She looked up at me quickly, and then put out her hands for me to pull
her up.
‘Perhaps I should look in the mirror,’ she said.
Poor Legs, as he had said, left by a very early train next morning, and
Helen, moved by a sudden violent attack of vague duty, went with him.
The access was quite indeterminate. She thought merely that one ought to
get back to town early on Monday, so as to have the whole day there
instead of splitting it up. Personally I followed neither her reasoning
nor example, and intended to spend the day in dignified inaction in the
country, and not split it up by going to town till after dinner. But to
the owner of a motor-car the train appears a degraded sort of business,
and, greatly daring, I meant to start about nine in the evening, and be
the monarch of the road; for when there is no other traffic, any car
becomes a chariot of triumph. Helen, I may remark, loves our motor when
she does not want to go anywhere particular. When she does she takes the
train. I think, in fact, that it was my proposal that we should drive up
together after dinner that was the direct parent of her sense of duty.
* * * * *
So, when I came down at the not unreasonable hour of nine to breakfast,
I found that I had the house to myself, and--I am not in the least
ashamed of the confession--found that the prospect of an absolutely
solitary day was quite to my mind. I do not believe myself to be
unsociable or morose, but every now and then I confess that I like a day
in which I see nobody. It is not that one is busy, and wants to get
through one’s work, for, on the contrary, when I have a great deal to
do, I hugely desire the presence and the conversation of friends in the
intervals of ‘doing.’ But occasionally it is a very good thing to chew
and ruminate, to be surrounded by the quiet green things of the earth,
which give you all their best without waking the corresponding instinct
to exchange ideas, to give something of yours to meet theirs. For
intercourse with one’s fellow-men, especially with one’s friends, is
like some rapid interchange of presents. Everybody (everybody, at least,
who has the smallest sense of sociability) searches in his mind for any
little thing that may be there, and gives it his friend, while the
friend, accepting it, gives something back. From all that--we cannot
call it an effort since it is so completely spontaneous on both
sides--it is well to be free occasionally, to lie, so to speak, under
the pelting rain of life that is ever poured out from the voiceless,
eloquent, bright-eyed happiness of Nature, to make no plan, to
contemplate no contingency, to drop that sort of fencing rapier that we
all wield when we are with our fellow-men, and lie like a log, with one
eye open it may be, and be rained upon by the things that live, and are
clothed and nourished without toil or spinning.
I am aware that the great Strenuists, from Mr. Roosevelt downwards,
would hold up their toil-hardened hands at this, exclaiming: ‘You mean
it is better now and then to be a cow than a Man?’ Precisely so, but
cows are not nearly as inactive as Man on these occasions ought to be.
They eat too long, and they switch their tails, and stamp their feet.
But the long, stupid, bovine gaze is moderately correct. At least, I
have never detected a shadow of intelligence in a cow’s eye. If there is
any, the man who occasionally becomes a cow must be careful to get rid
of it. Nor must he be a cow too often: that is fatal. If he is a cow for
one day in every six weeks, I think he will find the proportion is
about right.
So all day, literally all day, I sat, or, when sitting became too
fatiguing, lay on the lawn, and nothing happened that did not always
happen, but all was worth observing in a purely bovine manner, without
intelligence. Little brown twigs occasionally fell from the elms, and
once or twice a withered yellow leaf came spinning on its own axis, as
if it was the screw of some unseen steamer. A stag-beetle walked slowly
down from the wooden paling, and came some ten yards across the lawn. It
stopped there about an hour, I should think, doing nothing whatever.
Then it turned and went back on to the paling again. A robin took about
the same length of time to make up his mind that I was quite harmless,
and eventually pecked at my bootlace, which was undone. It took him an
enormous time to decide, with his head cocked sideways, whether it
tasted nice or not, but eventually he settled it did not, for he did not
peck it again. Then a jackdaw sat on one of the poles of the tennis-net,
and said ‘Jarck’ seventeen times after I began to count. He began to
say it the eighteenth time, but stopped in the middle and ate an
incautious earwig.
That was almost too exciting, and I transferred not my attention,
because I had not got any, but my bovine gaze to the big flower-bed
opposite. All summer was there, dim, hot, blossoming summer in full
luxuriance of growth, so that scarcely a square inch of earth was
visible. I did not even name the dear familiar flowers that grew there.
