large double engine of foot-thick pine swung upon hinges wrought many
generations ago by the sons of the Gods) came a little knocking. It was
a little tapping like the tapping of a bird. It rang musically of metal
and of hollow metal; it moved them curiously, and a very young man who
was of the blood said to his father: “Perhaps a God would warn us.”
The keeper of the door was a huge and kindly man, foolish but good
for lifting, with whom by daylight children played, and who upon such
evenings lay silent and contented enough to hear his wittier fellows.
This serf rose from the straw and went to unbar. But the Chief put his
hand forward, and bade him stay that they might still hear that little
tapping. Then he lowered his hand and the gate was swung open.
Cold came with it for a moment, and the night air; light, and as though
blown before that draught, drifted into the hall a tall man, very
young, who bowed to them with a gesture they did not know, and first
asked in a tongue they could not tell, whether any man might interpret
for him.
Then one old man who was their pilot and who had often run down into
the vineyard lands, sometimes for barter, sometimes for war, always
for a wage, said two words or three in that new tongue, hesitatingly.
His face was wrinkled and hard; he had very bright but very pale grey
eyes that were full of humility. He said three words of greeting which
he had painfully learned twenty years before, from a priest, upon the
rocks of Brittany, who had also given him smooth stones wherewith to
pray; and with these smooth stones the old Pilot continually prayed
sometimes to the greater and sometimes to the lesser Gods. His wife
had died during the first war between Hrolf and the Twin Brothers; he
had come home to find her dead and sanctified, and, being Northern, he
had since been also a silent man. This Pilot, I say, quoted the words
of greeting in the strange tongue. Then the tall young stranger man
advanced into the circle of the firelight and made a sign upon his head
and his breast and his shoulders, which was like the sign of the Hammer
of Thor, and yet which was not the sign of the Hammer of Thor. When he
had done this, the Pilot attempted that same sign, but he failed at
it, for it was many years since he had been taught it upon the Breton
coast. He knew it to be magical and beneficent, and he was ashamed to
fail.
The Chief of those who were descended from the Gods and were seated
round the fire, turned to the Priest and said: “Is this a guest, a
stranger sent, or is he a man come as an enemy who should be led out
again into the night? Have you any divination?”
“I have no divination,” said the Priest. “I cannot tell one thing or
the other, nor each from the other in the case of this young man. But
perhaps he is one of the Gods seeking shelter among men, or perhaps he
is a fancy thing, warlock, but not doing evil. Or perhaps he is from
the demons; or perhaps he is a man like ourselves, and seeking shelter
during some long wandering.”
When the Chief heard this he asked the Pilot, not as a man possessing
divine knowledge, but as one who had travelled and knew the sea,
whether he knew this Stranger and whence he came. To which the Pilot
answered:
“Captain, I do not know this young man nor whence he comes, nor any
of his tribe, nor have I seen any like him save once three slaves who
stood in a market-place of the Romans in a town that was subject to
a great lord who was a Frank and not a Breton, and who was hated by
the people of his town so that later they slew him. Then these three
slaves were loosened, and they came to the house of the Priest of the
Gods of that country, and they told me the name of the people whence
they sprang. But I have forgotten it. Only I know that it is among the
vineyard lands. There the day and the night are equally divided all the
year long, and if the snow falls it falls gently and for a very little
while, and there are all manner of birds, and those people are very
rich, and they have great houses of stone. Now I believe this Stranger
to be a man like ourselves, born of a woman, and coming northward upon
some purpose which we do not know. It may be for merchandise, or it may
be for the love of singing and of telling stories to men.”
When he had said this they all looked at the Stranger and they saw that
he had with him a little instrument that was not known to them, for it
was a flute of metal. It was of silver, as they could see, long drawn
and very delicately made, and with this had he summoned at the gate.
