Part 10
Of course, no one thing is the least more wonderful than any other. All that happens, if we look at it at all closely, is a marvellous conjuring-trick. Why don’t ducks come out of hen’s eggs? Is it not marvellous that chickens invariably issue? If you go a step farther back, and learn something about the continuance of type, it becomes even more wonderful. ‘How’ can be told us, but never ‘why.’ And so I am confident in the unanswerableness of my riddle. Why do sounds like those of the violin and the brass in the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ convey the essence of storm and tempest?
* * * * *
Another conjuring-trick of the most delightful kind occurred next morning. At twelve o’clock last night the streets of London had, without asking (thereby reversing the sad tale of Oliver Twist), been given a second helping of brown porridge. It was ankle-deep on the roadway of Sloane Street, thick brown porridge of mud; then during the night the temperature went down, and it froze. The result is that for the copious soup we are given a clean, dry roadway. There is no mud of any kind, not even frozen mud. The street is clear and dry, as if Oliver Twist had licked it. But where has gone that two inches of obfusc lather? Has the wood-pavement drunk it in? Has it gone into the air? Has some celestial housemaid, like the Awful Thing, been set to sweep the streets, even as she has swept the sky, and given us the invigoration of frost in exchange for the wet blanket of chilly cloud? Coming back from Richter last night, the streets were swimming; eight hours later (or it may be nine) one might walk barefoot across the road, or spread one’s dinner there, and get no taint. How it will be sparkling on the grasses and brave evergreens at home, turned to diamond spray by the red sun of frosty mornings!
* * * * *
‘O world as God has made it!’... How often involuntarily, as if coming from without, that line rings in my head! And how very little we, with all our jealousies, and depressions, and bickerings, and follies, are able to spoil or dim the beauty that is cast so broadly there. Puny as are our efforts for good, it really seems to me that our attempts at being evil are even more impotent and microscopic. We are often as tiresome and unpleasant as we know how to be, yet all the time we are swimming against that huge quiet tide of the beauty of the world as God made it, the knowledge of which is love, and beyond which there is no further declaration possible. Sometimes, if we are very active indeed, and exert ourselves very much, we can stand still or even move a little way in opposition to the great tide, but soon our efforts must relax, and we are swept down again with the current that eternally flows from the heart of the Infinite, and returns there again in those pulsations that are the life and the light of the world.
It is impossible, indeed, unless we say that evil is the vital principle of the world, to think otherwise. War there is between the two huge forces, but it is just Satanism, and nothing else whatever, that makes people say that the world is going from bad to worse. If you are so unfortunate as to be a Satanist, there is nothing more to be said, and I hope the devil will give you your due; but if otherwise, there can be no other conclusion than that good, all that is lovely and fine, is steadily gaining ground. For it does not seem reasonable to suppose that God contemplates some swift heady manœuvre which shall suddenly take evil in the rear, and in a moment rout the antagonism. At any rate, as far as we can possibly judge, it is by quiet processes that He deals with the sum of the world, even as He deals with the units that make it. For just as nobody has any right to expect that the evil in his nature will be suddenly expunged, even though the moment should be one of blinding revelation, so we should acquiesce in the slow progress of the sum-total. For there are only three possible alternatives--the first (namely, that the progress is from bad to worse), which is Satanism; the second, that there is now in the world (and will be) exactly the same amount of evil and good as there has always been, in which case you are confronted with the absurd proposition of two absolutely equal forces having made this scheme of things, which will war to all eternity; and the third, that good is stronger than evil, and is quietly gaining ground.
The objection to the first alternative is that it is Satanism--a very fatal objection. The objection to the second is that it is so stupendously dull. There cannot possibly be any point in anything if the two forces are equal. There can be no struggle in the mind as to whether one ought or ought not to do certain things, if whatever you do or don’t does not make any difference. There remains the third alternative. The objection to that is ... well, I can’t see there is any.
* * * * *
Hours ago this house has been asleep, the house in which I write on this early morning of the New Year, the house which is home to me, even as my own is; for it is the house--you will have guessed--where lives she who is neither dearer nor less dear than Helen, and where we always spend the week and a little more that begins before Christmas and finishes a little after the New Year has been swung from the voices of mellow bells. Before midnight we sat in the oak-panelled room and played the most heavenly games, charades, and insane gymnastic exercises, and table-turning, with terror when the dreadful table turned in a really unaccountable manner, all consecrated by love and laughter; and then, when the Old Year was to be numbered by minutes that the fingers could reckon, we drew nearer to the log fire and wished each other that which we all wanted for each. Legs’ triumphant entry into the Foreign Office was no longer capable of a wish, since it was already accomplished, so he was wished a wife; and--you will understand that we were all very intimate--my mother was wished freedom from all anxiety of whatever kind; and the old nurse of ninety years who had acted charades with us with astonishing power was wished her century; and I was wished the holding of the frost, so that I might skate--they were flippant again--and two cousins were respectively wished a microscope--one is of tender years--and a motor-car; and then, just as the clock jarred, telling us there was but a minute more to the New Year, it was Helen’s turn to be wished, and somebody said, ‘Your heart’s desire’; and she understood.
