Escape, and Other Essays Part 5

Far from finding the spring and motion of life diminished, I feel that the current of it runs with a sharper and clearer intensity, because I have learned my limitations, and expend no energy in useless enterprises. I have learned what the achievements are which come joyfully bearing their sheaves with them, and what are the trivial and fruitless aims. When I was younger I desired to be known and recognised and deferred to. I wanted to push my way discreetly into many companies, to produce an impression, to create a sense of admiration. Now as the sunset draws nearer, and the enriched light, withdrawn from the farther horizon, begins to pulsate more intensely in the quarter whence it must soon altogether fade, I begin to see that vague and widely ranging effects have a thinness and shallowness about them. It is a poor thing just to see oneself transiently reflected in a hundred little mirrors. There is no touch of reality about that. Little greetings, casual flashes of courteous talk, petty compliments--these are things that fade as soon as they are born. The only thing worth doing is a little bit of faithful and solid work, something given away which costs one real pain, a few ideas and thoughts worked patiently out, a few hearts really enlivened and inspirited. And then, too, comes the consciousness that much of one's cherished labour is of no use at all except to oneself; that work is not a magnificent gift presented to others, but a wholesome privilege conceded to oneself, that the love which brought with it but a momentary flash of self-regarding pleasure is not love at all, and that only love which means suffering--not delicate regrets and luxurious reveries, but hard and hopeless pain--is worth the name of love at all. Those are some of the lights of sunset, the enfolding gleams that are on their way to death, and which yet testify that the light which wanes and lapses here, drawn reluctantly away from dark valley and sombre woodland, is yet striding ahead over dewy uplands and breaking seas, past the upheaving shoulder of the world.

But best of all the gifts of sunset to the spirit is the knowledge that behind all the whirling web of daylight, beyond all the noise and laughter and appet.i.te and drudgery of life, lies the spirit of beauty that cannot be always revealed or traced in the louder and more urgent pageantry of the day. The sunset has the power of weaving a subtle and remote mystery over a scene that by day has nothing to show but a homely and obvious animation. I was travelling the other day and pa.s.sed, just as the day began to decline, through the outskirts of a bustling, seaport town. It had all the interest and curiosity of life. Crowded warehouses, swinging up straw-packed crates into projecting penthouses; steamers with red-stained funnels, open-mouthed tubes, gangways, staircase heads, dangling boats, were moored by bustling wharves.

One could not divine the use of half the strangely shaped objects with which the scene was furnished, or what the business could be of all the swarming and hurrying figures. Deep sea-horns blew and whistles shrilled, orders were given, hands waved. It was life at its fullest and busiest, but it was life demanding and enforcing its claim and concealing its further purposes. It was just a glimpse of something full of urgent haste, but pleasanter to watch than to mix with; then we pa.s.sed through a wilderness of little houses, street after street, yard after yard. Presently we were rushing away from it all past a lonely sea-creek that ran far up into the low-lying land. That had a more silent life of its own; old dusky hulks lay at anchor in the channel; the tide ebbed away from mudflats and oozy inlets, the skeletons of worn-out boats stood up out of the weltering clay. Gradually, as the sun went down among orange stains and twisted cloud-wreaths, the creek narrowed and beyond lay a mysterious promontory with shadowy woods and low bare pasture-lands, with here and there a tower standing up or a solitary sea-mark, or a hamlet of cl.u.s.tered houses by the water's edge, while the water between grew paler and stiller, reflecting the wan green of the sky. It is not easy to describe the effect of this scene, thus magically transfigured, upon the mind; but it is a very real and distinct emotion, though its charm depends upon the fact that it shifts the reality of the world to a further point, away from the definite shapes and colours, the tangible and visible relations of things, which become for an instant like a translucent curtain through which one catches a glimpse of a larger and more beautiful reality. The specific hopes, fears, schemes, designs, purposes of life, suddenly become an interlude and not an end. They do not become phantasmal and unreal, but they are known for a brief moment as only temporary conditions, which by their hardness and sharpness obscure a further and larger life, existing before they existed, and extending itself beyond their momentary pact and influence. All that one is engaged in busily saying and doing and enacting is seen in that instant to be only as a ripple on a deep pool. It does not make the activities of life either futile or avoidable; it only gives the mystical sense, that however urgent and important they may seem, there is something further, larger, greater, beyond them, of which they are a real part, but only a part.

