magic would bungle terribly if we attempted to rival the flashing hands
of the true conjurer. I do not suppose, at any rate, that it is worth
while for the meditative recluse to spend his days and nights at festive
gatherings, since he will never enjoy them himself, and, what is more
important, he will, in his small way, eclipse the gaiety of those
parties on which he sheds the gloom of his depressing countenance. Yet,
since I believe with my whole heart that joy and simple pleasure, so
long as they hurt nobody, are things wholly and entirely good, it
behoves every one to look sedulously in the garden of his mind to see
whether he cannot find there a few little seedlings of that species of
temperament which I have tried to indicate. His garden may be the most
strenuous and improving plot--a regular arboretum of high aspirations
and earnest endeavours with the most beautiful gravel paths of cardinal
virtues leading by the thickets and shrubberies of spiritual strivings,
but, should he happen to find a few of these seedlings, and be able to
raise them, they will not spoil the effect of the wholly admirable grove
of moral purpose. To be quite candid, I think a little colour ‘sets
off,’ as they say, the grandeur of high endeavour. It--well, it
brightens it up.
NOVEMBER
‘I’ remarked Helen, ‘am the rose of Sharon, _and_ the lily of the
valley.’
She laid great stress on the ‘and,’ which gave a perfectly new
significance to the verse.
‘The French for lily of the valley is _muguet_,’ said Legs, with an
intolerably superior air.
‘Oh, don’t show off!’ said she. ‘The great thing in walking along a rail
is to keep your balance.’
‘Through the looking-glass,’ said I. ‘Upon which the White Knight fell
head foremost into a hole----’
‘And kept on saying “Plenty of practice,”’ said Legs.
‘It’s easier if you wave your arms,’ said she. ‘Oh, there’s a train
coming. Where’s the gum?’
Legs had the gum--a small penny bottle--and Helen hastily gummed a
penny to the rail, and we all retired to the side of the line.
If you merely lay a penny on the rail, the chances are that the first
wheel that goes over it causes it to jump, and it falls off, whereas if
you gum it----
There was a wild maniac shriek from the engine, suddenly dropping an
octave as it passed us, and the huge train, towering high above us,
thundered by with rattle of wheels and the throbbing oscillation of very
high speed. A dozen bits of paper came trundling and dancing after it.
The rear of the van telescoped itself into a tiny square, and the signal
just above us, which had been down to let the train pass, shot up a
warning, right-angled arm.
‘Oh, well over sixty,’ said Legs, with deep appreciation, ‘and there’s
the penny sitting as tight as, as--I don’t know. Lord, how hot!’
The penny had already been under half the wheels of four trains, and was
so flattened that it was of knife-edge sharpness.
‘If you stropped it a little, you could shave with it,’ said Helen.
‘What babies you are!’
Legs was already busy on the up-line, arranging two pins crossways on
the gummed rail, so that they should be flattened and welded together,
making an entrancing object closely resembling a pair of scissors.
‘The up-train will be through in five minutes,’ he said. ‘Chuck me the
penny, Helen.’
I had another object of interest--namely, a threepenny piece with a hole
in it. I had tied a long string to this, the far end of which I held in
my hand. The reason for this was that the coin was beginning to crack,
but it would stand a wheel or two more, though it was already bigger
than a sixpence; after a wheel or two I could pull it away.
‘Gum!’ said I.
We moved to the far side of the up-line, and waited. Soon from the
tunnel a hundred yards below came a wreath of smoke, and the
black-fronted engine raced towards us. Everything went right on that
divine afternoon, and after four wheels had passed I jerked my
threepenny piece away. The scissors were adorable also, and it would be
scarcely necessary to strop the penny. Of course, we made a _cache_ of
these objects, burying them in a small tin box with the addition of a
piece of paper recording our names, weights, and ages. Legs also wrote a
short confession of how he murdered his two infant children, and hid the
bodies in a bramble-bush ten paces from the _cache_. There was no such
bramble-bush really, which would make it more puzzling to the inquiring
mind. He represented himself as being perfectly impenitent, and ready to
commit similar crimes should opportunity occur. He signed it, Benjamin
Yates of 21A, Park Lane, W. Then we went home to tea.
