Chapter 13

Where was it all gone? In the clear fresh air he felt like a man awaked from a nightmare, and restored to cheerful life again. What did past failures, future anxieties, matter to him? He had his work, his place, his liberty, and what further could he need?

His liberty! How good that was! He might go and come as he would, unquestioned, unblamed. He thought with a pitying horror of what his life had previously been--the tangle of small engagements, the silly routine work, in which no one believed; they had all been bound on a kind of make-believe pilgrimage, carrying burdens round and round, and putting them down where they had taken them up.

He determined that, whatever happened, he would do no more work in which he did not believe, that he would say what he felt, not what traditional formulas required him to say. Work! he believed in that with all his heart, so long as it had an end, an object. To wrestle with the comprehension of some difficult matter, there were few pleasures like that! but it must have been an advance, when it was over; one must feel that one was stronger, more clear-minded, more alert, more sincere; one must not feel that one was only more weary, more dissatisfied. His path was clear before him at all events.

Plans and schemes began to rise in Hugh's brain he felt as if he was delivered from the brooding sway of some evil and melancholy spirit. How strange was the power that physical conditions had upon the very stuff of the mind! Half-an-hour ago the grievances, the self-pity, the dissatisfaction had appeared to him to be real and tangible troubles; not indeed things which it was wise to brood over, but inevitable pains, to be borne with such philosophy as was attainable. But now they seemed as unreal, as untrue, as painful dreams, from which one wakes with a sharp and great relief.

What remained with Hugh was the sense of one of the dangers of the solitary life--the over-influence, the preponderance of sentiment. The only serenity was to be found in claiming and expecting nothing, but in welcoming what came as a gift, as an added joy, to which one had indeed no right; but which fell like the sunshine and the rain; one must be ready to help, to work, to use one's strength at whatever point it could be best applied, and to look for no reward. This was what poisoned life, the claim to be paid in the coin that pleased one best. Payment indeed was made largely; and the blessed thing was that if one was not paid fully for one's efforts, neither was one paid relentlessly for one's mistakes.

And then, as to the deeper shadows of the world, the sorrows, the bereavements, the sufferings, the dark possibilities, that lay like the shadows of trees across a sunlit road--death itself, that grim horizon that closed the view whichever way one looked--the mistake lay in attempting to reckon with them beforehand, to anticipate them, to discount them. They were all part of the plan, and one could not alter them. Better to let them come, to husband strength and joy to meet them, rather than to dissipate one's courage by dwelling upon them. Indeed all Hugh's experience showed him that troubles, even the deepest, wore a very different aspect when one was inside them.

The very storm itself was a parable. Those zigzag ribbons of purple fire, the fierce shouting of the thunderclap that followed! In all the wide forest-tracts over which the tempest hung, all that grim artillery did but rend and split some one tough tree. Rather it turned again to gladden the earth, and the tears of heaven, that fell so steeply, only laid the dust of the hot road, and filled the pasture and the lane with the fragrance of the cleansed earth and the comforted brake.

XXIII

The Club--Homewards--The Garden of God

As Hugh became more and more enamoured of his work, and of the sweet peace of the countryside, he became more and more averse to visiting London. But he was forced to do this at intervals. One hot summer day he went thus reluctantly to town; the rattle of the train, the heated crowd of passengers, the warm mephitic air that blew into the carriage from the stifling, smoke-grimed tunnel--all these seemed to him insupportably disgusting. But the sight, the sound, the very smell of London itself, was like a dreadful obsession; he wondered how he could ever have endured to live there. The streets lay in the steady sun, filled with fatigued, hurrying persons. The air was full of a sombre and oppressive murmur; the smell of the roadways, the hot vapour of cookshops, the din and whizz of vehicles, the ceaseless motion of faces: all this filled him with a deep pity for those who had to live their lives under such conditions. Was it to this that our boasted civilisation had brought us? and yet it seemed that the normal taste of ordinary people turned by preference to this humming and buzzing life, rather than to the quiet and lonely life in the green spaces of the country; Hugh had little doubt that the vast majority of those he saw, even the pale, patient workpeople who were peeping, as they toiled, grimy and sweat-stained, from the open windows, would choose this life rather than the other, and would have condemned the life of the country as dull. Was it he, Hugh wondered, or they that were out of joint? Ought he to accept the ordinary, sensible point of view, and try to conform himself to it, crush down his love for trees and open fields and smiling waters? The sociable, herding instinct was as true, as God-sent an instinct as his own pleasure in free solitude; and the old adage that God made the country but man the town was as patently absurd as to say that God made the iceberg, but the ant made the ant-heap.