Moreover, in my own experience, the further secret, whatever it is, is by no means wholly joyful and not at all light-hearted. It seems to me at such times that it is rather solemn, profound, serious, difficult, and sad. But it is not a heavy or depressing sadness-- indeed, the thought is at once hopeful and above everything beautiful. It has nothing that is called sentimental about it. It is not full of rest and content and peace; it is rather strong and stern, though it is gentle too; but it is the kind of gentle strength which faces labour and hardness, not troubled by them, and indeed knowing that only thus can the secret be attained. There is no hint of easy, childlike happiness about the mood; there is a happiness in it, but it is an old and a wise happiness that has learned how to wait and is fully prepared for endurance. There is no fretfulness in it, no chafing over dreams unrealised, no impatience or disappointment. But it does not speak of an untroubled bliss--rather of a deep, sad and loving patience, which expects no fulfilment, no easy satisfaction of desire.

It always seems to me that the quality which most differentiates men is the power of recognising the Unknown. Some natures acquiesce buoyantly or wretchedly in present conditions, and cannot in any circ.u.mstances look beyond them; some again have a deep distaste for present conditions whatever they are; and again there are some who throw themselves eagerly and freely into present conditions, use experience, taste life, enjoy, grieve, dislike, but yet preserve a consciousness of something above and beyond. The idealist is one who has a need in his soul to worship, to admire, to love. The mistake made too often by religious idealists is to believe that this sense of worship can only be satisfied by religious and, even more narrowly, by ecclesiastical observance. For there are many idealists to whom religion with its scientific creeds and definite dogmas seems only a dreary sort of metaphysic, an attempt to define what is beyond definition. But there are some idealists who find the sense of worship and the consciousness of an immortal power in the high pa.s.sions and affections of life. To these the human form, the spirit that looks out from human eyes, are the symbols of their mystery. Others find it in art and music, others again in the endless loveliness of nature, her seas and streams, her hills and woods. Others again find it in visions of helping and raising mankind out of base conditions, or in scientific investigation of the miraculous const.i.tution of nature. It has a hundred forms and energies; but the one feature of it is the sense of some vast and mysterious Power, which holds the world in its grasp--a Power which can be dimly apprehended and even communicated with. Prayer is one manifestation of this sense, though prayer is but a formulation of one's desires for oneself and for the world.

But the essential and vital part of the mystery is not what the soul asks of it, but the signals which it makes to the soul. And here I am but recording my own experience when I say that the lights and gleams of sunset, its golden inlets and cloud-ripples, the dusky veil it weaves about the world, is for my own spirit the solemnity which effects for me what I believe that the ma.s.s effects for a devoted Catholic--the unfolding in hints and symbols of the mysteries of G.o.d. An unbeliever may look on at a ma.s.s and see nothing but the vesture and the rite, a drama of woven paces and waving hands, when a believer may become aware of the very presence of the divine. And the sunset has for me that same unveiling of the beauty of G.o.d; it illumines and transfigures life; it shows me visibly and sacredly that beauty pure and stainless runs from end to end of the universe, and calls upon me to adore it, to prostrate myself before its divine essence. The fact that another may see it carelessly and indifferently makes no difference. It only means that not thus does he perceive G.o.d. But, for myself, I know no experience more wholly and deeply religious than when I pa.s.s in solitude among deep stream-fed valleys, or over the wide fenland, or through the familiar hamlet, and see the dying day flame and smoulder far down in the west among cloudy pavilions or in tranquil s.p.a.ces of clear sky. Then the well-known land whose homely, day- long energies I know seems to gather itself together into a far and silent adoration, to commit itself trustfully and quietly to G.o.d, to receive His endless benediction, and in that moment to become itself eternal in a soft harmony of voiceless praise and pa.s.sionate desire.

