is not a fairy-story. Like children, we crowd round the knees of the
wonderful teller of it, and say, ‘Is it true? Is it all true?’ And He
can’t tell lies. Sometimes, when we have a sort of moral toothache, we
sit apart, and sniff. We say that scientifically we have proved there is
no God. So said the fool in his heart. But nowadays the fools write it
down in their damned books, and correct the proofs of it, and choose the
bindings of it, and read, with gusto, the thoughtful reviews of it. And,
God forgive them, they think they are very clever people, if I may be
excused for mentioning them at all.
But fairy-stories! How surprising and entrancing are even those which
people make up and put in books, while round us every day a fairy-story
far more wonderful is being told not only for us to read, but enacted
for us to see. It is only familiarity with it which robs us of the
sense of its wonder, for imagine, if we could make ourselves ignorant
again of what happens to bulbs when we put them in the earth, how the
possibilities of flying-machines would grow flat and stale before the
opening of the daffodil. For a man’s capacity for happiness is in great
measure the same as his capacity for wonder and interest, and
considering that there is absolutely nothing round us which does not
teem with wonder if only we had the sense to see it, it argues very ill
for our----
A wild shriek from the hillside opposite (distance forty yards)
interrupted me.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ cried Helen; ‘but I cut a centipede in half. They
are going in opposite directions.’
‘Dig another hole!’ I shouted. ‘Then go back when the halves have gone
away. Yes, very distressing, but you can’t avoid everything.’
‘Murderer!’ said Helen.
This was feminine logic. I had not cut the centipede in half!
* * * * *
It was one of those golden October days of which we have now had some
half-dozen. Every night there is a little frost, so that morning both
looks and smells exquisitely clean, and it is hardly possible to regret
the turn of the year; though dahlias are blackened, the trees blaze with
copper and gold, for in this week of windless days scarce a leaf has
fallen, and the stems are as thick with foliage as they were in the
summer, and to my mind doubly beautiful. And this work of bulb-planting
seems to bridge over the winter, for we are already at work on spring.
But in November, Helen and I mean to turn our faces townwards again, for
it is possible there to be unaware of the transition to winter, which is
so patently before one’s eyes in the country, and which, with the best
will in the world, it is impossible not to find rather depressing. Some
people, I know, label the squalls of February March as execrable, and
flee the country then. But we both love them. These are the last
despairing efforts of winter. His hand is already loosed from the earth;
he strikes wildly, knowing that there are but few blows left in him. But
in the autumn he is gaining strength every day: it is life whose hold is
being loosed. And that is not exhilarating to watch. True, it is only a
mimic death-bed, but personally we don’t want to sit by the bedside. In
London there is no bedside. The shorter the day, the earlier the lamps
are lit. Those avenues of shining eyes, which are not shocked whatever
they see.... And the fogs--the mysterious fogs! I suppose we are
Cockneys.
* * * * *
Helen gave out first in the matter of bulbs, and came and sat by me.
‘How very dirty you are!’ she said. ‘And have you been planting bulbs
with your nose?’
‘Not at present. But it tickled, and so I rubbed it.’
‘Well, let’s stop now. I want to go for a walk. My back aches with
bending, and though I haven’t got toothache, I feel as if I might have,
and the kitchen-maid has given notice, and I don’t think anybody loves
me, and if Legs marries that awful girl, I will never speak to you
again. And they are coming to dinner to-night! I pray Heaven that Legs
may miss his train, and not get here till late.’
‘So do I. Yes; let’s go for a real tramp on the downs. Hadn’t I better
go and wash my face first?’
‘Oh no; what does it matter? But are you sure you don’t want to go on
bulbing?’
‘Quite sure. I think we won’t go by the road, do you know. We can strike
across the meadows and up the beacon.’
Helen gave a little purr--a querulous rumble of the throat.
‘I have the blues,’ she said, with great distinctness. ‘I was as happy
as possible till ten minutes ago, and then they came on like--like a
thunderstorm. Everything ached. I groaned aloud: my mind hurt me like
lumbago. It hurts still. Oh, do rub something on it.’
