war, the death, the murder, the butchery in which Nature’s fair hands
are steeped and stained, except by this one supposition that the spirit
of bird and beast escapes at the moment of death from the splendid
sunlit prison of this beautiful world, which has the bright-eyed hours
for its bars. Otherwise the world becomes a mere intolerable shambles,
viler than Chicago. I at any rate cannot believe otherwise, but should
any sceptical reader at this point ask me to sketch out for him the
subsequent movements of the wasp he has just squashed in the tongs, or
the trout I have just landed, I hasten to assure him that I have not the
slightest idea about them. But that does not invalidate the explanation,
nor in the least disturb my complete belief in it. I do not know what
the weather will be this day year. But I make no manner of doubt that
there will be weather of some kind. I only insist that he with his
tongs, and I with my Zulu-fly, cannot destroy life. One cannot even
destroy matter; how much less, then, the lord and master of matter!
* * * * *
I think I have never been in a house where absurd gaiety--the gaiety of
friends, of health, of outdoor spirits--was so rampant as here; and she
whose house it was, and who was leader of the ludicrous, was she, as you
may have guessed, who in June had asked me to come here for the last
time. That evening when I got home I found her sitting out in the garden
enjoying the last half-hour of sunset, and she beckoned to me across the
lawn.
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘I have caught the original trout. He had gone mad
from old age and riotous living, and came to the fly when the sun was
brightest and the winds were dead.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t use such beautiful language,’ she said. ‘How much
does he weigh?’
‘About a ton. He has gone to be weighed now.’
‘And anything else?’
‘Not a fin. No more bites, as somebody said last night. I chattered with
rage.’
‘You did; and what have you been thinking about?’ she asked.
‘Pan chiefly. No, to be honest, I think I have thought about the fish
most. But Pan next!’
She turned rather slowly on her long wicker-couch, the tired aching
body for the moment usurping the use of her eyes.
‘Ah, don’t let us talk,’ I said; ‘you are tired and suffering.’
At that she laughed.
‘All the more reason for thinking about something less inferior than
one’s own health,’ she said. ‘What cowards we are nowadays! Why, our
forebears in Elizabeth’s time used to go smiling to the rack for the
sake of some small difference of dogma, and we snivel when we have the
opportunity of showing, by our contempt for pain, the truth of things
that matter much more. If bravery in the abstract and cheerfulness are
not worth being brave and cheerful for, I don’t know what is. In any
case, what conclusion did you come to about Pan? Oddly enough, I have
been thinking of him, too. Let’s compare notes, and see if we mean the
same person.’
* * * * *
I told her more or less what I have already written down on the subject,
and at the end she nodded at me with the quick eager gesture that was so
characteristic of her.
‘Hurrah!’ she said. ‘I have guessed the same. So perhaps our guesses are
right. But I put it to myself rather more personally, and, though it
sounds conceited, so much more vividly than you. That is only natural,
you know; Pan concerns me much more immediately than he concerns you, we
hope. And another image of him suggested itself to me, which appeals to
me more than your figure of the ferns being pushed aside, and the hand
with the pipes in it being raised to the smiling lips. Listen!’
* * * * *
The sun had dropped behind the big trees to the west of the lawn,
leaving us in shadow, though it still shone on the hills to the east of
the house. But evening was coming without any chill or whisper of autumn
in it, and in this northern latitude nights were short in August. It was
as if she already saw dawn.
‘Jim and I and our children,’ she said, ‘and you and all my friends are
shipwrecked, or so it would seem to anyone who did not understand, on a
little rock surrounded by infinite sea. Every one alive in the world is
there, too, as a matter of fact, but our friends somehow are so big to
us, and strangers and acquaintances so small in comparison, that all
that really is seen by us is our own immediate circle. Huge thumping
seas surround our rock, and, for some occult reason, we all have to sit
exactly where we are, while the waves rush up, and every moment sweep
somebody away. We can’t move our places, and go higher up on the rock,
and we have to sit and look at the big waves, we poor shipwrecked people
(so a man who does not understand would say), and know that this wave or
the next will wash us off. That is the ignorant view of the situation,
and the most pessimistic, so we will answer it at once.
