I had a glimpse of Eden last night. It came, as visions should come,
out of the misery of things. In all these tragic years no night spent
in a newspaper office had been more depressing than this, with its
sense of impending peril, its disquieting _communique_, Wytschaate
lost, won, lost again; the eager study of the map with its ever
retreating British line; the struggle to write cheerfully in spite of a
sick and foreboding heart--and then out into the night with the burden
of it all hanging like a blight upon the soul. And as I stood in the
dark and the slush and the snow by the Law Courts I saw careering
towards me a motor-bus with great head-lights that shone like blast
furnaces on a dark hillside. It seemed to me like a magic bus pounding
through the gloom with good tidings, jolly tidings, and scattering the
darkness with its jovial lamps. Heavens, thought I, what strangers we
are to good tidings; but here surely they come, breathless and radiant,
for such a glow never sat on the brow of fear. The bus stopped and I
got inside, and inside it was radiant too--so brilliant that you could
not only see that your fellow-passengers were real people of flesh and
blood and not mere phantoms in the darkness, but that you could read
the paper with luxurious ease.
But I did not read the paper. I didn't want to read the paper. I only
wanted just to sit back and enjoy the forgotten sensation of a well-lit
bus. It was as though at one stride I had passed out of the long and
bitter night of the black years into the careless past, or forward into
the future when all the agony would be a tale that was told. One day,
I said to myself, we shall think nothing of a bus like this. All the
buses will be like this, and we shall go galumphing home at midnight
through streets as bright as day. The gloom will have vanished from
Trafalgar Square and the fairyland of Piccadilly Circus will glitter
once more with ten thousand lights singing the praises of Oxo and
Bovril and Somebody's cigarettes and Somebody else's pills. We shall
look up at the stars and not fear them and at the moon and not be
afraid. The newspaper will no longer be a chronicle of hell, nor
slaughter the tyrannical occupation of our thoughts.
And as I sat in the magic bus and saturated myself with this
intoxicating vision of the Eden that will come when the madness is
past, I wondered what I should do on entering that blessed realm that
was lost and that we yearn to regain. Yes, I think I should fall on my
knees. I think we shall all want to fall on our knees. What other
attitude will there be for us? Even my barber will fall on his knees.
"If I thought peace was coming to-morrow," he said firmly the other
day, "I'd fall on my knees _this very night_." He spoke as though
nothing but peace would induce him to do such a desperate, unheard-of
thing. I tried to puzzle out his scheme of faith, but found it beyond
me. It rather resembled the naked commercialism of King Theebaw, who
when his favourite wife lay ill promised his gods most splendid gifts
if she recovered, and when she died brought up a park of artillery and
blew their temple down. But my barber, nevertheless, had the root of
the matter in him, and I would certainly follow his example.
But then--what then? Well I should want to get on to some high and
solitary place--alone, or with just one companion who knows when to be
silent and when to talk--there to cleanse my soul of this debauch of
horror. I would take the midnight train and ho! for Keswick. And in
the dawn of a golden day--it must be a golden day--I would see the sun