 CHAPTER 32 ON PAST GREATNESS There lies in the northeast of France close against the Belgian frontier and within Canon and in the end shot of the famous battlefield of Melphe-Quay, a little town called Bavaye. I have written of it elsewhere. Coming into this little town you seem to be entering no more than a decent and important market borough, a larger village meant for country folk, perhaps without a history and certainly without fame. As you come to look about you, one thing after another enlivens your curiosity and suggest something at once enormous and remote in the destinies of the place. In the first place seven great roads go out like the seven rays of a star, plumb straight, darting along the line, across the vast bare fields of Flanders, past and along the many isolated woods of the provinces, and making to great capitals far off, took along to Paris, to Través, to the ports of the sea. These routes are deserted in great part, some of them are meddled in certain sections, and again in other sections there are no more than lanes and again no more than footpaths as you proceed along their miles away. But their exact design awfully impresses the mind. You know as you follow a set strict alignment that you are fulfilling the majestic purpose of Imperial Rome. It was the Romans that made these things. When intrigued and excited by set formades of greatness you read what you can of the place and you find nothing but the dust of a legend. You'll find a story that once here a king, filled with ambition and worshipping strange gods, thrust out these great roads to the ends of the earth, desired his capital to be a hub and naval for the world. He put them under the protection of seven planets and of the deities of those stars. Every he paved with black marble and four with white marble and where they met upon the marketplace he put up a golden terminal. There the legend ends. It is only legend, a true product of the Dark Ages, when all that Rome had done rose like a huge dream in the mind of Europe and took on gorgeous and fantastic coloring. You learn for the rest very little, that ornaments and money have been found dating from two thousand years, that once great walls surrounded the place, it must have had noble buildings and solemn courts. In strict history all you will discover is that it was the capital of that tribe, the Nervai, against whom Caesar fought and whose territory was early conquered for the empire. You'll find nothing more. There is no living tradition, there is no voice, the little town is dumb. The place is a figure and a striking one of greatness long dead. A man visiting its small domestic interest today and noting its comfort, its humility, its sleep is reminded of many things attaching to human fame. It would seem as though the ambitions of men and that exalted appetite for glory which has produced the chief things of this world suffer the effect of time somewhat as the body of an animal slain will suffer that. One part of the organism and then another decays and mixes back with nature. The effect of will has vanished, the things of prey to all that environment which once alive it combated, conquered and transformed to its own use. One portion after another is lost till at last only the most resisting stands, the skeleton and hard framework, the least expressive, the least personal part of the whole. This also decays and perishes, then there remains no more but a score of hardened fragments that linger in their place, and what has passed away is fortunate if even the slightest or most fantastic legend of itself survives. The great dead are first forgotten in their physical habit. We lose the nature of their voices, we forget their sympathies and their affections. It by bit, all that they intended to be eternal slips back into the common thing around. A blurred image growing fainter and fainter lingers. At last the person vanishes, and in its place some public raising material things, a monument, a tomb, an ornament, or a weapon of enduring metal, is all that remains. If it were possible for the spring of appetite and quest to be dried up in man, such a spectacle would dry up that spring. It is not possible, for it is providentially in the nature of man to cherish these illusions of an immortal memory, and of a life bestowed upon the shadow of the mere name of his living greatness. Those various forms of fame which are young man's goals and to which the eager, creative power of early manhood so properly directs itself, seem each in turn or each for his varying temperament, to promise the desired reward. And one imagined that his love, another that his discoveries, another that his victories in the field or his conspicuous acts of courage will remain permanently with his fellows long after he has left their feast. As though to give some substance to the flattering cheat, there is one kind of fame which men have been permitted to attain, and which does give them a sort of fixed tenure. If not forever, yet for generation upon generations, in the human city, this sort of fame is the fame of the great poets. There is nothing more enduring. It has for some who were most blessed outlasted, you may say, all material things which they handled or they knew, all fabrics, all instruments, all habitations. It is comparable in its endurance to the years, and a man reads the Song of Roland and can still look on that same unchanged cleft of Ronsavales, or a man reads the Iliad and can look to-day westward from the shores to Tenedos. But wait a moment. Are they indeed blessed in this, the great poets? Ronsard debated it. He decided that they were, and put into the mouth of the Muses, the great lines, a brief poem omitted probably in Latin. But the manner is still undecided. CHAPTER 33 Mr. the Duke, the man of Melplicay On the field of Melplicay, that battlefield, I met a man. He was pointed out to me as a man who drove travelers to Bavai. His name was Mr. the Duke, and he was very poor. If he comes across these lines, which is exceedingly unlikely, I offer him my apologies. Anyhow, I can write about him freely, for he is not rich, and what is more, the laws of his country permit the telling of the truth about our fellow men, even when they are rich. Mr. the Duke was of some years, and his color was that of cedar wood. I met him in his farmyard, and I said to him, Is it you, sir, that drive travelers to Bavai? No, he said. Accustomed by many years of travel to this type of response, I continued, And how much do you charge? Two francs fifty, he said. I would give you three francs, I said. When I had said this, he shook his head and replied, You fall at an evil moment. I was about to milk the cows. Having said this, he went to harness the horse. When the horse was harnessed to his little cart, it was an extremely small horse, full of little bones and white in color, with one eye stronger than the other. He gave it to his little daughter to hold, and himself sat down at the table, proposing a meal. It is but humble fare, he said, for we are poor. This sounded familiar to me. I had both read and heard it before. The meal was a bread and butter, pasty and beer. For Malplacay is a country of beer, and not of wine. As he sat at the table, the old man pointed out to me that Contraband across the Belgian frontier, which is close by, was no longer profitable. The fraud, he said, is no longer a living for anyone. Upon that frontier, Contraband is called the fraud. It holds an honorable place as a career. The fraud, he continued, as gone long ago, it is burst. It is no longer to be pursued. There is not even a duty upon apples, but there is a duty upon pears. Had I a son, I would not pull him into the fraud. Sometimes there is just a chance, here and there. One can pick up an occasion. But take it all and all, and here he wagged his head solemnly. There is nothing in it any more. I said that I had no experience of Contraband professionally, but that I knew a very honest man who lived by it in the country of Endora, and that according to my morals a man had a perfect right to run the risk and take his chance, for there was no contract between him and the power he was trying to get round. This announcement pleased the old gentleman, but it did not grip his mind. He was of your practical sort, he was almost a pragmatist, abstractions wearied him. He put no faith in the reality of ideas. I think he was a nominalist like Abelard, and whatever excuse you may make for him, Abelard was a nominalist right enough. For it was the intellectual thing to be at the time, though St. Bernard utterly confuted him in arguments of enormous length and incalculable boredom. The old man, then I say, would have nothing to do with first principles, and he reasserted his position that in the concrete, in the existent world, the fraud no longer paid. This said for the sixth or seventh time he drank some brandy to put heart into him, and climbed up into his little cart, eye by his side. He hit the white horse with a stick, making at the same time an extraordinary shrill noise with his mouth like a siren, and the horse began to slop and sludge very dolefully toward bevy. His horse, said Mr. the Duke, is a wonderfully good horse. He goes like the wind. He is of Arab abstraction, and comes from Africa. With his words he gave the horse another huge blow with his stick, and once more emitted his piercing cry. The horse went neither faster nor slower than before, and seemed very indifferent to the whole performance. He is from Africa, said Mr. the Duke again meditatively. Do you know Africa? Africa with the French populace means El Giers. I answered that I knew it, and that in particular I knew the road southward from Constantine. At this he looked very pleased, and said, I was a soldier in Africa. I deserted seven times. To this I made no answer. I did not know how he wanted me to take it, so I waited until he should speak again, which he soon did, and said, The last time I deserted I was free for a year and a half. I used to conduct beasts, that was my trade. When they caught me, I was to have been shot. I was saved by the tears