Chapter 12

The people who were returning were so full of activity and joy that it was like a hive of bees; but I no longer felt this as I had felt their earlier and more subdued emotion, for the place was no longer distant or mysterious as it had been when first its sons and daughters had come up on deck to welcome it and had given me part of their delight. It was now an evident and noisy town; hot, violent, and strong. The houses had about them a certain splendour, the citizens upon the quays a satisfied and prosperous look. Its streets, where they ran down towards the sea, were charmingly clean and cared for, and the architecture of its wealthier mansions seemed to me at once unusual and beautiful, for I had not yet seen Spain. Each house, so far as I could make out from the water, was entered by a fine sculptured porch which gave into a cool courtyard with arcades under it, and most of the larger houses had escutcheons carved in stone upon their walls.

But what most pleased me and also seemed most strange was to see against the East a vast cathedral quite Northern in outline, except for a severity and discipline of which the North is incapable save when it has steeped itself in the terseness of the classics.

This monument was far larger than anything in the town. It stood out separate from the town and dominated it upon its seaward side, somewhat as might an isolated hill, a shore fortress of rock. It was almost bare of ornament; its stones were very carefully worked and closely fitted, and little waves broke ceaselessly along the base of its rampart. Landwards, a mass of low houses which seemed to touch the body of the building did but emphasise its height. When I had landed I made at once for this cathedral, and with every step it grew greater.

We who are of the North are accustomed to the enormous; we have unearthly sunsets and the clouds magnify our hills. The Southern men see nothing but misproportion in what is enormous. They love to have things in order, and violence in art is odious to them. This high and dreadful roof had not been raised under the influences of the island; it had surely been designed just after the re-conquest from the Mohammedans, when a turbulent army, not only of Gascons and Catalans, but of Normans also and of Frisians, and of Rhenish men, had poured across the water and had stormed the sea-walls. On this account the cathedral had about it in its sky-line and in its immensity, and in the Gothic point of its windows, a Northern air. But in its austerity and in its magnificence it was Spaniard.

As I passed the little porch of entry in the side wall I saw a man. He was standing silent and alone; he was not blind and perhaps not poor, and as I passed he begged the charity not of money but of prayers. When I had entered the cool and darkness of the nave, his figure still remained in my mind, and I could not forget it. I remembered the straw hat upon his head and the suit of blue canvas which he wore, and the rough staff of wood in his hand. I was especially haunted by his expression, which was patient and masqued as though he were enduring a pain and chose to hide it.

The nave was empty. It was a great hollow that echoed and re-echoed; there were no shrines and no lamps, and no men or women praying, and therefore the figure at the door filled my mind more and more, until I went out and asked him if he was in need of money, of which at that moment I had none. He answered that his need was not for money but only for prayers.

"Why," said I, "do you need prayers?"

He said it was because his fate was upon him.

I think he spoke the truth. He was standing erect and with dignity, his eyes were not disturbed, and he repeatedly refused the alms of passers-by.

"No one" said I, "should yield to these moods."

He answered nothing, but looked pensive like a man gazing at a landscape and remembering his life.

But it was now the hour when the ship was to be sailing again, and I could not linger, though I wished very much to talk more with him. I begged him to name a shrine where a gift might be of especial value to him. He said that he was attached to no one shrine more than to any other, and then I went away regretfully, remembering how earnestly he had asked for prayers.

This was in Palma of Majorca not two years ago. There are many such men, but few who speak so humbly.

When I had got aboard again the ship sailed out and rounded a lighthouse point and then made north to Barcelona. The night fell, and next morning there rose before us the winged figures that crown the Custom House of that port and are an introduction to the glories of Spain.

ON A YOUNG MAN AND AN OLDER MAN

A Young Man of my acquaintance having passed his twenty-eighth birthday, and wrongly imagining this date to represent the Grand Climacteric, went by night in some perturbation to an Older Man and spoke to him as follows:

"Sir! I have intruded upon your leisure in order to ask your advice upon certain matters."

The Older Man, whose thoughts were at that moment intently set upon money, looked up in a startled way and attempted to excuse himself, suffering as he did from the delusion that the Young Man was after a loan. But the Young Man, whose mind was miles away from all such trifling things, continued to press him anxiously without so much as noticing that he had perturbed his Senior.

"I have come, Sir," said he, "to ask your opinion, advice, experience, and guidance upon something very serious which has entered into my life, which is, briefly, that I feel myself to be growing old."

Upon hearing this so comforting and so reasonable a statement the Older Man heaved a profound sigh of relief and turning to him a mature and smiling visage (as also turning towards him his person and in so doing turning his Polished American Hickory Wood Office Chair), answered with a peculiar refinement, but not without sadness, "I shall be happy to be of any use I can"; from which order and choice of words the reader might imagine that the Older Man was himself a Colonial, like his chair. In this imagination the reader, should he entertain it, would be deceived.