Immediately afterwards the clock struck, and everybody kissed everybody else, and said ‘Happy New Year,’ and no more. For you must not say anything more than that: you _must not_ even say ‘Good-night,’ else the charm is broken. So in dead silence we lighted bedroom candles, for the ritual was well known, and separated. And who knows but that all about the house, as in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ the dances of the fairies circled up and down by the light of drowsy fires?
JANUARY
A hundred pounds have suddenly and unexpectedly appeared on the horizon. People who are very rich have not the slightest idea what that means to us. People who are very poor have not the slightest idea either, because they would probably buy a public-house, or goodwill, or something of that nature, and never have any fun out of it at all. But to people who ‘jog along’ a hundred pounds is a treat which neither rich people nor poor can form any conception of. To those who just pay their way, as we do, it means several weeks somewhere. The only question is ‘Where?’ At this point in our argument it was impossible to proceed. Helen and I were both being so unselfish that we couldn’t go on. She said she longed to have two or three weeks in Switzerland; I said that what I really wanted was to go to the Riviera for a fortnight. Then, as always happens, these subterfuges broke down, and we both confessed that we neither of us really wanted to go where we said we did. She wanted to go to Nice; I wanted to go to the high altitudes. So, with the understanding that we were to go where the coin said we should, and not otherwise, we tossed up. It was high altitudes.
His country put in a claim for Legs at the Foreign Office, unfortunately, and he should not come with us; but we felt, when we observed the urbanity of the French customs-house officials, who obligingly shut their eyes to the presence of large quantities of tobacco, and the politeness of the railway officials, that Legs had probably made himself felt in our foreign relations already, and that he was responsible for all this very civil behaviour. At Bâle, however, where we had to change at the awful hour in the morning which is neither night nor day, we found that Legs’ diplomacy had not yet had time to make itself felt, for we were subjected to a searching scrutiny. Luckily I had had experience of the manners and customs-house officials of Bâle before, and had transferred my tobacco into my coat pockets, thus frustrating the baffled Teuton. But I am afraid it gave certain secret glee to observe that my travelling companion of the night before--a stout white man, with a name on his labels so long that I could not read it, who had snored all the time--was caught, and his rich stores of cigarettes taken from him, to be sent, I suppose, to Berne, for the delectation of the President of the Republic.
Switzerland is a land that always arouses curiosity as to how it came about that a country in which the people are so small, so ‘toy,’ should in itself be on so gigantic and marvellous a scale. Is it that the living among these stupendous surroundings has somehow dwarfed the people, or has Nature, by one of her inimitable contrasts, made the human part of Switzerland so insignificant in order to set off the vastness of peak and snowfield? Certainly the glib commonplace that national character is influenced and formed by national surroundings is here gloriously contradicted, since, as far as I am aware, no Swiss has ever attained to eminence in anything. They are a little toy people, who live in little toy towns, and make excellent chocolate, and run innumerable hotels on the most economical principles. But even then they do not (as one would expect) get very rich. They are never ‘very’ anything. ‘But the chocolate is excellent,’ said Helen to these speculations.
It requires faith this morning to believe that in a few hours we shall be crunching the dry, powdery snow beneath our feet, and before sunset be skating or gliding down the white frozen road, with puffs of snow coming from the bows of the toboggan, for here all down the shore of the Lake of Thun the country is brown and grey, with scarce a streak of white to show that it is winter. Low overhead are fat masses of dirty-looking cloud, but between them (and this is the door where faith enters) are glimpses of the perfect azure which we expect up above. Now and then the sun strikes some distant hillside, or, like a flashlight, is turned on to the waters of the lake, making of them a sudden aquamarine of luminous green. But the weather is undoubtedly mild; the eaves of the wooden toy-stations drip with discouraging moisture, and Interlaken, when we reach it, wears a dreadful spring-like aspect, and people are sitting out of doors at the cafés, and appear to find it relaxing.
Then the first of these wonderful winter miracles happened. There was the flat alluvial land at the end of the lake, across which ran the fussy little light railway which should take us above (so we hoped) the region of cloudland. Grey and puddle-strewn was it, with here and there a patch of dirty snow stained through with the earthy moistness beneath. A low-lying mist was spread over the nearer distance, which melted into the thicker clouds of the sky itself. It was just such a view as you shall see anywhere in the English fen-land during February.
