Beside Still Waters Part 6

XXI

A Far-off Day--A Compact--Fragrant Memories

There was, as I have said, a strong visionary tendency in Hugh, which had been to a certain extent restricted in the days of his professional life; but now that he was free, it began to recur with extraordinary frequency and force. It was when he was reading that this faculty visited him, as a rule, and more especially when he read, as he was accustomed to do, after he was awake in the morning, until the time came for him to rise. The mind, struggling to free itself from the dominion of sleep, had not yet put on the obedience of the day, but seemed to act with a whimsical independence of its own. His thoughts were then most apt to wear a melancholy tinge; a certain apprehensive shadow often lay upon him, a sense of being unequal to the claims of the day, a tendency to rehea.r.s.e, without hopefulness or spring, the part he would have to play, to exaggerate difficulties and obstacles.

Reading, as a rule, served to distract his thoughts; but it was hardly an intellectual so much as a meditative process; the thoughts and words of the writer, on such occasions, often seemed to him like beaters going through a covert, trampling the fern and rapping the tree trunks, starting from their lairs all kinds of hidden game.

One morning he was lying thus, reading quietly, when there suddenly darted into his mind, for no particular reason, the thought of a summer day he had spent as a small boy at his public school. It had been a holiday; the day cloudless and bright, yet with a delicious coolness in the air; and the suns.h.i.+ne fell, he remembered, on the great trees of the place and the venerable buildings, gleaming through a golden haze, which made it seem as though he viewed everything, not through empty air, but through a tinted and tangible medium, as it were an aerial honey, which lent a liquid sweetness to all outlines and surfaces. He had wandered off with a friend, in that perfect afternoon, through the meadows, for a long vague ramble, ending up with a bathe in the river.

The day was beautifully still, and he could almost smell the hot honied fragrance of the flowers, and hear the angry murmur of the busy flies, that sate basking on the leaves of the hedgerow. He seemed to himself to have been full of a vague and restless emotion, a sense of happiness that just missed its end, that would have been complete if there had not been something wanting, some satisfaction of an instinct that he could not put into words. His companion had been a boy of his own age, who, it had seemed to Hugh, was in the same wistful mood. But there had been no attempt to express in words any of these thoughts. They had walked for the most part in silence, interrupted by the vague, inconsequent, and rather gruff remarks, that are the symbols of equal friends.h.i.+p. They had rambled a long way beside the stream, with the thick water-plants growing deep at the edge. The river came br.i.m.m.i.n.g down, clear and cool, the tiny weeds swaying among the dark pools, the rushes bowing and bending, as though plucked by unseen hands. The stream was full of boys in boats, and the eager noise and stir was not congenial to Hugh's meditative mood. The bathing-place was by a weir, where the green water plunged through the sluices, filling the stream with foam and sound; all about floated the exquisite reedy smell of warm river-water, bringing with it a sense of cool and unvisited places, hidden backwaters among green fields, where the willows leaned together, and the fish hung mute in the pools. They had bathed under a tall grove of poplars, and Hugh could remember the delicious freshness of the turf under his naked feet, and the sun-warmed heat of the wooden beams of the wharf. The plunge in the cold bubbling water had swept all his thoughts away into the mere joy of life, but as he sat, after dressing, with the music of the water in his ears, the same wistful mood had settled down on his mind.

What did it all mean? Whither was all this beauty, this delight tending? He thought of all the generations of boys who had bathed in this place, full of joy and life. Where were they all now? He thought of those who should come after, when he too was gone to take his place in the world. And then they had gone slowly back through the meadows, with a delicious languor of sensation; the sun was now beginning to decline, and the blue wooded hills across the stream, with the smoke going up beneath them from unseen houses, wore the same air of holding some simple and sweet secret which they would not tell, and which Hugh could not penetrate. It was sad, too, to think that the beautiful day was done, become a memory only; and that he must plunge again for the morrow and for many morrows into the tide of affairs and boisterous life. He made one effort to put his thoughts into words. Putting his arm for a moment in the arm of his companion, he said, "Let us remember to-day!" His friend, who was walking sedately along with a stalk of gra.s.s between his lips, looked at him in a peculiar manner, smiled and nodded; this little compact, so quietly made, seemed for an instant to have brought Hugh and his friend together into a charmed circle. Had his friend forgotten what he remembered? The last time he had seen him, he had found a prosperous business man, full of affairs; and he had not reminded him of the day when they went together by the stream.

