our thoughts are much affected both consciously and unconsciously
by the thoughts of others. I believe thought takes place in a
spiritual medium and that there is much interlacing and
transference of thought. I have never tried any definite
experiments in it, but I have had frequent evidence of my thoughts
being affected by the thoughts of my friends. It seems to me that
this may be a case of some open channel of communication, as if two
wires had become in some way entangled. The whole method of thought
is so obscure that it is hard to say under what conditions this
takes place. But I allow myself the happiness of believing that the
place and the people of whom I have been so often aware are real
and tangible existences, and that impressions of things unseen and
unrecognised by me have passed into my brain, so that some secret
fellowship has been established. It would be a great joy to me if
this could be definitely established; and I am not without hopes
that this piece of writing may by some happy chance be the bearer
of definite tidings to two people whom unseen I love, and whose
thought may have been bent aimlessly perhaps and indistinctly upon
mine, but never without some touch of kinship and goodwill.
XI
THAT OTHER ONE
I am going to try, in these few pages, to draw water out of a deep
well--the well of which William Morris wrote as the "Well at the
World's End." I shall try to describe a very strange and secret
experience, which visits me rarely and at unequal intervals;
sometimes for weeks together not at all, sometimes several times in
a day. When it happens it is not strange at all, nor wonderful; the
only wonder about it is that it does not happen more often, because
it seems at the moment to be the one true thing in a world of vain
shadows; everything else falls away, becomes accidental and remote,
like the lights, let me say, of some unknown town, which one sees
as one travels by night and as one twitches aside the curtain from
the window of a railway-carriage, in a sudden interval between two
profound slumbers. The train has relaxed its speed; one looks out;
the red and green signal lamps hang high in the air; and one glides
past a sleeping town, the lamps burning quietly in deserted
streets; there are house-fronts below, in a long thoroughfare
suddenly visible from end to end; above, there are indeterminate
shadows, the glimmering faces of high towers; it is all ghost-like
and mysterious; one only knows that men live and work there; and
then the tides of slumber flow in upon the brain, and one dives
thirstily to the depths of sleep.
Before I say more about it, I will just relate my last taste of the
mood. I was walking alone in the autumn landscape; bare fields
about me; the trees of a village to my right touched sharply with
gold and russet red; some white-gabled cottages clustered
together, and there was a tower among the trees; it was near
sunset, and the sun seemed dragging behind him to the west long
wisps of purple and rusty clouds touched with fire; below me to the
left a stream passing slowly among rushes and willow-beds, all
beautiful and silent and remote. I had an anxious matter in my
mind, a thing that required, so it seemed to me, careful
deliberation to steer a right course among many motives and
contingencies. I had gone out alone to think it over. I weighed
this against that, and it seemed to me that I was headed off by
some obstacle whichever way I turned. Whatever I desired to do
appeared to be disadvantageous and even hurtful. "Yes," I said to
myself, "this is one of those cases where whatever I do, I shall
wish I had done differently! I see no way out." It was then that a
deeper voice still seemed to speak in me, the voice of something
strong and quiet and even indolent, which seemed half-amused,
half-vexed, by my perturbation. It said, "When you have done
reasoning and pondering, I will decide." Then I thought that a sort
of vague, half-spoken, half-dumb dialogue followed.
"What are you?" I said. "What right have you to interfere?"
The other voice did not trouble to answer; it only seemed to laugh
a lazy laugh.
"I am trying to think this all out," I said, half-ashamed, half-
vexed. "You may help me if you will; I am perplexed--I see no way
out of it!"
"Oh, you may think as much as you like," said the other voice. "I
am in no hurry, I can wait."
"But I AM in a hurry," I said, "and I cannot wait. This has got to
be settled somehow, and without delay."
"I shall decide when the time comes," said the voice to me.
"Yes, but you do not understand," I said, feeling partly irritated
and partly helpless. "There is this and that, there is so-and-so to
be considered, there is the effect on these other persons to be
weighed; there is my own position too--I must think of my health--
there are a dozen things to be taken into account."