The Younger Man then proceeded, knotting his forehead and putting into his eyes that troubled look which is proper to virtue and to youth:

"Oh, Sir! I cannot tell you how things seem to be slipping from me! I smell less keenly and taste less keenly, I enjoy less keenly and suffer less keenly than I did. Of many things which I certainly desired I can only say that I now desire them in a more confused manner. Of certain propositions in which I intensely believed I can only say that I now see them interfered with and criticised perpetually, not, as was formerly the case, by my enemies, but by the plain observance of life, and what is worse, I find growing in me a habit of reflection for reflection's sake, leading nowhere--and a sort of sedentary attitude in which I watch but neither judge nor support nor attack any portion of mankind."

The Older Man, hearing this speech, congratulated his visitor upon his terse and accurate methods of expression, detailed to him the careers in which such habits of terminology are valuable, and also those in which they are a fatal fault.

"Having heard you," he said, "it is my advice to you, drawn from a long experience of men, to enter the legal profession, and, having entered it, to supplement your income with writing occasional articles for the more dignified organs of the Press. But if this prospect does not attract you (and, indeed, there are many whom it has repelled) I would offer you as an alternative that you should produce slowly, at about the rate of one in every two years, short books compact of irony, yet having running through them like a twisted thread up and down, emerging, hidden, and re-emerging in the stuff of your writing, a memory of those early certitudes and even of passion for those earlier revelations."

When the Older Man had said this he sat silent for a few moments and then added gravely, "But I must warn you that for such a career you need an accumulated capital of at least £30,000."

The Young Man was not comforted by advice of this sort, and was determined to make a kind of war upon the doctrine which seemed to underlie it. He said in effect that if he could not be restored to the pristine condition which he felt to be slipping from him he would as lief stop living.

On hearing this second statement the Older Man became extremely grave.

"Young Man," said he, "Young Man, consider well what you are saying! The poet Shakespeare in his most remarkable effort, which, I need hardly tell you, is the tragedy of _Hamlet, or the Prince of Denmark,_ has remarked that the thousand doors of death stand open. I may be misquoting the words, and if I am I do so boldly and without fear, for any fool with a book at his elbow can get the words right and yet not understand their meaning. Let me assure you that the doors of death are not so simply hinged, and that any determination to force them involves the destruction of much more than these light though divine memories of which you speak; they involve, indeed, the destruction of the very soul which conceives them. And let me assure you, not upon my own experience, but upon that of those who have drowned themselves imperfectly, who have enlisted in really dangerous wars, or who have fired revolvers at themselves in a twisted fashion with their right hands, that, quite apart from that evil to the soul of which I speak, the evil to the mere body in such experiments is so considerable that a man would rather go to the dentist than experience them.... You will forgive me," he added earnestly, "for speaking in this gay manner upon an important philosophical subject, but long hours of work at the earning of my living force me to some relaxation towards the end of the day, and I cannot restrain a frivolous spirit even in the discussion of such fundamental things.... No, do not, as you put it, 'stop living.' It hurts, and no one has the least conception of whether it is a remedy. What is more, the life in front of you will prove, after a few years, as entertaining as the life which you are rapidly leaving."

The Young Man caught on to this last phrase, and said, "What do you mean by 'entertaining'?"

"I intend," said the Older Man, "to keep my advice to you in the note to which I think such advice should be set. I will not burden it with anything awful, nor weight an imperfect diction with absolute verities in which I do indeed believe, but which would be altogether out of place at this hour of the evening. I will not deny that from eleven till one, and especially if one be delivering an historical, or, better still, a theological lecture, one can without loss of dignity allude to the permanent truth, the permanent beauty, and the permanent security without which human life wreathes up like mist and is at the best futile, at the worst tortured. But you must remember that you have come to me suddenly with a most important question, after dinner, that I have but just completed an essay upon the economic effect of the development of the Manchurian coalfields, and that (what is more important) all this talk began in a certain key, and that to change one's key is among the most difficult of creative actions.... No, Young Man, I shall not venture upon the true reply to your question."

On hearing this answer the Young Man began to curse and to swear and to say that he had looked everywhere for help and had never found it; that he was minded to live his own life and to see what would come of it; that he thought the Older Man knew nothing of what he was talking about, but was wrapping it all up in words; that he had clearly recognised in the Older Man's intolerable prolixity several clichés or ready-made phrases; that he hoped on reaching the Older Man's age he would not have been so utterly winnowed of all substance as to talk so aimlessly; and finally that he prayed God for a personal development more full of justice, of life, and of stuff than that which the Older Man appeared to have suffered or enjoyed.

