battle. For the pudding was slippery. It stood on end amid its
paste-like sauce, impatient of amateur attack, inviting more skill than
evidently he possessed. He caught my warning eye once or twice upon
him, but disregarded it. These whole-hearted people never take advice.
Smothering the toppling form with sugar, he seized a fork and aimed;
but, before striking, buried his eyes again in the paper. The shot flew
wild. The pyramid of dough went slithering round the plate as though
alive, scattering sauce upon the marble table. A second shot, delivered
with impatience, took off the top and side. He speared the broken
piece--still without looking up to direct it properly--gathered a little
sauce and sugar on the way; then, flushed with success, the face turned
sideways towards the paper, rushed recklessly for his mouth--and bit an
empty fork. The load had slipped aside _en route_; or, rather, the
paper, holding the best position in the field, had taken it prisoner.
For it fell with a soft and sticky thud into the column nearest to his
waistcoat. This time he _spooned_ it up, and for a little time after
that he had success. The paper and the pudding ran neck and neck along
the home-stretch. He read with absorbing interest; he ate without waste
of attention. I watched him with amazement. This performance of a
divided personality must be given somewhere every day at the luncheon
hour. The mood of the afternoon hung probably upon its accomplishment
without disaster. The pudding had dwindled to its last titbit without
attempting further _ausflüge_, and his eyes had just begun to feast upon
a freshly turned page of the newspaper, when, crash, bang--there came
complete discomfiture.
Drunk with success, he made a violent misdirected shot. He had waited
long for that titbit, had nursed it carefully, keeping a little pool of
sauce and sugar especially for it, when this careless aim sent it flying
off the plate several inches into the middle of the table. The woman
with the milk and the banana gave a little scream--of indignation. He
turned abruptly, noticing her presence for the first time. He realised
that he had edged her almost off the couch. He also realised, with the
other eye, that the bit of pudding lay beyond redemption or recapture.
Several people were watching him. He could not possibly, without total
loss of dignity, restore it to an edible condition. He shunted down the
seat with the sideways movement of a penguin, quietly replaced the
errant morsel on his plate, called for his bill, then waited resignedly
with a sigh, a defeated man.
Our eyes met in that moment full and square across the room. “I told you
so,” mine said; “you were too reckless with it.” But in his own there
shone a look of misery and regret I shall not easily forget. For a
single instant his face vanished behind the crumpled but victorious
paper, to emerge, scarlet, a moment later with the strip of seaweed
drawn out of its normal bed into an unaccustomed route towards one
tilted eyebrow. In his distress the man had passed a hand
absent-mindedly across his forehead. The woman, putting on her
spectacles, eyed with relief his preparations for departure. He went.
But he took the paper with him.
And through the window I caught my final glimpse of him as he climbed
outside a passing omnibus. He was small and rotund. His eyes shone in a
flushed and disappointed face. His coat-tails spread sideways in the
wind. Like an irate and very swollen sparrow he looked, defeated in some
wretched gutter combat, yet eager for more, and certain to return to the
arena as long as life should last--about the luncheon hour.
XXVI
WIND
It is a curious reflection, though of course an obvious one, that wind
in itself is--silent; and that only from the friction against objects
set in its path comes the multiform music instantly associated with its
name. The fact, too, that so potent a force should be both silent and
invisible readily explains its common use as a simile, and a beautiful
one, for Spirit. Like flame, that other exquisite simile of spirit, how
clean it licks, how mysteriously it moves, how swiftly it penetrates!
And so subtly linked are they that the one almost seems to produce the
other--the swift hot winds that beat about a conflagration; the tongues
of fire that follow a fanning draught--“the wind that blew the stars to
flame!” True inspiration seems certainly born of this marriage of wind
and fire. How singular--have you ever thought?--would be the impressions
of a man to whom the motion of air, as wind, was unknown, when first he
witnessed the phenomenon of a twenty-knot breeze. Imagine a people that
knew not wind--how they would tremble to see the tree-tops bend; to
hear the roar, the whispers, the sweet singing of all Nature about them
for the first time; to know the sounds and movements of the myriad
objects that but for wind would be silent and motionless from one year’s
end to another! To me, it has always seemed that such a revelation might
be far more wonderful than the first torrent of light that beats upon
the eyes of a man who has been blind.