The whole picture came before Hugh as an almost impossible sweet and rapturous memory, clutching with a poignant pa.s.sion at his heart. What was the secret of the fragrant days that had departed and could never return? Was it well to recall them? And what too was the secret of that strange and beautiful alchemy of the mind, that forgot all the troubles and cares of the old life, and even touched the few harsh incidents that it did retain with a wistful beauty, as though they had had some desirable element in them? Would it not be better, more tranquillising for the spirit, if the memory retained only the dark shadows of the past? so that the mind could turn with zest and interest to the joys of the moment? Instead of that, memory tempted the soul, by a kind of magical seduction, to dwell only upon what was sweet and beautiful in the past, thereby emphasising and heightening the sense of dissatisfaction with the present. Was it true that the very days that were then pa.s.sing, those sober, uneventful days, would at some future time be touched by the same reluctant, pathetic quality of recollection? It was certainly so; the mind, dwelling on the past, had that extraordinary power of rejecting all the dreary debris of life, and leaving only the pure gold, a hundred times refined; and yet it brought with it that mournful shadow of sadness, of the irrevocable, the irreplaceable past. But it seemed, too, to hold a hope within it, a hope that, if the pilgrimage of the soul were not to be ended by death, then memory, unshadowed by present sadness, in the deep content of a freedom from all material anxieties, might become one of the purest and deepest treasures that it was possible to conceive. Hugh thought that his disembodied spirit might, in the after time, perhaps haunt those very river-banks, and with the mystery solved that had oppressed and darkened his human pilgrimage, might surrender itself to that beautiful and absolute tranquillity, that peace which the world could not give, for which he daily and hourly yearned. Perhaps indeed it was the presence of some such invisible, haunting _revenant_ whispering at his ear, longing even for some contact with healthy humanity, that had given him the wistful sense of mystery and longing.

Who could say?

And then the mood of recollection lapsed and rolled away like mists from a morning hill, and left Hugh once more confronted with the ugliness and dreariness of the actual world; only from his vision remained the hope, the resolution, to extract from life, as it pa.s.sed, the purest and most delicate elements; its sweetness, its serenity; so that he might leave, as far as was possible, an inheritance of undimmed beauty for the memory to traffic with, to rid it so far as he could from all the envy, the dull detail, the tiresome complexities that might poison retrospect, leaving nothing but the fine gold of thought.

XXII

Death--The Real and the Ideal--A Thunder Shower--Storm and Shadow

Hugh was wandering as his custom was, one hot and thunderous day, in the country lanes; it was very still, and through the soft haze that filled the air, the distant trees and fields lost their remoteness, and stood stiffly and quaintly as though painted. There seemed a presage of storm in the church-tower, which showed a ghostly white among the elms. A fitful breeze stirred at intervals. Hugh drew near the hamlet, and all of a sudden stepped into a stream of inconceivable sweetness and fragrance; he saw in a moment what was its origin. The strawberry-pickers were out in a broad field, and from the crushed berries, however lightly bruised, there poured this flow of scent, at once rich and pure, with all the native soul of the fruit exhaling upon the air. It was to other familiar scents like ointment poured forth; it seemed indeed to Hugh that anything so intensely impressive to the sense ought to have power to tinge the colourless air, which was thus so exquisitely laden and impregnated.

He was now close to the church. It was a little, low, ancient structure, with a small, quaint, open belfry, beautifully proportioned, and all built out of a soft and mellow grey stone. The gra.s.s grew long in the churchyard, which was not so much neglected as wisely left alone, and an abundance of pink mallow, growing very thickly, gave a touch of bright colour to the gra.s.s. He stopped for a while considering the grave of a child, who had died at the age of five years, with an artless epitaph painted on a wooden cross. The grave was piously tended, though it bore a date of some ten years back; there were little rose-trees growing there, and a border of pansies, all the work, Hugh fancied, of children, doing gentle honour to a dead sister; whom they thought of, no doubt, as lying below in all her undimmed childish beauty; the pale face, the waxen limbs, the flowing hair, as they had looked their last upon her, waiting in a quiet sleep for the dawn of that other morning. How much better to think of her so, than of the dreadful reality which Hugh, in a sudden, almost terrified, flash of fancy, knew to be lying, an almost insupportable blot upon all that was fair and seemly, in the stained and mouldered coffin. Yet there was a place for that difficult horror too in the scheme of things, though the thought seemed almost to taint the sweet air of the place.

