 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. On Nothing and Kindred Subjects by Hilaire Belock section twenty-one on jingos in the shape of a being the sad and lamentable history of Jack Bull, son of the late John Bull, India merchants, wherein it will be seen how this prosperous merchant left an heir that ran riot with squires, train-bands, black men, and soldiers, and squandered all his substance, so that at last he came to selling penny tokens in front of the Royal Exchange in Thread Needle Street, and is now very miserably writing for the papers. John Bull, whom I knew very well, drove a great trade in tea, cotton goods, and bombazine, and also in hardware, all manner of cutlery, good, and bad, and especially sea coal, and was very highly respected in the city of London, of which he was twice sheriff and once Lord Mayor. When he went abroad some begged of him, and to these he would give a million or so at a time, openly in the street, so that a crowd would gather and cry, Lord, what a generous fellow is this Mr. Bull. Some again a better station would pluck his sleeve and take him aside in the Broad Street corner of Mansion House Court, and say, Mr. Bull, a word in your ear. I have more paper about than I care for in these hard times, but I could pay you handsomely for a short loan. These always found Mr. Bull willing and ready, sure and silent, and with all cheaper, at a discount than any other. For buying cloth all came to Bull, and for buying other wares his house was preferred to those of Frog and Haines and the rest. Because he was courteous and ready always to be found in his office, which was near the wool-pack in Lindenhall Street, next to Mr. Marlow's, the Methodist preacher, and moreover he was very attentive to little things. This last habit he would call the soul of business. In such fashion Mr. Bull had accumulated a sum of five hundred thousand million pounds, or thereabouts, and when he died the neighbor said this and that spiteful thing about his son Jack, whom he had trained up to the business, making out that they knew more than they cared to say that Jack was not John, and that they had heard of pride going before a fall, and so much chiddlet-headle as jealousy will breed. But they were very much disappointed in their malice for this same Jack went sturdily to work and trod in his father's steps, so that his wealth increased even beyond what he had inherited. He had at last more risks upon the sea in one way or another than any other merchant in the city, and if you would know how Jack, who was to tell the truth more flighty and ill-informed than his father, came to go so wisely, it was thus. Old John had left him a few directions, rid up in pencil on a mantelpiece, which ran in this way. One. Never go into an adventure unless the feeling of your neighbors be with you. Two. Spend no more than you can earn. Nay, put by every year. Three. Put out no money for show in your business, but only for use. Save only on the occasion of the Lord Mayor's show. You're taking of an office, or on the occasion of public holidays as when the king's wife or daughter lies in. Four. Live and let live, for be sure your business can only thrive on the condition that others do also. Five. Vex no man at your door, buy and sell freely. Six. Do not associate with drunkards, brawlers, and poets, and God's blessing be with you. Now when Jack was grown to about thirty years old, he came most unfortunately upon a certain Sir John Snipe, Bart, that was a very scandalous young squire of Oxfordshire, and one that had published five lyrics and a play, enough to warn any bull against him, who spoke to him somewhat in this fashion. Lodzak, what a pity that you and I should live so separately. I'll be bound, you're the best fellow in the world, the very backbone of the country. To be sure there's a silly old-fashioned lot of lumpkins in our part that we'll have at your no gentleman, but I say gentle is as gentle does, and fair plays a jewel. I will enter your counting-house as soon as drink to you, as I do here. Where in Jack cried? God's a mercy, a very kind gentleman. Be welcome to my house, pray take it as your own. I think you may count me as one of you, huh? Be seated. Come, how can I serve you? And at last he had this Jack and apes taking a handsome salary for doing nothing. When Jack's friends would reproach him and say, Oh Jack, Jack, beware this fine gentleman, he will be your ruin, Jack would answer, A plague on all levelers, or again, so that he have talent is all I see. Now yet further, well gentle or simple, thank God, he's an honest Englishman. Where at Jack added to the firm Isaac of Hamburg, La Rochelle of Canada, Warmooga of Andeeman's Land, Smuts Beacon of the Cape of Good Hope, and the Maharaja of Mahoud in the East Indies, that was a plaguey devilish-looking black fellow, pockmarked and with a terrible great punch to him. So things went all to the dogs with poor Jack, that would hear no sense nor reason from his father's old friends. But was always seen arm in arm with Sir John Snipe, Warmooga, the Maharaja, and the rest, drinking at the sign of the birage, gambling and dicing at the tape, or playing fisticuffs at Lord Nelson, till last he quarreled with all the world, but his boon companions, and what was worse, most of that his father's brother's son, Rich Jonathan Spare, was of the company. So if he met some dirty dog or other in the street he would cry, Come and sub-tonight, you shall meet cousin Jonathan, and when no Jonathan was there he would make you a thousand excuses, saying, Excuse, Jonathan, I pray you, he has married a damned Irish wife that keeps him at home, or what, Jonathan not come, oh well, wait a while, he never fails, for we are like brothers, and so on, till his companions came to think at last that he had never met or known Jonathan, which was indeed the case. About this time he began to think himself too fine a gentleman to live over the shop, as his father had done, and so asked Sir John Snipe, where he might go that was more genteel, for he still had too much sense to ask any of those other outlandish fellows advice in such a manner. At last, on Snipe's speaking, he went to Wimbledon, which is a vastly smart suburb, and there, God knows, he fell into a thousand absurd tricks, so that many thought he was off his head. He hired a singing man to stand before his door day and night singing vulgar songs out of the street in praise of Dick Turpin and Molly, only forcing him to put in his name of Jack Bull in the place of the murderer, or Oysterwinch therein celebrated. He would drink rum with common soldiers in the public houses, and then asked them into dinner to meet gentlemen, saying, These are heroes and gentlemen, which are the first two kinds of men, and they would smoke great pipes of tobacco in his very dining-room, to the general disgust. He would run out and cruelly beat small boys, unaware, and when he had nigh killed him, would come back and sit up half the night writing an account of how he had fought Tom Muller of Bermondsey, and beat him in a hundred and two rounds, which, he would add, no man living but he could do. He would hang out of his window a great flag with a challenge on it, to all the people of Wimbledon assembled, or to any of them singly, and then he would be seen at his front gate waving a great red flag and gnawing a bone like a dog, saying that he loved force only, and would fight all and any. When he received any print, newspaper, or pamphlet that praised any but himself, he would throw it into the fire, in a kind of frenzy, calling God to witness that he was the only person of consequence in the world, that it was a horrible shame that he was so neglected, and Lord knows what other rubbish. In this spirit he quarreled with all his fellow underwriters and friends and comrades, and that in the most insolent way. For knowing well that Mr. Frog had a shrew of a wife, he wrote to him daily asking if he had a domestic broil of late, and how his poor head felt since it was bandaged. To Mr. Hans, who lived in a small way and loved gardening, he sent an express begging him to mind his cabbages and leave gentlemen to their greater affairs. To Nicolini of Savoy, that little swarthy merchant, he sent indeed a more polite note, but as he said in it, that he would be very willing to give him charity and help him as he could, and as he added, for my father it was, that put you up in business, which was a monstrous lie, for Frog had done this. He did but offend. Then to Mr. William Eagle, that was a strutting, arrogant fellow, but willing to be a friend. He wrote every Monday to say that the house of bull was lost, unless Mr. Eagle would very kindly protect it, and every Thursday to challenge him to mortal combat, so that Mr. Eagle, who to tell the truth was no great wit, but something of a duller than more over, suffering from a gathering in the ear, a withered arm, and poor blood, gave up his friendship in business with bull, and took to making up sermons and speeches for orators. He would have no retainers but two, whose common names were Hocus and Pocus, but as he hated the use of common names and as no one had heard of Hocus lineage, nor did he himself know it, he called him Hocus Freedom, as being a high-sounding and moral name for a footman, and Pocus, whose name was of an ordinary decent kind, he called Glory as being a good counterweight to Freedom. Both these were names, in his opinion, very decent and well-suited for a gentleman's servant. Now Freedom and Glory got together in the apple-closet and put it to each other that as their master was evidently mad, it would be a thousand pities to take no advantage of it, and they agreed that whatever bit of jobbing Hocus Freedom should do, Pocus Glory should approve, and contrary wise about. But they kept up a sham quarrel to mass this. Thus Hocus was for chapel, Pocus for church, and it was agreed Hocus should denounce Pocus for drinking-port. The first fruit of their conspiracy was that Hocus recommended his brother and sister, his two aunts and nieces and four nephews, his own six children, his dog, his conventical minister, his laundress, his secretary, a friend of whom he had once borrowed five pounds, and a blind beggar whom he favored, to various posts about the house, and to certain pensions, and these Jack Bull, though his fortune was already dwindling, had once accepted. Thereupon Pocus loudly reproached Hocus in the servants' hall, saying that the compact had only stood for things in reason, where at Hocus took off his coat and offered to take him on, and Pocus, thinking better of it, managed for his share to place in the household such relatives as he could, namely Cohen, to whom he was in debt, Bernstein, his brother-in-law, and all his family of five, except little Hugh, that blacked the boots for the priest, and so was already well provided for. In this way poor Jack's fortune went to wreck and ruin. The clerks in his office in the city whom he now never saw would telegraph to him, every making up day, that there was a loss that had to be met. But to these he always sent the same reply, namely sell stock and script to the amount, and as that phrase was costly, he made a code-word to wit prosperity, stand for it, till one day they sent word there is nothing left. Then he bethought him how to live on credit, but this plan was very much hampered by his habit of turning in a passion on all those who did not continually praise him. Then