green mounds of water were flawless, with shadows of mysteries in their
clear deeps. The boat and the tide were murmuring to each other
secretly. The boat's thwarts were hot and dry in the sun. The serene
immensity of the sky, the warmth and dryness of the boat's timbers, the
deep and translucent waters, and the coast so low and indistinct that
the silent flashing of the combers there might have been on nothing
substantial, were all timeless, and could have been but a thought and a
desire; they were like a memorable morning in a Floridan cay
miraculously returned. The boat did not move; the shore approached,
revealed itself. It was something granted on a lucky day. This country
would not be on the map.
I landed on a broad margin of sand which the tide had just left. It was
filmed with water. It was a mirror in which the sky was inverted. When
a breath of air passed over that polished surface it was as though the
earth were a shining bubble which then nearly burst. To dare that
foothold might precipitate the intruder on ancient magic to cloudland
floating miles beneath the feet. But I had had the propriety to go
barefooted, and had lightened my mind before beginning the voyage. Here
I felt I was breaking into what was still only the first day, for man
had never measured this place with his countless interruptions of
darkness. I don't know whether that mirror had ever been darkened till
I put my foot in it. After the news I had heard on the quay that
morning before starting out, news just arrived from London, the dunes
were an unexpected assurance that the earth has an integrity and purity
of its own, a quality which even man cannot irreparably soil; that it
maintains a pristine health and bloom invulnerable to the best our
heroic and intelligent activities can accomplish, and could easily
survive our extinction, and even forget it once supported us.
I found an empty bottle among the dry litter and drift above the
tide-mark, sole relic, as far as could be seen there, of man. No
message was in the bottle. The black bottle itself was forlornly the
message, but it lay there unregarded by the bright immemorial genius of
that coast. Yet it settled one doubt. This was not a land which had
never known man. It had merely forgotten it had known him. He had been
there, but whatever difference he had made was of the same significance
now as the dry bladder-wrack, the mummied gull near by, and the
bleached shells. The next tide probably would hide the memento for
ever. At the time this did not seem an unhappy thought, though the
relic had been our last witness, so enduring was the tenuous brightness
of the place, the shrine of our particular star, the visible aura of
earth. We rarely see it. It is something to be reminded it is not lost;
that we cannot, whatever else we can do, put out a celestial light.
Above the steep beach a dry flat opened out, reached only by gales and
the highest of the spring tides, a wilderness of fine sand, hot and
deep, its surface studded with the opaque blue of round pebbles and
mussel shells. It looked too arid to support life, but sea-rocket with
fleshy emerald stems and lilac flowers was scattered about. Nothing
moved in the waste but an impulsive small butterfly, blue as a fragment
of sky. The silence of the desert was that of a dream, but when
listening to the quiet, a murmur which had been below hearing was
imagined. The dunes were quivering with the intensity of some latent
energy, and it might have been that one heard, or else it was the
remembrance held by that strand of a storm which had passed, or it
might have been the ardent shafts of the sun. At the landward end of
the waste, by the foot of the dunes, was an old beam of a ship, harsh
with barnacles, its bolt-holes stopped with dust. A spinous shrub grew
to one side of it. A solitary wasp, a slender creature in black and
gold, quick and emotional, had made a cabin of one of the holes in the
timber. For some reason that fragment of a barque was more eloquent of
travel, and the work of seamen gone, than any of the craft moored at
the quay I left that morning. I smoked a pipe on that timber--for all I
knew, not for the first time--and did not feel at all lonely, nor that
voyages for the discovery of fairer times were finished.
Now the dunes were close they appeared surprisingly high, and were
formed, not like hills, but like the high Alps. They had the peaks and
declivities of mountains. Their colour was of old ivory, and the long
marram grass which grew on them sparsely was as fine as green hair. The
hollowed slope before me was so pale, spacious, and immaculate that
there was an instinctive hesitation about taking it. A dark ghost began
slowly to traverse it with outspread arms, a shade so distinct on that
virgin surface that not till the gull, whose shadow it was, had gone
inland, following its shadow over the high yellow ridge, did I know
that I had not been looking at the personality. But the surface had
been darkened, and I could overcome my hesitation.
