the history of this wonderful land, and the present, all that love
meant, and the future, the dear event that was coming closer, were so
inextricably mingled that no coherence is possible. But if you love a
place, and are there with your beloved, and know that she will bear a
child to you before many weeks are over, you may make a paradise of
Clapham Junction, and find the joy of it a thing incommunicable. And how
much more difficult a material is the magic of this land to work
in--this little Attic plain, peopled with the ghosts of that wonderful
age, which are not dead at all, but instinct with life to-day, at this
moment when spring has come, so forcibly that even the slow tortoises on
the side of Pentelicus hurried breathlessly about, with deep sighs (I
assure you) till they found a congenial lady. Then they ran--positively
ran--round her in ever-narrowing circles, still sighing. There were
grasshoppers, too--green gentlemen and brown ladies. The brown ladies
genteelly ran away, but they never ran far. The great hawks sought each
other in the sublime sky, and the young men and maidens of Athens as we
drove back were taking discreet walks together into the country. And
from the Acropolis the maiden goddess, who is the Wisdom of God, looked
down, and was well pleased.
For, thank Heaven! the Wisdom of God in no prude. To all has it given a
soul, and to all souls is desire of some sort given--to one the
perfection of form, to another the perfection of wit, to another the
perfection of colour, to another the perfection of truth. For each there
is a way; each has got to follow it; and for many there are various
ways, and these many must follow them all. If a thing is lovely and of
good report, we all have to hunt it home. It is no excuse to say you
have no time, for you have all the time there is. Search, search: there
is the Way everywhere.
Indeed, this is no mystical affair: it is the plainest sense. Whatever
happens, God is somehow revealed. But, being blind, we cannot always see
the revelation.
* * * * *
To-night, as Helen and I sit on deck of the steamer that takes us back
again to Marseilles, we wonder what gives Greece its inalienable magic.
We saw the fading of its shores in the dusk, and though the
phosphorescence of the sea was a thing to marvel at, it was no longer
the phosphorescence of Greek waters. That little fig-leaf-fingered land
has sentiment somehow in its soil; it cannot fail to move anybody. Its
history since the Great Age--it is no use to deny it--has been tawdry
beyond description. It yielded to the Romans, it scarcely resisted the
Albanians; and though some flickering spirit of its old grandeur flamed
again when its people rose against the Turkish rule in the early part of
last century, what are we to say of the spirit of the people when,
twelve years ago, they again fought their ancient and ancestral enemy?
The Turks strolled slowly southwards from the North of Thessaly, and
only the intervention of the Powers prevented Greece again becoming a
Turkish province. The Hellenic battle-cry went shrilly up to Heaven, but
the Hellenic army trotted like a flock of sheep before the foe, until
the Powers said that the war must cease. Only the year before there had
been revival of the Olympic games, and there had been a race from
Marathon to Athens in memory of Pheidippides, who bore the news of that
stupendous victory, and died as he reached Athens, saying, ‘Greece has
conquered the Persians.’ A Greek won that peaceful race from Marathon;
the same Greek won the peaceful race home, and arrived back in Attica in
the very van and forefront of the retreating army. The ‘host of hares’
was the Turkish name for the foes they never had occasion to meet, who
started from their fortresses like hares from their forms, and galloped
quietly away. Meantime the Greek fleet cruised in the Adriatic, and sank
a fishing-boat. When the war was over, they came home with the spoils
of their victory--a hat, a fish, a net. Perhaps it is best to say that
there was no war at all: the Turkish armies made peaceful manœuvres over
Thessaly, until they came to Volo. Then the Powers of Europe said: ‘We
think your manœuvres have extended far enough: kindly go home.’
* * * * *
Yet, somehow, the tragic futility of all this does not really touch
Greece or the sentiment that the lovers of the lovely land feel for it.
Supposing a Greek army, or a regiment of it, had met the Turk, and died
in the cause of patriotism, that could not have added to the compelling
charm of Greece, and so the fact that none of these patriotic events
happened does not diminish it. In Greece, whatever may be done or left
undone, you are in the country where once beauty shot up like the
aloe-flower, so that all else is inconsiderable beside that, since
whatever the world has achieved afterwards, whether in painting, or
sculpture, or drama, or poetry, or in that eagerness of life which is
the true romance of existence, is measured, if only it be fine enough,
by the standard set then. That is the haunting, imperishable charm of
this country, and, missing that, even the phosphorescence of waters by
night, divided by the swift keel of the lonely ship, was for a time a
soulless firework.
