your way by sound and smell; there’s things up here they wouldn’t make
so free with. They say from London ye can get to anywhere. But there’s
things no man can ride away from. Downs ’ll be left when they’re all
gone.... Never been off the Downs meself.”
“Don’t you ever feel you’d like to go?”
“There isn’t not hardly one as knows what these Downs are. I see the
young men growin’ up, but they won’t stay on ’em; I see folk comin’
down, same as yourself, to look at ’em.”
“What _are_ they, then--these Downs?”
His little eyes, that saw so vastly better than my eyes, deepened in his
walnut-coloured face. Fixed on those grey-green Downs, that reigned
serene above the country spread below in all its little fields, and
woods, and villages, they answered for him. It was long before he spoke.
“Healthiest spot in England!... Talkin’ you was of progress; but look at
bacon--four times the price now that ever it was when I were young. And
families--thirteen we had, my missus and meself; nowadays if they have
three or four it’s as much as ever they’ll put up with. The country’s
changed.”
“Does that surprise you? When you came up here this morning the sun was
just behind that clump of beech--it’s travelled on since then.”
He looked at it.
“There’s no puttin’ of it back, I guess, if that’s your meaning? It were
risin’ then, an’ now it’s gone past noon.”
“Joshua made the sun stand still; it was a great achievement!”
“May well say that; won’t never be done again, I’m thinkin’. And as to
knowin’ o’ the time o’ day, them ewes they know it better than ever
humans do; at tew o’clock exact you’ll see them comin’ out again to
feed.”
“Ah! well--I must be getting on. Good-bye!”
His little eyes began to twinkle with a sort of friendly mockery.
“Ye’re like the country, all for movin’ on your way! Well, keep on,
along the tops--ye can’t make no mistake!”
He gave me his old gnarled hand, whose finger-tips were so strangely
warped. Then, leaning on his stick, he fixed his eyes upon the beech
grove, where his ewes were lying in the cool.
Beyond him in the sun the hazy line of dust trailed across the
grey-green Downs, and on the rising breeze came the far-off music of the
cars.
HOLIDAY
X
HOLIDAY
The curtain whose colour changes from dawn to noon, from night to
dawn--the curtain which never lifts, is fastened to the dark horizon.
On the black beach, beneath a black sky with its few stars, the sea wind
blows a troubling savour from the west, as it did when man was not yet
on the earth. It sings the same troubling song as when the first man
heard it. And by this black beach man is collected in his hundreds,
trying with all his might to take his holiday. Here he has built a
theatre within the theatre of the night, and hung a canvas curtain to
draw up and down, and round about lit lights to show him as many as may
be of himself, and nothing of the encircling dark. Here he has brought
singers, and put a band, armed with pipes of noise, to drown the
troubling murmur of the wind. And behind his theatre he has made a fire
whose smoke has qualified the troubling savour of the sea.
Male and female, from all the houses where he sleeps, he has herded to
this music as close as he can herd. The lights fall on his faces,
attentive, white, and still--as wonderfully blank as bits of wood cut
out in round, with pencil marks for eyes. And every time the noises
cease, he claps his hands as though to say: “Begin again, you noises; do
not leave me lonely to the silence and the sighing of the night.”
Round the ring he circles, and each small group of him seems saying:
“Talk--laugh--this is my holiday!”
This is his holiday, his rest from the incessant round of toil that
fills his hours; to this he has looked forward all the year; to this he
will look back until it comes again. He walks and talks and laughs,
around this pavilion by the beach; he casts no glances at the pavilion
of the night, where Nature is playing her wind-music for the stars to
dance. Long ago he found he could not bear his mother Nature’s
inscrutable, ironic face, bending above him in the dark, and with a moan
he drew the clothes over his head. In Her who gave him being he has
perceived the only thing he cannot brave. And since there is courage and
pride in the feeblest of his hearts, he has made a compact with himself:
“Nature! There is no Nature! For what I cannot understand I cannot face,
and what I cannot face I will not think of, and what I will not think of
does not exist for me; thus, there is nothing that I cannot face.
And--deny it as I may--this is why I herd in my pavilion under my
lights, and make these noises against the sighing and the silence and
the blackness of the night.”