And so one comes to a further suggestive reflection: that objects all
possess their own particular sound or voice that the winds love to set
free; their essential note--that specific set of vibrations lying buried
in their form--of which, as some curious doctrines of the old magic
assert, their forms, indeed, are the visible expression. In this
region--pondering the relation between sound and shape--the imagination
may wander till it grows dizzy, for it leads very soon to the still more
wonderful world where sound and colour spin their puzzling web, and the
spiritual phenomena of music cry for further explanation. But, for the
moment, let only the sound of wind be in our ears; for in wind, I think,
there is a sweetness and a variety of music that no instruments invented
by men have yet succeeded in approaching so far as sheer thrill and
beauty are concerned.
Each lover of Nature knows, of course, the special voice of wind that
most appeals to him--the sighing of pines, the shouting of oaks, the
murmur of grasses, the whirring over a bare hillside, or the whistling
about the corners of the streets--the variety is endless; and there can
be no great interest in obtruding one’s own predilection. Only, to know
this music thoroughly, to catch all the overtones and undertones that
make it so wonderful, and to absorb its essential thrill and power, you
must listen, not for minutes, but for hours. If you want to learn the
secrets of the things themselves, betrayed in the varying response they
give back to the winds that sweep or caress them, lie leisurely for
hours at a time and--listen.
How, from the high desolation of mountain peaks it blows out--terror,
yet from the sea of bearded grain calls with soft whispering sounds such
as children use for their tales of mystery; from old buildings--the
melancholy of all dead human passion, yet from the rigging of ships the
abandon of wild and passionate adventure: wind, clapping its mighty
hands among the flapping sails, or running with weary little feet among
the ruined towers of broken habitations; sighing with long, gentle music
over English lawns, or rushing, full of dreams, across vast prairies
over-seas; kissing a garden into music, or blundering blind-eyed through
dark London squares; racing with thoughts of ice down precipices and
dropping, as through spaces of sleep, into little corners of oblivion
in waste lands of loneliness and desolation, or sighing with almost
human melody through the keyhole and down the farmhouse chimney.
From the curtained softness of the summer sky these viewless winds sift
silently into the heart, to wake yearnings infinite. From some high
attic window, perhaps, where you stand and watch, listen to that wind of
sighs that rises, almost articulate with the pains and sorrows, the
half-caught joys, too, from that crowded human world beneath the sea of
roofs and tiles. Winds of desire, winds of hope, winds of fear and love.
Ah! winds of all the spirit’s life and moods ... and, finally, the wind
of Death! And wind down a wet and deserted London street, shouting its
whistling song, its song of the triumphant desolation that has cleared
the way for it of human obstruction--how it sings the music of
magnificent poverty, of heavy luxury, and then of the loneliness bred by
both! And you see some solitary figure battling forwards, and hear that
curious whistling it makes over the dripping umbrella.... Ah! how _that_
wind summons pictures of courage in isolation, and of singing in a
wilderness! “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the
sound thereof, yet canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth”
... for wind is, indeed, of the nature of spirit, and its music, crowded
with suggestion, as sometimes, too, with memory and association, is, in
the true sense, magical.
“Where is thy soul? Thou liest i’ the wind and rain,” says the poetess
to the “Beloved Dead”; and in another passage the sound of wind brings
back for her the phantom face of the departed: “But who shall drive a
mournful face from the sad winds about my door?” Shelley, more than any
other, perhaps, loved wind and wind-voices, and has the most marvellous
and subtle descriptions of it in his work. Though he so often speaks of
the “viewless wind,” one cannot help thinking that in his imagination
lay some mental picture of wind--in the terms of sight. He _saw_ the
wind. For him it had colour as well as shape. He saw bright
sylphs--spirits of air--which “star the winds with points of coloured
light, as they rain through them,” and “wind-enchanted shapes of
wandering mist” that for his inner vision were “snow-white and swift as
wind nursed among lilies near a brimming stream.” And, alone among poets
so far as I know, he had that delightful conception of solid, smooth
surfaces of wind upon which it is possible to run and dance and sleep.