He went to his club, a place which he rarely entered; it was full of brisk and cheerful men, lunching with relish; some of them had hurried in from their work, and were enjoying the hour of leisure; some were the old frequenters of the place, men whose work in the world was over, as well as men who had never known what it was to work. But these men, even some who seemed crippled with age and infirmity, seemed as intent upon their pleasures, as avid of news, as eager for conversation, as particular about their food, as if their existence was of a supreme and weighty importance, Hugh watched an elderly man, whom he knew by name, who was said to be the most unoccupied man in London, who was administering food and drink to himself with a serious air of delicate zest, as though he were presiding benevolently at some work of charity and mercy. He had certainly flourished on his idleness like a green bay tree! Hugh was inclined to believe in the necessity to happiness of the observance of some primal laws, like the law of labour, but here was a contradiction to all his theories. He sighed to think of the mountains of carefully prepared food that this rosy, well-brushed person must have consumed in the course of his life! He was a notoriously selfish man, who never laid out a penny except on his own needs and pleasures. Yet here was he, guarded like the apple of God's eye, and all the good things that the earth held--ease, comfort, independence, health, honour, and the power of enjoyment--were heaped upon him with a liberal hand. No wonder he thought so well of the world! Hugh had heard him say, with an air of virtuous complacency, that he was generally pretty comfortable.

Hugh did not grudge his luxurious ease to the great statesman who sate in the corner, with an evening paper propped up on a silver dish, and some iced compound bubbling pleasantly in his glass, smiling benignly at a caricature of himself. He, at all events, paid for his comforts by unremitting labour. But what of the sleek and goodly drones of the hive?

Hugh had some cheerful unmeaning talk to several of his old friends, who regretted that they saw so little of him; he laughed with careful enjoyment at some ancient stories, very familiar to him, told him with rich zest by an acquaintance. But he could not help speculating what was the point of it all. Some of the happiest and most contented men there were high officials, engaged with a sense of solemn importance in doing work that could have been quite as well done by very ordinary people, and much of which, indeed, might as well have been left undone altogether. There was a bishop there, an old family friend of Hugh's father, with whom he entered into talk. The bishop had once been a man of great force and ability, who had been a conspicuous university teacher, and had written profound books. But now he was looking forward with a sense of solemn satisfaction to spending the following day in going down to his diocese in order to preside at a Church _fête_, make a humorous speech, and meet a number of important county people. There was no question of any religious element entering into the function, and Hugh found himself dimly wondering whether such a development of the energies of Christian elders was seriously contemplated in the Gospel. But the bishop seemed to have no doubts on the subject.

Well, anyhow, this was life; this was what men had to do, and what as a rule they enjoyed doing. Hugh had no objection to that, so long as people freely admitted that it was simply their chosen diversion, and that they did it because they liked it. It was only the solemn parade of duty that Hugh disliked.

One of the friends whom Hugh met said to him smilingly that he heard that he had become quite a hermit--adding that he must confess that he did not look like one. Hugh replied laughingly that it was only that he was fortunate enough to discover that his work amused him more and more; at which his friend smiled again, and told him to beware of eccentricity.

Hugh began to wonder whether his simple and solitary life was indeed tinged with that quality; but he answered that he was finding out to his great delight that he was less afraid than he used to be of living alone, to which his friend, a good-humoured and ineffective man, said that he found that the stir and movement of town kept people from rusting. Hugh wondered--but did not express his wonder--what was supposed to be the use of keeping the blade bright to no purpose; and he wished to ask his contented friend what his object was; but that appeared to be priggish, so Hugh left the question unuttered.

It was however with a huge relief that, his business over, Hugh found himself in the homeward train. But at the same time he took himself to task for finding this suspension of routine, this interruption of his literary work, so unpalatable. He realised that he was becoming inconveniently speculative; and that his growing impulse to get behind things, to weigh their value, to mistrust the conventional view of life, had its weak side, After all, the conventional, the normal view reflected the tastes of the majority of mankind. Their life was laid out and regulated on those lines; and the regulating instinct was a perfectly natural development of human temperament. Ought he not to embrace it for himself? was he not, perhaps, by seeking so diligently for fine flavours and intense impressions, missing the food of the banquet, and sipping only at the sauces? If his own work had been of any particular importance; if he was exercising a wide influence through his books, in the direction of leading others to love the simple sources of happiness, then his withdrawal from ordinary activities and pleasures would be justifiable. Was it justified as it was? Hugh could not answer the question. He only knew that as the train glided on its way, as the streets became less dense, as the country verdure began to occupy more and more of the horizon; as the train at last began to speed through wide fields full of ripening grain, and hamlets half hidden in high elms, he felt the blessed consciousness of returning freedom, the sense of recovering the region of peace and purity dear to his spirit; and the thought of the hot stifling town, with all its veins and arteries full of that endless ebb and flow of humanity, seemed to him like a nightmare from which he was being gradually delivered, and which he was leaving far behind him.

