to be of the same quality as the blue. The same fire which strikes to
the south will indubitably strike to all other points of the compass,
and when X is wheeled north, he will not see the same green as Y sees
there. He saw it through the alchemy of his own mind; it will be green,
but nobody else’s green. Or if it is, he has no individuality to speak
of. At least he belongs to a type that sees everything through the eyes
of others. That is generally labelled conventional, and there seems no
reason to change the name.
How I laboured during those last ten days of January, and how little
result there seems to be! Only--I console myself with this--the real
labour of writing does not chiefly consist in the effort of putting
things down, but in the moral effort of rejecting them. There is nothing
easier than to fill pages and pages with improving reflections or
inspiring events. But having done that, it is necessary to sound the
tuning-fork and see if, as I said at first, the story is in tune, if the
key is kept. Usually it is not. On which the fire ought to make to
itself a momentary beacon, or the waste-paper basket be replete. But the
pile of numbered pages should in any case be starving. That, as a matter
of fact, is my sole argument that I have justified my existence during
these ten days. I have really worked a great deal, and the waste-paper
basket could say how generous has been its diet. I have really left out
a very great deal, and I hasten to forestall the critic who will say
that I should, in order to act up to this excellent standard, have left
out the rest. I do not agree with him.
The key of which I have spoken has to be preserved, not only in matters
of consistency in character-drawing, but in style as well. If you lead
off with verbiage from the Orient, the East must continue, I submit, to
dye your paragraphs till the last page is turned. Though you may have
also at your command pure wells of the most limpid simplicity, you will
have to reserve them for some other immortal work; they will not mix
with the incense and heady draughts from the East. Or should you fancy a
mysterious Delphic mode of diction, Delphic you must be to the end.
But--as if all this was not so difficult, that, like Dr. Johnson, we
almost wish it was frankly impossible--interwoven in your Delphic or
Oriental narrative there must be a totally different woof--namely, the
thread of the spoken word, the speeches that you put into the mouths of
your various characters. And the written word, be it remembered, is
never like the spoken word: the two vocabularies, to begin with, are
totally distinct, and though I would not go so far as to affirm that the
spoken word ought to be ungrammatical, it should, if it is to recall
human speech, be colloquial, conversational. In interchange of ideas by
means of the mouth real people do not use fine language, especially when
their emotions are strongly aroused. Then, instead of becoming
high-flown and ornate in their speech, real people go to the opposite
extreme, and instinctively use only the very simplest words. When this
is stated, it seems natural enough, but you will find it very seldom
practised. Novelists have a tendency to let their puppets employ
magnificent high-sounding words to express the intensity and splendour
of great emotion; in fact, you may gauge the strength of their emotions,
as a rule, by the sonorous quality of their adjectives. I believe the
very opposite to be the truth of the matter: people in the grip of
passion do not use beautiful or highly-coloured words; above all, they
do not, like Mr. Wegg, ‘drop into poetry.’ Yet nothing is commoner than
to find prose degenerating into blank verse in the spoken records of
emotional crises, as if blank verse was a sublime form of prose. Little
Nell is continually half-way between prose and poetry, so also is
Nicholas Nickleby when his indignation is roused. In fact, in some of
his scenes with Ralph they both forget themselves so much in their
passion that torrents of decasyllabic lines flow from their lips. But,
on the other hand, the language of narrative should undoubtedly grow
more coloured, more vivid in such descriptions as are the setting of
some very emotional scene. Yet it should not depart from its original
key.... Well, as Mr. Tulliver said, ‘It’s puzzling work talking.’
* * * * *
But though the days have been so full, I have seen everything,
everything through the two transparencies that seem drawn between
external happenings and me.
FEBRUARY
The seasons, according to the literary and artistic view of things, have
been rather out of joint this year. The autumn was not a time of mellow
fruitfulness at all, because all the green things upon this earth had
exhausted themselves in the long hot summer, and had no more spirit left
to be fruitful with. Then January in England had been of the usual warm
mugginess and mist which poets say are characteristic of autumn, but
which in reality characterize winter. Indeed, I doubt if winter was ever
a time of hard frosts and sparkling snow, which is the artistic ideal,
and I am disposed to believe that that version of it was really brought
from Germany by the Prince Consort, and popularized by Charles Dickens.
