The rambles I have described were mostly inland: when by chance they
took us down to the sea our impressions and adventures appeared less
interesting. Looking back on the holiday, it would seem to us a somewhat
vacant time compared to one spent in wandering from village to village.
I mean if we do not take into account that first impression which the
sea invariably makes on us on returning to it after a long absence--the
shock of recognition and wonder and joy as if we had been suffering
from loss of memory and it had now suddenly come back to us. That brief
moving experience over, there is little the sea can give us to compare
with the land. How could it be otherwise in our case, seeing that we
were by it in a crowd, our movements and way of life regulated for us in
places which appear like overgrown and ill-organized convalescent homes?
There was always a secret intense dislike of all parasitic and holiday
places, an uncomfortable feeling which made the pleasure seem poor and
the remembrance of days so spent hardly worth dwelling on. And as we
are able to keep in or throw out of our minds whatever we please, being
autocrats in our own little kingdom, I elected to cast away most of the
memories of these comparatively insipid holidays. But not all, and of
those I retain I will describe at least two, one in the present chapter
on the East Anglian coast, the other later on.
It was cold, though the month was August; it blew and the sky was grey
and rain beginning to fall when we came down about noon to a small town
on the Norfolk coast, where we hoped to find lodging and such comforts
as could be purchased out of a slender purse. It was a small modern
pleasure town of an almost startling appearance owing to the material
used in building its straight rows of cottages and its ugly square
houses and villas. This was an orange-brown stone found in the
neighbourhood, the roofs being all of hard, black slate. I had never
seen houses of such a colour, it was stronger, more glaring and
aggressive than the reddest brick, and there was not a green thing to
partially screen or soften it, nor did the darkness of the wet weather
have any mitigating effect on it. The town was built on high ground,
with an open grassy space before it sloping down to the cliff in which
steps had been cut to give access to the beach, and beyond the cliff
we caught sight of the grey, desolate, wind-vexed sea. But the rain was
coming down more and more heavily, turning the streets into torrents,
so that we began to envy those who had found a shelter even in so ugly a
place. No one would take us in. House after house, street after street,
we tried, and at every door with "Apartments to Let" over it where we
knocked the same hateful landlady-face appeared with the same triumphant
gleam in the fish-eyes and the same smile on the mouth that opened to
tell us delightedly that she and the town were "full up"; that never had
there been known such a rush of visitors; applicants were being turned
away every hour from every door!
After three miserable hours spent in this way we began inquiring at all
the shops, and eventually at one were told of a poor woman in a small
house in a street a good way back from the front who would perhaps be
able to taken us in. To this place we went and knocked at a low door in
a long blank wall in a narrow street; it was opened to us by a pale
thin sad-looking woman in a rusty black gown, who asked us into a shabby
parlour, and agreed to take us in until we could find something better.
She had a gentle voice and was full of sympathy, and seeing our plight
took us into the kitchen behind the parlour, which was living- and
working-room as well, to dry ourselves by the fire.
"The greatest pleasure in life," said once a magnificent young athlete,
a great pedestrian, to me, "is to rest when you are tired." And, I
should add, to dry and warm yourself by a big fire when wet and
cold, and to eat and drink when you are hungry and thirsty. All these
pleasures were now ours, for very soon tea and chops were ready for us;
and so strangely human, so sister-like did this quiet helpful woman
seem after our harsh experiences on that rough rainy day--that we
congratulated ourselves on our good fortune in having found such a
haven, and soon informed her that we wanted no "better place."
She worked with her needle to support herself and her one child, a
little boy of ten; and by and by when he came in pretty wet from some
outdoor occupation we made his acquaintance and the discovery that he
was a little boy of an original character. He was so much to his mother,
who, poor soul, had nobody else in the world to love, that she was
always haunted by the fear of losing him. He was her boy, the child of
her body, exclusively her own, unlike all other boys, and her wise heart
told her that if she put him in a school he would be changed so that she
would no longer know him for her boy. For it is true that our schools
are factories, with a machinery to unmake and remake, or fabricate, the
souls of children much in the way in which shoddy is manufactured. You
may see a thousand rags or garments of a thousand shapes and colours
cast in to be boiled, bleached, pulled to pieces, combed and woven, and
finally come out as a piece of cloth a thousand yards long of a uniform
harmonious pattern, smooth, glossy, and respectable. His individuality
gone, he would in a sense be lost to her; and although by nature a
weak timid woman, though poor, and a stranger in a strange place, this
thought, or feeling, or "ridiculous delusion" as most people would call
it, had made her strong, and she had succeeded in keeping her boy out of
school.