The Chief then brought out with his own hands a carven chair, on which
he seated the Stranger, and he put into his right hand a gold cup taken
from the Romans in a city of the Franks, upon which was faintly carved
a cross, and round the rim of which were four precious stones, an
emerald, a ruby, an amethyst, and a diamond; and going to a skin which
he had taken in a Gascon raid, he poured out wine into that chalice and
went down upon one knee as is proper to strangers when they are to be
entertained, and put a cloth over his arms and bade him drink. But when
the young man saw the cross faintly carved upon the cup and the four
precious stones at the corners of it, he shuddered a little and put it
aside as though it were a sacred thing, at which they all marvelled.
Yet he longed for the wine. And they, understanding that in some way
this ornament was sacred to his Gods, gently took it from him and
through courtesy put it aside upon a separate place which was reserved
for honourable vessels, and poured him other wine into a wooden stoop;
and this he drank, holding it out now to one and now to another, but
last and chiefly to their Captain; and as he drank it he drank it with
signs of amity.
Then by way of payment for so much kindness he took his silver flute
and blew upon it shrill notes, all very sweet, and the sweeter for
their choice and distance one from another, until they listened,
listening every man with those beside him like one man, for they had
never heard such a sound; and as he played one man saw one thing in his
mind and one another thing; for one man saw the long and easy summer
seas that roll after a prosperous boat filled with spoil, whether of
fishes or of booty, when the square sail is taken aft by a warm wind
in the summer season, and the high mountains of home first show beyond
the line of the sea. And another man saw a little valley, narrow, with
deep pasture, wherein he had been bred and had learned to plow the
land with horses before ever he had come to the handling of a tiller
or the bursting of water upon the bows. And another saw no distinct
and certain thing, but vague and pleasurable hopes fulfilled, and the
advent of great peace. And another saw those heights of the hills to
which he ever desired to return.
But the old Pilot, straining with wonder in his eyes as the music rose,
thought confusedly of all that he had seen and known; of the twirling
tides upon the Breton coast and of the great stone towns, of the
bright vestments of the ordered armies in the market-places and of the
vineyard land.
When the Stranger had ceased so to play upon his instrument they
applauded, as their custom was, by cries, some striking the armour upon
the ground so that it rang, and by gesture and voice they begged him
play again.
The second time he played all those men heard one thing: which was a
dance of young men and women together in some country where there was
little fear. The tune went softly, and was softly repeated, full of the
lilt of feet, and when it was ended they knew that the dance was done.
This time they were so pleased that they waited a little before they
would applaud, but the old Pilot, remembering more strongly than ever
the vineyard land, moved his right hand back and forward with delight
as in some way he would play music with it, and thus by a communication
of heart to heart stirred in that Stranger a new song; and taking up
his flute for the third time he blew upon it a different strain, at
which some were confused, others hungry in their hearts, though they
could not have told you why, but the old Pilot saw great and gracious
figures moving over a land subject to blessedness; he saw that in
the faces of these figures (which were those of the Immortals) stood
present at once a complete satisfaction and a joyous energy and a
solution of every ill. “These,” he said to himself in the last passion
of the music, “these are true Gods.” But suddenly the music ceased, and
with it the vision also.
For the great pleasure which the Flute Player had given them they
desired to keep him in their company, and so they did for three full
years. That is, the winter long, the seed time, and the time of
harvest; and the next harvest also, and another harvest more, during
which time he played them many tunes, and learnt their tongue.
Now, his Gods were his own, but he pined for the lack of their worship
and for Priests of his own sort, and when he would explain these in
his own manner some believed him, but some did not believe him. And to
those who believed him he brought a man from the South, from beyond
the Dovrefield, who baptised them with water: as for those who would
not have this they looked on, and kept to their own decree: but there
was as yet no division among them. A little while after the third
harvest, hearing that the fleet, which was of twelve boats, would make
for Roman land, he begged to go with it, for he was sick for his own,
but first he made them take an oath that they would molest none, nor
even barter with any, until they had landed him in his own land. The
Chief took this oath for them, and though his oath was worth the oath
of twelve men, twelve other men swore with him. In this way the oath
was done. So they took the Flute Player for three days over the sea
before the wind called Eager, which is the north-east wind, and blows
at the beginning of the open season; they took him at the beginning of
the fourth year since his coming among them, and they landed him in a
little boat in a seaport of the Franks, on Roman land....