an honest man looked in and said, Jack, there is a goat eating your cabbages. He would fly into a rage and say, you lie, pro-bore, my cabbages are sacred, and Jove would strike the goat dead that dared to eat them. Or if a poor fellow should touch his head in the street and say, pardon sir, your buttons are awry. He would answer, off villain, Zown's name, know you not that my divine buttons are the model of things, and so forth, until he fell into a perfect lunacy. But how he came to selling tokens of little leaden soldiers at a penny in front of the exchange, and of how at last he even fell to writing for the papers, I will not tell you. For imprimice it has not happened yet, nor do I think it will, and in the second place I am tired of writing. CHAPTER XXII It so happened that one day I was writing my horse monster in the Berkshire Hills, right up above that white horse which was dug, they say, by this man and by that man, but no one knows by whom. For I was seeing England, a delightful pastime, but a somewhat anxious one if one is riding a horse. For if one is alone, one can sleep where one chooses and walk at one's ease, and eat what God sends one and spend what one has. But when one is responsible for any other being, especially a horse, there come in a thousand ferra-fiddles. For of everything that walks on earth, man, not woman, I use the word in the restricted sense, is the freest and the most unhappy. Well then I was riding my horse and exploring the island of England, going eastward of a summer afternoon, and I had so ridden along the ridge of the hills for some miles, when I came as chance would have it upon a very extraordinary being. He was a man like myself, but his horse, which was grazing by his side and from time to time snorting in a proud manner, was quite unlike my own. This horse had all the strength of the horses of Normandy, all the lightness, grace, and subtlety of the horses of Barbary, all the conscious value of the horses that race for rich men, and all the humour of old horses that have seen the world and will be disturbed by nothing, and all the valor of young horses who have their troubles before them and race round in paddocks attempting to defeat the passing trains. I say all these things were in the horse and expressed by various movements of his body, but the list of these qualities is but a hint of the way in which he bore himself, for it was quite clearly apparent as I came nearer and nearer to this strange pair, that the horse before me was very different, as perhaps was the man, from the beings that inhabit this island. While he was different in all qualities, that I had mentioned, or rather in their combination, he also differed physically from most horses that we know in this, that from his sides and clapped along them in repose was growing a pair of very fine sedate and noble wings. So habited with such an expression and with such gestures of his limbs, he browsed upon the grass of Berkshire, which, if you accept the grass of Sussex and the grass perhaps of Hampshire, is the sweetest grass in the world. I speak of the chalk grass, as for the grass of the valleys, I would not eat it in a salad, let alone give it to a beast. The man, who was the companion rather than the master of this charming animal, sat upon a lump of turf singing gently to himself and looking over the plain of Central England, the plain of the upper Thames, which men may see from these hills. He looked at it with a mixture of curiosity, of memory, and of desire which was very interesting, but also a little pathetic to watch. And as he looked, he went on crooning his little song, until he saw me, when with great courtesy he ceased and asked me in the English language whether I did not desire companionship. I answered him that certainly I did, though not more than was commonly the case with me, for I told him that I had had companionship in several towns and inns during the past few days, and that I had but a few hours bout of silence and of loneliness. Which period I added is not more than sufficient for a man of my years, though I confess that in early youth I should have found it intolerable. When I had said this he nodded gravely, and I in my term began to wonder of what age he might be, for his eyes and his whole manner were young, but there was a certain knowledge and gravity in his expression, and in the posture of his body, which in another might have betrayed middle age. He wore no hat, but a great quantity of his own hair which was blown about by the light summer wind upon these heights. As he did not reply to me I asked him a further question and said, I see you are gazing upon the plain. Have you interests or memories in that view? I ask you without compunction, so delicate a question, because it is as open to you to lie, as it was to me when I lied to them only yesterday morning a little beyond Wayland Cave, telling them that I had come to make sure of the spot where St. George conquered the dragon, though in truth I had come for no such purpose, and telling them that my name was so and so, whereas it was nothing of the kind. He brightened up at this and said, you are quite right in telling me that I am free to lie if I choose, and I would be very happy to lie to you if there were any purpose in so doing, but there is none. I gaze upon this plain with the memories that are common to all men when they gaze upon a landscape in which they have had a part in the years recently gone by. It is the plain fills me with a sort of longing, and yet I cannot say that the plain has treated me unjustly. I have no complaint against it. God bless the plain. After thinking a few moments, he added, I am fond of wattage. Wellingford has done me no harm. Oxford gave me many companions. I was not drowned in Dorchester, beyond the little hills, and the best of men gave me a true farewell in Farringdon Yonder. Moreover, Comnor is my friend. Nevertheless, I like to indulge in a sort of sadness when I look over this plain. I then asked him whether he would go next. He answered, My horse flies, and I am therefore not bound to any particular track or goal, especially in these light-hears of summer when all the heaven is open to me. As he said this, I look at his mount and notice that when he shook his skin, as horses will do in the hot weather to rid themselves of flies, he also passed a little tremor through his wings, which were large and goose-gray and spreading gently under that effort, seemed to give him coolness. You have, I said, a remarkable horse. At this word he brightened up, as men do, when something is spoken of that interests them nearly. And he answered, Indeed I have, and I am very glad you like him. There is no such other horse to my knowledge in England, though I have heard that some still linger in Ireland and in France, and that a few folds of the breed have been dropped with late years in Italy, but I have not seen them. How did you come by this horse, I asked, if it is not trespassing upon your courtesy to ask you so delicate a question? Not at all! Not at all, he answered. This kind of horse runs wild upon the heaths of morning and can be caught only by exiles, and I am one. Moreover, if you had come three or four years later than you have, I should have been able to give you an answer in rhyme. But I am sorry to say that a pestilent stricture of the imagination, or rather of the compositive faculties, so constrains me that I have not yet finished the poem. I have been writing with regard to the discovery of service and this beast. I have great sympathy with you, I answered. I have been at the ballad of Valles as Dunes since the year of 1897, and I have not yet completed it. Well then, he said, you will be patient with me when I tell you that I have but three verses completed, whereupon without further invitation he sang it aloud in clear voice the following verse. It's ten years ago today you turned me out of the doors to cut my feet on flinty lands and stumble down the shores, and I thought about it all in all the all in all I said is weak. He was immensely pleased with this, and standing up seized me by the hand. No, now you know. He said, for a man who does indeed write verse, I have done everything I could with those three syllables, and by the grace of heaven I shall get them right in time. Anyhow, they are not the stop-gap of the moment, and with your leave I shall reserve them for I do not wish to put words like tumity-tum into the middle of my verse. I bowed to him, and he proceeded, and I thought upon the all in all, and more than I could tell, but I caught a horse to ride upon, and rode him very well. He had flamed behind the eyes of him, and wings upon his side, and I ride, and I ride, and I ride. Of how many verses do you intend this metrical composition to be, said I, with great interest? I've sketched out thirteen, he said firmly, but I confess that the next ten are so embryonic in this year 1907 that I cannot sing them in public. He hesitated a moment and added, they have many fine lines, but there is still as yet no composition or unity about them. And as he recited the words of composition and unity, he waved his hand about like a man sketching a cartoon. He gave me then, said I, at any rate, the last two, for I had rapidly calculated how many would remain of his scheme. He was indeed pleased to be so challenged, and continued to sing. And once atop, of lamborn down, toward the hill of clear, I saw the host of heaven in rank, and Michael with his spear, and turpin' out of Gaskany, and Charlemagne the Lord, and rollin' of the marches with his hand upon his sword, for fear that he should need of it, and forty more beside, and I ride, and I ride, for you that took in the all-and-all. Hmm, that again is weak, I murmured. You are quite right, he said gravely, I will rub it out. Then he went on. For you that took the all-and-all, the things you left were three, a loud voice for singing, and keen eyes to see, and a spouting well of joy within that never-yet-was-dried, and I ride. He sang this last in so fierce and so exultant the manner that I was impressed more than I cared to say, but not more than I cared to show. As for him he cared little whether I was impressed or not, it was exalted and detached from the world. There were no stirrups upon the beast. He vaulted upon it, and said as he did so, You have put me into the mood. I must get away. And though the words were abrupt, he did speak them with such a grace that I will always remember them. He then touched the flanks of his horse with his heels, on which there were no spurs, and at once beating the air powerfully, twice sore thrice with his wings, it spurned the turf of Berkshire and made out southward and upward into the sun-lit air, a pleasing and a glorious sight. In a very little while they had dwindled to a point of light and were soon mixed with the sky. But I went on more lonely along the crest of the hills, very human, riding my horse-monster, a mortal horse. I had almost written a human horse. My mind was full of silence. Some of those to whom I have related this adventure criticize it by the method of questions and of cross-examination, proving that it could not have happened precisely where it did, showing that I left the vale so late in the afternoon that I could not have found this man and his mount at the hour I say I did, and making all manner of comments upon the exact way in which the feathers, which they say are those of a bird, drew out of the