Hers was an interesting story. Left alone in the world she had married
one in her own class, very happily as she imagined. He was in some
business in a country town, well off enough to provide a comfortable
home, and he was very good; in fact, his one fault was that he was too
good, too open-hearted and fond of associating with other good fellows
like himself, and of pledging them in the cup that cheers and at the
same time inebriates. Nevertheless, things went very well for a time,
until the child was born, the business declined, and they began to be a
little pinched. Then it occurred to her that she, too, might be able to
do something. She started dressmaking, and as she had good taste and
was clever and quick, her business soon prospered. This pleased him; it
relieved him from the necessity of providing for the home, and enabled
him to follow his own inclination, which was to take things easily--to
be an idle man, with a little ready money in his pocket for betting and
other pleasures. The money was now provided out of "our business." This
state of things continued without any change, except that process of
degeneration which continued in him, until the child was about four
years old, when all at once one day he told her they were not doing
as well as they might. She was giving far too much of her time and
attention to domestic matters--to the child especially. Business was
business--a thing it was hard for a woman to understand--and it was
impossible for her to give her mind properly to it with her thoughts
occupied with the child. It couldn't be done. Let the child be put away,
he said, and the receipts would probably be doubled. He had been making
inquiries and found that for a modest annual payment the boy could be
taken proper care of at a distance by good decent people he had heard
of.
She had never suspected such a thought in his mind, and this proposal
had the effect of a stunning blow. She answered not one word: he said
his say and went out, and she knew she would not see him again for many
hours, perhaps not for some days; she knew, too, that he would say no
more to her on the subject, that it would all be arranged about the
child with or without her consent. His will was law, her wishes nothing.
For she was his wife and humble obedient slave; never had she pleaded
with or admonished him and never complained, even when, after her long
day of hard work, he came in at ten or eleven o'clock at night with
several of his pals, all excited with drink and noisy as himself, to
call for supper. Nevertheless she had been happy--intensely happy,
because of the child. The love for the man she had married, wondering
how one so bright and handsome and universally admired and liked
could stoop to her, who had nothing but love and worship to give in
return--that love was now gone and was not missed, so much greater and
more satisfying was the love for her boy. And now she must lose him.
Two or three silent miserable days passed by while she waited for the
dreadful separation, until the thought of it became unendurable and she
resolved to keep her child and sacrifice everything else. Secretly she
prepared for flight, getting together the few necessary things she could
carry; then, with the child in her arms, she stole out one evening and
began her flight, which took her all across England at its widest part,
and ended at this small coast town, the best hiding-place she could
think of.
The boy was a queer little fellow, healthy but colourless, with
strangely beautiful grey eyes which, on first seeing them, almost
startled one with their intelligence. He was shy and almost obstinately
silent, but when I talked to him on certain subjects the intense
suppressed interest he felt would show itself in his face, and by and
by it would burst out in speech--an impetuous torrent of words in a high
shrill voice. He reminded me of a lark in a cage. Watch it in its prison
when the sun shines forth--when, like the captive falcon in Dante, it is
"cheated by a gleam"--its wing-tremblings, and all its little tentative
motions, how the excitement grows and grows in it, until, although shut
up and flight denied it, the passion can no longer be contained and it
bursts out in a torrent of shrill and guttural sounds, which, if it were
free and soaring, would be its song. His passion was all for nature, and
his mother out of her small earnings had managed to get quite a number
of volumes together for him. These he read and re-read until he knew
them by heart; and on Sundays, or any other day they could take, those
two lonely ones would take a basket containing their luncheon, her work
and a book or two, and set out on a long ramble along the coast to pass
the day in some solitary spot among the sandhills.