Back from the dark sea, across a grassy space, is his row of houses with
lighted windows; and behind it, stretching inland, a thousand more,
huddled, closer and closer, round the lighted railway shed, where, like
spider’s threads, the rails run in from the expanse of sleeping fields
and marshes and dim hills; of dark trees and moon-pale water fringed
with reeds. All over the land these rails have run, chaining his houses
into one great web so that he need never be alone.
For nothing is so dreadful to this man as solitude. In solitude he hears
the voice of Her he cannot understand: “Ah! the baby that you are, my
baby man!” And he sees Her smile, the ironic smile of evening over land
and sea. In solitude he feels so small, so very small; for solitude is
silence and silence irony, and irony he cannot bear, not even that of
Her who gave him birth.
And so he is neither careful of his beauty nor of his strength; not
careful to be clean or to be fine; his only care is not to be alone. To
all his young, from the first day, he teaches the same lesson: Dread
Her! Avoid Her! Look not on Her! Towns! more towns! There you can talk
and listen to your fellows’ talk! Crowd into the towns; the eyes in your
whitened faces need never see Her there! Fill every cranny of your
houses so that no moment of silence or of solitude can come to any one
of you. And if, by unhappy chance, in their parks you find yourself
alone, lie neither on your back, for then you will see the quiet
sunlight on the leaves, the quiet clouds, and birds with solitude within
their wings; nor on your face, or you will catch the savour of the
earth, and a faint hum, and for a minute live the life of tiny things
that straddle in the trodden grasses. Fly from such sights and scents
and sounds, for fear lest terror for your fate should visit you; fly to
the streets; fly to your neighbours’ houses; talk, and be brave! Or if,
and such times will come, your feet and brain and tongue are tired, then
sleep! For, next to the drug of fellowship is the anodyne of slumber!
And when it is your holiday, and time is all your own, be warned! The
lot of those few left among you who are forced to live alone--on the
sea, with the sheep of the green hills, guarding the trim wildness of
your woods, turning the lonely soil--may for a moment seem desirable.
Be sure it is not; the thought has come to you from books! Go to a spot
where, though the nights are clear and the sun burns hot, the sea wind
smells of salt, and the land wind smells of hay, you can avoid Her,
huddled in your throngs! Dread Her! Fly from Her! Hide from Her smile,
that seems to say: “Once, when you lived with me, you were a little
gentleman. You looked in my eyes and learned a measure of repose,
learned not to whimper at the dark, giggle, and jeer, and chatter
through your nose, learned to hold yourself up, to think your own
thoughts, and be content. And now you have gone from me to be a little
cockney man. But for all your airs of courage and your fear of me--I
shall get you back!” Dread Her! Avoid Her! Towns, more towns!
Such is the lesson man teaches, from the very birth, to every child of
his unstinted breeding. And well he teaches it. Of all his thousands
here to-night, drawn from his crowded, evil-smelling towns, not one has
gone apart on this black beach to spend a single minute with his shadow
and the wind and stars. His laughter fills the air, his ceaseless
chatter, songs, and fiddling, the clapping of his hands; so will it be
throughout his holiday.
And who so foolish as to say it is not good that man should talk and
laugh and clap his hands; who so blind as not to see that these are
antidotes to evils that his one great fear has brought to him? This ring
of him with vacant faces and staring eyes round that anæmic singer with
the worn-out voice, or the stout singer with the voice of brass, is but
an instance of Her irony: “This, then, is the medicine you have mixed,
my little man, to cure the pain of your fevered souls. Well done! But if
you had not left me you would have had no fever! There is none in the
wind and the stars and the rhythm of the sea; there is none in green
growth or fallen leaves; in my million courses it is not found. Fever is
fear--to you alone, my restless mannikin, has fever come, and this is
why, even in your holiday, you stand in your sick crowds gulping down
your little homœopathic draughts!”
The show is over. The pipes of noise are still, the lights fall dark,
and man is left by the black beach with nothing to look on but the sky,
or hear but the beat of wave-wings flighting on the sea. And suddenly in
threes and fours he scurries home, lest for one second he should see Her
face whose smile he cannot bear.