Then after the mists came the mellow fruitfulness, for I myself saw
strawberries in flower on February 2, and on February 9 Helen came in
saying she had found a real strawberry. That was strange enough, though
perhaps the finding of an unreal strawberry would have been stranger
still, so I said, ‘Where?’ and she said, ‘On the strawberry beds,
silly.’
Therefore I started up, leaving a most important and epoch-making
sentence unfinished (and I have never been able to remember what the end
of it was going to be), because I wanted to see the strawberry, and
write to the _Field_ about it. So she said, ‘Are you going out already?’
and I said, ‘Yes, just to see the strawberry, and write to the _Field_,
saying I have.’
Then she pointed to half-way down her person (since we are so abstemious
of words that indicate the anatomy below the throat), and said:
‘Would X rays help?’
Being extremely clever that morning, of course I understood, and reviled
her for eating an unnatural phenomenon. It was criminal; she might as
well have found the sea-serpent or the North Pole, and eaten it. But as
usual she was artful, and led the conversation away to daffodils, which
were behaving in a manner nearly equal to that of the strawberry-plant.
One, indeed, was in bud (a thing incredible, but true), and I supposed
she had eaten that, too. That led us back to the strawberry again, which
she was not even sorry about, for she said it was far more interesting
to be able to write to the _Field_ to say she had eaten a strawberry on
February 9 than that I should be able to say I had seen it. So I very
kindly gave her my pen, and said:
‘Write quickly.’
She said:
‘Oh, but I am only a woman; I can’t. They wouldn’t put it in.’
‘I wish you hadn’t put the strawberry in,’ said I.
‘I think I shall wish that, too, before long,’ said she.
I only mention this in order to show the utter unreasonableness of my
wife. If I want to write to the _Field_, and say there was a strawberry
in my garden on February 9, she will allow me to say that though I did
not see it, she ate it. (She certainly would not have eaten it if I
_had_ seen it.) But she will not write to say she ate it, like a true
woman. She says it does not matter, but added with a changed voice that
she was afraid it might. It did, for the fruitfulness of the season was
not so mellow as might have been wished.
* * * * *
Yes, once again spring has begun to stir in the fiery heart of the
world; once again the breath of Life blows the embers that seemed all
winter to be but grey and lifeless cinders, and from the centre the glow
spreads, till that grey surface of ash is alive with flame again. And as
the flames shoot upwards they are like rockets, rising from over the
whole face of the world. At present they are but going upwards, those
slender lines of flame, which are the sap that is rising through branch
and leafless stem until it reaches the very ends of the twigs. Then
these rockets will burst in stars of leaf and opening flower, till the
vast illumination is again complete. But in the warm soft February
morning, though I feel and know that this is so, I cannot help my
thoughts going back to the other side of things. What of the
illumination of last year? It is quenched dead, and even while the world
is getting ready for the next one there still lie broadcast the ashes
and fallen sticks of the last rocket-shower. However many more gladden
the world, even though to all infinity life was incessantly and
beautifully renewed, yet I cannot forgive the perishing of a single
flower. I know well that the material is indestructible, that of life
and the death of it is born fresh life, so that we are quite right to
say that life cannot be destroyed. But what of the individual rose, what
of that one purple star of clematis that twinkled on the end of the stem
I hold in my hand? Though it may be transformed, and will be
transformed, into a myriad other things, so that by its death it is
transfused into a hundred other flowers, and courses through the veins
of life for ever, yet it, that individual object, will be seen no more.
Its individuality is completely lost; it figures in new forms, not its
own.
It is quite certain also that the same things happen to our bodies. The
grass grows thick on the graves of those we have loved, and the roots of
the roses penetrate deep. I saw once on the crumbling, sea-devoured East
Coast of England the thing itself under my very eyes, which made it real
to me in a way that nothing had ever done before. For a churchyard
stood there on the very edge of the sandy cliff, and one night, with
noise of huge murmurous thunder, an acre of it slid down into the sea.