"I know," said the voice; "I do not mind your balancing all these
things if you wish. I shall take no heed of that! I repeat that,
when you have finished thinking it out, I shall decide."
"Then you know what you mean to do?" said I, a little angered.
"No, I do not know just yet," said the voice; "but I shall know
when the time comes; there will be no doubt at all."
"Then I suppose I shall have to do what you decide?" I said, angry
but impressed.
"Yes, you will do what I decide," said the voice; "you know that
perfectly well."
"Then what is the use of my taking all this trouble?" I said.
"Oh, you may just as well look into it," said the voice; "that is
your part! You are only my servant, after all. You have got to work
the figures and the details out, and then I shall settle. Of course
you must do your part--it is not all wasted. What is wasted is your
fretting and fussing!"
"I am anxious," I said. "I cannot help being anxious!"
"That is a pity!" said the voice. "It hurts you and it hurts me
too, in a way. You disturb me, you know; but I cannot interfere
with you; I must wait."
"But are you sure you will do right?" I said.
"I shall do what must be done," said the voice. "If you mean, shall
I regret my choice, that is possible; at least you may regret it.
But it will not have been a mistake."
I was puzzled at this, and for a time the voice was silent, so that
I had leisure to look about me. I had walked some way while the
dialogue went on, and I was now by the stream, which ran full and
cold into a pool beside the bridge, a pool like a clouded jewel.
How beautiful it was! . . . The old thoughts began again, the old
perplexities. "If he says THAT," I said to myself, thinking of an
opponent of my plan, "then I must be prepared with an answer--it
is a weak point in my case; perhaps it would be better to write;
one says what one thinks; not what one means to say. . . ."
"Still at work?" said the voice. "You are having a very
uncomfortable time over there. I am sorry for that! Yet I cannot
think why you do not understand!"
"What ARE you?" I said impatiently.
There was no answer to that.
"You seem very strong and patient!" I said at last. "I think I
rather like you, and I am sure that I trust you; but you irritate
me, and you will not explain. Cannot you help me a little? You seem
to me to be out of sight--the other side of a wall. Cannot you
break it down or look over?"
"You would not like that," said the voice; "it would be
inconvenient, even painful; it would upset your plans very much.
Tell me--you like life, do you not?"
"Yes," I said, "I like life--at least I am very much interested in
it. I do not feel sure if I like it; I think you know that better
than I do. Tell me, do I like it?"
"Yes," said the voice; "at least I do. You have guessed right for
once; it matters more what I like than what you like. You see, I
believe in God, for one thing."
"So do I," I said eagerly. "I have reached that point! I am sure He
is there. It is largely a question of argument, and I have really
no doubt, no doubt at all. There are difficulties of course--
difficulties about personality and intention; and then there is the
origin of evil--I have thought much about that, and I have arrived
at a solution; it is this. I can explain it best by an analogy. . . ."
There came a laugh from the other side of the wall, not a scornful
laugh or an idle laugh, but a laugh kind and compassionate, like a
father with a child on his knee; and the voice said, "I have seen
Him--I see Him! He is here all about us, and He is yonder. He is
not coming to meet us, as you think. . . . Dear me, how young you
must be. . . . I had forgotten."
This struck me dumb for an instant; then I said, "You frighten me!
Who are you, what are you, . . . WHERE are you?"
And then the voice said, in a tone of the deepest and sweetest
love, as if surprised and a little pained, "My child!"
And then I heard it no more; and I went back to my cares and
anxieties. But it was as the voice had said, and when the time came
to decide, I had no doubt at all what to do.
Now I have told all this in the nearest and simplest words that I
can find. I have had to use similitudes of voices and laughter and
partition-walls, because one can only use the language which one
knows. But it is all quite true and real, more real than a hundred
talks which one holds with men and women whose face and dress one
sees in rooms and streets, and with whom one bandies words about
things for which one does not care. There was indeed some one
present with me, whom I knew perfectly well though I could not
discern him, whom I had known all my life, who had gone about with
me and shared all my experiences, in so far as he chose. But before
I go on to speak further, I will tell one more experience, which
came at a time when I was very unhappy, longing to escape from
life, looking forward mournfully to death.