VII

THE HOUSE OF PENGERSICK

There are days--perhaps it is well that they are not more common-- when by some singular harmony of body and spirit, every little sound and sight strikes on the senses with a peculiar sharpness and distinctness of quality, has a keen and racy savour, and comes as delightfully home to the mind as cool well-water to thirsty lips.

Everything seems in place, in some well-designed combination or symphony of the senses; and more than that--the sound, the sight, whatever it be, sets free a whole train of far-reaching and mysterious thoughts, that seem to flash the secret of life on the spirit--or rather hint it in a tender, smiling way, as a mother nods a delighted acquiescence to the eager questions of a child face to face with some happy surprise. That day of January was just such a day to me, as we drove along the dreary road from Marazion to Helston, by ruined mine-towers with their heaps of scoriae, looking out to the sea on the one hand, and on the other to the low, monotonous slopes of tilth and pasture, rising and falling like broad-backed waves, with here and there a wild and broken wood of firs, like the forest of Broceliande, or a holt of wind-brushed, fawn-coloured ash-trees, half empurpled by the coming of spring, in some rushy dingle by the stream side.

It was a cool grey day, with a haze over the sea, the gusty sky of yesterday having hardened into delicate flakes of pearly cloud, like the sand on some wave-beaten beach. It was all infinitely soft and refreshing to the eye, that outspread pastoral landscape, seen in a low dusk, like the dusk of a winter dawn.

It was then that in a little hollow to our right we saw the old House of Pengersick--what a grim, lean, hungry sort of name! We made our way down along a little road, the big worn flints standing up out of the gravel, by brakes of bramble, turf-walls where the ferns grew thick, by bits of wild upland covered with gorse and rusty bracken, and down at last to the tiny hamlet--four or five low white houses, in little gardens where the escallonia grew thick and glossy, the purple veronica bloomed richly, and the green fleshy mesembryanthemum tumbled and dripped over the fences. The tower itself rose straight out of a farmyard, where calves stared through the gate, pigs and hens routed and picked in the mire. I have seldom seen so beautiful a bit of building: it was a great square battlemented tower, with a turret, the mullioned windows stopped up with sea-worn boulders. The whole built of very peculiar stone, of a dark grey tinge, weathered on the seaward side to a most delicate silvery grey, with ivy sprawling over it in places, like water shot out from a pail over a stone floor. There were just a few traces of other buildings in the sheds and walls, and bits of carved stonework piled up in a rockery. No doubt the little farm itself and the cottages were all built out of the ruins.

From the tower itself--it has a few bare rooms filled with farm lumber--one can see down the valley to the long grey line of the Prah sands, and the low dusky cliffs of Hove point, where the waves were breaking white.

I suppose it needed to be a strong place. The Algiers and Sallee pirates used to make descents upon this coast till a comparatively recent date. As late as 1636 they kidnapped seven boats and forty- two fishermen off the Manacles, none of whom were ever heard of again. Eighty fishermen from Looe were captured in one day, and there is a complaint extant from the justices of Cornwall to the lord lieutenant that in one year Cornwall had lost above a thousand mariners thus!

But there was also another side to the picture; the natives all along this coast were dreadful wreckers and plunderers themselves, and made little account of burning a ship and knocking the survivors on the head. The very parish, Germoe, in which Pengersick stands, had as bad a name as any in Cornwall:

G.o.d keep us from rocks and shelving sands, And save us from Breage and Germoe men's hands,

runs the old rhyme. And there is an evil old story of how a treasure ship, the St. Andrew of Portugal, went ash.o.r.e at Gunwalloe in January 1526. There were thousands of cakes of copper and silver on board, plate, pearls, jewels, chains, brooches, arras, satins, velvets, sets of armour for the King of Portugal, and a huge chest of coined gold.

