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Apologia Diffidentis
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
Sirenica
Apologia Diffidentis
By
W. Compton Leith
London: John Lane, The
Bodley Head. New York:
John Lane Company
MCMXVII
_Third Edition_
_Printed in Great Britain
by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh_
To One
Whose Friendship is beyond Desert
and above Requital
Apologia Diffidentis
"I am naturally bashful; nor hath conversation, age,
or travel been able to effront or enharden me."
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
In the matter of avowals the diffident never speak if they can write.
That is why my apology for a furtive existence is here set down in
solitude instead of being told face to face. You have borne so many
years with my unresponsive and incomprehensible ways that shame at last
constrains me to this poor defence; for I must either justify myself in
your sight, or go far away where even your kindness cannot reach me. The
first alternative is hard, but the second too grievous for impaired
powers of endurance; I must therefore find what expression I may, and
tell you how my life has been beshrewed ever since, a boy of twelve, I
first incurred the obloquy of being shy. The word slips easily from the
pen though the lips refuse to frame it; for I think most men would
rather plead guilty to a vice than to this weakness.
A doom of reticence is upon all our shy confraternity, and we seldom
make confidences even to each other. It is only at rarest intervals that
the spell is lifted, by silent sympathy, by a smile, by a tear, by I
know not what. At such times our souls are like those deep pools of the
shore, only open to the sky at lowest tides of still summer days, only
to be approached across long stretches of wet sand and slippery shelves
of rock. In their depths are delicate fronded seaweeds and shells tinted
with hues of sundawn; but to see them you must bend low over the
surface, which no lightest breath must furrow, or the vision is gone.
Few of the busy toilers of the world will leave the firm sands to see so
little; but sometimes one weary of keen life will stray aside, and
oftener a child will come splashing across the beach to peer down with
artless curiosity and delight. Then the jealous ocean returns, and the
still clear depths are confused once more with refluent waters; soon the
waves are tossing above the quiet spot, and the child is gone home to
sleep and forget. I cannot have you with me at these still hours of
revelation; I must tell my tale as best I can with such success as
fortune may bestow.
I shall say nothing of the miseries which embittered the life of the
diffident boy. But I cannot pass in silence the deeper trouble of
earliest manhood, when my soul first awoke to the dread that though
other clouds might drift westward and dissolve, one would impend over me
for ever. It was at the university that this vague misgiving crept upon
me like a chill mist, until the hopes and aspirations of youth were one
by one extinguished, as to a sailor putting out to sea the comfortable
harbour lights vanish in the wracks of a tempestuous winter morning. I
turned my face away from the gracious young life amidst which I moved,
like a man possessed of a dark secret to his undoing. My heart, yet
eager for the joy of living and yearning for affection, was daily
starved of its need as by a power of deliberate and feline cruelty; and
with every expansive impulse instantly restrained by this daemonic
force, I was left at last unresponsive as a maltreated child, who flings
his arms round no one, but shrinks back into his own world of solitary
fancies.
I think there is no misery so great as that of youth surrounded by all
opportunities for wholesome fellowship, endowed with natural faculties
for enjoyment, yet repressed and thwarted at every turn by invincible
self-consciousness and mistrust: surely no lost opportunities of manhood
leave such aching voids as these. In the spring-time of life to feel day
by day the slow erosion of the power of joy is of all pains most
poignant; out of it grow anxieties, premature despairs, incongruous with
fresh cheeks and a mind not yet mature. This misery was mine for those
four years which to most men are the happiest of a whole career, but to
me at every retrospect seem so beset with gloomy shadows that could I
live my life again, I would not traverse them once more for all the gold
of Ophir.
At first I writhed and strained in my bonds, and sometimes would make
timid advances to the generous young hearts around me. But the tension
always proved too sore; I never maintained the ground I had won, and
with a perilous fatalism more and more readily accepted what I deemed
inevitable failure. There were among them, I doubt it not now,
Samaritans who would have tended my bruised limbs; but then they all
seemed to be gliding over the black ice, too happy to stay and lift up
the fallen. And bruised though I was, I still rose time and again and
moved painfully among them, so that theirs was no culpable or merciless
neglect.
Yet the end for me was illimitable dreariness; and like Archie in _Weir
of Hermiston_, I seemed abroad in a world from which every hope of
intimacy was banished. And as with every month the hopelessness of
resistance was made plainer and plainer, there came upon me the
recklessness of the condemned man who jests or blasphemes to hide his
ruth. Overwrought continually by forebodings of coming pain, unstrung by
strange revulsions, I would pass from burning wrath to cold despair, a
most petulant and undisciplined sufferer. Uniting in one person the
physical exuberance of youth and the melancholy of disillusioned
manhood, I was deprived of the balanced energy proper to either age, and
kept up a braggart courage with the headiest wine of literature. I could
not bear the bland homilies of the preachers, but ranged myself with the
apostles of rebellion who blew imperious trumpet blasts before the walls
of ordered life.
