, do get on! Yes, that’s it. Sorry; I thought it was a sharp.’

They were nearing the end, and several loud and unsimultaneous thumps came.

‘I’ve finished,’ said Helen.

Legs had one thump more.

‘So have I,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it ripping?’

JULY

HELEN has gone to church, after several scathing remarks about Sabbath-breakers, by whom she means me, and probably also Legs, as I hear the piano being played indoors. As a matter of fact, I have not the slightest intention of breaking anything—though Legs seems to have designs on the strings—for even here under the trees on the lawn it is far too hot to think of such a thing. Several slightly disappointed dogs repose round me, who hoped that perhaps, as I was not going to church, I was going for a walk. This afternoon, I am afraid, they will be disappointed again, for I propose to go to afternoon service in the cathedral, and they will think I am going for a walk. But on Sunday dogs have to pay for the commissions and omissions of the week.

The bells have stopped, so Helen will quite certainly be late, and the silence of Sunday morning in the country grows a shade deeper. Fifi just now, with an air of grim determination, sat up to scratch herself; but she could not be bothered, and sank down again in collapse on the grass. Legs, too, has apparently found the heat too much even for him, and has stopped playing. And I abandoned myself to that luxury which can only be really enjoyed on Sunday morning, when other people have gone to church (I wish to state again that I am going this afternoon), of thinking of all the things I ought to do, and not doing them. On Monday and Tuesday, and all through the week, in fact, you can indulge in that same pursuit, but it lacks aroma: it is without bouquet. But give me a chair under a tree on Sunday morning, and let my wife call me names for sitting in it, and then let the church-bells stop. Fifi wants washing. Legs said so yesterday, and we meant to wash her this morning. I must carefully avoid the subject if he comes out, since I don’t intend to do so. Then I ought to write to the Secretary of State—having first ascertained who he is—to remind him that Legs is going up for his Foreign Office examination in November, and that his (the Secretary of State’s) predecessor in the late Government promised him a nomination. How tiresome these changes of Government are! One would have thought the Conservatives might have held on till Legs’ examination. Then I should not (1) have to consult Whitaker to find out who the present Secretary of State is, and (2) write to him, and—probably—(3) find that either I haven’t got a Whitaker, or else that it is an old one. This will entail expense as well.

How the silence grew! I could not even hear any bees buzz among the flower-beds, and wondered whether bees do no work on Sunday. There was not a sound or murmur of them. Probably this is quite a new fact in natural history, which has never struck anybody before. It would never have struck me if I had gone to church. Then Fifi pricked one ear, sat up, and snapped at something. It was a winged thing, with a brown body, rather like a bee. How indescribably futile!

Then there came a little puff of wind from the end of the garden, and next moment the whole air was redolent with the scent of sweet-peas. Sweet-peas! How strangely, vastly more intimate is the sense of smell than any other! How at one whiff of odour the whole romance of life, its beautiful joys and scarcely less beautiful sorrows, the dust and struggle and the glory of it, rises up, clad not in the grey robes, or standing in the dim light of the past, but living, moving, breathing—part of the past, perhaps, but more truly part of the present. Like a huge wave from the immortal sea of life, cool and green, and speaking of the eternal depths, yet exulting in sunshine and rainbow-hued in spray, all the memories entwined about this house held and enveloped me. Here lived once Dick and Margery, those perfect friends; here, when they had passed to their triumphant peace, came she whom, when I first saw her, I thought to be Margery. From this house (where still in memory of Margery we plant the long avenue of sweet-peas, because she loved them) two years ago we were married, and here I sit now drowned in the beautiful past that is all so essential a part of this beautiful present.

But it would be as well, perhaps, if this book is to be in the slightest degree intelligible (a thing which I maintain is a merit rather than a defect), to put together a few simple facts concerning these last two years.

It was two years ago last April that we were married, and took a small house in town, though we still spent a good deal of time down here with Helen’s father. But before the year was out he died, leaving everything to Helen, who was his only child. So, as was natural, we continued to live in the house which was so dear to both of us.

Legs is my first cousin, and he has lived with us for a year past, for he has neither father nor mother; and since he was cramming for his Foreign Office work in town, it was far the best arrangement that he should make his home with us. Legs is the only name he is ever known by, since he is one of those people who are almost unknown by their real name (which in this case is Francis Horace Allenby), and are alluded to only by some nickname which is far more suitable. If, for instance, I said to somebody who knew him quite well, ‘Have you seen Francis lately?’ I should probably be favoured with an inquiring stare, and then, ‘Oh, Legs you mean!’ while to his million acquaintances (he has more than anyone I ever knew) he is equally Legs Allenby. The name, I need scarcely add, is a personal and descriptive nickname, for Legs chiefly consists of them. When he sits down, he would be guessed to be well on the short side of middle height; when he stands up he is seen to be well on the farther shore of it. He was Legs at school, and his family, very sensibly, and all his friends, saw how impossible it was to call him Francis any more. For the rest, he is just over twenty, sandy-haired, freckle-faced, and green-eyed, with a front tooth broken across, a fact that is continually in evidence, since he is nearly always laughing. It would be sheer nonsense to call him good-looking, but it would be as sheer to call him ugly, since, when you have got a face like Legs’, either epithet has nothing to do with it. But I have never seen any boy with nearly so attractive and charming a face, and Legs, whose nature is quite as nice as his face, and extremely like it, has the most splendid time.

And that, to finish these tedious explanations, is our household. There is no other inmate of it—no little one, you understand.

Legs is an enthusiast—a fanatic on the subject of life. Everything, including even his foreign languages, which he has to cram himself with, is the subject of his admiration, and he discovers more secrets of life than the rest of the world put together. At one time it is a chord which is meat and drink to him; at another the romances of Pierre Loti; or, again, golf is the only thing worth living for, while occasionally some girl, or, as often as not, a respectable elderly married woman, usurps his heart. Last week he discovered that there were only two people in town the least worth talking to, but yesterday, when I asked him who the second one was, having forgotten myself, I found that he had forgotten too, for if the ‘Meistersinger’ overture was not enough for anybody, he was a person of no perception.

‘Why, it contains all there is,’ he had said, when he finished it the other evening with Helen. ‘It’s all there, the whole caboodle.’

But this morning, from the silence indoors, I imagine he must have found another caboodle—a book probably. Or equally possible, Legs has an attack of acute middle-age, which occasionally takes him like a bad cold in the head. Then he wonders whether anything is worth doing, and is sorry for Helen and me, because we are so frivolous. Six months ago, I remember, he had such an attack, induced by reading a book about three acres and a cow, which raised in him the sense of injustice that all of us three had so much more than that. During this period he took no sugar in his tea, refused wine, and began to write a book which was called ‘Tramps,’ contrasting the horror of indigence with the even greater horror of extravagance. It was really directed against Helen and me, for we had lately bought a small, snuffling motor-car. These outbursts of Socialism are generally coincident with Atheism. But they do not last long: Legs soon feels better again.

I was right, it appeared, about the conjecture that he had found a book, but I was wrong about the attack of middle-age. Legs jumped out of the drawing-room window with wild excitement.

‘Oh, I say!’ he cried, ‘why did you never tell me? I thought Swinburne was an awful rotter! But just listen.’

And he read: ‘When the hounds of spring are in winter’s traces.’

‘Did you ever hear anything like it?’ he said. ‘“Blossom by blossom the spring begins!” Why, it’s magic! Oh, don’t I know it! Do you remember—I suppose you don’t—when all the daffodils came out together last year?’

‘Oh, Legs, what an ass you are!’ I said. ‘Because you never noticed them till I showed you them.’

‘No, I believe that’s true. Oh, don’t argue! Listen!’

And he began all over again.

Then he lay back on the grass with his hands underneath his head, looking up unblinking into the face of the sun. That, by the way, is another peculiarity of his: he looks straight at the sun at noonday, and is not dazzled. His eyes neither blink nor water. He can’t understand why other people don’t look at the sun.

Then—if by any chance you care to understand this quiet, delightful life we lead, it is necessary that you understand Legs—then his mood suddenly changed.

‘Oh, I’m wrong about the daffodils,’ he said; ‘you showed me them. But this chap is a daffodil. I suppose he’s quite old, too. I wonder how you can get old, if you have ever felt like that. What a waste of time it is to do anything if you can feel. I hate this Foreign Office affair: why shouldn’t I do nothing?’

‘Because you can’t,’ I remarked.

‘What do you mean?’

I had not been to church, and so had heard no sermon. Therefore, I preached one on my own account.

‘You will know in about fifteen years,’ I said. ‘Anyhow, you will find that, unless you are brainless and absurd, you must do something. You are quite wrong. It isn’t nearly enough to feel. The moment you “feel,” you want to create. You not only want, but you have to; you can’t possibly help yourself. You have just read that heavenly poem. You now want to write something like it. You hear what spring once said to a poet, and you want to put down what spring says to you!’

‘Oh, you’re quite wrong,’ said Legs. ‘He has said what spring means. That’s the last word on the subject. But summer now: this, to-day——’

‘So you want to create,’ said I.

A glorious trait about Legs is that he never admits conviction. He only changes the subject. Thus, if the subject is changed by him, his controversialist is satisfied.

‘I don’t believe in the highest of the shortest suit if your partner doubles,’ he said. ‘What are you to do if you have two spades and two clubs all contemptible?’

‘Lead the less contemptible.’

Legs turned slowly over on his side, and lay with his face against the short turf of the lawn. ‘“Blossom by blossom,”’ he said, ‘“the spring begins.” I wonder if he meant more than that! Did he mean to tell of the time when one is young oneself, and it is all blossom? Lord, how priggish that sounds! But it is all blossom, except for this beastly German. I hate German! It sounds as if you were gargling. Damn! I have to go up by the early train to-morrow, too! And you and Helen will stop here till after lunch. Grind, grind—oh, I lead the life of a dog! And then, if I am very successful, I shall have the privilege of sitting on a stool in a beastly building in Whitehall, and writing a précis from some silly old man in Vienna or Madrid, about nothing at all. It isn’t worth it!’