With these two, the gentle woman and her quiet boy over his book, and
the kitchen fire to warm and dry us after each wetting, the bad weather
became quite bearable although it lasted many days. And it was amazingly
bad. The wind blew with a fury from the sea; it was hard to walk against
it. The people in hundreds waited in their dull apartments for a lull,
and when it came they poured out like hungry sheep from the fold, or
like children from a school, swarming over the green slope down to the
beach, to scatter far and wide over the sands. Then, in a little while;
a new menacing blackness would come up out of the sea, and by and by a
fresh storm of wind would send the people scuttling back into shelter.
So it went on day after day, and when night came the sound of the
ever-troubled sea grew louder, so that, shut up in our little rooms in
that back street, we had it in our ears, except at intervals, when the
wind howled loud enough to drown its great voice, and hurled tempests of
rain and hail against the roofs and windows.
To me the most amazing thing was the spectacle of the swifts. It was
late for them, near the end of August; they should now have been far
away on their flight to Africa; yet here they were, delaying on that
desolate east coast in wind and wet, more than a hundred of them. It was
strange to see so many at one spot, and I could only suppose that they
had congregated previous to migration at that unsuitable place, and were
being kept back by the late breeders, who had not yet been wrought up
to the point of abandoning their broods. They haunted a vast ruinous
old barn-like building near the front, which was probably old a century
before the town was built, and about fifteen to twenty pairs had their
nests under the eaves. Over this building they hung all day in a crowd,
rising high to come down again at a frantic speed, and at each descent
a few birds could be seen to enter the holes, while others rushed out to
join the throng, and then all rose and came down again and swept round
and round in a furious chase, shrieking as if mad. At all hours they
drew me to that spot, and standing there, marvelling at their swaying
power and the fury that possessed them, they appeared to me like
tormented beings, and were like those doomed wretches in the halls of
Eblis whose hearts were in a blaze of unquenchable fire, and who,
every one with hands pressed to his breast, went spinning round in an
everlasting agonized dance. They were tormented and crazed by the two
most powerful instincts of birds pulling in opposite directions--the
parental instinct and the passion of migration which called them to the
south.
In such weather, especially on that naked desolate coast, exposed to
the fury of the winds, one marvels at our modern craze for the sea; not
merely to come and gaze upon and listen to it, to renew our youth in its
salt, exhilarating waters and to lie in delicious idleness on the warm
shingle or mossy cliff; but to be always, for days and weeks and even
for months, at all hours, in all weathers, close to it, with its murmur,
"as of one in pain," for ever in our ears.
Undoubtedly it is an unnatural, a diseased, want in us, the result of a
life too confined and artificial in close dirty overcrowded cities. It
is to satisfy this craving that towns have sprung up everywhere on our
coasts and extended their ugly fronts for miles and leagues, with their
tens of thousands of windows from which the city-sickened wretches may
gaze and gaze and listen and feed their sick souls with the ocean. That
is to say, during their indoor hours; at other times they walk or sit
or lie as close as they can to it, following the water as it ebbs and
reluctantly retiring before it when it returns. It was not so formerly,
before the discovery was made that the sea could cure us. Probably our
great-grandfathers didn't even know they were sick; at all events, those
who had to live in the vicinity of the sea were satisfied to be a little
distance from it, out of sight of its grey desolation and, if possible,
out of hearing of its "accents disconsolate." This may be seen anywhere
on our coasts; excepting the seaports and fishing settlements, the towns
and villages are almost always some distance from the sea, often in a
hollow or at all events screened by rising ground and woods from it. The
modern seaside place has, in most cases, its old town or village not far
away but quite as near as the healthy ancients wished to be.
The old village nearest to our little naked and ugly modern town was
discovered at a distance of about two miles, but it might have been two
hundred, so great was the change to its sheltered atmosphere. Loitering
in its quiet streets among the old picturesque brick houses with tiled
or thatched roofs and tall chimneys--ivy and rose and creeper-covered,
with a background of old oaks and elms--I had the sensation of having
come back to my own home. In that still air you could hear men and women
talking fifty or a hundred yards away, the cry or laugh of a child and
the clear crowing of a cock, also the smaller aerial sounds of nature,
the tinkling notes of tits and other birdlings in the trees, the twitter
of swallows and martins, and the "lisp of leaves and ripple of rain." It
was sweet and restful in that home-like place, and hard to leave it to
go back to the front to face the furious blasts once more. Rut there
were compensations.