It was not peace, indeed! there was the obstinate spirit, repining, questioning, reviewing all things, striving to pierce the veil. But the veil was not so thick as it had seemed in the city. There he was distracted, bewildered, agitated. But in this quiet country the veil seemed thin enough. The trees, the flowers, seemed somehow nearer to God, who of very truth appeared to walk as of old in the garden, in the cool of the day.

XXIV

The Romance of Life--The Renewal of Youth--Youth

There were some days when the whole air of the place, the houses, the fields, the gardens, even the very people that Hugh met in the streets, seemed to be full of romance and poetry. There was no particular quality about the days themselves, that Hugh could ever divine, that produced this impression. Perhaps such moods came oftener and more poignantly when the air was cool and fresh, when the temperate sun filled his low rooms from end to end, lay serene upon the pastures, or danced in the ripples of the stream. But the mood came just as inevitably on dull days, when the sky was roofed with high grey clouds, or even on raw days of winter, when fitful gusts whirled round corners, and when the spouts and cornices dripped with slow rains. In these hours the whole world seemed possessed by some gracious and sweet mystery; everything was in the secret, everything was included in the eager and high-hearted conspiracy. It was all the same, on such days, whether Hugh was alone or with company; if he was among friends or even strangers, they seemed to look upon him, to speak, to move, with a blithe significance; he seemed to intercept tender messages in a casual glance, to experience the sense of a delighted goodwill, such as reigns among a party of friends on an expedition of pleasure. This mood did not produce in Hugh the sense of merriment or high spirits; it was not an excited frame of mind; it was rather a feeling of widespread tenderness, a sort of brotherly admiration. At such moments, the most crabbed and peevish person seemed to be transfigured, to be acting a delightful part for the pleasure of a spectator, and an inner benevolence, a desire to contribute zest and amusement to the banquet of life, seemed to underlie the most fractious gestures or irritable speech. On such days, one seemed to have an affectionate understanding with even slight acquaintances, an understanding which seemed to say, "We are all comrades in heart, and nothing but circumstance and bodily limitation prevents us from being comrades in life." Hugh used to fancy that this mood was like an earnest of the bodiless joy, the free companionship of heaven, if such a place there were, where one should know even as one was known, and be able to enter in and possess, in a flash of thought, the whole fabric of a fellow-creature's soul.

And then if Hugh spent such a day alone, his thoughts seemed to have the same enlightening and invigorating quality. He did not fumble among dreary details, but saw swiftly into the essence of things, so that he smiled as he sate. A book would, on such occasions, touch into life a whole train of pretty thoughts, as a spark leaps along a scattered line of gunpowder. A few remembered lines of poetry, a few notes played by unseen hands on a musical instrument, from a window that he passed in the street, would give a sense of completed happiness; so that one said, "Yes, it is like that!" The palings of gardens, the screen of shrubs through which the pleasaunce could be dimly discerned within, the high trees holding up their branches to the air, all half guarded, half revealed the same jocund secret. Here, by a hedgerow, in a lane, Hugh would discern the beady eye of a fat thrush which hopped in the tall grass, or plied some tiny business among the stems, lifting his head at intervals to look briskly round. "I see you!" said Hugh, as he used to say long ago to the birds in the Rectory garden, and the bird seemed almost to nod his head in reply.

And then, too, the houses that he passed all breathed the same air of romance. There, perhaps, behind the wall or at the open window, sat or moved the one friend of whom he was ever in search; but on these days it mattered little that he had not found him; he could wait, he could be faithful, and Hugh could wait too, until the day when all things should be made new. If he walked on days like these through some college court, the thought of the happy, careless, cheerful lives, lived there in strength and brightness, by generation after generation of merry young men, filled Hugh's heart with content; he liked to think that all the world over, in busy offices, in grave parlours, in pleasant parsonages, there were serious, commonplace, well-occupied men, who perhaps, in a tiny flash of memory, sent back a wistful thought to the old walls and gables, the towns with their chiming bells, and remembered tenderly the days of their blithe youth, the old companions, the lively hours. The whole world seemed knit together by sweet and gentle ties: labour and strife mattered little; it was but a cloud upon the path, and would melt into the sunlit air at last.