Verily the violence of the blasts was sometimes such that the ramparts
should have fallen down; and often in my exaltation I already saw them
totter, as I strode along reciting the dithyrambs of men who like myself
could find scarce a responsive heart-beat in all this throbbing world.
Above all I gloried in the declamations of Queen Mab, which sanctioned
by high poetic authority the waste of my affections and my moody
defiance of life's most salutary law. With these upon my lips I roamed,
an absurd pathetic figure, amid the haunts of the Scholar Gipsy, and the
wayward upland breezes conspired with my truant moods. And while I sat
by my lamp late into the night, I turned the pages of pessimists and
cynics, for no principles are dearer to a man than those which allow him
to profess contempt for the benefits which he cannot enjoy.
Yet by seeking amid such simples a balm for wounded pride, I did not
really deceive myself, but lived as a sophist rather than a philosopher.
And all the while I was digging graves for my better instincts, until my
sexton's mood, confining me within churchyard walls, gave me over almost
entirely to the company of mental bats and owls. The danger of it all
was that though I was yet youthful, and should have been still pliant as
a sapling, I was fostering the growth of those habits which, like rings
in the grain, are the signature of unyielding years. Naturalists say
that a bullfinch fed only on hempseed gradually loses his fair plumage
and becomes black as a raven: so my soul, nourished on thoughts of
rebellion, put off its bright and diverse enthusiasms and was clothed in
the dark garment of despair.
When the long-desired hour of release came, and I was free to turn my
back upon the spires of my prison city, I had already plumbed an abyss
of misery. The very thought of life in the conflict of the world was
abhorrent; and if I had been of the Roman Church I should have become a
Benedictine and sought a lettered and cloistered peace. I despaired of
finding anywhere upon earth the profound quietude, the absolute
detachment, when a chance occasion seemed to crown my desire, and blind
to all warnings of disillusion, I suddenly set sail for what I then
thought might be a permanent sojourn in the East.
Within two months' time the whole environment of my life was changed,
and I was established on a lonely plantation set high upon a range of
hills whose slopes were clothed with primeval forests verging to a
tropical sea. My home, a white-walled, red-roofed bungalow with a great
columned verandah like a temple's peristyle, lay in the issue of an
upper valley threaded by a clear stream, whence you may look far down
over rolling plains to an horizon lost in the shimmering heat of noon.
Immediately to the east rose the cone of a great solitary hill, always
outlined against the sky with a majestic isolation that lent it an
almost personal existence, and at the birth of every day bearing the orb
of the rising sun upon its wooded shoulder. Round about, in scattered
villages of thatched and mud-walled huts, dwelled brown men of ancient
pagan ways, men who neither knew progress nor set any price upon time.
There I entered upon a wholly new existence as remote from all the
social trials which beset shyness as if it were passed in some island of
the uttermost sea. I had escaped from a harrying pursuit; I was free;
and to the bliss of this recovered liberty I abandoned myself, without
attempting to justify my flight to conscience or forming any scheme for
future years. Like a deer which has eluded the hounds, I yearned only
for rest and long oblivion of the chase; I wanted to live woodland days
until, all the strain and panic of the past forgotten, I might rise
refreshed and see a new way clear before me.
And this first abandonment was a time of ecstasy. The long tranquil days
were crowned by nights of peace yet more desired. I lay beneath the
verandah and watched the stars in their splendour, not the pin-points of
cold light that pierce our misty western heavens, but bright orbs in
innumerable companies hovering upon the tranced earth. Night after night
I saw the incomparable vision; month after month the moon rose slowly
over the high wall of the jungle, first a great globe imminent upon the
trees, next soaring remote through the upper heavens, waning at last to
a sphere of pale unquickening light. I would lie thus for hours
motionless, with lulled mind, until the breeze forerunning the dawn, or
the quavering wail of the jackal, recalled the startled thought to the
prison bonds of self.
With the gentle lapse of months all these impersonal influences took
dominion over me and gave me a quiet happiness never known before. The
nights brought the greater light; but the days too had their glories. I
would climb the rugged sides of the mountain, and emerging into a colder
world sit beneath an overhanging rock and see the hot air quivering
over leagues of plain; while in the nearer distance, far down beneath my
feet, the rice-fields shone like emerald and the palm-fringed pools like
shields of silver. Or I would stretch myself at early afternoon on the
close-cropped grass on the jungle-edge, and watch the opposite sky take
on an ever-deeper blue against the setting sun behind me. Often at such
times I would hear a rushing in the highest branches, and turning very
silently, see the outposts of a troop of monkeys peering down through
the gleaming foliage. Then, if I moved, neither head nor limb, others
would come, and yet others, leaping from branch to branch and plunging
down from higher to lower levels like divers cleaving a deep green sea;
until at last some slightest involuntary movement of mine would put the
whole host to flight, and greybeards, young warriors, camp followers and
mothers with their children on their backs would spring precipitate from
tree to tree, screaming and gibbering like Homer's sapless dead. Then,
when the stars rushed out and the darkness came on apace, it was sweet
to wander home along those paths so dear to primitive men in all
countries, narrow paths and sinuous, smoothed by the footfalls of
centuries, winding patiently round every obstacle and never breaking
through after the brutal manner of civilization. The fire-flies gleamed
in the brushwood on either hand, and from every side rose that
all-pervading hum of busy insects through which the tropic forest is
never still.
