Apologia Diffidentis Part 1

Apologia Diffidentis.

by W. Compton Leith.

"I am naturally bashful; nor hath conversation, age, or travel been able to effront or enharden me."

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

In the matter of avowals the diffident never speak if they can write.

That is why my apology for a furtive existence is here set down in solitude instead of being told face to face. You have borne so many years with my unresponsive and incomprehensible ways that shame at last constrains me to this poor defence; for I must either justify myself in your sight, or go far away where even your kindness cannot reach me. The first alternative is hard, but the second too grievous for impaired powers of endurance; I must therefore find what expression I may, and tell you how my life has been beshrewed ever since, a boy of twelve, I first incurred the obloquy of being shy. The word slips easily from the pen though the lips refuse to frame it; for I think most men would rather plead guilty to a vice than to this weakness.

A doom of reticence is upon all our shy confraternity, and we seldom make confidences even to each other. It is only at rarest intervals that the spell is lifted, by silent sympathy, by a smile, by a tear, by I know not what. At such times our souls are like those deep pools of the sh.o.r.e, only open to the sky at lowest tides of still summer days, only to be approached across long stretches of wet sand and slippery shelves of rock. In their depths are delicate fronded seaweeds and sh.e.l.ls tinted with hues of sundawn; but to see them you must bend low over the surface, which no lightest breath must furrow, or the vision is gone.

Few of the busy toilers of the world will leave the firm sands to see so little; but sometimes one weary of keen life will stray aside, and oftener a child will come splashing across the beach to peer down with artless curiosity and delight. Then the jealous ocean returns, and the still clear depths are confused once more with refluent waters; soon the waves are tossing above the quiet spot, and the child is gone home to sleep and forget. I cannot have you with me at these still hours of revelation; I must tell my tale as best I can with such success as fortune may bestow.

I shall say nothing of the miseries which embittered the life of the diffident boy. But I cannot pa.s.s in silence the deeper trouble of earliest manhood, when my soul first awoke to the dread that though other clouds might drift westward and dissolve, one would impend over me for ever. It was at the university that this vague misgiving crept upon me like a chill mist, until the hopes and aspirations of youth were one by one extinguished, as to a sailor putting out to sea the comfortable harbour lights vanish in the wracks of a tempestuous winter morning. I turned my face away from the gracious young life amidst which I moved, like a man possessed of a dark secret to his undoing. My heart, yet eager for the joy of living and yearning for affection, was daily starved of its need as by a power of deliberate and feline cruelty; and with every expansive impulse instantly restrained by this daemonic force, I was left at last unresponsive as a maltreated child, who flings his arms round no one, but shrinks back into his own world of solitary fancies.

I think there is no misery so great as that of youth surrounded by all opportunities for wholesome fellowship, endowed with natural faculties for enjoyment, yet repressed and thwarted at every turn by invincible self-consciousness and mistrust: surely no lost opportunities of manhood leave such aching voids as these. In the spring-time of life to feel day by day the slow erosion of the power of joy is of all pains most poignant; out of it grow anxieties, premature despairs, incongruous with fresh cheeks and a mind not yet mature. This misery was mine for those four years which to most men are the happiest of a whole career, but to me at every retrospect seem so beset with gloomy shadows that could I live my life again, I would not traverse them once more for all the gold of Ophir.

At first I writhed and strained in my bonds, and sometimes would make timid advances to the generous young hearts around me. But the tension always proved too sore; I never maintained the ground I had won, and with a perilous fatalism more and more readily accepted what I deemed inevitable failure. There were among them, I doubt it not now, Samaritans who would have tended my bruised limbs; but then they all seemed to be gliding over the black ice, too happy to stay and lift up the fallen. And bruised though I was, I still rose time and again and moved painfully among them, so that theirs was no culpable or merciless neglect.