This was only one of the parts of the great mystery over which he brooded so often; the noisome things of the world, its weakness, its decay; the s.h.i.+vering repugnance of the spirit, the almost impossibility of joy or courage in the presence of such thoughts; that was the strangest part of it, the rebellion of the inmost central spirit against what was so natural, so common. Death was harsh enough, but that it should be attended with such an extremity of disgrace and degradation--that seemed an intolerable thing.

Yet to the charnel-worm, rioting in all the horror of decay, there could be nothing but a blind joy in the conditions which Hugh hardly even dared to imagine. To indulge such thoughts was morbid, perhaps.

But here they presented themselves at every turn, and Hugh felt that to turn his back upon them was but to s.h.i.+rk the part of the problem that he disliked. Not so could he attain to any knowledge of the secret of things. The horror must not of course be unduly emphasised; the morbidity lay there, in the danger of seeing things out of due proportion; but the proportion was just as much sacrificed, indeed more sacrificed, by ignoring the facts. Neither was he at all afraid of any undue preponderance of the morbid element in his contemplations. He took far too deep a delight in the beautiful and gracious sights and sounds of earth for that; and the conclusion that he drew, as he turned away, was that a suspension of judgment in the face of an insoluble mystery was the only course; to leave the windows of the soul open to every impression, to every fact, whether it was the voice and glance of humanity, the sweetness of art and sound, the appeal of ancient buildings, the waving of tall trees, the faces of bright flowers, the songs of lively birds in the thicket--ay, and the intimations of death and decay as well, all that was ugly and wretched in humanity, the coa.r.s.e song from the alehouse, the slatternly woman about her weary work, the crying of a child that had been punished, the foul oozings of the stockyard. These were all as real, as true impressions as the others. To strike some balance, neither to forget the ideal in the real, or to lose sight of the real in the ideal, that was his task.

And the consolation, though a stern one, lay in the fact that, dark and bitter as the mystery was at one point, gracious and glowing as it was at another, yet it was certainly _there_. Concrete and abstract, the impressions of sense, the intuitions of the spirit, each and all had their part. In this life, this swift interchange of darkness and light, of suns.h.i.+ne and gloom, he might never approach the secret--nay, he did not even hope that he would. But at least he could draw a few steps nearer, and with a humble heart he would wait for the glory that should be revealed, or for the silence and darkness that it might be would close upon him. For whatever should be the end, Hugh had no doubt that there was certainly behind life a mind and a will, to which it was not only no mystery, but a truth simple, obvious and plain; for him, his duty was to use both observation and imagination; not to let the imagination outrun the observation, but to mark all that he could, and infer what he could; while at the same time he felt equally sure that he was not to be a mere observer, blindly registering impressions, content to a.n.a.lyse difficulties. Better than that was to repose an ardent faith in his intuitions; but each alike, without the aid of the other, was perilous and insecure.

While he thus reflected, there seemed to flow into his mind a deep melancholy, which, like a dark liquid dropped into clear water, began to tinge and cloud the translucent tide. To live by a due proportion of emotion and reason, that was the problem; but how were they to be mingled? One seemed so isolated in the matter, so left without any certainty of guidance. If one allowed emotion too great a lat.i.tude, one became sentimental, unbalanced, personal; if one was swayed by reason, one became dry, impersonal, cold. Was one indeed meant to stumble along the track, making irreparable mistakes, seeing only in retrospect, with a shocking clearness of vision, what one ought to have done? Was one to regret alike impulse and prudence? And the old faults of temperament, how they appeared and reappeared! However clearly one saw one's mistakes, however much one admired n.o.bleness, and generosity, and courage, could one change the innermost character at all? The ghastly fact was that one seemed framed to desire the unattainable. What broken, faded, feeble things the majority of men's lives were! The pageant of human life seemed nothing more than failure on a gigantic scale.