FACTS
XI
FACTS
Each morning a noise of poured-out water revived him from that state in
which his thoughts were occasionally irregular. Raising his face, with
its regular nose above a regular moustache just going grey, he asked the
time. Each morning he received the same answer, and would greet it with
a yawn. Without this opening to his day he would not have known for
certain that it had begun. Assured of the fact, he would leap from his
bed into his bath, and sponge himself with cold, clear water. “Straight
out of bed--never lose heat!” Such was his saying; and he would maintain
it against every other theory of the morning tub. It was his own
discovery--a fact on which, as on all facts, he set much store; and
every morning he kept his mind fixed on its value. Then, in that
underclothing, of which he said, “Never wear any other--lets the skin
act!” he would take his stand in a chosen light before a glass, dipping
in boiling water a razor on which was written the day’s name, and
without vanity inspect his face to see that it preserved its shade of
faintly mottled red against the encroachments of the town. Then, with a
slanting edge--“Always shave slanting”--he would remove such hairs as
seemed to him unnecessary. If he caught himself thinking, he would go to
a bottle on the washstand and pour out a little bitter water, which he
would drink; then, seizing a pair of Indian clubs, he would wave them.
“I believe in Indian clubs!” he often said. Tying his tie at the angle
he had tied it for nearly thirty years, and placing lavender water--the
only scent he ever used--about his handkerchief, he would open his
wife’s door, and say, “How are you, my dear?” Without waiting for an
answer he would shut it, and go down.
His correspondence was set out on his writing-table, and as he was not
a stupid man he soon disposed of it; then, with his daily paper--which
he had long selected out of every other--he would stand before the
hearth, reading, and believing that the news he read was of a definite
importance. He took care that this reading should not stimulate his
thoughts. He wanted facts, and the fact that the day’s facts were
swallowed by the morrow’s did not disturb him, for the more facts he
read the better he was pleased.
After his breakfast--eaten opposite his wife, and ended with some
marmalade--he would go forth at ten o’clock, and walk the two miles to
the Temple. He believed in walking, wet or fine, for, as he said: “It
keeps your liver acting!”
On his way he would think of many things, such as: Whether to lay down
Gruaud La Rose, 1900, or Château Margaux, 1899? And, though alive to its
importance, he would soon decide this question, since indecision was
repugnant to his nature. He walked by way of the Green Park and Thames
Embankment, expanding his chest quietly, and feeling inward
satisfaction. To the crossing-sweeper nearest to Big Ben he gave on
every day, save Saturdays, a nod, and on Saturdays sixpence; and,
because he thus assisted him, he believed the man to be worthy of
assistance. He passed all other crossing-sweepers without being
conscious of their presence; and if they had asked for pennies would
have put them down as lazy persons making an illicit living. They did
not ask, however, accepting his attitude towards them as correct, from
the vigour of its regularity. He walked always at the same pace, neither
fast nor slow, his head erect, looking before him with an air of: I am
getting there; this is salubrious!
And on getting there he looked at his watch--not because he did not know
what it would tell him, but to satisfy his craving for the ascertainment
of a fact. It took, he knew, thirty-two minutes between door and door.
Up the stone staircase he would pause half-way and glance through the
window at a certain tree. A magpie had once built there. It had been
gone now fifteen years, but the peculiar fact remained. Meeting his
clerk in the dark narrow passage beyond the oaken door, he would address
the young man thus: “Mornin’, Dyson. Anything fresh?” and pass on into
his light and airy room, with its faint scent of Law Reports. Here, in
an old Norfolk jacket, a meerschaum pipe, rarely alight, between his
teeth, he would remain seated before papers of all sorts, working hard,
and placing facts in order, ready for the conclusions of his chief, a
man of genius, but devoid of regularity.
At one o’clock he would go out and walk some little way to lunch. When
tempted to go elsewhere he would say, “No, no! Come with me; better grub
at Sim’s!” He knew this for a fact--no novelty of any kind could alter
it. Cigar in mouth, he would then walk for twenty minutes in the Temple
Gardens, his hands behind his back, alone or with some friend, and his
good-humoured laugh would frequently be heard--the laugh of a fat man;
for though by careful weighing he kept his body thin, he could not weigh
his soul, and having thus no facts to go by, could never check its bulk.
