Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness
of man’s imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound
of mud, there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which
he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the
observer, he will have some kind of a bull’s-eye at his belt.—R. L. S.
The case of Paul Rivers after all was very simple, though perhaps in
some respects uncommon. Circumstances—to sum it up roughly—had so
conspired that the most impressionable portion of his character—half of
his mind and most of his soul, that is—had never found utterance. He had
never discovered the medium that could carry forth into the relief of
expression all the inner turmoil and delight of a soul that was very
much alive and singularly in touch with the simple and primitive forces
of the world.
It was not, as with the returned emigrant, grief that he felt, but
something far more troublesome: Joy. For the beauty of the world, of
character as of nature, laid a spell upon him that set his heart in the
glow and fever of an inner furnace, while the play of his imagination
among the ‘common’ things of life which the rest of the world apparently
thought dull set him often upon the borders of an ecstasy whereof he
found himself unable to communicate one single letter to his
fellow-beings. Thus, in later years, and out of due season, he was
afflicted and perplexed by a luxuriant growth that by rights should have
been harvested before he was twenty-five; and a great part of him had
neglected to grow up at all.
This result was due to no fault—no neglect, that is—of his own, but to
circumstances and temperament combined. It explains, however, why, after
twenty years in the backwoods of America, he saw the coast of the Old
Country with a deep emotion that was not all delight, but held something
also of dismay.
Left an orphan, with his younger sister, at an early age, the blundering
of trustees had forced him out into the world before his first term at
Cambridge was over, and after various vicissitudes he had found his way
to America and had been drawn into the lumber trade. Here his knowledge
and love of trees—it was a veritable passion with him—soon resulted in a
transfer from the Minneapolis office to the woods, and after an
interesting apprenticeship, he came to hold an important post in which
he was strangely at home. He was appointed to the post of ‘Wood
Cruiser’—forest-traveller, _commis voyageur_ of the primeval woods. His
duties, well paid too, were to survey, judge, mark, and report upon the
qualities and values of the immense timber limits owned by his Company.
And he loved the work. It was a life of solitude, but a life close to
Nature; borne in his canoe down swift wilderness streams; meeting the
wild animals in their secret haunts; becoming intimate with dawns and
sunsets, great winds, the magic of storms and stars, and being initiated
into the profound mysteries of the clean and haunted regions of the
world.
And the effect of this kind of life upon him—especially at an age when
most men are busy learning more common values in the strife of
cities—was of course significant. For here, in this solitary existence,
the beauty of the world, virgin and glorious, struck the eyes of his
soul and nearly blinded them.
His whole being threw itself inwards upon his thoughts, and outwards
upon what fed his thoughts—the wonder of Nature. Even as a boy he had
been mystically minded, a poet if ever there was one, though a poet
without a lyre; but at school he had chanced to come under the influence
of masters who had sought to curb the exuberance of his imagination, so
that he started into life with the rooted idea that it was something of
a disgrace for a man to be too sensitive to beauty, and to possess a
vivid and coloured imagination was almost a thing to be ashamed of.
This view of his only ‘silver talent,’ moreover, was never permitted by
the nature of his life to alter. His early American experiences
stiffened it into a conviction which he yet despised. The fires ran
hidden, if unchecked. Had he dwelt in cities, they might have suffered
total extinction perhaps, but here, in the heart of the free woods, they
speedily rose to the surface again and flamed. He grew up singularly
unspoilt, the shyness of the original nature utterly uncorrected, the
stores of a poetic imagination accumulating steadily, but always
unuttered.
For his sole companions all these years when he had any at all were the
‘Bosses’ of the lumber camps he inspected, the ‘Cookee’ who looked after
his stew-pot in the ‘home-shack,’ and the half-breed Indian who
accompanied him in the stern-seat of the bark canoe during the
month-long trips about the wilderness: these—with the animals, winds,
stars, and the forms of beauty his imagination for ever conjured out of
them.
For twenty years he lived thus, knowing all the secrets of the woods and
streams. In the summer he never slept under cover at all, so that even
in sleep he understood, through closed eyelids, the motions of the stars
behind the tangled network of branches overhead. In winter his
snow-shoes carried him into the heart of the most dazzling scenes
imaginable—the forest lying under many feet of snow with a cloudless sun
lifting it all into an appearance of magic that took the breath away.
Moreover, the fierce spring, when the streams became impassable floods,
and the autumn, with a flaming glory of gold and scarlet unknown
anywhere else in the world, he knew as intimately as the dryads
themselves.
And all these moods became the intimate companions of his life, taking
the place of men and women. He came to personify Nature as a matter of
course.
Without knowing it, too, the place of children was taken somehow by the
wild animals. He knew them all. He surprised them in their haunts in the
course of his silent journeys into the heart of their playgrounds; and
his headquarters—a one-story shanty on the height of land between his
two chief ‘limits’—was never without a tamed baby bear, a young moose to
draw him on his snow-shoes with the manners of a well-bred pony, and a
dozen other animals reclaimed from savagery and turned by some
mysterious system of his own into real companions and confidants.
And the only books he read in the long winter nights, besides a few
modern American novels that puzzled and vaguely distressed him, were
Blake, his loved Greek plays, and the Bible.