From the ridge, the country of the dunes opened inland with the
enlarged likeness of a lunar landscape surveyed in a telescope. It
merely appeared to be near. The sand-hills, with their acute outlines,
and their shadows flung rigidly from their peaks across the pallor of
their slopes, were the apparition of inviolable seclusion. They could
have been waiting upon an event secret from our knowledge, larger than
the measure of our experience; so they had still the aspect of a
strange world, not only infinitely remote, but superior with a greater
destiny. They were old, greatly older than the ancient village across
the water. Ships left the village and went by them to sea gay with the
bunting of a first voyage, with a fair wind, and on a fine morning; and
when such a ship came back long after as an old plank bearded with sea
moss, to the dunes under which it stranded the day was still the same,
vestal and innocent; for they were on a voyage of greater length and
import. They had buried many ships; but, as time moved to them, all on
the same day.
Only when resting on a knoll of one of the slopes, where the shadows of
a tuft of marram grass above my head lay as thin black wire on the
sand, were the dunes caught in part of their secret. There was no
sound. I heard the outer world from which I had come only as the
whistle of a curlew. It was far away now. To this place, the news I had
heard on the quay that morning would have sounded the same as Waterloo,
which was yesterday, or the Armada, which was the same day--wasn't
it?--or the day before, or as the whistle of a curlew. Here we were
outside time. Then I thought I heard a faint whisper, but when I looked
round nothing had altered. The shadows of the grass formed a fixed
metallic design on the sand. But I heard the whisper again, and with a
side glance caught the dune stealthily on the move.
It was alive. When you were not attentive, some of its grains would
start furtively, pour in increasing mobility fanwise, and rest
instantly when looked at. This hill was fluid, and circulated. It
preserved an outline that was fixed through the years, a known, named,
and charted locality, only to those to whom one map would serve a
lifetime. But it was really unknown. It was on its way. Like the ships
that were passing, it also was passing. It was only taking its own
time.
Secluded within the inner ranges were little valleys, where, for a
while, the dunes had ceased to travel, and were at leisure. I got into
a hollow which had a floor of hoary lichen, with bronze hummocks of
moss. In this moment of pause it had assumed a look of what we call
antiquity. The valley was not abundant with vegetation, but enamelled
and jewelled. A more concentrated, hectic, and volatile essence sent up
stalks, blades, and sprays, with that direction and restraint which
perfection needs. More than in a likelier and fecund spot, in this
valley the ichor showed the ardour and flush of its early vitality.
Even now it could shape like this, and give these dyes! Chosen by an
earth astringent and tonic, the forms were few and personal. Here you
should see to what influences our planet is still subject. The shapes
in that valley were more than coloured; they were rare jets of light,
emerald, orange, blue, and scarlet. Life burned with an original force,
a steady virtue. What is "good news"? It depends on the sort of
evidence for which we look.
Just showing in the drift on the seaward side of the valley were some
worked stones and a little brickwork. When the sandhill paused, it had
almost covered a building where man once worshipped. I could find
nobody afterwards who remembered the church, or had even heard of it.
Yet the doom of this temple, prolonged in its approach but inevitable,
to those to whom the altar once had seemed as indestructible as hope,
must on a day have struck the men who saw at last their temple's end
was near as a hint, vague but glacial, of the transience of all their
affairs.
But what were their affairs? We should have to know them before we
could regret the dry sand which buried them. The valley looked very
well as it was. It showed no sign of failure. Over one of the stones of
the forgotten altar was a casual weed which stood like a sign of
success and continuance. It was as indecipherable as the stone, but the
blue of its flowers, still and deep as rapture, surprising and
satisfying as an unexpected revelation of good, would have been better
worth reading for a knowledge of the heart from which could be drawn
the temper and intensity of that faith.
_August 1917._
XVII. Binding a Spell
You may never have addressed a meeting of the public, but you have long
cherished a vision of a figure (well known to your private mirror)
standing where it overlooks an intent and silent multitude to which it
communicates with apt and fluent words those things not seen by mortal
eyes, the dream of a world not ours.... You know what I mean. (Loud and
prolonged applause.)