of a woman. Having said this, the old man pulled out a very small pipe and filled it with exceedingly black tobacco. He lit it, then he began talking again, rather more excitedly. It is a terrible thing, and an unhappy thing nonetheless, he went on, that a man should be taken out to be shot, and should be saved by the tears of a woman. Then he added, I want you, sir, wars. How foolish is it that men should kill each other? If there were a war I would not fight, would you? I said I thought I would, but whether I should like to or not would depend on the war. He was eager to contradict and to tell me that war was wrong and stupid. Having behind him the logical training of fifteen Christian centuries, he was in no way muddleheaded upon the matter. He saw very well that his doctrine meant that it was wrong to have a country and wrong to love it, and that his patriotism was all bosh, and that no ideal is worth physical pain or trouble. To such conclusions had he come at the end of his life. The white horse, meanwhile, slouched, but by grew somewhat nearer as we sat in silence after his last sentence. He was turning many things over in his mind. He veered off onto a political economy. When the rich man at the manufacturer here, the place where they sell phosphates for the land, when he stands beard to all the workmen and to the countryside, I always say, fools, all this will be put out of the cost of the phosphates. They will cost you more. Mr. the Duke did not accept John Stuart Mill's proposition upon the cost of production, nor the general theories of Ricardo upon which Mill's propositions were based. In his opinion, Rant was a factor in the cost of production, for he told me that Butter had gone up because the price of land was rising near the towns. In what he next said, I found out that he was not a collectivist, for he said a man should own enough to live upon, and he said that this was impossible if rich people were allowed to live. I asked him what the politics of the countryside were and how people voted, and he said, The politicians trick the people, they are a heap of worthlessness. I asked him if he voted, and he said yes. He said there was only one way to vote, but I did not understand what this meant. Had time served, I should have asked him further questions. Upon the nature of the soul, its ultimate faith, the origin of man and his destiny, whether mortal or immortal, the proper constitution of the state, the choice of the legislature, the prince, and the magistrate, the function of art, whether it is subsidiary or primary in human life, the family, marriage. Upon the state he had already informed me and also upon the institution of property, and upon his view of armies. Upon all these other things he would equally have given me a clear reply, for he was a man that knew his own mind, and that is more than most people can say. But we were now in Bavai, and I had no time to discover more. We drank together before we parted, and I was very pleased to see the honest look in his face. With more leisure and born to greater opportunities, he would have been talked about this man in Melplicay. He had come to his odd conclusions, as the funny people do, in Scandinavia and in Russia, and among the rich intellectuals and usurers in London and Berlin. But he was a jollier man than they are, for he could drive a horse and lie about it, and he could also milk a cow. As we parted, he used a phrase that wounded me, and which I had only heard once before in my life, he said, We shall never see each other again. Another man had once said this thing to me before. This man was a farmer in the Northumbrian hills, who walked with me a little way in these days when I was going over Carter Fell to find the Scots people many, many years ago. He also said, We shall never meet again. CHAPTER 34 The Game of Cards A youth of no more than twenty-three years entered a first-class carriage at the famous station of Swindon in the country of Wilcher, proposing to travel to the outermost parts of the West and to enjoy a comfortable loneliness while he ruminated upon all things human and divine. When he was sufficiently annoyed to discover that in the furthest corner of the carriage was sitting an old gentleman of benevolent appearance, or at any rate a gentleman of benevolent appearance, who appeared in his youthful eyes to be old. For though the old gentleman was, as a fact but sixty, yet his virile beard had long gone white, and the fringes of his hair attaching to his ostrich egg-of-a-head confirmed his venerable appearance. When the train had started, the young man proceeded in no very good temper and with great solemnity to fill a pipe. He turned to his senior, who was watching him in a very paternal and happy manner, and said formally, I hope you do not mind my smoking, sir. Not at all, said the old boy, it's a habit I have long grown accustomed to in others. The young man bowed in a somewhat absurd fashion and felt for his matches. He discovered to his no small mortification that he had none. He was so used to his pipe after a meal that he really could not forego it. He came off his perch by at least three steps, and asked the old man very gently whether he had any matches. The older man produced a box, and at the same time brought out with it a little notebook and a playing card, which happened to be in his pocket. The young man took the matches and lit his pipe, surveying the old man the while with a more complacent eye. It is very kind of you, sir, he said a little less stiffly, and handed back the matches, wrapping his rug round his legs, sat down in his place, and knowing that one should prolong the conversation for a moment or two, after a favor, said, I see that you play cards. I do, said the old man simply, would you like a game? I don't mind, said the young man, who had always heard that it was unmanly and ridiculous to refuse a game of cards and a railway carriage. The elder man laughed merrily in his strong beard as he saw his junior begin to spread somewhat awkwardly a copy of a newspaper upon his knees. I'll show you a trick worth two of that, he said, and taking one of the first class cushions, which alone of railway cushions are movable from its place, he came over to the corner opposite the young man, and made a table of the cushion between them. Now said he genially, what's it to be? Well said the young man, like one who expounds new mysteries. Do you know Pequay? Oh, yes, said his companion, with another happy little laugh of contentment with the world. I'll take you on, what shall it be? Pennies, if you like, said the young man nonchalantly. Very well, and double for the Rubicon. How do you mean, said the young man, puzzled. You will see, said the old man, and they began to play. The game was singularly absorbing. At first the young man won a few pounds. Then he lost rather heavily, and then he won again, but not quite enough to recoup. Then in the fourth game he won so that he was a little ahead, and meanwhile the old man chattered merrily during the discarding and the shuffling, during the shuffling especially. He looked out towards the downs with something of a sigh at one moment and said, it's a happy world. Yes, answered the younger man with the proper legubriousness of youth, but it all comes to an end. It isn't coming to an end, said the older man, declaring a point of six. That's not the tragedy. It's the little bits coming to an end, meanwhile, before the hole comes to an end. That's the tragedy. But he added with another of his jolly laughs. We must play. Pequet takes up all one's gray manner. They played, and the young man lost again, but by a very narrow margin. It was quite an absorbing game. As they shuffled again, the young man said, What did you mean by the little bits stopping, or whatever it was? Oh, said the old man, as though he couldn't remember, and then he added, Oh yes, I mean, you'll find as you grow older, people die and affections change, and, though it seems silly to mention it in a company with higher things, there's what Shelley called the contagion of the world's slow stain. Then their conversation was interrupted by the ardor of the game. But as they played, the young man was ruminating, and he had come to the conclusion that his senior was imperfectly educated, and was probably of the middle classes, whereas he himself was destined to be a naval architect, and with that object had recently left the university for an office in the city. The young man thought that a man properly educated would never quote a tag. He was wrong there. As he had allowed his thoughts to wander somewhat, the young man lost that game rather heavily, and at the end of it he was altogether about ten shillings to the bad. It was his turn to shuffle. The older man was at leisure to speak, and did so rather dreamily as he gazed at the landscape again. "'Things change, you know,' he said, and there is the contagion of the world's slow stain. One gets preoccupied, especially about money. When men marry, they get very much preoccupied upon that point. It's bad for them, but it can't be helped.' "'You cut,' said the young man. His elder cut, and they played again. This time, as they played their game, the old man broke his rule of silence and continued his observations interruptedly. "'Four kings,' he said. "'It isn't that a man gets to think money all important. It is that he has to think of it all the time.' "'No, three queens are no good,' I said, four kings, four naves. The little losses of money don't affect one, but perpetual trouble about it does. And closing up the majority of tricks, which he had just gained, many a man goes on making more year after year, and yet feels himself in peril. And the last trick, he took up the cards to shuffle them. Towards the very end of life he continued, it gets less, I suppose, but you'll feel the burden of it.' He put the pack over for the younger man to cut. When that was done, he dealt them out slowly. As he dealt he said, one feels the loss of little material things, objects to which one was attached, a walking stick or a ring, or a watch which one