He rarely saw a woman. Sides of his nature that ought to have developed
under the influences of normal life at home lay dormant altogether, or
were filled as best might be by his intercourse with Nature. He wrote
few letters. After Dick Messenger died, the formal correspondence he
kept up at long intervals with his sister—Dick’s widow—hardly deserved
the name of letters. Great slabs of him, so to speak, stopped growing
up, sinking down into the subconscious region to await conditions
favourable for calling them to the surface again, and eventually coming
to life—this was his tragic little secret—at a time when they were long
overdue.
To the end of life he remained shy, shy in the sense that most of his
thoughts and emotions he was afraid to reveal to others; with the
shyness, too, of the utterly modest soul that cannot believe the world
will give it the very things it has most right to claim, yet never dares
to claim. And to the end Nature never lifted the spell laid upon him
during those twenty years of initiation in her solitudes. To see the new
moon tilting her silver horns in the west; to hear the wind rustling in
high trees, like old Indians telling one another secrets of the early
world; and to see the first stars looking down from the height of sky
through spaces of watery blue—these, and a hundred other things that the
majority seemed to ignore, were to him a more moving and terrible
delight than anything he could imagine. For him such things could never
be explained away, but remained living and uncorrected to the end.
Thus when, at forty-five, he inherited the fortune of his aunt (which he
had always known must one day come to him), he returned to England with
the shy, bursting, dream-laden heart of a boy, young as only those are
young whom life has kept clean and sweet in the wilderness; and the
question that sprang to life in his heart when he saw the blue line of
coast was a vague wonder as to what would become of his full-blooded
dreams when tested by the conventional English life that he remembered
as a boy. To whom could he speak of his childlike yearning after God; of
his swift divinations, his passionate intuitions into the very things
that the majority put away with childhood? What modern priest—so he
felt, at least—what befuddled mystic, could possibly enter into the
essential nature of these cravings as he did, or understand, without a
sneer, the unspoilt passions of a man who had never ‘grown up’?
‘I shall be out of touch with it all,’ he thought as he stood there in
the bows and watched the blue line grow nearer, ‘utterly out of touch.
What shall I find to say to the men of my own age—I, who stopped growing
up twenty years ago? How shall I ever link on with them? Children are
the only things I can talk to, and children!’—he shrugged his shoulders
and laughed—‘children will find me out at once and give me away to the
others.’
‘Dick’s children, though, may be different!’ came the sudden reflection.
‘Only—I’ve had nothing to do with children for such ages. Dick had real
imagination. By George,’—and his eyes glowed a moment—‘what if they took
after him!’
And for the fiftieth time, as he pictured the meeting with his stranger
sister, his heart sank, and he found refuge in the knowledge that he had
not altogether burned his boats behind him. For he had been wise in his
generation. He had arranged with his Company, who were only too glad of
the chance of keeping his services, that he should go to England on a
year’s leave, and that if in the end he decided to return he should have
a share in the business, while still continuing the work of
forest-inspection that he loved.
‘I’m nothing but a wood cruiser. I shall go back. In the big world I
might lose all my vision!’
And, having lived so long out of the world, he now came back to it with
this simple, innocent, imaginative heart of a great boy, a boy still
dreaming, for all his five-and-forty years. Fully realising that
something was wrong with him, that he ought to be more sedate, more
cynical, more prosaic and sober, he yet could not quite explain to
himself wherein lay the source of his disability. His thoughts stumbled
and blundered when he tried to lay his finger on it, with the only
result that he felt he would be ‘out of touch’ with his new world, not
knowing exactly how or why.
‘It’s a regular log-jam,’ he said, using the phraseology he was
accustomed to, ‘and I’m sorry for the chap that breaks it.’
It never occurred to him that in this simple thrill that Nature still
gave him he possessed one of the greatest secrets for the preservation
of genuine youth; indeed, had he understood this, it would have meant
that he was already old. For with the majority such dreams die young,
brushed rudely from the soul by the iron hand of experience, whereas in
his case it was their persistent survival that lent such a childlike
quality to his shyness, and made him secretly ashamed of not feeling as
grown up as he realised he ought to feel.
Paul Rivers, in a word, belonged to a comprehensible though perhaps not
over common type, and one not often recognised owing to the elaborate
care with which its ‘specimens’ conceal themselves from the world under
all manner of brave disguises. He was destitute of that nameless quality
that constitutes a human being, not mature necessarily, but grown up.
Sources of inner enthusiasm that most men lose when life brings to them
the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, had kept alive; and though on
the one hand he was secretly ashamed of the very simplicity of his great
delights, on the other hand he longed intensely for some means by which
he could express them and relieve his burdened soul.
He envied the emigrant who could let fall hot tears on the deck without
further ado, while at the same time he dreaded the laughter of the world
into which he was about to move when they learned the cause of the
emotions that produced them. A boy at forty-five! A dreamer of
children’s dreams with fifty in sight—and no practical results!
These were some of the thoughts still tumbling vaguely about his mind
when the tug brought letters aboard at Queenstown, and on the
dining-room table where they were spread out he found one for himself in
a handwriting that he both welcomed and dreaded.