The magic of it--the magic of it!
Thereafter we staggered across the Adriatic, over the ridge and furrow
of a grey and unquiet sea, till we found quiet below the heel of Italy.
Soon to the south-west the horizon lay in skeins of smoke, and it was
not for hours afterward that the cone of Etna, uprearing itself, showed
whence the trouble came. Narrower grew the straits, till we passed out
beside Messina, and for the pillar of smoke which Etna had raised all
day we sighted Stromboli, a pillar of fire by night. Next morning we
were in the narrows between Corsica and Sardinia, and saw the little
villages, tiny and toy-like, in the island whence sprang the brain that
was to light all Europe with the devouring flame of its burning. If the
dead return, I think it is not in Elba of St. Helena, nor even in the
pomp of Paris, nor on the battle-field, that we must guess that Napoleon
wanders. He sees the impotence of his destructive and untiring genius.
The lines of his new map of Europe have been gently defaced again by
time, and he sits quiet enough by the little house, where still the
descendants of his old nurse dwell, and sees the innocent campaigning of
her grandchildren in their childish games. And when the time comes for
unflinching justice to be done to that unflinching spirit, who spared
none, nor had pity so long as by any sacrifice the realization of his
ruthless imaginings came true, will not the spirit of his old nurse
stand advocate, and remind Justice that, even in the midst of his
gigantic schemes, he remembered her who had given him suck, and provided
for her maintenance? Somewhere in that iron soul was the soft touch of
childish days: he was kind who was so terrible, and that pen so unfacile
and so bungling that he hated to write at all put a little paragraph of
scarcely decipherable words to his will that showed (what would
otherwise have been incredible) how a certain gentleness of heart
underlay the iron.
Though all these sights--the chimney of Etna, the furnace of Stromboli,
the island of Napoleon--were but milestones, passed before, to show us
now how far we were travelling from the magic land, yet each brought us
nearer in time and space to the magic of home, and of the day, yet
unnamed, which must already, like some peak of an unknown range, be
beginning to rear itself up in the foreground of the future.
Then, as the magnet of Greece grew more remote, the magnet of home
gained potentiality, until there was no question which was the stronger.
We had intended--that is to say, more than half intended--to stay a day
or two in Paris; instead, we fled through Paris as if it had been a spot
plague-ridden, meaning to pass the night in London. But even as we
scurried from Gare de Lyon to Gare du Nord, so, too, we scurried from
Victoria to Waterloo, with intention now fully declared to get down to
the dear home without pause. As far as I remember, we sustained life on
thick brown tea and a Sahara of currant-cake; but at the end there was
the snorting motor waiting at the station, and a mile of sleeping
streets, cheered by the vision of Mr. Holmes going somewhere in a neat
Inverness cape and buttoned boots, a mile of spring-scented country
road, and then the little house, discreet behind its shrubbery, where
was the rose-garden, among other things, and among other things the
nursery.
The night was very warm, and lit by the full moon of April, so, after we
had dined, and run like two children from room to room in the house,
first to greet all the precious things of home, with Fifi, like an
animated corkscrew, performing prodigies of circular locomotion round
us, we found that there was still a large part of home to greet, and so
went out into the garden, to see what April had brought forth there. No
sudden riot or conflagration of leaf and flower, like that which we had
seen blaze over the lower slopes of Pentelicus, was there, but April day
by day had done his gentle work, so that where we had left a bed still
winter-naked it was now mapped out into the claims of the plants.