It had been under similar circumstances--a dreadful argument
proceeding in my mind as to what I could do to get back to
happiness again, whom to consult, where to go, whether to give up
my work, whether to add to it, what diet to use, how to get sleep
which would not visit me.
"Can't you help me?" I said over and over again to the other
person. At last the answer came, very faint and far away.
"I am sick," said the voice, "and I cannot come forth!"
That frightened me exceedingly, because I felt alone and weak. So I
said, "Is it my fault? Is it anything that I have done?"
"I have had a blow," said the other voice. "You dealt it me--but it
is not your fault--you did not know."
"What can I do?" I said.
"Ah, nothing," said the voice. "You must not disturb me! I am
trying to recover, and I shall recover. Go on with your play, if
you can, and do not heed me."
"My play!" I said scornfully. "Do you not know I am miserable?"
The voice gave a sigh. "You hurt me," it said. "I am weak and
faint; but you can help me; be as brave as you can. Try not to
think or grieve. I shall be able to help you again soon, but not
now. . . . Ah, leave me to myself," it added. "I must sleep, a long
sleep; it is your turn to help!"
And then I heard no more; till a day long after, when the voice
came to me on a bright morning by the sea, with the clear waves
breaking and hissing on the shingle; the voice came blithe and
strong, "I am well again; you have done your part, dear one! Give
me your burden, and I will carry it; it is your time of joy!"
And then for a long time after that I did not hear the voice, and I
was full of delight, hour by hour, grudging even the time I must
spend in sleep, because it kept me from the life I loved.
These then are some of the talks we have held together, that Other
One and I. But I must say this, that he will not always come for
being called. I sometimes call to him and get no answer; sometimes
he cries out beside me suddenly in the air. He seems to have a life
of his own, quite distinct from mine. Sometimes when I am fretted
and vexed, he is quietly joyful and elate, and then my troubles die
away, like the footsteps of the wind upon water; and sometimes when
I would be happy and contented, he is heavy and displeased, and
takes no heed of me; and then I too fall into sorrow and gloom. He
is much the stronger, and it matters far more to me what he feels
than what I feel. I do not know how he is occupied--very little, I
think, and what is strangest of all, he changes somewhat; very
slowly and imperceptibly; but he has changed more than I have in
the course of my life. I do not change at all, I think. I can say
better what I think, I am more accomplished and skilful; but the
thought and motive is unaltered from what it was when I was a
child. But he is different in some ways. I have only gone on
perceiving and remembering, and sometimes forgetting. But he does
not forget; and here I feel that I have helped him a little, as a
servant can help his master to remember the little things he has to
do.
I think that many people must have similar experiences to this.
Tennyson had, when he wrote "The Two Voices," and I have seen hints
of the same thing in a dozen books. The strange thing is that it
does not help one more to be strong and brave, because I know this,
if I know anything, that when the anxious and careful part of me
lies down at last to rest, I shall slip past the wall which now
divides us, and be clasped close in the arms of that Other One;
nay, it will be more than that! I shall be merged with him, as the
quivering water-drop is merged with the fountain; that will be a
blessed peace; and I shall know, I think, without any questioning
or wondering, many things that are obscure to me now, under these
low-hung skies, which after all I love so well. . . .
XII
SCHOOLDAYS
1
It certainly seems, looking back to the early years, that I have
altered very little--hardly at all, in fact! The little thing,
whatever it is, that sits at the heart of the machine, the speck of
soul-stuff that is really ME, is very much the same creature,
neither old nor young; confident, imperturbable, with a strange
insouciance of its own, knowing what it has to do. I have done many
things, gathered many impressions, ransacked experience, enjoyed,
suffered; but whatever I have argued, expressed, tried to believe,
aimed at, hoped, feared, has hardly affected that central core of
life at all. And I feel as though that strange, dumb, cheerful
self--it is always cheerful, I think--had played the part all along
of a silent and not very critical spectator of all I have tried to
be. The mind, the reason, the emotion, have each of them expanded,
acquired knowledge, learned skill, but that innermost cell has lain
there, sleepless, perceptive, dreaming head on hand, watching,
seldom making a sign of either approval or disapproval.