hide of the horse, and so forth. There are no witnesses of the manner, and I go lonely. For many people will not believe, and those who do believe, believe too much. On a man and his burden. Once there was a man who lived in a house at the corner of a wood, with an excellent landscape upon every side, a village about one mile off, and a pleasant stream flowing over chalk and full of trout, for which he used to fish. The man was perfectly happy, for some little time, fishing for the trout, contemplating the shapes of clouds in the sky, and singing all the songs he could remember in turn, under the high wood. Until one day he found to his annoyance that there was, strapped to his back, a burden. However he was by nature of a merry mood, and began thinking of all the things he had read about burdens. He remembered an uncle of his called Jonas, ridiculous name, who had pointed out that burdens especially, if born in youth, strengthened the upper deltoid muscle, expanded the chest, and gave to the whole figure any wrecked and graceful poise. He remembered also reading in a book upon country sports, that the bearing of heavy weights is an excellent training for all other forms of exercise, and produces a manly and resolute carriage, very useful in gulf, cricket, and colonial wars. He could not forget his mother's frequent remark that a burden, nobly endured, gave firmness, and at the same time elasticity to the character. And altogether he went about his way, taking it as kindly as he could. But I will not deny that it annoyed him. In a few days he discovered that, during sleep, when he lay down, the burden annoyed him somewhat less than that other times, though the memory of it never completely left him. He would therefore sleep for a very considerable number of hours every day, sometimes retiring to rest as early as nine o'clock, or rising till noon of the next day. He discovered also that rapid and loud conversation, adventure, wine, beer, the theatre, cards, travel, and so forth, made him forget his burden for the time being, and he indulged himself perhaps to excess in all these things. But when the memory of his burden would return to him, after each indulgence, whether working in his garden, or fishing for a trout, or on a lonely walk, he began reluctantly to admit that on the whole he felt uncertainty and doubt as to whether the burden was really good for him. In this unpleasing attitude of mind, he had the good fortune one day to meet with an excellent divine who inhabited a neighbouring parish, and was possessed of no less a sum than twenty-nine thousand pounds, this ecclesiastic seeing his wylum jokun to face, fretted with the marks of care, put a hand gently upon his shoulder and said, My young friend, I easily perceive that you are put out by this burden which you bear upon your shoulders. I am indeed surprised that one so intelligent should take such a manor so ill. What, do you not know that burdens are the common lot of humanity? I myself, though you may little suspect it, bear a burden far heavier than yours, though true it is invisible and not strapped on my shoulders by gross material thongs of leather, as is yours. The worthy squire of our parish bears one, too, and with what manliness, what ease, what abagnation. Believe me, these other burdens of which you never hear and which no man can perceive are for that very reason the heaviest and the most trying. Play the man, little by little you will find that the patient sustenance of this burden will make you something greater, stronger, nobler than you were, and you will notice as you grow older that those who are most favored by the unseen bear the heaviest of such impediments. With these last words recited in solemn and as it were an inspired voice, the hierarch lifted an immense stone from the roadway and placed it on the top of the burden, so as considerably to add to its weight went on his way. The irritation of the man was already considerable when his family called upon him, his mother, that is, his younger sister, his cousin Jane, and her husband, and after they had eaten some of his food and drunk some of his beer they all sat out in the garden with him and talked to him somewhat in this manner. We really cannot pity you much for ever since you were a child whatever evil has happened to you has been your own doing and probably this is no different from the rest. What can have possessed you to get putting upon your back an ugly, useless, and dangerous great burden? You have no idea how utterly out of fashion you seem stumbling about the roads like a clodhopper and going up and down stairs as though you were on the treadmill. For the Lord's sake, at least, have the decency to stay at home and not to disgrace the family with your miserable appearance. Having said so much they rose and adding to his burden a number of leaden weights they had brought with them, went on their way and left him to his own thoughts. You may well imagine that by this time the irritation of the man had gone almost past bearing. He would quarrel with his best friends and they in revenge would put something more onto the burden till he felt he would break down. It haunted his dreams and filled most of his waking thoughts, and did all those things which burdens have been discovered to do since the beginning of time. Until at last, though very reluctantly, he determined to be rid of it. Upon hearing of this resolution, his friends and acquaintances raised the most fearful hubbub, some talk of sending for the police, others of restraining him by force, and others again of putting him into an asylum. But he broke away from the mall, and making for the open road went out to see if he could not rid himself of this abominable strain. Of himself he could not, for the burden was so cunningly strapped on that his hands could not reach it, and there was magic about it and a spell, but he thought somewhere there must be someone who could tell him how to cast it away. In the very first alehouse he came to, he discovered what is common to such places, namely a batch of politicians, who laughed at him very loudly for not knowing how to get rid of burdens. It is done, they say, by the very simple method of paying one of us to get on top and undo the straps. This the man said, he would be very willing to do, where at the politicians, having fought somewhat among themselves for the money, desisted at last in favor of the most vulgar, who climbed to the top of the man's burden and remained there, viewing the landscape and commenting in general terms upon the nature of public affairs. And when the man complained a little, the politician did but cuff him sharply on the side of the head, to teach him better manners. Yet a little further on he met with a scientist who told him in English, Greek, a clear and simple method of getting rid of the burden, and since the man did not seem to understand he lost his temper and said, come on, let me do it, and climbed up by the side of the politician. Once there the scientist confessed that the problem was not so easy as he had imagined. But, said he, now that I am here you may as well carry me, for it will be no great additional weight, and meanwhile I will spend most of my time in trying to set you free. And the third man he met was a philosopher, with quiet eyes, a person whose very gestures were profound. And by the hand the man now fevered and despairing, he looked at him with a mixture of comprehension and charity, and he said, My poor fellow, your eyes are very wild and staring and blutch-shot. How little you understand the world! Then he smiled gently and said, Will you never learn? And without another word he climbed up on top of the burden and seated himself by the side of the other two. After this the man went mad. The last time I saw him he was wandering down the road with his burden very much increased. He was bearing not only these original three, but some kings and tax-gatherers and school-masters, several fortune-tellers, and an old admiral. He was blind and they were goading him. But as he passed me he smiled and jibbered a little and told me it was in the nature of things, and went on downward stumbling. This parable, I think, as I reread it, demands a key lest it prove a stumbling block to the muddle-headed and a perplexity to the foolish. Here then is the key. The man is a man. His burden is that burden which men often feel themselves to be bearing as they advance from youth to manhood. The relatives, his mother's, sister, cousins, etc., are a man's relatives, and the little weights they add to the burden are the little additional weights a man's relatives commonly add to his burden. The parson represents a parson, and the politician, the philosopher, the scientist, the kings, the tax-gatherers, and the old admiral stand severally for an old admiral, tax-gatherers, politicians, philosophers, scientists, and kings. The politicians who fight for the money represent politicians, and the money they struggle for is the money for which the politicians do ceaselessly jostle and barge one another. The most vulgar, in whose favor the others desisted, represent the most vulgar who among politicians invariably obtains the largest share of whatever public money is going. The madness of the man in the end stands for the madness which does, as a fact, often fall upon men late in life if their burdens are sufficiently increased. I trust that with this key the parable will be clear to all. The end of section twenty-three. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. On Nothing and Kindred Subjects by Hilaire Bellock Section twenty-four On a Fisherman and a Quest of Peace In that part of the Thames where the river begins to feel its life before it knows its name, the counties play with it upon either side. It is not yet a boundary. The parishes upon the northern bank are sometimes as truly Wilcher as those to the south. The men upon the farms that look at each other over the water are close neighbors. They use the same words, and the way they build their houses is the same. Between them runs the beginning of the Thames. From the surface of the water the whole prospect is sky, bounded by reeds. But sitting up in one's canoe one sees between the reeds distant hills to the southward or, on the north, trees in groups, and now and then the roofs of a village. More often the lonely group of a setting with the church close by. Running down this stream quite silently, but rather swiftly upon a summer's day, I saw on the bank to my right a very pleasant man. He was perhaps a hundred yards or two hundred ahead of me when I first caught sight of him, and I perceived that he was the clergyman of the Church of England. He was fishing. He was dressed in black, even his hat was black, though it was of straw, but his collar was of such a kind as his ancestors had worn. Turned down and surrounded by a soft white tie. His face was clear and ruddy, his eyes honest, his hair already grey, and he was gazing intently upon the float. For I will not conceal it that he was fishing in that ancient manner with a float shaped like a sea-boy and stuck through with a quill. So fished the yeoman to this day in northern France and in Holland. One such immutable customs does an ancient state repose, which if they are disturbed there is danger of its dissolution. As I so looked at him and rapidly approached him, I took care not to disturb the water with my paddle, but to let the boat glide far from his side until, in