Part 10

For the sun was now blotted out, and the enormous thing was upon us like a foe. First I saw from the high platform of my Mill a sort of driving mist or whirl, which at first I thought to be an arrow-shoot of rain; but looking again I saw it to be no more than the dust of many parched fields and lanes, driving before the edge of the thunder. There was a wind preceding all this like a herald. In a moment the oppressive air grew cool. It grew cool by a leap. It was like the descent into a cellar; it was like the opening of a mine door to a draft. The vigour of the mind, dulled by so many days of heat and nights without refreshment, leaped up to greet this change, which, though it came under a solemn and uncomforting aspect, gave breath and expansion. One might for some five minutes have imagined as the dust clouds advanced and the furious shaking of the trees and hedges a mile away began to be heard as well as seen, that the call of coolness for work had come. Then that wall of wind hit the two great oaks of my neighbour next to my own frontier trees. The fan of the Mill groaned, turning a little; it turned furiously, and the strength of the storm was upon us. It lightened, single and double and fourfold. The blinding fire sprang from arch to arch of an incredible architecture, higher than anything you might dream of, larger than the mountains of other lands. The thunder ran through all this, not very loud but continuous, and a sweep of darkness followed like a train after the movement of the cloud. White wreaths blown out in jets as though by some caprice in wilful shapes showed here and there, and here and there, against such a blackness, grey cloudlets drifted very rapidly, hurrying distracted left and right without a purpose. All the while the rain fell.

The village and the landscape and the Weald, the Rape, the valley, all my county you would have said, was swallowed up, occupied, and overwhelmed. It was more majestic than an army; it was a victory more absolute than any achievement of arms, and while it flashed and poured and proclaimed itself with its continual noise, it was itself, as it were, the thing in which we lived, and the mere earth was but a scene upon which the great storm trod for the purpose of its pageant.

When the storm had passed over northward to other places beyond, and when at evening the stars came out very numerous and clear in a sky which the thunder had not cooled, and when the doubtful summer haze was visible again very low upon the distant horizon, over the English sea, the memory of all this was like the memory of a complete achievement. No one who had seen the storm could doubt purpose or meaning in the vastness of things, nor the creative word of Almighty God.

XXVIII

THE VALLEY

Everybody knows, I fancy, that kind of landscape in which hills seem to lie in a regular manner, fold on fold, one range behind the other, until at last, behind them all, some higher and grander range dominates and frames the whole.

The infinite variety of light and air and accident of soil provide all men, save those who live in the great plains, with examples of this sort. The traveller in the dry air of California or of Spain, watching great distances from the heights, will recollect such landscapes all his life. They were the reward of his long ascents, and they were the sunset visions which attended his effort when at last he had climbed to the utmost ridge of his day's westward journey. Such a landscape does a man see from the edges of the Guadarrama, looking eastward and south toward the very distant hills that guard Toledo and the ravines of the Tagus. Such a landscape does a man see at sunrise from the highest of the Cevennes looking right eastward to the dawn as it comes up in the pure and cold air beyond the Alps, and shows you the falling of their foothills, a hundred miles of them, right down to the trench of the Rhone. And by such a landscape is a man gladdened when, upon the escarpments of the Tuolumne, he turns back and looks westward over the Stockton plain towards the coast range which guards the Pacific.

The experience of such a sight is one peculiar in travel, or, for that matter, if a man is lucky enough to enjoy it near his home, insistent and reiterated upon the mind of the home-dwelling man. Such a landscape, for instance, makes a man praise God if his house is upon the height of Mendip, and he can look over falling hills right over the Vale of Severn toward the rank above rank of the Welsh solemnities beyond, until the straight line and height of the Black Mountain against the sky bounds his view and frames it.

It is the character of these landscapes to suggest at once a vastness, a diversity, and a seclusion. When a man comes upon them unexpectedly he can forget the perpetual toil of men and imagine that those who dwell below in the nearer glens before him are exempt from the necessities of this world. When such a landscape is part of a man's dwelling place, though he well knows that the painful life of men within those hills is the same hard business that it is throughout the world, yet his knowledge is modified and comforted by the permanent glory of the thing he sees.

The distant and high range that bounds his view makes a sort of wall, cutting the country off and guarding it from whatever may be beyond. The succession of lower ranges suggests secluded valleys, and the reiterated woods, distant and more distant, convey an impression of fertility more powerful than that of corn in harvest upon the lowlands.

Sometimes it is a whole province that is thus grasped by the eye; sometimes in the summer haze of Northern lands, a few miles only; always this scenery inspires the onlooker with a sense of completion and of repose, and at the same time, I think, with worship and with awe.

