end of six weeks' strict training) of the House Races at school. Our
four had started bottom of the river, and day by day had crept up until,
in the evening of this particular one, we were to row the favourites,
School House, for the cup. When I call them the favourites, they were
this merely in a sporting sense. Because, I think, the succession of
good fights put up by our own insignificant little house, added to a
certain reputation for conceit that most School Houses would seem to
possess, had won pretty nearly the whole of the rest of the school to
our support. As a very junior and inferior oarsman (and I was more than
conscious of this at the time, I remember) I can claim no particular
share, other than an accidental one, in this series of victories. I had
been one of two candidates for the post of bow, and being a few pounds
heavier than my opponent, had managed to secure the thwart. But my mere
undeservedness did not lessen--in fact, I think, it enhanced--the almost
miraculous sweetness of those wonderful twelve hours. To be gazed at
surreptitiously by yet smaller boys in a patently envious admiration; to
be patted on the back by older ones who had never hitherto noticed my
existence; to be let out of school half an hour earlier by the
form-master, with a jocose phrase about privileged heroes--all these
things wove a magic round my way that no anxiety about the coming race
was strong enough to mar, and that has survived a good many years. Of
the race itself I can remember, curiously, nothing but the peculiar
hollow echo of our oars as we came through the Town Bridge, and the bare
fact that we succeeded in winning, to the supposed vast humiliation of
our superior enemies. But what I do remember most distinctly is being
invited to tea with the captain, a big man and a monitor. It was a
splendid, god-like meal, in which the six weeks' abstention (mistaken,
no doubt, but none the less heroic) from sweets and pastries was
utterly forgotten. And there stands out to me the doughnut that
dismissed them to oblivion, a doughnut of so succulent a clamminess that
it is unlikely, I think, ever to have had its peer--a very Lycidas among
doughnuts.
The second day that occurs to me is that in which, playing through, for
the first time in many years, to the Finals, the Hospital XV was
defeated after a gruelling ninety minutes by the team that represented
Guy's. This must have been some eight or nine years later, and its
essence is contained in my memory by five perfect minutes, gloriously
relaxed, tired but hard, in a hot bath at Richmond.
Now looking back, I know these to have been super-days, and they were,
as I have explained, in a very minor sense critical perhaps. But they
were exceptions, I think, to the general rule. For though the critical
day, the long-looked-forward-to, the apparently, and indeed,
chronologically speaking, the really important day may be a good one,
and contain great things, yet in later life, at any rate, there is an
inseparable anxiety about it of which the super-day knows nothing. The
day one qualified, for example, and became by one scratch of the pen
licensed to sign death-certificates, exempt from serving on fire
brigades, and worth (on paper) from three to five guineas a week as a
locum tenens, was, no doubt, a notable one. The day one proposed oneself
in a kind of stammering paralysis as a possible husband to the only
possible girl--and was unbelievably accepted; the marriage day; the day
when one was appointed to the hospital staff; the day when, in a cool
and blinded room, one stooped to kiss the tired but joyful eyes of the
first baby's mother--these are the dates over which, most probably, the
outside historian would choose to pour the vials of his fancy. But I
doubt if in any life these are ever the super-days. They are days to
remember; but at the same time they are days that one is glad to have
seen closed. They have beheld Destiny too visibly hanging on so
desperately fine a balance.
No, they come, these gift-days from the gods, even as they list; and
they refuse to be classified. The most constant feature about them, I
think, is that they rather generally appear during a holiday. And this,
I believe, is because they depend so much on a certain purely bodily
fitness. I hesitate a little to be very dogmatic about this, because the
older one grows the more spiritual, and consequently deeper, becomes
their joy. And yet, for the majority of us, at any rate, I am certain
that the temple must be at least in passable order if the spirit within
is to look abroad with an unworried heart, and thoroughly spring-cleaned
before its householder, free from domestic cares, can roam joyously at
will to find those rarer flowers that he's so seldom free enough to
seek. And there lies my stock argument for all misguided religious
workers who won't take holidays, and incidentally the real damnation of
all systems of monastic self-mortification. A sound body not only means
a sound mind, but an untrammelled spirit. For a spirit that has
constantly to be down on its knees stopping up some leak in the basement
cannot possibly find much time for walking in the garden with God. And
if it's a self-made or self-permitted leak, it hasn't even the excuse of
being engaged in some equally necessary occupation.