One was a spire of blue, one was a cluster of orange; there was an
orchestra of red trumpets, a mist of starry grey, and bits of sky caught
in a web of green. And from beyond (I could not help naming that) the
odour of sweet-peas. I lay and soaked in it.
* * * * *
To use a simile, do you know those mysterious things which are to be
found on the chalk downs, called dew-ponds? Often, of course, they are
fed with rain, but even when for months no rain has fallen, you will
still find them full. They just lie open to the sky and that is all. And
the mind, so it seems to me, is something like them. Often it is fed in
the obvious way, as the dew-pond with rain, by conscious thought, by
active intercourse with others. But sometimes it is not a bad thing for
it to be like the dew-pond, just to lie open to the sky, and drink in
the eternal wine of Nature, which fills its pond again. All that is
required of it is to do nothing whatever, not to think even, but just to
be there, to be in existence, to let go of everything. It really is
worth the experiment, though it is not quite so easy as it sounds, for
thoughts, ideas of some kind, keep leaking in. They must be firmly
excluded.
* * * * *
The snuffling motor rose like a hero to the occasion, and came round
throbbing with excitement. Something in the idea of this drive by night
had evidently taken its fancy, and it positively burned to exceed the
legal limit, a wish that I was only too glad to gratify. When we started
the crimson of the sunset was still aflame in the west, but gradually
the colour was withdrawn, as if some unseen hand was pulling out scarlet
threads that ran through some exquisite fabric of dainty embroidery,
leaving there only the soft transparent ground of it. Then more
gradually, so that the eye could not trace the appearance of each, but
only knew that the number was being multiplied, behind the dark velvet
of the sky were lit the myriad suns that make a flame of space, and sing
in their orbits. Colours faded and disappeared, and soon the world was
turned to an etching of black and white. The roads were empty of
traffic, and though July was here, still from dark coppice and leafy
screen there sounded the one eternal song, the rapture of nightingales.
Often it seemed to me as if we were standing still, while the world in
its revolution span by us; there was but a space of lamp-lit road by
which, shadow-like, dream-like, the trees and open spaces ran. For a
long piece together, as over the Hartford Bridge flats, nothing marked
our passage except this whirling of the world. It seemed in the darkness
that time had ceased, and that from its own impetus this globe and the
thousand globes above were circling still.
Then in front there began to shine, like the reflected light of some
comet coming nearer, the huge glow-worm of London. For a while it
rested, like some remote befogged star on the horizon; then its light
brightened, and its little crawling caterpillars, the trains and buses,
began to creep by us, reaching out, as it were, to the end of the leaf,
the greenest and most succulent parts.
Then, like the opening of a photographer’s shutter, so swift it was, we
were in the traffic of the town again, and all was familiar, all was
home. The country was home too, and here was another. Which was the
truer sense? The sense that claimed the jackdaw on the tennis-net as a
brother, or the sense that rejoiced in this fierce-beating pulse of
life?
Perhaps, since they are both true, there is no question of comparison.
AUGUST
Something of the primeval savage blood still beats in us, we must
suppose, else why is it that we, effete inhabitants of London, who love
the closeness and proximity of our fellow-men so much, feel no less
keenly the rapture of being miles and miles away from railways and the
folk who travel on them? How quick, too, is the transition from one mood
to another, so that while a week or two ago we rushed insanely, it may
be, but with extraordinary pleasure, from party to party, jabbering with
childlike delight to myriad acquaintances, face to face on a blocked
staircase, or in the drawing-room unwillingly silent while somebody
sang, we now take the same childlike pleasure in long days of solitude.
But we may take our solitude in pairs, in company with a friend who for
the time being is no friend at all, but a bitter (and, it is to be
hoped, disappointed) golfer, or we may lie out all day in the heather
with a silent stalker, or, as has been my fortunate lot for the last ten
days, may spend long hours, with a sandwich and a fishing-rod and a
gillie, in angling over coffee-coloured streams or windswept lochs.