‘Even if it was right, what then? Supposing we were shipwrecked, and all
round us was the howling sea of death, would it not be much better,
until the wave swept us off, to make the best of it, to talk, and laugh,
and be pleasant with our friends, instead of looking with
terror-stricken eyes at the hungry sea? How much nicer even for
ourselves to be amused and talk a little while, instead of being
frightened, and how much nicer for our friends when we are swept off, as
we all certainly shall be, to know that before we were swept off we
were moderately cheerful, and picked up bits of seaweed, and played with
shells! I say nothing of the moral aspect of it all, because if you once
bring that in there is no question any more about the matter, since in
one case we are brave, and in the other merely cowardly. But given that
we are shipwrecked, that the sea of hungry death surrounds us, and will
soon pick us off, how much better, on the lowest possible view of the
affair, to play about, to be kind and gentle, even if to-morrow there
will be an end of us, utterly and for ever!
‘Yes, I am using beautiful language too. But I am talking of beautiful
things.
‘Well, that view is the silliest and most incomprehensible possible. How
did we get on this absurd rock, if only death surrounds us? Did we come
from death into life? That is impossible, since scientifically you can’t
produce life out of dead things. Or did some ship founder on the sea of
death, and did we swim to shore, where we shall live until a wave sweeps
us off again? That is possible; but, then, what was that ship on which
we once were passengers, that for a time anyhow, until it foundered, if
it did founder, rode over these waves? That is a serious question, but
there is only one answer to it. The ship must have been life in some
form. But the image does not seem convincing, does it?
‘What is left, then? Only this, that the sea which surrounds us on our
little rock is not death at all, but life. Just as some day without
doubt a wave will sweep us off our rock again, so there is no doubt that
once a wave of that sea put us on the rock where you and I now are. If
there is a wreck at all, it is a land-wreck, a wreck that puts us on
shore. From the great sea of life we have been washed up for a little
moment on to our little rock. Soon we shall be received back into life
again!
‘In the interval, though in a new sense we are wrecked, how interesting
is our rock, and how full of dear people, and pink shells, and divine
things of the sea that life, not death, casts up round us, and nourishes
by the spent water of its waves! How utterly idiotic it would be not to
collect them eagerly, these little bits, for when we go back into life
we shall see the forests from which they come, the sapphire caves in
which they really dwell. A little bit of life, that grouse that the
eagles ate, was cast up close to you to-day. I shall particularly ask,
when the wave takes me off again, where it came from. And I shall go and
see the place. And certainly I shall see Mistress Eagle come back.’
Courage, huge, natural courage like this, absolutely unassumed,
absolutely instinctive, may have one of two effects on the beholder of
it. It may make him weep for the admiration of it, or it may make him
laugh out of joyousness of heart for the same admiration. At least I
laughed.
‘Oh, be sure to show me the place when I come,’ I said. ‘I am certain
that Mistress Eagle will have a nice house.’
‘They all have,’ she said. ‘There are many mansions.’
She looked at me in silence a moment.
‘But I was not so certain of all these things when first I knew that I
was so soon to see them all,’ she said. ‘At first, though I was never
exactly frightened, I was dazed and stunned. I saw nothing clearly. I
must use another image for that, and say that days passed as one sees
the landscape pass through a railway-carriage window which is blurred by
rain. I could see nothing clearly; it was all dim and rain-streaked. But
then, without any conscious effort on my part, except perhaps a little
exercise of patience, we passed--the train and I--out of the scud again,
and soon the glass cleared, and I saw the green valleys and the sunny
hillside just as they had always been.’
Again she paused.
‘I have not told you anything of importance yet,’ she said; ‘all I have
said is really quite obvious. But this now----
‘You think of Pan as the smiling face that peeps from the fern, the
presence that assures all suffering things that he is kind when he pipes
to them, even though the sound means death. But surely that is no more
than a sort of pagan mythical aspect of him. I always think that he
suffers too, that every pain which he seems to inflict is only the
reflection of the pain in his own universal heart, although he still
smiles. It is from the cross that He smiles at us all.’