In childhood it was more dominant than it is now, perhaps. It went
its way more securely, because, in my case at least, the mind was,
in those far-off days, strangely inactive. The whole nature was
bent upon observation. Ruskin is the only writer who has described
what was precisely my own experience, when he says that as a child
he lived almost entirely in the region of SIGHT. It was the only
part of me, the eye, that was then furiously and untiringly awake.
Taste, smell, touch, had each of them at moments a sharp
consciousness; but it was the shape, the form, the appearance of
things, that interested me, took up most of my time and energy,
occupied me unceasingly. Even now my memory ranges, with lively
precision, over the home, the garden, the heathery moorland, the
firwoods, the neighbouring houses of the scene where I lived. I can
see the winding walks, the larch shrubberies, the flower-borders,
the very grain of the brickwork; while in the house itself, the
wall papers, the furniture, the patterns of carpets and chintzes,
are all absolutely clear to the memory.
Thus I lived, from day to day and from year to year, in the moment
as it passed; but I remember no touch of speculation or curiosity
as to how or why things existed as they did. The house, the
arrangements, the servants, the meal-times, the occupations were
all simply accepted as they were, just the will of my parents
taking shape. I never thought of interrogating or altering
anything. Life came to me just so. I remember no sharp emotions, no
dominant affections. My parents seemed to me kind and powerful; but
it did not occur to me that, if I had died, they would feel any
particular grief. I was just a part of their arrangements; and my
idea of life was simply to manage so that I should be as little
interfered with as possible, and go my way, annexing such little
property as I could, and learning the appearance of the things that
were too large to be annexed.
Then my elder brother went off to school. I do not remember being
sorry, or missing his company; in fact, I rather welcomed the
additional independence it gave me. I was glad in a mild way when
he came back for the holidays; but I do not recollect the faintest
curiosity about what he did at school, or what it was all like. He
told us some stories about boys and masters; but it was all quite
remote, like a fairy-tale; and then the time gradually drew near
when I too was to go to school; but I remember neither interest or
curiosity or excitement or anxiety. I think I rather enjoyed a few
extra presents, and the packing of my school-box with a
consciousness of proprietorship. And then the day came, and I
drifted off like thistledown into the big world.
2
My father and mother took us down to school. It was a fine place
at Mortlake, called Temple Grove, near Richmond Park. Mortlake was
hardly more than an old-fashioned village then, in the country, not
joined to London as it is now by streets and rows of villas. It was
a place of big suburban mansions, with high walls everywhere,
cedars looking over, towering chestnuts, big classical gate-posts.
Temple Grove, so called from the statesman, the patron of Swift,
was a large, solid, handsome house with fine rooms, and large
grounds well timbered. Schoolrooms and dormitories had been tacked
on to the house, but all built in a solid, spacious way. It was
dignified, but bare and austere. We arrived, and went in to see the
headmaster, Mr. Waterfield, a tall, handsome, extremely alarming
man, with curled hair and beard and flashing eyes. He was a fine
gentleman, a brilliant talker, and an excellent teacher, though
unnecessarily severe. I had been used to see my father, who was
then himself headmaster of Wellington College, treated with obvious
deference; but Waterfield, who was an old family friend, met him
with a dignified sort of equality. My parents went in to luncheon
with the family. My brother and I crawled off to the school dinner;
he of course had many friends, and I was plunged, shy and
bewildered, into the middle of them. There were over a hundred boys
there. Some of them seemed to me alarmingly old and strong; but my
brother's friends were kind to me, and I remember thinking at first
that it was going to be a very pleasant sort of place. Then in the
early afternoon my parents went off; we went to the station with
them, and I said good-bye without any particular emotion. It seemed
to me a nice easy kind of life. But as my brother and I walked
away, between the high-walled gardens, back to the school, the
first shadow fell. He was strangely silent and dull, I thought; and
then he turned to me, and in an accent of tragedy which I had never
heard him use before, he said, "Thirteen weeks at this beastly
place!"