From two to four he would continue the arrangement of his facts, and on
the rising of the Courts place them before his chief. Strong in his
power of seeing them as facts with no disturbing relevance to other
things, he would show a shade of patronage to that disorderly
distinguished man. Then, washing with Pears’ soap, and saying to his
clerk, “Evenin’, Dyson; nothing that won’t keep,” he would take his
umbrella and walk west. And again he would reflect on many things, such
as: Whether to use the iron or cleek for the approach to that last hole?
and would soon decide on one or on the other.
Passing the portals of his Club, of which he used to say, “I’ve belonged
here twenty years; that shows you!” he would hang his hat upon a
certain peg and go into the card-room, where, for small stakes that
never varied, he played the game of Bridge till seven o’clock. Then in a
hansom cab he would go home resting body and brain, and looking straight
before him at the backs of cabs in front. Entering his drawing-room he
would go over to his wife, kiss her, and remark: “Well, old girl, what
have you been doing?” and at once relate what he himself had done,
finishing thus: “Time to dress for dinner! I’ve got a twist!” In a white
tie and swallow-tail if they were dining out, a black tie and tail-less
coat if they were dining in--for these were the proved facts of
suitability--he would go to his wife’s room, take up one of her toilet
bottles, examine the stamp on it, and tell her his programme for the
morrow.
His habits in dining out were marked by regularity. A sweet or ice he
never touched for fear of gout, of which he had felt twinges. He drank
brandy with his coffee, not for fear of sleeplessness, which he had
never had, but because he found it adjusted preceding facts more nicely
than liqueurs; after champagne he would consume a glass or two of port.
Some men drank claret, believing that it did less harm, but he would
say: “Port after champagne--proved it a dozen times.” For, though it was
really not important to his body which he drank, it concerned his soul
to make the choice, and place importance on it. When the ladies had
withdrawn, he would talk on the facts of politics and guns, of stocks
and women; and, chiefly in the form of stories--facts about facts. To
any one who linked these facts to an idea he would remark at once:
“Exactly!” and, staring slightly, restore order with another fact. At
last he would go home, and in the cab would touch his wife to see that
she was there.
On Sundays he played golf--a game in which, armed with a fact, he hit a
little fact long distances until he lodged it in a hole, when he would
pick it out again and place it on a little fact and hit it off once
more. And this was good for him. Returning in the train with other
players of the game, he would sit silently reviewing the details of the
business, and a particularly good and pleasant look would come upon his
face, with its blue eyes, red cheeks, and fair moustache just going
grey. And suddenly he would begin speaking to his neighbour, and tell
him how at certain moments he had hit the little fact with an unwonted
force, or an unusual gentleness.
Two days before the 12th of August he would take his guns and wife to
Scotland, where he rented annually a piece of ground inhabited by
grouse.
On arriving he would have a bath, then go out with his keeper and a
ferret to “get his eye in”; and his first remark was always this: “Well,
McNab, and how are you? Afraid I’m a bit above myself!” And his old
keeper would answer thus: “Aye, I’m no saying but ye’ll be as well for a
day on the hill.”
Each evening on returning from the moors he would cause the dead facts
to be turned out of the pony’s paniers and laid in rows before him,
and, touching them with the end of a stick so as to make sure, he would
count them up; and the more there were of them the better he was
pleased. Then, when they were removed and hung, he would enter their
numbers in a book. And as these numbers grew, he compared them day by
day and week by week with the numbers of each former year; thus,
according to whether they were more or less, he could tell at any moment
how much he was enjoying life.
On his return to London he would say: “First-class year--five hundred
brace.” Or, shake his head and murmur: “Two hundred and thirty brace--a
wretched year!”
Any particularly fine creature that he shot he would have stuffed, so
that the fact might be remarked for ever.
Once, or perhaps twice, each year, _malaise_ would come on him, a
feeling that his life was not quite all he wished, a desire for
something that he could not shape in words, a conviction that there
were facts which he was missing. At these times he was almost irritable,
and would say: “Mistake for a man to marry, depend on it--narrows his
life.” And suddenly one day he would know what he wanted, and, under
pretext perhaps of two days’ sport, would go to Paris. The fact
accomplished, of irregularity, that he would not have committed in
England for the world--was of advantage to his soul, and he would
return, more regular than ever.