To-morrow there would be disputes to be settled, for the day-lily had
pegged out more than her share, and between her and the iris a
delphinium would be crowded out of existence. But every plant--such is
our rule--may claim all the ground it can get until the end of April;
then come round the judges of the court of appeal, and if any plant
distinctly says, ‘I have not room to grow, because of these
encroachers,’ his appeal, if he promises at all well, is usually upheld,
and the encroacher is shorn of his unreasonable encroachments. Even by
the moonlight it was quite certain that the court of appeal had a heavy
day in front of it: there were lawsuits regarding land to settle, which
would require most careful adjustment, for the court hates depriving a
rightful possessor of that which his vigor has appropriated. On the
other hand, the slender aristocracy of the bed (for the aristocrat grows
upwards rather than sideways) must not be elbowed out of existence. One
plant only is allowed to do exactly what it pleases and when it
pleases--the pansy, which is ‘for thoughts’ that are always sweet, and
so may roam unchecked and welcome, for who would set limits to the
wanderings of so kindly and humble a soul? It but touches the ground,
too (to be absolutely honest, I must confess that this has something to
do with the liberties we give it), as a moth still hovering and on the
wing draws from the flower the sustenance it needs. It does not, so to
speak, sit down to make a square meal, or burrow with searching roots
deep into the earth, and drain it of all its treasure, but it is ever on
the move, like some bright-eyed beggar-girl, to whom none but the
churlish would grudge the wayside halfpenny. She will not linger and
settle and sponge on your bounty, but be off again elsewhere next
moment, just turning to you a smiling face, and whispering a murmured
thanks in the bright language of flowers. So she is privileged to wander
even in the sacred territory of the roses, where I hope she has already
wandered wide. There, however, we did not penetrate to-night, for it and
the meadow we kept for the morrow. But on the top margin of the field
against the sky I saw shapes that were unmistakable. To-morrow our
hearts will go dancing with the daffodils.
But to-night we are content with the thoughts that the pansies have
given us, and can even forgive Milton for speaking of them as ‘freaked
with jet.’ Freaked with jet!--when Ophelia had said that they were ‘for
thoughts’! But, then, Milton speaks of the ‘well-attired woodbine,’
which is almost as bad. Imagine looking at pansies, and finding it
incumbent on one to say: ‘I perceive they are freaked with jet’! But, as
one who had the highest appreciation of Milton remarked, to appreciate
Milton is the reward of consummate scholarship, which was certainly a
very pleasant reflection for himself, and perhaps if I were a better
scholar I should think with appreciation of the pansy ‘freaked with
jet.’ As it is, I merely conclude that Milton was flower-blind--a sad
affliction.
* * * * *
Helen is absolutely ultra-Japanese in her observance of the
flower-festivals, of which she marks some dozen of red-letter days in
the year. They cannot, of course, be celebrated on any fixed day, since,
owing to the vagaries of climate, there might not be a single lily to be
seen, for instance, this year on the actual day which was Lily-day a
year ago. She waits instead, like the Japanese, until the particular
flower is in the zenith of its blossoming, and then proclaims the
festival. Other flowers, naturally, sometimes are at their best on the
red-letter day of another, but this, as she observes, is canonically
correct, since St. Simon and St. Jude, and St. Philip and St. James, are
celebrated together. I was not, therefore, the least surprised next
morning, when, after a short excursion to the garden, she came in to
breakfast, saying:
‘It is Daffodil-day, and the day of its sisters of the spring.’
‘But we had the sisters of the spring in Greece,’ said I.
‘Yes; that is the advantage of going to Greece: the Greek calendar is
different to ours. We had Easter Day before we started, and another
Easter Day when we got there. Besides, it was Anemone-day, and the day
of its sisters of the spring. The anemone’s sisters were not the same
as the daffodil’s.’
This was convincing (even if I needed conviction, which I did not), and
Daffodil-day it was.