I took a high place for my age, and after due examination in the
big schoolroom, where four masters were teaching at estrades, with
little rows of lockered desks much hacked and carved, arranged
symmetrically round each, the big fireplace guarded with high iron
bars, I was led across the room, and committed to the care of a
little, pompous, stout man, with big side-whiskers, a reddish nose,
and an air half irritable, half good-natured, in a short gown, who
was holding forth to a class. It was all complete: I had my place
and my duty before me; and then gradually day by day the life
shaped itself. I had a little cubicle in a high dormitory. There
was the big, rather frowsy dining-room, where we took our meals; a
large comfortable library where we could sit and read; outside
there were two or three cricket fields, a gravelled yard for drill,
a gymnasium; and beyond that stretched what were called "the
grounds," which seemed to me then and still seem a really beautiful
place. It had all been elaborately laid out; there was a big lawn,
low-lying, where there had once been a lake, shrubberies and
winding walks, a ruinous building, with a classical portico, on the
top of a wooded mound, a kitchen garden and paddocks for cows
beyond; and on each side the walls and palings of other big
mansions, all rather grand and mysterious. And there within that
little space my life was to be spent.
The only sight we ever had of the outer world was that we went on
Sundays to an extraordinarily ugly and tasteless modern church,
where the services were hideously performed; and occasionally we
were allowed to go over to Richmond with a shilling or two of
pocket-money to shop; and sometimes there were walks, a dozen boys
with a good-natured master rambling about Richmond Park, with its
forest clumps and its wandering herds of deer, all very dim and
beautiful to me.
Very soon I settled in my own mind that it was a detestable place.
Yet I was never bullied or molested in any way. The tone of the
place was incredibly good; not one word or hint of moral evil did I
ever hear there during the whole two years I spent there, so that I
left the school as innocent as I had entered it.
But it was a place of terrors and solitude. There were rules which
one did not know, and might unawares break. I did not, I believe,
make a single real friend there. I liked a few of the boys, but was
wholly bent on guarding my inner life from everyone. The work was
always easy to me, the masters were good-natured and efficient. But
I lived entirely in dreams of the holidays--home had become a
distant heavenly place; and I recollect waking early in the summer
mornings, hearing the scream of peacocks in a neighbouring
pleasaunce, and thinking with a sickening disgust of the strict,
ordered routine of the place, no one to care about, dull work to be
done, nothing to enjoy or to be interested in. There were games,
but they were not much organised, and I seldom played them. I
wandered about in free times in the grounds, and the only times of
delight that I recollect were when one buried oneself in a book in
the library, and dived into imaginations.
The place was well managed; we were wholesomely fed; but there had
grown up a strange kind of taboo about many of the things we were
supposed to eat. I had a healthy appetite, but the tradition was
that all the food was unutterably bad, adulterated, hocussed. The
theory was that one must just eat enough to sustain life. There
was, for instance, an excellent tapioca pudding served on certain
days; but no one was allowed to eat it. The law was that it had to
be shovelled into envelopes and afterwards cast away in the
playground. I do not know if the masters saw this--it was never
adverted upon--and I did it ruefully enough. The consequence was
that one lived hungrily in the midst of plenty, and food became the
one prepossession of life.
I was a delicate boy in those days, and used often to be sent off
to the sanatorium with bad throats and other ailments. It was a
little, old-fashioned house in Mortlake, and the matron of it had
been an old servant of our own. She was the only person there whom
I regarded with real affection, and to go to the sanatorium was
like heaven. One had a comfortable room, and dear Louisa used to
embrace and kiss me stealthily, provide little treats for me, take
me out walks. I have spent many hours happily in the little walled
garden there, with its big box trees, or gazing from a window into
the street, watching the grocer over the way set out his shop-
window.