grocer's boy, who went about masked with a mouth open a little
fatuously, an insignificant face, goggles, and a hand-truck, himself of
no account in a flat and unremarkable place aside from the press of
life's affairs, had discovered there were hills to which he could lift
his eyes after those humiliating interviews with Mr. Monk concerning
the wrong delivery of cheese and bacon. I was aware of the means by
which news of the outer world got to Clayton. It came in a popular
halfpenny paper, and that outer world must therefore have seemed to
Clayton to be all aeroplanes, musical-comedy girls, dog shows, and Mr.
Lloyd George. The grocer's boy got his tongue free at last, and talked.
He was halt and obscure, but I thought I saw a mind beating against the
elms and stones of the village, and repelled by the concrete, asphalt,
and lodging-houses of the seaside place. But I am impressionable, too.
It may have been my fancy. What the boy finished with was: "There's no
chance here. You never hear of anything."
You never heard of anything. That countryside really looked remote
enough from the centre of affairs, from the place where men,
undistracted by the news and pictures of the halfpenny illustrated
Press, were getting work done. Clayton was deaf and dumb. Some miles
away the smoke of the London train was streaming across the dim fields
like a comet. We both stood watching that comet going sure and bright
to its destiny, leaving Clayton behind, regardless of us, and as though
all we there were nothing worth. We were outside the pull of life's
spinning hub. Beyond and remote from us things would be happening; but
no voice or pulse of life could vibrate us, merged as we were within
the inelastic silence of Clayton.
We walked back to the village, and the boy said good-night, passing
through a white gate to a cottage unseen at that late hour of the
evening. Near midnight I left my stuffed birds, with their fixed and
upturned gaze, and went into the open, where above the shapeless lumps
of massive dark of Clayton the stars were detaching their arrows, for
the night was clear and frosty at last. Sirius, pulsing and
resplendent, seemed nearer and more vital than anything in the village.
I walked as far as the white gate of the cottage where I had left Mr.
Monk's boy; and there he was again, to my surprise, at that hour. He
came forward. At first he appeared to be agitated; but as he talked
brokenly I saw he was exalted. He was no grocer's boy then. The lad
half dragged me, finding I did not understand him, towards his home. We
went round to the back of the sleeping cottage, and found a little
shed. On a bench in that shed a candle was burning in a ginger-beer
bottle. By the candle was a structure meaningless to me, having nothing
of which I could make a guess. It was fragmentary and idle, the
building which a child makes of household utensils, naming it anything
to its fancy. There were old jam-pots, brass door-knobs, squares of
india-rubber, an electric bell, glass rods, cotton reels, and thin
wires which ran up to the roof out of sight.
"Listen!" said the grocer's boy imperatively, holding up a finger. I
remained intent and suspicious, wondering. Nothing happened. I was
turning to ask the lad why I should listen, for the shed was very
still, and then I saw the hammer of the bell lift itself, as though
alive. Some erratic and faint tinkling began. "That's my wireless,"
said the grocer's boy, his eyes extraordinarily bright. "I've only just
finished it. Who is calling us?"
III. Old Junk
Business had brought the two of us to an inn on the West Coast, and all
its windows opened on a wide harbour, hill-enclosed. Only small
coasting craft were there, mostly ketches; but we had topsail schooners
also and barquantines, those ascending and aerial rigs that would be
flamboyant but for the transverse spars of the foremast, giving one who
scans them the proper apprehension of stability and poise.
To come upon a craft rigged so, though at her moorings and with sails
furled, her slender poles upspringing from the bright plane of a
brimming harbour, is to me as rare and sensational a delight as the
rediscovery, when idling with a book, of a favourite lyric. That when
she is at anchor; but to see her, all canvas set for light summer airs,
at exactly that distance where defects and harshness in her apparel
dissolve, but not so far away but the white feathers at her throat are
plain, is to exult in the knowledge that man once reached such
greatness that he imagined and created a thing which was consonant with
the stateliness of the slow ranging of great billows, and the soaring
density of white cumulus clouds, and with the brightness and compelling
mystery of the far horizon at sundown.
