From the Austin girls, whose eyes followed him, from Mr Hare, from Mrs
Norton, John wandered sorrowfully away,--he wandered through the green
woods and fields into the town. He stood by the railway gates. He saw
the people coming and going in and out of the public houses; and he
watched the trains that whizzed past, and he understood nothing, not
even why the great bar of the white gate did not yield beneath the
pressure of his hands; and in the great vault of the blue sky, white
clouds melted and faded to sheeny visions of paradise, to a white form
with folded wings, and eyes whose calm was immortality....
A train stopped. He took a ticket and went to Brighton. As they
steamed along a high embankment, he found himself looking into a
little suburban cemetery. The graves, the yews, the sharp church spire
touching the range of the hills. _Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust
to dust_, and the dread responsive rattle given back by the coffin lid.
He watched the group in the distant corner, and its very remoteness and
removal from his personal knowledge and concern, moved him to passionate
grief and tears....
He walked through the southern sunlight of the town to the long expanse
of sea. The mundane pier is taut and trim, and gay with the clangour
of the band, the brown sails of the fishing boats wave in the translucid
greens of water; and the white field of the sheer cliff, and all the
roofs, gables, spires, balconies, and the green of the verandahs are
exquisitely indicated and elusive in the bright air; and the beach
is strange with acrobats and comic songs, nursemaids lying on the
pebbles reading novels, children with their clothes tied tightly about
them building sand castles zealously; see the lengthy crowd of
promenaders--out of its ranks two little spots of mauve come running
to meet the advancing wave, and now they fly back again, and now they
come again frolicking like butterflies, as gay and as bright.
Under the impulse of his ravening grief, John watched the spectacle
of the world's forgetfulness, and the seeming obscenity horrified him
even to the limits of madness. He cried that it might pass from him.
Solitude--the solemn peace of the hills, the appealing silence of a
pine wood at even; how holy is the idea of solitude, find it where you
will. The Gothic pile, the apostles and saints of the windows, the deep
purples and crimsons, and the sunlight streaming through, and the
pathetic responses and the majesty of the organ do not take away, but
enhance and affirm the sensation of idea and God. The quiet rooms
austere with Latin and crucifix; John could see them. Fondly he allowed
these fancies to linger, but through the dream a sense of reality began
to grow, and he remembered the narrowness of the life, when viewed from
the material side, and its necessary promiscuousness, and he thought
with horror of the impossibility of the preservation of that personal
life, with all its sanctuary-like intensity, which was so dear to him.
He waved away all thought of priesthood, and walking quickly down the
pier, looking on the gay panorama of town and beach, he said, "The
world shall be my monastery."