Legs and I, it will be observed, deal largely in contradictions.

‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘Everything almost that one does is worth it. As long as you are actively doing anything with all your heart, you can’t be wasting time, nor can there be anything better worth doing. It is only when you say that a thing isn’t worth doing that it becomes so.’

Legs sat up again.

‘Oh, I want nine lives at least!’ he said. ‘Or why can’t one buy some of the time that hangs so heavy on other people’s hands? I know a man who reads the Times all through every morning, and the Globe every evening. Yet, after all, I dare say it is quite as improving as sitting here and talking rot as we are doing. I shall go and put in half an hour over that accursed Teutonic language before lunch.’

Legs had, as it seemed to me, run over most of the topics of human interest in the few minutes he had been out, and since I was still irrevocably determined neither to wash Fifi, nor to write to the Secretary of State, nor, indeed, to open the very large book on the crisis in Russia, which I had brought out with me (to bring out a book on Sunday morning and not to open it is strictly in accordance with the spirit of the thing), my mind went slowly browsing, like a meditative cow, over the dazzling display he had spread before me. And instinctively and instantaneously I found myself envying him, though why I envied him I did not immediately know. But it was soon obvious; I envied his power of making soul-stirring discoveries; his rapture over that magical spring song of the man he had thought ‘an awful rotter.’ I envied him his ignorance of the perfectly patent fact that it is only fools who can go on doing nothing, and of the fact that it is infinitely better to sit on a stool and do arithmetic for stockbrokers than to do nothing at all. But youth does not know that, and I think I envied him his youth. Yet—so often does one contradict oneself—I knew very soon that I did not envy him any of these things. After all, I still went on making soul-stirring discoveries, and propose to do so until the very end of my life, when I shall make the most soul-stirring discovery of all, which is death. And to envy the fact of his having just discovered the magic of Swinburne’s spring song would be exactly the same as envying the appetite of somebody who has just come down to breakfast, when you are half-way through. Your eggs and bacon were delicious, but the fact that you have eaten them makes it impossible to wish for them again. And it should make you only delighted that other people keep coming down to breakfast—till the end of your life they will do that, unless the world comes to an end first—and, thank God, they will find eggs and bacon delicious too, hungry and fresh in the morning of their lives.

I was becoming slightly too active in mind for the proper observance of Sunday morning (given, of course, that you have chosen not to go to church), for the real attitude is a state of tranquil bemusedness, but it was too late to stop now.... What, in fact, did I want? Did I want to be twenty again, and go through the days and hours of those fifteen years once more?

Yes, I did. If the world could be turned back for fifteen years, I would gladly take my place there, and go through it all, good and bad together, just as it has happened. I would encore this delightful song, in fact, and be content that it should be sung again—it, not another song. Of course, if one could start again at the age of twenty—or ten, for that matter—and live it over again with the knowledge, infinitesimal as it is, that one has gained now, I imagine that the vast majority of the world would put the hands of the clock back. On all those thousands of occasions on which one has acted stupidly, unkindly, evilly, and has probably suffered for it without delay (for it is mercifully ordained that we have not long to wait before our punishment begins, especially if we have been foolish), we should now do differently, remembering that it did not pay—to put things at their lowest—to be asses and knaves. Apart from that, we should have the same beautiful, flawless days again, when, so I cannot but think, the beneficent power has somehow come very close to us and our surroundings, and by its neighbourhood has given us a series, again and again repeated, of hours in which we have been unable to imagine anything better than what we have got. We have wanted, with all the eager happiness that wanting gives, and we have obtained; but before any leanness of the soul has entered we have wanted again. We have had happiness, not content (since that implies the end of wanting) but happiness, the content that dwells not in the present only, but looked forward. I have no idea whether, on the whole, I am happier than the average of other people, since there is no thermometer yet invented that can register that. But I do know that I would choose to go back and live it all over again, as it has been. With the little experience, the little knowledge that must inevitably come with years, whether one is stupid or not, I imagine that everybody would choose to go back, but I wish to state distinctly that I would go back without that. I suppose it was that which made me just now feel I envied Legs. But I don’t do that really for this reason.

Supposing that what I should choose (because I really should) were given me, what then? I should arrive again eventually in the mere measure of years at the point where I am now, no different, no better, no worse. I should like to go back, because it has been such fun. But there is better than that ahead: of that I am completely convinced. There are as many (if not more, and I think there are more) entrancing discoveries from middle age as there have been from youth, and I am convinced again that if one happens to live to be old there will be as many more.

After all, to re-read life again would be like re-reading the first volume of an absorbing book. One has revelled in the first volume, and naturally wants to revel again. But what is going to happen? There is nothing that interests me so much as that. To-day, even in this quiet domestic life of ours, there are a hundred threads leading out into unknown countries, all of which, if one lives, one will follow up. And all, big and tiny alike, are so stupendous. If, to take the forward view, I could see in a mirror now what and where all those people—few of them, no doubt, but friends—those who really matter, would be in a year’s time, how I should seize the magic reflector, and gaze into it! Incomparable as has been the romance of life up till now, it is known to me. But to peep into the second volume!

The sun, in the full blaze of which Legs had laid, peeped over the top of the elm in shade of which I had seated myself, and, not being Leggish, I shifted my chair again to consider this point.

It is a question of scale that is here concerned, though the scale seems to me to be an unreal one. If I happened to be the Emperor of All the Russias, and the magic mirror were given me, I should look eagerly out for my own figure, and see if I still wore a crown. I should scrutinize the faces of those around me, to see if war and the hell-hag of revolution had been shrieking through my illimitable country. But my interests are not soul-stirring to any but me, and anyhow not of European importance. So I should look to see who sat on this lawn a year hence; I should ask for a short survey of the Embassy at Paris, to see if Legs was attached; I should visit a dozen houses or so. But if I was allowed to put the clock back fifteen years, I should have to wait longer for this.... So I must reconsider my choice, and I am afraid I must reverse it. But it must be understood that I choose not to be twenty again, merely because it will take longer to be forty and fifty. I want the second volume so much.

‘Or....’ Here Helen’s voice broke in. She had come back from church, and had seated herself on the grass, and I believe that half of what appeared to be soliloquy was actually spoken to her. But she is wonderfully patient.

‘It is youth you want,’ she said, ‘and you have got it till you cease to want it. It is only people who don’t care about it that grow old. Or is there more than that? Is it wanting to go on learning that keeps one young?’

A dreadful misgiving came over me.

‘Am I dreaming?’ I said. ‘Or did you tell me the other day that I showed signs of wishing to teach?’

She laughed.

‘No; it is quite true. But I will tell you when you cease to wish to learn. I shall say it quite, quite clearly.’

She took off her hat, and speared it absently with a pin.

‘We had an awful sermon,’ she said, ‘all about the grim seriousness of life, and the opportunities that will never come back. It does seem to me it is most absolute waste of time to give a thought to that. I shan’t go to church next Sunday. I don’t feel fortified by thoughts like that. It’s much better for me to know that you would put the clock back, live it all over again. But about looking forward. Oh, Jack, I think I shouldn’t look in the magic mirror if I had the chance. What if one saw oneself all alone? One would live in dread afterwards.’

‘Or what if you saw a cradle in the room?’ said I.

She looked up at me quickly, and then put out her hands for me to pull her up.

‘Perhaps I should look in the mirror,’ she said.

Poor Legs, as he had said, left by a very early train next morning, and Helen, moved by a sudden violent attack of vague duty, went with him. The access was quite indeterminate. She thought merely that one ought to get back to town early on Monday, so as to have the whole day there instead of splitting it up. Personally I followed neither her reasoning nor example, and intended to spend the day in dignified inaction in the country, and not split it up by going to town till after dinner. But to the owner of a motor-car the train appears a degraded sort of business, and, greatly daring, I meant to start about nine in the evening, and be the monarch of the road; for when there is no other traffic, any car becomes a chariot of triumph. Helen, I may remark, loves our motor when she does not want to go anywhere particular. When she does she takes the train. I think, in fact, that it was my proposal that we should drive up together after dinner that was the direct parent of her sense of duty.

So, when I came down at the not unreasonable hour of nine to breakfast, I found that I had the house to myself, and—I am not in the least ashamed of the confession—found that the prospect of an absolutely solitary day was quite to my mind. I do not believe myself to be unsociable or morose, but every now and then I confess that I like a day in which I see nobody. It is not that one is busy, and wants to get through one’s work, for, on the contrary, when I have a great deal to do, I hugely desire the presence and the conversation of friends in the intervals of ‘doing.’ But occasionally it is a very good thing to chew and ruminate, to be surrounded by the quiet green things of the earth, which give you all their best without waking the corresponding instinct to exchange ideas, to give something of yours to meet theirs. For intercourse with one’s fellow-men, especially with one’s friends, is like some rapid interchange of presents. Everybody (everybody, at least, who has the smallest sense of sociability) searches in his mind for any little thing that may be there, and gives it his friend, while the friend, accepting it, gives something back. From all that—we cannot call it an effort since it is so completely spontaneous on both sides—it is well to be free occasionally, to lie, so to speak, under the pelting rain of life that is ever poured out from the voiceless, eloquent, bright-eyed happiness of Nature, to make no plan, to contemplate no contingency, to drop that sort of fencing rapier that we all wield when we are with our fellow-men, and lie like a log, with one eye open it may be, and be rained upon by the things that live, and are clothed and nourished without toil or spinning.