On hearing these words the Older Man leapt to his feet (which was not an easy thing for him to do) and as one overjoyed grasped the Younger Man by the hand, though the latter very much resented such antics on the part of Age.

"That is it! That is it!" cried the Older Man, looking now far too old for his years. "If I have summoned up in you that spirit I have not done ill! Get you forward in that mood and when you come to my time of life you will be as rotund and hopeful a fellow as I am myself."

But having heard these words the Young Man left him in disgust.

The Older Man, considering all these things as he looked into the fire when he was alone, earnestly desired that he could have told the Young Man the exact truth, have printed it, and have produced a proper Gospel. But considering the mountains of impossibility that lay in the way of such public action, he sighed deeply and took to the more indirect method. He turned to his work and continued to perform his own duty before God and for the help of mankind. This, on that evening, was for him a review upon the interpretation of the word _haga_ in the Domesday Inquest. This kept him up till a quarter past one, and as he had to take a train to Newcastle at eight next morning it is probable that much will be forgiven him when things are cleared.

ON THE DEPARTURE OF A GUEST

_C'est ma Jeunesse qui s'en va. Adieu! la tres gente compagne-- Oncques ne suis moins gai pour ça (C'est ma Jeunesse qui s'en va) Et lon-lon-laire, et lon-lon-là Peut-etre perd's; peut-etre gagne. C'est ma Jeunesse qui s'en va._

(From the Author's MSS. In the library of the Abbey of Theleme.)

Host: Well, Youth, I see you are about to leave me, and since it is in the terms of your service by no means to exceed a certain period in my house, I must make up my mind to bid you farewell.

Youth: Indeed, I would stay if I could; but the matter lies as you know in other hands, and I may not stay.

Host: I trust, dear Youth, that you have found all comfortable while you were my guest, that the air has suited you and the company?

Youth: I thank you, I have never enjoyed a visit more; you may say that I have been most unusually happy.

Host: Then let me ring for the servant who shall bring down your things.

Youth: I thank you civilly! I have brought them down already--see, they are here. I have but two, one very large bag and this other small one.

Host: Why, you have not locked the small one! See it gapes!

Youth (_somewhat embarrassed_): My dear Host ... to tell the truth ... I usually put it off till the end of my visits ... but the truth ... to tell the truth, my luggage is of two kinds.

Host: I do not see why that need so greatly confuse you.

Youth (_still more embarrassed_): But you see--the fact is--I stay with people so long that--well, that very often they forget which things are mine and which belong to the house ... And--well, the truth is that I have to take away with me a number of things which ... which, in a word, you may possibly have thought your own.

Host (_coldly_): Oh!

Youth (_eagerly_): Pray do not think the worse of me--you know how strict are my orders.

Host (_sadly_): Yes, I know; you will plead that Master of yours, and no doubt you are right.... But tell me, Youth, what are those things?

Youth: They fill this big bag. But I am not so ungracious as you think. See, in this little bag, which I have purposely left open, are a number of things properly mine, yet of which I am allowed to make gifts to those with whom I lingered--you shall choose among them, or if you will, you shall have them all.

Host: Well, first tell me what you have packed in the big bag and mean to take away.

Youth: I will open it and let you see. (_He unlocks it and pulls the things out_.) I fear they are familiar to you.

Host: Oh! Youth! Youth! Must you take away all of these? Why, you are taking away, as it were, my very self! Here is the love of women, as deep and changeable as an opal; and here is carelessness that looks like a shower of pearls. And here I see--Oh! Youth, for shame!--you are taking away that silken stuff which used to wrap up the whole and which you once told me had no name, but which lent to everything it held plenitude and satisfaction. Without it surely pleasures are not all themselves. Leave me that at least.

Youth: No, I must take it, for it is not yours, though from courtesy I forbore to tell you so till now. These also go: Facility, the ointment; Sleep, the drug; Full Laughter, that tolerated all follies. It was the only musical thing in the house. And I must take--yes, I fear I must take Verse.

HOST: Then there is nothing left!

YOUTH: Oh! yes! See this little open bag which you may choose from! Feel it!

HOST (_lifting it_): Certainly it is very heavy, but it rattles and is uncertain.

YOUTH: That is because it is made up of divers things having no similarity; and you may take all or leave all, or choose as you will. Here (_holding up a clout_) is Ambition: Will you have that?...

HOST (_doubtfully_): I cannot tell.... It has been mine and yet ... without those other things....

YOUTH (_cheerfully_): Very well, I will leave it. You shall decide on it a few years hence. Then, here is the perfume Pride. Will you have that?

HOST: No; I will have none of it. It is false and corrupt, and only yesterday I was for throwing it out of window to sweeten the air in my room.

YOUTH: So far you have chosen well; now pray choose more.