The Faith went over the world as very light seed goes upon the wind,
and no one knows the drift on which it blew; it came to one place and
to another, and to each in a different way. It came, not to many men,
but always to one heart, till all men had hold of it.
The Dream
The experience I am about to set down was perhaps the result, and at
any rate it was the sequel, of a conversation engaged between three men
in London in the year 1903.
Of these three men one was returned but recently from South Africa,
where he had seen all too much of the war; another was a kindly,
wealthy, sober sort of man, young, virtuous, and full of inquiry; the
third was a hack.
It was about the season of Easter and of spring, when actually and
physically one can feel and handle the force of life about one, all
ready to break bounds; but these young men (for no one of them was
yet of middle age) preferred to talk of things more shadowy and less
certain than the air and the life and the English spring all around.
Things more shadowy and less certain, but to the mind of youth, being
a vigorous mind things fixed and absorbing; destiny, for instance, and
the nature of man.
Not one of these three, however, affirmed in this conversation (which
I so well remember!) any definite scheme. They spoke in terms of
violent opinion, of argument, and of analogy, but none of the three
came forward with a faith or even with a philosophy from which one
felt he could not be shaken. The more remarkable was it, therefore,
that one of them on his return in the early morning to his rooms,
after this young and long conversation of a mixed sort, such as men
entering upon life will often indulge, should have suffered and should
have remembered an exact and even terrible vision. It would indeed be
inexplicable that he should have suffered such a thing as a consequence
of his waking thoughts, though, if there be influences upon minds other
than the influences they themselves can bring--if there be influences
from without, and other wills determining our dreams--then what next
followed is less difficult to comprehend. For, when he had fallen
asleep, it seemed to him at once that he was in the midst of a very
gay and pleasant company in a sort of palace whereof the vast room in
which he stood was one out of very many that opened one into the other
in sequence. The crowd, and he with it, went forward slowly towards
a banquet which he heard was prepared. He did not see among those he
spoke to, and who spoke to him, any face with which he was familiar or
to which he could attach a name; and yet he seemed to know them all,
in that curious inconsequence of dreams, and one in especial, at some
distance from him, which seemed to have been lost once, and now to be
seen again through the crowd, was a face the sight of which moved in
him a very passionate memory: yet it was no early memory.
So they went forward, and soon they were all seated at a table of
enormous length, so long that its length seemed to have some purpose
about it; and at the farther end of this table was a door leading out
of that hall. It was a door not very large for so magnificent a space;
such a door as a man or woman could easily open with a common gesture,
and pass through and shut behind them quickly.
Now, for the first time, when they were eating and drinking, it seemed
to him that the conversation took on meaning, and a more consecutive
meaning than is usual in dreams; when, just as that new phase of his
dream had begun, one of the guests, a little to the left of the place
opposite to him, a woman of middle age who had been somewhat silent,
rose without apology, and without warning left her place he hardly knew
how, and passed out of the room through the door that he had noticed.
It shut behind her. No one mentioned or noticed her going, but in a
little while another and another had risen and had gone. And still as
each guest departed, some in the midst of a sentence, some during a
silence in the talk, there increased upon him an appalling sense of
unusual things; it was appalling to him that no one said good-bye, that
none of the fellows of those who so departed turned to them or noticed
their going, and that none of those who so departed returned or made
any promise to return. Next he noticed with an increasing ill-ease, by
some inconsequence of his dream, that when he watched the departure of
a guest (as the others did not) he saw the empty chair and the gap left
in the ranks; but when he looked again after speaking to some other to
the right or left the gap was somehow less defined, and when he looked
yet again it was no longer to be noticed or perceived; though it could
not be said that the chair was filled or was removed, but in some way
the absence of the man or woman who had been there ceased to be marked,
and it was as though they had never been present at all. It was not
often that he cared to look for more than a moment at one or another
of these risings from the feast; yet in the moment’s observation he
could see very different things. Some rose as though in terror; some as
though in weariness; some startled, as at a sudden command which they
alone could hear; some in a natural manner as though at an appointed
moment. But there was no order or method in their going: only all went
through that door.