"I should be glad," wrote one who is still unashamed to call himself my
friend, "if you could run down here one evening and address a meeting
on your experiences. Just conversationally, you know."
A casual sort of letter. Designedly so. But I could see through it. It
was an invitation which did not wish to scare me from accepting it. I
smiled with serene amusement at its concluding sentence.
Conversationally! Why, that would be merely talking; tongue-work;
keeping on and on after one usually, if merciful to a friend, lets him
off. I felt instantly that for once it might be even more pleasant to
entertain an audience than to be one of the crowd and bored. And it
happened that my experiences really did give me something to say, and
were exactly what an audience, in war-time, might be glad to hear. I
therefore wrote a brief note of acceptance, as one to whom this sort of
thing comes ten times a day; and thought no more about it.
No more, that is to say, till I saw the local paper announced me as a
coming event, a treat in store. I was on the list. There were those
that evening who, instead of going to a theatre, a concert, or to see
Vesta Tilley, would come to hear me. I felt then the first cold
underdraught of doubt, the chilling intimation from the bleak unknown,
where it is your own affair entirely whether you flourish or perish.
What a draught! I got up, shut the door, and looked at the day of the
month.
That was all right; yet another fortnight!
But what weakness was this? Anybody, could do it, if they knew as much
of my subject as did I. Many men would do it, without a tremor, without
shame, if they knew next to nothing about it. Look at old Brown, for
example, whose only emotions are evoked by being late for dinner, the
price of building materials, the scandalous incapacity of workmen, and
the restriction of the liberty of the subject by trade unions! He will
sit, everybody knows, while wearing plaid trousers and side-whiskers,
on the right hand of a peer, in full view of thousands, at a political
meeting, untroubled, bland, conscious of his worth, and will rise at
the word, thumbs carelessly thrust into his waistcoat pockets, begin
with a jest (the same one), and for an hour make aspirates as uncommon
as are bathrooms in his many houses.
He has nothing to say, and could not say it if he had; but he can speak
in public. You will observe the inference is obvious. One who is really
capable of constructive thought (like you and me); who has a wide range
of words to choose from even when running; who is touched, by events,
to admiration, to indignation, to alarm, to--to all that sort of thing,
he could ... the plastic audience would be in his skilful hands, there
is no doubt. (Hear, hear!)
Time passed. As Mr. A. Ward once pointed out, it is a way time has. The
night came, as at last I began to fear it would. My brief notes were in
my pocket, for I had resolutely put from me the dishonourable and
barren safety of a written lecture. In the train--how cold was the
night--I wished I had gone more fully into the matter. Slightly
shivering, I tried to recall the dry humour of those carefully prepared
opening sentences which shortly would prove to my audience that I had
their measure, and was at ease; would prove that my elevation on the
platform was not merely through four feet of deal planking, but was a
real overlooking. But those delicate sentences had broken somehow. They
were shards, and not a glitter of humour was sticking to the fragments.
I felt I would rather again approach one of those towns in France,
where it was likely you would run into the Uhlans, than go to that
lecture hall. No doubt, too, my friend had explained to them what a
clever fellow I was, in order to get some reflected glory out of it.
Then it would serve him right; there would be two of us.
The hall was nearly full. What surprises one is to find so many ladies
present. A most disquieting fact, entirely unforeseen. They sit in the
front rows and wait, evidently in a tranquil, alert, and mirthful mind,
for you to begin. I could hear their leisurely converse and occasional
subdued laughter (about what?) even where, in a sort of frozen, lucid
calm, indifferent to my fate, the mood of all Englishmen in moments of
extreme peril, I was handing my hat and coat to my friend in a room
behind the platform. All those people out there were waiting for me.
When we got on the platform the chairman told them something about me,
I don't know what, but when I looked up it was to find, like the soul
in torment, that a multitude of bodiless eyes had fixed me--eyes
intent, curious, passionless.
"I call upon--" said the chairman.
I stood up. The sound of my voice uplifted in that silence was the most
startling sound I have ever heard. Shortly after that there came the
paralysing discovery that it is a gift to be able to think while
hundreds wait patiently to see what the thought is like when it comes.