* * * * *
Legs had been in for his Foreign Office examination, and had come down
to spend the next two days with us, before we all moved up to town;
also, to our deep-felt and secret joy, he had shown no desire to visit
the Ampses, or talk any more German with Charlotte. The process of
disillusionment began, I think, on the evening in October when he was
here last, and the Ampses dined with us; for I saw him overhear Mrs.
Amps ask Helen who ‘was the heir to all our beautiful property.’ At that
moment I almost pitied Mrs. Amps. She had begun by making jam, but I
felt that she had gone on to cook Charlotte’s goose. Legs, anyhow,
stopped in the middle of a sentence, and took a couple of seconds to
recover himself. I am sure I don’t wonder. You require to recuperate
after that sort of remark. I felt that I knew all about Mrs. Amps when
she asked that simple question. I felt as if I had known her parents and
grandparents, and could prophesy about her children and grandchildren;
and Legs’ eyes, which till that moment had been quite shut, began to
open, just to blink.
Next day, however, he lunched with them. What happened I do not know,
since he has not told me; but he was rather silent in the evening, ate
little, but drank four glasses of port after dinner. I think the
instinct of the drowning of care was there, and he was slightly cynical
and Byronic afterwards. I love Legs.
I hasten to add, lest I may appear unfeeling, that Charlotte has for the
last week or two been kind and encouraging to another young man, who is
the heir to far more beautiful property. I saw him at the golf-links
yesterday in a bunker. He was arranging her hands so as to grasp her
niblick properly. They seemed to want a great deal of arranging.
By-and-by they allowed my opponent and me to pass. Charlotte seemed not
to recognize me, or else she was really so much employed in making her
hat stay on that she did not see me. I mentioned, however, to Legs that
I had seen her, but that she had not seen me. It seemed to interest him
very little.
But this morning, as Legs and I played golf over the grey back of the
huge down that rises from our happy valley, it seemed a sheer insanity
that we should all go up to London the next day, so blithe was the air,
so invigorating to the whole sense. The short, springy turf seemed to
put its own vitality into one’s feet; they were shot forward
automatically without conscious effort. And--ah, the rapture!--(it
occurred more frequently to Legs than to me) of seeing a clean white
ball scud for a hundred yards or so low over the ground, and then rise
swallow-like against the ineffable blue! Golfers, I am told, reck
nothing of their surroundings, provided only they drive far, approach
dead, and hole their puts; and so I must conclude--indeed, I conclude
it for other reasons--that I am no golfer. But I am an epicure in my
surroundings when I go a-golfing, and though the grey dunes and sandy
hollows of the seaside course are most to my mind, I place very near
those perfect joys the hugeness of scale which you get only on the
uplands. To-day no whiff of vapour flecked the whole field of the
shining heavens, and the country, grey and green, with fire of autumn
beech-wood here and there, stretched map-like round us. But to the west
the view was even more stirring to that desire of the infinite which
lies so close to the heart of man. There fold after fold of downs, the
knitted muscles of the huge, kind earth lay in unending interlacement.
And it was all empty. There were no trees, no lines of hedgerows to
break the void, and lend a scale to the eye. From the immediate green
foreground slope after slope melted into grey, and from grey to the blue
of distance, which fused itself into the tender azure of the sky’s
horizon, so that the line between earth and air indistinguishable. It
was as empty us the desert, yet one knew that from every inch of it a
thousand lives rejoiced in the sun of November. Yes, even the knowledge
that there would be but few more of such hours before winter hurled its
armoury of squalls on to the earth added, perhaps, to their joy. None
could have expected such a November as has been ours. We have snatched
it from winter; it is our possession.
Yet the colour of the grass, no less than the underlying keenness of the
air, savour of the sunless months. It is scarcely green; it has been
bleached by the torrid months, and Nature is too wise to let it shine
forth in a fresh coat of colour when so soon it will sleep, waiting for
the spring. High up in the liquid blue, too, of the sky there is the
sparkle of frost, for all the warm strength of the sunlight. It is not
summer that floats above our heads, soon to descend earthwards, but the
frost and cold. Yet they bless the Lord also.