The little town, we have seen, was overcrowded with late summer
visitors, all eager for the sea yet compelled to waste so much precious
time shut up in apartments, and at every appearance of a slight
improvement in the weather they would pour out of the houses and the
green slope would be covered with a crowd of many hundreds, all hurrying
down to the beach. The crowd was composed mostly of women--about three
to every man, I should say--and their children; and it was one of the
most interesting crowds I had ever come across on account of the large
number of persons in it of a peculiarly fine type, which chance had
brought together at that spot. It was the large English blonde, and
there were so many individuals of this type that they gave a character
to the crowd so that those of a different physique and colour appeared
to be fewer than they were and were almost overlooked. They came from
various places about the country, in the north and the Midlands, and
appeared to be of the well-to-do classes; they, or many of them, were
with their families but without their lords. They were mostly tall and
large in every way, very white-skinned, with light or golden hair and
large light blue eyes. A common character of these women was their quiet
reposeful manner; they walked and talked and rose up and sat down and
did everything, in fact, with an air of deliberation; they gazed in a
slow steady way at you, and were dignified, some even majestic, and were
like a herd of large beautiful white cows. The children, too, especially
the girls, some almost as tall as their large mothers, though still in
short frocks, were very fine. The one pastime of these was paddling, and
it was a delight to see their bare feet and legs. The legs of those
who had been longest on the spot--probably several weeks in some
instances--were of a deep nutty brown hue suffused with pink; after
these a gradation of colour, light brown tinged with buff, pinkish buff
and cream, like the Gloire de Dijon rose; and so on to the delicate
tender pink of the clover blossom; and, finally, the purest ivory
white of the latest arrivals whose skins had not yet been caressed and
coloured by sun and wind.
How beautiful are the feet of these girls by the sea who bring us glad
tidings of a better time to come and the day of a nobler courage, a
freer larger life when garments which have long oppressed and hindered
shall have been cast away! It was, as I have said, mere chance which had
brought so many persons of a particular type together on this occasion,
and I thought I might go there year after year and never see the like
again. As a fact I did return when August came round and found a crowd
of a different character. The type was there but did not predominate:
it was no longer the herd of beautiful white and strawberry cows with
golden horns and large placid eyes. Nothing in fact was the same, for
when I looked for the swifts there were no more than about twenty birds
instead of over a hundred, and although just on the eve of departure
they were not behaving in the same excited manner.
Probably I should not have thought so much about that particular crowd
in that tempestuous August, and remembered it so vividly, but for the
presence of three persons in it and the strange contrast they made to
the large white type I have described. These were a woman and her two
little girls, aged about eight and ten respectively, but very small for
their years. She was a little black haired and black-eyed woman with a
pale sad dark face, on which some great grief or tragedy had left its
shadow; very quiet and subdued in her manner; she would sit on a chair
on the beach when the weather permitted, a book on her knees, while her
two little ones played about, chasing and flying from the waves, or
with the aid of their long poles vaulting from rock to rock. They
were dressed in black frocks and scarlet blouses, which set off their
beautiful small dark faces; their eyes sparkled like black diamonds, and
their loose hair was a wonder to see, a black mist or cloud about their
heads and necks composed of threads fine as gossamer, blacker than jet
and shining like spun glass-hair that looked as if no comb or brush
could ever tame its beautiful wildness. And in spirit they were what
they seemed: such a wild, joyous, frolicsome spirit with such grace and
fleetness one does not look for in human beings, but only in birds or
in some small bird-like volatile mammal--a squirrel or a marmoset of the
tropical forest, or the chinchilla of the desolate mountain slopes,
the swiftest, wildest, loveliest, most airy and most vocal of small
beasties. Occasionally to watch their wonderful motions more closely and
have speech with them, I followed when they raced over the sands or flew
about over the slippery rocks, and felt like a cochin-china fowl, or
muscovy duck, or dodo, trying to keep pace with a humming-bird. Their
voices were well suited to their small brilliant forms; not loud, though
high-pitched and singularly musical and penetrative, like the high
clear notes of a skylark at a distance. They also reminded me of
certain notes, which have a human quality, in some of our songsters--the
swallow, redstart, pied wagtail, whinchat, and two or three others. Such
pure and beautiful sounds are sometimes heard in human voices, chiefly
in children, when they are talking and laughing in joyous excitement.