His verse is alive with spirits “trampling the wind”; “trampling the
slant winds on high with golden-sandalled feet”; or climbing the hills
of wind that run up into the highest peaks of heaven. The “Witch of
Atlas” not only rode “singing through the shoreless air,” but also “ran
upon the platforms of the wind, and laughed to hear the fireballs roar
behind.” And it is the Chorus in _Prometheus Unbound_ that so
exquisitely “weaves the dance on the floor of the breeze.”
But for less gifted mortals there are certain effects of wind that seem
to me to approach uncommonly close to actual sight, or at least to a
point where one may imagine what wind _ought_ to look like. Watch the
gusts of a northwest wind as they fall in rapid succession upon a
standing field of high barley, beating the surface into long curved
shadows that bring to mind Shelley’s “kindling within the strings of the
waved air, Æolian modulations.” One can see the velvet touch of those
soft, vast paws, and the immense stretch of the invisible footsteps that
press the long stalks down and as suddenly sweep away and set them free
again. And with the changing angle of the myriad yellow heads the colour
also changes, till gradually there swims upon the mind the impression of
some huge and shadowy image that flies above the field--some personal
deity of wind, some djin of air. One almost sees the spirit of the
wind....
It is fascinating, too, to stand opposite a slope of wooded mountains,
near enough to distinguish the individual swing of each separate tree,
yet far enough to note how the forest as a whole blows all one way--the
way of the wind. Also--to hear the chord of sound as a whole, yet mark
the different notes that pour out of the various trees composing it. In
some such way--one wonders, perhaps!--the Spirit of God moves over the
surface of men’s minds, each swinging apparently its own individual way,
yet when seen in proper perspective, all moving the one way--_to Him_.
And the voices of all these separate little stray winds--who shall
describe them? Creep with me now out of the house among these Jura
vineyards, and come up into the pine forests that encircle the village.
Put your ear against that bosom of the soft dark woods where the wind is
born--and listen! Find the words if you can----!
XXVII
PINES
All trees, doubtless, appeal in some measure to the sense of poetry,
even in those who are not strictly speaking lovers of Nature; but the
pine, for many, seems to have a message more vivid, more vital than the
rest: as though it possessed some occult quality that speaks not merely
to the imagination, or to the general love of Nature _per se_, but
directly to the soul. The oak for strength, the ash for mystery, the
birch for her feminine grace and so forth; but the pine, like a sharp
sword, pierces straight through to that inner sense of beauty which
accepts or rejects beyond all question of analysis. The personality of
this “common” tree touches the same sense of wonder that is stirred by
the presence of a human personality, strong beyond ordinary; and worship
is ever subtly linked with wonder.
The analogy is interesting. The pine plants its roots where more showy
trees faint and die; straight, strong, and sweet to the winds, it
flourishes where only gorse, heather, and toughly obstinate things can
live. Out of the rock, where there seems not earth enough to feed a
violet, it lifts its sombre head undaunted; scorched by the sun, torn by
the blast, peering into dreadful abysses, yet utterly fearless, and
yielding so little that the elements must pluck it up by the roots
before they can destroy it. Only lightning can break it. At a height
above the sea that means death to other trees, it climbs singing,
“rock-rooted, stretched athwart the vacancy”; and even when the main
army halts, stragglers are always to be seen, leading forlorn hopes into
the heart of desolation beyond. And if, amid the stress of conditions,
it cannot look well, it is content to look ill, showing a dwarfed and
stunted figure to the skies. Only then, ye elemental powers! what
strength in the gnarled roots, what iron resistance in the twisted
trunk, what dour endurance in the short, thick limbs! It assumes the
attitude of the fighting animal, back to the wall.