But though I feel all this, feel it in every bone and fibre of my body,
I know that I feel it more when I am doing something else--as, for
instance, playing golf. I think it must be that one pleasure quickens
others. The fact of attempting to keep one’s eye on the ball as one
hits it makes the whole of one’s perceptions more alert. If I was taking
a solitary walk here, with no occupation except that of walking, I know
quite well that I should not be conscious of the same rapturous
well-being as I am now, when the object of my walk is to hit a small
piece of indiarubber for three or four miles, hitting it, too, as seldom
as possible. So it is not the mere hitting it that gives rapture, else
the rapture would be increased by the frequency of the operation. Oh, I
have been talking on the stroke! This will never do. But it was my own
stroke, and Hampshire flew about in fids in consequence.
This was at the twelfth hole, and it made the match square. Legs, I need
hardly remark, was playing a pitiful game for him. But on the
moment--this is one of the inexplicable things about those foolish
people who play games--- my whole mood changed. I cared no more at all
for the empty, glorious downs. I did not mind whether the grass was
blue, or grey, or green, or magenta. I saw no more flaring beech-woods,
no more mapped counties. There was one desire only in the entire
contents of my soul, and that was to beat Legs. I did not feel as if I
even wanted anything so much as that, and if Mephistopheles had appeared
at that moment to bargain for my salvation as the price of my victory, I
should have signed in my blood or any other blood that was handy. But
Mephistopheles was probably otherwise engaged. At any rate, after being
still all square at the seventeenth, I drove into a silly irrational
bunker that ought never to have been there at the eighteenth. I took
three to get out. But we had a heavenly morning. If only ... well, well.
And Legs told Helen that he only just won, because he was completely off
his game! The tongue is an unruly member. Mine is. Had I won, I should
have certainly told Helen that Legs played a magnificent game and I had
only just won. That sounds more generous than his remark, but if you
think it over, you will see that it comes to exactly the same thing.
Yes; it seems an insanity to leave the country just now, especially
since there is no earthly reason for our doing so. Divine things, it is
true, are going on in town, for our matchless Isolde is conducting
symphony concerts, and a perfect constellation of evening stars are
singing together at the opera; but, after all, Legs and I play the
‘Meistersinger’ overture arranged for four hands on the piano; while,
for the rich soup of Sloane Street mud and the vapour-ridden sky, we
have here the turf of the downland and the ineffable blue. In fact, I am
sorry to go, but should be rather disappointed if I was told that I was
not going. Helen characterizes this state of mind as feeble, which it
undoubtedly is, and says that she is perfectly willing either to go
to-morrow or to stop on another week, if I will only make up my mind
which I want to do. But there is the whole difficulty: I haven’t the
slightest idea which I want to do. You might as well say to a dog which
is being called from opposite quarters by two beloved voices: ‘Only make
up your mind which of us you like best.’ If it knew, the question would
be solved.
Well, the question was solved by tossing up, and then, of course, doing
the opposite to what we had decided the arbitrament of the coin should
indicate. If it was heads, we were to stop in the country; and since it
was heads, that helped us to decide that we would go to town. That, too,
may seem a feeble proceeding, but I do not think it really is. To do
anything as irrational as tossing causes the mind to revolt from the
absurdity of abiding by the result. The consequence is that a weighty
factor for doing what the coin did not indicate is supplied; for you
never toss unless you are quite unable to decide.
So for the last afternoon the garden claimed me, for not only is the
garden the symbol and embodiment of the country, but to me it is a sort
of diary almost, since the manual acts of planting and tending have got
so interwoven with that which made one’s mind busy while the hands were
thus occupied that the sight of this plant or that, of a new trellis, or
the stacked sticks of the summer’s sweet-peas, are, when one looks at
them as now, retrospectively, on the eve of departure, retranslated
back, as are the records of a phonograph, into the memories that have
been pricked and stamped into them. All I see--croquet hoops,
flower-beds--without ceasing to be themselves, have all become a secret
cipher. By some mysterious alchemy, something of oneself has passed into
them. Secret fibres of soul-stuff are woven into them. Through the touch
of the hands that tended them, something from the being of that which
directed those hands has entered into their life, so that next year, it
may be, some regret belonging to an autumn day will flower in the
daffodils of our planting. Hope, I am sure, will flower too; and with
how vivid a wave of memory do I know what silent resolve went into the
cutting back of that Gloire de Dijon! Thus, when in June its fragrance
streams in the air, one must trust that some fragrance not its own, but
of a fruit-bearing effort, will be spread about the garden.