I am aware that the great Strenuists, from Mr. Roosevelt downwards, would hold up their toil-hardened hands at this, exclaiming: ‘You mean it is better now and then to be a cow than a Man?’ Precisely so, but cows are not nearly as inactive as Man on these occasions ought to be. They eat too long, and they switch their tails, and stamp their feet. But the long, stupid, bovine gaze is moderately correct. At least, I have never detected a shadow of intelligence in a cow’s eye. If there is any, the man who occasionally becomes a cow must be careful to get rid of it. Nor must he be a cow too often: that is fatal. If he is a cow for one day in every six weeks, I think he will find the proportion is about right.

So all day, literally all day, I sat, or, when sitting became too fatiguing, lay on the lawn, and nothing happened that did not always happen, but all was worth observing in a purely bovine manner, without intelligence. Little brown twigs occasionally fell from the elms, and once or twice a withered yellow leaf came spinning on its own axis, as if it was the screw of some unseen steamer. A stag-beetle walked slowly down from the wooden paling, and came some ten yards across the lawn. It stopped there about an hour, I should think, doing nothing whatever. Then it turned and went back on to the paling again. A robin took about the same length of time to make up his mind that I was quite harmless, and eventually pecked at my bootlace, which was undone. It took him an enormous time to decide, with his head cocked sideways, whether it tasted nice or not, but eventually he settled it did not, for he did not peck it again. Then a jackdaw sat on one of the poles of the tennis-net, and said ‘Jarck’ seventeen times after I began to count. He began to say it the eighteenth time, but stopped in the middle and ate an incautious earwig.

That was almost too exciting, and I transferred not my attention, because I had not got any, but my bovine gaze to the big flower-bed opposite. All summer was there, dim, hot, blossoming summer in full luxuriance of growth, so that scarcely a square inch of earth was visible. I did not even name the dear familiar flowers that grew there. One was a spire of blue, one was a cluster of orange; there was an orchestra of red trumpets, a mist of starry grey, and bits of sky caught in a web of green. And from beyond (I could not help naming that) the odour of sweet-peas. I lay and soaked in it.

To use a simile, do you know those mysterious things which are to be found on the chalk downs, called dew-ponds? Often, of course, they are fed with rain, but even when for months no rain has fallen, you will still find them full. They just lie open to the sky and that is all. And the mind, so it seems to me, is something like them. Often it is fed in the obvious way, as the dew-pond with rain, by conscious thought, by active intercourse with others. But sometimes it is not a bad thing for it to be like the dew-pond, just to lie open to the sky, and drink in the eternal wine of Nature, which fills its pond again. All that is required of it is to do nothing whatever, not to think even, but just to be there, to be in existence, to let go of everything. It really is worth the experiment, though it is not quite so easy as it sounds, for thoughts, ideas of some kind, keep leaking in. They must be firmly excluded.

The snuffling motor rose like a hero to the occasion, and came round throbbing with excitement. Something in the idea of this drive by night had evidently taken its fancy, and it positively burned to exceed the legal limit, a wish that I was only too glad to gratify. When we started the crimson of the sunset was still aflame in the west, but gradually the colour was withdrawn, as if some unseen hand was pulling out scarlet threads that ran through some exquisite fabric of dainty embroidery, leaving there only the soft transparent ground of it. Then more gradually, so that the eye could not trace the appearance of each, but only knew that the number was being multiplied, behind the dark velvet of the sky were lit the myriad suns that make a flame of space, and sing in their orbits. Colours faded and disappeared, and soon the world was turned to an etching of black and white. The roads were empty of traffic, and though July was here, still from dark coppice and leafy screen there sounded the one eternal song, the rapture of nightingales. Often it seemed to me as if we were standing still, while the world in its revolution span by us; there was but a space of lamp-lit road by which, shadow-like, dream-like, the trees and open spaces ran. For a long piece together, as over the Hartford Bridge flats, nothing marked our passage except this whirling of the world. It seemed in the darkness that time had ceased, and that from its own impetus this globe and the thousand globes above were circling still.

Then in front there began to shine, like the reflected light of some comet coming nearer, the huge glow-worm of London. For a while it rested, like some remote befogged star on the horizon; then its light brightened, and its little crawling caterpillars, the trains and buses, began to creep by us, reaching out, as it were, to the end of the leaf, the greenest and most succulent parts.

Then, like the opening of a photographer’s shutter, so swift it was, we were in the traffic of the town again, and all was familiar, all was home. The country was home too, and here was another. Which was the truer sense? The sense that claimed the jackdaw on the tennis-net as a brother, or the sense that rejoiced in this fierce-beating pulse of life?

Perhaps, since they are both true, there is no question of comparison.

AUGUST

SOMETHING of the primeval savage blood still beats in us, we must suppose, else why is it that we, effete inhabitants of London, who love the closeness and proximity of our fellow-men so much, feel no less keenly the rapture of being miles and miles away from railways and the folk who travel on them? How quick, too, is the transition from one mood to another, so that while a week or two ago we rushed insanely, it may be, but with extraordinary pleasure, from party to party, jabbering with childlike delight to myriad acquaintances, face to face on a blocked staircase, or in the drawing-room unwillingly silent while somebody sang, we now take the same childlike pleasure in long days of solitude. But we may take our solitude in pairs, in company with a friend who for the time being is no friend at all, but a bitter (and, it is to be hoped, disappointed) golfer, or we may lie out all day in the heather with a silent stalker, or, as has been my fortunate lot for the last ten days, may spend long hours, with a sandwich and a fishing-rod and a gillie, in angling over coffee-coloured streams or windswept lochs.

The oldest inhabitants never remember anything like this summer, but they are bad evidence, because their memories are probably very defective owing to their age; but, what is more convincing, younger people, whose memories are less impaired, never remember anything like it. So there has been little of the coffee-coloured streams for me personally, but, instead, long quiet days by this wonderful loch, supposed to hold trout of fabulous dimensions, which, as far as I can make out, nobody has ever caught, though every one agrees that they are there. Then came a wonderful day, with more than trout-wonder in it.

I came up here to this remote lodge alone, for the trio of us usually go our own ways in holiday time. Legs, in any case, had to go to Germany to learn that classic and guttural tongue, and Helen and I always make visiting arrangements independently of each other, unless we are both bidden to a house to which we both want to go. But it stands to reason, so it seemed to us, that husband and wife probably do not have the same friends, and it is as absurd for her to stay at a house because the host is a great friend of mine as it is for me to stay at a house because the hostess is a great friend of hers. Coincidences sometimes happen, in which we both go together. Otherwise we make our own arrangements. I cannot bear some of her friends; she finds it almost impossible to tolerate some of mine. And with shouts of laughter we agree to differ. Then in September or October the trio will come together again, and will all talk at once, describing simultaneously, while nobody listens, our delightful adventures.

I started from the lodge that morning after an early breakfast, the gillie having already gone on with lunch, and what we hoped would be the apparatus of death; for, the first time during this last week, it was a soft and cloudy morning, with a warm wind from the south-west, sufficient even in this cup of the hills, where the lodge stands, to set the trees tossing their branches, and to strip the red ripe rowanberries from their stalks. Upon the unsheltered tops, then, where lay the dark-coloured loch with its fabled inhabitants, there should be ripple enough for fishing purposes. I walked unencumbered but for the field-glasses I always carry; for nothing, during periods of waiting or in the half-hour that follows the sandwich, is so fascinating as to spy out the busy animal life on these empty moors, or find some three or four miles away two or three little human specks moving very gently up the hillside after the deer, or sitting there patiently till some untoward affair, suspicious hinds, or a foul wind are lulled into inactivity.

But first I had a mile of pine-wood to climb, up steep, slippery, needle-strewn paths, with bracken already yellowing on each side, making a sea of russet and green, while from overhead, in the thick arching boughs, there came, as it were, the noise of an aerial sea, the hiss of ripples on a sandy shore as the wind whistled through the stiff springy foliage. Now and then a rabbit scuttled through the ferns, and once I saw quite close at hand a roe-deer with flicking ears and startled eyes, that, as it caught sight of me, gave me one shy look of the woodland, and then galloped off, cutting its way through the tall bracken. The path sometimes led by the side of the stream that came out of the loch to which I was bound, but the dryness of the summer had hushed its voice, and it but trickled down the ways it was wont to prance along in spring. Here and there a tree of the tamer woodland, a beech, or stripling elm, grew among the primeval firs, but it looked as if it had wandered here by mistake, had strayed, a member of some later civilization, into a settlement peopled by those of the older world.

And as I walked something of the same feeling of strangeness, of having gone back to the earlier ages of the world, came over me also. Like the lost beech, there were none of my kind here, and I felt, though in an immeasurably greater degree, what one feels when one stands in the valley of the tombs of the Egyptian Kings. But all round me here were things far more ancient than they. Æons before Pharaoh oppressed the children of promise there stood here on this hillside the ancestors in direct line of this woodland. The knowledge of the dawn of the world, when it was still but a little time since God had bidden the green things to live upon the earth, had been transmitted to these citizens of the hillside, and to them time had been but a little thing, and a thousand ages were but as yesterday.

As I ascended farther and more remotely into the heart of the wood, a sort of eager tremor, a desire to see that which I knew was there, and which must be so overpowering in its immensity, began to grow on me. Wild silent life bubbled and hummed round me; eyes watched me from beneath the fern, and looked down on me from the over-arching fans of the pines; ears were pricked at my footstep; strange wild smiles broadened into a laugh at the intruder, at this child of immeasurably later ages. Sometimes it seemed to me as if this ancient consciousness of the woods was scornful and contemptuous, so that I quickened my pace and longed to get out of this dark room; at other moments, and truer ones, I knew better, knowing that I, too, was of it all, a manifestation of life, a piece of the pine-woods and brother of the bracken.