The oldest inhabitants never remember anything like this summer, but
they are bad evidence, because their memories are probably very
defective owing to their age; but, what is more convincing, younger
people, whose memories are less impaired, never remember anything like
it. So there has been little of the coffee-coloured streams for me
personally, but, instead, long quiet days by this wonderful loch,
supposed to hold trout of fabulous dimensions, which, as far as I can
make out, nobody has ever caught, though every one agrees that they are
there. Then came a wonderful day, with more than trout-wonder in it.
I came up here to this remote lodge alone, for the trio of us usually go
our own ways in holiday time. Legs, in any case, had to go to Germany to
learn that classic and guttural tongue, and Helen and I always make
visiting arrangements independently of each other, unless we are both
bidden to a house to which we both want to go. But it stands to reason,
so it seemed to us, that husband and wife probably do not have the same
friends, and it is as absurd for her to stay at a house because the host
is a great friend of mine as it is for me to stay at a house because the
hostess is a great friend of hers. Coincidences sometimes happen, in
which we both go together. Otherwise we make our own arrangements. I
cannot bear some of her friends; she finds it almost impossible to
tolerate some of mine. And with shouts of laughter we agree to differ.
Then in September or October the trio will come together again, and will
all talk at once, describing simultaneously, while nobody listens, our
delightful adventures.
I started from the lodge that morning after an early breakfast, the
gillie having already gone on with lunch, and what we hoped would be the
apparatus of death; for, the first time during this last week, it was a
soft and cloudy morning, with a warm wind from the south-west,
sufficient even in this cup of the hills, where the lodge stands, to
set the trees tossing their branches, and to strip the red ripe
rowanberries from their stalks. Upon the unsheltered tops, then, where
lay the dark-coloured loch with its fabled inhabitants, there should be
ripple enough for fishing purposes. I walked unencumbered but for the
field-glasses I always carry; for nothing, during periods of waiting or
in the half-hour that follows the sandwich, is so fascinating as to spy
out the busy animal life on these empty moors, or find some three or
four miles away two or three little human specks moving very gently up
the hillside after the deer, or sitting there patiently till some
untoward affair, suspicious hinds, or a foul wind are lulled into
inactivity.
But first I had a mile of pine-wood to climb, up steep, slippery,
needle-strewn paths, with bracken already yellowing on each side, making
a sea of russet and green, while from overhead, in the thick arching
boughs, there came, as it were, the noise of an aerial sea, the hiss of
ripples on a sandy shore as the wind whistled through the stiff springy
foliage. Now and then a rabbit scuttled through the ferns, and once I
saw quite close at hand a roe-deer with flicking ears and startled eyes,
that, as it caught sight of me, gave me one shy look of the woodland,
and then galloped off, cutting its way through the tall bracken. The
path sometimes led by the side of the stream that came out of the loch
to which I was bound, but the dryness of the summer had hushed its
voice, and it but trickled down the ways it was wont to prance along in
spring. Here and there a tree of the tamer woodland, a beech, or
stripling elm, grew among the primeval firs, but it looked as if it had
wandered here by mistake, had strayed, a member of some later
civilization, into a settlement peopled by those of the older world.
And as I walked something of the same feeling of strangeness, of having
gone back to the earlier ages of the world, came over me also. Like the
lost beech, there were none of my kind here, and I felt, though in an
immeasurably greater degree, what one feels when one stands in the
valley of the tombs of the Egyptian Kings. But all round me here were
things far more ancient than they. Æons before Pharaoh oppressed the
children of promise there stood here on this hillside the ancestors in
direct line of this woodland. The knowledge of the dawn of the world,
when it was still but a little time since God had bidden the green
things to live upon the earth, had been transmitted to these citizens of
the hillside, and to them time had been but a little thing, and a
thousand ages were but as yesterday.
* * * * *
As I ascended farther and more remotely into the heart of the wood, a
sort of eager tremor, a desire to see that which I knew was there, and
which must be so overpowering in its immensity, began to grow on me.
Wild silent life bubbled and hummed round me; eyes watched me from
beneath the fern, and looked down on me from the over-arching fans of
the pines; ears were pricked at my footstep; strange wild smiles
broadened into a laugh at the intruder, at this child of immeasurably
later ages. Sometimes it seemed to me as if this ancient consciousness
of the woods was scornful and contemptuous, so that I quickened my pace
and longed to get out of this dark room; at other moments, and truer
ones, I knew better, knowing that I, too, was of it all, a
manifestation of life, a piece of the pine-woods and brother of the
bracken.