Amid these surroundings, so peaceful and so new, my soul was stilled to
that {galene} or ocean-calm which the old Greek philosopher found the
highest good for man. And month by month the mere material side of life
grew of less moment; the body fretted the spirit less, but often seemed
a tissue of gossamer lightness through which it could pass at will, as
the breeze through the gleaming spider-webs upon the bushes at dawn.
There were times when the ideal of the mystic seemed well-nigh
accomplished, when my body might almost have been abandoned by the soul
for hours upon end. The words of Emerson seemed to be fulfilled: "By
being assimilated to the original soul by whom and after whom all things
subsist, the soul of man does then easily flow into all things and all
things flow into it: they mix; and he is present and sympathetic with
their structure and law."
As I write now amid the roar of London traffic, I well believe that to
men who have never bathed in eastern moonlight, the description will
sound hyperbolical and false. But when I think of those old days, how
serene they were, how apart, I let the words stand: I am not artist
enough to give them a more plausible simplicity. All conditions that a
recluse might crave seemed now to be fulfilled for my benefit. The
virgin forests and great hills were a perpetual joy, but there was a
tranquil pleasure in the plantation which man's labour had reclaimed
from these. That was a meet place indeed for the meditation of a quiet
hour, and no more grateful refuge can be conceived than such a shady
grove at the height of noon. You must not fancy an expanse of dusty land
lined with prim rows of plants in the formal style of a nursery garden;
but, spread over the lower slopes of the valleys, spacious woods of
clean, grey-stemmed trees, with overarching branches thinned to cast a
diaphanous shade over the sea of lustrous dark leaves below. The shrubs
stood waist-high in serried, commingling ranks, their dark burnished
leaves gleaming here and there in the sifted rays that found their way
down through the vaults of foliage; the groves of Daphne had no more
perfect sheen.
I learned to feel for this gracious place a love only second to that of
the wilder jungle; for nature thus tamed to work side by side with man
loses indeed her austerer charm, but not her calm and dignity: these she
brings with her always to be a glory to the humblest associate of her
labour. Often as I pruned a tree, or stripped its stem of suckers, I
felt the soothing, quickening influence of this partnership, and my
thoughts turned to others who had known a like satisfaction and relief;
to Obermann forgetting his melancholy in the toil of the vintage,
plucking the ripe clusters and wheeling them away as if he had never
known the malady of thought; or to Edward Fitzgerald out with the dawn
among his roses at Little Grange.
Amid these high dreams and simple occupations, time seemed to glide away
like a brimming stream, and the only events that marked the passing of
the years were wayfarings through the country-side, sojournings in
strange, slumbrous native towns, expeditions of wider range to old white
ports of Malabar still dreaming of the forgotten heroes whose story
Camoens sang. After many such journeys the genius of this oriental land
seemed to travel with us, so familiar did every aspect of this simple
Indian life become. Our equipment was of set purpose the patriarchal
gear of native fashion; narrow carts with great lumbering wheels were
covered by matting arched upon bent saplings, and had within a depth of
clean rice-straw on which at night mattresses were spread. Beneath each
yoke went a pair of milk-white oxen with large mild eyes and pendulous
dewlaps, great beasts of a fine Homeric dignity and worthy of
Nausicaa's wain. They swung along with a leisurely rolling gait; and if
their silent feet moved too slowly, the sleepy brown-skinned driver,
crouching on the pole between them, would shame them into speed by
scornful words about their ancestry, more prompt than blows in their
effect on beasts of ancient and sacred lineage.
We travelled at night or in the freshness of early morning, regardless
of the hours, unfretted by the tyrannous remembrances of appointed
times. Milestones passed slowly, like things drifting, which ask no
attention, and hardly perceived in the moment of their disappearance,
serve only to enrich and replenish the mind's voluptuous repose. It was
a joy to lie drowsily back upon the straw, awaiting sleep and looking
out upon the stars through the open back of the cart, while the
fire-flies darted across the feathery clusters of bamboo, and the
cradling sound of wheels and footfalls called slumber up out of the
darkness. And it was equal delight to spring from the cart at first
flush of dawn, and see some far blue hill in the east lined like a
cloud with broadening gold, until the resistless sun rose a full orb
above it, flooding the grey plains and making the leaves of the banyans
gleam with the lustre of old bronze. But though the sun was come, we
would often press on for yet three hours, through belts of
squirrel-haunted wood, beside great sheets of water with wild-duck
floating far amidst, and borders starred with yellow nenuphars, across
groves of mango and plantain trees into landscapes of tiny terraced
plots, where the vivid green rice-blades stood thick in the well-soaked
earth, and bowed brown figures diverted to their roots the thread-like
rivulet from the great brown tank above.