has carried for years. Your Declare. The young man declared, and that game was played in silence. I regret to say that the young man was Rubicon'd, and was thirty shillings in the elder's debt. "'We'll stop if you like,' said the elder man kindly. "'Oh, no,' said the youth, with nonchalance, I'll pay you now, if you like. "'Not at all. I didn't mean that,' said the older man, with a sudden prick of honor. "'Oh, but I will, and we'll start fair again,' said the young man. Whereupon he handed over his combined losses in gold. The older man gave him change. They shuffled again, and they went on with their play. "'After all,' said the older man, musing as he confessed to a point of no more than five, it's all in the day's work. It's just the day's work,' he repeated, with a sad look in his eyes. It's a game that one plays like this game, and then when it's over, it's over. It's the little losses that count.' That game again was unfortunate for the young man, and he had to shell out fifteen and six. But the breaks were applied. Bristol was reached. The train came to a standstill, and the young man looked up a little confused and hurried, said, "'Hello, Bristol. I get out here.' "'So do I,' said the older man. They both stood up together, and the jolt of the train as it stopped dead threw them into each other's arms. "'I am really very sorry,' said the youth. "'It's my fault,' said the old chap, like a good fellow. "'I ought to have caught hold. You'll get out, and I'll hand you your bag.' "'It's very kind of you,' said the young man. He was really flattered by so much attention. But he knew himself what a good companion he was, and he could understand it. Besides which, they had made friends during that little journey. He always liked a man to whom he had lost some money in an honest game. There was a heavy crowd upon the platform, and two men barging up out of it saluted the old man boisterously by the name of Jack. He twinkled at them with his eyes as he began moving the luggage about and stood for a moment in the doorway with his own bag in his right hand and the young man's bag in his left. The young man so saw it for an instant, a fine upstanding figure. He saw his bag handed by some mistake to the second of the old man's friends. A porter came by at the moment, pushing through the crowd with a trolley. An old lady made a scene. The porter apologized. The crowd took sides. For some the porter, for some the old lady, the young man with deference at his age, politely asked several people to make way. But when he had emerged from the struggle his companion, his friends, and his own bag could not be found, or at any rate he could not make out where they were in the great mass that pushed and surged upon the platform, he made himself a little conspicuous by asking too many questions and by losing his temper twice with people who had done him no harm. When just as his excitement was growing more than quarrelless a very heavy, stupid-looking man in regulation boots, capped him on the shoulder and said, Follow me. He was prepared with an oath by way of reply, but another gentleman of equal weight wearing boots of the same pattern linked his arm in his, and between them they marched him away to a little private closet opening out of the station master's room. Now, sir, he said, who had first tapped him on the shoulder, be good enough to explain your movements. I don't know what you mean, said the young man. You were in the company, said the older man severely, of an old man, bald with a white beard and a blue sailor suit. He had come from London. You joined him at Swindon. We have evidence that he was to be met at this station, and it will be to your advantage if you make a clean rest of it. The young man was violent, and he was born away. But he had friends at Bristol. He gave his references, and he was released. To this day he believes that he suffered not from folly, but from injustice. He did not see his bag again, but after all it contained no more than his evening clothes, for which he had paid, or rather owed, six guineas, four shirts and his many collars, and dressed ties, a silver-mounted set of brushes and combs, and useless cut glass bottles, a patented razor, a stick of shaving soap, and two very, very confidential letters which he treasured. His watch, of course, was gone, but not I am glad to say his chain, which hung dangling, though in his flurry he had not noticed it. It made him look a trifle ridiculous. As he wore no tie pin, he had not lost that. And beyond his temper he had indeed lost nothing further, say possibly a textbook upon thermodynamics. This book he thought he remembered having put into the bag, and if he had, it belonged to his library, but he could not quite remember this point, and when the library reclaimed it he stoutly disputed their claim. In this dispute he was successful, but it was the only profit he made out of that journey, unless we are to count his experience, and experience, as all the world knows, is a thing that men must buy. CHAPTER 35 King Lear The great unity which was built up two thousand years ago, and was called Christendom in its final development, split and broken pieces. The various civilizations of its various provinces drifted apart, and it will be for the future historian to say at what moment the isolation of each, from all, was farthest pushed. It is certain that that point is past. In the task of reuniting what was broken, it is the novelest work a modern man can do. The very first mechanical act must be to explain one national soul to another. That act is not final. The nations of Europe, now so divided, still have more in common than those things by which they differ, and it is certain that when they have at last revealed to them their common origin they will return to it. They will return to it perhaps under the pressure of a war waged by some not-Christian civilization, but they will return. In the meanwhile of those acts not final, yet of immediate necessity in the task of establishing unity, is the act of introducing one national soul to another. Now this is best accomplished in a certain way which I will describe. You will take that part in the letters of a nation which you maturely judge most or best to reflect the full national soul with its qualities, careless of whether these be great or little. You will take such a work as reproduces for you as you read it, not only its sentiment but its very rhythm, the stuff and color of the nation. This you will present to the foreigner who cannot understand. His efforts must be laborious, very often unfruitful, but where it is fruitful it will be of a decisive effect. Let any one take some one of the immortal things that Racine wrote and show them to an Englishman. He will hardly ever be able to make anything of it at first. Here and there some violently emotional passage may faintly touch him, but the mass of the verse will seem to him dead. Now if by constant reading, by association with those who know what Racine is, he at last sees him, and these changes in the mind come very suddenly, he will see into the soul of Gaul. For the converse task today, not equally difficult but once almost impossible, of presenting England to the French intelligence, or indeed to any other alien intelligence, you may choose the play King Lear. That play has every quality which does reflect the soul of the community in which and for which it was written. Note a few in their order. First it is not designed to its end. At least it is not designed accurately to its end. It is written as a play, and it is meant to be acted as a play, and it is the uniform opinion of those versed in plays and in the acting that in its full form it could hardly be presented, while in any form it is the hardest even of Shakespeare's plays to perform. Here you have a parallel with a thousand mighty English things to which you can turn. Is there not institution after institution to decide on, so lacking a complete fitness to its end, larger in a way than the end it is to serve, and having as it were a life of its own which proceeds apart from its effect, this quality which makes so many English things growths rather than instruments is most evident in the great play. Again it has that quality which Voltaire noted, which he thought abnormal in Shakespeare, but which is the most national characteristic in him, that a sort of formlessness, if it marrs the framework of the thing and spoils it, yet also permits the exercise of an immeasurable vitality. When a man has read King Lear and lays down the book, he is like one who has been out in one of those empty English uplands in a storm by night. It is written as though the pen bred thoughts. It is possible to conjecture as one reads, and especially in the diatribes, that the pen itself was rapid and the brain too rapid for the pen. One feels the rush of the air. Now this quality is to be discovered in the literature of many nations, but never with the fullness which it has in the literature of England. And note that in those phases of the national life, when foreign models have constrained this instinct of expansion in English verse, they never have restrained it for long, and that even though the bonds established by those models, the instinct of expansion breaks. You see it in the Exuberance of Dryden and in the occasional running rhetoric of Pope, until it utterly loosens itself with the end of the eighteenth century. The play is national again in that permanent curiosity upon knowable things, nay, that mysterious half-knowledge of unknowable things which in its last forms produce the mystic, and which is throughout history so plainly characteristic of these northern Atlantic islands. Every play of Shakespeare builds with that material, and no writer, even of the English turn, has sent out points further into the region of what is not known, than Shakespeare has in sudden flashes of phrase. But King Lear, though it contains a lesser number of lines of this mystical and half-religious effect than, say, Hamlet, yet as a general impression is the more mystical of the two plays. The element