IN EXILE.
And Wisdom’s self
Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude,
Where with her best nurse Contemplation,
She plumes her feathers and lets grow her wings,
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impaired.
—_Milton._
No star is ever lost we once have seen:
We always may be what we might have been.
—_Proctor._
Elsworth spent a few days in Paris, and then determined he would go on
to Spain. He dreaded discovery, for ridicule was more terrible to him
than any bodily danger. He had been only two days in Paris when he
passed a London friend, who, however, did not notice him. He neither
wanted to be chaffed by old companions, nor urged back to a life with
which he had resolved to break. He was not strong enough to fight—the
highest bravery is sometimes to fly. He felt that, though the world is
so small, he would be less likely to meet acquaintances in Spain,
especially if he did not stay in the capital.
As he entered the night express for Madrid, and settled himself in a
corner of the carriage for sleep, he felt some sinking at heart, a
sense of his isolation and a misgiving of the adequacy of his motive
which had driven him into his solitude. This age of ours, he thought,
is not the time for sacrifice to principle. Retreats for clergymen and
devotees might be right because customary; but, whoever heard of a
medical man, scarcely emerged from his hospital, giving up all his
professional prospects, abandoning friends and position, country and
habits, because a great sense of non-response to the higher call of
duty, had suddenly come upon him? Yet history was full of such
precedents. Men had done all this and more to seek an island in unknown
seas, to trace the sources of a river, to get gold, to seek for
novelty, to gratify small ambitions, to chase the merest butterfly of a
pleasure. He had seen, as a lightning flash in an instant reveals a
yawning precipice or some great danger in time to be averted, that he
was descending from his higher self, and leading a life which could not
be worth living for any man who had once known a better and followed
nobler things. Could it be wrong to break with the past like this? Was
it not just this that the Great Teacher meant when He said, “If thy
right hand offend thee, cut it off?” Was it not good for him to go out
into the desert for awhile, and let God speak to him in the silence? He
had said to himself that he would live to make the world better for his
living. He had vowed himself to the order of those who smooth away some
of the roughnesses of this life for weaker brethren; not a very
wonderful thing after all, to do, in face of what had been done for him
by others. True, this is the age of “doing nothing without a _quid pro
quo_” paid down in hard cash. A cruel and a soul-benumbing maxim,
which, if acted upon universally would turn the brightness of the world
into the grimness and noisy whirl of a mere factory. Let him for
awhile, at least, see if it were possible to live the life of an early
Christian; such a life as was common enough in the dawn of the new
civilization which had love and self-abnegation for its motive power.
And so musing, with heart-aspirations going up to God for help and His
sustaining power in following this better ideal, he fell asleep.
* * * * *
The morning broke struggling through the mists that hung over the
strange, weird country of the Landes. The train ran through miles of
fir-trees—nothing but fir-trees, grown for the sake of their resin.
Every tree had its cup slowly but steadily filling with the fragrant
exudation. Every tree, as he saw, gave up its blood to help mankind;
not one refused to fill with resin the cup affixed to it. Was not all
Nature at work to keep the world a-going, and to better its life? And
then he rebuked himself in George Herbert’s lines:—
“All things are busy; only I
Neither bring honey with the bees,
Nor flowers to make that, nor the husbandry
To water these.
“I am no link of Thy great chain,
But all my company is as a weed.
Lord! place me in Thy concert, give one strain
To my poor reed.”
Soon Bordeaux was reached; then, as the afternoon drew on, the Pyrenees
were passed, and at midnight he alighted at Burgos, to rest a day or
two before going on. An old-world place, where the railway was a gross
anomaly, and the telegraph poles a violation of the fitness of things.
At least two hundred years behind the times, the great offence to the
eye being smart French-looking soldiers where one looked for mailed
knights with their esquires. Here was a market-place with its traffic
much as it had been conducted any day this five hundred years. True, by
ferreting amongst the stalls you could find some nineteenth-century
novelties in the shape of wax matches and paper collars; there were
books, too, in secluded corners, “printed on scrofulous grey paper with
blunt type,” which evidenced some demand for modern literature; but,
these indications of our advanced civilization excepted, the rest of
the dealing was in things which cannot have much changed their form or
their use for many generations. A sleepy, quiet, leisurely place, with
plenty of time to be wicked in, but also with much opportunity to be
good. In such a place, indeed in the whole peninsula, there is every
inducement to lead the devout life; there is so little else to do.
One’s activities have small outlets, except towards the other world.
Yet for a busy Londoner, a blasé Parisian, what a blessed sense of
peace comes over the soul resting in such a becalmed water-way on one’s
voyage!
But a terrible sense of loneliness possessed Elsworth. The day after
his arrival here it was Sunday. The wind was bitterly cold. His Spanish
was not quite Castilian in its perfection, though he could make himself
understood; and when he had spent some hours in the cathedral, visited
what a young fruit-seller called the Mercado de la Llendre, which is
not quite literally rendered as Rag Fair, and wandered round and round
the quaint old market-place half a dozen times, his questioning spirit
disturbed him as to why he had ever left London, and how was a
nineteenth-century life to be supported long under such conditions? St.
Simeon Stylites, on the top of his pillar, must have had some such
misgivings for the first few days at least, and St. Francis could not
have found all at once the birds and the fishes supply the place of
familiar friends, nor their sentiments, if they expressed any, a
sufficient substitute for his human interests of former days. The
dinner table did not mend matters. The company at the hotel consisted
of some half a dozen priests, as many young officers of the army from
the barracks opposite, and some of the towns-people, who evidently were
quite at home in their surroundings and particularly provincial in
their breeding. No one took the least notice of him, and his attempts
at conversation, like sparks of damp wood, went out dismally. The truth
was, the Castilians had paid for a good Sunday dinner, and the matter
of making the most of it was of too serious importance to every one of
them to permit of their being beguiled in their work by any such
trivial considerations as the young Englishman’s conversation could
offer. So everybody ate as became good hearty Burgolese, and poor
Elsworth was left to his meditations.
He knew the only remedy for this depression was to get out of cities
into the country. There is no such loneliness as that experienced in a
crowd where one knows nobody; so he determined henceforth to live
chiefly in villages, roadside inns, and places where he might hope to
make friends with the less sophisticated of the people. Sending
therefore, his luggage on to Madrid, he packed a small knapsack, took
his stout walking-stick, and set off for a good spell of pedestrian
work. He resolved to purchase a bicycle when he reached the capital. He
was an ardent cyclist, but had not brought his machine with him, and
now missed it sadly. He loved his steel roadster as men love a
favourite horse, and felt shorn of his strength without it. His Spanish
stood him in good stead, not only at the posadas, but with the people
he met on the roads. Spain is so little known from the play-ground
point of view, that he felt sure of the retirement he sought, and had
been but a few days on the tramp ere he found his healthy life invite
healthy thoughts; and as the London smoke got out of his lungs, a
clearer spirit entered him in its place. The smoke of the great city
had penetrated deeper even than his lungs: it had begun to pollute his
mind. It was time he broke with it. Thank God, he was not out of tune
for Nature altogether, and as he sat beside a mountain stream could
lift up his heart and meditate, and say with old Isaac Walton:—
“Here we may think and pray, before death stop our breath.
Other joys are but toys, and to be lamented.”