Some mornings, when breakfast-time came with the top of the tide, we
could look down on the plan of a deck beneath, with its appurtenances
and junk, casks, houses, pumps, and winches, rope and spare spars,
binnacle and wheel, perhaps a boat, the regular deck seams curving and
persisting under all. An old collier ketch she might be, with a name
perhaps as romantic as the _Mary Ann_; for the owners of these little
vessels delight to honour their lady relatives.
Away in mid-stream the _Mary Ann_ would seem but a trivial affair, no
match for the immensities about her, diminished by the vistas of shores
and beaches, and the hills. But seen close under our window you
understood why her men would match her, and think it no hardihood, with
gales and the assaults of ponderous seas. Her many timbers, so well
wrought as to appear, at a distance, a delicate and frail shape, are
really heavy. Even in so small a craft as a ketch they are massive
enough to surprise you into wondering at the cunning of shipwrights,
those artists who take gross lumps of intractable timber and metal, and
compel them to subtle mouldings and soft grace, to an image which we
know means life that moves in rhythmic loveliness.
Talk of the art of book and picture making! There is an old fellow I
met in this village who will take the ruins of a small forest, take
pine boles, metal, cordage, and canvas, and without plans, but from the
ideal in his eye, build you the kind of lithe and dainty schooner that,
with the cadences of her sheer and moulding, and the soaring of her
masts, would keep you by her side all day in harbour; build you the
kind of girded, braced, and immaculate vessel, sound at every point,
tuned and sweet to a precision that in a violin would make a musician
flush with inspiration, a ship to ride, lissom and light, the uplifted
western ocean, and to resist the violence of vaulting seas and the
drive of hurricane. She will ride out of the storm afterwards, none to
applaud her, over the mobile hills travelling express, the rags of her
sails triumphant pennants in the gale, the beaten seas pouring from her
deck.
He, that modest old man, can create such a being as that; and I have
heard visitors to this village, leisured and cultured folk, whose own
creative abilities amount to no more than the arranging of some
decorative art in strata of merit, talk down to the old fellow who can
think out a vessel like that after supper, and go out after breakfast
to direct the laying of her keel--talk down to him, kindly enough, of
course, and smilingly, as a "working man."
I told you there were two of us, at this inn. We met at meals. I think
he was a commercial traveller. A tall young fellow, strongly built, a
pleasure to look at; carefully dressed, intelligent, with hard and
clear grey eyes. He had a ruddy but fastidious complexion, though he
was, I noticed, a hearty and careless eater. He was energetic and swift
in his movements, as though the world were easily read, and he could
come to quick decisions and successful executions of his desires. He
had no moments of laxity and hesitation, even after a breakfast, on a
hot morning, too, of ham and eggs drenched in coffee. He made me feel
an ineffective, delicate, and inferior being.
He would bang out to business, after breakfast and a breezy chat with
me; and I lapsed, a lazy and shameless idler, into the window, to
wonder among the models outside, the fascinating curves of ships and
boats, as satisfying and as personal to me as music I know, as the lilt
of ballads and all that minor rhythm which wheels within the enclosing
harmonies and balance of stars and suns in their orbits. Those forms of
ships and boats are as satisfying as the lines which make the strength
and swiftness of salmon and dolphins, and the ease of the flight of
birds with great pinions; and, in a new schooner which passed this
window, on her first voyage to sea--a tall and slender ship, a being so
radiant in the sun as to look an evanescent and immaterial vision--as
inspiring and awful as the remoteness of a spiritual and lovely woman.
"I can't make out what you see in those craft," said my companion one
morning. "They're mostly ancient tubs, and at the most they only muck
about the coast. Now a P. & O. or a Cunarder! That's something to look
at." He was looking down at me, and there was a trace of contempt in
his smile.
