"There are the smokes," I said, "and let me know when you want a
cocktail. We'll have dinner when you like. Now I have heard nothing
from you for the last three months; let's have a budget."
"Right. Well, the material side of the affair is soon done with. I'm
Quartermaster-Sergeant, with stripes and a crown on my arm, as you have
noticed, and I live immersed in accounts and stores and supplies. I
have to see that the men have enough and are comfortable, and I have to
be as economical as I can. That's my life, and it's being my salvation."
He lay back in his chair, the picture of complete indolence, with eyes
half closed. But I knew that to be a sign of intense internal activity.
Most people, I am aware, when they are aflame with some mental or
spiritual topic, walk up and down with bright eyes and gesticulating
hands. But it is Francis's great conjuring trick to disconnect his
physical self, so to speak, and let it lie indolent; his theory is that
thus your vitality is concentrated on thought. There seems something to
be said for it, when once you have learned how to do it.
"Of course, in order to get anywhere," he said, "you must go through
contemplative periods and stages, and towards the end of the journey,
I fancy that you enter into an existence where only that is possible.
But before that comes, you have to know the sacredness of common
things. It's like this. The first stage is to know that the only thing
worth our consideration is the reality that lies behind common things:
it is then that you think them worthless and disregard them. But
further on you find out that they aren't common, because the reality
behind permeates them, and makes them sacred. Later, if you ever get
there, you find, I believe, that in your union with the reality behind,
they cease to exist again for you. But, good heavens, what miles apart,
are the first and third stages! And the danger of the first stage is
that, if you are not careful, you imagine it to be the same as the
third.
"I was in danger of getting like that, living in perfect comfort and
peace on that adorable island. Do you know how a jelly looks the day
after a dinner-party, how it is fatigued, and lies down and gets
shapeless and soft? I might have stayed in that stage, if the war
hadn't summoned me. I did not consciously want material things: I was
not greedy or lustful, and I had a perfectly conscious knowledge that
God existed in everything. But I didn't reverence things for that
reason, nor did I mix myself up in them. I held aloof, and was content
to think. Then came the war, and now for nearly fifteen months I have
been learning to get close to common things, to see, as I said, that
the sacredness of their origin pervades them. It doesn't lie in them,
tucked away in some secret drawer, which you have to open by touching
a spring. The spring you have to touch is in yourself, you have
to open your own perception of what is always before your eyes. It
doesn't require any wit or poetic sense to perceive it: it is there, a
plain simple phenomenon. But in it is the answer to the whole cosmic
conundrum, for there lies the Love that 'moves the sun and the other
stars!' Theoretically I knew that, but not practically.
"Now, after a good deal of what you might call spade-work, I'm
beginning to feel that, first-hand. For months I hated the drill, and
the sordidness (so I said) and the life in which you are so seldom
alone. I hated the rough clothes, and the heavy boots and the food.
But I never hated the other fellows: I've always liked people. Then
when I got on I hated the accounts I had to do, and the supplies I
had to weigh, but in one thing I never faltered, and that was in the
desire to get at what lay behind it all. There was something more in
it than the fact that the work had to be done because England was at
war with Germany, and because I wanted to help. That was sufficient to
bring me out of Alatri, and it would have been sufficient to carry me
along, even if there had been nothing else behind it. But always I had
the knowledge of there being something else behind. And clearly the
life I was leading gave me admirable conditions for finding that out.
Everything was very simple: I had no independence; I had to do what I
was told. You may bet that obedience is the key to freedom.
"There were days of storm and days of peace, of course. There were
darknesses in which one was tempted to say that there wasn't anything
to be perceived. Some persistent devil inside me kept suggesting that
an account-book was just an account-book, and a rifle nothing more than
a rifle. But I still clung to that which had grown, in all those years
at Alatri, to be a matter of knowledge. I knew there was something
behind, and I knew what it was, though the mists obscured it, just as
when the sea-fog comes down in the winter over the island, and you
cannot see the mainland for days together. But you don't seriously
question whether the mainland is there because you don't see it. A
child might: if you told a child that the mainland had been taken
away, he would probably accept what you said.... There were days when
I doubted everything, not only the reality at the back of it all, but
even the immediate cause for my work, namely, that the regiment was
part of the army that was fighting the Germans, and that so it was my
job to help.