After the early heats of February the year had had a long set-back in
March, and though April was nearly over, I doubt whether there had been
any more gorgeous decoration in our absence than that which we found
waiting this morning in the church of the daffodils and its sisters of
the spring. It was not in vain that we had dug and delved last autumn
with such strenuous patience, for that half-acre of field beside the
rose-garden was a thing to make the blind see. A rainbow of blossom lay
over it all: the early tulips had opened their great chalices of gold
and damask; the blue mist of forget-me-nots seemed as if a piece of the
sky had fallen, and lay mutely under the trees; brown-speckled
fritillaries crouched shyly in the grass, and their white-belled sister
nestled beside them; narcissus was there, all yellow, and narcissus with
the eye of the pheasant; primroses still lingered, waiting for Helen’s
proclamation to take part in the festival; while some bluebells had
hurried to be here in time; crocuses in the grass were like the dancing
of the sun on green waters, or purple as the deep-sea caves; and
anemones, greedy for more festivals, had hurried overland from Greece to
be here before us; and clumps of iris were like banners carried in
procession. These were the sisters of the spring. It was their day; but
first it was Daffodil-day. Slender and single, tall and yellow, it was
as if through the web of them, the golden net that they had laid over
the field, that you perceived their sisters. And the sun shone on them,
and the great blue sky was over them, and the warm wind made them dance
together.
After a long time, Helen spoke.
‘Oh, oh!’ she said.
That about expressed it.
‘My heart with pleasure fills,’ she added.
MAY
It always seems to me a matter for wonder why the astronomers, or Julius
Cæsar, or whoever it was who took the trouble to divide time up into
months and years, should have made the day of the New Year come in the
middle of winter. Probably it has got something to do with the solar
eclipse, or the lunar theory, or movements and motions quite
unintelligible to the ordinary mind, which would easily have the point
of beginning the New Year in spring--for instance, on May-day--when the
season is clearly suitable for beginning again. But to make a fresh
start by candlelight in a fog on the first of January implies a more
vivid effort of the imagination and a sterner resolve of the spirit than
most of us able to manage. You might as well try to make up for misspent
years by selecting Blackfriars or Baker Street Station as a place to
start afresh in.
Personally, though I think the 1st of May would be a quite reasonable
occasion on which to begin a New Year, I should prefer a rather later
date, when summer is more certain, and it was for this reason that when
I formed this (I hope) harmless little project of putting down the quiet
happenings of a year of life, I began in June. Month by month I kept
this diary, and you will see when you come to the end of this month of
May that my plan was endorsed by what happened then, and that New Year
must, in the future, always begin for Helen and me on the first of June.
* * * * *
Even with the early days of May summer descended on us, and Mr. Holmes’s
Panama hat and a neat new suit of yellowish flannel made their due
appearance to confirm the fact. Soon, if this goes on, he will be
handing ices instead of buns at tea-parties, and I have often seen him
lately on the ladies’ links playing golf in his little buttoned boots.
He came to call yesterday, and told me of Charlotte’s engagement, and
announced the fact that my Archdeacon (I call him mine because of what
happened at that dreadful Sunday-school) was giving a garden-party on
the 11th, and the wife of the younger son of our Baronet had not been
invited. The fact of the garden-party on the 11th was not new to us,
because We Had Been Invited. Oh, revenge is sweet, and we gloated over
the discomfiture of the foe. Her mother had been a governess, too. That
was a new fact that Mr. Holmes had gathered in the last half-year--just
a governess, and not in a noble family even, but in the employment of a
retired tradesman. That accounted for the fact that her daughter spoke
French so well; no wonder, since the mother had to teach it. Her
knowledge of that language, scraps of which she constantly introduced
into her conversation, had always puzzled Mr. Holmes; now he knew how it
had been acquired. Indeed, she had come rightly by it, poor thing! We
none of us grudged it her. And it was no wonder now to Mr. Holmes that
she looked so thin; probably she had never had enough to eat when she
was a child, and that indescribable air of commonness about her was
perfectly accounted for. Indeed, Mr. Holmes became so sardonic that you
would have thought that his family was one (as I dare say it is)
compared to which the Plantagenets were parvenus; and Helen changed the
subject, which I thought was a pity, as I wanted to hear ever so much
more about the lady’s obscure origin.
We chatted very pleasantly for a long time, and learned all that the
_Morning Post_ had said in little paragraphs during the past week, and
all that the Close and the County (I recommend that expression) and the
Military were doing here. We were going to be very gay indeed; there was
already an absolute clash of entertainments during a week of cricket
next month, so that the Mayor was forced to give a luncheon-party one
day instead of a mere tea, which he would probably not like at all,
since if ever there was a Mayor who collected candle-ends, this was the
one. Did I remember that which was called champagne at the famous lunch
which has already been spoken of?