He was right in a way. I felt rebuked and embarrassed, and could not
explain to him. These were the common objects of the Channel after all,
old and weather-broken, sea wagons from the Cowes point of view, source
of alarm and wonder to passengers on fine liners when they sight them
beating stubbornly against dirty winter weather, and hanging on to the
storm. Why should they take my interest more than battleships and
Cunarders? Yet I could potter about an ancient hooker or a tramp
steamer all day, when I wouldn't cross a quay to a great battleship. I
like the pungent smells of these old craft, just as I inhale the health
and odour of fir woods. I love their men, those genuine mariners, the
right diviners of sky, coast, and tides, who know exactly what their
craft will do in any combination of circumstances as well as you know
the pockets of your old coat; men who can handle a stiff and cranky
lump of patched timbers and antique gear as artfully as others would
the clever length of hollow steel with its powerful twin screws.
But when my slightly contemptuous companion spoke I had no answer, felt
out of date and dull, a fogey and an idle man. I had no answer
ready--none that would have satisfied this brisk young man, none that
would not have seemed remote and trivial to him.
He left me. Some other visitor had left behind Stevenson's _Ebb Tide_,
and trying to think out an excuse that would quiet the qualms I began
to feel for this idle preference of mine for old junk, I began picking
out the passages I liked. And then I came on these words of Attwater's
(though Stevenson, for certain, is speaking for himself): "Junk ...
only old junk!... Nothing so affecting as ships. The ruins of an empire
would leave me frigid, when a bit of an old rail that an old shellback
had leaned on in the middle watch would bring me up all standing."
IV. Bed-Books and Night-Lights
The rain flashed across the midnight window with a myriad feet. There
was a groan in outer darkness, the voice of all nameless dreads. The
nervous candle-flame shuddered by my bedside. The groaning rose to a
shriek, and the little flame jumped in a panic, and nearly left its
white column. Out of the corners of the room swarmed the released
shadows. Black spectres danced in ecstasy over my bed. I love fresh
air, but I cannot allow it to slay the shining and delicate body of my
little friend the candle-flame, the comrade who ventures with me into
the solitudes beyond midnight. I shut the window.
They talk of the candle-power of an electric bulb. What do they mean?
It cannot have the faintest glimmer of the real power of my candle. It
would be as right to express, in the same inverted and foolish
comparison, the worth of "those delicate sisters, the Pleiades." That
pinch of star dust, the Pleiades, exquisitely remote in deepest night,
in the profound where light all but fails, has not the power of a
sulphur match; yet, still apprehensive to the mind though tremulous on
the limit of vision, and sometimes even vanishing, it brings into
distinction those distant and difficult hints--hidden far behind all
our verified thoughts--which we rarely properly view. I should like to
know of any great arc-lamp which could do that. So the star-like candle
for me. No other light follows so intimately an author's most ghostly
suggestion. We sit, the candle and I, in the midst of the shades we are
conquering, and sometimes look up from the lucent page to contemplate
the dark hosts of the enemy with a smile before they overwhelm us; as
they will, of course. Like me, the candle is mortal; it will burn out.
* * * * *
As the bed-book itself should be a sort of night-light, to assist its
illumination, coarse lamps are useless. They would douse the book. The
light for such a book must accord with it. It must be, like the book, a
limited, personal, mellow, and companionable glow; the solitary taper
beside the only worshipper in a sanctuary. That is why nothing can
compare with the intimacy of candle-light for a bed-book. It is a
living heart, bright and warm in central night, burning for us alone,
holding the gaunt and towering shadows at bay. There the monstrous
spectres stand in our midnight room, the advance guard of the darkness
of the world, held off by our valiant little glim, but ready to flood
instantly and founder us in original gloom.
The wind moans without; ancient evils are at large and wandering in
torment. The rain shrieks across the window. For a moment, for just a
moment, the sentinel candle is shaken, and burns blue with terror. The
shadows leap out instantly. The little flame recovers, and merely looks
at its foe the darkness, and back to its own place goes the old enemy
of light and man. The candle for me, tiny, mortal, warm, and brave, a
golden lily on a silver stem!
"Almost any book does for a bed-book," a woman once said to me. I
nearly replied in a hurry that almost any woman would do for a wife;
but that is not the way to bring people to conviction of sin. Her idea
was that the bed-book is a soporific, and for that reason she even
advocated the reading of political speeches. That would be a dissolute
act. Certainly you would go to sleep; but in what a frame of mind! You
would enter into sleep with your eyes shut. It would be like dying, not
only unshriven, but in the act of guilt.