That is one of the heavenly things about Helen. If she ‘feels bad,’ she
comes and tells me about it like a child. She scolds me for all sorts of
things of which I am perfectly innocent, because she knows I don’t mind
one scrap (I love it, really, but I don’t tell her that), and it makes
her feel better. She scolded now, even when we had passed the
water-meadow and began a really steep ascent of the flanking hills.
‘I knew the kitchen-maid wouldn’t stop,’ she said, ‘because those London
girls hate the country. So do I. And it was all your fault. You engaged
her; I had nothing to do with it. And we never _had_ such a
kitchen-maid. She cooks better than the cook, and does everybody else’s
work as well. You might have known she wouldn’t stand the country.’
‘Go on,’ said I. ‘My fault entirely. So is the toothache, isn’t it?’
‘I haven’t got one, but I might have. And that’s your fault, too. I
wanted to go to the dentist as I passed through London, and you
persuaded me to come down here without stopping. It did ache just
then--it did.’
The hill got rather steeper.
‘Go on,’ said I. ‘How slowly you walk!’
‘Yes, but I have to do all the talking. You have no conversation. Oh
dear, what a devil I am! Aren’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘There! I told you nobody loved me. Oh, look! we are going to have a
real red sunset. All the hills are getting molten, as if they were
red-hot and glowing.’
She was feeling a little better--not much, but a little. We had come up
the two hundred feet of steep down-side as if we had been storming a
breach. To walk very fast up a hill makes all proper people feel better,
unless they have heart disease, in which case they die, and so, we hope,
feel better also. But for those who have not heart disease, and want to
feel better, the prescription is confidently recommended.
‘And then that awful girl!’ she went on. ‘You insisted on being
neighbourly, as you call it, with the Ampses, and this is the result.’
‘There has been none at present.’
‘No; but you tell me to ask the family to dinner on the very day that
Legs comes down. Oh dear, what a heavenly evening! I should so enjoy it
if everything wasn’t wrong. Look at the sky! Fifty thousand little pink,
fluffy angels floating about in it! Do you want to go right to the top
of the hill?’
‘Yes, right to the top. Then I shall begin to answer you back.’
Helen laughed.
‘Oh no, don’t,’ she said. ‘It is no fun plaguing you if you dispute my
facts. So tell me quickly: isn’t everything your fault, and not mine?
Please pull me, if you intend to go that pace.’
So I pulled her, she holding the end of my stick, and we arrived at the
very top of all. Sunset was below us, evening stars were above us, and
on the huge expanse of down there was no one else. It was the loneliness
I love.
‘The devil has gone,’ she said, after a while. ‘You are rather nice to
me. And I don’t think I have toothache, and--well, you thought that
Charlotte was a little Ampsy before I did. And even if nobody loves
me--oh, how dirty your nose is!’
That was true, anyhow.
An extraordinary phenomenon in country towns is that, though nobody has
anything to do, everyone feels extremely busy; whereas in town, though
you have got an enormous deal to do, you never feel busy at all, and
can, without fail, find time for anything else. I think there must be
some microbe which cannot live in London, but thrives elsewhere, which
produces the illusion of being rushed. Personally, I know it well: it is
not an old enemy of mine, nor is it an old friend, but it is a pleasant
old humbug, which I am afraid I rather encourage. This evening, for
instance, when I went to my room after tea, I encouraged it, and argued
that one never had a moment to oneself. I had two hours in front of me
now, as a matter of fact, in which I should be undisturbed; but the Old
Humbug said that it was all very well to think about the future. All he
knew was that he--that is, I--had been rushed--yes, rushed--all day and
all yesterday, and ever since we came down to this dear, sleepy old
town. To-day was Tuesday, and people were coming to dinner. We had gone
out to lunch yesterday, and had dined out twice last week. Also, there
was the garden to attend to, and a little golf (almost every day, as a
matter of fact) was necessary for the health, and what with letters to
write and cigarettes to smoke, and the Meistersinger overture to learn,
in order to play it with Legs, I was a victim of this hurrying, bustling
mode of life, which in a generation or so more would assuredly send
everybody off their heads.