Yet apart from this, there isn't a doubt, I think, that these super-days
stand out in memory, and gain their constructive force less by reason of
their muscular exaltation than by virtue of their spiritual vision. For
even in the days of the doughnut and the hot bath this last wasn't
altogether absent. The doughnut marked the closing of an epoch and the
dawn of its successor. It meant the passage--and to a certain extent
the conscious passage, too--of an irresponsible childhood into a region
of honourable reputation. It was a doughnut that had been bestowed by
the hands of a captain. While the hot bath, careless of defeat, merely
whispered how great had been the game. And in their successors of later
years this spiritual factor has tended to emphasise itself in an
ever-growing proportion. Wordsworth might almost have selected the
theme, I think, for an Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in Middle
Age. I can remember one such day on Butser Hill, during a snatched
week-end in Hampshire, and another that is summed up for me in a bend of
heather-bordered road, turning, at a hot day's end, towards
Stronachlacher and a green lawn above Loch Katrine.
And now, with an equal unexpectedness, there has come the latest of them
all.
You know how it goes on a holiday--the holiday, that is, of a man to
whom holidays are rare and very blessed. For the first day your mind has
not yet freed itself from town and toil and the hundred other interests
for which they stand. Nor has your body quite overcome the lassitude
inspired by pavements, and encouraged by taxi-cabs and broughams. Your
host, too, wants to learn the latest tidings from the great metropolis;
what So-and-so thinks of the political situation; the prevailing opinion
on stocks and shares; the last pronouncements on art and music; the
newest good thing in plays. And perhaps even, if you chance to be of the
same profession, you fall to talking shop. Not even the magic of
plunging streams and deep, rock-shaded pools is quite sufficient, for
the moment, to dispel the urban atmosphere that still clings about you.
Your unused muscles remind you of the reason for their flabbiness. Your
eye, too long engaged upon other sights, is not yet quick enough to mark
the swift rise among those ripples at the tail of the pool. And you
return from your first day's fishing a little annoyed with yourself,
aching as regards the wrist and thigh, and more often than not with a
light or empty bag. Yet even so, mark the change in your after-dinner
talk! Smoking there round the hall fire, surrounded by rods and guns and
cases of fish and game, you no longer deliver yourself of opinions on
the rubber market or the precise value of the latest vaccine. You
discuss instead the reason why you missed that pounder under Applebrook
Bridge. And you sit for long minutes staring through a blue tobacco haze
into the wood-fire's heart, presumably thinking, but in reality doing
nothing of the kind. For though the gates of your brain are open, it is
to speed rather than receive impressions. And by to-morrow the
overcrowded hostel of your mind will be standing with doors ajar for its
lustier moorland visitors.
So it has been with me, Hugh, and to-day, the third of my holiday, has
been one of those great ones of which I have been writing. Talking
sleepily in bed last night to Esther I had announced an intention,
received by her with a discreet appearance of belief, of sallying out
early to try a couple of those big pools at the junction of the
Applebrook and Dart. But the servant with the shaving water found us
both comfortably asleep at half-past eight, with two silvery morning
hours unfished except in dreams. Dear me, but what a glorious air, and
how divine a whisper, too frail to be called a scent, of delicately
browning trout!
For old Bob had been up betimes, and, in spite of a powder of frost on
the riverside gorse and alders, had succeeded in beguiling half a dozen
plump little troutlings into providing the _hors-d'oeuvre_ to a
substantial three-decker breakfast. The family had already made their
meal, by the time we got downstairs, and old Bob, ruddy and contented,
surveyed us approvingly from the hearthrug.
"If the sun didn't find you yesterday," he chuckled, "I fancy the breeze
did," and Mrs. Bob murmured something to Esther about hazeline ointment.
A long round would prevent Bob from doing any more fishing for the rest
of the day, but a touch of south in the wind had decided him that Esther
and I must settle upon the East Dart for our third day's sport.