Next morning I visited the place, and there, sticking out of the cliff,
were the bones of the dead that had been buried there. A ruin of roses
that had sprawled and trumpeted over the churchyard gate, which had been
plucked in half by the fall, lay on the ground, and I wondered how the
trees had not slipped with the rest of the landslide, until I saw. Their
roots had lain just where the fracture of the earth occurred, and in the
exposed face of the new cliff I saw their anchorage. One was wrapped
round a thigh-bone, another had made a network among ribs ... it was all
horrible and revolting. And that has happened to the million dead who
have lived and loved, whose limbs have been swift to move, who have
drawn rapturous, long breaths of this keen sea-scented air, whose eyes
have been bright and mouths eager when they met, lover and beloved. This
is all--this ruin of red roses on the grass.
There is nothing in the world more certain than this, and one may as
well face it. Helen will die, and I shall die, and one of us will die
first. And the other will sometimes see a grave with the grass green
over it, and roses triumphant thereon. For we have settled most things
at one time or another, she and I, and the manner of our funerals and
what happens after has passed under discussion. We have decided
definitely against cremation, because it seems such a waste of tissue,
and we are both of us going to be properly buried, the one close to the
other so that the same rose may bloom from us both. But she _will_ have
roses and strawberries on her grave, so that the Sunday-school children
may pluck and eat them, while I, on the other hand, am going to be a
spring-man, and have daffodils, for I feel no leaning, as I have said,
towards Sunday-schools. Here lies the difficulty: she wants a rich
clayey soil for her roses and strawberries, and my daffodils will demand
not clay but sand. Also she is going to plant purple clematis by my
head, and clematis likes sand too. We have not yet perfectly decided
where we are going to die, but it seems probable that the survivor will
stay in the same place as the survived. But I want purple clematis,
since it was when I saw that that I knew somebody whom I had thought to
be a friend was false. Indeed, I have done all I could to forgive, but I
think a clematis that feeds on me may make it surer.
Our funerals will shock the neighbourhood, I am afraid. I am going to
have the A flat Fugue and Prelude blared on the organ (it is time
somebody began to learn to play) at that distressing moment when my
coffin is wheeled out of the church, simply to show that I have enjoyed
myself enormously. Great Heaven! I should as soon think of having a dead
march of whatever kind played over me as I should let them play the
works of Mr. Mendelssohn. I shall have had (whatever happens) an
immensely good time. It seems to me much fitter to return thanks for
that than to remind people that my poor body is dead, which they knew
already, or why did they come to my funeral service? As for requiems, I
will have none of them. Whatever happens, _I_, my body at least, cannot
possibly lie quiet in my grave. The dear flowers planted there will see
to that.
Oh, my God, my God, what unanswerable riddles you set us! Even this
body, and what happens to it, is so occupying a subject. I don’t really
care what happens to mine: it may be set up in an anatomical museum if
it will teach anybody anything; but Helen’s.... Somehow, when I come out
of the valley of the shadow, something of that must wait for her; or, if
she has gone through that passage first, I shall not know myself unless
at the end of it, when the darkness lifts a little, I shall see grey
eyes looking at the procession of those passing over, and meeting mine,
and saying somehow, ‘I am here.’ She must be there (is it not so?)
waiting on the eternal shore for me.
There she must be. I can’t help what I believe; that is the one thing in
oneself which one can never change. And Dick will be there, and Margery
... what a splendid day!
* * * * *
Then the one horrible certainty descended on me again. In so few years
we shall all--our bodies, I mean, the appearance by which we recognize
each other--not be our bodies at all, but part of the fibre of other
living things which are having their day, even as we have had ours. It
is so now with Dick and Margery, so how shall I _know_ them? Are they to
be just voices in the air, presences that are felt? Is that all? Shall I
never see again that quiver on Margery’s mouth, which means that a smile
is ready to break from it? I don’t want incorporeal presences. I want
Dick and his crooked nose, and Margery’s smile....