Now one such group of valleys there was, hill above hill, forest above forest, and beyond it a great, noble range, unwooded and high against Heaven, guarding all the place, which I for my part knew from the day when first I came to know anything of this world. There is a high place under fir trees; a place of sand and bracken in South England, whence such a view was always present to my eye in childhood, and "There," said I to myself (even in childhood) "a man should make his habitation. In those valleys is the proper settling place for a man."

And so there was. There was a steading for me in the midst of those hills.

It was a little place which had grown up as my county grows, the house throwing out arms and layers, and making itself over ten generations of men. One room was panelled in the oak of the seventeenth century--but that had been a novelty in its time, for the walls upon which the panels stood were of the late fifteenth, oak and brick intermingled. Another room was large and light, built in the manner of one hundred and fifty years ago, which people call Georgian.

It had been thrown out South--and this is quite against our custom; for our older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to present a corner to the south-west and the storms. So they stand still.

It had round it a solid cornice which the modern men of the towns would have called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then, further on this house had modern roominess stretching in one new wing after another; and it had a great set of byres and barns, and there was a copse and some six acres of land. Over a deep gully stood over against it the little town that was the mother of the place; and altogether this good place was enclosed, silent, and secure.

"The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm." If this is not a Chinese proverb it ought to be. That little farm and steading and those six acres, that ravine, those trees, that aspect of the little mothering town; the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range beyond--all these were not, and for ever will not be mine.

For all I know some man quite unacquainted with that land took the place, grumbling, for a debt; or again, for all I know it may have been bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man who, seeing them perpetually, regretted the flat marshes of his home. To-day, this very day, up high on Egdean Side, not thinking of such things, through a gap in the trees, I saw again after so many years, set one behind the other, the woods, wave upon wave, the summer heat, the high, bare range guarding all; and in the midst of that landscape, set like a toy, the little Sabine farm.

Then, said I, to this place I might not know, "Continue. Go and serve whom you will. You were not altogether mine because you would not be, and to-day you are not mine at all. You will regret it perhaps, and perhaps you will not. There was verse in you perhaps, or prose, or, much better still (for all I know), contentment for a man. But you refused. You lost your chance. Good-by," and with that I went on into the wood and beyond the gap and saw the sight no more.

It was ten years since I had seen it last, the little Sabine farm. It may be ten years before I see it again, or it may be for ever. But as I went through the woods saying to myself:

"You lost your chance, my little Sabine farm, you lost your chance!" another part of me at once replied:

"Ah, and so did you!"

Then, by way of riposte, I answered in my mind:

"Not at all, for the chance I never had; all I have lost is my desire--no more."

"No, not only your desire," said the voice to me within, "but the fulfilment of it." And when that reply came I naturally turned, as all men do on hearing such interior replies, to a general consideration of regret, and was prepared, if any honest publisher should have come whistling through that wood, with an offer proper to the occasion to produce no less than five volumes on the Nature of Regret, its mortal sting, its bitter-sweetness, its power to keep alive in man the pure passions of the soul, its hint at immortality, its memory of Heaven.

But the wood was empty. The offer did not come. The moment was lost. The five volumes will hardly now be written. In place of them I offer poor this, which you may take or leave. But I beg leave, before I end, to cite certain words very nobly attached to that great inn, The Griffin, which has its foundation set far off in another place, in the town of March, in the sad Fen-Land near the Eastern Sea:

"England my desire, what have you not refused?"

XXIX

A CONVERSATION IN ANDORRA

The other day--indeed some months ago--I was in the company of two men who were talking together and were at cross-purposes. The one was an Englishman acquainted with the Catalonian tongue and rather proud of knowing it; the other was a citizen of the Republic of Andorra.

The first had the advantage of his fellow in world-wide travel, the reading of many newspapers and (beside his thorough knowledge of Catalonian) a smattering of French, German, and American.

I was touched to see the care and deference and good-fellowship which the superior extended to the inferior in this colloquy.

I did not hear the beginning of it: it was the early middle part which I came in for; it was conducted loudly and with gestures upon the part of the Andorran, good-humouredly but equally openly on the part of the Englishman, who said:

"I grant you that life is very hard for some of our town dwellers in spite of the high wages they obtain."

To which the Andorran answered: "There is nothing to grant, your Grace, for I would not believe their life was hard; but I was puzzled by what you told me, for I could not make out how they earned so much money, and yet looked so extraordinary." The Andorran showed by this that he had visited England.

At this the Englishman smiled pleasantly enough and said: "Do you think me extraordinary?"

The Andorran was a little embarrassed. "No no," he said, "you do not understand the word I use. I do not mean extraordinary to see, I mean unhappy and lacking humanity."

The Englishman smiled more genially still in his good wholesome beard, and said: "Do I look to you like that?"