There is no myth that grew so close to the heart of things as the story of Pan, for it implies the central fact of all, the one fact that is so indisputably true, that all the perverted ingenuity of man has been unable to split into various creeds about it. For Pan is All, and to see Pan or to hear him playing on his pipes means to have the whole truth of the world and the stars, and Him who, as if by a twisting thumb and finger, set them endlessly spinning through infinite Space, suddenly made manifest. Flesh and blood, as the saying is, could not stand that, and there must be a bursting of the mortal envelope. Yet that, indisputably also, is but the cracking of the chrysalis. How we shall stand, weak-eyed still and quivering, when transported from the dusk in which we have lived this little life, into the full radiance of the eternal day! How shall our eyes gain strength and our wings expansion and completeness, when the sun of which we have seen but the reflection and image is revealed! That is to see Pan. It killed the mortal body of Psyche—the soul—when she saw him on the hill-top by the river, and heard the notes of his reed float down to her; but she and every soul who has burst the flimsy barrier of death into life joins in his music, and every day makes it the more compelling. Drop by drop the ocean of life, made up of the lives that have been, rises in the bowl in which God dips His hands. He touches every drop.

The wood in front had grown thin, and I was nearly out on the open heather of the hills. Just here the path crossed the stream bed; a great grey cliff of rock was above me, in which a pattern of lichens had found crevices for their roots; the pine-trees waved solemnly overhead; the miracle of running water, perhaps the greatest miracle of all, chuckled and eddied as it slid into the brown pool. And quite seriously I waited to see Pan. The ferns would be pushed aside, and the merry face would smile at me (for Pan, though he kills you, is kind), and he would put his pipes to his lips, and the world, as I had hitherto seen it, would swim away from me. And just before he puts his pipes to his mouth, I hope I shall say: ‘Yes, begin; I am ready!’ Or shall I stop my ears, and shut my eyes to him? I hope not. But the fern waved only, and the water ran, and ... and I was going a-fishing.

I suppose I had not gone more than a hundred yards after this pause when execrable events occurred. It seemed as if some dreadful celestial housemaid suddenly woke up, and went on with her work. She shut the window (that is to say, the wind dropped), and began to dust. She dusted all the clouds away, and in ten minutes there was not one left. From horizon to horizon there was a sky positively Egyptian, and an abominable sun shone with hooligan ferocity. And I was going a-fishing! I said what I should not say with such extraordinary distinctness and emphasis that I rapidly took out my field-glass, and swept the untenanted fields of heather to see that there was no one within a mile or two. But I expect the roe-deer heard.

Sandy was waiting for me at the near end of the loch, when I arrived there a quarter of an hour afterwards. Scotchmen are never cynical, but I should otherwise have suspected him of cynicism when I saw that he had been at pains to set up my rod, and was soaking a length of gut. The brilliance of the sun from the polished and untarnished field of water was a thing to make the eyes dazzle. So I was cynical in turn, and, from pure cynicism and nothing else at all, I put on (for the sake of the curious) an astonishing fly, with a green body bound with silver, and a Zulu. It was a shade too cynical to go out in the boat, for I think Sandy would have seen through that, as it was impossible that any fish should rise at anything in this state of affairs, and I fished from the shore. Fishing at all was an idiotic proceeding, and so the incredible happened. I wish to call attention to the incredibility of it, since it happens to be true.

Here was I, then, on a still and windless morning, with a blazing sun overhead, and a looking-glass loch in which were supposed to be monstrous fish, whose shyness apparently increased in ratio to their weight, for nobody had ever seen them before, but had only heard about them second-hand, like ghost-stories. Half a dozen casts carried out a convenient length of line, which fell, so it appeared to me, on the glassy surface of the water like the cane of an angry schoolmaster, resonant and cruel. Then at the end of the cane, where the Zulu was, there came a boil just underneath the looking-glass; my rod bent, and the reel screamed. For one moment I knew, so I thought (for the boil came just as I was preparing to cast again), that I had hooked some stalwart weed, or perhaps a snag of tree-trunk. Then I knew I had hooked a fish. He was clearly insane to have taken a fly at all, but what mattered was that he was a large lunatic. I thought I knew also that this was but the first act of what would turn out to be a tragedy. But the tragedy was not for me.

Again, for the sake of the curious, I will give his weight. He turned the scale at five pounds some six hours later. So I imagine he was about five and a half when he came out of the water with the Zulu in his mouth. He was mad; he turned a fierce Bedlamite eye on me.

I dare say I am more impatient than the true fisherman, but when I have cast my fly upon the waters for three hours without a hint of a rise, I sit down, and do not feel it incumbent on me to rise again unless conditions change. So when, at about two o’clock, nothing further had broken the surface of the loch except the cane of the schoolmaster, I felt, after eating my sandwich, that I was not unlikely, without incurring the contempt of Sandy, to prolong the interval. I wanted also, after my mis-tryst with Pan that morning, vaguely also, after that day of bovine observance of Nature which I had spent a week or two ago in the garden at home, to ‘sit up and take notice.’ Instead of nirvanic contemplation, I wanted to focus all that surrounded me, not to see a stag-beetle advance ten yards, and then go back to the place he advanced from, but to see the activity of it all, to be alert and to collect, not to be lazy and to soak.

Yes; it was a wonderful day. Almost immediately I spied two little human figures on the adjoining forest creeping, creeping up a steep brae. A mile below I saw their ponies. They moved so slowly that it was only possible to see they moved at all, because they passed out of the field of my glass; the deer I could not find.

Then, after watching them for ten minutes more, I saw they stopped. Stealthy movements went on. Then came the sharp crack of a rifle, but before the report reached me they had both jumped up, and ran into a hollow of the hills, where I lost them. It was like being at sea, and having news twitched out from the receiver of a Marconi apparatus.

But hardly had that drama been played to its curtain when another started. The call of a startled grouse, ‘Come back, come back, come back!’ sounded close at hand, and it was followed by another and yet another. Sandy had remained by the edge of the loch when I climbed this hillock for my lunch, and since then I had been very quiet, so I could not imagine what had caused this commotion on the hill, as the stalkers were not on this beat at all to-day. I could account, in fact, for the movements of any human being that could have disturbed grouse for a mile or two. Then I looked up to the enormous sky, and saw.

Above me, but close, so that I could see the outspread feathers of the wing, was a golden eagle. As I watched I saw he was not vaguely circling, looking out for prey, but employed in his stalk, even as on the other side of the valley ten minutes ago I had watched another stalk. He was sweeping wide circles of the moor, and driving up towards a gully of the hills behind the fowls of the mountain, flying in low and ever narrowing semicircles, so that it must seem to the terrified grouse and black game that huge-winged danger threatened from every quarter but that. Yet still I could not guess what his plan was when he had driven them there.

And then I saw. Straight down from the grey crag of cliff that rose on the west of this gully, into which he had driven the birds, there dropped his mate, savage and hungry, seeking her meat from God. Aha, you grand Mistress Eagle; it is dinner-time!

Merrily and well has the old cock-grouse lived in the heather, lying warm in the sun, and filling himself with the good things of the moorland, but to-day Pan sends him to your table, and in the swift hissing down-rush of your wings he hears his pipes. Pan will play them for you, too, some day, and the grey film will cover over your fierce yellow eye that was wont undazzled to behold the sun in his strength, and the strong hooked beak which gasped for one breath more of the aromatic moorland air will close, and be hungry no more, and the crooked, horny talon will relax, and next year, maybe, I shall find whitened bones on the hillside, and perhaps, crumpled up under them, a feather, an eagle’s feather. But I shall not be so foolish as to say I have found you, for do I imagine that that is all there is of you, that your life, your spirit, has been blown out like a candle? I know better than that.

For, indeed, there is no other explanation possible of the incessant war, the death, the murder, the butchery in which Nature’s fair hands are steeped and stained, except by this one supposition that the spirit of bird and beast escapes at the moment of death from the splendid sunlit prison of this beautiful world, which has the bright-eyed hours for its bars. Otherwise the world becomes a mere intolerable shambles, viler than Chicago. I at any rate cannot believe otherwise, but should any sceptical reader at this point ask me to sketch out for him the subsequent movements of the wasp he has just squashed in the tongs, or the trout I have just landed, I hasten to assure him that I have not the slightest idea about them. But that does not invalidate the explanation, nor in the least disturb my complete belief in it. I do not know what the weather will be this day year. But I make no manner of doubt that there will be weather of some kind. I only insist that he with his tongs, and I with my Zulu-fly, cannot destroy life. One cannot even destroy matter; how much less, then, the lord and master of matter!

I think I have never been in a house where absurd gaiety—the gaiety of friends, of health, of outdoor spirits—was so rampant as here; and she whose house it was, and who was leader of the ludicrous, was she, as you may have guessed, who in June had asked me to come here for the last time. That evening when I got home I found her sitting out in the garden enjoying the last half-hour of sunset, and she beckoned to me across the lawn.

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘I have caught the original trout. He had gone mad from old age and riotous living, and came to the fly when the sun was brightest and the winds were dead.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t use such beautiful language,’ she said. ‘How much does he weigh?’

‘About a ton. He has gone to be weighed now.’

‘And anything else?’

‘Not a fin. No more bites, as somebody said last night. I chattered with rage.’

‘You did; and what have you been thinking about?’ she asked.

‘Pan chiefly. No, to be honest, I think I have thought about the fish most. But Pan next!’

She turned rather slowly on her long wicker-couch, the tired aching body for the moment usurping the use of her eyes.

‘Ah, don’t let us talk,’ I said; ‘you are tired and suffering.’

At that she laughed.