Then, on this warm February morning I must suppose that I went down into
Hell. Dead leaves and flowers, it was certain, were transformed into
fresh living forms, the bones, too, and flesh of dead animals, and of
men and women, passed again into the great machine of life, and were
served up in new transformations, so that of the individual body nothing
at all was left. That is bad enough; I shall never see Margery and Dick
again as I used to see them. Helen will pass, too, into other forms ...
that is bad enough. But this is infinitely worse. What of the individual
soul, the spirit that we love? Will that, too, as analogy grimly
insists, be put back again into the principle of eternal life from which
it came, so that its identity, too, is lost, and lives but only as the
autumn leaves of last year live in the verdure of the next spring? With
everything else that happens; the bodies of those we love even, a cruel
thing surely, but certainly true, are used up again to make fresh forms
of life. Why should we suppose that God makes any exception in dealing
with the souls of men, the individuals? Every other form of life He uses
and re-uses ... the world is but a lump of modelling clay, with which He
beguiles the leisure of eternity, making now one shape, then crushing it
all up and making another.
So this is all that the promise of Eternal Life amounts to, that we
shall pass back into the crucible, and issue forth again as bits of
somebody else! It seems to me a very mean affair; frankly, it seems a
swindle. It is a poor trick to make us puny little creatures love one
another, and try to be kind, and console ourselves for the evil days and
the sorrows of the world with thoughts of the everlasting day that shall
dawn for us all, if that everlasting day is nothing more than the day
that is here already; if the souls whom we have believed are at rest in
some ineffable peace and content, or, on the other hand, through further
suffering are getting nearer, ever nearer, to the perfection and flower
of their being, have already passed into other forms of life, so that
Dante and Beatrice are themselves no longer (as we should call
‘themselves’), but have been infinitely divided into soldiers, sailors,
tinkers, and tailors. In that sense they may be said to be alive still,
but it is a very paltry sense. _They_ (what we mistakenly call ‘they’)
are as dead as if they had never been.
It is all very well to say that Dante is immortal by reason of his
deathless verse; that is all very well for us, but how is it for that
fiery soul which is split up into a thousand other bodies? When he
thought to open his eyes on the Mystical Rose as the dark waves of death
slowly drew back from his emancipated spirit, it was all a dismal
mistake. No Beatrice awaited him; she, too, is split into a million
other forms of life. They were absorbed back into the central fire, and
a spark of Dante’s soul went into this man, and another into that, so
that in this sense there is eternal life for him. But in no other; the
Dante which we mean was formed out of other lives, and into other lives
he went. The man is there no more, and there is no Beatrice. There will
be nothing of us either, unless you mean that at some future time I am
alive because part of me has become perhaps a murderer, and another part
a politician, and another a housemaid, for all I know.
The February sun was warm; you might almost call it hot. A little wind
pregnant with spring moved through the bushes; the snowdrops, those pale
heralds of the triumphant march of the new year, were thick in the grass
where we had planted them, Helen and I, last autumn, so that they should
give us the earliest news of the returning tide of life. And to me this
morning they brought but bitter news, for they spoke not of the
returning of life, but of the thousand deaths which made them alive.
They pointed not forwards towards the glory of the many-coloured summer,
but back to the innumerable decay of the autumn. And the quiet garden
which I loved, the tiled mossy roof which I had called home, became the
place of death, even as last autumn death had called to me from it, and
had been seen by Legs, and had made the dog howl. Was it this that was
hinted at by those dim forebodings which for months had never been
absent from me? Was the fear that crouched in the shadow ready to spring
taking form now? It seemed to me that the logic which had turned the
world to hell was irrefutable; I expected some shattering stroke that
should blot out sunshine and sensation from me for ever, proving that I
and my logic were right. I had guessed the horrid secret of the world; I
was like a spy found with the plans of the enemy’s fortress on me, and
must die, lest I should communicate them. I said that to myself; I said
‘Enemy’s fortress,’ meaning the world where I had loved and been loved.
‘Enemy,’ mark you; I knew what I meant. The world was the enemy’s
fortress.