Yet the end for me was illimitable dreariness; and like Archie in _Weir of Hermiston_, I seemed abroad in a world from which every hope of intimacy was banished. And as with every month the hopelessness of resistance was made plainer and plainer, there came upon me the recklessness of the condemned man who jests or blasphemes to hide his ruth. Overwrought continually by forebodings of coming pain, unstrung by strange revulsions, I would pa.s.s from burning wrath to cold despair, a most petulant and undisciplined sufferer. Uniting in one person the physical exuberance of youth and the melancholy of disillusioned manhood, I was deprived of the balanced energy proper to either age, and kept up a braggart courage with the headiest wine of literature. I could not bear the bland homilies of the preachers, but ranged myself with the apostles of rebellion who blew imperious trumpet blasts before the walls of ordered life.

Verily the violence of the blasts was sometimes such that the ramparts should have fallen down; and often in my exaltation I already saw them totter, as I strode along reciting the dithyrambs of men who like myself could find scarce a responsive heart-beat in all this throbbing world.

Above all I gloried in the declamations of Queen Mab, which sanctioned by high poetic authority the waste of my affections and my moody defiance of life's most salutary law. With these upon my lips I roamed, an absurd pathetic figure, amid the haunts of the Scholar Gipsy, and the wayward upland breezes conspired with my truant moods. And while I sat by my lamp late into the night, I turned the pages of pessimists and cynics, for no principles are dearer to a man than those which allow him to profess contempt for the benefits which he cannot enjoy.

Yet by seeking amid such simples a balm for wounded pride, I did not really deceive myself, but lived as a sophist rather than a philosopher.

And all the while I was digging graves for my better instincts, until my s.e.xton's mood, confining me within churchyard walls, gave me over almost entirely to the company of mental bats and owls. The danger of it all was that though I was yet youthful, and should have been still pliant as a sapling, I was fostering the growth of those habits which, like rings in the grain, are the signature of unyielding years. Naturalists say that a bullfinch fed only on hempseed gradually loses his fair plumage and becomes black as a raven: so my soul, nourished on thoughts of rebellion, put off its bright and diverse enthusiasms and was clothed in the dark garment of despair.

When the long-desired hour of release came, and I was free to turn my back upon the spires of my prison city, I had already plumbed an abyss of misery. The very thought of life in the conflict of the world was abhorrent; and if I had been of the Roman Church I should have become a Benedictine and sought a lettered and cloistered peace. I despaired of finding anywhere upon earth the profound quietude, the absolute detachment, when a chance occasion seemed to crown my desire, and blind to all warnings of disillusion, I suddenly set sail for what I then thought might be a permanent sojourn in the East.

Within two months' time the whole environment of my life was changed, and I was established on a lonely plantation set high upon a range of hills whose slopes were clothed with primeval forests verging to a tropical sea. My home, a white-walled, red-roofed bungalow with a great columned verandah like a temple's peristyle, lay in the issue of an upper valley threaded by a clear stream, whence you may look far down over rolling plains to an horizon lost in the shimmering heat of noon.

Immediately to the east rose the cone of a great solitary hill, always outlined against the sky with a majestic isolation that lent it an almost personal existence, and at the birth of every day bearing the orb of the rising sun upon its wooded shoulder. Round about, in scattered villages of thatched and mud-walled huts, dwelled brown men of ancient pagan ways, men who neither knew progress nor set any price upon time.

There I entered upon a wholly new existence as remote from all the social trials which beset shyness as if it were pa.s.sed in some island of the uttermost sea. I had escaped from a harrying pursuit; I was free; and to the bliss of this recovered liberty I abandoned myself, without attempting to justify my flight to conscience or forming any scheme for future years. Like a deer which has eluded the hounds, I yearned only for rest and long oblivion of the chase; I wanted to live woodland days until, all the strain and panic of the past forgotten, I might rise refreshed and see a new way clear before me.

And this first abandonment was a time of ecstasy. The long tranquil days were crowned by nights of peace yet more desired. I lay beneath the verandah and watched the stars in their splendour, not the pin-points of cold light that pierce our misty western heavens, but bright orbs in innumerable companies hovering upon the tranced earth. Night after night I saw the incomparable vision; month after month the moon rose slowly over the high wall of the jungle, first a great globe imminent upon the trees, next soaring remote through the upper heavens, waning at last to a sphere of pale unquickening light. I would lie thus for hours motionless, with lulled mind, until the breeze forerunning the dawn, or the quavering wail of the jackal, recalled the startled thought to the prison bonds of self.