I made myself quite comfortable in my chair, and proceeded to think
about it seriously, because I had two hours in front of me. It was all
quite true (I was encouraging the Old Humbug, you will understand), and
the modern mode of life was insane. London, anyhow, was insane, and in a
little while I should probably get to agree with the Old Humbug that I
was rushed and driven in the country also. But, to encourage credulity,
I took London first. There one certainly was busy--all the hours, that
is to say, of a day that began quite early and ended next morning were
full, and I reconstructed one such as I often spend, and hope to spend
many times more. I do not give it, because it seems to me the least
edifying, and all stern moralists (the Old Humbug is an awfully stern
moralist) would--as, indeed, they have done--shake their heads over it,
and say, ‘To what purpose?’ I will tell you that afterwards.
I was called, let me say, at half-past seven, and after a few
incredulous groans got up. I shaved, washed a little--not much, for
reasons that will appear--drank some tea, and in a quarter of an hour
was wildly bicycling towards the Park. When things flourished very much,
and money flowed, Helen and I rode champing steeds; but just now things
were what is called fluctuating, and I rode a bicycle, and she stayed
in bed. An hour and a half of frantic pedalling on a hot June morning
produces excellent physical results; and at half-past nine I was in the
swimming-bath at the Bath Club, where I became cool and clean. I changed
into another suit of flannels there, rode sedately home, and had
breakfast at precisely a quarter-past ten. By eleven I had eaten
breakfast, read the _Daily Mail_, and smoked a cigarette, and was about
to spend a quiet, studious morning until half-past one (for we were
lunching out at two), when Helen came in.
‘Do come to Lord’s,’ she said; ‘it’s Gentlemen and Players, and we can
sit there till lunch. We can’t go this afternoon, and you are playing
golf at Woking to-morrow.’
‘I can’t. Not time.’
‘Oh, just this once.’
Just this once, then, we went. It was too heavenly, and we were late for
lunch.
It was one of the rather long lunches, and it was nearly four when we
left the house. Then, as we had neither of us seen the Sargents at the
Academy, we went there, since the afternoon was already gone, and got
home about six; and as we had been given a box at the opera for
‘Tristan,’ which began at half-past seven, it was necessary to dine at
half-past six--a terrible hour, but true. At the opera Legs picked Helen
up to go to a ball, and I went home to answer my morning’s post, which I
had not yet read.
But, it will be objected, Gentlemen and Players, and the one necessary
visit to the Academy, and ‘Tristan’ does not occur every day. Quite
true; but something else always does, and the Old Humbug, who had got
quite large and important during this short survey, said in those
canting tones which I knew so well: ‘You are wasting your life over this
insensate rush and hurry. And you do no better down here. What have you
done to-day? Planted bulbs, and written two or three pages of your silly
book. What will you do to-morrow? You won’t even write your silly book,
because you are going to play golf with Legs in the morning, and you say
you can’t work after lunch. And the days will make themselves into
months, and the months into years’ (here he dropped into poetry), ‘and
you will ever be a name of scorn--at least, you would if ten minutes
after you were dead anybody remembered what your name was. But you will
have gone to your account.’
Well, I join issue with the Old Humbug over this. For my part, I assert
that it was perfectly right for me to go to the Gentlemen and Players,
and to the opera, and to plant bulbs, and to play golf with Legs
to-morrow morning if fine. And as for his objection to what he calls
‘rush,’ why, I fling it in his face, since I must rush. If I set apart a
certain time every day for private meditation, I should be simply bored.
I should get--I suppose this must be the proposed practical effect of
the plan--no great and ennobling thoughts out of my solitary
meditations, and instead of feeling that I had spent the morning to some
serious purpose, I should feel, and I think rightly, that I had merely
wasted it. But if I have planted bulbs all morning, I haven’t wasted it.