This made my brow hot. There was a boy in an Eton suit, sitting in
front with his legs wide apart, who was grinning at me through his
spectacles. How he got there I don't know. I think he was the gift of
the gods. His smile so annoyed me that I forgot myself, which saved me.
I just talked to that boy.
Once there was loud laughter. Why? It is inexplicable. I talked for
about an hour. About what? Heaven knows. The chairman kindly let me out
through a side entrance.
XVIII. A Division on the March
We passed a division on the march the other day. Though the British
occupy this country, it is not often one sees them as a multitude. When
in the trenches, you are concerned with but a handful of your fellows.
But just then an interminable river of steel helmets poured along in
regular waves.
It is something to be able to say you have seen a British army moving
down the straight leagues of a French road through its guarding avenue
of trees. My own brother may have been in that host.... Yet I never
thought of him. A torrent of sounds swamped and submerged my
thoughts--the clangour of chains, the rumbling of wheels, the deep
growling of guns; and that most ominous and subduing sound in war, the
ceaseless rhythmic tramp of armed men marching without music or song,
men who, except the menace of their measured progress, that intimation
of destiny and fate irresistible, are but a multitude of expressionless
masks that glance at you, and pass.
These men are all dressed alike; they are a tide of men. They all look
alike. Their mouths are set. They move together with the common,
irresistible, uncritical urge of migratory animals. Their eyes fix you
in a single ceaseless interrogation. About what?
There is no knowing. Don't ask me what the men are thinking in
Flanders; I don't know, and I have been with them since the beginning.
And I don't think any one else does.
But once, as this division was passing, one of those little go-carts on
perambulator wheels in which the men, holding drag-ropes, transport
their own personal belongings, upset a few books. You would have
recognized their popular covers; and the anxiety, instantly shown, to
recover those treasures, broke up the formation there for a few moments
into something human and understandable. The wind took a few escaped
leaves and blew them to me. The _Pickwick Papers_!
It was as though the inscrutable eye of the army had tipped me a wink.
I got the hint that I was, in the right sense, on the same road as
these men. My brother was certainly there. For sometimes, you know, one
has a bleak sense of doubt about that, a feeling of extreme isolation
and polar loneliness. You wonder, at times, mixed up here in the
mysterious complexities of that elemental impulse which is visible as
ceaseless clouds of fire on the Somme, whether you are the last man,
witnessing in helpless and mute horror the motiveless upheaval of earth
in final ruin.
So that, even as I write this, and glance, safe for tonight, at the
strangeness of this French house, I see everything about me with
astonishment, and feel I may wake at any moment to the familiar things
of that home in which I fell asleep to dream of calamity.
Moving about this dubious and unauthentic scene of war, an atom of a
fortuitous host, each one of the host glancing at me with inscrutable
eyes which seem to show in passing--if they show anything at all--a
faint hint of reproach, the interruption of war by the page of a
familiar book, and the sudden anxious effort by one of the uniformed
phantoms to recover words which you remember well enough were once
worth hearing, was like momentary recovery. An unexpected revelation.
For a moment I saw the same old enduring earth under us. All was well.
I often doubt here the existence of a man who is talking to me. He
seems altogether incredible. He might be talking across the Styx; and I
am not sure at the moment on which side of that river I stand. Is he on
the right side or am I? Which of us has got the place where a daily sun
still rises? Yes, it is the living men here who are the uncanny
spectres.
I have come in a lonely spot upon a little cross by the wayside, and
have been stopped by a familiar name on it. Dead? No. There, right
enough, is my veritable friend, as I knew and admired him. He cannot be
dead. But those men in muddy clothes who sometimes consort with me
round the burning logs on the hearth of an old chateau at night, I look
across the floor at them as across countless ages, and listen to their
voices till they sound unintelligibly from a remote and alien past. I
do not know what they say to me. I am encompassed by dark and insoluble
magic, and have forgotten the Open Sesame, though I try hard to
remember it; for these present circumstances and the beings who move in
them are of a world unreal and unreasonable.