Hugh used to feel half amused at the irrepressible sense of youth which thrilled him still. As a boy, he had little suspected that the serious elderly men, of settled habits and close-shaved chins, had any such thoughts as these under their battered exteriors. He had thought that such persons were necessarily stolid and comfortable persons, believing in committees and correspondence, fond of food and drink, careful of their balance at the bank, and rather disgusted at than tolerant of the irrepressible levity and flightiness of youth. Yet now that he himself was approaching middle age, he was conscious, not indeed of increased levity or high spirits, but of undiminished vigour, wider sympathy, larger joy. Life was not only not less interesting, but it seemed rather to thrill and pulsate with fresh and delightful emotion. If he could not taste it with the same insouciance, it was only because he perceived its quality more poignantly. If life were less full of laughter, it was only because there were sweeter and more joyful things to enjoy. What was best of all about this later delight, was that it left no bitter taste behind it; in youth, a day of abandonment to elation, a day of breezy talk, hearty laughter, active pleasure, would often leave a sense of flatness and dissatisfaction behind it; but the later joy had no sort of weariness as its shadow; it left one invigorated and hopeful.

The most marked difference of all was in one's relations with others. In youth a new friendship had been a kind of excited capture; it had been shadowed by jealousy; it had been a desire for possession. One had not been content unless one had been sure that one's friend had the same sort of unique regard that one experienced oneself. One had resented his other friendships, and wished to supersede them. But now Hugh had no such feeling. He had no desire to make a relationship, because the relationship seemed already there. If one met a sympathetic and congenial person, one made, as it were, a sort of sunlit excursion in a new and pleasing country. One admired the prospects, surveyed the contours. In old days, one had desired to establish a kind of fortress in the centre, and claim the fruitful land for one's own.

Of course, in Hugh's dealings with the youthful persons whom he encountered in his Cambridge life, he became aware of the existence of the subtle barrier which is erected between youth and middle age; he was conscious often that the delightful egotism of youth has, as a rule, very little deference for, or interest in, the opinions of older persons. Youth is so profoundly absorbed in its own visions, that it is very rarely curious about the duller reveries of older people. It regards them as necessarily dreary, grey, wise, and prudent. The only thing it values is sympathy for itself, just as a child is far more interested in the few chords which it can strum on a piano than in the richest performance of a maestro. But Hugh did not find this to be disagreeable, because he was less and less concerned about the effect he produced. He had found out that the joys of perception are at least equal to the joys of expression. Youth cannot wait, it must utter its half-formed wishes, put out its crude fruits; and it used to seem to Hugh that one of the most pathetic and beautiful things in the world was the intensity of feeling, the limitless dreams, that rose shadowily in a boy's mind side by side with the inarticulateness, the failure to command any medium of expression. One of the reasons why young and clever men are so desperately anxious to be amusing and humorous, is because they desire above all things to see the effect of their words, and long to convulse an audience; while they lack, as a rule, the practised delicacy, the finished economy in which humour, to be effective, must be clothed.

But, after all, what brought Hugh the best comfort, was the discovery that advancing years did not bring with them any lack of sensitiveness, any dreariness, any sense of dulness. It was indeed rather the reverse. The whole fabric of life was richer, more impassioned, more desirable than he had ever supposed. In youth, emotion and feeling had seemed to him like oases in a desert, oases which one had to quit, when one crossed the threshold of life, to plod wearily among endless sands. But now he had found that the desert had a life, an emotion, a beauty of its own, and the oases of youthful fancy seemed to be tame and limited by comparison. Hugh still thought with a shudder of old age, which lay ahead of him; but even as he shuddered, he began to wonder whether that too would not open up to him a whole range of experiences and emotions, of which to-day he had no inkling at all. Would life perhaps seem richer still? That was what he dared to hope. Meanwhile he would neither linger nor make haste: he would not catch at the past as containing a lost and faded sweetness; neither would he anticipate, so far as he could help it, the closing of the windows of the soul.

XXV

A Narrow Path--A Letter--Asceticism--The Narrow Soul