‘All the more reason for thinking about something less inferior than one’s own health,’ she said. ‘What cowards we are nowadays! Why, our forebears in Elizabeth’s time used to go smiling to the rack for the sake of some small difference of dogma, and we snivel when we have the opportunity of showing, by our contempt for pain, the truth of things that matter much more. If bravery in the abstract and cheerfulness are not worth being brave and cheerful for, I don’t know what is. In any case, what conclusion did you come to about Pan? Oddly enough, I have been thinking of him, too. Let’s compare notes, and see if we mean the same person.’

I told her more or less what I have already written down on the subject, and at the end she nodded at me with the quick eager gesture that was so characteristic of her.

‘Hurrah!’ she said. ‘I have guessed the same. So perhaps our guesses are right. But I put it to myself rather more personally, and, though it sounds conceited, so much more vividly than you. That is only natural, you know; Pan concerns me much more immediately than he concerns you, we hope. And another image of him suggested itself to me, which appeals to me more than your figure of the ferns being pushed aside, and the hand with the pipes in it being raised to the smiling lips. Listen!’

The sun had dropped behind the big trees to the west of the lawn, leaving us in shadow, though it still shone on the hills to the east of the house. But evening was coming without any chill or whisper of autumn in it, and in this northern latitude nights were short in August. It was as if she already saw dawn.

‘Jim and I and our children,’ she said, ‘and you and all my friends are shipwrecked, or so it would seem to anyone who did not understand, on a little rock surrounded by infinite sea. Every one alive in the world is there, too, as a matter of fact, but our friends somehow are so big to us, and strangers and acquaintances so small in comparison, that all that really is seen by us is our own immediate circle. Huge thumping seas surround our rock, and, for some occult reason, we all have to sit exactly where we are, while the waves rush up, and every moment sweep somebody away. We can’t move our places, and go higher up on the rock, and we have to sit and look at the big waves, we poor shipwrecked people (so a man who does not understand would say), and know that this wave or the next will wash us off. That is the ignorant view of the situation, and the most pessimistic, so we will answer it at once.

‘Even if it was right, what then? Supposing we were shipwrecked, and all round us was the howling sea of death, would it not be much better, until the wave swept us off, to make the best of it, to talk, and laugh, and be pleasant with our friends, instead of looking with terror-stricken eyes at the hungry sea? How much nicer even for ourselves to be amused and talk a little while, instead of being frightened, and how much nicer for our friends when we are swept off, as we all certainly shall be, to know that before we were swept off we were moderately cheerful, and picked up bits of seaweed, and played with shells! I say nothing of the moral aspect of it all, because if you once bring that in there is no question any more about the matter, since in one case we are brave, and in the other merely cowardly. But given that we are shipwrecked, that the sea of hungry death surrounds us, and will soon pick us off, how much better, on the lowest possible view of the affair, to play about, to be kind and gentle, even if to-morrow there will be an end of us, utterly and for ever!

‘Yes, I am using beautiful language too. But I am talking of beautiful things.

‘Well, that view is the silliest and most incomprehensible possible. How did we get on this absurd rock, if only death surrounds us? Did we come from death into life? That is impossible, since scientifically you can’t produce life out of dead things. Or did some ship founder on the sea of death, and did we swim to shore, where we shall live until a wave sweeps us off again? That is possible; but, then, what was that ship on which we once were passengers, that for a time anyhow, until it foundered, if it did founder, rode over these waves? That is a serious question, but there is only one answer to it. The ship must have been life in some form. But the image does not seem convincing, does it?

‘What is left, then? Only this, that the sea which surrounds us on our little rock is not death at all, but life. Just as some day without doubt a wave will sweep us off our rock again, so there is no doubt that once a wave of that sea put us on the rock where you and I now are. If there is a wreck at all, it is a land-wreck, a wreck that puts us on shore. From the great sea of life we have been washed up for a little moment on to our little rock. Soon we shall be received back into life again!

‘In the interval, though in a new sense we are wrecked, how interesting is our rock, and how full of dear people, and pink shells, and divine things of the sea that life, not death, casts up round us, and nourishes by the spent water of its waves! How utterly idiotic it would be not to collect them eagerly, these little bits, for when we go back into life we shall see the forests from which they come, the sapphire caves in which they really dwell. A little bit of life, that grouse that the eagles ate, was cast up close to you to-day. I shall particularly ask, when the wave takes me off again, where it came from. And I shall go and see the place. And certainly I shall see Mistress Eagle come back.’

Courage, huge, natural courage like this, absolutely unassumed, absolutely instinctive, may have one of two effects on the beholder of it. It may make him weep for the admiration of it, or it may make him laugh out of joyousness of heart for the same admiration. At least I laughed.

‘Oh, be sure to show me the place when I come,’ I said. ‘I am certain that Mistress Eagle will have a nice house.’

‘They all have,’ she said. ‘There are many mansions.’

She looked at me in silence a moment.

‘But I was not so certain of all these things when first I knew that I was so soon to see them all,’ she said. ‘At first, though I was never exactly frightened, I was dazed and stunned. I saw nothing clearly. I must use another image for that, and say that days passed as one sees the landscape pass through a railway-carriage window which is blurred by rain. I could see nothing clearly; it was all dim and rain-streaked. But then, without any conscious effort on my part, except perhaps a little exercise of patience, we passed—the train and I—out of the scud again, and soon the glass cleared, and I saw the green valleys and the sunny hillside just as they had always been.’

Again she paused.

‘I have not told you anything of importance yet,’ she said; ‘all I have said is really quite obvious. But this now——

‘You think of Pan as the smiling face that peeps from the fern, the presence that assures all suffering things that he is kind when he pipes to them, even though the sound means death. But surely that is no more than a sort of pagan mythical aspect of him. I always think that he suffers too, that every pain which he seems to inflict is only the reflection of the pain in his own universal heart, although he still smiles. It is from the cross that He smiles at us all.’

SEPTEMBER

THE ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ has indeed been a close bosom friend of the maturing sun, and for the last three days before Legs went back to his crammer in town, he, Helen, and I spent a prostrated existence. Heat that in July invigorates, is utterly intolerable if it occurs at the end of September, just as the crisp winter day, which would be so welcome in January, descending to the earth as it usually does in June, produces merely amazed horror at the weather, and probably a cold. The superficial view that we suffer because we are improperly clad for these climatic surprises (a view that Helen put forward the other night) is beside the point. During these days, if I was improperly clad, it was only because I has so little on. In fact, only ten minutes before she had said as much.

The state of Legs’ affections, I am bound to add, aggravated the sultriness of the weather, and made me feel exactly 350 (three hundred and fifty) years old. To take it at its best, he was embarked on a violent flirtation with a dreadful girl; to take it at its worst, he was falling in love with her. She is the daughter of a neighbouring minute squire, who owns three turnip-fields, and calls it shooting. Legs shot over it the other day, and after walking over the whole estate twice, got back to The Grange in time for lunch. This was before I returned from Scotland, or I should have tried to prevent it. Probably I should not have succeeded.

The neighbouring squire’s name is Ampthump. I know quite well that it is not his fault, but that, wedded to what he is and a German wife, makes me unable to like him. His wife makes incredible quantities of jam, which, again, is an innocent pursuit; and Charlotte, the daughter, talks German to Legs, who I wish was more like Goethe. The whole family, in fact, as may have been already perceived, appear to me to be simply intolerable.

The attachment also has already led to equivocation on the part of Legs. He pretends that he talks to Charlotte because it is so good for his German. He knows that it is not so, and I know it is not so, and I think he knows that I know it is not so. But it really looks at the moment that unless they marry each other there will be a broken or, at any rate, a cracked heart. I only hope it will not be Legs’. I don’t care the least what happens to Charlotte’s heart. It may, however, be only a flirtation, in which case there probably will not even be a crack. Legs will wake up one morning, and after handling some precious withered flowers will wonder what on earth they ever meant to him, and throw them in the fire. Or Charlotte will do something equally desperate. That is my hope; my fear is that they are falling in love with each other.

This narrative, it should be understood, is the gist of what I have been saying fragmentarily to Helen. She considers it a cynical view, which alarms me, since I hold the creed that all cynics are properly and irretrievably damned. To-night Legs went to bed early, with dishevelled hair, a wakeful eye, and a gale of sighs, and I came upstairs to talk to Helen about it all while she brushed her hair.

‘You are quite ridiculous about it,’ she said. ‘Because you happen not to like the Ampses (we have agreed on that abbreviation), you think that they are unlovable. Legs has proved the contrary. Besides, what on earth does her name matter, if she is going to change it?’

I groaned intentionally, and in a graveyard manner.

‘Do you mean that you think Legs is in love with her?’ I asked.

‘Yes; at least, I hope so. He had a long talk with me to-day. He said he felt it was time he settled down. What a darling! Just twenty! I wish I was.’

Most of this was irrelevant. I tried to pick out pieces that were not.

‘Of course, her name doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Her name might be—— Well, you can’t do worse than Ampthump, and it does happen to be exactly that. But her face is like a ham——’

‘That is superficial,’ said Helen. ‘Beside, it isn’t. It’s oval.’

‘So is a ham. And she’s a prig. Ampthump! Good Lord!’

I am afraid I shouted this, because she said: ‘Hush! Legs will hear.’

‘Not he. Or if he does, he will think it is only the wind whispering the beloved name.’

‘Yes, but you didn’t whisper it. Oh, do take the brush. You made me send my maid away, so you must do it yourself. I can’t brush from here, because my arms are in front.’