With the gentle lapse of months all these impersonal influences took dominion over me and gave me a quiet happiness never known before. The nights brought the greater light; but the days too had their glories. I would climb the rugged sides of the mountain, and emerging into a colder world sit beneath an overhanging rock and see the hot air quivering over leagues of plain; while in the nearer distance, far down beneath my feet, the rice-fields shone like emerald and the palm-fringed pools like shields of silver. Or I would stretch myself at early afternoon on the close-cropped gra.s.s on the jungle-edge, and watch the opposite sky take on an ever-deeper blue against the setting sun behind me. Often at such times I would hear a rushing in the highest branches, and turning very silently, see the outposts of a troop of monkeys peering down through the gleaming foliage. Then, if I moved, neither head nor limb, others would come, and yet others, leaping from branch to branch and plunging down from higher to lower levels like divers cleaving a deep green sea; until at last some slightest involuntary movement of mine would put the whole host to flight, and greybeards, young warriors, camp followers and mothers with their children on their backs would spring precipitate from tree to tree, screaming and gibbering like Homer's sapless dead. Then, when the stars rushed out and the darkness came on apace, it was sweet to wander home along those paths so dear to primitive men in all countries, narrow paths and sinuous, smoothed by the footfalls of centuries, winding patiently round every obstacle and never breaking through after the brutal manner of civilization. The fire-flies gleamed in the brushwood on either hand, and from every side rose that all-pervading hum of busy insects through which the tropic forest is never still.

Amid these surroundings, so peaceful and so new, my soul was stilled to that {galene} or ocean-calm which the old Greek philosopher found the highest good for man. And month by month the mere material side of life grew of less moment; the body fretted the spirit less, but often seemed a tissue of gossamer lightness through which it could pa.s.s at will, as the breeze through the gleaming spider-webs upon the bushes at dawn.

There were times when the ideal of the mystic seemed well-nigh accomplished, when my body might almost have been abandoned by the soul for hours upon end. The words of Emerson seemed to be fulfilled: "By being a.s.similated to the original soul by whom and after whom all things subsist, the soul of man does then easily flow into all things and all things flow into it: they mix; and he is present and sympathetic with their structure and law."

As I write now amid the roar of London traffic, I well believe that to men who have never bathed in eastern moonlight, the description will sound hyperbolical and false. But when I think of those old days, how serene they were, how apart, I let the words stand: I am not artist enough to give them a more plausible simplicity. All conditions that a recluse might crave seemed now to be fulfilled for my benefit. The virgin forests and great hills were a perpetual joy, but there was a tranquil pleasure in the plantation which man's labour had reclaimed from these. That was a meet place indeed for the meditation of a quiet hour, and no more grateful refuge can be conceived than such a shady grove at the height of noon. You must not fancy an expanse of dusty land lined with prim rows of plants in the formal style of a nursery garden; but, spread over the lower slopes of the valleys, s.p.a.cious woods of clean, grey-stemmed trees, with overarching branches thinned to cast a diaphanous shade over the sea of l.u.s.trous dark leaves below. The shrubs stood waist-high in serried, commingling ranks, their dark burnished leaves gleaming here and there in the sifted rays that found their way down through the vaults of foliage; the groves of Daphne had no more perfect sheen.

I learned to feel for this gracious place a love only second to that of the wilder jungle; for nature thus tamed to work side by side with man loses indeed her austerer charm, but not her calm and dignity: these she brings with her always to be a glory to the humblest a.s.sociate of her labour. Often as I pruned a tree, or stripped its stem of suckers, I felt the soothing, quickening influence of this partnership, and my thoughts turned to others who had known a like satisfaction and relief; to Obermann forgetting his melancholy in the toil of the vintage, plucking the ripe cl.u.s.ters and wheeling them away as if he had never known the malady of thought; or to Edward Fitzgerald out with the dawn among his roses at Little Grange.