of madness which in Hamlet hangs in the background like a storm cloud ready to break, in King Lear rages, and it is the use of this which lends its amazing psychical power to the play. It has been said, with no great profundity of criticism, that English fiction is chiefly remarkable for its power of particularization of character, and that where French work, for instance, will present ideas, English will present persons. The judgment is grossly insufficient and therefore false, but it is based upon a proof which is very salient in English letters, which is that, say, in quite short-hand modern work, the sense of complete unity deadens the English mind. The same nerve which revolts at a straight road, at a code of law, revolts against one tone of thought, and the sharp contrast of emotional character, not the dual contrast which is common to all literatures, but the multiple contrast runs through King Lear, and gives the work such a tone that one seems as one reads it to be moving in a cloud. The conclusion is perhaps Shakespearean rather than English, and in a fashion escapes from any national labeling. But the note of silence which Shakespeare suddenly brings in upon the turmoil, and with which he is so fond of completing what he has done, would not be possible, were it not that spirit of expansion and of a kind of literary adventurousness present in all that went before. It is indeed this that makes the play so memorable, and it may not be fantastic to repeat and expand what has been said above in other words, namely that King Lear has something about him which seems to be a product of English landscape and of English weather, and if its general movement is the storm its element is one of those sudden silences that come sometimes with such magical rapidity after the booming of the wind. CHAPTER XXXVI The Excursion It is so old a theme that I really hesitate to touch it, and yet it is so true and so useful that I will. It is true all the time, and it is particularly useful at this season of the year to men in cities, to all repetitive men, to the men that read these words. What is more true as it is and useful as it is, no amount of hammering at people seems to get this theme into their practice, though it has long ago entered into their convictions that they will not act upon it in their summers. And this true and useful theme is the theme of little freedoms and discoveries, the value of getting loose and away by a small trick when you want to get your glimpse of fairyland. Now how does one get loose and away? When a man says to himself that he must have a holiday, he means that he must see quite new things that are also old. He desires to open that door which stood wide like a window in childhood and is now shut fast. But where are the new things that are also the old? Paradoxical fellows who deserve drowning tell one that they are at our very doors. Well, that is true of the eager mind, but the mind is no longer eager when it is in need of a holiday, and you can get at the new things that are also the old by way of drugs, but drugs are a poor sort of holiday fabric. If you have stored up your memory well with much experience, you can get these things from your memory, but only in a pale sort of way. I think the best avenue to recreation by the magical impressions of the world upon the mind is this. Go to some place to which the common road leads you, and then to just get off the common road. You will be astonished to find how strange the world becomes in the first mile, and how strange it remains till the common road is reached again. It always sounds like a mockery for a man who has traveled to a great many places, as I have, to advise his fellows to travel abroad. They are most of them hard-tried, yet it is really a much easier thing than men bound to the desk and the workshop understand. Britain is but one great port, and its inward seas are narrow, and the fares are ridiculously low. If you are a young man, you can go almost anywhere for almost anything, sitting up by night on a deck and not expecting too much courtesy. But of course if you shirk the sea, you are a prisoner. Well then, supposing you abroad, or even in some other part of this highly varied kingdom in which you live, and supposing you to have reached some chosen place by some common road, what I desire to dilate upon here is the truth which every little excursion of business or of leisure, and precious few of leisure, make me more certain of every day, that just a little way off the road is fairyland. It was exactly three days ago that I had occasion to go down the railway line that is the most frequented in Europe. I was on business, not leisure, but in the business I had two days leisure, and I did what I would advise all other men to do in such a circumstance. I took a train to nowhere, fixing my starting point thus. I first looked at the map and saw where, nearest to me, was a quadrilateral bear of railways. This formula, to look for a quadrilateral bear of railways, is a very useful formula for the man who is seeking another world. Then I fixed at random upon one little roadside station upon the main line. I determined to get there, and to walk aimlessly and westward till I should strike the other side of the quadrilateral. I made no plan, not even of the hours of the day. I came into my roadside station at half-past eight of the long summer night, broad daylight that is, but with the night advancing. I got out and began my westward march. At once there crowded upon me any number of unexpected and entertaining things. The first thing I found was the street which was used by horses as well as by men, and yet was made up of broad steps. It was a sort of staircase going up a hill. At the top of it I found a woman leading a child by the hand. I asked her the name of the steps. She told me they were called the Steps of St. John. A quarter of a mile further down the narrow lane I saw to my astonishment an enormous castle, ruined and open to the sky. There are many such ruins, famous in Europe, but of this one I had never even heard. I went lonely under the evening and looked at its main gate and saw Annette a molded estusian carved and the motto in French. Henceforward, which word made me think a great deal, but resolved no problem in my mind. I went on again westward as the darkness fell and saw what I had not seen before. Though my reading had told me of its existence, a long line of trees marking a bridge on the horizon, which line was the border of that ancient road the Roman soldiers built, leading from the west into Emmions. Along that road thought I St. Martin Road before he became a monk, and while he was yet a soldier, and was serving under Julian the Apostate. Along that road he came to the west gate of Emmions and there cut his cloak in two and gave the half of it to a beggar. The memory of St. Martin's deed entertained me for some miles of my way, and I remembered how when I was a child it had seemed to me ridiculous to cut your coat in two, whether for a beggar or for anybody else. Not that I thought charity ridiculous, God forbid, but that a coat seemed to me a thing you could not cut in two with any profit to the user of either half. You might cut it in latitude and turn it into an eaten jacket and a kilt, neither of much use to a gallow Roman beggar, or you might cut it in meridian and leave but one sleeve, mere folly. Considering these things I went over the rolling plateau. I saw a great owl flying before me against the sky. I turned from the owls of home. I saw Jupiter shining above a cloud and Venus shining below one. The long line lingered in the north above the English sea. At last I came quite unexpectedly upon that delight and plaything of the French. A light railway or esteem tram such as that people build in great profusion to link up their villages and their streams. The road where I came upon it made a level crossing, and there was a hut there, and a woman living in it who kept the level crossing and warned the pastors by. She told me no more trains or rather little trams would pass that night, but that three miles further on I should come to a place called the Mills of the Vadim. Now the name of Vadim remind me that a Vadim was the lay protector of a cathedral chapter in feudal times, so the name gave me a renewed pleasure. But it was now near midnight, and when I came to this village I remembered how, in similar night walks, I had sometimes been refused lodging. When I got among the few houses, all was dark. I found, however, in the darkness two young men, each bearing an enormous, curled trumpet of the kind which the French call cordy chase, that is, hunting horns. So I asked them where the inn was. They took me to it, and woke up the hostess who received us with oaths. This she did, lest the young man with hunting horns should demand a commission. Her heart, however, was better than her mouth, and she put me up, but she charged me ten pence from my room, counting coffee in the morning, which was, I am sure, more than her usual rate. Next day I took the little steam tram away from the place, and went on vaguely, with her it should please God to take me. Still the plateau changed, and the light railway fell into a charming valley. And seeing a town rooted therein, I got out and paid my fare, and visited the town. In this town I went to church, as it was early morning, you must accuse the foible, and coming out of church I had an argument with a working man upon the matter of religion, in which argument, as I believe, I was the victor. Then I went on north out of this town, and came into the wood of enormous size. It was miles and miles across, and the trees were higher than anything I have seen outside of California. It was an enchanted wood. The sun shone down through a hundred feet of silence by little rounds between the leaves, and there was silence everywhere. In this wood I sojourned all day long, making slowly westward till in the very midst of it I found a troubled man. He was a man of middle-age, short, intelligent, fat, and weary. He said to me, Have you noticed any special mark