the pleasure of watching him, I got fast upon the further reeds. There she held, and I, knowing that the effort of getting her off would seriously stir the water, lay still. One day I speak to him, though he pleased me so much, because a friend of mine in the land-born had once told me of all things in nature, what a fish most fears is the voice of a man. He, however, first spoke to me in a sort of easy tone that could frighten no fish. He said, Hello I answered to him in a very subdued voice, for I have no art where fishes are concerned. Hello Then he asked me, after a good long time, whether his watch was right, and as he asked me he pulled out his, which was large, thick, golden watch, and looked at it with anxiety and dread. He asked me this, I think, because I must have had the look of a tired man, fresh from the towns, and with the London time upon him, and yet I had been four weeks in no town larger than quickly. Moreover I had no watch, since, none the less, it is once duty to uplift, upstain, and comfort all one's fellows. I told him that his watch was but half-minute fast, and he put it back with a greater content than he had taken it out, and indeed anyone who blames me for what I did, and so assuring him of the time, should remember that I had other means than a watch for judging it. The sunlight was already full of old kindness. The midges were active, the shadow of the reeds on the river was of a particular color, the haze of a particular warmth. No one who had passed many days and nights together sleeping out and living under this rare summer could mistake the hour. In a little while I asked him whether he had caught any fish. He said he had not actually caught any, but that he would have caught several, but four accidents, which he explained to me in technical language. Then he asked me in his turn where I was going to that evening. I said I had no object before me, that I would sleep when I felt sleepy and wake when I felt wakeful, and that I would so drift down the tames until I came to anything unpleasant, when it was my design to leave my canoe at once, to tie it up to a post, and to go off to another place. For I told him I am here to think about peace, and to see if she can be found. When I said this his face became moody, and as those such portentious thoughts required action to balance them, he strained his line and lifted his float smartly from the water, so that I saw the hook flying through the air with a quarter of a warm upon it, and brought it down far upstream. Then he let it go slowly down again as the water carried it, and instead of watching it with his steady and experienced eyes, he looked up at me and asked me if, as yet, I had come upon any clue to peace, that I expected to find her between Criclate and Bablock Hith. I answered that I did not exactly expect to find her, that I had come out to think about her, and to find out whether she could be found. I told him that often, and often as I wandered over the earth, I had clearly seen her, as once in Avignon by pointe-je-baude, once in Ternizun, several times in Hazelmere, Hampstead, Clapham, and other suburbs, and more often than I could tell in the wheel. But seeing her, said I, is one thing, and holding her is another. I hardly propose to follow all her ways, but I do propose to consider her nature, until I know so much as to be able to discover her, at last, whenever I have need, for I am convinced by this time that nothing else is worth the effort of a man, and I think I shall achieve my object somewhere between here and Bablock Hith. He told me, without interest, that there was nothing attractive in the pursuit or in its realization. I answered, with equal promptitude, that the whole of attraction was summed up in it, that to nothing else did we move by nature, and to nothing else were we drawn, but to peace. I said that a completion and a fulfillment were vaguely demanded by a man, even in very early youth, that in manhood the desire for them became a passion, and in early middle age so overmastering and natural a necessity, that all who turned aside from it and attempted to forget it were justly despised by their fellows, and were some of them monkey-makers, some of them civil rights, but all of them perverted men, whose hard eyes, weak mouths, and fear of every trial sufficiently proved the curse that was upon them. I told him, as heatedly as one can speak, flying and back in a canoe, to a man beyond a little river, that he, being older than I, should know that everything in a full man tended toward some place where expression is permanent and secure. And then I told him that since I had only seen such a place far off as it were, but never lived in, I had set forth to see if I might think out the way to it. And I hoped, I said, to finish the problem, not so far down as bad luck hath. But nearer by, towards Newbridge, or even higher, by Helmsott. He asked me, after a little space, during which he took off the remnant of the worm and replaced it by a large new one, whether, when I said peace, I did not really mean harmony. At this phrase a suspicion arose in my mind. It seemed to me that I knew the school that had bred him, and that he and I should be acquainted. So I was appeased and told him I did not mean harmony, for harmony suggested that we had to suit ourselves to the things around us, or to get suited to them. I told him what I was after was no such German business, but something which was fruition, and more than fruition, full power to create, at the same time to enjoy a coexistence of new delight and of memory, of growth, and yet of foreknowledge, and an increasing reverence that should be increasingly upstanding and high-hatred as well as high-love justified. For surely this peace is not a lessening into which we sink, but an enlargement which we merit, and into which we rise and enter. At this I entered. I am determined to obtain before I get the bad luck hithe. He shook his head determinedly, and said my quest was hopeless. Sir said I, are you acquainted with the use of Serum? I have read it, he said, but I do not remember it well. Then indeed, indeed I knew that he was of my own university, and of my own college, and my heart warmed to him as I continued. It is in Latin, but after all that was the custom of the time. Latin, he answered, was in the Middle Ages a universal tone. Do you know, I said, that passage which begins ill impassioned. At this moment the float which I had almost forgotten, but which he in the course of our speeches, had more and more remembered, began to bob up and down violently, and if I may so express myself, the philosopher in him was suddenly swamped by the fisherman. He struck with zeal and the accuracy of a conqueror. He did something dexterous with his rod, flourished the line, and landed a magnificent, ah, there the whole story fails, for what on earth was the fish. Had it been a pike or a trout I could have told it, for I am well acquainted with both. But this fish was to me, as a human being is to a politician. This fish was to me, unknown, the end of Section 24. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org On Nothing and Kindred Subjects by Hilaer Bilak Section 25 On a Hermit Whom I Knew In a valley of the Epidanes, a little before it was day, I went down by the side of a torrent, wondering where I should find repose. For it was now some hours since I had given up all hope of discovering a place for proper human rest, and for the passing of the night. But at least I hoped to light upon a dry bed of sand under some overhanging rock, or possibly of pine needles beneath closely woven trees where one might get sleep until the rising of the sun. As I still trudged, half-expectant, and half-careless, a man came up behind me walking quickly as do mountain men, for throughout the world, if I cannot tell why, I have noticed that the men of the mountains walked quickly and in a sprightly manner, arching the foot and with a light and general gait as though the hills were waves and as though they were in thought springing upon the crests of them. This is true of all mountaineers. They are but few. This man I say came up behind me and asked me whether I were going towards a certain town of which he gave me the name, and as I had not so much as heard of this town I told him I knew nothing of it. I had no maps for there was no good map of that district, and a bad map is worse than none. I knew the names of no towns except the large towns on the coast, so I said to him, I cannot tell anything about this town. I am not making towards it, but I desire to reach the sea-coast which I know to be many hours away, and I had hoped to sleep overnight under some roof, or at least in some cavern, and to start with the early morning. But here I am at the end of the night without repose and wondering whether I can go on. He answered me, It is four hours to the sea-coast, but before you reach it you will find a lane branching to the right, and if you will go up it, for it climbs the hill, you will find a hermitage. Now by the time you are there the hermit will be risen. Will he be at his prayers, said I? He says no prayers to my knowledge, said my companion lightly, for he is not a hermit of that kind. Hermits are many, and prayers are few, but you will find him hustling about, and he is a very hospitable man. Now as it so happens that the road to the sea-coast bends here round along the foot of the hills, you will in his company perceive the port below you, and the populace, and the high road, and yet you will be saving a good hour in distance of time, and will have ample rest before reaching your vessel, if it is a vessel indeed that you intend to take. When he had said these things I thanked him, and gave him a bit of sausage, and went along my way. For as he had walked faster than me before our meeting, and while I was still in the dumps, so now I walked faster than him, having received good news. All happened just as he had described. The dawn broke behind me over the noble but sedate peaks of the Eponines. It first defined the heights against the growing colors of the sun. It next produced the gentle warmth and geniality in the air about me. It last displayed, and downward opening of the valley, and very far off, a plane that sloped toward the sea. Invigorated by the new presence of the day, I went forward more rapidly, and came at last to a place where a sculptored panel, made out of marble, very clever and modern, and representing a mystery, marked the division between two ways, and it took the lane to my right as my companion of the night hours had advised me. For perhaps a mile, or a little more, the lane rose continually between rough walls, intercepted by high banks of thorn, with here and there a vineyard, and as it rose one had between the breaches of the wall, glimpses of an ever-growing sea. For as one rose the sea became a broader and broader belt, and the very distant islands, which at first had been but little clouds along the horizon, stood out and became parts of the landscape, and as it were framed all the way. Then at last, when I had come to the heights of the hill to where it turned a corner, and ran level along the escarpment of cliffs that dominated the sea-plane, I saw below me a considerable stretch of country between the fall of the ground and the distant shore. And under the daylight which was now full and clear, one could perceive all that this plane was packed with, with an intense cultivation, with