Now in my heart I pity everybody who has not seen Helen with her hair down. All such folk, in all their millions, lead impoverished existences. There is a wave in it that is like the big unbroken billows which succeed a storm, when the clouds have passed and the sun shines. It is lit from within, even as they seem to be irradiated from the depths. Those billows must go over a sandy foreshore, for they are yellow, and the sun—I know not how—must be foggy, for there is a little red light in them. And brushing, as I did now, I held my hand over them, and the hair rose to it with a tiny cracking sound. Her hair came to my hand, lifted towards it that unminted gold that framed her face, and covered her ears. And for a little while it was no wonder that I forgot about Legs and his Charlotte.

I suppose every one knows the sensation of being lost. You can be lost all by yourself, as I was once, as I have said, in the western desert of Egypt, on which occasion the bray of a donkey was to me the trumpet of the Seraphin. That was a dreadful experience, since it implied being out of touch with life. But I should be glad to know if there is anything the world holds which is more enraptured than the sense of being lost with one other person, to feel the world swim away, and be dissolved, so that you and the comrade you are with are quite alone. To feel that there is no existence except the existence of her who is lost with you.... It was Helen’s hair.

‘That’s the world’s side; there’s the wonder!’ That lover understood. Everyone saw Helen’s hair.

‘“But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious moonshine,
Come out on the other side....”’

I never could quote correctly. The point is that the beloved has another face, the face she turns to her lover. No one else sees it; it is ‘blind to Keats, him even.’

A moment ago I thought that no one but me must see Helen’s hair. Now let them all see it, the waves of the sunlit sea, not breaking, unless the break be where I put my hand an inch above them.

‘Thanks, dear,’ she said soon. ‘You brush it much better than my maid. Now shall we talk for five minutes? Then I must go to bed.’

I had hideous accumulations of various fag-ends of work to do, and at the end of the five minutes, or it might be ten, I went downstairs again, to begin at any rate this dreadful patchwork of odds and ends. It was still, I was almost sorry to observe, only just eleven, and since I had with both eyes open deliberately and firmly wasted all the hours of the day, my uneasy Conscience told me that I had better, if it was to have the ease it craved, not think of leaving my chair for a couple of hours at least. I argued this point with it, and lost some minutes, for I told it that it was extremely bad for me to work at night; that it took more out of one than work in the day; that work done under these circumstances was never good work; that doctors recommended one never to work at night, but go peacefully to bed before the evening fever—whatever that might be—set in. Then there ensued a short spirited dialogue.

‘Most sensible,’ said Conscience. ‘Give me your word that you will get up at six to-morrow, then, and work for two hours before breakfast, and you have my leave to go to bed now.’

‘But I shan’t wake at six,’ said I, ‘and the servants have gone to bed.’

‘I will wake you,’ said Conscience. (Conscience is quite capable of the odious feat.)

‘But I can’t work before breakfast,’ I said. ‘It makes me feel’—I could not think of the word for the moment—‘oh yes, faint.’

‘Well, feel faint, then,’ said Conscience.

‘But I would sooner not; it implies weakness of the heart.’

‘Not to do your work implies weakness of character.’

‘Shut up,’ said I, ‘and let me begin, then.’

And I could swear that my Conscience gave a self-satisfied chuckle.

For an hour I waded wearily, knee-deep only, so to speak, in work, like a man who wants to swim, but has to trudge out over level sands. Most people, I fancy, even the laziest of us, like working, when we get up to our necks, or, better even, out of our depths, in it, but the wading is weary work. The worst of it was that the fact that I had to wade so far was entirely my own fault, for the whole of the last week I had never taken the trouble to finish up any one job, and now there waited for me several bills to pay, since a few mornings ago I had sat down to pay bills, and had paid them all except two or three; several letters to write, all of which had to begin either falsely (i.e., ‘I have just found your letter of the 17th) or apologetically (i.e. ‘I haven’t answered your letter before because——’). Then there was a half-corrected proof of an unfinished article, badly written originally, and, what is more, written without conviction. It was on a subject that did not particularly interest me, and I had only written it because the misguided editor of a magazine had offered me £25 for it, and I very much wished to buy a seal-top spoon which cost exactly that sum, and which I knew perfectly well I had no right to buy. So, saying to myself that I would write this article (which I should not otherwise have done), I had bought it, and here was the dismal price that I had to pay for it—namely, that this wretched article was a piece of literary dishonesty. I had to fudge and vamp over it, trying to conceal the nakedness of the land by ornamental expressions. That was brought home to me now. It was all bad cheap stuff, and though most of us are continually turning out bad cheap stuff, not knowing it is bad and cheap, such manufactures become criminal when we do know it. As long as work is honest from the workman’s point of view, it is only his misfortune when he does not know its valuelessness; but when he does know its valuelessness, he sins by intention, and is a forger. I was one, and by my forgery I had bought a seal-top that was not. I thought that when I tacitly agreed to work for two hours to-night, my tiresome Conscience would put its head under its wing, and leave me alone; but I found now that it was broad awake again, and chirping like a canary.

‘What are you going to do?’ it chirped. ‘Are you going to send out a rotten forgery which everybody who knows anything will detect? or are you going to tear it up, and be left with a purchase that you know you can’t really afford? Remember that you must get a new dining-room carpet too; you promised Helen you would. Chirp, chirp, chirp!’

I am bound to say that this enraged me.

‘What’s the use of making that row?’ I said. ‘It’s you, Conscience, who has to settle.’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ said Conscience. ‘It’s your fault; you wouldn’t listen to me when I told you that you had no right to accept £25 for your dreadful article.’

‘You didn’t say it so loud, then,’ said I.

‘No, but you heard all right,’ said Conscience.

‘I hardly heard,’ said I. ‘You spoke so indistinctly.’

‘Yes, but you did hear,’ it chirped, with a sort of devilish cheerfulness. ‘You knew quite well what I meant. Now you suffer for it. Hurrah!’

I wonder if I am cursed in this matter of Conscience beyond the majority of mankind. Often and often (I will swear to this in the House of Lords if necessary) my Conscience is hardly audible at all at the time when I do anything which I ought not to do, or omit to do anything which I ought. To continue the simile of the canary, which really fits the case, when the actual choice comes, it is as if the canary had a thick green-baize cover round its cage, and only hoarse and muffled notes reach me. Very often, indeed, I am sorry to say, I don’t attend to them, or say it is only the cat, and in consequence do what I should not. Then the moment it is done the baize cover is whisked off, and the infernal and cheerful chirping, or so it sounds, succeeds to the wrong choice or the weak omission. And the burden of the chirping is always the same.

‘I told you so; I told you so. Now you are in a mess! What are you going to do now? Chirp, chirp, chirp!’

And a hurricane of dry and deafening notes follows.

I sat there with this column of stupid twaddle in my hands, and Conscience watched me with its bright bird-like eye. Much as I like birds, I hate their eyes, because they remind me of Conscience. They are beady and absolutely unsympathetic, frightfully quick to see, and without a particle of pity in them. Conscience never pities one at all; it is the foe that is of a man’s household. It always gloats over one’s mistakes, and things that are more than mistakes, and only says:

‘Here comes the master with the whip. A new lash, I see, this time. And what a thin shirt you have got on!’

Nor, when the whipping is over, does Conscience sympathize.

‘I told you so; I told you so,’ it says. ‘No, there is no soothing ointment of any kind in the house. I ate it all up. Wasn’t that a beautiful new lash?’

Well, I tore that dreadful nonsense up, and wrote another apologetic letter. I am getting quite good at them. But to-morrow—this is what makes Conscience mad—I shall tell Helen about it. The telling is not pleasant; it never is. But as soon as Helen knows, Conscience has simply to retire. It does not understand why it suddenly becomes so unimportant, and that gives it a fit of impotent rage. Nor do I quite understand, though I am nearer to the explanation than Conscience is. But she understands. At least, I suppose so, or else she would not be able to put the green-baize cover on again.

And then, what with apologetic letters, and the drawing of two or three cheques, and the stupid attempts, in this matter of the dishonest article, to produce something out of nothing, by covering up the nothingness by more ornamental expressions, and the eventual destruction of it all, I found that the two hours were gone, and that I had kept my promise to the idiotic canary. It had ceased chirping from experience when I told it I was going to confess to Helen.

The night was intensely hot, and through the long open windows of the room in which I had been working no breeze entered. Though September had but a quarter more of its course to run, it was like some sultry July midnight, portending storm, for when I went out to take the night-breath the sky was thickly overcast, so that no direct ray either of moonlight or of starshine, came earthwards. The serrated outline of the elms at the end of the lawn was scarce distinguishable against the scape of the clouds, and the low land of the water-meadows was blanketed in a mist that was only just visible by its whiteness against the black blot of the hills behind. Fifi, who had very sensibly decided to sleep on the veranda, did not stir when I came out, though I heard the instinctive thump of her short tail on the tiles, the natural politeness of the dear dog, though she really could not stand on ceremony with me to the length of getting up. So, maliciously, I am afraid, since I thought this slightly cavalier conduct, I said ‘Puss,’ though there was no Puss of any sort, as far as I was aware. But my malice was again thwarted, for Fifi just tapped again with her tail, in courteous recognition of a stale old joke, just to show that she appreciated my intention, but she made not the smallest further effort towards activity.

So she was half asleep, and all the world, this dear, blessed world, which is so full of merriness and simple, innocent pleasure, despite the fulminations of fashionable priests, was quite asleep, not stirring, scarcely breathing, just sleeping, sleeping. It was not yet the hour when, just before the hold of the night begins to tremble and be weakened in the sky, all living things wake for a moment—that mysterious moment, when sheep take a bite of grass and cows twitch their grave ears, and horses stand up for a minute before they settle down to the light morning sleep which dissolves with day, and when even indoors, if you sleep with a dog in your room, and happen yourself to be awake, you will hear a stretching of limbs on your bed or on the carpet, and a long sigh breathed into the blankets. Plants and flowers, so I truly believe, feel the same thing; and though there may be no wind perceptible to you if you are abroad, as sometimes I am, at that hour, you will hear, just at the moment when cattle move and sheep take their bite of grass, a stir go through the trees, and a hushed whisper lisp in the flower-beds. At that moment, too (you need not credit this, though it is absolutely true), though it has rained all night till then, and will rain thereafter, steadily, soakingly till morning, the rain ceases, as suddenly as if a tap was turned off. Time and again I have tested that.