And then, thank God--oh! thank God!--before that which was impending
happened, I said to myself that I was wrong. I did not at the moment see
where I was wrong, but I knew that I must have made some gross and awful
mistake. Things could not be as I had imagined them. And the moment I
said that to myself the darkness lifted a little. It was all dark
still, but the quality of the darkness changed. And then, unbidden as a
tune that suddenly rings in one’s head, a few words made themselves
recollected. And they were, ‘If I go down into hell, Thou art there
also.’
At that I caught a glimpse again of this dear garden and house, as I had
seen and known them. I do not suppose that this blackness and loneliness
of spirit which I have tried to indicate could have lasted more than a
few minutes, as measured in the world of time, but time has nothing to
do with the spirit. In a second, as computed by the unmeaning scale of
hours and days, the soul may live a thousand lifetimes or die a thousand
deaths. Redemption may be wrought there in an infinitesimal fraction of
a moment, or in that same fraction a soul may damn itself. For it is not
the moment which is anything: it is the instantaneous choice which
therein sums up the infinite series of deeds which one has already done,
and thoughts which one has harboured. And the message that leaps round
the world on electric wires is a sluggard to choice. My choice at this
moment was between the truth of what I had been elaborately thinking out
and the truth of the words that rang in my head. There was reason on one
side; there was just It on the other. And what was ‘It’? Just that
which, very faintly, but quite audibly, said that I had come near to
blasphemy. There are many names for it: we all know its visitation,
though it is obscured sometimes because we encourage the Devil, who
comes to us all in many forms, and can take the most respectable
disguises, like those of intellect and mind. But perhaps the simplest
name and the truest for It is the Grace of God.
Then, in the same moment (I am lumbering in words, and trying to express
what I know cannot be said), I saw that Helen was already half-way
across the grass, coming towards me. She held a telegraphic sheet in her
hand, and there was in her face a gravity infinitely tender, and quite
quiet, and quite normal. I had seen it there once before, when the news
came of her father’s death, which was sudden.
‘Legs won’t come down this afternoon,’ she said gently. ‘We have got to
go up to him.’
And then she showed me the telegram.
* * * * *
It was not many hours before we knew all there was to be known. Legs had
started to ride down from town, and turning into the King’s Road from
Sloane Square his motor bicycle had skidded, and he had fallen under an
omnibus. A wheel had passed over him.
He had a letter or two, which identified him, in his pockets, and he had
been taken, since it was so near, back to the house in Sloane Street.
When we got there he was still alive.
His room was at the back of the house, and we were allowed to go in at
once. He lay there, quite unconscious, and in no pain, for the only
thing that could be done for him was to keep him like that. The
bedclothes were not allowed to touch him, and a round wooden frame was
under them. There was no hope at all.
His bed ran out into the middle of the room, and Helen and I sat one on
each side of it, while a little distance off was the doctor, who just
watched him. Sometimes he got up and looked at him, sometimes he softly
left the room, returning as quietly. And in those hours of waiting, for
a long time I was conscious of nothing except the trivial details of the
room itself. I suppose I had been there before--ah! yes, of course, I
had, when Legs had the influenza in the winter--but it was not familiar.
Yet it was just like what I should have expected Leg’s room to be, and
in a moment I found I knew it as well as I knew him. There was a pile of
letters on the writing-table, a bag of golf-clubs in the corner, an
enormous sponge on the washing-stand, and on the dressing-table a most
elaborate shaving apparatus--a metal bowl, a little Etna for hot water,
a half-dozen razor blades in a neat case, with a sort of mowing-machine
handle. He had not packed them, since he was only going to be with us
for a couple of days, and he could never have used all those blades once
each on that smooth chin....
He had been, as I remembered now, to a fancy-dress ball the night
before, and his wardrobe, gaping open, showed the hose and ruffles of
the Elizabethan period, while hanging up by them was a small pointed
beard and a high head-top, with long and rather scanty brown hair. ‘For
the point is,’ Legs had said rather shrilly, ‘everyone will say,
“Shakespeare, I presume?” and I shall say, “How dare you! I am Hall
Caine!” And if some people are a little cleverer and say, “‘The
Bondman,’ I suppose?” I shall say, “You seem to have forgotten William
Shakespeare.” Perhaps you don’t think it funny. But then, you see, you
are not going to the ball.’
* * * * *