Here would be a wayside shrine, a simple stuccoed portico with columns
streaked in red, enclosing the sacred emblems with their offerings of
golden marigold, and bearing upon each corner, carved in dark grey
stone, Siva's recumbent bull. Here millet fields, with hedges of blue
aloe or euphorbias like seven-branched candlesticks, announced a place
of habitation; soon the village itself appeared, a long irregular line
of white-walled houses roofed with thatch or tile, and here and there
greater dwellings with carved balconies and barred verandahs, behind
which impassive white-robed figures sat and seemed to ponder upon life.
On the right, perhaps, would be a shop all open to the road, where,
cross-legged upon a kind of dais, the merchant sat among his piled
wares, unenterprising and unsolicitous, serenely confident in the
balance-sheet of fate. On the left, in a shady corner, a barber would be
bending over a half-shaven skull. Everywhere children of every shade
from yellow to deep umber would be playing solemnly about the ways,
turning upon the passing stranger their grave, unfathomable eyes.
Beyond the village there would be a rest-house maintained for the use of
wayfaring white men, and here we would repose through the heat of the
day, reclining with a book in rooms shaded with shutters, or with fine
mats drenched from hour to hour with cooling sprays of water. Then with
the sun's decline we would set out once more, meeting a file of
blue-robed women erect as caryatides as they came up from the well,
each bearing upon her back-thrown head a water-jar of earthen or brazen
ware, staying her burden with a shapely brown arm circled with bangles
of glass and silver. In the short hours before the darkness, we would
encounter all the types of men which go to make up Indian country
life--the red-slippered banker jogging on his pony beneath a white
umbrella, the vendor of palm-wine urging a donkey almost lost beneath
the swollen skins, barefooted ryots with silent feet and strident
tongues, crowds of boys and children driving buffaloes and cows, all
coming homeward from their labour with the evening.
And when these had gone by, and we rolled on through the scented air of
the silent open country, we would come perhaps in the gathering darkness
to a great river lapping and murmuring through the blackened rocks above
the ford, and shining like a glorious path in the light of the rising
moon. Silently, high above the banks, there would flit through the still
air bands of flying foxes awakened for their nightly raid upon the
plantain groves; and in the shadows of the further bank there would
gleam a sudden light, or the echoes of a hailing voice would rise and
then die away. Steeped in the poetry of all these things we would cross
and emerge upon the opposite slope to begin the pilgrimage of the night
anew. So to live tranquil days and unfretful, moving in quiet through a
still land rich in old tradition--this was an experience of peace which
no dreams of imagination could surpass, a freshness of joy penetrative
as the fragrance of unplucked wayside flowers.
Sometimes we would set out on longer journeys by land and sea, crossing
the wooded ghats and descending to some old port of historic name,
Cochin or Mangalore or Calicut, white places of old memory, sleeping by
the blue waves as if no Vasco de Gama had ever come sailing up out of
the West to disturb their enchanted slumber. The approach to these
dreamy shores was dark and tumultuous, as if nature had set an
initiation of contrasting toil before the enjoyment of that light and
peace. It followed the bed of a mountain stream, which began in a mere
pleat of the hills, tumbling often in white cascades, and enduring no
boat upon its waters until half its course was run. But here it
challenged man to essay a fall; for where it burst its way over rocky
slopes were channels jeopardous and hardly navigable, sequences of
foaming rapids, races of wild water swirling round opposing boulders,
and careering indignant of restraint between long walls of beetling
rock. Here when the sun had gone down we would embark with a crew of
lithe brown men in a boat hewn from a single tree, seamless and stoutly
fashioned to be the unharmed plaything of such rocks and boisterous
waters as these. In these rapids the river waked to consciousness of
mighty life, tossing our little craft through a riot of dancing waves,
whirling it round the base of perpendicular rocks set like adamant in
the hissing waters, sweeping it helpless as a petal down some glassy
plane stilled, as it were, into a concentrated wrath of movement. The
men sprang from side to side, from bow to stern, staving the craft with
a miraculous deftness from a projecting boulder, forcing her into a new
course, steadying her as she reeled in the shock and strain of the
conflict, while their long poles bent continually like willow wands
against her battered sides. The steersman stood silent, except when he
shouted above all the din some resonant, eruptive word of command; the
men responded by breathless invocations to their gods, relaxing no tense
sinew until the pent waters rushed out into some broad pool where the
eased stream went brimming silently, gathering new strength in the
darkness of its central deeps.
At such places the moon would perhaps be obscured by passing clouds, and
we would land upon an eyot until she shone once more in a clear heaven.