But, as I have said, that mysterious moment was not due yet. It was still two hours short of it, and everything was still asleep. Even in the last minute or two Fifi had fallen fast asleep, too, after I had sat down in a wicker chair on the veranda, for when I called her there was no tap of response. To-night, too, the sleep of the world seemed to me (feeling it as one does by that sixth sense, which still exists dormant in us, and is most awake at night) to be extraordinarily deep. It was the sleep of a world that was very tired with this long hot summer. There seemed no pulse stirring in it at all, as you may find it stir in the light sleep in which Nature indulges in June, or still more in the dark, wet nights of spring, when the secret boiling up of life begins again from hidden root to budding tendril, so that if you lay your ear to the trunk of a tree it seems that the effervescence of the young year is audible, and sings within it, even as the telegraph poles are resonant with the wind that hums in the wires. Nor could I hear, when I rose and walked across the lawn, even though the dew was heavy on the grass, the hiss of startled worms, withdrawing from the approaching footfall. Black, too, and lifeless, was the oblong of the house except where the lights burned in the room in which I had been trying to be honest. The long herbaceous hedge was black, the lawn was black, Helen’s windows and Legs’ were black.

I went back to the seat I had just left, and lit a cigarette, meaning to go upstairs to bed when I had smoked it. Fifi still lay motionless, though generally any excursion into the garden at any time of day or night sets her scampering. And then, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, for nothing was further from my thoughts, I became aware that, though the physical world was asleep, there was some enormous stir and activity going on in the occult world which surrounds and permeates us. Yet that is perhaps a wrong expression, for the same activity and stir always goes on in that unsleeping realm; and I must express it more accurately by saying that the part of me which was able to perceive it was suddenly quickened. It is possible, of course, since I confess to being able to go to sleep whenever I choose, and often without delay, when I do not, that at that moment I fell asleep. But whether I fell asleep or not, does not make the slightest difference, for there was clearly some part of my brain awake, and it made my eyes think that they saw, and my ears think that they heard, that which immediately followed.

As far as I am aware, in any case, I sat down again in a rather creaky basket-chair and lit a cigarette. The match with which I lit it, I threw on to the gravel path in front of me, and, since I required it no further, it proceeded to burn prosperously. By its light I could see Fifi with her nose between her paws. I saw, also, that my shoe-lace was untied.

And then I heard my name called from the garden, in a voice that was perfectly familiar to me, though for the moment I could not say, so elusive is the ear, whose voice it was that called. It was not Helen’s, it was not Legs’, it was not ... and then I remembered whose voice it was. It called me by name, once only, in the voice that had said, ‘It is from the cross that He smiles at us all.’

I do not think I was frightened, but simply for the purely personal reason, that to me there was nothing to be frightened at. The match still burned on the gravel path, so short had been the measurement of this in the world of time, and I could still see Fifi’s nose buried between her paws. Then she raised it, looked out into the garden with terrified scrutinizing eyes, focussing them on something, invisible to me, and gave one long howl. But there was no moon. It was at something else she howled.

Then, I confess, as if some bomb had burst within me, terror flooded my whole mind, submerging it, and I sprang up. Simultaneously I heard a sort of strangled scream from the room above, and the scurry of unshod feet overhead. Next moment the sound of an opening door came to my ears, and a quick stumbling tread on the stairs. I ran indoors, and reached the door leading from my room into the hall, just as the handle was seized and shaken by someone on the other side of it, and Legs burst into the room, his hair all tumbled and erect, and his face wearing such a mask of terror that for the moment I recognized him only because it must be he.

‘Who is that in the garden?’ he said. ‘Someone in white, who looked up at my window? And Fifi howled at her.’

This would never do. Nerves, terror are the most infectious things in the world, and unless I took steps, there would, I knew, be standing here two babbling lunatics.

‘I was dozing in the veranda,’ I said, ‘and Fifi woke me by howling. She woke you, too! Legs, don’t be an ass! Pull yourself together. If there had been anything, I should have seen it.’

Legs was as white as a sheet. The whiteness somehow showed through his freckled sun-tanned skin. He was swaying to and fro on his feet, as if he would fall, and I put my arm around him, and deposited him in a chair. Then I poured out a wineglassful of neat whisky.

‘Don’t speak another word till you have drunk that,’ I said. ‘Then I shall count ten slowly, and then you may speak.’

Fifi had followed me in, and sat close to the door whimpering. With my heart in my mouth and a perspiring forehead, I went across to the window as I counted, shut and locked it, and pulled down the blind.

‘Nine, ten,’ I said.

A little colour had begun to come back to Leg’s face. He had drunk the whisky, a beverage which he detested, like water, and the frozen fear of his eyes was less biting. And then, as suddenly as it had come on, my terror left me. Whatever it was that I had heard, whatever it was that Legs had seen and Fifi perceived, there was nothing to terrify. Besides, within myself, now that the cowardly disorder of my nerves had passed, I believed I knew what it was that had made its presence so strangely perceived by us all. The mortal suffering of a dear friend was over. Already I was ashamed of having told Legs that I had been asleep and had neither seen nor heard anything.

‘Legs, I lied just now,’ I said. ‘I heard my name called from the garden in Margaret’s voice.’

‘You mean she is dead?’ asked he gently. ‘The last accounts had been better, I thought.’

‘I’m sure she is.’

Then for a moment, like a sudden squall, the white terror passed over Legs’ face again.

‘It was not her I saw,’ he said hoarsely; ‘it was Death. I thought she had come for me. Fifi saw her too.’

I sat down on the arm of his chair.

‘Yes, old boy,’ I said, ‘I think that you and Fifi both saw some manifestation of what I heard. But there is nothing to be frightened at. But how was it you were at your window? You had gone to bed hours ago.’

‘I know, but I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and sat by the window.’

We sat there for some time after that, and by degrees Legs recovered from his collapse, and soon, instead of terror, mere sleepiness invaded his face. Once or twice he stifled a yawn, and at length he got up.

‘I am dead sleepy,’ he said. ‘I think I shall go to bed.’

‘You are not frightened any longer, are you?’ I asked.

Legs looked at me out of drooping eyelids, and he seemed puzzled.

‘Frightened? What about?’ he said. ‘Good-night.’

I was very late down next morning, and found that Helen and Legs had nearly finished breakfast. As I came in he jumped up.

‘Ah, here he is!’ he cried. ‘Now, did you sit up very late last night?’

When he asked that I began to have some suspicion of what was coming next.

‘Yes, very. Why?’

‘Well, were you talking to yourself? Helen and I both woke in the night, and heard talking in your room. I had had some dream that frightened me, and I nearly came downstairs for human companionship.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I was too sleepy. But—were you talking?’

‘No. You were dreaming. So was Helen. I may have groaned now and then over proofs, but not more than that.’

Legs nodded at Helen.

‘I told you it was ghosts,’ he said.

‘And you heard voices too?’ I asked Helen.

‘Yes; at least, I thought so. But I was very sleepy. I thought also I heard Fifi howl.’

So, you see, there is no corroboration of my story, and if I dreamed it at all, or made it up, there is no one to whom I can appeal for confirmation of its verity. But there is just this little bit of evidence—namely, that though Legs had finished breakfast, he went on drinking cup after cup of tea. When Helen left us he explained this to me.

‘I woke with a mouth like a lime-kiln,’ he said—‘just as if I had been drinking that dreadful whisky of yours. I drank most of my jug, too, and they had to bring me more water to wash in.’

What happened last night, then, had been wiped clean off Legs’ brain again. Whatever it was that he had seen, that which made him stumble white-faced downstairs, had gone. But an hour or two later, while we were out playing croquet in the garden, some faint echo of it, I think, crossed him again. A telegram was brought out for me, which contained what I knew it would contain, and I handed it to him when I had read it. Then we went quietly indoors.

Just as we got into my room again, he said:

‘How odd that sensation is of feeling that something has happened before! When you handed me the telegram, I felt I knew what was in it. And during the last week she had been rather better, had she not?’

OCTOBER

THE business of the dining-room carpet (a case of conscience makes the whole world kin, so I confidently return to this matter) was settled more beautifully than I had thought possible. I told Helen all about it, and she said:

‘Thank goodness you tore the thing up! Dear, you are such a silly ass! There’s nothing whatever more to be said. You are, aren’t you?’

‘There’s nothing more to be said, I believe you remarked.’

‘Well, you may just say “Yes,”’ said she.

So I said ‘Yes.’ It was a variant of the woman’s last word, spoken by a man instead.

‘There, now we’ll go and quarrel about the rose-garden,’ said she.

We went and quarrelled. She was flushed with triumph over making me say ‘Yes,’ and in consequence I got my way about several disputed points, which to-day the darling thinks she chose herself.

The rose-garden is a design of unparalleled audacity, and when it grows up, it will be nothing short of stupendous. For between us Helen and I are territorial magnates, and beyond this house and garden, which are hers, I am owner of two fields, and limitless possibilities. I bought them a year ago, in a sudden flush of extravagance, and for six months we maintained there (at staggering loss) a poultry-yard in one corner and a cow over the rest. The original design, of course, was to make a sound investment in land, which, in addition to the fathomless pleasure of owning it, would keep us in butter, eggs, chickens to eat (not to mention, as I hasten to do, savouries of chicken liver on toast), and possibly beef. If one considers the question closely, it is difficult to see how a cow can (1) give milk, and (2) give beef; but Helen, in visionary enthusiasm, said we should have oxen as well, and why not pigs in the farther corner? I did not at once see why not, and I bought the two fields with the same unconcern as I should have bought a box of matches, which yield so sure an enjoyment in the matter of lighting cigarettes.