The wretched crew got most of the treasure to land and stacked it on the cliffs, when John Milliton of Pengersick, with a St. Aubyn and a G.o.dolphin, came down with sixty armed men, and took all the treasure away. Complaints were made, and the three gentlemen protested that they had but ridden down to save the crew, had found them dest.i.tute, and had even given them money. But I daresay the big guest-chamber of Pengersick was hung with Portuguese arras for many a long year afterwards.

The Millitons died out, and their land pa.s.sed by purchase or marriage to the descendants of another of the three pious squires, G.o.dolphin of G.o.dolphin--and belongs to-day to his descendant, the Duke of Leeds.

One would have thought that men could not have borne to live so, in such deadly insecurity. But probably they troubled their heads little about the pirates, kept the women and children at home, and set a retainer on the cliff in open weather, to scan the offing for the light-rigged barques, while poorer folk took their chance. We live among a different set of risks now, and think little of them, as the days pa.s.s.

The life of the tower was simple and hardy enough--some fishing and hunting, some setting of springes on the moor for woodc.o.c.k and rabbits, much farmwork, solid eating and drinking, and an occasional carouse--a rude, plentiful, healthy life, perhaps not as far removed from our own as we like to believe.

But the old tower spoke to me to-day of different things, of the buried life of the past, of the strange drift of human souls through the world for their little span of life, love, and sorrow, and all so pathetically ignorant of what goes before and follows after, why it so comes about, and what is the final aim of the will we blindly serve. Here was a house of men, I said to myself, with the same hopes and fears and fancies as myself, and yet none of them, could I recall them, could give me any reason for the life we thus hurriedly live, so much of it entirely joyful and delightful, so much of it distasteful and afflicting. On a sunny day of summer, with the sea a sapphire blue, set with great purple patches, the scent of the gorse in the air, the sound of the clear stream in one's ears, what could be sweeter than to live? and even on dark days, when the wind volleys up from the sea, and the rain dashes on the windows, and the gulls veer and sail overhead, the great guest- room with its fire of wreckage, the women working, the children playing about, must have been a pleasant place enough. But even to the strongest and boldest of the old squires the end came, as the waggon with the coffin jolted along the stony lane, and the bell of Germoe came faintly over the hill.

But I could not think of that to-day, with a secret joy in my heart; I thought rather of the splendid mystery of life, that seems to screen from us something more gracious still--the steep velvet sky full of star-dust, the flush of spring in sunlit orchards, the soft, thunderous echoes of great ocean billows, the orange glow of sunset behind dark woods: all that background of life; and then the converse of friend with friend, the intercepted glance of wondering eyes, the whispered message of the heart. All this, and a crowd of other sweet images and fancies came upon me in a rush to-day, like scents from a twilight garden, as I watched the old silvery tower stand up bluff and square, with the dark moorland behind it, and the little houses cl.u.s.tering about its feet.

VIII

VILLAGES

I wonder if any human being has ever expended as much sincere and unrequited love upon the little pastoral villages about Cambridge as I have. No one ever seems to me to take the smallest interest in them or to know them apart or to remember where they are. It is true that it takes a very faithful lover to distinguish instantly and impeccably between Histon, Hinxton, Hauxton, Harston, and Harlton; but to me they have all of them a perfectly distinct quality, and make a series of charming little pastoral pictures in the mind. Who shall justly and perfectly a.s.sess the beautiful claims of Great and Little Eversden? I doubt if any inhabitant of Cambridge but myself and one friend of mine, a good man and true, could do it. Yet it is as pleasant to have a connoisseurship in villages as to have a connoisseurship in wines or cigars, though it is not so regarded.