His mind was now oppressed by the change which comes in dreams, and
turns them sometimes from phantasy to horror. There sat opposite
him a man somewhat older than himself, with a face vigorous and yet
despairing, not without energy, and trained in self-command. And this
man answered his thoughts at once, as thoughts are answered in dreams.
He said that it was of no use wondering why any guest left that feast,
nor what there was, if there was anything, beyond the door through
which this inconsequential passage was made. Even as he was saying
this he himself, suddenly looking towards it with an expression of
extreme sadness and abandonment, rose abruptly, bowed to no one, and
went out. At his departure the dreamer heard a little sigh, and he
who had sighed said that doors of their nature led from one place to
another, and then he tittered a little as though he had said a clever
thing. Then another, a large happy man, laughed somewhat too loudly,
and said that only fools discussed what none could know. A third, still
upon that same theme, said in fixed, contented manner, that, in the
nature of things, nothing was beyond the door. At which, the first
who had spoken tittered again, and said doors of their nature led
somewhere. Even as he said it his eyes filled with tears, and he also
rose and went out.
For the first time during this increasing pressure of mystery and
disaster (for so the dreamer felt it) he watched the figure of that
guest; none of his companions about him dared or chose to do so; but
the dreamer fixedly watched, and he saw the figure going down the long
perspective of the hall very rapidly and very directly. It did not
hesitate nor look back for one moment, it passed through--it was gone.
The dreamer suddenly felt the wine of that feast, the words spoken
round him, more full of meaning and of novelty; the noise of speech,
though more confused, was more pleasing and louder; the candles were
far more bright. He had forgotten, or was just forgetting, all that
other mood of his dream, when it seemed to him that in a sense all
that converse was struck dumb. He heard no sound; he was cut off.
Their hands still moved, their eyes and lips framed words and repeated
glances, but around him, and for him, there was silence. The candles
burned bright through the length of the room, and brightest, as in a
guiding manner, towards the end of it where was the Door. He felt a
thrill pass from his face. He rose and walked directly--no one speaking
to him or noticing him at all--down the long, narrow space behind their
chairs. It took him but a moment, innumerable as were those whom he
must pass. His hand was upon the latch; with his head bent forward
somewhat, and downwards, in the attitude of a man hurrying, he passed
through. And, not knowing what he did, but doing it as though by habit,
he shut the door between him and the feast, and immediately he was in a
complete and utterly silent darkness. But he still was.
The Silence of the Battlefields
Whoever has had occasion, whether for study or for curiosity, to
visit many of the battlefields of Europe, must have been especially
struck by their silence. There are many things combining to produce
this impression, but when all have been accounted for, something over
remains. Thus it is true that in any countryside the contrast between
the noise of the great fight that fills one’s mind and the natural
calm of woods and of fields must penetrate the mind; and, again, it
is evident that any piece of land which one closely examines, noting
all its details for the purposes of history, must seem more lonely and
deserted than those general views in which the eye comprehends so much
of the work of man; because all this special watching of particular
corners, noting of ranges and the rest, make one’s progress slow, keep
one’s eyes close fixed to things more or less near, and thus allow one
to appreciate how far between men are save in the towns. But there
is more than this. It can be proved that there is more. For the same
sense of complete loneliness does not take a man in other similar
work. He does not feel it when he is surveying for a map nor when he
is searching for an historic site other than that of battle. But the
battlefields are lonely.
Some few, especially in this crowded island, are not lonely. Life has
overtaken them, spreading outwards from the towns. By what a curious
irony, for instance, the racecourse at Lewes, with a shouting throng
of men as the horses go by, corresponds precisely to the place where
must have been the thickest of the advance on Montfort’s right as he
led them to attack the King. Evesham is not lonely. Battle is full of
houses and of villas, and the chief centre of the fight is in a garden.
