UPTON,
July 29, 1904.
DEAR HERBERT,--You must forgive me if this is a very sentimental
letter, but this is the day that, of all days in the year, is to me
most full of pathos--the last day of the summer half. My heart is like
a full sponge and must weep a little. The last few days have been full
to the brim of work and bustle--reports to be written, papers to be
looked over. Yesterday was a day of sad partings. Half-a-dozen boys are
leaving; and I have tried my best to tell them the truth about
themselves; to say something that would linger in their minds, and yet
to do it in a tender and affectionate way. And some of these boys'
hearts are full to bursting too. I remember as if it were yesterday the
last meeting at Eton of a Debating Society of which I was a member. We
were electing new members and passing votes of thanks. Scott, who was
then President and, as you remember, Captain of the Eleven, sate in his
high chair above the table; opposite him, with his minute-book, was
Riddell, then Secretary--that huge fellow in the Eight, you recollect.
The vote of thanks to the President was carried; he said a few words in
a broken voice, and sate down; the Secretary's vote of thanks was
proposed, and he, too, rose to make acknowledgment. In the middle of
his speech we were attracted by a movement of the President. He put his
head in his hands and sobbed aloud. Riddell stopped, faltered, looked
round, and leaving his sentence unfinished, sate down, put his face on
the book and cried like a child. I don't think there was a dry eye in
the room. And these boys were not sentimental, but straightforward
young men of the world, honest, and, if anything, rather contemptuous,
I had thought, of anything emotional. I have never forgotten that
scene, and have interpreted many things in the light of it.
Well, this morning I woke early and heard all the bustle of departure.
Depression fell on me; soon I got up, with a blessed sense of leisure,
breakfasted at my ease, saw one or two boys, special friends, who came
to me very grave and wistful. Then I wrote letters and did business;
and this afternoon--it is fearfully hot--I have been for a stroll
through the deserted fields and street.
So another of these beautiful things which we call the summer half is
over, never to be renewed. There has been some evil, of course. I wish
I could think otherwise. But the tone is good, and there have been none
of those revelations of darkness that poison the mind. There has been
idleness (I don't much regret that), and of course the usual worries.
But the fact remains that a great number of happy, sensible boys have
been living perhaps the best hours of their life, with equal, pleasant
friendships, plenty of games, some wholesome work and discipline to
keep all sweet, with this exquisite background of old towers and
high-branching elms, casting their shade over rich meadow-grass; the
scene will come back to these boys in weary hours, perhaps in sun-baked
foreign lands, perhaps in smoky offices--nay, even on aching deathbeds,
parched with fever.
The whole place has an incredibly wistful air, as though it missed the
young life that circulated all about it; as though it spread its
beauties out to be used and enjoyed, and wondered why none came to
claim them. As a counterpoise to this I like to think of all the
happiness flowing into hundreds of homes; the father and mother waiting
for the sound of the wheels that bring the boy back; the children who
have gone down to the lodge to welcome the big brothers with shouts and
kisses; and the boy himself, with all the dear familiar scene and home
faces opening out before him. We ought not to grudge the loneliness
here before the thought of all those old and blessed joys of life that
are being renewed elsewhere.
But I am here, a lonely man, wondering and doubting and desiring I
hardly know what. Some nearness of life, some children of my own. You
are apt to think of yourself as shelved and isolated; yet, after all,
you have the real thing--wife, children, and home. But, in my case,
these boys who are dear to me have forgotten me already. Disguise it as
I will, I am part of the sordid furniture of life that they have so
gladly left behind, the crowded corridor, the bare-walled schoolroom,
the ink-stained desk. They are glad to think that they have not to
assemble to-morrow to listen to my prosing, to bear the blows of the
uncle's tongue, as Horace says. They like me well enough--for a
schoolmaster; I know some of them would even welcome me, with a
timorous joy, to their own homes.
I have had the feeling of my disabilities brought home to me lately in
a special way. There is a boy in my house that I have tried hard to
make friends with. He is a big, overgrown creature, with a perfectly
simple manner. He has innumerable acquaintances in the school, but only
a very few friends. He is amiable with every one, but guards his heart.
He is ambitious in a quiet way, and fond of books, and, being brought
up in a cultivated home, he can talk more unaffectedly and with a more
genuine interest about books than any boy I have ever met. Well, I have
done my best, as I say, to make friends with him. I have lent him
books; I have tried to make him come and see me; I have talked my best
with him, and he has received it all with polite indifference; I can't
win his confidence, somehow. I feel that if I were only not in the
tutorial relation, it would be easy work. But perhaps I frightened him
as a little boy, perhaps I bored him; anyhow the advances are all on my
side, and there seems a hedge of shyness through which I cannot break.
Sometimes I have thought it is simply a case of "crabbed age and
youth," and that I can't put myself sufficiently in line with him. I
missed seeing him last night--he was out at some school festivity, and
this morning he has gone without a word or a sign. I have made friends
a hundred times with a tenth of the trouble, and I suppose it is just
because I find this child so difficult to approach that I fret myself
over the failure; and all the more because I know in my heart that he
is a really congenial nature, and that we do think the same about many
things. Of course, most sensible people would not care a brass farthing
about such an episode, and would succeed where I have failed, because I
think it is the forcing of attentions upon him that this proud young
person resents. I must try and comfort myself by thinking that my very
capacity for vexing myself over the business is probably the very thing
which makes it easy as a rule for me to succeed.
Well, I must turn to my books and my bicycle and my writing for
consolation, and to the blessed sense of freedom which luxuriates about
my tired brain. But books and art and the beauties of nature, I begin
to have a dark suspicion, are of the nature of melancholy consolations
for the truer stuff of life--for friendships and loves and dearer
things.
I sit writing in my study, the house above me strangely silent. The
evening sun lies golden on the lawn and among the apple-trees of my
little orchard; but the thought of the sweet time ended lies rather
heavy on my heart--the wonder what it all means, why we should have
these great hopes and desires, these deep attachments in the short days
that God gives us. "What a world it is for sorrow," wrote a wise and
tender-hearted old schoolmaster on a day like this; "and how dull it
would be if there were no sorrow." I suppose that this is true; but to
be near things and yet not to grasp them, to desire and not to attain,
and to go down to darkness in the end, like the shadow of a dream--what
can heal and sustain one in the grip of such a mood?--Ever yours,