But for any sort of conversation they were too volatile; before I could
get a dozen words from them they would be off again, flying and
flitting along the margin, like sandpipers, and beating the clear-voiced
sandpiper at his own aerial graceful game.
By and by I was favoured with a fine exhibition of the spirit animating
these two little things. The weather had made it possible for the crowd
of visitors to go down and scatter itself over the beach, when the usual
black cloud sprang up and soon burst on us in a furious tempest of
wind and rain, sending the people flying back to the shelter of a large
structure erected for such purposes against the cliff. It was a vast
barn-like place, open to the front, the roof supported by wooden
columns, and here in a few minutes some three or four hundred persons
were gathered, mostly women and their girls, white and blue-eyed with
long wet golden hair hanging down their backs. Finding a vacant place
on the bench, I sat down next to a large motherly-looking woman with a
robust or dumpy blue-eyed girl about four or five years old on her lap.
Most of the people were standing about in groups waiting for the storm
to blow over, and presently I noticed my two wild-haired dark little
girls moving about in the crowd. It was impossible not to seen them,
for they could not keep still a moment. They were here, there, and
everywhere, playing hide-and-seek and skipping and racing wherever they
could find an opening, and by and by, taking hold of each other, they
started dancing. It was a pretty spectacle, but most interesting to see
was the effect produced on the other children, the hundred girls, big
and little, the little ones especially, who had been standing there
tired and impatient to get out to the sea, and who were now becoming
more and more excited as they gazed, until, like children when listening
to lively music, they began moving feet and hands and soon their whole
bodies in time to the swift movements of the little dancers. At last,
plucking up courage, first one, then another, joined them, and were
caught as they came and whirled round and round in a manner quite new
to them and which they appeared to find very delightful. By and by I
observed that the little rosy-faced dumpy girl on my neighbour's knees
was taking the infection; she was staring, her blue eyes opened to their
widest in wonder and delight. Then suddenly she began pleading, "Oh,
mummy, do let me go to the little girls--oh, do let me!" And her mother
said "No," because she was so little, and could never fly round like
that, and so would fall and hurt herself and cry. But she pleaded still,
and was ready to cry if refused, until the good anxious mother was
compelled to release her; and down she slipped, and after standing still
with her little arms and closed hands held up as if to collect herself
before plunging into the new tremendous adventure, she rushed out
towards the dancers. One of them saw her coming, and instantly quitting
the child she was waltzing with flew to meet her, and catching her round
the middle began spinning her about as if the solid little thing weighed
no more than a feather. But it proved too much for her; very soon she
came down and broke into a loud cry, which brought her mother instantly
to her, and she was picked up and taken back to the seat and held to the
broad bosom and soothed with caresses and tender words until the sobs
began to subside. Then, even before the tears were dry, her eyes were
once more gazing at the tireless little dancers, taking on child after
child as they came timidly forward to have a share in the fun, and once
more she began to plead with her "mummy," and would not be denied, for
she was a most determined little Saxon, until getting her way she rushed
out for a second trial. Again the little dancer saw her coming and
flew to her like a bird to its mate, and clasping her laughed her merry
musical little laugh. It was her "sudden glory," an expression of pure
delight in her power to infuse her own fire and boundless gaiety of soul
into all these little blue-eyed rosy phlegmatic lumps of humanity.