"No," said the Andorran gravely, "nor does that gentleman whom you pointed out to me when we left France, your English patron, Mr. Bernstein I think ... you were both well-fed and well-clothed ... and what is more, I know nothing of what you earn. But in Andorra we ask about this man and that man indifferently, and especially about the poorest, and when I asked you about the poorest in your towns you told me that there was not one of them who did not earn, when he was fully working, twenty-five pesetas a week. Now with twenty-five pesetas a week! Oh ...! Why, I could live on five, and five weeks of twenty saved is a hundred pesetas; and with a hundred pesetas ...! Oh, one can buy a great brood sow; or if one is minded for grandeur, the best coat in the world; or again, a little mule just foaled, which in two years, mind you, _in two years_" (and here he wagged his finger) "will be a great fine beast" (and here he extended his arms), "and the _next_ year will carry a man over the hills and will sell for five hundred pesetas. Yes it will!"

The Englishman looked puzzled. "Well," said he, leaning forward, ticking off on his fingers and becoming practical, "there's your pound a week."

The Andorran nodded. He began ticking it off on his fingers also.

"Now of course the man is not always in work."

"If he is lazy," said the Andorran with angry eyes, "the neighbours shall see to that!"

"No," said the Englishman, irritated, "you don't understand; he can't always find some one to _give_ him work."

"But who _gives_ work?" said the Andorran. "Work is not _given_." And then he laughed. "Our trouble is to get the youngsters to do it!" And he laughed more loudly.

"You don't understand," repeated the Englishman, pestered, "he can't work unless some one allows him to work for him."

"Pooh!" said the Andorran, "he could cut down trees or dig, or get up into the hills."

"Why," said the Englishman with wondering eyes, "the perlice would have him then."

The Andorran looked mournful: he had heard the name of something dangerous in this country. He thought it was a ghost that haunted lonely places and strangled men.

"Well then," went on the Englishman in a practical fashion, again ticking on his fingers, "let us say he can work three weeks out of the five."

"Yes?" said the Andorran, bewildered.

"He gets, let us say, three times a week's wage in the five weeks.... I don't mind, call it an average of twenty pesetas if you like, or even eighteen."

"What is an 'average'?" said the Andorran, frowning.

"An average," said the Englishman impatiently, "oh, an average is what he gets all lumped up."

"Do you mean," said the Andorran gravely, "that he gets eighteen pesetas every Saturday?"

"No, _no_, NO!" struck in the Englishman. "Twenty-five pesetas, as you call them, when he can get work, and nothing when he can't."

"Good Lord!" said the Andorran, with wide eyes and crossing himself. "How does the poor fellow know whether perlice will not be at him again? It is enough to break a man's heart!"

"Well, don't _argue_!" said the Englishman, keen upon his tale. "He gets an average, anyhow, of eighteen pesetas, as you call them, a week. Now you see, however wretched he is, five of those will go in rent, and if he is a decent man, seven."

The Andorran was utterly at sea. "But if he is wretched, why should he pay, and if he is decent why should he pay still more?" he asked.

"Why, damn it all!" said the Englishman, exploding, "a man must live!"

"Precisely," said the Andorran rigidly, "that is why I am asking the question. He pays this tax, you say, five pesetas, if he is wretched and seven if he is decent. But a man may be decent although he is wretched, and who is so brutal as to ask a tax of the poor?"

"It isn't a tax," said the Englishman. "He pays it for his house."

"But a man could buy a house," said the Andorran, "with a few payments like that."

The Englishman sighed. "Do listen to my explanation. He's got to pay it anyhow."

"Well," said the Andorran, sighing in his turn, "you must have a wicked King. But, please God, he cannot spend it all on his pleasures."

"It isn't paid to the King, God bless him," said the Englishman. "The man pays it to his landlord."

"And suppose he doesn't?" said the Andorran defiantly.

"Well, the perlice," began the Englishman, and the Andorran's face showed that he was afraid of occult powers.

"So there, you see," went on the Englishman, calculating along with rapid content, "he's only got thirteen."

The Andorran was willing to stretch a point. "Well," said he doubtfully, "I will grant him thirteen, and with thirteen pesetas a man can do well enough. His wife milks, and it does not cost much to put a little cotton on the child, and then, of course, if he is too poor to buy a bed, why there is his straw."

"Straw's not decent, and we don't allow it," said the Englishman firmly; "he doesn't buy a bed always; sometimes he rents it."

"I don't understand," said the Andorran, "I don't understand."

There was a little pause during which neither of the two men looked at the other. The Englishman went on good-naturedly and laboriously explaining:

"Now let's come to bread."

"Yes," said the Andorran eagerly, "man lives by bread and wine."