Amid these high dreams and simple occupations, time seemed to glide away like a br.i.m.m.i.n.g stream, and the only events that marked the pa.s.sing of the years were wayfarings through the country-side, sojournings in strange, slumbrous native towns, expeditions of wider range to old white ports of Malabar still dreaming of the forgotten heroes whose story Camoens sang. After many such journeys the genius of this oriental land seemed to travel with us, so familiar did every aspect of this simple Indian life become. Our equipment was of set purpose the patriarchal gear of native fashion; narrow carts with great lumbering wheels were covered by matting arched upon bent saplings, and had within a depth of clean rice-straw on which at night mattresses were spread. Beneath each yoke went a pair of milk-white oxen with large mild eyes and pendulous dewlaps, great beasts of a fine Homeric dignity and worthy of Nausicaa's wain. They swung along with a leisurely rolling gait; and if their silent feet moved too slowly, the sleepy brown-skinned driver, crouching on the pole between them, would shame them into speed by scornful words about their ancestry, more prompt than blows in their effect on beasts of ancient and sacred lineage.

We travelled at night or in the freshness of early morning, regardless of the hours, unfretted by the tyrannous remembrances of appointed times. Milestones pa.s.sed slowly, like things drifting, which ask no attention, and hardly perceived in the moment of their disappearance, serve only to enrich and replenish the mind's voluptuous repose. It was a joy to lie drowsily back upon the straw, awaiting sleep and looking out upon the stars through the open back of the cart, while the fire-flies darted across the feathery cl.u.s.ters of bamboo, and the cradling sound of wheels and footfalls called slumber up out of the darkness. And it was equal delight to spring from the cart at first flush of dawn, and see some far blue hill in the east lined like a cloud with broadening gold, until the resistless sun rose a full orb above it, flooding the grey plains and making the leaves of the banyans gleam with the l.u.s.tre of old bronze. But though the sun was come, we would often press on for yet three hours, through belts of squirrel-haunted wood, beside great sheets of water with wild-duck floating far amidst, and borders starred with yellow nenuphars, across groves of mango and plantain trees into landscapes of tiny terraced plots, where the vivid green rice-blades stood thick in the well-soaked earth, and bowed brown figures diverted to their roots the thread-like rivulet from the great brown tank above.

Here would be a wayside shrine, a simple stuccoed portico with columns streaked in red, enclosing the sacred emblems with their offerings of golden marigold, and bearing upon each corner, carved in dark grey stone, Siva's rec.u.mbent bull. Here millet fields, with hedges of blue aloe or euphorbias like seven-branched candlesticks, announced a place of habitation; soon the village itself appeared, a long irregular line of white-walled houses roofed with thatch or tile, and here and there greater dwellings with carved balconies and barred verandahs, behind which impa.s.sive white-robed figures sat and seemed to ponder upon life.

On the right, perhaps, would be a shop all open to the road, where, cross-legged upon a kind of das, the merchant sat among his piled wares, unenterprising and unsolicitous, serenely confident in the balance-sheet of fate. On the left, in a shady corner, a barber would be bending over a half-shaven skull. Everywhere children of every shade from yellow to deep umber would be playing solemnly about the ways, turning upon the pa.s.sing stranger their grave, unfathomable eyes.

Beyond the village there would be a rest-house maintained for the use of wayfaring white men, and here we would repose through the heat of the day, reclining with a book in rooms shaded with shutters, or with fine mats drenched from hour to hour with cooling sprays of water. Then with the sun's decline we would set out once more, meeting a file of blue-robed women erect as caryatides as they came up from the well, each bearing upon her back-thrown head a water-jar of earthen or brazen ware, staying her burden with a shapely brown arm circled with bangles of gla.s.s and silver. In the short hours before the darkness, we would encounter all the types of men which go to make up Indian country life--the red-slippered banker jogging on his pony beneath a white umbrella, the vendor of palm-wine urging a donkey almost lost beneath the swollen skins, barefooted ryots with silent feet and strident tongues, crowds of boys and children driving buffaloes and cows, all coming homeward from their labour with the evening.