What was it in these human mites, these fantastic Brownies, which, in
that crowd of Rowenas and their children, made them seem like beings not
only of another race, but of another species? How came they alone to be
distinguished among so many by that irresponsible gaiety, as of the
most volatile of wild creatures, that quickness of sense and mind and
sympathy, that variety and grace and swiftness--all these brilliant
exotic qualities harmoniously housed in their small beautiful elastic
and vigorous frames? It was their genius, their character--something
derived from their race. But what race? Looking at their mother watching
her little ones at their frolics with dark shining eyes--the small
oval-faced brown-skinned woman with blackest hair--I could but say that
she was an Iberian, pure and simple, and that her children were like
her. In Southern Europe that type abounds; it is also to be met with
throughout Britain, perhaps most common in the southern counties, and it
is not uncommon in East Anglia. Indeed, I think it is in Norfolk
where we may best see the two most marked sub-types in which it is
divided--the two extremes. The small stature, narrow head, dark skin,
black hair and eyes are common to both, and in both these physical
characters are correlated with certain mental traits, as, for instance,
a peculiar vivacity and warmth of disposition; but they are high and
low. In the latter sub-division the skin is coarse in texture, brown or
old parchment in colour, with little red in it; the black hair is also
coarse, the forehead small, the nose projecting, and the facial angle
indicative of a more primitive race. One might imagine that these people
had been interred, along with specimens of rude pottery and bone and
flint implements, a long time back, about the beginning of the Bronze
Age perhaps, and had now come out of their graves and put on modern
clothes. At all events I don't think a resident in Norfolk would
have much difficulty in picking out the portraits of some of his
fellow-villagers in Mr. Reed's Prehistoric Peeps.
The mother and her little ones were of the higher sub-type: they
had delicate skins, beautiful faces, clear musical voices. They were
Iberians in blood, but improved; purified and refined as by fire;
gentleized and spiritualized, and to the lower types down to the
aboriginals, as is the bright consummate flower to leaf and stem and
root.
Often and often we are teased and tantalized and mocked by that old
question:
Oh! so old--
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told--
of black and blue eyes; blue versus black and black versus blue, to put
it both ways. And by black we mean black with orange-brown lights in
it--the eye called tortoise-shell; and velvety browns with other browns,
also hazels. Blue includes all blues, from ultramarine, or violet, to
the palest blue of a pale sky; and all greys down to the grey that is
almost white. Our preference for this or that colour is supposed to
depend on nothing but individual taste, or fancy, and association. I
believe it is something more, but I do find that we are very apt to be
swayed this way and that by the colour of the eyes of the people we meet
in life, according as they (the people) attract or repel us. The eyes of
the two little girls were black as polished black diamonds until looked
at closely, when they appeared a beautiful deep brown on which the black
pupils were seen distinctly; they were so lovely that I, predisposed to
prefer dark to light, felt that this question was now definitely settled
for me--that black was best. That irresistible charm, the flame-like
spirit which raised these two so much above the others--how could it go
with anything but the darkest eyes!
But no sooner was the question thus settled definitely and for all time,
to my very great satisfaction, than it was unsettled again. I do not
know how this came about; it may have been the sight of some small
child's blue eyes looking up at me, like the arch blue eyes of a kitten,
full of wonder at the world and everything in it;
"Where did you get those eyes so blue?"
"Out of the sky as I came through";
or it may have been the sight of a harebell; and perhaps it came from
nothing but the "waste shining of the sky." At all events, there they
were, remembered again, looking at me from the past, blue eyes that were
beautiful and dear to me, whose blue colour was associated with every
sweetness and charm in child and woman and with all that is best and
highest in human souls; and I could not and had no wish to resist their
appeal.
Then came a new experience of the eye that is blue--a meeting with one
who almost seemed to be less flesh than spirit. A middle-aged lady,
frail, very frail; exceedingly pale from long ill-health, prematurely
white-haired, with beautiful grey eyes, gentle but wonderfully bright.
Altogether she was like a being compounded as to her grosser part of
foam and mist and gossamer and thistledown, and was swayed by every
breath of air, and who, should she venture abroad in rough weather,
would be lifted and blown away by the gale and scattered like mist
over the earth. Yet she, so frail, so timid, was the one member of
the community who had set herself to do the work of a giant--that of
championing all ill-used and suffering creatures, wild or tame, holding
a protecting shield over them against the innate brutality of the
people. She had been abused and mocked and jeered at by many, while
others had regarded her action with an amused smile or else with a cold
indifference. But eventually some, for very shame, had been drawn to her
side, and a change in the feeling of the people had resulted; domestic
animals were treated better, and it was no longer universally believed
that all wild animals, especially those with wings, existed only that
men might amuse themselves by killing and wounding and trapping and
caging and persecuting them in various other ways.
