Beside Still Waters

XXII

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

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

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

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

Yet to the charnel-worm, rioting in all the horror of decay, there could be nothing but a blind joy in the conditions which Hugh hardly even dared to imagine. To indulge such thoughts was morbid, perhaps. But here they presented themselves at every turn, and Hugh felt that to turn his back upon them was but to shirk the part of the problem that he disliked. Not so could he attain to any knowledge of the secret of things. The horror must not of course be unduly emphasised; the morbidity lay there, in the danger of seeing things out of due proportion; but the proportion was just as much sacrificed, indeed more sacrificed, by ignoring the facts. Neither was he at all afraid of any undue preponderance of the morbid element in his contemplations. He took far too deep a delight in the beautiful and gracious sights and sounds of earth for that; and the conclusion that he drew, as he turned away, was that a suspension of judgment in the face of an insoluble mystery was the only course; to leave the windows of the soul open to every impression, to every fact, whether it was the voice and glance of humanity, the sweetness of art and sound, the appeal of ancient buildings, the waving of tall trees, the faces of bright flowers, the songs of lively birds in the thicket – ay, and the intimations of death and decay as well, all that was ugly and wretched in humanity, the coarse song from the alehouse, the slatternly woman about her weary work, the crying of a child that had been punished, the foul oozings of the stockyard. These were all as real, as true impressions as the others. To strike some balance, neither to forget the ideal in the real, or to lose sight of the real in the ideal, that was his task. And the consolation, though a stern one, lay in the fact that, dark and bitter as the mystery was at one point, gracious and glowing as it was at another, yet it was certainly there. Concrete and abstract, the impressions of sense, the intuitions of the spirit, each and all had their part. In this life, this swift interchange of darkness and light, of sunshine and gloom, he might never approach the secret – nay, he did not even hope that he would. But at least he could draw a few steps nearer, and with a humble heart he would wait for the glory that should be revealed, or for the silence and darkness that it might be would close upon him. For whatever should be the end, Hugh had no doubt that there was certainly behind life a mind and a will, to which it was not only no mystery, but a truth simple, obvious and plain; for him, his duty was to use both observation and imagination; not to let the imagination outrun the observation, but to mark all that he could, and infer what he could; while at the same time he felt equally sure that he was not to be a mere observer, blindly registering impressions, content to analyse difficulties. Better than that was to repose an ardent faith in his intuitions; but each alike, without the aid of the other, was perilous and insecure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plans and schemes began to rise in Hugh's brain he felt as if he was delivered from the brooding sway of some evil and melancholy spirit. How strange was the power that physical conditions had upon the very stuff of the mind! Half-an-hour ago the grievances, the self-pity, the dissatisfaction had appeared to him to be real and tangible troubles; not indeed things which it was wise to brood over, but inevitable pains, to be borne with such philosophy as was attainable. But now they seemed as unreal, as untrue, as painful dreams, from which one wakes with a sharp and great relief.

What remained with Hugh was the sense of one of the dangers of the solitary life – the over-influence, the preponderance of sentiment. The only serenity was to be found in claiming and expecting nothing, but in welcoming what came as a gift, as an added joy, to which one had indeed no right; but which fell like the sunshine and the rain; one must be ready to help, to work, to use one's strength at whatever point it could be best applied, and to look for no reward. This was what poisoned life, the claim to be paid in the coin that pleased one best. Payment indeed was made largely; and the blessed thing was that if one was not paid fully for one's efforts, neither was one paid relentlessly for one's mistakes.

And then, as to the deeper shadows of the world, the sorrows, the bereavements, the sufferings, the dark possibilities, that lay like the shadows of trees across a sunlit road – death itself, that grim horizon that closed the view whichever way one looked – the mistake lay in attempting to reckon with them beforehand, to anticipate them, to discount them. They were all part of the plan, and one could not alter them. Better to let them come, to husband strength and joy to meet them, rather than to dissipate one's courage by dwelling upon them. Indeed all Hugh's experience showed him that troubles, even the deepest, wore a very different aspect when one was inside them.

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

XXIII

The Club – Homewards – The Garden of God

As Hugh became more and more enamoured of his work, and of the sweet peace of the countryside, he became more and more averse to visiting London. But he was forced to do this at intervals. One hot summer day he went thus reluctantly to town; the rattle of the train, the heated crowd of passengers, the warm mephitic air that blew into the carriage from the stifling, smoke-grimed tunnel – all these seemed to him insupportably disgusting. But the sight, the sound, the very smell of London itself, was like a dreadful obsession; he wondered how he could ever have endured to live there. The streets lay in the steady sun, filled with fatigued, hurrying persons. The air was full of a sombre and oppressive murmur; the smell of the roadways, the hot vapour of cookshops, the din and whizz of vehicles, the ceaseless motion of faces: all this filled him with a deep pity for those who had to live their lives under such conditions. Was it to this that our boasted civilisation had brought us? and yet it seemed that the normal taste of ordinary people turned by preference to this humming and buzzing life, rather than to the quiet and lonely life in the green spaces of the country; Hugh had little doubt that the vast majority of those he saw, even the pale, patient workpeople who were peeping, as they toiled, grimy and sweat-stained, from the open windows, would choose this life rather than the other, and would have condemned the life of the country as dull. Was it he, Hugh wondered, or they that were out of joint? Ought he to accept the ordinary, sensible point of view, and try to conform himself to it, crush down his love for trees and open fields and smiling waters? The sociable, herding instinct was as true, as God-sent an instinct as his own pleasure in free solitude; and the old adage that God made the country but man the town was as patently absurd as to say that God made the iceberg, but the ant made the ant-heap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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