upon the trees, a white mark of the number ninety? No, said I. Are there any wild boars in the forest? Yes, he answered a few, but not of use. I am looking for trees marked in white with the number ninety. I have paid a price for them, and they cannot find them. I saluted him and went on my way. At last I came to an open clearing where was a town, and in the town I found a very delightful inn where they would cook anything anyone felt inclined for within reason, and charge one very moderately indeed. I have retained its name. By this time I was completely lost, and in the heart of Fairyland, when suddenly I remembered that every one that strikes root in Fairyland loses something, at the least his love and at the worst his soul, and that it is a perilous business to linger there. So I asked them in that hotel how they worked it, when they wanted to go west into the great towns. They put me into an omnibus which charged me four pence for a journey of some two miles. It took me, as heaven ordained, to a common great railway, and that common great railway took me through the night to the town of Dieppe, which I have known since I could speak and before, and which was about as much of a Fairyland to me as Piccadilly or Monday morning. Thus ended those two days in which I had touched again the unknown places, and all that heaven was but two days, and cost me not fifty shillings. Excuse the folly of this. CHAPTER 37 The Tide I wish I had been one of those men who first sailed beyond the pillars of Hercules, and first saw, as they edged northward along a barbarian shore, the slow swinging of the sea. How much, I wonder, did they think themselves enlarged? How much did they know that all the civilization behind them, the very ancient world of the Mediterranean, was something protected and enclosed, from which they had escaped into an outer world? And how much did they feel that here they were now physically caught by the moving tides that bore them in the whole movement of things? For the tide is of that kind, and the movement of the sea four times daily back and forth is a consequence, a reflection, and a part of the ceaseless pulse and rhythm which animates all things made, and which links what seems not living to what certainly lives and feels, and has power over all movement of its own. The circuits of the planets stretch and then recede. Their ellipse elongate and flatten again to the semblance of circles. The poles slowly nod once every many thousand years. There is a vibration to the moon, and in all this vast harmonious process of come and go, the units of it twirl and spin, and as they spin, run more gravely in ordered procession round their central star. That star moves also to a beat, and all the stars of heaven move each in times of its own as well, and their movement is one thing altogether. Whoever should receive the mighty business moving in one ear would get the music of it in a perfect series of chords, superimposed the one upon the other, but not a tremble of them out of tune. The great scheme is not infinite, for were it infinite such rhythms could not be. It was made and it moves in order to the scheme of its making without caprice, not wayward anywhere, but in and out and back and forth as to a figure set for it. It must be so, or these exact arrangements could not be. Now with this regulated breathing and expiration, playing itself out in a million ways and co-extensive with the universe of things, the tides keep time, and they alone are verly things bring its actual force to our physical perception, to our daily life. We see the sea in movement and power before us, heaving up whatever it may bear, and we feel in an immediate way its strong backward sagging when the rocks appear above it as it falls. We have our hand on the throb of the current, turning an assaulting river inland between green hills. We are born upon it bodily as we sail, its movement kicks the tiller in our grasp, and the strength beneath us and around us, the rush and the compulsion of the stream, its silence, and as it were its purpose, all represent to us immediately and here that immeasurable to and fro which rules the skies. When the Roman soldier came marching northward with Caesar, and first saw the shores of ocean, when, after that occupation of Gaul which has changed the world, they first mounted guard upon the quays of the Etienne ports under Grisnaz, or the rocky inlets of the Veneti by St. Malo and the Breton reefs, they were appalled to see what for centuries chanced traders and the few curious travelers that met a marseille and of the islands had seen before them. They saw in numbers and in a corporate way what hitherto individuals alone had seen. They saw the sea like a living thing, advancing and retreating in an ordered dance, alive with deep sighs and intakes, and ceaselessly proceeding about work and doing which seemed to be the very visible action of an unchanging will, still pleased with calculated change. It was the presence of the Roman army upon the shores of the channel which brought the tide into the general conscience of Europe, and that experience I think was among the greatest, perhaps the greatest of those new things which rushed upon the mind of the empire when it launched itself by the occupation of Gaul. The tide, when it is mentioned in brief historical records of times long since, suddenly strikes one with vividness and with familiarity, so that the past is introduced at once, presented to us physically and up-trooted against our modern senses alive. I know of no other physical thing mentioned in this fashion in chronicle or biography which has so powerful an effect to restore the reality of a dead century. The venerable Beatty is speaking in one place of Southampton Water in his ecclesiastical history, or rather of the Isle of White, whence those two princes were baptized and died under Kedwalla. As the historian speaks to the place he says, In this sea, which is the Solent, comes a double tide out of the seas which spring from the infinite ocean of the Arctic, surrounding all Britain. And he tells us how these double tides rush together and fight together, sweeping as they do round either side of the island by the needles and by a spit-head, into the landlocked sheet within. Now that passage in Beatty's fourth book is more real to me than anything in all his chronicle. For in the Southampton Water today the living thing which we still note as we sail is the double tide. You take a falling tide at the head of the water near Southampton Town, and if you are not quick with your business it is checked in two hours, and you meet a strange flood, the second flood, before you have rounded Kelshaw Castle. Then there is a charter of Newcastle, or rather the inviolable customs of that town. Very old, drawn up nearly eight hundred years ago, but beginning from far earlier, and in these customs you find written. If a plea shall arise between a burgess and a merchant, it must be determined before the third flowing of the sea. That is within three tides, a wise provision. For thus the merchant would not miss the last tide of the day after the quarrel. How living it is, a phrase of that sort, coming in the midst of those other phrases. All the rest, worst luck, has gone. Burgage, tenure, and the economic independence of the humble and the busy, healthy life of men working to enrich themselves, not others, and that corporate association, which was the blood of the Middle Ages, and the power of popular opinion, and in general freedom. By out of all these things that have perished, the tide remains, and in the eighteen clauses of the customs the title clause alone stands fresh, and still has meaning. The capital, great clinching clause, by which men owned their own land within the town, has gone utterly and altogether. The modern workmen on the time would not understand you, perhaps, to whom in that very place you should say, many centuries ago the men that came before you here, your fathers, were not working precariously at a wage, or paying rent to others, but living under their own roofs, and working for themselves. There is only one passage in the document that all could understand in Newcastle today. The very few rich who are hardly secure, the myriads of poor who are not secure at all, and that passage is the passage which talks about the Third Tide. For even today there is some good we have left undestroyed, and the sea still ebbs and flows. This little note of the Newcastle men and of the flowing and ebbing of their sea is to be found, you say, in the archives of England. Not at all. It is to be found in the acts of the Parliament of Scotland. At least so my book assures me. But why? I do not know. Perhaps of the times when between tine and tees men look northward, and of the times when they look southward, for they alternately did one and the other during many hundreds of years. Those times when they look northward seemed the more natural to them. Anyhow, the reference is to the acts of the Parliament of Scotland, and that is the end of it. The end of Chapter 37. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. Chapter 38. On a Great Wind It is an old dispute among men, or rather a dispute as old as mankind. Whether will be a cause of things or no. Nor is there anything novel in those moderns who affirm that will is nothing to the matter save their ignorant belief that their affirmation is new. The intelligent process whereby I know that will not seems, that is, and can alone be truly and ultimately a cause, is fed with stuff and strengthened sacramentally as it were, whenever I meet and I am made the companion of a Great Wind. It is not that this lively creature of God is indeed perfected with a soul. This would be superstition to believe. It has no more of a person than any other of its material fellows. But in its vagary of way, in the largeness of its apparent freedom, in its rush of purpose, it seems to mirror the action of mighty spirit. When a Great Wind comes roaring over the eastern flats toward the North Sea, driving over the fens and the ringland, it is like something of this island that must go out and wrestle with the water or play with it in a game or a battle, and when upon the western shores the clouds come bowling up from the horizon, messengers, outriders, or comrades of a gale. It is something of the sea determined to possess the land. The rising and falling of such power, its hesitations, its renewed violence, its fatigue and final repose, all these are symbols of a mind, but more than all the rest, its exultation. It is the shouting and the harrying of the wind that suits a man. Note, you, we have not many friends. The older we grow and the better we can sift mankind, the fewer friends we count. Although man lives by friendship, but a Great Wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the strength of good fellowship, and even doing battle with it is something worthy and well chosen. If there is cruelty in the sea and terror in high places and malice lurking in profound darkness, there is no one of these qualities in the wind, but only power. Here is strength too full for such negations as cruelty, as malice, or as fear, and that strength in a solemn manner proves and tests health in our own souls. For with terror of the sort I mean, terror of the abyss or panic at remembered pain, and in general a losing grip of the succors of the mind, and with malice and with cruelty, and with all the forms of that evil which lies in wait for men. There is the savor of disease. It is an error to think of such things as power set up in equality against justice and right living. We were not made for them, but rather for influences large and soundly poised. We are not subject to them, but to other powers that can always enliven and relieve. It is health in us, I say, to be full of heartiness and of joy of the world, and of whether we have such health or comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man, and the days of high winds are days in which a physical compulsion has been about us and we have met pressure and blows, resisted and turned them. It enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in companionship are at their noblest. It is pretended sometimes, less often perhaps now than a dozen years ago, that certain ancient pursuits congenial to man will be lost to him under his new necessities. Thus men sometimes talk foolishly of horses being no longer ridden, houses no longer built of wholesome wood and stone, but of metal, meat no more roasted but only baked, and even of stomachs grown too weak for wine. There is a fashion of saying these things and much other nastiness. Such talk is, thank God, mere folly, for man will always at last tend to his end, which is happiness, and he will remember again to do all those things which serve that end. So it is with the uses of the wind, and especially the using of the wind with sails. No man has known the wind by any of its names, who has not sailed his own boat, and felt life in the tiller. Then it is that a man has most to do with the wind, plays with it, coaxes or refuses it, is wary of it all along, yields when he must yield, but comes up and pits himself again against its violence, trains it, harnesses it, calls it if it fails him, denounces it, if it will try to be too strong, and in every manner conceivable handles this glorious playmate. As far as those who say that men did but use the wind as an instrument for crossing the sea, and that sails were mere machines to them, either they have never sailed, or they were quite unworthy of sailing, it is not an accident that the tall ships of every age of varying fashions so arrested human sight and seemed so splendid. The whole of man went into their creation, and they expressed him very well, his cunning and his mastery, and his adventurous heart. For the wind is in nothing more capitely our friend than in this, that it has been, since men were men, their ally in the seeking of the unknown, and in their divine thirst for travel, which in its several aspects, pilgrimage, conquest, discovery, and in general enlargement, is one prime way whereby man fills himself with being. I love to think of those Norwegian men who set out eagerly before the northeast wind, when it came down from their mountains in the month of March, like a god of great stature, to impel them to the west. They pushed their long keels out upon the rollers, grinding the shingle of the beach at the fjord head. They ran down the calm narrows, they breasted and they met the open sea. Then for days and days they drove under this master of theirs and high friend, having the wind for a sort of captain, and looking always out to the sea-line to find what they could find. It was the springtime, and men feel the spring upon the sea, even more surely than they feel it upon the land. They were men whose eyes, pale with the foam, watched for a landfall, that unmistakable good sight which the wind brings us to, the cloud that does not change, and that comes after the long emptiness of sea days, like a vision after the sameness of our common lives. To them the land they so discovered was wholly new. We have no cause to regret the youth of the world, if indeed the world were ever young. When we imagine in our cities that the wind no longer calls us to such things, it is only our reading that blinds us, and the picture of satiety which our reading breathes is wholly false. Any man today may go out and take his pleasure with the wind upon the high seas. He also will make his landfalls today, or in a thousand years, and the sight is always the same, and the appetite for such discoveries is wholly satisfied, even though he be only sailing, as I have sailed, overseas that he has known from childhood, and come upon an island far away, mapped and well known, and visited for the hundredth time. CHAPTER 39 THE LETTER If you ask me why it is now three weeks since I received your letter, and why it is only today that I answer it, I must tell you the truth, lest further things I may have to tell you should not be worthy of your dignity, or of mine. It was because at first I dared not, and then later I reasoned with myself and so bred delay, and at last took refuge in more delay. I will offer no excuse, and will not tell you that I suffered illness, or that some accident of war had taken me away from this old house, or that I have just returned from a journey to my hill, and my view over the plain, and the great river. Your messenger I have kept, and I have entertained him well. I looked at him a little narrowly at his first coming, thinking perhaps he might be a gentleman of yours. But I soon found that he was not such, and that he bore no disguise, but was a plain rider of your household. I put him in good quarters by the hunting-stables. He has had nothing to do but await my resolution, which is now at last taken, and which you receive in this. But how shall I begin, or how express to you what not distance, but a slow and bitter conclusion of the mind has done? I shall not return to Mudan. I shall not see the woods, the summer woods, turning to autumn, nor follow the hunt, nor take pleasure again in what is still the best of Europe at Versailles. And now that I have said it, you must read it so, for I am unalterably determined. Believe me it is something much more deep than courtesy, which compels me to give you my reasons for this final and irrevocable doom. We were children together, though we lent so lightly in our conversation of the spring upon all we knew in common. I know your age and all your strong early experience, and you know mine. Your mother will recall that day's riding when I came back from my first leave, and you were home. Not I think for good, from the convent. A fixed domestic habit blinded her, so that she could then still see in us no more than two children. Yet I was proud of my sword and headed on, and you, that they were proud of a beauty which could no longer be hidden even from yourself. I would then have sacrificed, and would now, all I had or was, or had or am, to have made that beauty immortal. I say you remember that day's riding, and how after it the world was changed for you and me, and how that same evening the elders saw that it was changed. You will remember that for two years we were not allowed to meet again. When the two years were passed, we met indeed by a mere accident of that rich and tedious life wherein we both were now engaged. I was returned from leave before Tornay. You had heard, I think, a false report that I had been wounded in the dreadful business at Fontanoi, which, to remember even now, horrifies me a little. I had heard and knew which of the great names you now bore by marriage. The next day it was your husband who rode with me to Marley. I liked him well enough. I have grown to like him better. He is an honest man, though I confess his philosopher's weary me. When I say an honest man, I am giving the highest praise I know. My dear, that was sixteen years ago. You may not even now understand, so engrossing is the toilsome and excited ritual of that rich world at Versailles. How blessed you are, your children are growing round you, your daughters are beginning to reveal your own duty, and your sons will show in these next years immediately before us. That temper which in you was the spirit and the height of being, and in them men will show us plain courage. During that long space of years, your house has remained well ordered, it was your husband's doing. His great fortune and yours have jointly increased. If I may tell you so, it is a pleasure to all who understand fitness to know that this is so, and that your lineage and his will hold so great a place in the state. As you review those sixteen years, you may, if you will, I trust you will not, recall those occasions when I saw the woods of Moudin mixed by chance with your world, and when we renewed the rides which had ended our childhood. As for me, I have not to recall those things. They are alas myself, and beyond them there is nothing that I can call a memory, or a being at all. Nevertheless, as I have told you, I shall not come to Moudin. I shall not hear again the delightful voices of those