I will assert that on the Day of Judgment; for I have been busy walking
along the path I feel sure I was meant to walk on. There are a thousand
other paths all leading to the central and celestial light, and they
are for other people to walk on. It would, of course, be a terrible
waste of time for one who by nature was a meditative recluse to go to
the match between the Gentlemen and Players, or for a deaf man to go to
‘Tristan,’ or for a blind one to lie on his back and look at the
filtering sunlight between the leaves of beech-trees in June. But the
point for everybody is to get into touch with life as continually as he
can, and at as many points as he can. This is gospel. I would I had the
palate of a wine-taster to get into touch with life there; the
prehensile toe and sense of balance of a tight-rope walker to get into
touch there, the mathematical head of the astronomer to learn the orbit
of a star that has never been seen, but only conjectured; or I wish very
much indeed that I had the missionary spirit. Indeed, then I would go to
the nearest cannibal islands and (probably a good thing, too) be
cheerfully devoured; or, again, if I had it in a lesser degree, I would
go and teach in the Sunday-school, and have a class for boys in the
evening. I did try the Sunday-school when first I lived here, and for
four unhallowed Sundays I passed a feverish hour surrounded by mystified
infants and intolerable lithographs. You never saw such a failure as I
was: I dreaded those hours so much that I thought my reason would be
unhinged. And the children used to regard me, I am sure, as they would
have regarded some queer, though harmless, creature of the menagerie. I
couldn’t do that sort of thing.
* * * * *
I neither made them happy nor could I teach them anything. That latter
was quite proved when, on the Sunday succeeding my fourth lesson, an
Archdeacon came round and examined all the classes in turn. I think I
shall never get over the nightmare horror of that scrutiny when he sat
in my arm-chair at the desk, and I, the trembling instructor, stood by
the side while he asked my idiot flock who Adam and Eve and Cain and
Abel ware, and other really elementary things. One child said that Eve
was God’s wife, and I wished the earth might open and swallow me up.
Then he came to the Catechism, and it really seemed as if nobody knew
his own name. And it was for that nightmare that I had spent four
feverish Sunday afternoons and a parody of days between, for every
moment Sunday was coming nearer.
No; I give more happiness to Legs by being soundly beaten by him at
golf, or by wasting (so says the Old Humbug) a morning in taking Helen
up to Lord’s to see the Gentlemen and Players. Also--I hasten to
forestall criticism--I like it much better myself; and though you may,
if you like, call it selfish, I hereby state that to like doing anything
is a very good and Christian reason for doing it. Behold the gauntlet!
For we poor folk who really cannot teach in Sunday-schools, and are not
employed in making discoveries which will alleviate painful diseases,
and do not serve our constituency or our King, and sneakingly throw
pamphlets about the Education Bill into the fire without reading them,
because we know we don’t actually care one pin what happens, and are in
every single respect quite unsatisfactory and useless and unornamental,
have yet, somehow (there can be no doubt of this), to add if we can to
the happiness, anyhow, of those dear folk among whom our lot has been so
graciously cast. We have no great gifts of any description; we are
neither wise nor witty, and there has been only one talent given us,
which is the power of enjoyment. Well, that is a very little one, you
may say, and a very selfish one to cultivate, but if we have nothing
else at all, had we not better try to make some use of that?
For the fact remains that it can be made some use of. Every one feels
better for seeing one of these drones, who are neither soldiers, nor
sailors, nor politicians, nor teachers, enjoy himself. Enjoyment in the
air is like oxygen in the air: it quickens everybody, and in its way
makes them happier. The poor drones can neither teach nor fight, nor
make anybody good, but they can in their humdrum way make people a
little more cheerful for a few minutes. For they have--this is what I
mean by drones--a happy temperament, and as they are no good at all in
any other direction, it is indeed time that they should be done to
death by the workers of the hive if they do not exert themselves in the
mere exercise of their temperament. And just as the drone of the hive
lives immersed in the honey of his flowers and in the garnered stuff
that the workers have brought home, so the drone man must continue to
take active and continual pleasure in all the delightful things of this
world. He must pounce on enjoyment with eager zeal, and glut himself on
it till he reels with the stupefaction of pleasure; he must keep himself
keen and alert for the smallest humorous or engrossing detail that is
within his horizons: it is shameful if he does not go to bed every night
tired with his own laughter and enjoyment. And woe to him if he invests
his pleasures with the serious garb of duty! The leader of the
delectable life who says that he plays golf because he finds exercise so
important for his health, or who sits out all afternoon to watch other
people playing other games, and explains that his doctor (his doctor,
forsooth!) tells him to have plenty of fresh air, or who drinks his
delicious wine and says that it is good for his digestion, is a mere
scampish hypocrite. He plays games because they are such fun; he
watches other people play because it amuses him; he drinks wine because
it tastes so nice.