Stretched at length upon the fine white sand waiting for her return, we
could hear the boom of waters in the distance calling us on to a renewal
of the conflict. These periods of great stillness, interposed between
tumults past and impending, had their own refinement of pleasure as far
above the joys of fenced and covenanted ease as the bivouac of the hard
campaign surpasses slumber in the fine linen of a captured city: they
brought the wandering mind into communion with elemental forces, and
seemed to hold it expectant of supernatural events. In that interlunar
twilight there reigned a solemn sense of wonder evoked here eternally,
one felt, from the ancient time, with the rustling of stirred foliage
and the voice of those far waters for its music.
The lulled reason yielded place to reverie, and the whole rapt being
abandoned itself like an Orphic worshipper to the guidance of an unseen
mysteriarch. This acquiescence in the swift succession of calm to fury
and stress, resembled the quiet which may be conceived to follow sudden
death; the heightened sense of vicissitude in things summoned up and
sustained a solemn mood. All the while that we lay charmed and half
oppressed in this atmosphere as of an under-world, the clouds were
drawing forward on their course; and as their last fringe trailed slowly
by and the moon was revealed once more, the spell was broken in an
instant by human voices calling us to re-embark. Again we glided to the
verge of tumultuous falls, again we were flung through foaming narrows
and labyrinthine passages of torn rocks, until, the last promontory
turned with arrowy swiftness, we shot through a postern of the granite
barrier and bounded far into still water fringed with trees of
profoundest shadow. We put in to shore, for this stage of our journey
was over; the dawn was near; the carts stood waiting on the road. But
the influence of the wonderful night, clinging about us, would keep us
long silent, as if awed by the passing of ancient Vedic gods.
I will not describe the later stages of these journeys: the coasting
voyages in restful ships that seemed built to sail Maeander; the
touchings at old wharfless ports; the visits to lone temples where
Herodotus would have loved to linger; the rambles on the slopes of
Adam's Peak; the meditations amid the ruins of Anaradhapura and
Pollanarrua, ancient homes of kings, now stripped of every glory but
that of these sonorous names--such are the records of every traveller,
and are chronicled to satiety by a hundred hasty pens. A month of
wandering within the fringe of civilization would be closed by a last
week of patriarchal travel, bringing us back to our remote valley just
as the clouds of the coming monsoon were ranging in denser ranks along
the evening sky like the tents of a beleaguering army. Hardly had we
time to settle down for the wet season, see to the stacking of
fire-logs, and be sure that every tile on the roof was firm in its
appointed place, when the embattled host seemed to break up from its
last camp, and advance upon us along the whole line that the eye
perceived.
One year I was witness of the first onset, which came in the late
afternoon--an immediate shock of massed clouds without throwing forward
of skirmishers or any prelude of the vanguard. Our home looked down upon
a gentle incline of open grassy land to a broad belt of jungle in the
middle distance; here the undergrowth and small trees had been newly
cleared away, opening out a dim far view across an uncumbered
leaf-strewn floor into the backward gloom of the forest. I sat with my
eyes fixed upon the trees, drawing the rain on with the whole strength
of desire to the parched country lying there faint with the exhaustion
of three months of drought. While I watched, the deep line of cloud, at
first distinct from the forest-top along which it came rolling,
insensibly merged with the foliage, until every contour was lost in a
common gloom, only the great bare stems below standing pale against the
gathering darkness. There was an intense stillness everywhere like the
silence of expectation which falls upon an awestruck crowd; the very
insects had ceased their usual song. And now the ear caught a distant
sound, vague and deep, coming up out of the mid darkness, and growing to
a mighty volume as a sudden wind swept out from the sounding foliage
into the open land and searched every cranny of the house as it passed.
Then, as if drawn by the wind, there came into view among the nearest
tree-stems a moving grey line advancing with a long roar until it hid
the whole forest from sight: it was the wave of battle about to break
upon us. It came on like a wall, enormous, irresistible; one instant,
and it had devoured the intervening space; another, and we were lost in
the deluge, and the great rain drops were spilled upon the roof with the
noise of continuous thunder. As the deep sound reverberated through the
roof above me, I went in exulting to a hearth piled with blazing logs,
glad in the prospect of renewing for many weeks old and quiet habitudes
of indoor life, rich with solace of books and tranquil meditation.
* * * * *
I have dwelt upon the outward aspects of my life in exile, because the
sojourn of these years amid the hills and forests taught a natural
leechcraft which was to stand me in good stead in coming years, and may
stand in equal stead other souls desolate as mine. Like the Nile
brimming over the fields, a flood of joy from nature overlaid my parched
being, enriching it with a fertile loam, and shielding it from the
irritations of the world. I lay fallow beneath the still, sunlit waters,
unharrowed by teasing points of doubt, and porous to the influence of an
all-encompassing peace. Exile had opened to me a new heaven and a new
earth, whose freshness and calm charmed thought away from all vain
questionings; the fascination of outward things had for a while cooled
the useless ardour of introspection. But it was inevitable that the
bland ease of such a contemplative life should bring no enduring
satisfaction to the mind; it was not an end in itself, but a mere means
to serenity, a breathing-space useful to the recovery of a long-lost
fortitude. The time was now come when the hunted deer, refreshed in the
quiet of his inaccessible glen, was to awake to new thought of the herd,
and of the duties of a common life; when the peace of successful flight
was to appear in its true light as a momentary release, and no longer as
the ultimate goal imagined in the anguish of pursuit.