"The wind should help you," he said; "and you ought to have a pretty
good time," and became forthwith a prophet, though not concerning trout.
I'm not going to bother you with details of our angling. It was very
arduous, for the wind changed almost as soon as we had started, and blew
down the steep valley at a good many miles an hour. But it was at least
exciting, and we lunched in a hail-storm on sandwiches and fruit pies,
conveyed to us across the moor by Nancy on her pony.
Do you remember Nancy Lynn, a blush-rose little baby-girl a dozen years
ago? But I'm sure you do, and I wish you could have seen her to-day as
she rode down to us along the steep path to the river, straddle-legged
on her Dartmoor pony, bareheaded, and the colour of a ripe
chestnut--lustiest of little animals, but with eyes, as she cuddled her
pony's nose, that have already learned to spell mother, and sometimes
wonder what it means.
After lunch, Esther went home with her to meet some friends of Mrs. Lynn
at tea, and I was to fish a mile or two further up stream, returning
later in the evening. But smoking my pipe under the stone wall that had
sheltered our meal, it was a long time before I again took up my rod.
And instead I sat there under the clearing sky--a great gulf now of
tear-washed blue, deepening into an immeasurable calm behind these
trivial clouds--and watched the two of them making their leisurely way
along the hill. And seen thus, at a little distance, they might very
easily have been sisters. There was the same spring in their boyish
tread, and, could I have seen it, I have no doubt that there was the
same kind of look in their clear, contented eyes. For what Nancy now
was, Esther so obviously once had been. And what Esther had become,
Nancy in her kind would also grow to be--and subtly, to some small
extent, because of Esther. Indeed it might almost have been Esther as
she was, walking pleasantly with Esther as she is, the child's instinct
of living only each moment's life, clinging happily to the woman's
deeper philosophy of doing precisely the same. I wonder if you see what
I'm driving at. It all looks so commonplace on paper. They were really
of course two ordinary people, a young girl and a woman, disappearing
down a path. But to an elderly physician (a thousand feet up, and on a
super-day, mind you) they seemed suddenly to be something rather more.
For swinging hands as they walked, half-way between the changing water
and the changeless Tor, it was as though now they held visibly between
them some mystical arm's-length of the secret core of life--something
that was at once common to their age and youth, and was yet apart from
both; something, independent of circumstance, that was swinging for a
benediction over the years that lay between them. And I'll tell you what
it was, Hugh, or at any rate what I knew it to be this afternoon. It was
just the Ultimate Truth about things. And behold it was very good!
So that's why I've written you this letter in answer to your sad one of
this evening.
For though there is said to be a kind of comfort, I believe, in
realising that others are suffering like ourselves, I doubt if this is
ever a comfort worth having. And, on the other hand, there is a certain
amount of real satisfaction in knowing, at the end of a blank day, that
your neighbour, at any rate, has had a bit of luck. And so because you
write to me _de profundis_, your bronchial mucous membrane being more
than usually congested, I'm deliberately crowing to you from my little
hill-top. But there's another reason, Hugh. Do you remember, twelve
years ago, facing me on Believer Bridge, and holding out to me a lean
brown hand to grasp? I was there this afternoon, and that nice sunburnt
girl has now got a family of six.
"Peter," you said to me, "this has been a great day. It has been worth
living for. I wouldn't have missed it for whatever's got to come. And if
you're a real pal you won't let me forget that."
And so I have reminded you. That was one of _your_ super-days, and you
chose to make it your throne of judgment upon life. And you were right,
Hugh, because you judged by the best, and life, like genius, must always
be greater than even its highest gifts to us. Some day, when I too am
glowering upon it from the windward side of a bronchitis-kettle, I hope
there'll be an equally tactful fellow to remind me of this. Perhaps
you'll be the fellow.
Ever yours,
P. H.
XIV
_To Miss Molly Harding, 91B Harley Street, London, W._
c/o DR. ROBT. LYNN,
APPLEBROOK, DEVON,
_May_ 6, 1910.