We were looking at this with, I am bound to say, a certain despondency. It seemed almost certain that we should find dull weather (which means thaw) up above, when a sudden draught from some funnel of the hills came down, making agitation and disturbance both among the low-lying mist and the higher clouds. The former was vanquished first, and, torn to ribbons by the wind, and scorched up by a sudden divine gleam of sun that smote downwards, disclosed in its vanishing the long, piney sides of an upward-leading gorge. The higher clouds, being thicker, took longer to disperse, I suppose, for at its farther end the gorge was still full of scudding vapours. Then suddenly they cleared, and high, high above, a vignette of fairyland--the Jungfrau herself, queen of the snows--stood out in glacier, and snowfield, and peak, against a sky of incredible blue. There she stood in full blaze of sunshine, the silver-crystal maiden, donned in blue, enough to open the eyes of the blind and make the dumb mouth sing.
Then afterwards, as the little Turkish bath of a train went heavenwards, how magical and divine a change happened! Inside the steamy carriages, smelling of railway-bags, and rugs, and forgotten sandwiches, it was not possible to see through the condensation on the window-panes, but the blood that trots through the body knew the change, and took a more staccato note. Then--I suppose that travelling stupidity had seized us both--it suddenly occurred to Helen that we might, without fear of prosecution, put the windows down, though by a printed notice of by-laws of the railway it was still defended that we should not agitate ourselves out of it. Once a ticket-puncher, exactly like a figure out of Noah’s ark, put them scowlingly up again; but with the boldness that this whiff of mountain-air supplied, we again lowered them, after a further consultation of the by-laws.
The ineffable change had begun. Soon for the moistness of the lowland there was exchanged a hint of frost--something that made outlines a little more determinate, a little crisper. Then, as we mounted higher, there was further change. For dripping twigs of the trees there were trees that showed a hard, white outline of frost; for the sullen muddy stream there was clearer water, that went on its way beneath half-formed lids of ice; and thinner and thinner above our heads grew the grey blanket of cloud.
Then that, too, was folded away, and above is was the sun and the sparkling of the unending firmament. Below it had been like a London fog, when you cannot see the tops of the shrouded houses; now we saw the roofs of the world, the Queen Anne’s mansion of Europe, all clean, all clear, just as they were when I saw this land three years ago. No tile had slipped, no chimney-pot required repairs. The top of the world was good. Oh, how good!
The clear dry air, the sunset lights on the peaks, the liquid twilight (keen as snuff to the nostril), from which the sun had gone! There was the rose-tinted Wetterhorn, black Eiger, flaming finger of Finster-Aarhorn; or, on more human plane, the hiss of skates over the perfect ice, the passage of a toboggan, with a little Swiss girl holding in front of her a baby sister, and steering with her heels, and shrilly shouting ‘_Achtung!_’ There was ‘Madame’ who keeps a restaurant (I do not know her name), standing to see the train-passengers come in, and shaking hands, and saying, ‘You shall have wings to-morrow, no legs’ (alluding to an amiable altercation of three years ago, when I drew a kind but firm sort of line about eating chickens’ legs for lunch on four consecutive days); and there was the beerman, whose admirable beverage I always drank at 11.30 a.m., being thirsty with skating; and there was a skater I knew, who attempted a rather swift back-bracket for the admiration of the new arrivals by the train to see, and fell down in a particularly complicated manner in the middle of it; and there was the barrack of an hotel which always smells of roasting leather, because people put their skates and boots on the hot-water pipes, and right above it was the Mettelhorn; and to the left was the Lady Wetterhorn; and to the right the smooth, steely-looking toboggan-run down into the valley. ‘Oh, world----’ I beg your pardon.
I have omitted to mention the magic word on our luggage-labels, ‘Grindelwald.’
Three years ago, I must tell you, among other foolish and futile deeds, I made a _cache_ underneath a particular tree on the path leading to the Scheidegg, consisting, as far as I remember, of chocolate, coins, and matches. These insignificant facts I published in another place, and since then I have received every winter mysterious letters from Grindelwald, showing that other people are as absurd as myself. My _cache_, in fact, has been found (I gave directions which I hoped would be sufficient), and it has been, so these letters tell me, enriched by other secret and beautiful things. There has been placed there, on separate occasions, by separate passionate pilgrims, all manner of store, and the very next morning, instead of going to skate, Helen and I skulked off with a toboggan to see what we should find. A poem on the Wetterhorn, so I had been informed, was there, to form the nucleus of a library; there were a tin of potted meat and some caramels for the larder; and furniture had been added by a third person in the shape of a lead soldier and an ink-bottle; while the exchequer, I knew, also had been enriched by at least half a franc in nickel pieces. We had debated earnestly last night as to what to add to the establishment, if we found it, and eventually decided on a handkerchief, which is to be regarded by passionate pilgrims as a tablecloth, a reel of cotton, and a copy of ‘Shirley’ in the sixpenny edition, to swell the library shelves. This latter was in a small linen bag, to keep it from the wet.