And he must never falter on his primrose path; the high gods have given
him but one little talent, and all that is asked of him is that he
should enjoy life enormously. He has got to do that, then. The soldier
and sailor may not, perhaps, enjoy life, but they are useful in other
ways. The drone is only useful in this one. He must never remit his
efforts, and must never want to; he must ‘rush,’ as the Old Humbug said,
all the time, for if he ceases to rush he ceases to justify his
existence at all. And--a heavenly destiny, one, too, beyond all desert
of his--he does, if he is at all a conscientious drone, make other
people a shade more cheerfully disposed than they would otherwise have
been.
This breathless dissertation on drones requires at this point, as
printers say, ‘paragraphing.’ In other words, I began to talk about one
thing, and without pause talked about another. It was really the fault
of the Old Humbug, who said that I wasted those days in which I didn’t
do something for somebody. I then justified my position on those days by
pleading the desire to be a drone--a life which, as I have sketched it
out, seems to me to be wholly admirable. I wish to Heaven I could be in
the least like those adorable people. Misbegotten industry stands in my
way, and a deep-rooted, but equally misbegotten, idea that if I am very
industrious I shall one day write a good story. Also, I have not the
drone temperament necessary for dronage. I am not, in fact, any longer
defending myself, but extolling other people.
* * * * *
Loafers there are in plenty in this world, but personally I have no use
for them. They lead the same external lives as the lover of life leads,
but how different is the spirit that animates them! The loafer may have
been side by side with the life-loving drone all day, at the same
parties, at the same games, at the same music, but the one goes to all
these things in order to get through the hours without boredom, while
the other wishes the hours infinitely multiplied so that he might go to
more. The one sucks enjoyment of but a stupefied sort from them; the
other catches the iridescent balls and bubbles of joy that are cast like
sea-spray over the tides of time, only to throw out double of what he
has received. He is like some joyful juggler: a stream of objects pours
into the air from his flashing hands; he catches them and hurls them
into the air again, so that the eye cannot follow the procession of
flying joys. And at the end, at the close of each day, he stands still
for a moment, his hands full of them, his memory stored with them, eager
for the next day.
How different is the loafer! Have you ever seen the chameleon feed on
flies? It is just so that the loafer, who wants only to get through the
hours, feeds on the simple, silly joys of life. In expression the
chameleon is like a tired old gentleman with the face-ache, though the
impression of face-ache is chiefly produced by cheeks swollen in other
ways, for he rolls up his tongue in a ball in his mouth when he is going
to feed. Then, with an expression of bored senility, he moves very
cautiously to where a fly is sitting. When he is within range, he shoots
out his tongue, and the fly sticks to the adhesive tip of it. There is a
slight swallowing motion, and the chameleon again rolls about his greasy
eye, looking for the next victim. The loafer, in a metaphysical sense,
has got just such an adhesive tongue as the chameleon. He puts it out,
and pleasures stick to it like postage stamps. Then he swallows them.
Observe, too, when he has to make occupations for himself, how heavily,
and stupidly he passes the hours! He will read the morning paper till
midday, then totter out into his garden, sadly remove one weed from the
path, and totter back to the house to throw it in the fire. Then he will
re-read a page of his paper, and write an unnecessary note with
unnecessary care, probably wiping his pen afterwards. It will then be
lunch-time. How different would the drone’s morning have been! Even if
he had been compelled to spend it on the platform of Clapham Junction,
he would have constructed some ‘dome in air’ out of that depressing
suburb. The flashing trains would have allured him (especially the
boat-trains), and his mind would have gone long journeys to the sunny
South. He would have built romance round the signals, and found a
fairy-tale in the advertisements.
* * * * *
And what is the practical side of all this? for is it not temperament
which makes the magic of these wonderful persons, and temperament is a
thing which is supposed to be quite outside the power of its possessor
to alter or amend?