houses, happiness, and men. Far off a little to the northward lay the mass of the town, and stretching out into the Mediterranean with the gesture of command and of desire were the new arms of the harbor. To see such things filled me with complete content. I know not whether it be the effect of long vigil, or whether it be the effect of contrast between the darkness and the light. But certainly to come out of a lonely night spent on the mountains, down with the sunlight into the civilization of the plane, is for any man that cares to undergo the suffering and the consolation, as good as any experience at life affords. Hardly had I so conceived the views before me, when I became aware upon my ride of a sort of cavern, or rather a little and carefully minded shrine, from which a greeting proceeded. I turned round and saw there a man of no great age, and he had of a venerable appearance. He was perhaps fifty-five years old, possibly a little less, but he let his gray-white hair grow longish, and his beard was very ample and fine. It was he that had addressed me. He sat dressed in a long gown, in a modern and rather luxurious chair, at a long, low table of chestnut wood, on which he had placed a few books, which I saw were in several languages, and two of them not only in English, but having upon them the mark of an English circulating library, which did business in the great town at Arfine. There was also upon the table a breakfast ready of white bread and honey, a large brown coffee-pot, two white cups, and some goat milk and a bowl of silver. This meal he asked me to share. It is my custom, he said, when I see a traveller coming up my mountain road, to get out a cup and a plate for him, or if it is midday a glass. At evening, however, no one ever comes. Why not, said I? Because he answered, this lane goes but a few yards further round the edge of the cliff, and there it ends in a precipice. The little platform where we are is all but the end of the way. Indeed I chose it upon that account, seeing, when I first came here, that from its height and isolation it was well fitted for my retreat. I asked him how long ago that was, and he said nearly twenty years. For all that time he had lived there, going down into the plain but once or twice in a season, and having for his rare companions those who brought him food and the peasants on such days as they toiled up to work at their plots toward the summit. Also from time to time a chance traveller like myself. But these, he said, made but poor companions, for they were usually such as had missed their way at the turning and arrived at that high place of his out of breath and angry. I assured him that this was not my case, for a man had told me in the night how to find his hermitage, and I had come of set purpose to see him. At this he smiled. We were now seated together at a table, eating and talking. So when I asked him whether he had a reputation for sanctity and whether the people brought him food, he answered with a little hesitation, that he had a reputation, he thought, for necromancy rather than anything else, and that upon this account it was not always easy to persuade a messenger to bring him the books in French and English which he ordered from below. Though these were innocent enough, being as a rule novels written by women or academicians, records of travel, the classics of the eighteenth century, or the biographies of aged statesmen. This for food the people of the place did indeed bring it to him, but not, as in an idol, for courtesy. Contrary wise they demanded heavy payment, and his chief difficulty was with bread, for stale bread was intolerable to him. In the matter of religion he would not say that he had none, but rather that he had several religions, only at this season of the year when everything was fresh, pleasant and entertaining, he did not make use of any of them, but laid them all aside. As this last saying of his had no meaning for me, I turned to another matter and said to him, In any solitude contemplation is the chief business of the soul. How then do you who say you practice no rites fill up your loneliness here? In answer to this question he became more animated, spoke with a sort of laugh in his voice, and seemed as though he were young again as though my question had aroused a whole lifetime of good memories. My contemplation, he said, not without large gestures, is this wide and prosperous plain below, the great city with its harbor and ceaseless traffic of ships, the roads, the houses, buildings, the fields, yielding every year to husbandry, the perpetual activities of men. I watch my kind, and I glory in them, too far off to be disturbed by the friction of individuals, yet near enough to have a daily companionship in the spectacle of so much life. The mornings when they are all at labor I am inspired by their energy. In the noon and the afternoon I feel a part of their patient vigorous endurance. And when the sun broadens near the rim of the sea at evening, and all work ceases, I am filled with their repose. The lights along the harbor front and the twilight and on into the darkness remind me of them when I can no longer see the crowd and movements, and so does the music which they love to play in their recreation after the fatigues of the day, and the distant songs which they sing far into the night. I was about thirty years of age and had seen, in a career of diplomacy, many places and men. I had a fortune quite insufficient for a life among my equals. My youth had been therefore anxious, humiliated, and worn. One upon a feverish and unhappy holiday taken from the capital of this state, I came by accident to the cave and platform which you see. It was one of those days in which the air exhaled revelation, and I clearly saw that happiness inhabited the mountain corner. I determined to remain forever in so rarer companionship, and from that day she has never abandoned me. For a little while I kept a touch with the world by purchasing those newspapers in which I was reported shot by brigands or devoured by wild beasts. But the amusement soon wearied me, and now I have forgotten the very names of my companions. We were silent then, until I said, but some day you will die here, all alone. And why not, he answered calmly. It will be a nuisance for those who find me, but I shall be indifferent altogether. That is blasphemy, says I. So says the priest of St. Anthony, he immediately replied, but whether as a reproach, an argument, or a mere commentary, I could not discover. And a little while he advised me to go down to the plane before the heat should incommode my journey. I left him therefore reading a book of Jane Austen's, and I have never seen him since. Of the many strange men I have met in my travels, he was one of the most strange, and not the least fortunate. Every word I have written about him is true. I came in the Houston Road, that thoroughfare of empire, upon a young man, a little younger than myself, whom I knew though I did not know him very well. It was drizzling, and the secondhand bookseller, who are rare in this thoroughfare, were beginning to put out the water-proof covers over their wares. This disturbed my acquaintance, because he was engaged upon buying a cheap book that should really satisfy him. Now this was difficult, for he had no hobby, and the book which should satisfy him must be one that should describe more summoner, or it is better to say hand-ad at least, the theologians would say reveal, or the Platonists would say recall, the unknown country, which he thought was his very home. I had known his habit of seeking such books for two years, and had half wondered at it, and half sympathized. It was an appetite partly satisfied by almost any work that brought to him the vision of a place in the mind, which he had always intensely desired, but to which, as he had then long guessed, and is, he is now quite certain, no human paths directly lead. He would buy with avidity travels to the moon and to the planets, from the most worthless to the best. He loved utopias, and did not disregard even so prosaic a category as books of real travel, so long as by exaggeration or by a glamour in the style, they gave him a full draught of that drug which he desired. After this satisfaction, the young man saw it was a satisfaction in illusion, I have used the word drug with hesitation, or whether it was, as he persistently maintained, the satisfaction of a memory, or whether it was, as I am often tempted to think, the satisfaction of a thirst which will ultimately be quenched in every human soul. I cannot tell. Whatever it was, he sought it with more than the appetite with which a hungry man seeks food. He sought it with something that was not hunger but passion. That evening he found a book. It is well known that men purchase with difficulty second-hand books upon the stalls, and that in some mysterious way the sellers of these books are contempt to provide a kind of library for the poorer and more eager of the public. And a library admirable in this, that it is accessible upon every shelf and exposes a man to no control, except that he must not steal. And even in this it is nothing but the force of public law that interferes. My friend therefore would in the natural course of things have dipped into the book and lifted there, but a better luck persuaded him. Whether it was the beginning of the rain or a sudden loneliness in such terrible weather, and in such a terrible town, compelling him to seek a more permanent companionship with another mind, or whether it was my sudden arrival and shameless his poverty should appear in his refusing to buy the book, whatever it was he bought that same. And since he bought the book, I also have known it and have found in it as he did the most complete expression that I know of the unknown country of which he was a citizen, oddly a citizen as I then thought, wisely as I now conceive. All that can best be expressed in word, should be expressed in verse. But verse it is a slow thing to create. Now it is not really created, it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has long lane, potential and unexpressed in the mind of the man who secretes it. One knows that this unknown country has been hit off in verse a hundred times. If I were perfectly sure of my accents I would quote two lines from the Odyssey in which the unknown country stands out as clear as does the sudden vision from a mountain ridge when the mist lifts after a long climb, and one sees beneath one an unexpected and glorious land. Such a vision is greets a man when he comes over the saldu into the simple and secluded republic of the Andorans. And again the Germans in their idioms have flashed it out. I am assured, for I remember a woman telling me that there was a song by Schiller which exactly gave the revelation of which I speak. In English, thank heaven, emotion of this kind, emotion necessary to the life of the soul, is very abundantly furnished. As who does not know the lines? Blessed with that which is not in the word of man nor his conception, blessed land. Then there is also the whole group of glimpses which Shakespeare amused himself by scattering as might a man who had a great oak chest full of jewels, and who now and then out of kindly fun poured out a handful, and gave them to his guests. I quote from memory, but I think certain of the lines run more or less like this. Look how the dawn and russet mantle clad stands on the steep slope of