What book shall it shine upon? Think of Plato, or Dante, or Tolstoy, or
a Blue Book for such an occasion! I cannot. They will not do--they are
no good to me. I am not writing about you. I know those men I have
named are transcendent, the greater lights. But I am bound to confess
at times they bore me. Though their feet are clay and on earth, just as
ours, their stellar brows are sometimes dim in remote clouds. For my
part, they are too big for bedfellows. I cannot see myself, carrying my
feeble and restricted glim, following (in pyjamas) the statuesque
figure of the Florentine where it stalks, aloof in its garb of austere
pity, the sonorous deeps of Hades. Hades! Not for me; not after
midnight! Let those go who like it.
As for the Russian, vast and disquieting, I refuse to leave all,
including the blankets and the pillow, to follow him into the gelid
tranquillity of the upper air, where even the colours are prismatic
spicules of ice, to brood upon the erratic orbit of the poor mud-ball
below called earth. I know it is my world also; but I cannot help that.
It is too late, after a busy day, and at that hour, to begin overtime
on fashioning a new and better planet out of cosmic dust. By
breakfast-time, nothing useful would have been accomplished. We should
all be where we were the night before. The job is far too long, once
the pillow is nicely set.
For the truth is, there are times when we are too weary to remain
attentive and thankful under the improving eye, kindly but severe, of
the seers. There are times when we do not wish to be any better than we
are. We do not wish to be elevated and improved. At midnight, away with
such books! As for the literary pundits, the high priests of the Temple
of Letters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an acolyte
to swinge them a good hard one with an incense-burner, and cut and run,
for a change, to something outside the rubrics. Midnight is the time
when one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the Great
Works which every gentleman ought to have read, but which some of us
have not. For there is almost as much clotted nonsense written about
literature as there is about theology.
* * * * *
There are few books which go with midnight, solitude, and a candle. It
is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly
right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning
fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness,
anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally
clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only
the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns to drink. The
late candle throws its beams a great distance; and its rays make
transparent much that seemed massy and important. The mind at rest
beside that light, when the house is asleep, and the consequential
affairs of the urgent world have diminished to their right proportions
because we see them distantly from another and a more tranquil place in
the heavens where duty, honour, witty arguments, controversial logic on
great questions, appear such as will leave hardly a trace of fossil in
the indurated mud which presently will cover them--the mind then
certainly smiles at cleverness.
For though at that hour the body may be dog-tired, the mind is white
and lucid, like that of a man from whom a fever has abated. It is bare
of illusions. It has a sharp focus, small and star-like, as a clear and
lonely flame left burning by the altar of a shrine from which all have
gone but one. A book which approaches that light in the privacy of that
place must come, as it were, with honest and open pages.
* * * * *
I like Heine then, though. His mockery of the grave and great, in those
sentences which are as brave as pennants in a breeze, is comfortable
and sedative. One's own secret and awkward convictions, never expressed
because not lawful and because it is hard to get words to bear them
lightly, seem then to be heard aloud in the mild, easy, and confident
diction of an immortal whose voice has the blitheness of one who has
watched, amused and irreverent, the high gods in eager and secret
debate on the best way to keep the gilt and trappings on the body of
the evil they have created.
That first-rate explorer, Gulliver, is also fine in the light of the
intimate candle. Have you read lately again his Voyage to the
Houyhnhnms? Try it alone again in quiet. Swift knew all about our
contemporary troubles. He has got it all down. Why was he called a
misanthrope? Reading that last voyage of Gulliver in the select
intimacy of midnight I am forced to wonder, not at Swift's hatred of
mankind, not at his satire of his fellows, not at the strange and
terrible nature of this genius who thought that much of us, but how it
is that after such a wise and sorrowful revealing of the things we
insist on doing, and our reasons for doing them, and what happens after
we have done them, men do not change. It does seem impossible that
society could remain unaltered, after the surprise its appearance
should have caused it as it saw its face in that ruthless mirror. We
point instead to the fact that Swift lost his mind in the end. Well,
that is not a matter for surprise.