Suddenly the lightning writhed and fell, the thunder broke out over Hugh's head, as he walked in the quiet lane; a rattling, furious peal, like leaden weights poured in a cascade upon a vast boarded floor--an inconceivable sound, from its sharpness, its tangibility, its solidity, to proceed from those soft regions of the air, in which a velvety greyness dwelt suffused, with a lurid redness in the west. The rain fell a moment afterwards in a soft sheet, leaping in the road, and making a mist above the ground.

It was soon over, while Hugh sheltered in a big barn, with a pleasant dark dusty roof, and high piles of fragrant straw all about him.

What a change when he stepped out! the thunder had leapt into the west, the air was clean and sweet, and a ravis.h.i.+ng scent came from the satisfied fields.

With the drench of rain, something poisonous seemed to have been washed out of Hugh's mind. All that afternoon, in the sullen heat, he had brooded stupidly and miserably enough, picking up, as it were, dart after dart from his little bundle of cares and miseries, and p.r.i.c.king his heart with them.

Where was it all gone? In the clear fresh air he felt like a man awaked from a nightmare, and restored to cheerful life again. What did past failures, future anxieties, matter to him? He had his work, his place, his liberty, and what further could he need?

His liberty! How good that was! He might go and come as he would, unquestioned, unblamed. He thought with a pitying horror of what his life had previously been--the tangle of small engagements, the silly routine work, in which no one believed; they had all been bound on a kind of make-believe pilgrimage, carrying burdens round and round, and putting them down where they had taken them up.

He determined that, whatever happened, he would do no more work in which he did not believe, that he would say what he felt, not what traditional formulas required him to say. Work! he believed in that with all his heart, so long as it had an end, an object. To wrestle with the comprehension of some difficult matter, there were few pleasures like that! but it must have been an advance, when it was over; one must feel that one was stronger, more clear-minded, more alert, more sincere; one must not feel that one was only more weary, more dissatisfied. His path was clear before him at all events.

Plans and schemes began to rise in Hugh's brain he felt as if he was delivered from the brooding sway of some evil and melancholy spirit.

How strange was the power that physical conditions had upon the very stuff of the mind! Half-an-hour ago the grievances, the self-pity, the dissatisfaction had appeared to him to be real and tangible troubles; not indeed things which it was wise to brood over, but inevitable pains, to be borne with such philosophy as was attainable. But now they seemed as unreal, as untrue, as painful dreams, from which one wakes with a sharp and great relief.

What remained with Hugh was the sense of one of the dangers of the solitary life--the over-influence, the preponderance of sentiment. The only serenity was to be found in claiming and expecting nothing, but in welcoming what came as a gift, as an added joy, to which one had indeed no right; but which fell like the suns.h.i.+ne and the rain; one must be ready to help, to work, to use one's strength at whatever point it could be best applied, and to look for no reward. This was what poisoned life, the claim to be paid in the coin that pleased one best.

Payment indeed was made largely; and the blessed thing was that if one was not paid fully for one's efforts, neither was one paid relentlessly for one's mistakes.

And then, as to the deeper shadows of the world, the sorrows, the bereavements, the sufferings, the dark possibilities, that lay like the shadows of trees across a sunlit road--death itself, that grim horizon that closed the view whichever way one looked--the mistake lay in attempting to reckon with them beforehand, to antic.i.p.ate them, to discount them. They were all part of the plan, and one could not alter them. Better to let them come, to husband strength and joy to meet them, rather than to dissipate one's courage by dwelling upon them.

Indeed all Hugh's experience showed him that troubles, even the deepest, wore a very different aspect when one was inside them.

The very storm itself was a parable. Those zigzag ribbons of purple fire, the fierce shouting of the thunderclap that followed! In all the wide forest-tracts over which the tempest hung, all that grim artillery did but rend and split some one tough tree. Rather it turned again to gladden the earth, and the tears of heaven, that fell so steeply, only laid the dust of the hot road, and filled the pasture and the lane with the fragrance of the cleansed earth and the comforted brake.