And when these had gone by, and we rolled on through the scented air of the silent open country, we would come perhaps in the gathering darkness to a great river lapping and murmuring through the blackened rocks above the ford, and shining like a glorious path in the light of the rising moon. Silently, high above the banks, there would flit through the still air bands of flying foxes awakened for their nightly raid upon the plantain groves; and in the shadows of the further bank there would gleam a sudden light, or the echoes of a hailing voice would rise and then die away. Steeped in the poetry of all these things we would cross and emerge upon the opposite slope to begin the pilgrimage of the night anew. So to live tranquil days and unfretful, moving in quiet through a still land rich in old tradition--this was an experience of peace which no dreams of imagination could surpa.s.s, a freshness of joy penetrative as the fragrance of unplucked wayside flowers.

Sometimes we would set out on longer journeys by land and sea, crossing the wooded ghats and descending to some old port of historic name, Cochin or Mangalore or Calicut, white places of old memory, sleeping by the blue waves as if no Vasco de Gama had ever come sailing up out of the West to disturb their enchanted slumber. The approach to these dreamy sh.o.r.es was dark and tumultuous, as if nature had set an initiation of contrasting toil before the enjoyment of that light and peace. It followed the bed of a mountain stream, which began in a mere pleat of the hills, tumbling often in white cascades, and enduring no boat upon its waters until half its course was run. But here it challenged man to essay a fall; for where it burst its way over rocky slopes were channels jeopardous and hardly navigable, sequences of foaming rapids, races of wild water swirling round opposing boulders, and careering indignant of restraint between long walls of beetling rock. Here when the sun had gone down we would embark with a crew of lithe brown men in a boat hewn from a single tree, seamless and stoutly fashioned to be the unharmed plaything of such rocks and boisterous waters as these. In these rapids the river waked to consciousness of mighty life, tossing our little craft through a riot of dancing waves, whirling it round the base of perpendicular rocks set like adamant in the hissing waters, sweeping it helpless as a petal down some gla.s.sy plane stilled, as it were, into a concentrated wrath of movement. The men sprang from side to side, from bow to stern, staving the craft with a miraculous deftness from a projecting boulder, forcing her into a new course, steadying her as she reeled in the shock and strain of the conflict, while their long poles bent continually like willow wands against her battered sides. The steersman stood silent, except when he shouted above all the din some resonant, eruptive word of command; the men responded by breathless invocations to their G.o.ds, relaxing no tense sinew until the pent waters rushed out into some broad pool where the eased stream went br.i.m.m.i.n.g silently, gathering new strength in the darkness of its central deeps.

At such places the moon would perhaps be obscured by pa.s.sing clouds, and we would land upon an eyot until she shone once more in a clear heaven.

Stretched at length upon the fine white sand waiting for her return, we could hear the boom of waters in the distance calling us on to a renewal of the conflict. These periods of great stillness, interposed between tumults past and impending, had their own refinement of pleasure as far above the joys of fenced and covenanted ease as the bivouac of the hard campaign surpa.s.ses slumber in the fine linen of a captured city: they brought the wandering mind into communion with elemental forces, and seemed to hold it expectant of supernatural events. In that interlunar twilight there reigned a solemn sense of wonder evoked here eternally, one felt, from the ancient time, with the rustling of stirred foliage and the voice of those far waters for its music.

The lulled reason yielded place to reverie, and the whole rapt being abandoned itself like an Orphic worshipper to the guidance of an unseen mysteriarch. This acquiescence in the swift succession of calm to fury and stress, resembled the quiet which may be conceived to follow sudden death; the heightened sense of vicissitude in things summoned up and sustained a solemn mood. All the while that we lay charmed and half oppressed in this atmosphere as of an under-world, the clouds were drawing forward on their course; and as their last fringe trailed slowly by and the moon was revealed once more, the spell was broken in an instant by human voices calling us to re-embark. Again we glided to the verge of tumultuous falls, again we were flung through foaming narrows and labyrinthine pa.s.sages of torn rocks, until, the last promontory turned with arrowy swiftness, we shot through a postern of the granite barrier and bounded far into still water fringed with trees of profoundest shadow. We put in to sh.o.r.e, for this stage of our journey was over; the dawn was near; the carts stood waiting on the road. But the influence of the wonderful night, clinging about us, would keep us long silent, as if awed by the pa.s.sing of ancient Vedic G.o.ds.

