The moonless night has a touch of frost, and is steely-clear. High and
dominant amidst the Populations of the Sky, the restless and the
steadfast alike, hangs the great Plough, lit with a hard radiance as of
the polished and shining share. And yonder, low on the horizon, but
half resurgent as yet, crouches the magnificent hunter: watchful,
seemingly, and expectant: with some hint of menace in his port.
Yet should his game be up, you would think by now. Many a century has
passed since the plough first sped a conqueror east and west, clearing
forest and draining fen; policing the valleys with barbed-wires and
Sunday schools, with the chains that are forged of peace, the irking
fetters of plenty: driving also the whole lot of us, these to sweat at
its tail, those to plod with the patient team, but all to march in a
great chain-gang, the convicts of peace and order and law: while the
happy nomad, with his woodlands, his wild cattle, his pleasing
nuptialities, has long since disappeared, dropping only in his flight
some store of flint-heads, a legacy of confusion. Truly, we Children of
the Plough, but for yon tremendous Monitor in the sky, were in right
case to forget that the Hunter is still a quantity to reckon withal.
Where, then, does he hide, the Shaker of the Spear? Why, here, my
brother, and here; deep in the breasts of each and all of us! And for
this drop of primal quicksilver in the blood what poppy or mandragora
shall purge it hence away?
Of pulpiteers and parents it is called Original Sin: a term wherewith
they brand whatever frisks and butts with rude goatish horns against
accepted maxims and trim theories of education. In the abstract, of
course, this fitful stirring of the old yeast is no more sin than a
natural craving for a seat on a high stool, for the inscription—now
horizontal, and now vertical—of figures, is sin. But the deskmen
command a temporary majority: for the short while they shall hold the
cards they have the right to call the game. And so—since we must bow to
the storm—let the one thing be labelled Sin, and the other
Salvation—for a season: ourselves forgetting never that it is all a
matter of nomenclature. What we have now first to note is that this
original Waft from the Garden asserts itself most vigorously in the
Child. This it is that thrusts the small boy out under the naked
heavens, to enact a sorry and shivering Crusoe on an islet in the
duck-pond. This it is that sends the little girl footing it after the
gipsy’s van, oblivious of lessons, puddings, the embrace maternal, the
paternal smack; hearing naught save the faint, far bugle-summons to the
pre-historic little savage that thrills and answers in the tingling
blood of her; seeing only a troop of dusky, dull-eyed guides along that
shining highway to the dim land east o’ the sun and west o’ the moon:
where freedom is, and you can wander and breathe, and at night tame
street lamps there are none—only the hunter’s fires, and the eyes of
lions, and the mysterious stars. In later years it is stifled and
gagged—buried deep, a green turf at the head of it, and on its heart a
stone; but it lives, it breathes, it lurks, it will up and out when
’tis looked for least. That stockbroker, some brief summers gone, who
was missed from his wonted place one settling-day! a goodly portly man,
i’ faith: and had a villa and a steam launch at Surbiton: and was
versed in the esoteric humours of the House. Who could have thought
that the Hunter lay hid in him? Yet, after many weeks, they found him
in a wild nook of Hampshire. Ragged, sun-burnt, the nocturnal haystack
calling aloud from his frayed and weather-stained duds, his trousers
tucked, he was tickling trout with godless native urchins; and when
they would have won him to himself with honied whispers of American
Rails, he answered but with babble of green fields. He is back in his
wonted corner now: quite cured, apparently, and tractable. And yet—let
the sun shine too wantonly in Throgmorton Street, let an errant zephyr,
quick with the warm South, fan but his cheek too wooingly on his way to
the station; and will he not once more snap his chain and away? Ay,
truly: and next time he will not be caught.
Deans have danced to the same wild piping, though their chapters have
hushed the matter up. Even Duchesses (they say) have “come tripping
doon the stair,” rapt by the climbing passion from their
strawberry-leaved surroundings into starlit spaces. Nay, ourselves,
too—the douce, respectable mediocrities that we are—which of us but
might recall some fearful outbreak whose details are mercifully unknown
to the household that calls us breadwinner and chief? What marvel that
up yonder the Hunter smiles? When he knows that every one in his ken,
the tinker with the statesman, has caught his bugle blast and gone
forth on its irresistible appeal!
Not that they are so easily followed as of yore, those flying echoes of
the horn! Joints are stiffer, maybe; certainly the desolate suburbs
creep ever farther into the retreating fields; and when you reach the
windy moorland, lo! it is all staked out into building-lots. Mud is
muddier now than heretofore; and ruts are ruttier. And what friendless
old beast comes limping down the dreary lane? He seems sorely shrunk
and shoulder-shotten; but by the something of divinity in his look,
still more than by the wings despondent along his mighty sides, ’tis
ever the old Pegasus—not yet the knacker’s own. “Hard times I’ve been
having,” he murmurs, as you rub his nose. “These fellows have really no
seat except for a park hack. As for this laurel, we were wont to await
it trembling: and in taking it we were afraid. Your English way of
hunting it down with yelpings and hallooings—well, I may be out of
date, but we wouldn’t have stood that sort of thing on Helicon.” So he
hobbles down the road. Good night, old fellow! Out of date? Well, it
may be so. And alas! the blame is ours.
But for the Hunter—there he rises—couchant no more. Nay, flung full
stretch on the blue, he blazes, he dominates, he appals! Will his turn,
then, really come at last? After some Armageddon of cataclysmal ruin,
all levelling, whelming the County Councillor with the Music-hall
artiste, obliterating the very furrows of the Plough, shall the
skin-clad nomad string his bow once more, and once more loose the
whistling shaft? Wildly incredible it seems. And yet—look up! Look up
and behold him confident, erect, majestic—there on the threshold of the
sky!