"And then, one day when I was least expecting it or consciously
thinking of it, the knowledge came with that sense of realization that
makes all the difference between theoretical and practical knowledge. I
was among the stores, rather busy, and suddenly the tins of petroleum
shone with God. Just that."
He turned his handsome, merry face to me: there was no solemnity in it,
it was as if he had told me some cheerful piece of ordinary news.
"Now will you understand me when I say that that moment was in no
sense overwhelming, nor did it interfere in the slightest degree with
either the common work of the day, drill and accounts and what not,
or with the common diversions of the day? It did not even give them
a new meaning, for I had known for years that the meaning was there;
only, it had not been to me a matter of practical knowledge. It was
like--well, you know how slow I am at learning anything on the piano,
but with sufficient industry I can get a thing by heart at last. It
was like that: it was like the first occasion on which one plays it
by heart. It did not yet, nor does it now get between me and all the
things that fill the day. It is not a veil drawn between me and them,
so that drudgery and little menial offices are no longer worth while:
it is just the opposite: it is as if a veil were drawn away, and I can
see them and handle them more clearly and efficiently, and enjoy them
infinitely more. This warm fire feels more delightfully comfortable
than ever a fire did. I take more pleasure in seeing you sitting there
near me than ever before. There was never such a good muffin as the one
you sent up to the bath-room. That's only natural, if you come to think
of it. It would be a very odd sort of illumination, if it served only
to make what we have got to do obscure or tiresome or trivial. Instead,
it redeems the common things from triviality. It takes weariness out of
the world."
"You said the petroleum-tins shone with God," I said. "Can you tell me
about that? Was it a visible light?"
"I wondered if you would ask that," he said, "and I wish I could
explain it better. There was no visible light, nothing like physical
illumination round them. But my eyes told that faculty within me which
truly perceives, that they shone. What does St. Paul call it? 'The
light invisible,' isn't it? That is exactly descriptive. 'The light
invisible, the uncreated light.' I can't tell you more than that, and
I expect that it is only to be understood by those who have seen it. I
am quite conscious that my description of it must mean nothing. I have
long known it was there, and so have you, but till I perceived it I had
no idea what it was like."
"There's another thing," said I, "you are going out next week to the
Dardanelles. What does the business of killing look like in the light
of the light invisible?"
He laughed again.
"It hasn't turned me into a conscientious objector, if you mean that,"
he said. "I hate the notion of shooting jolly funny rabbits, or merry
partridges, though I'm quite inconsistent enough to eat them when they
are shot--at least, not rabbits: I would as soon eat rats. But I shall
do my best to kill as many Turks as I possibly can. I _know_ it's right
that we should win this war. I was never more certain about anything.
The Prussian standpoint is the devil's standpoint, and since it's our
business to fight the devil, we've got to fight the Prussians and all
who are allied with them. It seems a miserable way of fighting the
devil, to go potting Turks. If I could only get to know the fellows I
hope I am going to kill, I would bet that I should find them awfully
decent chaps. I shouldn't be surprised if they would shine, too, like
the petroleum-tins. But there's no other alternative. No doubt if our
diplomatists hadn't been such apes, we should be friends with the
Turks, instead of being their enemies, but, as it is, there's no help
for it. I've no patience with pacificists; we've got to fight, unless
we choose to renounce God. As for the man who has a conscientious
objection to killing anybody, I think you will find very often that
he has a conscientious objection to being killed. I haven't any
conscientious objection to either. I shall be delighted to kill Turks,
and I'm sure I don't grudge them the pleasure of killing me."
"But you think they're fighting on the devil's side," I objected. "You
don't want to be downed by the devil?"