There is no myth that grew so close to the heart of things as the story
of Pan, for it implies the central fact of all, the one fact that is so
indisputably true, that all the perverted ingenuity of man has been
unable to split into various creeds about it. For Pan is All, and to see
Pan or to hear him playing on his pipes means to have the whole truth of
the world and the stars, and Him who, as if by a twisting thumb and
finger, set them endlessly spinning through infinite Space, suddenly
made manifest. Flesh and blood, as the saying is, could not stand that,
and there must be a bursting of the mortal envelope. Yet that,
indisputably also, is but the cracking of the chrysalis. How we shall
stand, weak-eyed still and quivering, when transported from the dusk in
which we have lived this little life, into the full radiance of the
eternal day! How shall our eyes gain strength and our wings expansion
and completeness, when the sun of which we have seen but the reflection
and image is revealed! That is to see Pan. It killed the mortal body of
Psyche--the soul--when she saw him on the hill-top by the river, and
heard the notes of his reed float down to her; but she and every soul
who has burst the flimsy barrier of death into life joins in his music,
and every day makes it the more compelling. Drop by drop the ocean of
life, made up of the lives that have been, rises in the bowl in which
God dips His hands. He touches every drop.
* * * * *
The wood in front had grown thin, and I was nearly out on the open
heather of the hills. Just here the path crossed the stream bed; a great
grey cliff of rock was above me, in which a pattern of lichens had found
crevices for their roots; the pine-trees waved solemnly overhead; the
miracle of running water, perhaps the greatest miracle of all, chuckled
and eddied as it slid into the brown pool. And quite seriously I waited
to see Pan. The ferns would be pushed aside, and the merry face would
smile at me (for Pan, though he kills you, is kind), and he would put
his pipes to his lips, and the world, as I had hitherto seen it, would
swim away from me. And just before he puts his pipes to his mouth, I
hope I shall say: ‘Yes, begin; I am ready!’ Or shall I stop my ears, and
shut my eyes to him? I hope not. But the fern waved only, and the water
ran, and ... and I was going a-fishing.
I suppose I had not gone more than a hundred yards after this pause when
execrable events occurred. It seemed as if some dreadful celestial
housemaid suddenly woke up, and went on with her work. She shut the
window (that is to say, the wind dropped), and began to dust. She dusted
all the clouds away, and in ten minutes there was not one left. From
horizon to horizon there was a sky positively Egyptian, and an
abominable sun shone with hooligan ferocity. And I was going a-fishing!
I said what I should not say with such extraordinary distinctness and
emphasis that I rapidly took out my field-glass, and swept the
untenanted fields of heather to see that there was no one within a mile
or two. But I expect the roe-deer heard.
* * * * *
Sandy was waiting for me at the near end of the loch, when I arrived
there a quarter of an hour afterwards. Scotchmen are never cynical, but
I should otherwise have suspected him of cynicism when I saw that he had
been at pains to set up my rod, and was soaking a length of gut. The
brilliance of the sun from the polished and untarnished field of water
was a thing to make the eyes dazzle. So I was cynical in turn, and, from
pure cynicism and nothing else at all, I put on (for the sake of the
curious) an astonishing fly, with a green body bound with silver, and a
Zulu. It was a shade too cynical to go out in the boat, for I think
Sandy would have seen through that, as it was impossible that any fish
should rise at anything in this state of affairs, and I fished from the
shore. Fishing at all was an idiotic proceeding, and so the incredible
happened. I wish to call attention to the incredibility of it, since it
happens to be true.