HOST: I will have this--and this--and this. I will take Health (_takes it out of the bag_), not that it is of much use to me without those other things, but I have grown used to it. Then I will take this (_takes out a plain steel purse and chain_), which is the tradition of my family, and which I desire to leave to my son. I must have it cleaned. Then I will take this (_pulls out a trinket_), which is the Sense of Form and Colour. I am told it is of less value later on, but it is a pleasant ornament ... And so, Youth, goodbye.

Youth (_with a mysterious smile_): Wait--I have something else for you (_he feels in his ticket pocket_); no less a thing (_he feels again in his watch pocket_) than (_he looks a trifle anxious and feels in his waistcoat pockets_) a promise from my Master, signed and sealed, to give you back all I take and more in Immortality! (_He feels in his handkerchief pocket._)

Host: Oh! Youth!

Youth (_still feeling_): Do not thank me! It is my Master you should thank. (_Frowns_.) Dear me! I hope I have not lost it! (_Feels in his trousers pockets._)

Host (_loudly_): Lost it?

Youth (_pettishly_): I did not say I had lost it! I said I hoped I had not ... (_feels in his great-coat pocket, and pulls out an envelope_). Ah! Here it is! (_His face clouds over_.) No, that is the message to Mrs. George, telling her the time has come to get a wig ... (_Hopelessly_): Do you know I am afraid I have lost it! I am really very sorry--I cannot wait. (_He goes off_.)

ON DEATH

I knew a man once who made a great case of Death, saying that he esteemed a country according to its regard for the conception of Death, and according to the respect which it paid to that conception. He also said that he considered individuals by much the same standard, but that he did not judge them so strictly in the matter, because (said he) great masses of men are more permanently concerned with great issues; whereas private citizens are disturbed by little particular things which interfere with their little particular lives, and so distract them from the general end.

This was upon a river called Boutonne, in Vendée, and at the time I did not understand what he meant because as yet I had had no experience of these things. But this man to whom I spoke had had three kinds of experience; first, he had himself been very probably the occasion of Death in others, for he had been a soldier in a war of conquest where the Europeans were few and the Barbarians many! secondly, he had been himself very often wounded, and more than once all but killed; thirdly, he was at the time he told me this thing an old man who must in any case soon come to that experience or catastrophe of which he spoke.

He was an innkeeper, the father of two daughters, and his inn was by the side of the river, but the road ran between. His face was more anxiously earnest than is commonly the face of a French peasant, as though he had suffered more than do ordinarily that very prosperous, very virile, and very self-governing race of men. He had also about him what many men show who have come sharply against the great realities, that is, a sort of diffidence in talking of ordinary things. I could see that in the matters of his household he allowed himself to be led by women. Meanwhile he continued to talk to me over the table upon this business of Death, and as he talked he showed that desire to persuade which is in itself the strongest motive of interest in any human discourse.

He said to me that those who affected to despise the consideration of Death knew nothing of it; that they had never seen it close and might be compared to men who spoke of battles when they had only read books about battles, or who spoke of sea-sickness though they had never seen the sea. This last metaphor he used with some pride, for he had crossed the Mediterranean from Provence to Africa some five or six times, and had upon each occasion suffered horribly; for, of course, his garrison had been upon the edge of the desert, and he had been a soldier beyond the Atlas. He told me that those who affected to neglect or to despise Death were worse than children talking of grown-up things, and were more like prigs talking of physical things of which they knew nothing.

I told him then that there were many such men, especially in the town of Geneva. This, he said, he could well believe, though he had never travelled there, and had hardly heard the name of the place. But he knew it for some foreign town. He told me, also, that there were men about in his own part of the world who pretended that since Death was an accident like any other, and, moreover, one as certain as hunger or as sleep, it was not to be considered. These, he said, were the worst debaters upon his favourite subject.

Now as he talked in this fashion I confess that I was very bored. I had desired to go on to Angouléme upon my bicycle, and I was at that age when all human beings think themselves immortal. I had desired to get off the main high road into the hills upon the left, to the east of it, and I was at an age when the cessation of mundane experience is not a conceivable thing. Moreover, this innkeeper had been pointed out to me as a man who could give very useful information upon the nature of the roads I had to travel, and it had never occurred to me that he would switch me off after dinner upon a hobby of his own. To-day, after a wider travel, I know well that all innkeepers have hobbies, and that an abstract or mystical hobby of this sort is amongst the best with which to pass an evening. But no matter, I am talking of then and not now. He kept me, therefore, uninterested as I was, and continued:

"People who put Death away from them, who do not neglect or despise it but who stop thinking about it, annoy me very much. We have in this village a chemist of such a kind. He will have it that, five minutes afterwards, a man thinks no more about it." Having gone so far, the innkeeper, clenching his hands and fixing me with a brilliant glance from his old eyes, said:

"With such men I will have nothing to do!"