There, for instance, are the croquet-hoops still standing, though it
must be a month since we had played. A few withered leaves of the plane
have drifted against the wires, and the worms have been busy on the
neglected lawn, that speaks only of November. But that corner hoop has a
significance beyond paint and wire. It is the record of the telegram
that came out to me one morning in late September which I showed Legs.
After that we abandoned the game, and went to the house. It may have
more for us yet, that corner hoop--more, I mean, than that memory of
which I have spoken. Joy or sorrow may be so keen, so poignant on some
day yet hid behind the veil of the future, when I shall be looking at
it, that till the day of my death it will never again be seen by my
mortal eye without rousing an immortal and imperishable memory. It is
thus, in a manner antimaterialistic, so to speak, that men, material
things, are woven into the psychical web of life, so that, almost before
the eye has seen them, they have sent the message of their secret
significance to the brain.
Everywhere, wherever I look, the tangle of these subtle threads is
spread, even as on summer dawns the myriad spinning of gossamer makes
network on the grass, so that each is crossed and intertwined with a
woof of others. There is the bank where I lay all one hot July day doing
nothing, thinking nothing, just lapped in the tide of living things.
That has gone home. That bank and the hours I passed there are part of
me now, even as I feel that I am part of it, and I have but to look at
it now to bask again in the absorbing stupor of the midsummer. There, in
its blades of grass and shadowed turf, is written my doing for the day.
The bank holds it in kind, safe keeping, so that when God inquires of me
what I have done with that day that He gave me, the bank will be able to
answer for me. Nor does it tell my secret to the croquet-hoop that holds
another, nor to the clematis that on that day was a heaven full of
purple stars spread over the trellis. There was nothing in all the
treasure of the summer so beautiful, so triumphant as that; but what to
me now is the memory of the clematis? The memory of a friendship that is
over. At least, I was looking at it when I know that somebody I had
loved and trusted was neither trustworthy nor lovable. It was as if a
friend had pushed back the carpet from the boards of the room where he
and I had so often been merry and intimate together, and showed me, with
a sort of secret hideous glee, that a sewer flowed beneath the floor.
Poor clematis! it is sick at heart. Its thin, bare stalk shivers
mournfully as this golden afternoon begins to turn a little grey with
the chill wind of evening.
Ah, if only he had said he was sorry! If only he had said that he knew
it was wrong, but that the flesh was weak! If only he had even
contemplated the step, which to some extent undoes the wrong that has
been done, I do not think the clematis would have shed a single one of
its purple stars. All of us, saints or sinners, do dreadful things, the
memory of which is sufficient to make us long to sink into the earth for
shame. But he only smiled behind his hand, and with whispered gusto told
me about it, licking the chops of memory. It is _that_ which matters.
* * * * *
That corner of the garden had delayed me long, and it was already
getting dark when I had gathered up and fingered the gossamer threads
that lay so thickly down the border that led to the gate from which
descend the steps of the rose-garden. There were so many messages there.
The bare stalks of phloxes and campanulas, Oriental poppies and
hollyhocks, Japanese anemone and iris--all had something to say. Some
memories were a little vague, faint, and dim even as the odour of the
phloxes; some were tall and resplendent like the hollyhocks; some were
vivid as the poppies. And then I went through the gate of the
rose-garden and stood there. There was nothing there but the rose-trees;
there was no one there but Helen.
* * * * *
So the tale of the garden was told, and by the time it was finished dusk
had begun to deepen, and cheerful beckoning lights were gleaming from
the house. It was time to go in to take up, and with what love and
alacrity, the pleasant hour of the present again; for it is not ever
good to linger too long over memories, or for however short a time to
indulge in regrets, unless those regrets are to be built into the fabric
of the present, making it stronger and more courageous. All other
regrets, all other regarding of the past, which says, ‘It is past; it is
irretrievably done,’ is enervating and poisonous, and but paralyzes our
energies. Indeed, it is better not to be sorry at all for the unwise,
unkind, and mistaken things we have done if our sorrow tends to unfit
us for doing better in the future.