* * * * *
Here was I, then, on a still and windless morning, with a blazing sun
overhead, and a looking-glass loch in which were supposed to be
monstrous fish, whose shyness apparently increased in ratio to their
weight, for nobody had ever seen them before, but had only heard about
them second-hand, like ghost-stories. Half a dozen casts carried out a
convenient length of line, which fell, so it appeared to me, on the
glassy surface of the water like the cane of an angry schoolmaster,
resonant and cruel. Then at the end of the cane, where the Zulu was,
there came a boil just underneath the looking-glass; my rod bent, and
the reel screamed. For one moment I knew, so I thought (for the boil
came just as I was preparing to cast again), that I had hooked some
stalwart weed, or perhaps a snag of tree-trunk. Then I knew I had hooked
a fish. He was clearly insane to have taken a fly at all, but what
mattered was that he was a large lunatic. I thought I knew also that
this was but the first act of what would turn out to be a tragedy. But
the tragedy was not for me.
Again, for the sake of the curious, I will give his weight. He turned
the scale at five pounds some six hours later. So I imagine he was about
five and a half when he came out of the water with the Zulu in his
mouth. He was mad; he turned a fierce Bedlamite eye on me.
I dare say I am more impatient than the true fisherman, but when I have
cast my fly upon the waters for three hours without a hint of a rise, I
sit down, and do not feel it incumbent on me to rise again unless
conditions change. So when, at about two o’clock, nothing further had
broken the surface of the loch except the cane of the schoolmaster, I
felt, after eating my sandwich, that I was not unlikely, without
incurring the contempt of Sandy, to prolong the interval. I wanted also,
after my mis-tryst with Pan that morning, vaguely also, after that day
of bovine observance of Nature which I had spent a week or two ago in
the garden at home, to ‘sit up and take notice.’ Instead of nirvanic
contemplation, I wanted to focus all that surrounded me, not to see a
stag-beetle advance ten yards, and then go back to the place he advanced
from, but to see the activity of it all, to be alert and to collect, not
to be lazy and to soak.
Yes; it was a wonderful day. Almost immediately I spied two little
human figures on the adjoining forest creeping, creeping up a steep
brae. A mile below I saw their ponies. They moved so slowly that it was
only possible to see they moved at all, because they passed out of the
field of my glass; the deer I could not find.
Then, after watching them for ten minutes more, I saw they stopped.
Stealthy movements went on. Then came the sharp crack of a rifle, but
before the report reached me they had both jumped up, and ran into a
hollow of the hills, where I lost them. It was like being at sea, and
having news twitched out from the receiver of a Marconi apparatus.
But hardly had that drama been played to its curtain when another
started. The call of a startled grouse, ‘Come back, come back, come
back!’ sounded close at hand, and it was followed by another and yet
another. Sandy had remained by the edge of the loch when I climbed this
hillock for my lunch, and since then I had been very quiet, so I could
not imagine what had caused this commotion on the hill, as the stalkers
were not on this beat at all to-day. I could account, in fact, for the
movements of any human being that could have disturbed grouse for a mile
or two. Then I looked up to the enormous sky, and saw.
Above me, but close, so that I could see the outspread feathers of the
wing, was a golden eagle. As I watched I saw he was not vaguely
circling, looking out for prey, but employed in his stalk, even as on
the other side of the valley ten minutes ago I had watched another
stalk. He was sweeping wide circles of the moor, and driving up towards
a gully of the hills behind the fowls of the mountain, flying in low and
ever narrowing semicircles, so that it must seem to the terrified grouse
and black game that huge-winged danger threatened from every quarter but
that. Yet still I could not guess what his plan was when he had driven
them there.
And then I saw. Straight down from the grey crag of cliff that rose on
the west of this gully, into which he had driven the birds, there
dropped his mate, savage and hungry, seeking her meat from God. Aha, you
grand Mistress Eagle; it is dinner-time!
Merrily and well has the old cock-grouse lived in the heather, lying
warm in the sun, and filling himself with the good things of the
moorland, but to-day Pan sends him to your table, and in the swift
hissing down-rush of your wings he hears his pipes. Pan will play them
for you, too, some day, and the grey film will cover over your fierce
yellow eye that was wont undazzled to behold the sun in his strength,
and the strong hooked beak which gasped for one breath more of the
aromatic moorland air will close, and be hungry no more, and the
crooked, horny talon will relax, and next year, maybe, I shall find
whitened bones on the hillside, and perhaps, crumpled up under them, a
feather, an eagle’s feather. But I shall not be so foolish as to say I
have found you, for do I imagine that that is all there is of you, that
your life, your spirit, has been blown out like a candle? I know better
than that.