For he was a man who must be doing, who respected only the thing done.
He had no use for schemes of life, theories, dreams, or fancies. Ideas
were “six a penny,” he would say. And the fact that facts without ideas
were “six a ha’penny” was perhaps the only fact that he did not
appreciate. He was made, in fact, for laying trains of little facts, in
almost perfect order, in almost all directions. Forced by his nature to
start laying without considering where they led to, he neither knew nor
cared when or what they would blow up; and when in fact they blew up
something unexpected, or led into a _cul de sac_, he would start at once
laying them again in the first direction that seemed open. Thus actively
employed, he kept from brooding, thinking, and nonsense of all kinds, so
busy that he had no time to look ahead and see where he was going; and
since, if he had got there he would not have known it, this was just as
well.
Beyond everything, he believed in freedom; he never saw the things that
his way of acting prevented him from doing, and so believed his life to
be the freest in the world.
Nothing occasioned him a more unfeigned surprise than to tell him his
ways were typical of the country where he lived. He answered with a
stare, knowing well enough that no such likeness could be shown him as a
fact. It was not his habit to be conscious; he was neither conscious of
himself nor of his country, and this enabled him to be the man he was.
When he met himself about the town (which hourly happened) he had no
knowledge that it was himself; on the contrary he looked on himself as
specially designed, finding most other people “rather funny.”
An attempt to designate him as belonging to a type or class he
mistrusted as some kind of Socialism. And yet he ate with himself in
restaurants and private houses, travelled with himself in trains, read
the speeches of himself in Parliament, and the accounts of how he had
been surrounded by persons of Dutch origin, or on some frontier punished
a tribe whose manners were not quite his own. He played golf with
himself, and shot with his very images. Nor was he confined to his own
class; but frequently drove himself home in cabs, watched himself
drilling in the barrack squares, or, walking up and down in blue,
protected his own house at night from burglars. If he required to send a
message from his Club, he sent himself; he sold himself his waistcoats,
and even laid the pavements of the streets that he trod daily in his
pilgrimage. From his neighbourhood Imagination stretched its wings and
flitted further on. Patron of precedent, pattern of order, upholder of
the law, where he dwelt an orderly disorder reigned. He was for ever
doing things, and out of everything he did there sprang up two more
things that wanted to be done, and these things he would do--in time!
Believing no real harm of others or himself, he kept young and green!
Oh! very green and young!
And in old age, past doing things, seated in the Club smoking-room, he
will recount behind his comely grey moustache that day’s shooting and
that day’s run; the marriage of that fine girl; the death of that dear
old chap; the details of that first-rate joke, or that bad dinner; and
dwelling with love on these isolated facts, his old blue eyes will
twinkle. Presently, when it is late and he is left alone, he will put
his old tired feet up on the sofa, remove the cigar from his old lips,
and, holding it a foot from off his eyes, look closely at the ash;
finding this fact a little yellow, he will frown.
POWER
XII
POWER
When he rose every morning, the first thing he would do was to fall on
his knees beside his bed. His figure in its white garment--for he wore a
nightshirt--was rather long and lean, and looked its longest thus bent
from the loins. His thick fair hair, little disturbed by sleep, together
with a glimpse of sanguine neck and cheek, was all that could be seen
above that figure, for his face was buried in the counterpane. Here he
would commune with the deity he had constructed for himself out of his
secret aspirations and desires, out of his most private consciousness.
In the long and subtle processes of contemplation this deity had come to
be a big white-clothed figure, whose face and head were shrouded from
his gaze in frosty dimness, but whose hands--great hands, a little
red--were always clearly visible, reposing motionless on knees parted
beneath the white and flowing garment. The figure appeared in his
imagination seated as it were on air ten or fifteen feet above the floor
of a white, wide, marble corridor, and its great hands seemed to be
pressing down and stilling all that came before them. So oddly concrete
was this image that sometimes he addressed no prayers to it, but knelt,
simply feeling that it was sitting there above him; and when at last he
raised his head, a strange aspiring look had come into his strained
eyes, and face suffused with blood. When he did pray, he himself hardly
knew for what he prayed, unless it were to be made like his deity, that
sat so quiet, above the marble corridor.