Of course, we did not expect to find all the objects that I had been informed had been placed there from time to time, for the rule of the _cache_ is that you may use what you find there, provided only you replace it with something else. The potted meat, for instance, one could not expect to go undiscussed, and I cannot personally conceive leaving caramels uneaten. But in place of those, if only passionate pilgrims had played the game, we should find other objects. Thus the _cache_ becomes a sort of exchange and mart--a reciprocal table laid in the wilderness, where you take one dish and replace it with another.
How it all savours of romance to the childish mind! With agitated fingers you scoop away the earth and moss which form the entrance to the _cache_, under a pine tree on the empty, frozen hillside, and you know you will find treasure of some kind, but what it is you cannot possibly tell. And inviolable secrecy must surround and embellish your manœuvres; the _cache_ should not be mentioned at all except discreetly to the elect, for it partakes of Freemasonry, the masons of which are those who delight in idiotic proceedings. But just as three years ago I gave the inventory of the _cache_ as it was then, so in the minds of the idiotic there may be felt some interest as to its inventory when the founder again revisited it. _Caches_, of course, are socialistic in spirit, and anybody may appropriate whatever he chooses; but I should be glad if the copy of ‘Shirley’ is left there. It is such a pleasant book to read after lunch, if you are tobogganing alone. A book, at any rate, is rather a good thing to have in a _cache_, and the wishes of the founder will be satisfied if another book is put there instead. But let us have a book. I should prefer that it should not be the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’
The morning, I think, must have been ordered on purpose, for I can imagine nothing so exquisite being served up in the ordinary way, _à la carte_; such weather must have been specially chosen. Not a single ripple of air stirred; an unflecked sky was overhead, and the sun, as we set off, just topped the hills to the south-east, and sat like a huge golden bandbox on the rim of them. The frost had been severe in the night, but in this windlessness and entire absence of moisture no feeling of cold reached one. There was in the air a briskness of quality more than magical; it was as if made of ice and fire and wine, and in a sort of intoxication we slid down into the valley. Then, crossing the stream, since there was water about, it suddenly seemed desperately chill; but no sooner had we mounted a dozen yards of ascent again than the same dry kindling of the blood reasserted itself. Toboggans will not run of their own accord uphill, so I put ours under my arm, and for a hundred yards we danced a _pas de quatre_ up the trodden snow. We both sang all the time, different tunes, when suddenly we saw a clergyman observing us from a few yards ahead. He had a wildish and severe eye, and we stopped. David before the Ark would have stopped if he had unexpectedly come on that man. He was sitting in the snow, and wore a black hat, black coat, and black trousers, but he had yellow boots. He kept his eye on us all the time that we were within sight, and seemed to have no other occupation. We neither of us dared to look round till we had left him some way behind, neither did we dare to dance again. Eventually I turned my head to look at him from behind a tree. He was still sitting in the snow, not on a rug, you understand, nor on a toboggan, nor on any of the things upon which you usually sit in the snow. He was not breakfasting or lunching or looking at the view. He was sitting in the snow, and that was all. I have no explanation of any kind to offer about this unusual incident. Helen thinks he was mad. That very likely is the case, but it is an interesting form of mania. Perhaps by-and-by we shall have an asylum for snow-sitters. Or is it a new kind of rest-cure?
It is astonishing how you can argue about things of which you know nothing. Indeed, I think that all proper arguments are based on ignorance. If you know anything whatever on the subject of which you are talking, you produce a fact of some kind, which knocks argument flat. It is only possible to reason rightly on those subjects concerning which no fact, except the phenomenon itself, is ascertainable. Had we asked the clergyman why he sat in the snow, he would probably have told us, and the subject would have ceased to interest us conversationally. As it was, we held heated debate upon him, just as if he was the Education Bill, for a long time. But the unusualness of it merited attention and conjecture. And think how divine an opening for conversation at dinner-parties, if you know nothing of your neighbour, and have not caught her name.
‘Did you ever see a clergyman sitting in the snow?’
That, in fact, was the outcome of our argument. No theory about him would really hold water. He was probably a conversational gambit, which might lead to much. For instance, in answer to your question, your interlocutor might reply in five obvious ways:
1. ‘I once saw a clergyman, but he was not sitting in the snow.’
2. ‘I have seen snow, but I never saw a clergyman sitting in it.’
3. ‘I once saw a clergyman being snowballed.’
4. ‘Yes. What are your views about the best treatment for the insane?’
5. ‘Such strange things happen at Grindelwald. Did you know----’
Yes; he was probably a conversational opening made manifest to mortal eyes. Anyhow, when we returned he was not sitting there. If he had been real, he probably would have been--at least, if you once sit in the snow there is no reason why you should ever get up. Obviously it is your _métier_.