The sight of that burning and shining spirit in its frail tenement--for
did I not actually see her spirit and the very soul of her in those
eyes?--was the last of the unforgotten experiences I had at that place
which had startled and repelled me with its ugliness.
But, no, there was one more, marvellous as any--the experience of a day
of days, one of those rare days when nature appears to us spiritualized
and is no longer nature, when that which had transfigured this visible
world is in us too, and it becomes possible to believe--it is almost a
conviction--that the burning and shining spirit seen and recognized in
one among a thousand we have known is in all of us and in all things. In
such moments it is possible to go beyond even the most advanced of the
modern physicists who hold that force alone exists, that matter is but a
disguise, a shadow and delusion; for we may add that force itself--that
which we call force or energy--is but a semblance and shadow of the
universal soul.
The change in the weather was not sudden; the furious winds dropped
gradually; the clouds floated higher in the heavens, and were of a
lighter grey; there were wider breaks in them, showing the lucid blue
beyond; and the sea grew quieter. It had raved and roared too long,
beating against the iron walls that held it back, and was now spent
and fallen into an uneasy sleep, but still moved uneasily and moaned
a little. Then all at once summer returned, coming like a thief in the
night, for when it was morning the sun rose in splendour and power in
a sky without a cloud on its vast azure expanse, on a calm sea with
no motion but that scarcely perceptible rise and fall as of one that
sleeps. As the sun rose higher the air grew warmer until it was full
summer heat, but although a "visible heat," it was never oppressive; for
all that day we were abroad, and as the tide ebbed a new country that
was neither earth nor sea was disclosed, an infinite expanse of pale
yellow sand stretching away on either side, and further and further out
until it mingled and melted into the sparkling water and faintly seen
line of foam on the horizon. And over all--the distant sea, the ridge
of low dunes marking where the earth ended and the flat, yellow expanse
between--there brooded a soft bluish silvery haze. A haze that blotted
nothing out, but blended and interfused them all until earth and air
and sea and sands were scarcely distinguishable. The effect, delicate,
mysterious, unearthly, cannot be described.
Ethereal gauze...
Visible heat, air-water, and dry sea,
Last conquest of the eye...
Sun dust,
Aerial surf upon the shores of earth,
Ethereal estuary, frith of light....
Bird of the sun, transparent winged.
Do we not see that words fail as pigments do--that the effect is too
coarse, since in describing it we put it before the mental eye as
something distinctly visible, a thing of itself and separate. But it is
not so in nature; the effect is of something almost invisible and is
yet a part of all and makes all things--sky and sea and land--as
unsubstantial as itself. Even living, moving things had that aspect. Far
out on the lowest further strip of sand, which appeared to be on a level
with the sea, gulls were seen standing in twos and threes and small
groups and in rows; but they did not look like gulls--familiar birds,
gull-shaped with grey and white plumage. They appeared twice as big as
gulls, and were of a dazzling whiteness and of no definite shape: though
standing still they had motion, an effect of the quivering dancing air,
the "visible heat"; at rest, they were seen now as separate objects;
then as one with the silver sparkle on the sea; and when they rose
and floated away they were no longer shining and white, but like pale
shadows of winged forms faintly visible in the haze.
They were not birds but spirits--beings that lived in or were passing
through the world and now, like the heat, made visible; and I, standing
far out on the sparkling sands, with the sparkling sea on one side and
the line of dunes, indistinctly seen as land, on the other, was one of
them; and if any person had looked at me from a distance he would have
seen me as a formless shining white being standing by the sea, and then
perhaps as a winged shadow floating in the haze. It was only necessary
to put out one's arms to float. That was the effect on my mind: this
natural world was changed to a supernatural, and there was no more
matter nor force in sea or land nor in the heavens above, but only
spirit.