Yon High Eastern Hill. And again, night's candles are burnt out, and Jokun Day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. Which moves me to digress. How on earth did any living man pull it off as well as that? I remember arguing with a man who very genuinely thought the talents of Shakespeare was exaggerated in public opinion, and discovering at the end of a long wrangle that he was not considering Shakespeare as a poet. But as a poet, then, how on earth did he manage it? Keats did continually, especially in the Hyperion. Milton does it so well in the fourth book of Paradise Laws that I defy any man of a sane understanding to read the whole of that book before going to bed, and not wake up the next morning as though he had been on a journey. William Morris does it, especially in the verses about a prayer over the corn, and as for Virgil the poet, Virgil, he does it continually like a man who is very traded is. Who does not remember the swimmer who saw Italy from the top of the wave? Here also let me digress. How do the poets do it? I do not mean where do they get their power, as I was asking just now of Shakespeare, but how do the words simple or complex produce that effect? Very often there is not any adjective, sometimes not any qualification at all, often only one subject with its predicate and its statement and its object. There is never any detail of description, but the scene rises more vivid in color, more exact in outline, more wonderful in influence than anything we can see with our eyes, except perhaps those things we see in the few moments of intense emotion which come to us we know not whence and expand out into completion and into manhood. Catalyst does it, he does it so powerfully in the opening lines of Vesper ad Est, that a man reads the first couplet of that hymenial and immediately perceives the Aponines. The nameless translator of the Highland song does it, especially when he advances that battering line, and we in dreams behold the Hibrides. They all do it, bless their hearts, the poets, which please me back again to the mournful reflection that it cannot be done in prose. Little friends, my readers, I wish it could be done in prose, for if it could, and if I knew how to do it, I would here present to you that unknown country in such a fashion that every landscape which you should see henceforth would be transformed by the appearing through it, the shining and uplifting through it, of the unknown country upon which reposes this tedious and repetitive world. Now you may say to me that prose can do it, and you may quote to me the end of the pilgrim's progress, a very remarkable piece of writing, or better still, as we shall be more agreed upon it, the general impression left upon the mind by the book which set me writing, Mr. Hudson's Crystal Age. I do not deny that prose can do it, but when it does it it is hardly to be called prose, for it is inspired. No carefully the passage is in which the trick is worked in prose, for instance in the story of Ruth in the Bible where it is done with complete success. You will perceive an incantation and a spell. Indeed this same episode of Ruth in exile has inspired two splendid passages of European verse, of which it is difficult to say which is the more national, and therefore the greatest. Here he goes, in the legend Disseccles, or Keats astounding four lines. There was a shepherd the other day up at Findon Fair, who had come from the east by Luz, with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons, which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers, different from the eyes of other men. He was occupied when I came upon him in pulling Mr. Fulton's sheep by one hind leg, so they should go the way they were desired to go. It happened that day that Mr. Fulton's sheep were not sold, and the shepherd went driving them back through Findon Village and up on to the high-downs. I went with him, to hear what he had to say, for shepherds talk quite differently from other men, and when we came on to the shoulder at Chaktonbury, and looked on upon the wheeled, which stretched out like the plains of heaven. He said to me, I never come here, but it seems like a different place down below, and as though it were not the place where I have gone afoot with sheep under the hills. It seems different when you are looking down at it. He added that he had never known why, and then I knew that he, like myself, was perpetually in perception of the unknown country, and I was very pleased. But we did not say anything more to each other about it until we got down into stining. There we drank together, and we still said nothing more about it. So that to this day, all we know of the matter, is what we knew when we started, and what you knew when I began to write this, and what you now are no further informed upon, namely, that there is an unknown country lying beneath the places that we know, and appearing only in moments of revelation. Whether we shall reach this country at last, or whether we shall not, it is impossible to determine. CHAPTER XXVII A woman whose presence in English letters will continue to increase, wrote of a cause to which she had dedicated her life, that it was like that fairy castle of which men became aware when they wandered upon a certain moor. In that deserted place, the picture was taken from the writings of Sir Walter Scott, the lonely traveller heard, above him, a noise of bugles in the air, and thus a fairy castle was revealed. But again, when the traveller would reach it, a doom comes upon him, and in the act of its attainment it vanishes away. We are northern, full of dreams in the darkness. This castle is caught and glimpses a misty thing. It is seen a moment, and then it mixes once again with the mist of our northern air, and when that mist has lifted from the heath, there is nothing before the water, but a bear upland, open to the wind, and roofed only by a hurrying cloud. Yet in the moment of revelation, most certainly, the traveller perceived it, and the call of its bugle guard was very clear. He continues his way, perceiving only the things he knows, trees bent by the gale, rude heather, the gravel of the path, and mountains all around. In that landscape he has no companions, and he cannot but be haunted as he goes by towers upon which he surely looked, and by the sharp memory of bugle notes that still seem to startle his hearing. In our legends of Western Europe this castle perpetually returns. It has been seen not only on the highlands of Ireland, of Wales, of Brittany, of the Erestes, of Normandy, of Avignon, but in the plains also, and on those river meadows where wealth comes so fast that even simple men early forgot the visions of the hills. The imagination, or rather the speech of our race, has created or recognized throughout our territory this stronghold which was not all together of the world. Queen Isilt, as she sat with Tristan in a castle garden, towards the end of summer night, whispered to him, Tristan, they say that this castle is fairy, it is revealed at the sound of a trumpet, but presently it vanishes away. And as she said it, the bugles rang dawn. Raymond of Saragosa saw this castle also, as he came down from the wooded hills, after he had found the water of life, and was bearing it toward the plain. He saw the towers quite clearly, and also thought he heard the call upon that downward road, at whose end he was to meet with Brahma-Mondi. But he saw it thence only in the exultation of the summits, as he looked over the falling forests to the plain, and the Sierra, miles beyond. He saw it thence only. Never after, upon either bank of Abril, could he come upon it, nor could any manisher him of the way. In the story of Vala's dunes, Hugh, the Fortenbras of the Cotentin, had a castle of this kind, for when after the battle they count the dead, the priest finds in the seagrass among other bodies that of this old lord. And Hugh, that trusted in his glass, but rode not home the day, whose title was the Fortenbras, with the lords of his array. This was that old Hugh, the Fortenbras, who had been lured to the priest's father, so that when the battle was engaged the priest watched him from the opposing rank and saw him fall, far off, just as the line broke, and before the men of the cock had room to charge. It was easy to see him, for he rode a high horse and was taller than any other Normans, and when his horse was wounded. The girth severed and the saddle swung, and he went down. He nevermore sang winter songs in his high town. In his high town, that fairy is, and stands on Harcourt Lee to summon him up his aryir band, his writ beyond the mountain ran. My father was his serving man, although the pharon was free, before the angry wars began. He was a friend to me. In his high town, that fairy is, and stands on Harcourt Bay, the fisher, driving through the night, makes harbor by that castle-hide, and moors him till the day, but with the broadening of the light it vanishes away. So the fairy castle comes in by an allusion to the ballad of the Battle of Valles Dunes. What is this vision which our race has so symbolized or so seen into which are thus attached its oldest memories? It is the miraculous moment of intense emotion, in which, whether we are duped or transfigured, we are in touch with a reality firmer than the reality of this world. The fairy castle is the counterpart and the example of those glimpses which every man has enjoyed, especially in youth, and which no man, even in the dust of Middle Age, can quite forget. Even these were found a complete harmony and satisfaction, which were not negative nor dependent on the absence of discord. Such completion as criticism may conceive, but as positive as color or as music, and clothed as it were in the living body of joy. The vision may be unreal or real. In either case it is valid. If it is unreal it is the symbol of the world behind the world, and it is no less a symbol, even if it is unreal. It is the sudden seeing of the place to which our faces are set, during this unbroken marching of years. Once on the Sacramento River, a little before sunrise, I looked eastward from a boat, and saw along the dawn the black edge of the Sierras. The peaks were as sharp as are the Malvern from the Cotswold, though they were days and days away. I made a broad-jagged band intensely black against the glow of the sky. I drew them so. A tiny corner of the sun appeared between two central peaks. At once the whole range was suffused with glory. The sun was wholly risen, and the mountains had completely disappeared. In a place where they had been was the sky of the horizon. At another time also in a boat I saw beyond a spit of the Tunisian coast as it seemed the flat island, through the heat with which the air trembled was a low gleam of sand, a palm or two and less certainly the flats and domes of a white native village. Our course, which was to round the point, went straight for this island, and as we approached it became first outfold and flickering, then a play of light upon the waves. It was a mirage, and it had melted into the sky. There is a part of us, as all the world knows, which is imixed with change, and by change only can live. There is another part which lies beyond motion and time, and that part is ourselves. This divine part has surely a stronghold which is also an inheritance. It has a home which perhaps it remembers, and which certainly it conceives at rare moments during our path over the moor. This