SEPTEMBER
The ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ has indeed been a close
bosom friend of the maturing sun, and for the last three days before
Legs went back to his crammer in town, he, Helen, and I spent a
prostrated existence. Heat that in July invigorates, is utterly
intolerable if it occurs at the end of September, just as the crisp
winter day, which would be so welcome in January, descending to the
earth as it usually does in June, produces merely amazed horror at the
weather, and probably a cold. The superficial view that we suffer
because we are improperly clad for these climatic surprises (a view that
Helen put forward the other night) is beside the point. During these
days, if I was improperly clad, it was only because I has so little on.
In fact, only ten minutes before she had said as much.
The state of Legs’ affections, I am bound to add, aggravated the
sultriness of the weather, and made me feel exactly 350 (three hundred
and fifty) years old. To take it at its best, he was embarked on a
violent flirtation with a dreadful girl; to take it at its worst, he was
falling in love with her. She is the daughter of a neighbouring minute
squire, who owns three turnip-fields, and calls it shooting. Legs shot
over it the other day, and after walking over the whole estate twice,
got back to The Grange in time for lunch. This was before I returned
from Scotland, or I should have tried to prevent it. Probably I should
not have succeeded.
The neighbouring squire’s name is Ampthump. I know quite well that it is
not his fault, but that, wedded to what he is and a German wife, makes
me unable to like him. His wife makes incredible quantities of jam,
which, again, is an innocent pursuit; and Charlotte, the daughter, talks
German to Legs, who I wish was more like Goethe. The whole family, in
fact, as may have been already perceived, appear to me to be simply
intolerable.
The attachment also has already led to equivocation on the part of
Legs. He pretends that he talks to Charlotte because it is so good for
his German. He knows that it is not so, and I know it is not so, and I
think he knows that I know it is not so. But it really looks at the
moment that unless they marry each other there will be a broken or, at
any rate, a cracked heart. I only hope it will not be Legs’. I don’t
care the least what happens to Charlotte’s heart. It may, however, be
only a flirtation, in which case there probably will not even be a
crack. Legs will wake up one morning, and after handling some precious
withered flowers will wonder what on earth they ever meant to him, and
throw them in the fire. Or Charlotte will do something equally
desperate. That is my hope; my fear is that they are falling in love
with each other.
This narrative, it should be understood, is the gist of what I have been
saying fragmentarily to Helen. She considers it a cynical view, which
alarms me, since I hold the creed that all cynics are properly and
irretrievably damned. To-night Legs went to bed early, with dishevelled
hair, a wakeful eye, and a gale of sighs, and I came upstairs to talk
to Helen about it all while she brushed her hair.
‘You are quite ridiculous about it,’ she said. ‘Because you happen not
to like the Ampses (we have agreed on that abbreviation), you think that
they are unlovable. Legs has proved the contrary. Besides, what on earth
does her name matter, if she is going to change it?’
I groaned intentionally, and in a graveyard manner.
‘Do you mean that you think Legs is in love with her?’ I asked.
‘Yes; at least, I hope so. He had a long talk with me to-day. He said he
felt it was time he settled down. What a darling! Just twenty! I wish I
was.’
Most of this was irrelevant. I tried to pick out pieces that were not.
‘Of course, her name doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Her name might be----
Well, you can’t do worse than Ampthump, and it does happen to be exactly
that. But her face is like a ham----’
‘That is superficial,’ said Helen. ‘Beside, it isn’t. It’s oval.’
‘So is a ham. And she’s a prig. Ampthump! Good Lord!’
I am afraid I shouted this, because she said: ‘Hush! Legs will hear.’
‘Not he. Or if he does, he will think it is only the wind whispering the
beloved name.’
‘Yes, but you didn’t whisper it. Oh, do take the brush. You made me send
my maid away, so you must do it yourself. I can’t brush from here,
because my arms are in front.’
Now in my heart I pity everybody who has not seen Helen with her hair
down. All such folk, in all their millions, lead impoverished
existences. There is a wave in it that is like the big unbroken billows
which succeed a storm, when the clouds have passed and the sun shines.