"Oh, they don't down me by shooting me," he said. "Also, they don't
think they are in league with the devil; at least, we must give them
the credit of not thinking so, and they've got every bit as good a
right to their view as I have. Lord! I am glad, if I may say it without
profanity, that I'm not God. Fancy having millions and millions of
prayers, good sincere honest prayers, addressed to you every day from
opposite sides, entreating you to grant supplications for victory!
Awfully puzzling, for Him! You'd know what excellent fellows a lot of
our enemies are."
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed at this moment, and Francis jumped
up with a squeal.
"Eight o'clock already!" he said. "What an idiot you are for letting me
jaw along like this! I'm not dressed yet, nor are you."
"You may dine in a dressing-gown if you like," I said.
"Thanks, but I don't want to in the least. I want to put on the fine
new dress-clothes which I left here a year ago. Do dress too; let's
put on white ties and white waistcoats, and be smart, and pompous. I
love the feeling of being dressed up. Perhaps we won't go to the movies
afterwards; what do you think? We can't enjoy ourselves more than
sitting in this jolly room and talking. At least, I can't; I don't know
about you. Oh, and another thing. You have a day off to-morrow, haven't
you, it being Saturday? Let's go and stay in the country till Monday.
I've been in a town for so many months. Let's go to an inn somewhere
where there are downs and trees, and nobody to bother. If we stayed
with people, we should have to be polite and punctual. I don't want to
be either. I don't want to hold forth about being a Tommy, except to
you. Most people think there's something heroic and marvellous about
it, and they make me feel self-conscious. It's no more heroic than
eating when you're hungry. You want to: you've got to: your inside
cries out for food, it scolds you till you give it some."
* * * * *
We put Francis's plan into execution next morning, and at an early
hour left town for a certain inn, of which I had pleasant memories,
on the shore of the great open sea of Ashdown Forest, to spend three
days there, for I got rid of my work on Monday. St. Martin came with
us and gave us warm windless days of sun, and nights with a scrap of
frost tingling from the stars, so that in the morning the white rime
turned the blades of grass into spears of jewellery, and the adorable
sharp scent of autumn mornings pricked the nostrils. The great joyful
forest was ablaze with the red-gold livery of beech trees, and the pale
gold of birches, and holly trees wore clusters of scarlet berries among
their stiff varnished foliage. Elsewhere battalions of pines with tawny
stems defied the spirit of the falling leaf, and clad the hill-sides
with tufts of green serge, in which there sounded the murmur of distant
seas. Here the foot slid over floors of fallen needles, and in the
vaulted darkness, where scarce a ray of sun filtered down, there seemed
to beat the very heart of the forest, and we went softly, not knowing
but that presently some sharp-eared faun might peep round a tree-trunk,
or a flying drapery betray a dryad of the woods.
Deeper and deeper we went into the primeval aisles, among the Druid
trees that stood, finger on lip, for perhaps even Pan himself had
lately passed that way, and they, initiate, had looked on the
incarnate spirit of Nature. Then, distantly, the gleam of sunshine
between the trunks would show the gates of this temple of forest, and
we passed out again into broad open spaces, covered with the russet of
bracken, and stiff with ling, on which the spikes of minute blossom
were still pink. Here we tramped till the frosted dews had melted and
dried, and sat in mossy hollows, where gorse was still a-flower, and
smelled of cocoa-nut biscuits. Across the weald the long line of South
Downs, made millions of years ago by uncounted myriads of live things,
was thrust up like some heaving shoulder of a marine monster above the
waves. It seemed necessary to walk along that heavenly ridge, and next
day, we drove to Lewes, and with pockets bulging with lunch, climbed on
to that fair and empty place. There, with all Sussex lying below us,
and the sea stretched like a brass wire along the edge of the land to
the south, we made a _cache,_ containing the record of the expedition,
and buried it in a tin-box below a certain gnarled stump that stood on
the edge of the steep descent on to the plain. Francis insisted also
on leaving our empty wine bottle there, with a wisp of paper inside
it, on which he wrote: "We are now utterly without food, and have
already eaten the third mate. Tough, but otherwise excellent. Latitude
unknown: longitude unknown: God help us!" And he signed it with the
names of Queen Adelaide and Marcus Aurelius. Neither he nor I could
think of anything sillier than this, and since, when you are being
silly, you have to get sillier and sillier, or else you are involved in
anticlimaxes, he rolled over on to his face and became serious again.