many friends now in midlife as I am, who are my equals at Versailles. I shall not see your face. I did not take service with the empire from any pick or folly, but from a necessity for adventure, and for the refounding of my house. It might have chanced that I should marry the land demanded in air, my impoverishment weighed upon me like an ill deed, for all this belt of land is dependent upon the old house, which I can with such difficulty retain, and from which I write today. I spent all those years in the service of the empire, and even of Russia, from now uncertain temper, and from now imaginary quarrel. It is so common, or so necessary, for men and women to misjudge each other, that I believe you thought me wayward, or at least unstable. If you did so, you did me wrong. Those two good seasons when we met again, and this last of but a month ago, were not accidents or fitful recoveries. They were all I possessed in my life, and all that will perish with me when I die. But now, to tell you the very core of my decision, it is this. The years that pass carry with them an increasing weight at once somber and majestic. There are things belonging to youth, which have it continue strangely longer than the season to which they properly belong. If when we discover them to be too prolonged, as cling to their survival, why then we eat dust? So long as we possess the illusion, and so long as the dearest things of youth maintain unchanged, in one chamber of our life at least, our twentieth year, so long, all is well. But there is a cold river which we must pass in our advance towards nothingness and age. In the passage of that stream we change, and you and I have passed it. There is no more endurance in that young mood of ours than in any other human thing. One always wakes from it at last, one sees what it is. The soul sees and counts with hard eyes the price at which a continuance of such high dreams must be purchased, and the heart has a prevision of the evil that the happy cheat will work as maturity is reached by each of us, and as each of us fully takes on the burden of the world. Therefore I must not return. Foolishly and without thinking of real things, acting as though indeed that life of dream and of illusion were still possible to me, I yesterday cut with great care a rose from one of the many that have now grown almost wild upon the great wall overlooking the Danube. Then I could not but smile to myself when I remembered how by the time that rose should have reached you every petal would be wasted and fallen in the long week's ride. There is a fixed term of life for roses also as for men. I do not cite this to you by way of a parable. I have no heart for tricks of the pen tonight, but the two images came together and you will understand. If I do not return it is for the same reason that I could not send the rose. The end of Chapter 39. First and last by Hilaire Belock. CHAPTER 40 THE REGRET Nobody knows, I suppose, that kind of landscape in which hills seem to lie in a regular manner, fold on fold, one range behind the other, until at last, behind them all, some higher and grander range dominates and frames the whole. The infinite variety of light and air and accident of soil provide all men save those who live in the great plains with examples of this sort. The traveler in the dry air of California or of Spain, watching great distances from the heights, will recollect such landscapes all his life. They were the reward of his longest sense and the visions which attended his effort as he climbed up to the ridge of his horizon. Such a landscape does a man see from the western edges of the Guatemala, looking eastward and south toward the very distant hills that guard Toledo and the Gulf of Tategus. Such a landscape does a man see at sunrise from the highest of the Sevines, looking right eastward to the dawn, as it comes up in the pure cold air beyond the Alps, and shows you the falling of the foothills to the Rome. And by such a landscape is a man gladden when upon the escarpments of the Tulemin he turns back and looks westward over the plain toward the vast range. The experience of such a sight is one peculiar in travel or for that matter if a man is lucky enough to enjoy it at home, insistent and reiterated upon the mind of the home-dwelling man. Such a landscape, for instance, makes a man praise God if his house is upon the height of Mendip, and he can look over falling hills right over the Vail Severn toward the ridge above ridge of the Welsh salinities beyond, until the straight line and the high of the Black Mountains ends his view. It is the character of these landscapes to suggest it wants a vastness, diversity, and seclusion. When a man comes upon them unexpectedly, he can forget the perpetual toil of men, and imagine that those who dwell below in the near side before him are exempt from the necessities of this world. When such a landscape is part of a man's dwelling place, though he well knows that the painful life of men within those hills is the same hard business that it is throughout the world, yet his knowledge is modified and comforted by the permanent glory of the thing he sees. The distant and high range that bounds his view makes a sort of veiling, cutting it off and guarding it from whatever may be beyond. The secession of lower ranges suggests secluded valleys, and the reiterated woods, distant and more distant, convey an impression of fertility, more powerful than that of corn and harvest, upon the lowlands. Sometimes it is a whole province that is thus grasped by the eye, sometimes in the summer haze but a few miles. Always this scenery inspires the onlooker with a sense of completion and of repose, and at the same time, I think with worship and with awe. Now one such group of valleys there was, hill above hill, forest above forest, and beyond it a great noble range, unwoddered and high against heaven, guarding it, which I for my part knew when I first knew anything of this world. There is a high place under fir trees, a place of sand and bracken, in South England, when such a view was always present to the eye in childhood, and there said I to myself, even in childhood, a man should make his habitation. In those valleys is the proper offset for man. And so there was. It was a little place which had grown up as my county grows, the house throwing out arms and layers. One room was paneled in the oak of the seventeenth century, but that had been a novelty in its time, for the walls upon which the panels stood were of the late fifteenth oak and brick intermingled. Another room was large and light-built in the manner of one hundred and fifty years ago, which people called Georgian. It had been thrown out south, which is quite against our older custom, for our older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to present a corner to the southwest and the storms. So they stand still. It had rounded a solid cornice which the modern men of the towns would have called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then further on this house had modern roominess stretching in one new wing after another, and it had a great steading, and there was a copse in some six acres of land. Over a deep ravine looked the little town that was the mother of the place, and altogether it was enclosed, silent, and secure. The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm. If this is not a Chinese proverb it ought to be. That little farm and steading and those six acres that ravine those trees, that aspect of the little mothering town, the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range beyond, will not be mine. For all I know some men quite unacquainted with the land took them grumbling for a debt, or again for all I know they may have been bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man who seeing them perpetually regretted the flat marshes of the fins. One day, up high on Igdeon's side, not thinking of such things, through a gap in the trees, I saw again after so many years, set one behind the other, the forests wave upon wave, the summer heat, the high bare range guarding all, and in the midst of that landscape set like a toy, the little Sabine farm. Then I said to it, Continue, go and serve whom you will, my little Sabine farm. You were not mine because you would not be, and you are not mine at all today. You will regret it, perhaps, and perhaps you will not. There was a verse in you, perhaps, or prose, or infinitely more, contentment for a man, for all I know. But you refused. You lost your chance. And with that I went on into the wood and beyond the gap and saw the sight no more. It was ten years since I had seen it last. It may be ten years before I see it again, or it may be forever. But as I went through the wood saying to myself, You lost your chance, my little Sabine farm. You lost your chance. Another part of me at once replied, And so did you. Then by way of repost I answered in my mind, Not at all for the chance I never had, but what I lost was my desire. No, not your desire, said the voice to me within, but the fulfillment of it, in which you would have lost your desire. And when that reply came I naturally turned, as all men do, on hearing such interior replies to a general consideration of regret, and was prepared, if any honest publisher should have come whistling through that wood, with an offer proper to the occasion, namely to produce no less than five volumes on the nature of regret. Its mortal sting, its bitter sweetness, its power to keep alive in man the pure passions of the soul, its hints at immortality, its memory of heaven. But the wood was empty of publishers. The offer did not come. The moment was lost. The five volumes will hardly now be written. In place of them I offer poor this, which you may take or leave. But I beg, leave before I end, to cite certain words very nobly attached to that great inn, the Gryphon, which has its foundation set far off in another place in the town of March, in the Fenland. England, my desire, what have you not refused? CHAPTER 41 THE END OF THE WORLD One day I met a man, who was sitting quite silent