is that fairy castle. It is revealed at the sound of a trumpet. We turn our eyes, we glance, and we perceive it. We strain to reach it, and the very effort of our going, the doom of human labor falls upon us. And it vanishes away. It is real or unreal. It is unreal like that island which I thought to see some miles from Africa, but which was not truly there. For the ship, when it came to the place that the island had occupied, sailed easily over an empty sea. It is real, like those high-exy eras which I drew from the Sacramento River at the turn of the night and which were suddenly obliterated by the rising sun. But where the vision is, but mirage, even there it is a symbol of our goals. Where it stands fast and true, for however brief a moment it can illumine and should determine the whole of our lives. For such sights are the manifestation of that glory, which lies permanently beyond the changing of the world. Of such a sort are the young, passionate intentions to relieve the burden of mankind. First love, the moot created by certain strains of music, and, as I am willing to believe, the walls of heaven. The ship had sailed northward in an even manner and under a sky that was full of stars, when the dawn broke and the full day quickly broadened over the Mediterranean. With the advent of the light the salt of the sea seems stronger and there certainly arose a new freshness in the following air. But as yet no land appeared. Until at last, seated as I was alone in the four-part of the vessel, I clearly saw a small, unchanging shape far off before me, peaked upon the horizon and gray like a cloud. This I watched, wondering what its name might be, who lived upon it, or what its fame was, for it was certainly land. I watched in this manner for some hours, perhaps for two, when the island now grown higher was so near that I could see trees upon it. But the trees were set sparsely as trees are on dry land, and most of them seemed to be thorn trees. It was at this moment that a man who had been singing to himself in a low tone aft came up to me and told me that this island was called the Island of Goats, and that there were no men upon it to his knowledge, that it was a lonely place and worth little. But by this time there had risen beyond the Island of Goats another and much larger island. It lay all along the north in a monstrous belt of blue, and any man coming to it for the first time, or unacquainted with the maps, would have said to himself I have found a considerable place. And, indeed, the name of the island indicates this, for it is called Majorca, the larger land. For this, past the Island of Goats, and past the Strait, we continued to sail with a light breeze for hours. Until at last we could see on this shore also sparse trees. But most of them were olive trees, and they were relieved with a green of cultivation, up the high mountain sides, and with the white houses of men. The deck was now crowded with people, most of whom were coming back to their own country after an exile in Africa among un-christian and dangerous things. The little children, who had not yet known Europe, having been born beyond the sea, were full of wonder. But their parents, who knew the shortness of human life and its trouble, were happy because they had come back at last, saw before them the known jetties and the familiar hills of home. As I was surrounded by so much happiness, I myself felt as though I had come home to the end of a long journey, and was up northward through the Sardine, and after that to Paragord, and after that to the Channel. And so to Sussex were all journeys end. The harbour had about it that Mediterranean go as you please, which everywhere in the Mediterranean distinguishes harbours. It was as though the men of that had said, It never blows for long, let us build ourselves a rough refuge, and to-morrow sail away. We neared this harbour, but we flew no flag and made no signal. Beneath us the water was so clear that all one would need to have done to have brought the vessel in, if one had not known the Channel, would have been to lean over the side and keep the boy at the helm off the very evident shallows and the crusted rocks, by gestures of one hands. For the fairway was like a trench, deep and blue. So we slid into Palma Haven. And as we rounded the pier, the light wind took us first to beam, and then forward, then we let go, and she swung up, and was still. They lowered the sails. The people who were returning were so full of activity and joy that it was like a hive of bees. But I no longer felt this, as I had felt their earlier and more subdued emotion. So the place was no longer distant or mysterious, as it had been when first its sons and daughters had come up on deck to welcome it, and had given me part of their delight. It was now an evident and noisy town, hot, violent, and strong. The houses had about them a certain splendor. The citizens, upon the quays, a satisfied and prosperous look. Its streets, where they ran down towards the sea, were charmingly clean and cared for. And the architecture of its wealthier mansion seemed to me at once unusual and beautiful, for I had not yet seen Spain. Each house, so far as I could make out from the water, was entered by a fine, sculptured porch, which gave into a cool courtyard with arcades under it, and most of the larger houses had estusians carved in stone upon their walls. But what most pleased me, and also seemed most strange, was to see against the east a vast cathedral, quite northern and outlying, except for its severity and discipline of which the north is incapable, save when it has steeped itself in the terseness of the classics. This monument was far larger than anything in the town. It stood out, separate from the town, and dominated it, upon its seaward side, somewhat as might an isolated hill, a shore fortress of rock. It was almost bare of ornament, its stones were very carefully worked and closely fitted, and little ways broke ceaselessly along the base of its ramparts. Landwards a mass of low houses, which seemed to touch the body of the building, did but emphasize its height. When I had landed, I made at once for this cathedral and with every step it grew greater. We who are of the north are accustomed to the enormous, we have unearthly sunsets, and the clouds magnify our hills. The southern men see nothing but misproportion in what is enormous. They love to have things in order, and violence in art is odious to them. This high and dreadful roof had not been raised under the influence of the island. It had surely been designed just after the reconquest from the Mohammedans, when a turbulent army not only of Glaskins and Catalans, but of the Normans also, and the Frisians, and the Ranishmen, had poured across the water and had stormed the sea walls. On this account the cathedral had about it in its skyline and in its immensity, and in the gothic point of its windows, a northern air. But in its austerity and in its magnificence it was spanyard. As I have passed the little porch of entry in the side wall, I saw a man. He was standing silent and alone. He was not blind, and perhaps not poor, and as I passed he beggared the charity not of money but of prayers. When I had entered the cool and darkness of the nave his figures still remained in my mind, and I could not forget it. I remembered the straw hat upon his head, the suit of blue canvas which he wore, and the rough staff of wood in his hand. I was especially haunted by his expression, which was patient and massed as though he were enduring a pain and chose to hide it. The nave was empty. It was a great hollow that echoed and re-echoed. There were no shrines and no lamps and no men or women praying. Therefore the figure at the door filled my mind more and more, while I went out and asked him if he was in need of money, of which at that moment I had none. He answered that his need was not for money but only for prayers. Why said I, do you need prayers? He said it was because his fate was upon him. I think he spoke the truth. He was standing erect and with dignity. His eyes were not disturbed, and he repeatedly refused the alms of passersby. No one said I should yield to these moods. He answered nothing but looked pensive like a man gazing at a landscape and remembering his life. But it was now the hour when the ship was to be sailing again, and I could not linger, though I wished very much to talk more with him. I begged him to name a shrine where a gift might be of special value to him. He said that he was attached to no one shrine more than to another, and then I went away regretfully, remembering how earnestly he had asked for his prayers. This was in Pama of Majorca, not two years ago. There are many such men, but few who speak so humbly. When I got aboard again the ship sailed out and rounded a lighthouse point, and then made north to Barcelona. The night fell, and the next morning there rose before us the winged figures that crown the custom house of that port, and are an introduction to the glories of Spain, and to Section 28. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. On Nothing and Kindred Subjects by Hilaer Bellach Section 29 On a Young Man and an Older Man A young man of my acquaintance, having passed his 28th birthday, and wrongly imagining this date to represent the Grand Climateric, went by night in some perturbation to an Older Man, and spoke to him as follows. Sir, I have intruded upon your leisure, in order to ask your advice upon certain matters. The Older Man, whose thoughts were at that moment intently set upon money, looked up in a startled way, and attempted to excuse himself, suffering as he did from the delusion that the young man was after alone. But the young man, whose mind was miles away from all such trifling things, continued to press him anxiously without so much as noticing that he had perturbed his senior. I have come, sir, said he, to ask your opinion, advice, experience, and guidance upon something very serious which has entered into my life, which is, briefly, that I feel myself to be growing old. Upon hearing this so comforting and so reasonable a statement, the Older Man heaved a profound sigh of relief, and turning to him a mature and smiling visage, as also turning towards him his person, and in so doing, turning his polished American hickory wood-office chair, answered with a peculiar refinement, but not without sadness. I shall be happy to be of any use I can. From which order and choice of words the reader might imagine that the Older Man was himself a colonial like his chair? In this imagination the reader, should he entertain it, would be deceived. The Younger Man then proceeded, nodding his forehead and putting into his eyes that troubled look which is proper to virtue and to youth. Oh, sir, I cannot tell you how things seem to be slipping from me. I smell less keenly, and taste less keenly. I enjoy less keenly, and suffer less keenly than I did. Of many things which I certainly desired, I can only say that I now desire them in a more confused manner. Of certain propositions in which I intensely believed, I can only say that I now see them interfered with and criticized perpetually, not as was formerly the case by my enemies, but by the plain observance of life. And what is worse, I find growing in me a habit of reflection, for reflection's sake, leading nowhere, at a sort of sedentary attitude in which I watch, but neither judge nor support nor attack any portion of