"Lord, Lord, how I love life!" he said, "in whatever form it manifests
itself. I love these great open and empty places, and the smile of the
indolent earth. Great kind Mother, she is getting sleepy, and will
soon withdraw all her thoughts back into herself and doze and dream
till spring awakens her again. She will make no more birds and beasts
and flowers yet awhile, for those are the thoughts she puts out, but
collect herself into herself, hibernating in the infinite cave of the
heavens. All the spring and the summer she has been so busy, thinking,
thinking, and putting forth her thoughts. In the autumn she lies down
and just looks at what she has made, and in the winter she sleeps.
I love that life of the earth, which is so curiously independent of
ours, pagan in its essence, you would think, and taking very little
heed of the children of men and the sons of God. How odd she must think
our businesses and ambitions, she who only makes, and feeds. What a
spendthrift, too, how lavish of life, how indifferent to pain, and
death, and all the ills that her nurselings make for themselves. She
doesn't care, bless you."
"You called her kind just now," I remarked.
"Yes, she is kind to joy, because joy is productive. She loves health
and vitality and love, but she has no use for anything else. It is only
one aspect of her, however, the pagan side, which sets Pan a-fluting
in the thickets. But what she makes is always greater than she who made
it. She gives us and maintains for us till death our physical nature,
and yet the moment she has given it us, even before perhaps, it has
passed out of her hands, being transfused with God. Then, when she has
done with us, she lets death overtake us, and has no more use for us,
except in so far that our bodies can enrich her soil. She does not
know, the pagan earth, that death is only an incident in our lives.
The death of our body, as St. Francis says, is only our sister, for
whom we should praise God just as much as for our life, or the sun and
moon. Really, I don't know what I should do, how I should behave, if
I thought it ever so faintly possible that death was the end of us.
Should I take immense care of myself, so as to put off that end as long
as possible, and in the interval grab at every pleasure and delight I
could find? I don't think so. If I thought that death was the end, I
think I should kill myself instantly, out of sheer boredom. All the
bubble would have gone out of the champagne. I love all the pleasures
and interests of life just because they are part of an infinitely
bigger affair. If there wasn't that within them, I don't think I should
care about them."
"But if they are only part of the bigger thing," said I, "why don't we
kill ourselves at once, in order to get to the bigger thing?"
"Surely for a very good reason, namely, that whatever life lies
beyond, it cannot be this life again. And this life is such awful fun:
I want lots of it. But it doesn't rank in the same class with the
other. I mean that no sensible fellow will want to prolong this at
the expense of what comes after. Much as we like it, we are perfectly
willing to throw it away if we are shown a sufficiently good cause to
throw it away for. It's like a tooth: have it out if it aches. And life
would ache abominably if we clung to it unworthily."
Suddenly I felt horribly depressed.
"Oh, Francis, don't die at the Dardanelles," I said.
"I haven't the slightest intention of doing so. I sincerely hope I
shall do nothing of the sort. But if I do, mind you remember that I
know it is only an incident in life. As we sit here, secure in the sun
and the safety, it is easy enough to realize that. But it is harder
to realize it when it happens to someone you like, and people are apt
to talk rot about the cruel cutting-short of a bright young life. My
bright middle-aged life mustn't rouse these silly reflections, please,
if it's cut off. They are unreal: there is a touch of cant about them.
So promise!"
"If you'll promise not to die, I'll promise not to be vexed at your
death. Besides, you aren't middle-aged; you're about fourteen."