MY DEAR HOUSEKEEPER,
Twenty years ago your mother and I came down here for a fortnight's
fishing to stay, just as we are staying now, and in the same month, too,
with Bob Lynn and his wife. I remember that we wondered for quite six
weeks if we could properly afford to do this. The house, you see--not
91B, but the tiny one at the end of Devonshire Street--had been so very
costly in its demand for furniture, for rent, for wear and tear. The
practice was so uncertain, seemed so desperately slow in growing. Was it
safe to leave it? Would it be still there when we returned? And if
not----?
So we argued, and knew all the time that there was a far more important
consideration than any of these tucked away in the upstairs part of our
minds. Was it safe to leave her at only ten months old? Would she know
us again when we came back? Could any one in the world take a great
enough care of her?
Perhaps you have never guessed what an important little person she was;
and perhaps, even now, you decline, in that very calm and unimpassioned
habit of yours, to believe it. But that must be because you have never
properly studied the evidence. I wonder if you have ever seen, for
instance, the clothes that she wore--such little clothes, but just look
at them, every stitch as delicate as a tendril, and every dimple and
pucker as soft as a wild bird's nest. There's never more than one person
in the world who can make clothes like that; and nobody, not even her
husband, knows where she learned the secret. And if this were only the
husk, what then about the plump little kernel inside?
I can remember the long discussions, and how at last two cold-blooded
physicians, the one in Devonshire and the other in town, had their own
way, and forced a mother from her babelet for two long, if
health-giving, weeks. I can remember the arrival of a Miss Sarah
Harding--admirablest of lay-mothers (God bless them all)--to take up her
awful charge; and the hour or so during which she received instructions
enough to cause a less iron brain to melt upon its pan. But she was a
wonderful woman even then, and _somebody_ had to take care of the child.
And now, with a trifling difference or two, here's history repeating
itself in the oddest manner possible, father and mother flown down again
to Devonshire, and somebody offering, in their absence, to take care of
Miss Molly--but for rather longer than a paltry two weeks; and please
what do we think of it?
By the same post, too, comes a brief, apologetic sort of letter from the
candidate himself. He had meant to wait for another year or so before
suggesting himself as even a possible caretaker, only as it happened
last night at Lady Pearson's she was looking, etc. etc.--and you know
how these things will get the better of a chap, etc. etc.--and, well,
there it was, don't you know; and now it is all upon the knees of the
gods. Or of one little goddess, did he mean to say? Because that of
course is where it really is, as you both know very well indeed, in
spite of your pretty letters to us, which have made your mother and me
feel at once very elderly and happy and anxious (in a not too unpleasant
sense) and also--do you mind?--vicariously honoured.
I doubt if I am looking at the matter quite eye to eye with the W.S.P.U.
when I say this; but you'll have to forgive me, I think, especially as
it's your Daddy's opinion that you ask for, and not theirs. So I'll tell
you just what I felt when I read your letter, and comprehended its
tidings.
1. Dear me, is she really as old as that?
2. Then what am I?
3. _O tempus edax rerum!_
4. But it's really rather gratifying.
5. Because after all there are so many nice girls in the world.
6. And yet it's _my_ girl that he would like to marry.
7. _Our_ girl, please. (This from Esther.)
You see how primitive we become in these little crises of life.
And I think, if you really want to have my very particular message to
you about this, it is--don't mind being a little primitive yourself.
On the whole, perhaps, I am not able to prescribe this as often as I
should like; and chiefly because, I suppose, the young couples that come
to me for an opinion on matrimony are not as a rule normal young
couples. They have usually been sent, that is to say, by some wise or
anxious guardian who has foreseen for them some probable disaster. And
often enough I have had to beseech them for their own good and for the
unborn others to let their reason lay aside their passion--not without
tears.
Now, I believe I know you well enough to be right in saying that
the--shall I call it the strictly eugenic?--side of the question is not
likely to suffer from your neglect. Newnham and the W.S.P.U. will have
taken care of that. Nor is there anything, in the present case, to
trouble you from this point of view. For Arthur Lynn is a sound,
healthy, athletic young man, four years your senior, of good stock and
sufficiently satisfactory means and prospects. Both physically and in
every other way he would be a desirable husband for you. And all this,
as I gather from your letter, you have been very carefully, and very
rightly, considering. Moreover you can be quite sure--you probably _are_
quite sure--that there is no one whom your mother and I would sooner
have for a son-in-law, as I am writing to tell him this evening.