It was during this last monsoon that doubts began to stir within,
interrupting my studies of the systems of Hindu philosophy and my
porings over sacred books. The vague insistence of these misgivings made
me surely aware that even in this eastern paradise all was not well;
but at first I refused to listen, and plunged deep into the maze of the
Vedanta to escape the importunate voice. Yet anxiety came up around me
like a heavy atmosphere; an indescribable sense of disillusion, clinging
as a damp mist, brought its mildew to the soul, until my new heaven was
overcast and my new earth dispeopled of all pleasures. Then one day the
fever struck me down, and of a sudden my mind became an arena in which
memories of earlier life chased one another unceasingly in the round of
a delirious dance. Trivial events impressed themselves on consciousness
with strange precision; objects long forgotten rose before me outlined
in fire--one, a pane of stained glass in Fairford Church, with a lost
soul peering in anguish through the red bars of hell. Each and every
apparition was of the old life; all were emissaries from the forsaken
West summoning me back to my renounced allegiance. When the fever left
me, returning reason slowly brought order amid the welter of confused
ideas, as the ants sorted the grain for distracted Psyche, and for the
first time I considered in the detachment of reminiscence the nature of
my action in leaving England. I sifted the evidence at length as I lay
under the verandah slowly recovering strength; and when at last judgment
was delivered, it took the necessary form of condemnation.
I saw now that unless a man is prepared to discard every western usage,
to slough off his inherited cast of thought, to renounce his faith,
wholly and finally to abandon his country and his father's house, his
flight is but the blind expedient of cowardice or pride. Here and there
may be born one who can so cut himself off from the parent stem as to
endure a fruitful grafting upon an oriental stock, but I knew that I at
least was none such. I was no more prepared for so uncompromising a
renunciation than any other weakling who seeks prestige by parade of
exotic wisdom, and deems himself a seer if he can but name the Triad, or
tell the avatars of Vishnu, I had not the credulity which may justify
the honest renegade, and the western blood still ran too warmly in my
veins. I felt that were I to stay in the East for fifty years, I should
never reach the supreme heights of metaphysical abstraction whence men
really appear as specks and life as a play; therefore to remain was to
avow myself a runaway and to live henceforth despicable in my own eyes.
For over the unfathomable deep of oriental custom the torrent of our
civilization flows unblending, as in the Druid's legend the twin streams
of Dee flow clear through Bala lake, and never mingle with its waters.
Not for our use is that intricate mind which in logic needs more than
two premises to a conclusion, and in art is intolerant of all void
space, entangling its figures in labyrinths of ornament which Maya
herself might have devised to distract the sight from truth.
The Hindu has the true dignity of contemplation, and superbly removes
himself from the sordid greeds of life. But in imagining and reviling an
abstraction called Matter, he abides in the errors of the first Greek
sages, and mines so far beneath the trodden earth that when he looks up
into middle day he sees only the stars above him. Could I have shared
the eremite's belief that his prayers help not merely his own solitary
soul but all souls travailing through all the world, I might yet have
remained where I was, an alien living indifferent to the common rule,
like a monk of some shunned exotic order. But with convictions like
mine, to do so would have brought the drear sense of derogation. All the
miseries of the past were as nothing to that; there was but one manly
course--to return and gird my loins for a new struggle with western
life. Within a month from the time when this course was seen to be a
duty, I was standing on the deck of a homeward-bound steamer, watching
the harbour lights recede into the distance.
* * * * *
Back once more in England, I threw aside the clinging robe of
meditation, and falling upon work ravenously, indulged what genius of
energy was still alive within me. I made haste to adore all that I had
so lately burned, making life objective, revering personal ideals, and
in the ordinance of material things finding the truest satisfaction of
all endeavour. I saw in civilization the world's sole hope; its brisk
life and abounding force took sudden hold of a fancy enervated by
dreams. Again I found a new heaven and a new earth, though earth was now
no more than man's dinted anvil, and heaven his reservoir of useful
light. I lived for action and movement; I mingled eagerly with my
fellows, and cursed the folly which had driven me to waste three years
in an intellectual swoon. Now the day was not long enough for work,
Lebanon was not sufficient to burn. I saw the western man with race-dust
on his cheeks, or throned in the power-houses of the world, moving upon
iron platforms and straight ladders in the mid throb and tumult of
encompassing engines. One false step, and he must fall a crushed and
mutilated thing. Yet unconcerned as one strolling at large, he
controlled the great wheels and plunging pistons, and brought them to a
standstill with a touch of his finger. The confidence and strenuous ease
of such life compelled me to marvel and admire, and I who had so lately
lain at the feet of eastern sages, set up this mechanician as my god.
If I looked back at all to the land of dreams, the placid figure beneath
the Tree of Enlightenment took on the aspect of a fool's idol, ignobly
self-manacled, pitiful and irksome in remembrance.