But for the most part the great battlefields are lonely; and their
loneliness is unnatural and oppressive. In some way they repel men.
Trasimene is the lonely shore of a marsh. One would imagine that a
place so famous would be in some way visited. One of the great sewers
of cosmopolitan travel runs close by; one would imagine that the
historic interest of the place would bring men from that railway to
the shore upon which so very nearly the Orientals destroyed us. There
is no such publicity. Sitting at evening near those reeds, where the
great fight was fought, one has a feeling, rare in Italy, commoner in
the north, of complete isolation. There is nothing but water and the
evening sky, and it is so mournful that one might imagine it a place to
which things doomed would come to die.
Roncesvalles, which means so little in the military history of Europe
and so much in her literature, is a profound gorge, cleft right into
the earth 3000 feet, and clothed with such mighty beech woods that
for these alone, apart from its history, one might imagine it to be
perpetually visited. It is not visited. No house is near it, save the
huddled huts round the gloomy place of pilgrimage upon the farther
side of the pass. A silence more profound, a sense of recession more
complete, is not to be discovered upon any of the great roads of
Europe--for one of the great roads goes by the place where Roland died,
but very few travel along it.
Toulouse is popular and noisy; surrounded by so many small market
gardens and so busy and humming a Southern life (detestable to quiet
men!) that you might think no site near it was touched with loneliness.
But there is such a site. It is the crest beyond the city where
Wellington’s victory was won. More curious still, Waterloo, at the very
gates of Brussels, within a stone’s throw, one may say, of building
sites for suburbs, is the only lonely place in its neighbourhood. That
valley, or rather that little dip which is so great in military history
and yet which did so little to change the general movement of the
world, is the one deserted set of fields that you can find for a long
way round. And the soil of Belgium, a gridiron of railways, stuffed
with industry, a place where one short walk takes you from a town to
a town anywhere throughout the little State, is still remarkable for
the way in which its battlefields seem to fend off the presence of
man. The plateau of Fleurus, the marshy banks of Jemappes, the roll of
Neerwinden, all illustrate what I mean.
If one considers in what two places since Christendom was Christendom
most was done to save Christendom from destruction, one will fix upon
the Catalaunian Fields and upon that low tableland in the fork of the
two rivers between Poitiers and Tours. In the first Attila was broken,
Asia from the East; in the second the Mohammedan, Asia from the South.
The Catalaunian Fields have a bleakness amazing to the traveller.
Nothing perhaps so near so much wealth is so utterly alone. Great folds
of empty land that will grow little, that only lately were planted
with stunted pine trees that they might at least grow something,
weary the eye. One dead straight road, Roman in origin, Gallic in its
continuance, drives right across the waste. It is there that the Huns
were broken. It is from that point that their sullen retreat eastward
was permitted, as was permitted in 1792 the retreat eastward of the
Royal Armies from their check in that same plain at Valmy; and Valmy
also is intensely lonely, a bare ridge despoiled to-day even of its
mill, and the little chapel raised to the soul of Kellerman hides
itself away so that you do not see it until you are close upon the
place.
Poitiers has the same loneliness. The Mohammedan had ridden up from the
Pyrenees, ricochetted from the walls of Toulouse, but poured on like
a flood into the centre of Gaul. Charles the Hammer broke him in the
fields beyond Vouneuil. The district is populous and the Valley of the
Clain is full of pastures and among the tenderest of European valleys,
but as you drift down stream and approach this place the plateau upon
the right above you grows bare, and it was there, so far as modern
scholarship can be certain, that the last effort of the Arabs was
forced back.
That other battle of Poitiers among the vineyards, the Black Prince’s
battle, one would imagine, could not seem lonely, for it was fought in
the midst of tilled land full of vineyards and right above the great
high road which leads south-east from the town. But lonely it is, and
if you will go up the little gully where the head of the French column
advanced against the English archers upon the high land above, you will
not find a man to tell you the memories of the place.