No, my dear, I don't think that your danger lies in a too slender
application of reason to the problem before you. It lurks, if anywhere,
in a too great disregard of what is often supposed to be its
antithesis. And I should like you to have written to me, not only that
you were 'naturally pleased, of course, if a little perplexed,' but that
you were _thrilled_. To which, no doubt, you will reply that in the
first place you're not the sort of young woman that indulges in thrills,
and in the second that, had you done so, you would certainly never have
committed the fact to paper. But I should have read it between the
lines. Ah, Molly, don't ever be _too_ afraid of thrills. For at the
worst (the most _bourgeois_) they are at any rate evidences of life, not
only within but without--some all-pervading force, short-circuited for a
moment through your own awakened consciousness to that old, old world on
which you stand; while at the best--well, who shall say from what unseen
Vessel the current has its birth?
Could I find a place to be alone with heaven,
I would speak my heart out; heaven is my need.
Was it like that with you, Molly? Because that is how I would have it
for you, my dear. And I think it is worth waiting for, not for a week
only, as you have suggested to Arthur, but for far longer than that. You
will tell me, very likely, and with perfect truth, to remember that
wherever marriages may be said to have their hypothetical origin, in
actual practice they must needs evolve upon earth. And that's a side of
the question, no doubt, that a good many people are inclined to forget.
But you're not one of them. And I should like you to give Heaven a
chance, not only for your own sake, but for your future husband's,
whoever he may ultimately be. Husbands need a little halo, you see, at
any rate to begin with. And that's why I should like you to wait
awhile--say six months or so--even at the risk of causing young Lynn a
little gentle (but quite harmless) unhappiness. And when--and if--he
comes to you then (for you mustn't allow him to promise) let your heart
have no doubt in its yes.
Your affect. father,
P. H.
XV
_To Miss Josephine Summers, The Cottage, Potham, Beds._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_May_ 16, 1910.
MY DEAR AUNT JOSEPHINE,
It is certainly very wrong of Claire not to have written to thank you
for the mittens. As you say, colds in the head are quite common in the
months of May and June, and I have no doubt that if she wears them, as
you suggest, whenever she goes out to play, they will keep her hands
very warm indeed. I hope that you will hear from her in a day or two.
With regard to the vicar's boy, I think, from what I remember of him,
that you can quite safely leave him in the hands of the vicar's very
wise housekeeper and your own excellent doctor. I doubt too if he would
ever really constantly wear the flannel cholera-belt that you have been
making for him; and in any case, I think a temporary abstinence from
butter-scotch would be an even more effective measure. Your doctor is
quite right about the tomatoes. There is no evidence to show that they
cause cancer. But of course one must always be careful not to eat too
many of them. No, the gravel from which, I am sorry to hear, the new
lay-reader suffers has nothing to do with that which is found in
gardens. And it is quite sufficient, as you say, to account for a little
occasional hastiness in his temper. We are all glad to hear that you
have been so busy and comparatively well, and both Esther and Molly join
me in sending you their best love.
Your affect. nephew,
PETER HARDING.
XVI
_To Lady Wroxton, The Manor House, Stoke Magna, Oxon._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_May_ 23, 1910.
MY DEAR LADY WROXTON,
I was very glad, as were we all, to hear from you again after so long a
silence, and gladder still to learn that the pleasant peacefulness of
Stoke is doing its good work on your behalf so surely, if still a little
slowly. For both from your own letter and that of Dr. Rochester I can
see that the spirit of you is climbing back again towards the light,
less lonely than you would have thought possible six months ago, and
into an air as clear even as that which you and your husband breathed
together before he was taken from you. I think that I know how hard must
be the ascent, although in my own perhaps too peaceful life I have had
little enough experience of these swift and terrible bereavements, that
will come to me also, I must suppose, in their due time. And it is only
from the share, sometimes completely professional, sometimes rather
more intimate than this, that I have been called upon to take in such
experiences of others that I seem to have learned a very little about
the tides of grief.