"Oh, I hope I'm younger now at thirty-five than I was when I was
fourteen. I used to be terribly serious at fourteen, and think about my
soul in a way that was positively sickening. I wonder my bright young
life wasn't cut short by a spasm of self-edification. I was a prig, and
prigs are the oldest people in the world. They are older than the rocks
they sit among, as Mr. Pater said, and have been dead many times. You
didn't know me then, thank God."
"Were you very beastly?"
"Yes, quite horrible, and so old. Easily old enough to be my own father
now, if that's what Wordsworth means when he says the child is father
to the man. I thought a lot about my soul, and took great care of it,
and wrapped it up. In fact, I set about everything entirely the wrong
way. What does Thomas à Kempis say, do you remember? That a man must
forsake himself, and go wholly from himself, and retain nothing out of
self-love. He must give up his soul too, for it is only by giving it up
that he avoids losing it...."
He turned over again on his face, sniffing a sprig of thyme that still
lingered into November.
"And yet, oh, how I love all the jolly things in the world!" he
said; "but I don't want them to be mine, and I don't think that I am
entangled in them. Surely it is right to love them if you don't cling
to them. I love the smile of the earth when she wakes in spring, and
puts forth her thoughts again. When she thinks about hawthorn, she
thinks in little squibs of green leaf, when she thinks about birds she
thinks in terms of nightingale-song, or when she thinks about crocuses
she sees her thoughts expressed in yellow chalices, with pollen-coated
tongues. She thinks she has had enough of the grey winter-withered
grass, and, lo, the phalanxes of minute green spears charge and rout
it. She thinks in the scent of wall-flowers, and the swift running of
lizards on the stone-walls, and pinks of peach-blossom, and foam of
orchid-flower. My goodness, what a poet she is!"
"And you aren't attached to all that?" I asked.
"Of course I like it tremendously, but it doesn't entangle me any
more. But I took years to disentangle myself, all those years when you
thought I was being so lazy and ineffective in Alatri. Ineffective I
was, no one ever made less of a splash than I have done; but lazy I
wasn't. I thought, and I thought, and unconsciously to myself, while I
was sunk, as I imagined, in a stupor of purring content with the world,
this war woke me up, and, as you know, I found I wasn't entangled. But
I have learned such a lot this year. I always liked people: I liked
their funny ridiculous ways, their queernesses and their attractions.
But I never got into them before. People are like oranges: the rind
smells delicious, you like them first for the rind. Then just inside
the rind you find that fluffy white stuff, but inside of all is the
substance of them, in which lies their unity with God. There is this,
too: when you get down to the fruit, you find that it has the same
savour as the rind. I take it that the attraction of people, the thing
you love them for, is the first thing you perceive about them, the
aromatic rind. It's a hint of what is within, if you get through
their fluffy part. You find first of all the emanation of their real
selves, next their funny odd ways, and finally themselves. Deep in the
heart of everyone you find what seemed at first their most superficial
qualities. That's an excursus by the way; think it out for yourself."
The sun was already wheeling westwards, and presently after, as we had
half a dozen miles of this high down-land to traverse, we got up and
went on our way. Here and there a copse of flaming beech climbed like
stealthy fire up from the weald on to this roof of South England, on
the ridge of which we walked; but the prevalent wind from the sea had
so continuously blown their branches in one direction that now they
grew there, brushed back in permanence, as Francis suggested, like
the hair of a Knut. Northwards and far below the weald stretched into
misty distances, laid out like a map, with here and there a pond, here
a group of clustered houses, while a moving plume of steam marked the
passage of a train. Mile after mile of springy turf we traversed,
empty and yellowing and uniform, save where a patch of brambles lay
dark, like the shadow from a cloud. Once or twice we passed a dew-pond
dug in the chalk, but otherwise in all those miles we found no sign
up here on the heights of the fretful ways and works of man. All was
untouched and antique: a thousand years had wrought no more change
here than on the liquid plain of the sea. A steady westerly breeze met
us all the way, warmed with the leagues of autumn sunshine through
which it had travelled all day, and it streamed past us like some quiet
flowing river out of the eternal reservoir of the sky. And never, even
in children, round whom there still trail the clouds of glory, have I
seen such ecstatic and natural enjoyment as was Francis's. Around them,
perhaps, linger the lights that play outside the prison-house, but to
him, it seemed that into the prison-house itself there streamed in such
a jubilation of sunshine that every vestige of shade was banished.