Then we both began to learn that, though we might be gardeners, we were not farmers. The poultry-yard was (mistakenly, no doubt) erected at the corner of the field nearest the house, and morning after morning we were awakened at dead and timeless hours. Helen said that when a hen made a long clucking noise, it meant she had laid an egg, and that, till the thing became incredible, consoled me. For if she was right, it was clear that hens laid invisible eggs, or that they were doing tiresome conjuring tricks, and that the long-drawn crow meant, ‘I have laid an egg, but see if you can find it. I am the mother of this disappearing egg.’ We usually were not able to do so, but sometimes an egg was found in a hedge, or in a ditch, which when found was totally uneatable, except by the Chinese. Personally, I believe that by some unhappy mischance we had bought celibate and barren poultry, whose customs drove us daily nearer Bedlam; in fact, it the pig that was our hellebore.

The pig was not a pig, but a sow. She went mad, too—or so I must believe—jumped the pigsty in the opposite corner, made a bee-line for the poultry-yard, went through our beautiful wire-fencing as if it had been a paper hoop in a circus, and ate two hens. The cock beat a masterly retreat, and was never heard of again. The other four hens followed him. And the sow, dripping with gore, lay down in the hen-house and slept. Almost before she woke, she was sold for a song.

Then the cow came. I do not wish to libel her, but I think I may safely say that she was milkless and excitable, and had a wild eye. She roamed over my fields (mine, I had bought them) as if they were her own. Had not Legs been so agile and swift, she might have tossed him. As it was, she ran into the brick wall at the lower end of the garden, and made her nose bleed. As far as I know, that was the only liquor that she parted with. She was probably mad also, for she used to low in the middle of the night, when all proper cows are fast asleep. Asleep or awake, however, now she makes her fantasias elsewhere. I almost hope she is dead, for it requires a larger optimism than I possess to believe that she will ever become a proper cow, for she was more of a steed for Mazeppa. Perhaps she was a horse after all, a horned horse. I wish we had thought of that at the time. As it was, we sold her at outrageous loss, as a cow. And with her we parted with any idea of keeping farmyard animals for purposes of gain. Perhaps we were not serious enough about it, and the animals saw that.

Through last spring and summer the fields rested after this invasion of outrageous animals, and about the middle of May it struck Helen and me simultaneously that we were going to have a crop of hay. That was delightful, and much less harassing than hens. Hay would not wake one at timeless hours, nor would it go mad, and have to be sold at a quarter of the price we gave for it, since we gave nothing for it at all. It was the pound of tea thrown in with the fields we had bought, or the Times newspaper thrown in with your subscription to that extraordinary library.

From this there was born the scheme of giving a haymaking party, to which we originally planned to ask everybody we knew, amended that to asking all the children we knew, and afterwards (this was Helen’s amendment) decided not to ask anybody at all, partly because children were so serious, but chiefly because there might not be enough hay to go round. We neither of us knew how many square yards of hay it was reasonable to supply to each person, and it would be dreadful if there was not enough. Either Helen or I, or both of us, would have to go without, and it was safer to give the haymaking party to each other. We were in town all May, and the first half of June, but had left word with the gardener to send us a postcard when the hay was ready. The weather throughout these weeks was gloriously sunny, and in our mind’s eye we saw the crop growing taller and thicker with each blazing day.

Then one evening came the memorable postcard:

‘A reddy.’

We flew to the ‘A.’ In the middle of the largest field was a small haycock like a penwiper. One not quite so large and round at the top, more like a pincushion, was visible in the next field.

It was clear after this that the Powers that Are willed that our fields should not be used for utilitarian purposes. Hence the inception of the rose-garden.

A brick wall (the one against which the insane cow had blooded her nose) bounded the garden. From there the ground declined steeply away into the middle of the larger field, which was cup-shaped, the ground rising on all sides of it. (It was at the centre of the cup, where the sugar is, that the penwiper had been raked together.) To-day a flight of steps made of broken paving-stones—an entrancing material—led down the side of the cup from the garden-gate, and up the opposite slope. Standing where the sugar is, therefore, you saw on every side of you rising ground, which had been terraced, and walks of broken paving-stone, communicating with the two staircases, lay concentrically round. And the Herculean labour which had already occupied us so many rapturous afternoons was to plant the whole cup with rose-trees, so that, standing in the centre, there was nothing visible except sky and roses. That was practically done; and to-day what occupied us was the consideration of the level remainder of the field, of which there was some half acre. It was rough, coarse grass, starred with dandelion, which gave the first hint. We wanted to get rid of the dandelion, and——

At last I got Helen to agree, and I mixed together in a wheelbarrow an infinity of bulbs, and other delectable roots. There were big onion-like daffodils, neat crocuses with an impatient little yellow horn sticking up, fritillary roots, bottle-shaped tulips, the corms of anemones, and the orris of the iris. Then, trowel in hand, each with a bag of bulbs taken haphazard out of the wheelbarrow and with a bag of sand to make a delectable sprouting-place for the roots, we started. Every dandelion encountered was to be dug up with honesty and thoroughness, and where the dandelion had been there was to be planted a bulb taken at random out of the bag. Helen said it would take ten years. Personally, when I looked, I thought longer, but I did not say so, for I practice reticence on discouraging occasions.

I wonder how many people know the extraordinary delight of doing a thing for oneself, starting from the beginning. I do not say that it gives me the smallest pleasure to black my boots or brush my clothes, since somebody has already made those boots and woven the cloth. But there is nothing more entrancing than to deal first-hand with Nature, to make holes in the earth, and put in them roots, the farthest back that we can go with regard to vegetable life. Rightly or wrongly, it seems to me a pleasure as clean and as elemental as the joy of creation itself. Whether we write a book, or paint a picture, or carve a statue, we, though we do not really create, but only arrange what is in existence already, are going back as far as we can, taking just the root-thoughts and translating them to song or shape. And though we do not really create at all, but only use and arrange, as I have said, the already existing facts of the world, passing them, it may be, through the crucible of the mind, we get quite as near to Nature, if not nearer, when we go a-bulb-planting. The bulbs are our thoughts, our pigments, what you will, and when in spring-time we shall see them making a meadow of Fra Angelico, it will be because we have actually planted these things ourselves that the joy of creation will be ours. Not to do that would be as if an artist laid no brush on the canvas himself, but merely dictated to a dependent where such a colour should be spread. But given that he had a slave so intelligent and so obedient that he could follow to a hair’s-breadth the directions given him, can you imagine the artist feeling the possessive joy of creation in the result, even though it realized the conception to the uttermost? Not I; nor, in the garden, do I care, like that, to see what others have done. It is not sufficient to direct; one has to do it oneself.

I love, too, and cannot conceive not loving, getting hot and dirty over the wrestling with the clean, black earth. A great deal of nonsense is talked about the dignity of labour, but it is chiefly talked by those whose labour lies indoors, who, excellent craftsmen as they may be, go spudding about in the intangible realms of the mind. I doubt, indeed, whether any market-gardener has ever spoken of the dignity of labour. We leave that to those who only know it by repute. But I long to put down the manner of the transaction. I do not in the least think it dignified, but it is such fun.

The green had mostly faded from the grass, leaving the meadow, as is always the case in October, far more grey than green. Certain plants, however, were still of varnished brightness, and the dandelion leaf was one. There was no need to pick and choose, and without moving a step, I dug the trowel down into the earth, loosened it all round the vegetable enemy, and lifted it. An ominous muffled snap came from inches down in the earth, which I tried to pretend I had not heard. But one could not cheat the eye also. There, at the bottom of my excavation, was a milky root, showing a danger-signal of white against the brown loam. I had to go deeper yet: the whole of the tap-root must be exhumed. Another dig, another snap, a raw-looking worm recoiled from the trowel, only just in time, and eventually up came the remotest fibre. How good the earth smelt! How reeking with the life of the world! Cold, clammy, rich earth, ever drawn upon by the needs of the Bank of Life, ever renewed by that which life paid back to it. A thousand years had gone to the formation of my trowelful, and a few inches below was the chalk, where a million lives a million years ago had spent themselves on the square inch of it. Slowly, by work of the myriad sea-beasts, this shoulder of chalk was heaved from the sea, the myriad lives became a myriad myriad, and here I had the little lump of chalk borne up on the end of the trowel which told of the labourers of the unnumbered years. Then, in a spoonful of sand, I put the sign, the evidence of another decade of millions on the top of them, and stuck thereon an onion-like daffodil root that was born last year. In a fortnight’s time that child of to-day will have reached downwards, feeling with delicate, pleased touch the sand of a thousand years ago, will delve through the time of the pyramids of Egypt, will draw moisture from the chalk that was old when our computation of time was not yet born, and will blossom next April, feeding its sap on the primeval years. And for what? To make Helen and Legs and me say, ‘Oh, what a beautiful Horsfeldii!’ Then we shall look at the fritillary that prospers a yard away.

The eternal romance of it all! To the right-minded there is nothing that is not a fairy-story. Like children, we crowd round the knees of the wonderful teller of it, and say, ‘Is it true? Is it all true?’ And He can’t tell lies. Sometimes, when we have a sort of moral toothache, we sit apart, and sniff. We say that scientifically we have proved there is no God. So said the fool in his heart. But nowadays the fools write it down in their damned books, and correct the proofs of it, and choose the bindings of it, and read, with gusto, the thoughtful reviews of it. And, God forgive them, they think they are very clever people, if I may be excused for mentioning them at all.