It is lit from within, even as they seem to be irradiated from the
depths. Those billows must go over a sandy foreshore, for they are
yellow, and the sun--I know not how--must be foggy, for there is a
little red light in them. And brushing, as I did now, I held my hand
over them, and the hair rose to it with a tiny cracking sound. Her hair
came to my hand, lifted towards it that unminted gold that framed her
face, and covered her ears. And for a little while it was no wonder that
I forgot about Legs and his Charlotte.
* * * * *
I suppose every one knows the sensation of being lost. You can be lost
all by yourself, as I was once, as I have said, in the western desert of
Egypt, on which occasion the bray of a donkey was to me the trumpet of
the Seraphin. That was a dreadful experience, since it implied being out
of touch with life. But I should be glad to know if there is anything
the world holds which is more enraptured than the sense of being lost
with one other person, to feel the world swim away, and be dissolved, so
that you and the comrade you are with are quite alone. To feel that
there is no existence except the existence of her who is lost with
you.... It was Helen’s hair.
‘That’s the world’s side; there’s the wonder!’ That lover understood.
Everyone saw Helen’s hair.
‘“But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious moonshine,
Come out on the other side....”’
I never could quote correctly. The point is that the beloved has another
face, the face she turns to her lover. No one else sees it; it is ‘blind
to Keats, him even.’
A moment ago I thought that no one but me must see Helen’s hair. Now let
them all see it, the waves of the sunlit sea, not breaking, unless the
break be where I put my hand an inch above them.
‘Thanks, dear,’ she said soon. ‘You brush it much better than my maid.
Now shall we talk for five minutes? Then I must go to bed.’
* * * * *
I had hideous accumulations of various fag-ends of work to do, and at
the end of the five minutes, or it might be ten, I went downstairs
again, to begin at any rate this dreadful patchwork of odds and ends. It
was still, I was almost sorry to observe, only just eleven, and since I
had with both eyes open deliberately and firmly wasted all the hours of
the day, my uneasy Conscience told me that I had better, if it was to
have the ease it craved, not think of leaving my chair for a couple of
hours at least. I argued this point with it, and lost some minutes, for
I told it that it was extremely bad for me to work at night; that it
took more out of one than work in the day; that work done under these
circumstances was never good work; that doctors recommended one never to
work at night, but go peacefully to bed before the evening
fever--whatever that might be--set in. Then there ensued a short
spirited dialogue.
‘Most sensible,’ said Conscience. ‘Give me your word that you will get
up at six to-morrow, then, and work for two hours before breakfast, and
you have my leave to go to bed now.’
‘But I shan’t wake at six,’ said I, ‘and the servants have gone to bed.’
‘I will wake you,’ said Conscience. (Conscience is quite capable of the
odious feat.)
‘But I can’t work before breakfast,’ I said. ‘It makes me feel’--I could
not think of the word for the moment--‘oh yes, faint.’
‘Well, feel faint, then,’ said Conscience.
‘But I would sooner not; it implies weakness of the heart.’
‘Not to do your work implies weakness of character.’
‘Shut up,’ said I, ‘and let me begin, then.’
And I could swear that my Conscience gave a self-satisfied chuckle.
For an hour I waded wearily, knee-deep only, so to speak, in work, like
a man who wants to swim, but has to trudge out over level sands. Most
people, I fancy, even the laziest of us, like working, when we get up to
our necks, or, better even, out of our depths, in it, but the wading is
weary work. The worst of it was that the fact that I had to wade so far
was entirely my own fault, for the whole of the last week I had never
taken the trouble to finish up any one job, and now there waited for me
several bills to pay, since a few mornings ago I had sat down to pay
bills, and had paid them all except two or three; several letters to
write, all of which had to begin either falsely (_i.e._, ‘I have just
found your letter of the 17th) or apologetically (_i.e._ ‘I haven’t
answered your letter before because----’). Then there was a
half-corrected proof of an unfinished article, badly written originally,
and, what is more, written without conviction. It was on a subject that
did not particularly interest me, and I had only written it because the
misguided editor of a magazine had offered me £25 for it, and I very
much wished to buy a seal-top spoon which cost exactly that sum, and
which I knew perfectly well I had no right to buy. So, saying to myself
that I would write this article (which I should not otherwise have
done), I had bought it, and here was the dismal price that I had to pay
for it--namely, that this wretched article was a piece of literary
dishonesty. I had to fudge and vamp over it, trying to conceal the
nakedness of the land by ornamental expressions. That was brought home
to me now. It was all bad cheap stuff, and though most of us are
continually turning out bad cheap stuff, not knowing it is bad and
cheap, such manufactures become criminal when we do know it. As long as
work is honest from the workman’s point of view, it is only his
misfortune when he does not know its valuelessness; but when he does
know its valuelessness, he sins by intention, and is a forger. I was
one, and by my forgery I had bought a seal-top that was not. I thought
that when I tacitly agreed to work for two hours to-night, my tiresome
Conscience would put its head under its wing, and leave me alone; but I
found now that it was broad awake again, and chirping like a canary.