Like the petroleum-tins, when first illumination had come to him, the
whole world shone with God, and that in no vague and mystical manner,
but with a defined and comprehended brightness. Here was no dream-like
mysticism, no indifferent contemplation like that of the Quietists,
but an active and ecstatic enjoyment, eager and alert, and altogether
human. He moved in a fairyland, the magic of which was not imaginary
and fabulous; the spell lay in the very fact that it was real. He was
convinced by the conviction that comes from personal experience: the
glory that enveloped the world was as certain as the streaming wind and
the pervasion of the autumn sun.
It was no haphazard intoxication of animal spirits that possessed him,
no wild primal delight in health and physical vigour, it was a joy that
had had its birth in thought and contemplation, and had passed through
dark places and deserts. But, even as the sunlight of ages past sleeps
in seams of coal, ready to burst into blaze, so through darknesses and
doubts had passed the potential sunlight of his soul, black, you would
say, and dormant, but alive and pregnant with flame, when the finger of
God touched it into illumination. For him no longer in gloomy recesses
sat Pan, the incarnate aspect of the cruelty and the lust of Nature,
the sight of whom meant death to the seer, but over all the world shone
the face of Christ, Who, by the one oblation of Himself, had transfused
His divine nature into all that lived and moved. This was no fact just
accepted, and taken for granted: it was the light from which sprang all
his joy of life, the one central and experienced truth which made all
common things sacred, and opened for him, as for all mystics who have
attained the first illumination, the gates of pearl within which shines
the Heavenly Kingdom. This was no visionary place: it stood solid about
him, an Earthly Paradise no less than a heavenly, and men and women
were its citizens, the hills and valleys, the birds and beasts of this
actual world were of it, the blaze of the westering sun lit it, and
this wind from the West streamed over it. And yet it was the actual
kingdom of heaven.
Francis told me that day how he had attained to where he stood. It was
by no vague inactive passivity, but by stern and unremitting training
of the mind and spirit. He had learned by hard work, first of all, to
concentrate his mind on some given concrete object, to the exclusion of
all other objects, forcing himself, as he put it, "to flow into this
one thing." By slow degrees he had so cultivated this power that he
was able at last to be conscious of nothing else than that on which he
fixed his attention, making all his faculties of perception concentrate
upon it. One of the objects of his meditation had often been the
stone-pine in our garden at Alatri, and "opening himself to it," as
he said, he saw it not only as it was in shape and form, but into his
mind were conveyed its whole nature and formation; not by imagining
them, so it seemed to him, for himself, but by receiving suggestions
from outside. He felt it growing from the pine-seed of a cone that had
dropped there; he felt it as a sapling, and knew how its roots were
groping their ways underground, one to the north, another to the south,
to anchor it from the stress of winds. He felt the word go forth among
the spiders and creeping things that here was a new city a-building for
their habitations. Out of the sapling stage it passed into mature life,
and stripped itself of its lower branches, concentrating its energy on
its crown of foliage. The soft sappy bark hardened itself to resist
the rains, the roots spread further and further, and burrowed more
deeply: the murmur of sea began to nest in its branches, and its shadow
spread like a pool around it. It grew fruitful with cones that opened
themselves so that its seed might ripen; it became a town of fertility.
All this came, not student-wise, but from eager meditation, a vision
evoked not from within, but seen through the open windows of his mind.
A new mode of sight dawned on him.