I get up from the talk of war by that fireside of an old chateau built
on a still more ancient field where English archers fought a famous
battle six hundred years ago. A candle stands on a bracket beneath a
portrait of a lady. The lady is in the dress of the days of the French
Revolution. She is young and vivid, and looks down at me under lowered
eyelids in amused and enticing scrutiny. Her little mouth has the
faintest trace of a contemplative smile; and as I look at her I could
swear the corners of her mouth twitch, as if in the restraint of
complete understanding.
She is long gone. She was executed at Arras. But I know her well. The
chateau is less cold and lonely than it was.
Old stairs wind upwards to a long corridor, the distant ends of which
are unseen. A few candles gutter in the draughts. The shadows leap. The
place is so still that I can hear the antique timbers talking. But
something is without which is not the noise of the wind. I listen, and
hear it again, the darkness throbbing; the badly adjusted horizon of
outer night thudding on the earth--the incessant guns of the great war.
And I come, for this night at least, to my room. On the wall is a tiny
silver Christ on a crucifix; and above that the portrait of a child,
who fixes me in the surprise of innocence, questioning and loveable,
the very look of warm April and timid but confiding light. I sleep with
the knowledge of that over me, an assurance greater than that of all
the guns of all the hosts. It is a promise. I may wake to the earth I
used to know in the morning.
_Winter 1917._
XIX. Holly-Ho!
In the train bound for the leave boat, just before Christmas, the
Knight-Errant, who also was returning to the front, re-wrote the
well-known hymn of Phillips Brooks for me, to make the time pass. It
began:
"Oh little town of Bethlehem,
To thee we give the lie."
So you may guess, though I shan't tell you, how it continued. For the
iron was in the soul of the Knight and misery was twisting it. I cannot
pretend it was a pleasure trip. This was to be our third Christmas in
Flanders. Is it any good trying to pass on the emotion common to men
who go to that place because they must? No, it is not. Yet, throughout
the journey to the boat, I was not astonished at the loud gaiety of
many of our passengers. I have got used to it; for they were like that
when they landed at Boulogne in August 1914; and they will be no
different when they come back for good, to comfortable observers who
prefer to be satisfied easily.
There was a noise of musical instruments and untractable boots on the
floor-boards. While waiting in the nervous queue on the Day of Judgment
one of those fellows will address a mouth organ to the responsive feet
of a pal, and the others will look on with intent approval, indifferent
to Gabriel. Having watched disaster experiment variously with my
countrymen for three years, I begin to understand why once the French
hated us, why lately they have learned to admire us and to be amused by
us, why the blunders of our governing classes don't damage us vitally
(which seems miraculous unless you know the reason); and, indeed, why
that blessed flag has braved a thousand years the battle and the
breeze.
It is because the quality of our Nobodies (about whom a great epic will
get written when a poet is born good enough and big enough to receive
the inspiration), it is because any average Nobody has a cool
impregnability to the worst bad luck can do which is supernal. That
gives the affair something of the comic. That is what makes the humour
of the front. And after the first silent pause of respect and wonder at
one more story of the sort a journalist knows so well who knows but a
little of railway men and miners, seamstresses and the mothers in mean
streets, and ships and the sea, one cannot help chuckling. Again, the
sons of Smith and Jones and Robin! The well-born, the clever, the
haughty, and the greedy, in their fear, pride, and wilfulness, and the
perplexity of their scheming, make a general mess of the world.
Forthwith in a panic they cry, "Calamity cometh!"
Then out from their obscurity, where they dwelt because of their low
worth, arise the Nobodies; because theirs is the historic job of
restoring again the upset balance of affairs. They make no fuss about
it. Theirs is always the hard and dirty work. They have always done it.
If they don't do it, it will not be done. They fall with a will and
without complaint upon the wreckage wilfully made of generations of
such labour as theirs, to get the world right again, to make it
habitable again, though not for themselves; for them, they must spend
the rest of their lives recreating order out of chaos. A hopeless task;
but they continue at it unmurmuring, giving their bodies without stint,
as once they gave their labour, to the fields and the sea. And some day
the planet will get back to its old place under the sun; but not for
them, not for them.