I will not describe the later stages of these journeys: the coasting voyages in restful ships that seemed built to sail Maeander; the touchings at old wharfless ports; the visits to lone temples where Herodotus would have loved to linger; the rambles on the slopes of Adam's Peak; the meditations amid the ruins of Anaradhapura and Pollanarrua, ancient homes of kings, now stripped of every glory but that of these sonorous names--such are the records of every traveller, and are chronicled to satiety by a hundred hasty pens. A month of wandering within the fringe of civilization would be closed by a last week of patriarchal travel, bringing us back to our remote valley just as the clouds of the coming monsoon were ranging in denser ranks along the evening sky like the tents of a beleaguering army. Hardly had we time to settle down for the wet season, see to the stacking of fire-logs, and be sure that every tile on the roof was firm in its appointed place, when the embattled host seemed to break up from its last camp, and advance upon us along the whole line that the eye perceived.

One year I was witness of the first onset, which came in the late afternoon--an immediate shock of ma.s.sed clouds without throwing forward of skirmishers or any prelude of the vanguard. Our home looked down upon a gentle incline of open gra.s.sy land to a broad belt of jungle in the middle distance; here the undergrowth and small trees had been newly cleared away, opening out a dim far view across an unc.u.mbered leaf-strewn floor into the backward gloom of the forest. I sat with my eyes fixed upon the trees, drawing the rain on with the whole strength of desire to the parched country lying there faint with the exhaustion of three months of drought. While I watched, the deep line of cloud, at first distinct from the forest-top along which it came rolling, insensibly merged with the foliage, until every contour was lost in a common gloom, only the great bare stems below standing pale against the gathering darkness. There was an intense stillness everywhere like the silence of expectation which falls upon an awestruck crowd; the very insects had ceased their usual song. And now the ear caught a distant sound, vague and deep, coming up out of the mid darkness, and growing to a mighty volume as a sudden wind swept out from the sounding foliage into the open land and searched every cranny of the house as it pa.s.sed.

Then, as if drawn by the wind, there came into view among the nearest tree-stems a moving grey line advancing with a long roar until it hid the whole forest from sight: it was the wave of battle about to break upon us. It came on like a wall, enormous, irresistible; one instant, and it had devoured the intervening s.p.a.ce; another, and we were lost in the deluge, and the great rain drops were spilled upon the roof with the noise of continuous thunder. As the deep sound reverberated through the roof above me, I went in exulting to a hearth piled with blazing logs, glad in the prospect of renewing for many weeks old and quiet habitudes of indoor life, rich with solace of books and tranquil meditation.

I have dwelt upon the outward aspects of my life in exile, because the sojourn of these years amid the hills and forests taught a natural leechcraft which was to stand me in good stead in coming years, and may stand in equal stead other souls desolate as mine. Like the Nile br.i.m.m.i.n.g over the fields, a flood of joy from nature overlaid my parched being, enriching it with a fertile loam, and shielding it from the irritations of the world. I lay fallow beneath the still, sunlit waters, unharrowed by teasing points of doubt, and porous to the influence of an all-encompa.s.sing peace. Exile had opened to me a new heaven and a new earth, whose freshness and calm charmed thought away from all vain questionings; the fascination of outward things had for a while cooled the useless ardour of introspection. But it was inevitable that the bland ease of such a contemplative life should bring no enduring satisfaction to the mind; it was not an end in itself, but a mere means to serenity, a breathing-s.p.a.ce useful to the recovery of a long-lost fort.i.tude. The time was now come when the hunted deer, refreshed in the quiet of his inaccessible glen, was to awake to new thought of the herd, and of the duties of a common life; when the peace of successful flight was to appear in its true light as a momentary release, and no longer as the ultimate goal imagined in the anguish of pursuit.