But just as I crossed the lawn, going towards the house, another memory
started up out of the dusk so clearly that I almost thought that I heard
my name called from the garden, and almost expected, when I got indoors,
to hear again the sound of shuffling, unshod feet on the stairs. The
memory of that mysterious midnight hour, though I have not spoken of it
again, is seldom out of my thoughts. It does not sit, so to speak, in
the front row, but in the dimness that lies at the back of one’s mind,
out of which come those vague vapours which are, if they have body
enough, eventually condensed into thought, just as out of thought is
coined speech and action. There in that dark kitchen of the mind I know
that the thought of that night has ever been simmering on the fire.
Something within me is not content with the fact that even at the moment
that the voice cried from the garden, at the moment when Legs saw the
white face smiling at him, that dear soul passed to the other side.
There is more to come yet. Else--here is the vapour taking the shape of
thought at last--else why did Legs, who scarcely knew her, receive that
warning? No echo of any memory of that night, strangely also, has ever
come back to him. He knows no more about it now than he did the next
morning, when he asked me if I had been sitting up late talking.
I have told Helen all about it; I have told her too--for there is
nothing so wild and fantastical that I would not tell it her--that there
is some uneasy guest sitting at my hearth who stays in the shadow, so
that I cannot see his face. And she answered with a serenity that was
almost reassuring, saying that, if something more was coming, there was
still, whatever it was, nothing to fear; if otherwise, the uneasy guest
was moonshine of the imagination. That seems to cover the whole ground.
But the fact is that I am afraid of my fear--a thing for which it is
idle to try to find excuses.
* * * * *
We are leaving quite early to-morrow morning, so, when I entered the
house that evening after the tour of the garden, I had definitely
finished with the country for some weeks to come. So, too, had Helen
and Legs, for tea had already gone into the drawing-room. And even as I
locked the garden-door behind me, I heard a sudden gust of wind come and
shake the panes, as if this calm, golden day had been sent just for us,
and that the moment we had finished with it the winds, overdue, but
kindly waiting for us, began to drive their cloud-flocks out of the
south-west. Nor was the coming of the rain long delayed. Even while we
sat at tea, a sheet of it was flung with a sudden wild tattoo against
the panes, and there hissed on to the logs of the open hearth a few
stray drops. Legs paused, with his mouth full of crumpet.
‘It makes me feel twice as comfortable as I was before,’ he said. ‘It
must be so beastly out of doors.’
Legs had just uttered this thoroughly Lucretian sentiment, when--
The door opened, and Mr. Holmes was announced. I have refrained from
mentioning Mr. Holmes before because I expected he would come in about
now, big with purpose. He is a kind little gentleman, about forty-five
years old, who lives with his sister, and does not do anything
whatever. He is generally known as the Bun-hander, because no tea-party
has ever been known to take place for miles round at which Mr. Holmes
was not handing refreshments to the ladies. That is his strength, his
forte. His weakness is just as amiable--though, perhaps, hardly so
useful--for his weakness is Rank.
He constantly comes to see Helen--about once a fortnight, that is to say
(for in the autumn he is very busy going to tea-parties)--for the
reason, so Legs and I believe, that she is the daughter of the younger
son of a peer. Helen will have none of this, and maintains that he comes
to see her for Herself. Personally, I can behave beautifully when Mr.
Holmes finds Helen and me alone, but I am rather nervous if Legs happens
to be in the room, for he is quite unable to take his eyes off Mr.
Holmes, but stares at him in a sort of stupor of wonderment. Once (that
is a year ago now) he left the room very suddenly. Choking and muffled
sounds were heard from the hall and the stamping of feet. Helen and I
talked very loud to overscore this, and I trust Mr. Holmes did not
hear. But when Legs is there, I am afraid (it is a sort of nightmare)
that I shall be overtaken, too, with helpless giggling. If I begin,
Helen will go off, and I can imagine no way of satisfactorily
terminating the interview. Because if once I began laughing at Mr.
Holmes, I do not see how I could ever stop. His appearance, his voice,
his conversation, are all quite inimitable.