|I was leaning over the rails of the upper deck idly watching the
Chinese whom, to the number of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre
and were to disgorge at Halifax, when the bugle sounded for lunch. A
mistake, I thought, looking at my watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon
hour was one. Then I remembered. I had not corrected my watch that
morning by the ship's clock. In our pursuit of yesterday across the
Atlantic we had put on another three-quarters of an hour. Already on
this journey we had outdistanced to-day by two and a half hours. By
the time we reached Halifax we should have gained perhaps six hours. In
thought I followed the Chinamen thundering across Canada to Vancouver,
and thence onward across the Pacific on the last stage of their voyage.
And I realised that by the time they reached home they would have caught
yesterday up.
But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at
this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd
years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure
thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always
the same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of
it than I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind
as insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us,
beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we
were overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by
sea and land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight
across the plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it
was neither yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a
confusion of all three.
In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and
absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom--a parochial illusion
of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own
axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of
light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that
they were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and
numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away
on the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length
of light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And
meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light
and dark--what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for ever
and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark--not many days, but
just one day and that always midday.
At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time
itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck
of dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A
few hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of
dark, I should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo
sky--specks whose strip of daylight was many times the length of
ours, and whose year would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the
astronomers tell us that Neptune's year is equal to 155 of our years?
Think of it--our Psalmist's span of life would not stretch half round
a single solar year of Neptune. You might be born on New Year's Day and
live to a green old age according to our reckoning, and still never see
the glory of midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our
ideas of Time have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune--if,
that is, there be any dwellers on Neptune.
And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts
of other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this
regal orb above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and
numbered their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons
by the illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of
other systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to
have any fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the
unthinkable void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time:
there was only duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of
fable.
As I reached this depressing conclusion--not a novel or original one,
but always a rather cheerless one--a sort of orphaned feeling stole over
me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift
from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in
eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly
in the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a
gay time on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during
yesterday's storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of
his comrades at an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges
before him, was crying something that sounded like “Al-lay! Al-lay!”
counting the money in his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he
doubted whether it was all there, but because he liked the feel and
the look of it. A sprightly young rascal, dressed as they all were in a
grotesque mixture of garments, French and English and German, picked
up on the battlefields of France, where they had been working for three
years, stole up behind the orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me
as he did so) snatched an orange and bolted. There followed a roaring
scrimmage on deck, in the midst of which the orange-seller's coppers
were sent flying along the boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and
scuffling, and from which the author of the mischief emerged riotously
happy and, lighting a cigarette, flung himself down with an air of
radiant good humour, in which he enveloped me with a glance of his bold
and merry eye.
The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the
illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass,
not intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The
experiences were always associated with great physical weariness and
the sense of the endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the
Dauphiné coming down from the mountains to Bourg-d'Oison. And that other
experience in the Lake District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a
companion in the doorway of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain.
We had come to the end of our days in the mountains, and now we were
going back to Keswick, climbing Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was
robed in clouds, and the rain was of that determined kind that admits of
no hope. And so, after a long wait, we decided that Helvellyn “would
not go,” as the climber would say, and, putting on our mackintoshes and
shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for Keswick by the lower slopes of
the mountains--by the track that skirts Great Dodd and descends by the
moorlands into the Vale of St John.
All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung
low over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force
booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor,
tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the
struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to
be without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious
loneliness of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the
late afternoon we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the
Vale of St John and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the
road. What with battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the
dripping mackintosh and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked
myself into that passive mental state which is like a waking dream,
in which your voice sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your
thoughts seem to play irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering
consciousness.
Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember
that it is what Mr Chesterton calls “a rolling road, a reeling road.”
It is like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it
is going down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for
Penrith, then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that
goal, only to give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so
on, and all the time it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or
to Penrith, but is sidling crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road
which is like the whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of
his signature, thus:
[Illustration: 0148]
Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw
through the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that
fine mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses
that sustain the southern face were visible. They looked like the
outstretched fingers of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds
and clutching the earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The
image fell in with the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the
similitude out to my companion as we paced along the muddy road.
Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and
we went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As
we did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds
and clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere,
far off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same
mist of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same
gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been
years ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might
have been in another state of existence.... Ah no, of course, it was
this evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the
impression remained of something outside the confines of time. I had
passed into a static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished,
and Time was only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I
had walked through the shadow into the deeps.
But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when
I reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very
earnestly in order to discover the time of the trains for London next
day. And the recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings
brought my thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just
below me, was happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread,
one of those long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck
from the shore at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed
along a rope connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of
the man as he devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the
brown crust reminded me of something.... Yes, of course. The bugle had
gone for lunch long ago. They would be half through the meal' by this
time. I turned hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch
back three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the
fiction of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.
[Illustration: 0150]
[Illustration: 0151]