High mountains are full of vivid pictures of this courage
against Titanic odds. For the pine tree has the courage of its
convictions--fine, simple, tenacious--as it has also that other quality
of the strong soul: the power to stand alone. “Some say there is a
precipice where _one_ vast pine is frozen to ruin o’er piles of snow and
chasms of ice ’mid Alpine mountains.” No one who has canoed on Canadian
lakes and seen those frequent rocky islets, each with its solitary pine,
can have ignored that there is something strangely significant in
the sight of that slender spire rising out of the heart of
loneliness--something that thrills, and thrills deeply, into the region
beyond words. Unsheltered, beneath wide skies, remote from its own kind,
the tree stands there, splendid in its isolation, straight as a temple
column and prepared for any shock. “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam,” of
course--but there is more than the pathos of Heine’s poem in its
unapproachable loneliness: there is the spiritual suggestion of
personality--this upright, self-sufficing tree upon a rock, buffeted by
winds and waves, asking no sympathy and dreading no possible fate. The
picture, symbolic of the strong soul, conveys the inevitable parable.
Compared with other trees, too, the pine does not change. One knows, of
course, the tips of tender green that come with May and turn a pine wood
into a sea of bewildering beauty. But, though deciduous, one is never
aware that anything is lost; its branches never thin; it puts out,
properly speaking, no buds. And the monotony of a pine forest is merely
a defect of its great quality of constancy. In summer its shade is
deeper, its recesses more cool than those of other woods; and in winter,
just when most trees are leafless and unable to fight, it bears the full
weight of the snow and meets the whole force of the destroying winds. It
stands to face disaster when others faint or run. The analogy with man
is again striking and complete. Yet its qualities are not merely
negative. More than most, it gives out--without reward, often without
recognition; for the great forests that sweeten the world with their
balsam, and their life-giving odours, stand most often in the deserted
regions of the earth, unseen, unknown. And, by their death, they become
more useful still, journeying over all the seas. In the true sense, most
ascetic of trees, accepting discipline that good may come for others,
not for themselves!
Like the vital human personality, too, what “atmosphere” it has! What it
lends of suggestiveness to the commonest landscape--a few pines
clustered on the hill; a sombre group among the green trees in the
plain! In the suburban garden even, or rearing its dark crest against
the hoardings of the street, how its picturesqueness spreads about it!
It is the gipsy among trees, and its perfume, like the wood fire, sets
the blood aflame for wandering and for the lonely places of the world.
At the sight of it one thinks, perhaps, of the stone pine “into which
the forest has whispered its gravest and sweetest thought,” and at the
same instant is caught away to that other revelation where it stands by
the sea. For, by the shore of southern seas, it betrays a scarcely
suspected touch of melancholy, gentle and pathetic in its essence,
feminine almost, that makes the heart yearn for lovely and impossible
things. One sees it there, rooted among golden sands, and gazing across
a waste of purple sea, the wash of whose waves is hardly to be
distinguished from the wash of wind through its own branches....
The mystery of the pines, too, seems to hold a peculiar quality
unapproached elsewhere in Nature: it subdues without terrifying,
inspires awe without distress, and is more human than the mystery which
belongs to mountains, sea, or desert. The fairies come out from the pine
woods; for no other woods conceal so gently, yet hold within their
velvety recesses such possibilities of revelation. To meet them
unexpectedly is to experience a thrill of subtle suggestion. Among tamer
trees, suddenly to come upon these black, vigorous things, contemptuous
of soil, independent of sympathy, thriving where others droop or die, is
to know a leap of the imagination, an increase of vitality, as when,
among a crowd of common souls, one finds a man--strong, radiating
confidence and hope. Their very darkness stimulates. One cannot conceive
such trees stooping to any kind of show. “Lowland trees,” says the
author of _Modern Painters_, may “show themselves gay with blossoms and
glad with pretty charities of fruitfulness,” but the pines “have harder
work to do for man and must do it in close-set troops.” While other
trees “may turn their paleness to the sky if but a rush of rain passes
them by, the pines must live carelessly amidst the wrath of clouds,” and
“only wave their branches to and fro when a storm pleads with them, as
men toss their arms in a dream.... You cannot reach them, cannot cry to
them; these trees never heard human voice,” he says, speaking of their
inaccessible multitudes among the precipices; “they are far above all
sound but of the winds. No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs. All
comfortless they stand, between the two eternities of Vacancy and the
Rock; yet with such iron will that the rock itself looks bent and
shattered beside them--fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their
dark energy of delicate life, and monotony of enchanted
pride--unnumbered, unconquerable.”