XXIII

The Club--Homewards--The Garden of G.o.d

As Hugh became more and more enamoured of his work, and of the sweet peace of the countryside, he became more and more averse to visiting London. But he was forced to do this at intervals. One hot summer day he went thus reluctantly to town; the rattle of the train, the heated crowd of pa.s.sengers, the warm mephitic air that blew into the carriage from the stifling, smoke-grimed tunnel--all these seemed to him insupportably disgusting. But the sight, the sound, the very smell of London itself, was like a dreadful obsession; he wondered how he could ever have endured to live there. The streets lay in the steady sun, filled with fatigued, hurrying persons. The air was full of a sombre and oppressive murmur; the smell of the roadways, the hot vapour of cookshops, the din and whizz of vehicles, the ceaseless motion of faces: all this filled him with a deep pity for those who had to live their lives under such conditions. Was it to this that our boasted civilisation had brought us? and yet it seemed that the normal taste of ordinary people turned by preference to this humming and buzzing life, rather than to the quiet and lonely life in the green s.p.a.ces of the country; Hugh had little doubt that the vast majority of those he saw, even the pale, patient workpeople who were peeping, as they toiled, grimy and sweat-stained, from the open windows, would choose this life rather than the other, and would have condemned the life of the country as dull. Was it he, Hugh wondered, or they that were out of joint?

Ought he to accept the ordinary, sensible point of view, and try to conform himself to it, crush down his love for trees and open fields and smiling waters? The sociable, herding instinct was as true, as G.o.d-sent an instinct as his own pleasure in free solitude; and the old adage that G.o.d made the country but man the town was as patently absurd as to say that G.o.d made the iceberg, but the ant made the ant-heap.

He went to his club, a place which he rarely entered; it was full of brisk and cheerful men, lunching with relish; some of them had hurried in from their work, and were enjoying the hour of leisure; some were the old frequenters of the place, men whose work in the world was over, as well as men who had never known what it was to work. But these men, even some who seemed crippled with age and infirmity, seemed as intent upon their pleasures, as avid of news, as eager for conversation, as particular about their food, as if their existence was of a supreme and weighty importance, Hugh watched an elderly man, whom he knew by name, who was said to be the most unoccupied man in London, who was administering food and drink to himself with a serious air of delicate zest, as though he were presiding benevolently at some work of charity and mercy. He had certainly flourished on his idleness like a green bay tree! Hugh was inclined to believe in the necessity to happiness of the observance of some primal laws, like the law of labour, but here was a contradiction to all his theories. He sighed to think of the mountains of carefully prepared food that this rosy, well-brushed person must have consumed in the course of his life! He was a notoriously selfish man, who never laid out a penny except on his own needs and pleasures. Yet here was he, guarded like the apple of G.o.d's eye, and all the good things that the earth held--ease, comfort, independence, health, honour, and the power of enjoyment--were heaped upon him with a liberal hand. No wonder he thought so well of the world! Hugh had heard him say, with an air of virtuous complacency, that he was generally pretty comfortable.

Hugh did not grudge his luxurious ease to the great statesman who sate in the corner, with an evening paper propped up on a silver dish, and some iced compound bubbling pleasantly in his gla.s.s, smiling benignly at a caricature of himself. He, at all events, paid for his comforts by unremitting labour. But what of the sleek and goodly drones of the hive?

Hugh had some cheerful unmeaning talk to several of his old friends, who regretted that they saw so little of him; he laughed with careful enjoyment at some ancient stories, very familiar to him, told him with rich zest by an acquaintance. But he could not help speculating what was the point of it all. Some of the happiest and most contented men there were high officials, engaged with a sense of solemn importance in doing work that could have been quite as well done by very ordinary people, and much of which, indeed, might as well have been left undone altogether. There was a bishop there, an old family friend of Hugh's father, with whom he entered into talk. The bishop had once been a man of great force and ability, who had been a conspicuous university teacher, and had written profound books. But now he was looking forward with a sense of solemn satisfaction to spending the following day in going down to his diocese in order to preside at a Church _fete_, make a humorous speech, and meet a number of important county people. There was no question of any religious element entering into the function, and Hugh found himself dimly wondering whether such a development of the energies of Christian elders was seriously contemplated in the Gospel. But the bishop seemed to have no doubts on the subject.

Well, anyhow, this was life; this was what men had to do, and what as a rule they enjoyed doing. Hugh had no objection to that, so long as people freely admitted that it was simply their chosen diversion, and that they did it because they liked it. It was only the solemn parade of duty that Hugh disliked.

One of the friends whom Hugh met said to him smilingly that he heard that he had become quite a hermit--adding that he must confess that he did not look like one. Hugh replied laughingly that it was only that he was fortunate enough to discover that his work amused him more and more; at which his friend smiled again, and told him to beware of eccentricity.