But if once more I dreamed of finality in change I deceived myself,
forgetting that God Himself cannot unmake the past or undo what is done.
A year had hardly gone by in this new apprenticeship to life, when at
moments of weariness or overstrain sharp doubts shot through me and were
gone again, like twinges of sudden pain recalling old disease to one who
has lulled himself with dreams of cure. The feeling of fellowship with
men grew weaker, and as it waned I began to shrink once more from my
kind. I still believed myself happy, but happiness seemed to need
constant affirmation, as though it could make no way in my favour
without display of token or credential to confirm its truth. There were
pauses in the clatter and jangle of life; the revolutions of the great
wheels sometimes slowed into silence; and as these interludes grew more
frequent, I caught myself repeating that I really was content. The faint
assurance given, I flung myself with devouring industry upon my allotted
task, trying to stifle the forebodings which prophesied against my
peace.
In one such pause my old self appeared before me again, like the face of
an ancient enemy looking in from the darkness; stealthy footfalls which
of late I had so often seemed to hear were now referred to their true
cause as we saw each other eye to eye. The old Adam had awakened and was
come for his inheritance; and the vision of him there across the pane
gazing in upon his own, seemed to arraign me for disowning a brother and
denying his indefeasible right. I recognized that with this familiar
form cold reason had returned to oust the hopes and emotions which had
usurped her office. My rush for freedom had ended, as such sallies often
do, in exhaustion, capture and despair; upon the thrill and thunder of
the charge followed the silence of the dungeon and the anguish of
stiffening wounds. The truth, so simply written that a child might have
spelled it, lay clear before me: I had left reformation till too late. I
was too old to change.
Even a few years before, I might have dashed out, like Marmion, from the
prison-fortress; but now the opportunity was past and the portcullis was
down. My character with all its faults was formed within me; and the
very years which I had passed in the wilderness, instead of averting the
danger, had set the final seal upon my fate, for when a man has reached
a certain point in life he is intractable to the reforming hand. But
though at last I knew myself beaten, and helpless in the hands of an
implacable power, I fluttered like a wounded bird and sought wildly for
a loophole of escape. I could no longer hope to stand alone against
destiny; that conceit was gone: could I find a comrade to help me
through the press and lift me when I fell? But here the invincible pride
of shyness barred the way, forbidding alike any confession of weakness
or any appeal to man's compassion. I could not bring myself to say: I am
unable to rule my life, do you undertake it for me. Was marriage a
conceivable path of redemption? I had never envisaged it before, but
now, in my desperation, I dreamed it for a moment a possible issue. I
even fixed upon the person who should thus save me from myself, and
beguiled many lonely hours by picturing her charms and enumerating her
noble qualities.
She lived in a country house where I had been several times a guest, and
she had one of those faces which, in Gray's beautiful expression, speak
the language of all nations. Her features had that sunny charm which
thaws mistrust; she was dowered with all graces and sweet qualities; and
you could no more have doubted the immanent nobility of her nature than
you could have dreamed a stain in the texture of a white petal. And with
all her gentleness there was present I know not what sign and promise of
strength, waking in those who saw her an intuitive trust in loyalty of
uttermost proof. She would have flamed indignant against evil, but only
evil could have moved her from that equal poise of soul which made her
entrance into a room the prelude to higher thoughts and finer feelings.
She was naturally kind without consciousness of a mission, neither
seeking to enslave nor enfranchise, but by a silent outflowing of
goodness ennobling whatever company she was in. Nor was her tongue the
prattling servant of her beauty, but a guide of cheerful converse; for
just as she charmed without device or scheme of fascination, so she
possessed the art of speaking well without seeming to have ever studied
it. In the chase after just and felicitous ideas, she could lead or
follow over the most varied fields with the intuition of the huntress
born. With all these excellences, her wit, her sincerity, her ardour for
all things bright and true, she had no conceit of herself but kept her
father's house in gladness and loved the country-side.
To her, in these days of imminent dismay, my thoughts flew out as to a
fair protecting saint; until the inspiration of her visionary presence
wrought in my fancy with such a dramaturgic power, that I seemed to walk
daily with her, and to know all those delicate and sweet propinquities
by which liking passes into affection and affection is glorified into
love. So far did these happy day-dreams carry me, that they brought me
to the extreme of imaginary bliss, and poured out for me the wine of
untempered joy which thrills the hearts of lovers on the verge of their
betrothal. The dreams that followed that magic draught denied me no
convincing touch of circumstance, and projected upon a credible and
familiar scene the bright possibilities to which fate denied a real
existence. The scene was always the same, and the words and movements
which entranced me followed each other with almost religious exactitude
of detail which the adult demands of his day-dreams and the child of the
fairy-tale he loves.