And there is no sound in Nature quite so wonderful as that faint
spiritual _singing_ of pine trees, that gentle whirring of a forest when
soft airs are moving--that _säuseln_, _susurrement_, whispering. Midway
in the wood, of course, a pine forest shouting in a free wind is simply
the sea shouting on a sandy shore; close the eyes, and it is impossible
to tell the difference; it is tumbling surf, mellowed by distance,
tossing, instead of spray, the flying odours of their needles’
frankincense. But when only stray puffs come a-wandering, and other
trees are silent, listen at the skirts of a pine grove, and hear those
ghosts of sound that fall from nowhere, that thin away to a mere ghost
of sighing, and then come running back to you over the motionless
crests. For pines can answer the wind apparently without moving. No
other sound can faint as this does--or sing alone; among the stragglers
at the edge of the wood you may hear distinct _solos_. Isolated pines
respond to a wind you cannot feel; and a tree at your side will sigh and
murmur, while another six feet away keeps silent. Almost as though the
wind can consciously pick and choose when and where it shall shake “the
clinging music from their boughs,” so that “low, sweet sounds, like the
farewell of ghosts,” are heard.
Wherever they are found, whether they “fledge the wild ridgéd mountain
steep by steep,” or gather in greater concourse like “fallen flakes and
fragments of the night, stayed in their solemn squares,” these trees,
for some imaginations at least, seem charged with a potent symbolism.
And, from the particular, they sweep the mind across continents to the
general. Their shadows rest upon a nation, as Ruskin puts it, and absorb
and mould the life of a race. “The Northern people, century after
century, lived under one or another of the two great powers of the Pine
and the Sea, both infinite.... Whatever elements of imagination, or of
warrior strength, or of domestic justice, were brought down by the
Norwegian and the Goth against the dissoluteness or degradation of the
South of Europe, were taught them under the green roofs and wild
penetralia of the pine.”
XXVIII
THE WINTER ALPS
With an audacity of outline denied to them in the softer seasons, the
Alps rear themselves aloft in Winter more grandly self-revealed than at
any other time--still with their brave and ancient pretence of being
unconquerable. The black and white become them best; and they know it:
the savage, iron black that seems pitiless, and that shining, silvery
white that dazzles so piercingly. They are really not summer things at
all, but creatures of the winter--the short, brilliant day of icy
keenness, and the long night of tempest, wind, and drifting snows. Then,
at least, clothed so simply in their robes of jet and ermine, they stand
in something of their old true majesty, solemn, forbidding, terrible.
Summer, as it were, over-dresses them, with its skirts of emerald-bright
meadows and fringe of purple forests, and all its flying scarves of
painted air and mist. The colours are so brilliant, the skies so soft,
the flowers climb so high. Then winter comes, undressing them slowly,
from the head and shoulders downwards, till they emerge, austere in
black and white, naked and unashamed beneath the skies.
The associations of summer, of course, help very largely to emphasise
the contrast. Those stubborn peaks that lie in January beneath forty
feet of packed and driven snow, on many a morning in July and August
carried twenty tourists prattling to one another of the sunrise, sucking
thermos flasks, giggling of the hotel dances to come, not a few having
been bodily dragged up, probably, by guides and porters overburdened
with the latest appliances for comfort and ease. And the mere thought of
them all somehow makes the Alps--dwindle a little. But in winter they
become free again, and hold uninterrupted converse with the winds and
stars. Their greatest characteristic becomes manifest--their _silence_.
For the silence of the Winter Alps is genuinely overwhelming. One feels
that the whole world of strife, clamour and bustle, and with it all the
clash of vulgar ambitions among men, has fallen away into some void
whence resurrection is impossible. Stand upon one of the upper slopes in
mid-winter and listen: all sound whatsoever has fled away into the
remotest comers of the universe. It seems as though such a thing had
never existed even, the silence is so enormous, yet at the same time
more stimulating than any possible music, more suggestive than the
sweetest instrument ever heard. It encompasses the sky and the earth
like an immense vacuum.