Hugh began to wonder whether his simple and solitary life was indeed tinged with that quality; but he answered that he was finding out to his great delight that he was less afraid than he used to be of living alone, to which his friend, a good-humoured and ineffective man, said that he found that the stir and movement of town kept people from rusting. Hugh wondered--but did not express his wonder--what was supposed to be the use of keeping the blade bright to no purpose; and he wished to ask his contented friend what his object was; but that appeared to be priggish, so Hugh left the question unuttered.

It was however with a huge relief that, his business over, Hugh found himself in the homeward train. But at the same time he took himself to task for finding this suspension of routine, this interruption of his literary work, so unpalatable. He realised that he was becoming inconveniently speculative; and that his growing impulse to get behind things, to weigh their value, to mistrust the conventional view of life, had its weak side, After all, the conventional, the normal view reflected the tastes of the majority of mankind. Their life was laid out and regulated on those lines; and the regulating instinct was a perfectly natural development of human temperament. Ought he not to embrace it for himself? was he not, perhaps, by seeking so diligently for fine flavours and intense impressions, missing the food of the banquet, and sipping only at the sauces? If his own work had been of any particular importance; if he was exercising a wide influence through his books, in the direction of leading others to love the simple sources of happiness, then his withdrawal from ordinary activities and pleasures would be justifiable. Was it justified as it was? Hugh could not answer the question. He only knew that as the train glided on its way, as the streets became less dense, as the country verdure began to occupy more and more of the horizon; as the train at last began to speed through wide fields full of ripening grain, and hamlets half hidden in high elms, he felt the blessed consciousness of returning freedom, the sense of recovering the region of peace and purity dear to his spirit; and the thought of the hot stifling town, with all its veins and arteries full of that endless ebb and flow of humanity, seemed to him like a nightmare from which he was being gradually delivered, and which he was leaving far behind him.

It was not peace, indeed! there was the obstinate spirit, repining, questioning, reviewing all things, striving to pierce the veil. But the veil was not so thick as it had seemed in the city. There he was distracted, bewildered, agitated. But in this quiet country the veil seemed thin enough. The trees, the flowers, seemed somehow nearer to G.o.d, who of very truth appeared to walk as of old in the garden, in the cool of the day.

XXIV

The Romance of Life--The Renewal of Youth--Youth

There were some days when the whole air of the place, the houses, the fields, the gardens, even the very people that Hugh met in the streets, seemed to be full of romance and poetry. There was no particular quality about the days themselves, that Hugh could ever divine, that produced this impression. Perhaps such moods came oftener and more poignantly when the air was cool and fresh, when the temperate sun filled his low rooms from end to end, lay serene upon the pastures, or danced in the ripples of the stream. But the mood came just as inevitably on dull days, when the sky was roofed with high grey clouds, or even on raw days of winter, when fitful gusts whirled round corners, and when the spouts and cornices dripped with slow rains. In these hours the whole world seemed possessed by some gracious and sweet mystery; everything was in the secret, everything was included in the eager and high-hearted conspiracy. It was all the same, on such days, whether Hugh was alone or with company; if he was among friends or even strangers, they seemed to look upon him, to speak, to move, with a blithe significance; he seemed to intercept tender messages in a casual glance, to experience the sense of a delighted goodwill, such as reigns among a party of friends on an expedition of pleasure. This mood did not produce in Hugh the sense of merriment or high spirits; it was not an excited frame of mind; it was rather a feeling of widespread tenderness, a sort of brotherly admiration. At such moments, the most crabbed and peevish person seemed to be transfigured, to be acting a delightful part for the pleasure of a spectator, and an inner benevolence, a desire to contribute zest and amus.e.m.e.nt to the banquet of life, seemed to underlie the most fractious gestures or irritable speech. On such days, one seemed to have an affectionate understanding with even slight acquaintances, an understanding which seemed to say, "We are all comrades in heart, and nothing but circ.u.mstance and bodily limitation prevents us from being comrades in life." Hugh used to fancy that this mood was like an earnest of the bodiless joy, the free companions.h.i.+p of heaven, if such a place there were, where one should know even as one was known, and be able to enter in and possess, in a flash of thought, the whole fabric of a fellow-creature's soul.