Part 3

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.