"Well," said the Englishman, ignoring this interruption, "you see, bread for the lot of them would come to half that money."

"Yes," said the Andorran, nodding, "you are quite right. Bread is a very serious thing." And he sighed.

"Half of it," continued the Englishman, "goes in bread. And then, of course, he has to get a little meat."

"Certainly," said the Andorran.

"Bacon anyhow," the Englishman went on, "and there's boots."

"Oh, he could do without boots," said the Andorran.

"No he can't," said the Englishman, "they all have to have boots; and then you see, there's tea."

The Andorran was interested in hearing about tea. "You Englishmen are so fond of tea," he said, smiling. "I have noticed that you ask for tea. Juan has tea to sell."

The Englishman nodded genially. "I will buy some of him," he said.

"Well, go on," said the Andorran.

"And there's a little baccy, of course"--and he gave the prices of both those articles. "They're a leetle more than you might think," continued the Englishman, a little confused. "They're taxed, you see."

"Taxed again?" said the Andorran.

"Yes," said the Englishman rapidly, "not much; besides which, I haven't said anything was taxed yet: they pay about double on their tea and about four times on the value of the tobacco. But they don't feel it. Oh, if they get regular work they're all right!"

"Then," said the Andorran, summing it all up, "they ought to do very well."

"Yes, they ought," said the Englishman, "but somehow they're not steady of themselves: they get _pauperised_."

"What is that?" said the Andorran.

"Why, they get to expect things for nothing."

"They think," said the Andorran cheerfully, "that good things fall from the sky. I know that sort: we have them." He thought he had begun to understand, and just after he had said this we came to a village.

I must here tell you what I ought to have put at the beginning of these few lines, that I heard this conversation in Andorra valley itself, while four of us, the Andorran guide, the Englishman, myself and an Ironist were proceeding through the mountains, riding upon mules.

We had come to the village of Encamps, and there we all got down to enter the inn. We had a meal together and paid, the four of us, exactly five shillings and threepence all together for wine and bread, cooked meat, plenty of vegetables, coffee, liqueurs and a cigar.

This was the end of the conversation in Andorra: it was my business to return to England after the holiday to write an essay on a point in political economy, to which I did justice; but the conventions of academic writing prevented me from quoting in that essay this remarkable experience.

XXX

PARIS AND THE EAST

One of the things that set a modern man wondering is the nature of the survivor of our time.

It is customary to say that all human things decay and end; and if you will take a period long enough of course it is true, for at last the world itself shall dissolve. But when men point to dead Empires, as Egypt or Assyria are dead, or when they point to a fossilised civilisation, as it seems, according to travellers, that certain civilisations of the East are fossilised, or when they point to little broken cities where once were famous towns, one is tempted to remember that to all these there is an exceptional glorious sort which is ourselves. Atlantic Europe, the Europe that was made by the Christian Faith and in the first four centuries of our era, lives on from change to change in a most marvellous way, and for now two thousand years has not seemed capable of decline. You have in the history of it resurrection after resurrection, and through all those rapid and fantastic developments, transformations far more rapid and far more fantastic than any other of which we have record, a sort of inner fixity of type remains, like the individual soul of the man which makes him always himself in spite of accident and in spite of the process of age; only, Europe differs from such metaphor in this, that it is like some man not subject, it would seem, to mortality.

This thought to which I perpetually return, occurred to me as I handled a book on Paris, the illustrations of which were impressions gathered by a Japanese artist. Such a contrast will call up in the minds of many the contrast between something very old and something very new. A reader might say as he glanced at this book: "Here is one of the most ancient things we have, the Oriental mind, and it is looking at one of the freshest and most modern things we have, modern Paris."

I confess that to me the contrast is of another kind. I should say: "Here is something which is, so far as its inner force goes, immovable, the Oriental mind; and this is how it looks at the most mobile thing on earth, the heart of Gaul--yet the mobile thing has a history almost as long as, and far more full than, the immobile thing."

Upon a central page of this book I found a really splendid bit of drawing. It is an impression of the Statue of the Republic under a cold dawn. Now when one thinks what that statue means, what portion of the stoical philosophy re-arisen after so many centuries it embodies, what furious combats have raged round that idea: I mean combats, not debates: pain, not rhetoric; men dying in great numbers and desiring to kill others as they died. When one considers that statue but the other day, with the raging mob of workmen round it, and when one suddenly remembers that the whole thing is after all only of the last hundred years--what a multiplicity of life this chief of our European cities possesses in one's eyes!

The admirable pictures in this book are drawn as nearly in the European manner as one could expect, but the feeling is an unchanging feeling which we know in Eastern things. The mind is like deep and level water, never stirred by wind: a big lake in a crater of the hills. But the thing drawn is as moving and as living as the air.