It was always a June afternoon when we went out together, into the
meadows near her home; she moving with fluent grace as befitted a
daughter of the woods, her eyes indrawing joy from all nature, her hair
reflecting rich gold of the sunlight, her whole face lit with the
pleasure of a bright hour; I a mere satellite attendant upon its
central star. We strolled through the four home-meadows, crossed a
high-banked lane and a dingle with a brook running down it, and then
from an open common flooded with sunlight passed into a wood of tallest
beeches. In that cool, shadowy place the sun, searching a way through
crannies in the upper verdure, chequered with patches of silver light
the even mast-strewn floor. The multitude of smooth grey stems rose
aligned like cathedral columns; and the grateful dimness of the wood,
succeeding the glare of day, wakened a sense of purposed protection and
quietude pervading all things, which soothed the mind with the illusion
that this was a sacred spot appointed for an offering of souls. Near one
of those isles of sunlight we lingered; and as she looked up to the
source of light, the movement brought her face near the slanting shaft
of rays, until there was set round it an aureole of dancing beams. It
seemed to me at this part of my dream that there came to both of us some
gracious influence, for as her eyes met mine they dropped again, and
were fixed for a moment upon the wild flowers she carried. Then my heart
began to beat and my whole being to grow greater: impassioned words, to
that hour unconceived, came rushing to my lips; the fire and glory of a
new manhood were kindling in me to the transformation of my
nature--when, in the very moment of utterance, a sheer barrier of doom
descended between me and my joy; the fire was quenched, and my soul was
poured out within me.
To this fatal point my fancy always brought me and no further, that
coming thus to the threshold of the house of joy and hearing the bars
shoot into their sockets I might thoroughly know my ineffectual self and
leave untouched the forbidden latch. So far I came in my dream times
without number; and always on the verge of joy there came that doom, and
the shooting of those adamantine bolts.
Yet all the while I wove it, I knew that this texture of dreams must
soon be drawn aside, and like the curtain in the tragedy reveal at last
the horror concealed within. Such brooding was but the deception of a
reluctant spirit dallying and delaying with any trifle by the way to put
off the arrival at the hill of evil prospect. At last I learned the
lesson of this abrupt ending to the dream at the point of full
disillusion; it forced itself upon me with the power of an oracular
utterance warning me to cease my palterings with fate. My reason now
rebuked me like a stern judge, dissecting all false pleas and laying
bare their weakness. What right had I, now knowing myself incurable,
even to dream of easing my own pain by darkening and despoiling a second
life? The love of solitude was now more to me than even the love of a
wife; it would surely come between us like a strange woman, and fill a
pure heart with bitterness. No smiling hopes of a possible redemption
could annul the immutable decree, and if I disobeyed the warning, guilt
as well as misery would be mine; for he is pitiful indeed who only weds
that his wife may suck the poison from his wounds. If I married I should
stand for ever condemned of an unutterable meanness. So I dispelled my
dreams and looked reality in the face.
It was a dismal prospect that lay before me. Until then the future had
held its possible secrets, its imaginable revelations of change, which,
like the luminous suggestions in dark clouds, allured with a promise of
a brief and penetrable gloom. In my darkest hours I had lulled fear by
the thought of a haply interposing Providence, and drifted on from day
to aimless day nursing the hope of some miraculous release upon the very
steps of the scaffold. But now I was twice fallen; and as a man
abandoned by the last illusion of deliverance calls ruin to him, and in
the new leisure of despair calmly scans the features at which but now he
dared not glance, so I saw as in a hard grey light the true outlines of
my destiny. The wreathing mist, the profound soft shadows, the clouds
with their promise of mutability, were now all gone, leaving the bare
framework of a world arid and severe as a lunar landscape.
I seemed to be sitting in the dust, as in inmost Asia a sick man may
crouch abandoned, while the caravan in which all his earthly hopes are
centred goes inexorably upon its way. The blue sky flushes to deep
purple before him; night falls; all colour is swallowed up in darkness,
until the jingling camel-bells receding up the pass cross the dividing
ridge, and for him the last silence is begun. Such then was the end of
youthful ambition: for food a mouthful of ashes instead of the very
marrow of joy; for home not the free ocean, but a stagnant pool ringed
with weeping willows, a log's fit floating-place. Here to float, marking
the weed creep onward until all from bank to bank was overfilmed, and
there remained no clear water of space for reflection of a single star:
to float, and feel the sodden fibres of life loosening in slow
decay--this was to be the last state of the seedling which had sprung up
on the mountain slopes with promise of mighty stem and overarching
branches full of sap like the cedars of the Lord.
My life henceforth was to be ringed round and overhung with so heavy an
air that joy and fancy should never fly in it, but fall dead as the
birds above Avernus according to the ancient story. I seemed to see
nothing upon the path of the future but the stern form of Renunciation
drawing between me and the living world the impassable circle of death
in life, the _ultima linea rerum_. It was the last decree, the
irrevocable sentence, the absolute end: and I had not yet reached half
the Psalmist's span; I had not yet forgotten the lost summer mornings
when the breeze scented with lilac came blowing through the casement,
bearing with it the sound of glad voices welcoming the day.