In fact, Mr. Holmes shook his head over the general trend of affairs,
and spoke quite bitterly about the wave of Radicalism which was passing
over the country. The County Club, so he said, which had always prided
itself on being a little exclusive, was tainted with commonness now, and
had positively disgraced itself at the last election by letting in those
three new members. They were nobodies--local nobodies--one the son of a
doctor, another the father of a doctor; the third nobody at all.
And--would I believe it?--there had been a veterinary surgeon up for
election as well. Luckily, the club had pulled itself together over him,
and given him a smart shower of black-balls. No doubt the club was in
want of funds, but why, then, have built a new billiard-room? How much
better to poke the butt-end of our cues into the chimney-piece, as we
had always done when playing from over the left-hand middle pocket, than
purchase increased cue-room at the sacrifice of our standing as a County
Club? If we did not draw the line somewhere, where were we to draw the
line? That was unanswerable. We all said what is written, ‘Tut!’ and
looked very proud. Helen, I consider, looked prouder than Mr. Holmes,
but she disagrees with me, having seen her own face in the looking-glass
over the mantelpiece. True, she had not the natural advantage that Mr.
Holmes’s aquiline nose conferred upon him, but the assumed curl of her
lip was superb: she looked like a Duchess in her own right.
* * * * *
How slowly these beautiful days of May passed, for when one is very
happy and very expectant, time seems to stop. Exactly the opposite
happens when one is spending days that are full of pleasures, and living
entirely in the moment, for then hours and days pass on unregarded, so
that it is Saturday again before you know the week has really begun. But
happiness--I but bungle with words over a thing that is obvious to
everybody who knows the difference between happiness and pleasure--is a
thing quite detached from the present moment, just as the sunlight which
floods these downs is not _of_ them. Happiness ever broods on the wing,
and swings high above the things of the earth, like some poised eagle,
or like the sun itself. It illuminates what it looks on, turning dew to
diamond, and striking sapphires into the heart of what has been a grey
sea, but it is independent of material concerns; and were the world to
be withdrawn and extinguished, it would shine still. True, it shines on
the dewdrop and turns it into wondrous prismatic colours, and thus the
common surface of life is always iridescent when we are happy. But
happiness--that golden, high-swung sun--does not, I think, particularly
regard the jewels he makes out of common things: his own bright shining,
perhaps, weaves a golden haze between him and what he shines upon.
* * * * *
It was somehow thus, I think, that things were with us during that first
fortnight of May. Below the golden haze were these entrancing facts
which I have just recorded about the Archdeacon’s party, the frightful
disclosures concerning the mother of the wife of the younger son of the
Baronet, and the growing plebeianism of the County Club; but neither
Helen nor I could focus our attention on them; for though, as I have
said, time went so slowly, yet there was not time enough to regard them:
they belonged to a different plane to that on which we were living. We
could penetrate down into it and giggle, but then our attention
wandered, and before we knew it, we had swum up again like bubbles
through water to the sunlit surface.
There took place, in fact, a revision in our list of joyful and dreadful
affairs. No one could appreciate the humour of Mr. Holmes more than
Helen did, but, as I have said, she could not attend to him now. Nor
could she attend to the perfectly hideous fact that the greater part of
the ceiling in the dining-room in Sloane Street had fallen, and that our
tenants had (quite reasonably) demanded to be released from their
tenancy, of which there was still six weeks to run, since the house was
uninhabitable. Nor did I think she would have cared if the ceiling had
smothered them as they sat at dinner. And the dreadful earthquake in
China failed to move her, and so did the church crisis in France. But
for certain other things she cared more than ever, though you would
have said they were little enough. All the growth of the spring-time
made her eyes brighten and ever grow dim again, and she would dream over
the tiny buds of the rose-garden with smiles that were sped to her mouth
from the inmost spring of happiness. She spread fat Heliogabalian feasts
for the birds, since they wanted nourishment now that they were so busy
over their nests, and many dyspeptic bachelors and spinsters, I expect,
reeled daily from their table laid on the lawn to sleep off the results
of their excess. She loved the sun, too, more than she had ever loved
it, and the shade also, and day and night, and all the firm, great
forces of the world.