‘What are you going to do?’ it chirped. ‘Are you going to send out a
rotten forgery which everybody who knows anything will detect? or are
you going to tear it up, and be left with a purchase that you know you
can’t really afford? Remember that you must get a new dining-room carpet
too; you promised Helen you would. Chirp, chirp, chirp!’
I am bound to say that this enraged me.
‘What’s the use of making that row?’ I said. ‘It’s you, Conscience, who
has to settle.’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ said Conscience. ‘It’s your fault; you
wouldn’t listen to me when I told you that you had no right to accept
£25 for your dreadful article.’
‘You didn’t say it so loud, then,’ said I.
‘No, but you heard all right,’ said Conscience.
‘I hardly heard,’ said I. ‘You spoke so indistinctly.’
‘Yes, but you did hear,’ it chirped, with a sort of devilish
cheerfulness. ‘You knew quite well what I meant. Now you suffer for it.
Hurrah!’
I wonder if I am cursed in this matter of Conscience beyond the majority
of mankind. Often and often (I will swear to this in the House of Lords
if necessary) my Conscience is hardly audible at all at the time when I
do anything which I ought not to do, or omit to do anything which I
ought. To continue the simile of the canary, which really fits the case,
when the actual choice comes, it is as if the canary had a thick
green-baize cover round its cage, and only hoarse and muffled notes
reach me. Very often, indeed, I am sorry to say, I don’t attend to them,
or say it is only the cat, and in consequence do what I should not. Then
the moment it is done the baize cover is whisked off, and the infernal
and cheerful chirping, or so it sounds, succeeds to the wrong choice or
the weak omission. And the burden of the chirping is always the same.
‘I told you so; I told you so. Now you are in a mess! What are you going
to do now? Chirp, chirp, chirp!’
And a hurricane of dry and deafening notes follows.
* * * * *
I sat there with this column of stupid twaddle in my hands, and
Conscience watched me with its bright bird-like eye. Much as I like
birds, I hate their eyes, because they remind me of Conscience. They
are beady and absolutely unsympathetic, frightfully quick to see, and
without a particle of pity in them. Conscience never pities one at all;
it is the foe that is of a man’s household. It always gloats over one’s
mistakes, and things that are more than mistakes, and only says:
‘Here comes the master with the whip. A new lash, I see, this time. And
what a thin shirt you have got on!’
Nor, when the whipping is over, does Conscience sympathize.
‘I told you so; I told you so,’ it says. ‘No, there is no soothing
ointment of any kind in the house. I ate it all up. Wasn’t that a
beautiful new lash?’
* * * * *
Well, I tore that dreadful nonsense up, and wrote another apologetic
letter. I am getting quite good at them. But to-morrow--this is what
makes Conscience mad--I shall tell Helen about it. The telling is not
pleasant; it never is. But as soon as Helen knows, Conscience has simply
to retire. It does not understand why it suddenly becomes so
unimportant, and that gives it a fit of impotent rage. Nor do I quite
understand, though I am nearer to the explanation than Conscience is.
But she understands. At least, I suppose so, or else she would not be
able to put the green-baize cover on again.
And then, what with apologetic letters, and the drawing of two or three
cheques, and the stupid attempts, in this matter of the dishonest
article, to produce something out of nothing, by covering up the
nothingness by more ornamental expressions, and the eventual destruction
of it all, I found that the two hours were gone, and that I had kept my
promise to the idiotic canary. It had ceased chirping from experience
when I told it I was going to confess to Helen.