UPTON,
Aug. 4, 1904.
MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have just been over to Woodcote; I have had a few
days here alone at the end of the half, and was feeling so stupid and
lazy this morning that I put a few sandwiches in my pocket and went off
on a bicycle for the day. It is only fifteen miles from here, so that I
had two or three hours to spend there. You know I was born at Woodcote
and lived there till I was ten years old. I don't know the present
owner of the Lodge, where we lived; but if I had written and asked to
go and see the house, they would have invited me to luncheon, and all
my sense of freedom would have gone.
It is thirty years since we left, and I have not been there, near as it
is, for twenty years. I did not know how deeply rooted the whole scene
was in my heart and memory, but the first sight of the familiar places
gave me a very curious thrill, a sort of delicious pain, a yearning for
the old days--I can't describe it or analyse it. It seemed somehow as
if the old life must be going on there behind the pine-woods if I could
only find it; as if I could have peeped over the palings and seen
myself going gravely about some childish business in the shrubberies. I
find that my memory is curiously accurate in some respects, and
curiously at fault in others. The scale is all wrong. What appears to
me in memory to be an immense distance, from Woodcote to Dewhurst, for
instance, is now reduced to almost nothing; and places which I can see
quite accurately in my mind's eye are now so different that I can
hardly believe that they were ever like what I recollect of them. Of
course the trees have grown immensely; young plantations have become
woods, and woods have disappeared. I spent my time in wandering about,
retracing the childish walks we used to take, looking at the church,
the old houses, the village green, and the mill-pool. One thing came
home to me very much. When I was born my father had only been settled
at Woodcote for two years; but, as I grew up, it seemed to me we must
have lived there for all eternity; now I see that he was only one in a
long procession of human visitants who have inhabited and loved the
place. Another thing that has gone is the mystery of it all. Then,
every road was a little ribbon of familiar ground stretching out to the
unknown; all the fields and woods which lay between the roads and paths
were wonderful secret places, not to be visited. I find I had no idea
of the lie of the ground, and, what is more remarkable, I don't seem
ever to have seen the views of the distance with which the place now
abounds. I suppose that when one is a small creature, palings and
hedges are lofty obstacles; and I suppose also that the little busy
eyes are always searching the nearer scene for things to FIND, and do
not concern themselves with what is far. The sight of the Lodge itself,
with its long white front among the shrubberies and across the pastures
was almost too much for me; the years seemed all obliterated in a
flash, and I felt as if it was all there unchanged.
I suppose I had a very happy childhood; but I certainly was not in the
least conscious of it at the time. I was a very quiet, busy child, with
all sorts of small secret pursuits of my own to attend to, to which
lessons and social engagements were sad interruptions; but now it seems
to me like a golden, unruffled time full of nothing but pleasure.
Curiously enough, I can't remember anything but the summer days there;
I have no remembrance of rain or cold or winter or leafless
trees--except days of snow when the ponds were frozen and there was the
wild excitement of skating. My recollections are all of flowers, and
roses, and trees in leaf, and hours spent in the garden. In the very
hot summer weather my father and mother used to dine out in the garden,
and it seems now to me as if they must have done so all the year round;
I can remember going to bed, with my window open on to the lawn, and
hearing the talk, and the silence, and then the soft clink of the
things being removed as I sank into sleep. It is a great mystery, that
faculty of the mind for forgetting all the shadows and remembering
nothing but the sunlight; it is so deeply rooted in humanity that it is
hard not to believe that it means something; one dares to hope that if
our individual life continues after death, this instinct--if memory
remains--will triumph over the past, even in the case of lives of
sordid misery and hopeless pain.
Then, too, one wonders what the strong instinct of permanence means, in
creatures that inhabit the world for so short and troubled a space; why
instinct should so contradict experience; why human beings have not
acquired in the course of centuries a sense of the fleetingness of
things. All our instincts seem to speak of permanence; all our
experience points to swift and ceaseless change. I cannot fathom it.
As I wandered about Woodcote my thoughts took a sombre tinge, and the
lacrimae rerum, the happy days gone, the pleasant groups broken up to
meet no more, the old faces departed, the voices that are silent--all
these thoughts began to weigh on my mind with a sad bewilderment. One
feels so independent, so much the master of one's fate; and yet when
one returns to an old home one begins to wonder whether one has any
power of choice at all. There is this strange fence of self and
identity drawn for me round one tiny body; all that is outside of it
has no existence for me apart from consciousness. These are fruitless
thoughts, but one cannot always resist them; and why one is here, what
these vivid feelings mean, what one's heart-hunger for the sweet world
and for beloved people means--all this is dark and secret; and the
strong tide bears us on, out of the little harbour of childhood into
unknown seas.
Dear Woodcote, dear remembered days, beloved faces and voices of the
past, old trees and fields! I cannot tell what you mean and what you
are; but I can hardly believe that, if I have a life beyond, it will
not somehow comprise you all; for indeed you are my own for ever; you
are myself, whatever that self may be.--Ever yours,