It was during this last monsoon that doubts began to stir within, interrupting my studies of the systems of Hindu philosophy and my porings over sacred books. The vague insistence of these misgivings made me surely aware that even in this eastern paradise all was not well; but at first I refused to listen, and plunged deep into the maze of the Vedanta to escape the importunate voice. Yet anxiety came up around me like a heavy atmosphere; an indescribable sense of disillusion, clinging as a damp mist, brought its mildew to the soul, until my new heaven was overcast and my new earth dispeopled of all pleasures. Then one day the fever struck me down, and of a sudden my mind became an arena in which memories of earlier life chased one another unceasingly in the round of a delirious dance. Trivial events impressed themselves on consciousness with strange precision; objects long forgotten rose before me outlined in fire--one, a pane of stained gla.s.s in Fairford Church, with a lost soul peering in anguish through the red bars of h.e.l.l. Each and every apparition was of the old life; all were emissaries from the forsaken West summoning me back to my renounced allegiance. When the fever left me, returning reason slowly brought order amid the welter of confused ideas, as the ants sorted the grain for distracted Psyche, and for the first time I considered in the detachment of reminiscence the nature of my action in leaving England. I sifted the evidence at length as I lay under the verandah slowly recovering strength; and when at last judgment was delivered, it took the necessary form of condemnation.

I saw now that unless a man is prepared to discard every western usage, to slough off his inherited cast of thought, to renounce his faith, wholly and finally to abandon his country and his father's house, his flight is but the blind expedient of cowardice or pride. Here and there may be born one who can so cut himself off from the parent stem as to endure a fruitful grafting upon an oriental stock, but I knew that I at least was none such. I was no more prepared for so uncompromising a renunciation than any other weakling who seeks prestige by parade of exotic wisdom, and deems himself a seer if he can but name the Triad, or tell the avatars of Vishnu, I had not the credulity which may justify the honest renegade, and the western blood still ran too warmly in my veins. I felt that were I to stay in the East for fifty years, I should never reach the supreme heights of metaphysical abstraction whence men really appear as specks and life as a play; therefore to remain was to avow myself a runaway and to live henceforth despicable in my own eyes.

For over the unfathomable deep of oriental custom the torrent of our civilization flows unblending, as in the Druid's legend the twin streams of Dee flow clear through Bala lake, and never mingle with its waters.

Not for our use is that intricate mind which in logic needs more than two premises to a conclusion, and in art is intolerant of all void s.p.a.ce, entangling its figures in labyrinths of ornament which Maya herself might have devised to distract the sight from truth.

The Hindu has the true dignity of contemplation, and superbly removes himself from the sordid greeds of life. But in imagining and reviling an abstraction called Matter, he abides in the errors of the first Greek sages, and mines so far beneath the trodden earth that when he looks up into middle day he sees only the stars above him. Could I have shared the eremite's belief that his prayers help not merely his own solitary soul but all souls travailing through all the world, I might yet have remained where I was, an alien living indifferent to the common rule, like a monk of some shunned exotic order. But with convictions like mine, to do so would have brought the drear sense of derogation. All the miseries of the past were as nothing to that; there was but one manly course--to return and gird my loins for a new struggle with western life. Within a month from the time when this course was seen to be a duty, I was standing on the deck of a homeward-bound steamer, watching the harbour lights recede into the distance.

Back once more in England, I threw aside the clinging robe of meditation, and falling upon work ravenously, indulged what genius of energy was still alive within me. I made haste to adore all that I had so lately burned, making life objective, revering personal ideals, and in the ordinance of material things finding the truest satisfaction of all endeavour. I saw in civilization the world's sole hope; its brisk life and abounding force took sudden hold of a fancy enervated by dreams. Again I found a new heaven and a new earth, though earth was now no more than man's dinted anvil, and heaven his reservoir of useful light. I lived for action and movement; I mingled eagerly with my fellows, and cursed the folly which had driven me to waste three years in an intellectual swoon. Now the day was not long enough for work, Lebanon was not sufficient to burn. I saw the western man with race-dust on his cheeks, or throned in the power-houses of the world, moving upon iron platforms and straight ladders in the mid throb and tumult of encompa.s.sing engines. One false step, and he must fall a crushed and mutilated thing. Yet unconcerned as one strolling at large, he controlled the great wheels and plunging pistons, and brought them to a standstill with a touch of his finger. The confidence and strenuous ease of such life compelled me to marvel and admire, and I who had so lately lain at the feet of eastern sages, set up this mechanician as my G.o.d.