Such books, and France's _Isle of Penguins_, are not disturbing as
bed-books. They resolve one's agitated and outraged soul, relieving it
with some free expression for the accusing and questioning thoughts
engendered by the day's affairs. But they do not rest immediately to
hand in the bookshelf by the bed. They depend on the kind of day one
has had. Sterne is closer. One would rather be transported as far as
possible from all the disturbances of earth's envelope of clouds, and
_Tristram Shandy_ is sure to be found in the sun.
But best of all books for midnight are travel books. Once I was lost
every night for months with Doughty in the _Arabia Deserta_. He is a
craggy author. A long course of the ordinary facile stuff, such as one
gets in the Press every day, thinking it is English, sends one
thoughtless and headlong among the bitter herbs and stark boulders of
Doughty's burning and spacious expanse; only to get bewildered, and the
shins broken, and a great fatigue at first, in a strange land of fierce
sun, hunger, glittering spar, ancient plutonic rock, and very Adam
himself. But once you are acclimatized, and know the language--it takes
time--there is no more London after dark, till, a wanderer returned
from a forgotten land, you emerge from the interior of Arabia on the
Red Sea coast again, feeling as though you had lost touch with the
world you used to know. And if that doesn't mean good writing I know of
no other test.
Because once there was a father whose habit it was to read with his
boys nightly some chapters of the Bible--and cordially they hated that
habit of his--I have that Book too; though I fear I have it for no
reason that he, the rigid old faithful, would be pleased to hear about.
He thought of the future when he read the Bible; I read it for the
past. The familiar names, the familiar rhythm of its words, its
wonderful well-remembered stories of things long past,--like that of
Esther, one of the best in English,--the eloquent anger of the prophets
for the people then who looked as though they were alive, but were
really dead at heart, all is solace and home to me. And now I think of
it, it is our home and solace that we want in a bed-book.
V. Transfiguration
There it is, thirty miles wide between the horns of the land, a bay
opening north-west upon the Atlantic, with a small island in the midst
of the expanse, a heap of sundered granite lying upon the horizon like
a faint sunken cloud, like the floating body of a whale, like an area
of opalescent haze, like an inexplicable brightness at sea when no
island can be seen. The apparition of that island depends upon the
favour of the sun. The island is only a ghost there, sometimes
invisible, sometimes but an alluring and immaterial fragment of the
coast we see far over the sea in dreams; a vision of sanctuary, of the
place we shall never reach, a frail mirage of land then, a roseous spot
which is not set in the sea, but floats there only while the thought of
a haven of peace and secure verities is still in the mind, and while
the longing eye projects it on the horizon.
The sun sets behind the island. On a clear day, at sundown, the island
behaves so much like a lump of separated earth, a piece of the black
world we know, that I can believe it is land, something to be found on
the map, a place where I could get ashore, after toil and adventures.
At sundown a low yellow planet marks its hiding-place.
If the island in the bay is usually but a coloured thought in the mind,
a phantom and an unattainable refuge by day, and a star by night, the
real coast which stretches seaward to it, marching on either hand into
the blue, confident and tall, is hardly more material, except by the
stones of my outlook. The near rocks are of indubitable earth.
Beyond them the coloured fabric of the bay becomes diaphanous, and I
can but wonder at the permanence of such a coast in this wind, for in
it the delicate cliffs and the frail tinted fields inclined above them
seem to tremble, as though they would presently collapse and tear from
their places and stream inland as torn flimsies and gossamer.
It is the sublimation of earth. Our own shining globe floats with the
others in a sea of light. Here in the bay on a September morning, if
our world till then had been without life and voice, with this shine
that is an impalpable dust of gold, the quickened air, and the seas
moving as though joyous in the first dawn, Eros and Aurora would have
known the moment, and a child would have been born.
None but the transcendent and mounting qualities of our elements, and
the generative day which makes the surf dazzling, and draws the
passionate azure of the bugloss from hot and arid sand, and makes the
blobs of sea-jelly in the pools expand like flowers, and ripens the
clouds, nothing but the indestructible essence of life, life uplifted
and dominant, shows now in this world of the bay.