mankind. The Older Man, hearing this speech, congratulated his visitor upon his terse and accurate methods of expression, detailed to him the careers in which such habits of terminology are valuable, and also those in which they are a fatal fault. Having heard you, said he, it is my advice to you, drawn from a long experience of men, to enter the legal profession, and having entered it to supplement your income with writing occasional articles for the more dignified organs of the press. But if this prospect does not attract you, and indeed there are many whom it has repelled, I would offer you as an alternative, that you should produce slowly at about the rate of one in every two years short books, compact of irony, yet having running through them like a twisted thread, up and down, emerging, hidden, and reemerging in the stuff of your writing, a memory of those early certitudes, and even of passion for those earlier revelations. When the Older Man had said this, he sat silent for a few moments, then added gravely, but I must warn you that for such a career you need an accumulated capital of at least thirty thousand pounds. The Young Man was not comforted by advice of this sort, and was determined to make a kind of war upon the doctrine which seemed to underlie it. He said in effect that if he could not be restored to the pristine condition which he felt to be slipping from him, he would as leaf stop living. When hearing this second statement, the Older Man became extremely grave. Young Man, said he, Young Man, consider well what you are saying. The poet Shakespeare, in his most remarkable effort, which I need hardly tell you is the tragedy of Hamlet, or the Prince of Denmark, has remarked that the thousand doors of death stand open. I may be misquoting the words, and if I am, I do so boldly and without fear, for any fool with a book at his elbow can get the words right, and yet not understand their meaning. Let me assure you that the doors of death are not so simply hinged, and that any determination to force them involves the destruction of much more than these light, though divine memories of which you speak. They involve indeed the destruction of the very soul which conceives them. And let me assure you, not upon my own experience, but upon that of those who have drowned themselves imperfectly, who have enlisted in really dangerous wars, or who have fired revolvers at themselves in a twisted fashion with their right hands. That quiet apart from that evil to the soul of which I speak, the evil to the mere body in such experiments is so considerable that a man would rather go to the dentist than experience them. You will forgive me, you added earnestly. For speaking in this gay manner upon an important philosophical subject, but long hours of work at the earning of my living forced me to some relaxation towards the end of the day, and I cannot restrain a frivolous spirit even in the discussion of such fundamental things. No, do not, as you put it, stop living. It hurts, and no one has the least conception of whether it is a remedy. What is more, the life in front of you will prove, after a few years, as entertaining as the life which you are rapidly leaving. The young man caught on to this last phrase and said, What do you mean by entertaining? I intend, said the older man, to keep my advice to you in the note to which I think such advice should be said. I will not burden it with anything awful nor wait an imperfect diction with absolute verities in which I do indeed believe but which would be altogether out of place at this hour of the evening. I will not deny that from eleven to one, and especially if one be delivering and historical, or better still, a theological lecture, one can, without loss of dignity, allude to the permanent truth, the permanent beauty, and the permanent security without which human life reads up like mist, and is at best futile, at the worst, tortured. But you must remember that you have come to me suddenly, with a most important question after dinner, that I have but just completed an essay upon the economic effect of the development of the Manchurian coal fields, and that, what is more important, all this talk began in a certain key, and that to change one's key is among the most difficult of creative actions. No, young man, I shall not venture upon the true reply to your question. On hearing this answer the young man began to curse and to swear, and to say that he had looked everywhere for help and had never found it, that he was minded to live his own life and see what would come of it, that he thought the older man knew nothing of what he was talking about, but was wrapping it all up in words, that he had clearly recognized in the older man's intolerable polyxity several clichés already made phrases, that he hoped on reaching the older man's age he would not have been so utterly winnowed of all substance as to talk so aimlessly, and finally that he prayed God for a personal development more full of justice, of life, and of stuff than that which the older man appeared to have suffered or enjoyed. On hearing these words the older man leapt to his feet, which was not an easy thing for him to do, and as one overjoyed grasped the young man by the hand, though the latter very much resented such antics on the part of age. That is it! That is it! pried the older man, looking now far too old for his years. If I have summoned up in you that spirit I have not done ill. Get you forward in that mood, and when you come to my time of life you will be as rotund and hopeful a fellow as I am myself. But having heard these words the young man laughed and discussed. The older man, considering all these things as he looked into the fire when he was alone, earnestly desired that he could have told the young man the exact truth, have printed it, and have produced a proper gospel. But considering the mountains of impossibility that lay in the way of such public action, he sighed deeply and took to the more indirect method. He turned to his work, and continued to perform his own duty before God, and for the help of mankind. This on that evening was for him a review upon the interpretation of the word Haga in the doomsday inquest. This kept him up till quarter-past one, and as he had to take a train to Newcastle at eight next morning, it is probable that much will be forgiven him when things are cleared. The end of Section 29. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org. Nothing and Kindred Subjects by Hitler Bellach Section 30 on the Departure of a Guest, a French poem from the author's manuscript in the Library of the Abbey of Thelmy. Host. Well, youth, I see you are about to leave me, and since it is in the terms of your service by no means to exceed a certain period in my house, I must make up my mind to bid you farewell. Youth. Indeed I would stay if I could, but the manner lies as you know in other hands, and I may not stay, host. I trust, dear youth, that you have found all comfortable while you were my guest, that the air has suited you and the company. Youth. I thank you. I have never enjoyed a visit more. You may say that I have been most unusually happy. Host. Then let me ring for the servant who shall bring down your things. Youth. I thank you civilly. I have brought them down already. See, they are here. I have but two, one very large bag and this other small one. Host. Why, you have not locked the small one. See, it gapes. Youth. Somewhat embarrassed. My dear host, to tell the truth. I usually put it off till the end of my visits. But the truth. To tell the truth. My luggage is of two kinds. Host. I do not see why that needs so greatly confuse you. Youth. Still more embarrassed. But you see, the fact is, I stay with people so long that, well, that very often they forget which things are mine and which belong to the house, and, well, the truth is that I have to take away with me a number of things which, in a word, you may possibly have thought you're wrong. Host. Coldly. Oh. Youth. Eagerly. Pray do not think the worst of me. You know how strict are my orders. Host. Sadly. Yes, I know. You will plead that master of yours. And no doubt you are right. But tell me, youth, what are those things? Youth. They fill this big bag. But I am not so ungracious as you think. See, in this little bag which I have purposely left open are a number of things, properly mine, yet of which I am allowed to make gifts to those with whom I lingered. You shall choose among them, or, if you will, you shall have them all. Host. Well, first tell me what you have packed in the big bag and mean to take away. Youth. I will open it and let you see. He unlocks it and pulls the things out. I fear they are familiar to you. Host. Oh, youth. Youth, must you take away all of these? Why are you taking away as it were my very self? Here is the love of women, as deep and changeable as an opal. And here is carelessness that looks like a shower of pearls. And here I see, oh, youth, for shame. You are taking away that silken stuff which used to wrap up the hole, and which you once told me had no name, but which lent to everything it held. Youth. No, I must take it, for it is not yours, though from courtesy I forbear to tell you so till now. These also go, facility, the ointment, sleep, the drug, full laughter, that tolerated all follies. It was the only musical thing in the house. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. Youth. That is because it is made up of diverse things having no similarity, and you may take all or leave all, or choose as you will. Here, pulling up a cloud, is ambition. Will you have that? Post, doubtfully. I cannot tell. It has been mine, and yet, without those other things. Youth. Cheerfully. Very well, I will leave it. You shall decide on it in a few years, Hanson. Here is the perfume-pride. Will you have that? Post, no. I will have none of it. It is false and corrupt, and only yesterday. I was for throwing it out of window, to sweeten the air in my room. Youth. So far you've chosen well. Now, pray choose more. Post. I will have this, and this, and this. I will take health. Takes it out of the bag. Not that it is of much use to me without those other things, but I have grown used to it. Then I will take this. Takes out a plain steel purse and chain, which is the tradition of my family, and which I desire to leave to my son. I must have it cleaned. Then I will take this, and pulls out a trinket, which is the sense of form and color. I am told it is of less value later on, but it is a pleasant ornament, and so, youth, goodbye, youth with a mysterious smile. Wait, I have something else for you. He feels in his ticket pocket. No less a thing. He feels again in his watch pocket. Then he looks a trifle anxious and feels in his waist-coast pockets. A promise from my master, signed and sealed, to give you back all I take and more in immortality. He feels in his handkerchief pocket. Post. Oh, youth. Youth still feeling. Do not thank me. It is my master you should thank, frowns. Dear me, I hope I have not lost it. Feels in his trouser pockets. Post. Loudly. Lost it? Youth, pettishly. I did not say I had lost it. I said I hoped I had not. Feels in his great-coat pocket, and pulls out an envelope. Ah, here it is. His face clouds over. No. That is the message to Mrs. George, telling her the time has come to get a wig. Hopelessly. Do you know? I am afraid I have lost it. I am really very sorry. I cannot wait. He goes off. The end of section 30