From meditation on concrete and visible things he passed to meditation
on abstract qualities, which clothed themselves in images. He saw
Mercy, a woman with hands of compassion, touching and remitting the
debts of the crowd that brought the penalties they had incurred: he saw
Truth, nude and splendid, standing on the beach, fresh from the sea,
with a smile for those who ignorantly feared him, and anger blazing
from his eyes for those who tried to hide from him, and hands of love
for those who came to him. But such visions never came to the scope of
his physical sight, only by interior vision did he see Mercy bending to
him, and Truth holding out a strong and tender hand. Their presences
lived with him, and the gradual realization of them caused a shining
company to stand round him.
* * * * *
But they were not what he sought: he sought that which lay behind them,
that of which, for all their splendour, they were but the pale symbols
and imperfect expressions. They were the heralds of the King, who
attended in his presence-chamber, and came forth into the world radiant
with his tokens. There were strange presences among them: there came
Sorrow with bowed head, and Pain with pierced hands, and that darkness
of the soul which still refuses to disbelieve in light. Often he turned
his face from these storm-vexed visitants, crying out that they were
but phantoms of the pit, and yet not quite endorsing his rejection of
them, for their wounded hands shone, and there lurked a secret behind
the tragedy of their faces....
We had come to the end of the ridge, and must descend into the plain
below us. The sun had just set, and the wind that still blew steadily
from the West held its breath for a moment.
"They took their places there," said Francis, "until they became
friendly and glorious, and I did not fear them any longer. I knew
what they represented, of what they were the symbols. Just as I had
contemplated the stone-pine till I saw what was the nature from which
it sprang, so I contemplated Sorrow and Doubt, till I saw that they had
come from the Garden of Gethsemane. They are as holy as Mercy or Truth,
and their touch sanctifies all the pain and sorrow that you and I and
the whole world can ever feel. I dwelt within them. I learned to love
them. I learned also to do the daily tasks that were mine, no longer
with any sense of the triviality of them or with the notion that I
might have been better employed on larger things. But for a long time,
employed on this common round, nothing more happened: I just went on
doing them, believing that they were part of a great whole, but not, I
may say, energetically conscious of it. Then one day, as I told you, I
saw God shining from the petroleum-tins and the shelves of the store."
* * * * *
There are certain moments in one's life that are imperishably
photographed on the mind, and will live there unblurred and unfaded
till the end. I think the reason for this (when so much that seemed
important at the time, constantly fades from one's memory) is that in
some way, great or small, they mark the advent of a new perception,
and this sense of enlightenment gives them their everlasting quality.
They are thus more commonly associated with childish days, when
discoveries are of more frequent occurrence than is the case in later
years. Certainly now the smell of lilac is hugely significant to me
because of that one moment when, at the exploring age of five, I was
first consciously aware of it. It was time to go to bed, though the
sunlight still lay level across the garden where we children played,
and the nurse who had come to fetch us in, relented, and gave us five
minutes' grace, the granting of which at that moment seemed to endow
one with all that was really desirable in life. Simultaneously the
evening breeze disentangled the web of fragrance from the lilac bush
near which I stood, and cast it over me, so that, imperishable to this
day, the scent of it is mixed up in my mind with a mood of ecstatic
happiness. What went before that, what had been the history of the
afternoon, or what was the history of the days that followed, has quite
gone, but vignetted for ever for me is the smell of the lilac bush and
the rapture of five minutes more play. The first conscious sight of the
sea, lying grey and quiet beneath a low sky, is another such picture,
and another such, I am sure, will be the sight of Francis's face as he
stood there facing westwards, with the glow of molten clouds on it,
and with the wind just stirring his hair, as he stood bare-headed, and
spoke those last words. The memory of our walk that day may grow dim,
much may get blurred and indistinct in my mind, but his face then,
alight with joy, not solemn joy at all, but sheer human happiness, will
live to me in the manner of the lilac-scent, and the first sight of the
sea. It was new; never before had I seen so complete an exuberance, so
unshadowed a bliss.
We returned to town next morning. Two days later he rejoined his
regiment.