If I looked back at all to the land of dreams, the placid figure beneath the Tree of Enlightenment took on the aspect of a fool's idol, ign.o.bly self-manacled, pitiful and irksome in remembrance.

But if once more I dreamed of finality in change I deceived myself, forgetting that G.o.d Himself cannot unmake the past or undo what is done.

A year had hardly gone by in this new apprenticeship to life, when at moments of weariness or overstrain sharp doubts shot through me and were gone again, like twinges of sudden pain recalling old disease to one who has lulled himself with dreams of cure. The feeling of fellowship with men grew weaker, and as it waned I began to shrink once more from my kind. I still believed myself happy, but happiness seemed to need constant affirmation, as though it could make no way in my favour without display of token or credential to confirm its truth. There were pauses in the clatter and jangle of life; the revolutions of the great wheels sometimes slowed into silence; and as these interludes grew more frequent, I caught myself repeating that I really was content. The faint a.s.surance given, I flung myself with devouring industry upon my allotted task, trying to stifle the forebodings which prophesied against my peace.

In one such pause my old self appeared before me again, like the face of an ancient enemy looking in from the darkness; stealthy footfalls which of late I had so often seemed to hear were now referred to their true cause as we saw each other eye to eye. The old Adam had awakened and was come for his inheritance; and the vision of him there across the pane gazing in upon his own, seemed to arraign me for disowning a brother and denying his indefeasible right. I recognized that with this familiar form cold reason had returned to oust the hopes and emotions which had usurped her office. My rush for freedom had ended, as such sallies often do, in exhaustion, capture and despair; upon the thrill and thunder of the charge followed the silence of the dungeon and the anguish of stiffening wounds. The truth, so simply written that a child might have spelled it, lay clear before me: I had left reformation till too late. I was too old to change.

Even a few years before, I might have dashed out, like Marmion, from the prison-fortress; but now the opportunity was past and the portcullis was down. My character with all its faults was formed within me; and the very years which I had pa.s.sed in the wilderness, instead of averting the danger, had set the final seal upon my fate, for when a man has reached a certain point in life he is intractable to the reforming hand. But though at last I knew myself beaten, and helpless in the hands of an implacable power, I fluttered like a wounded bird and sought wildly for a loophole of escape. I could no longer hope to stand alone against destiny; that conceit was gone: could I find a comrade to help me through the press and lift me when I fell? But here the invincible pride of shyness barred the way, forbidding alike any confession of weakness or any appeal to man's compa.s.sion. I could not bring myself to say: I am unable to rule my life, do you undertake it for me. Was marriage a conceivable path of redemption? I had never envisaged it before, but now, in my desperation, I dreamed it for a moment a possible issue. I even fixed upon the person who should thus save me from myself, and beguiled many lonely hours by picturing her charms and enumerating her n.o.ble qualities.

She lived in a country house where I had been several times a guest, and she had one of those faces which, in Gray's beautiful expression, speak the language of all nations. Her features had that sunny charm which thaws mistrust; she was dowered with all graces and sweet qualities; and you could no more have doubted the immanent n.o.bility of her nature than you could have dreamed a stain in the texture of a white petal. And with all her gentleness there was present I know not what sign and promise of strength, waking in those who saw her an intuitive trust in loyalty of uttermost proof. She would have flamed indignant against evil, but only evil could have moved her from that equal poise of soul which made her entrance into a room the prelude to higher thoughts and finer feelings.

She was naturally kind without consciousness of a mission, neither seeking to enslave nor enfranchise, but by a silent outflowing of goodness enn.o.bling whatever company she was in. Nor was her tongue the prattling servant of her beauty, but a guide of cheerful converse; for just as she charmed without device or scheme of fascination, so she possessed the art of speaking well without seeming to have ever studied it. In the chase after just and felicitous ideas, she could lead or follow over the most varied fields with the intuition of the huntress born. With all these excellences, her wit, her sincerity, her ardour for all things bright and true, she had no conceit of herself but kept her father's house in gladness and loved the country-side.