near Whitney, in the Thames Valley, in a large, long, low inn, that stands in those parts, or at least stood then, for whether it stands now or not depends upon fussyites, whose business is to fuss, and in their fussing to disturb mankind. He had nothing to say for himself at all, and he looked not gloomy but sad. He was tall and thin with high cheekbones. His face was the color of leather that has been some time in the weather, and he despised us altogether. He would not say a word to us until one of the company said, rising from his meat and drink, very well, there's a thing we shall never know till the end of the world. He was talking about some discussion or other which the young man had been holding together. There's a thing we shall never know till the end of the world, and about that nobody knows. You will pardon me, said the tall, thin and elderly man with a face like leather that has been exposed to the weather. I know about the end of the world, for I had been there. This was so interesting that we all sat down again to listen. I wasn't talking of a place but of time, murmured the young man, whom the stranger had answered. I cannot help that, said the stranger decisively. The end of the world is the end of the world, and whether you are talking of space or of time it does not matter, for when you have got to the end, you have got to the end, as may be proved in several ways. How did you get to it, said one of our companions. That is very simply answered, said the older man. You get to it by walking straight in front of you. Anyone could do that, said the other. Anyone could, said the older man, but nobody does. I did, when I was quite a boy in my father's parsonage, for when my father was a parson, having heard so much about the end of the world and seeing that people's descriptions of it differed so much and that everybody was quite sure of his own, I used to take my father's friends and guests aside privately, for I was afraid to take my father himself, and I used to ask them how they knew what the end of the world was really like and whether they had seen it. Some laughed, others were silent, and others were angry, but no one gave me any information. At last I decided, and it was very wise of me, that the only way to find out a thing of that sword was to find it out for one self and not to go by hearsay, so I determined to go straight on without stopping till I got to the end of the world. Which way did you walk, said yet another of my companions. Young man said the stranger was salinity. I walked westward toward the setting sun. I walked, and I walked, and I walked, day after day and year after year. Whenever I came to the sea coast, I would take work on board a ship, and remember, it is always easy to get work if you will take the wages that are offered, and always difficult to get it if you will not. Well then I went in this way, through all known lands and over all known seas. Until at last I came to the shore of a sea beyond which, so the people told me who lived there, there was no further shore. I cannot help that, said I. I have not yet come to the end of the world, and it is common sense that such a lot of water must have something at the back of it to hold it up, besides which there is a strong wind blowing out of the gates of the west and from the sunset. Now that wind must rise somewhere, and I am going to see where it rises. One of them was kind enough to lend me a boat with oars. I thanked him prettily, and then I set out to row toward the end of the world, taking with me two or three days provisions. When I had rowed a long time I went to sleep, and when I woke up next morning I rowed again all day until the second night I went to sleep. On the third day I rowed again. A little before sunset on the third day I saw before me high hills, all in peaks like a great saw. On the very highest of the peaks there were streaks of snow, and at about six o'clock in the afternoon I grounded my boat upon that gravelly shore, and pulled up upon the shingle, though it was evident that the tide was high, or that there was no tide in these silent places. I offered up a prayer to the genius of this land, and tied the painter of the boat to great stones so that no way reaching it might move it. And then I went on inland. When I had gone a little way I saw a signpost on which was written, to the end of the world, one mile. And there was a rough track along which it pointed. I went along this track. Everything was completely silent. There were no birds. There was no wind. There was nothing in the sky. But one thing I did notice, which was that the sun was much larger than it used to be. And that as I went along this last mile or so it seemed to get larger still. But that may have been my imagination, for I must tell you my imagination is pretty strong. Well then, gentlemen, when I had gone a mile or so I saw another signpost on which there was a large board marked Danger. In a hundred yards beyond the track went between two great dark rocks. And there I was. The road had stopped short. It was broken off jagged, just like a torn bit of paper. And there was the end of the world. How do you mean, said one of the younger men in an odd tone? What I say, said the stranger decidedly. I come to the end. There was nothing beyond. You look down over a precipice where there was moss and steep grass and on the ledges and trees far below, and then more precipice, and then, a whole miles below, a few more trees are so clean to the steep, and then more precipice and then darkness. And far away before me was the whole expansive sky, and in the midst of it I saw the broad red sun setting into the broom. It was not yet dark enough to see the stars, and there was no moon in the sky. I assure you it was a very wonderful sight, and I was awed though I was not afraid, and how glad I was to find that the world had an edge to it, and that all that talk about its being round was nonsense. When the sun was set, it grew dark, and I returned to find my boat. But I must have missed my way, for the track became broader and better, and at last I came to a gate of a human sword with an initial on it, which showed that it had been put up by some landlord. It was an open gate, and after I had entered it, I came upon a broad highway, beautifully meddled, and when I had gone along this for less than half a mile I came to this inn where I am now sitting. That was a week ago, and I had been here ever since. They took me in kindly enough, but they would not believe what I had to tell them about the end of the world. It is a great pity, gentlemen, for that wonderful sight is to be discovered somewhere hereabouts, and the mere accident of my losing my way in the darkness makes it difficult for me to find it by daylight. Having said all this, the stranger was silent. One of my companions whispered to me that the old man must be mad. The stranger overheard him, and said with a thin smile, Oh, I know all about that. Several have suggested it already, but it is no answer. For if I did not come from the end of the world, where did I come from? No one has seen me hereabouts during the last few days until I came to this inn, and all the first part of my journey I can very easily explain, for I have notes of it, and it lasted for years. It is only this last part which seems to me so difficult. I tell you I lost my way, and when a man has lost his way at night, he can never find it again in the daytime. As he spoke he took a little piece of folded paper, rather dirty, out of his inner pocket, on which a rough sketch map was drawn, and he began touching it with a stump of pencil that he held in his hand. His eyes seemed to go dimmer as he did so, and he leaned his head upon his hand. I think I have got hold of it, gentlemen, he said. We did not get up or go to near him, for we thought he might be dangerous. I think, gentlemen, he repeated in a more mumbling and lower and less certain voice, I think I have got hold of it. I go backwards again through the gate to the right, just as then I went to the left, and after that it cannot be very far, for I see those two rocks in front of me. Besides which he muttered less and less coherently. I ought to have remembered, of course, those very high and silent hills with nothing living upon them, and he added half of sleep as his head dropped upon his hand. He was westward. I had forgotten that. Having so spoken he seemed to fall asleep altogether, and his head fell back upon the corner of the wanes cutting behind the bench where he sat. He made no noise in breathing as he slept. It was the first time that any of his young men had come across this fairly common sight of a man who took things within for things without. Some of us were frightened and all of us wished to be rid of the place and to get away. As we went out we told the landlord nothing either of the old fellow's vagaries or of his sleep, but we went out and reached the town of Whitney, and when we had stayed there a couple of hours or so we went out southward to the station and waited there for the train which should take us back to Oxford. While we were waiting there in the station two farmers were talking together. One said to the other, Our, if you paid them they wouldn't have minded so much. To which the other answered, Our, it isn't only the paying, it's always an awkward thing when a man dies in your house, especially if it's licensed. My wife's brother was caught that way. Then as they went on talking we found that they were talking of the man in the inn, who it seems had not slept very long but was dead and had died in that same room. It was a shocking thing to hear. The first farmer said to the second in the railway carriage when we had all got in, Where did he come from? The other who was an old man grinned and said, Where we all come from I suppose and where will all go to? He touched his forehead with his hand. He said he'd come from the end of the world. Our said the other gloomily in answer, like enough. And after that they talked no more about the matter. The end of Chapter 41. The end of Hilaire Bellach's first and last.