Howard was very singularly impressed by this talk. It seemed to him,
not certainly indeed, but possibly, that he had stumbled, almost as it
were by accident, upon a great current of force and emotion running
vehemently through the world, under the calm surface of things. How
many apparently unaccountable events it might explain! one saw frail
people doing fine things, sensitive people bearing burdens of
ill-health or disappointment, placidly and even contentedly, men making
gallant, unexpected choices, big expansive natures doing dull work and
living cheerfully under cramped conditions. He had never troubled to
explain such phenomena, beyond thinking that for some reason such a
course of action pleased and satisfied people. Of course everyone did
not hide the struggle; there were men he knew who had a grievance
against the world, for ever parading a valuation of themselves with
which no one concurred. But there were many people who had the material
for far worse grievances, who never seemed to nourish them. Had they
fought in secret and prevailed? Had they been floated into some moving
current of strength by a rising tide? Were they, like the man in the
Gospel, conscious of a treasure hidden in a field which made all other
prizes tame by comparison? Was the Gospel in fact perhaps aiming at
that--the pearl of price? To be born again--was that what had happened?
The thought cast a light upon his own serene life, and showed him that
it was essentially a pagan sort of life, temperate perhaps and refined,
but still unlit by any secret fire. It was not that his life was wrong,
or that an abjuration was needed; it was still to be lived, and lived
more intently, but no longer merely self-propelled. . . .
He needed to be alone, to consider, to focus his thought; he went off
for a walk by himself among the hills, past the spring, up the valley,
till he came to a place where the down ran out into the plain, the
bluff crowned with a great earthwork. An enormous view lay spread out
before him. To left and right the smooth elbows of the uplands ran down
into the plain, their skirts clothed with climbing woods and orchards,
hamlets half-hidden, with the smoke going up from their chimneys;
further out the cultivated plain rose and fell, field beyond field,
wood beyond wood, merging at last in a belt of deep rich colour, and
beyond that, blue hills of hope and desire, and a pale gleam of sea
beyond all. The westering sun filled the air with a golden haze, and
enriched the land with soft rich shadows. There was life spread out
before him, just so and not otherwise, life organised and constructed
into toil and a certain order, out of what dim concourse and strife!
For whatever reason, it was there to be lived; one could not change the
conditions of it, the sun and the rain, the winter and the spring; but
behind all that definite set of forces, was there perhaps a stronger
and larger force still, a brimming tide of energy, that clasped life
close and loved it, and yet regarded something through it and beyond it
that was not yet? His heart seemed full of a great longing, not to
avoid life, but to return and live it in a larger way, at once more
engaged in it, and more detached from it, each quality ministering to
the other. It seemed to him that afternoon that there was something
awaiting him greater than anything which had yet befallen him--an open
door, through which he might pass to see strange things.