What is the charm of them? That I cannot say. It is a mystery, like the charm of all sweet things; and further, what is the meaning of love for an inanimate thing, with no individuality, no personality, no power of returning love? The charm of love is that one discerns some spirit making signals back. "I like you to be here, I trust you, I am glad to be with you, I wish to give you something, to increase your joy, as mine is increased." That, or something like that, is what one reads in the eyes and faces and gestures of those whom one dares to love. One would otherwise be sadly and mournfully alone if one could not come across the traces of something, some one whose heart leaps up and whose pulse quickens at the proximity of comrade and friend and lover. But even so there is always the thought of the parting ahead, when, after the sharing of joy, each has to go on his way alone.

Then, one may love animals; but that is a very strange love, for the man and the animal cannot understand each other. The dog may be a true and faithful comrade, and there really is nothing in the world more wonderful than the trustful love of a dog for a man. One may love a horse, I suppose, though the horse is a foolish creature at best; one may have a sober friendship with a cat, though a cat does little more than tolerate one; and a bird can be a merry little playfellow: but the terror of wild animals for men has something rather dreadful about it, because it stands for many centuries of cruel wrong-doing.

And one may love, too, with a wistful sort of love the works of men, pictures, music, statues; but that, I think, is because one discerns a human figure at the end of a vista--a figure hurrying away through the ages, but whom one feels one could have loved had time and place only allowed.

But when it comes to loving trees and flowers, streams and hills, buildings and fields, what is it that happens? I have a perfectly distinct feeling about these little villages hereabouts. Some are to me like courteous strangers, some like dull and indifferent people, some like pleasant, genial folk whom I am mildly pleased to see; but with some I have a real and devoted friendship. I like visiting them, and if I cannot visit them, I think of them; when I am far away the thought of them comes across me, and I am glad to think of them waiting there for me, nestling under their hill, the smoke going up above the apple-orchards.

One or two of them are particularly beloved because I visited them first thirty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, and the thought of the old days and the old friendships springs up again like a sweet and far-off fragrance when I enter them. Yet I do not know any of the people who live in these villages, though by dint of going there often there are a few people by whom I am recognised and saluted.

But let me take one village in particular, and I will not name it, because one ought not to publish the names of those whom one loves.

What does it consist of? It straggles along a rough and ill-laid lane, under a little wold, once a sheep-walk, now long ploughed up.

The soil of the wold is pale, so that in the new-ploughed fields there rest soft, creamlike shadows when the evening sun falls aslant. There are two or three substantial farmhouses of red brick, comfortable old places, with sheds and ricks and cattle-byres and barns close about them. And I think it is strange that the scent of a cattle-byre, with its rich manure and its oozing pools, is not ungrateful to the human sense. It ought to be, but it is not. It gives one, by long inheritance, no doubt, a homelike feeling.

Then there are many plastered, white-walled, irregular cottages, very quaint and pretty, perhaps a couple of centuries old, very ill built, no doubt, but enchanting to look at; there is a new schoolhouse, very ugly at present, with its smart red brick and its stone facings--ugly because it does not seem to have grown up out of the place, but to have been brought there by rail; and there are a few new yellow-brick cottages, probably much pleasanter to live in than the old ones, but with no sort of interest or charm. The whole is surrounded by little fields, orchards, closes, paddocks, and a good many great elms stand up above the house-roofs. There is one quaint old farm, with a moat and a dove-cote and a fine, old mellow brick wall surrounded by little pollarded elms, very quiet and characteristic; and then there is a big, ancient church, by whom built one cannot divine, because there is no squire in the village, and the farmers and labourers could no more build such a church now than they could build a stellar observatory. It would cost nowadays not less than ten thousand pounds, and there is no record of who gave the money or who the architect was. It has a fine tower and a couple of solid bells; it has a few bits of good bra.s.s-work, a chandelier and some candlesticks, and it has a fine eighteenth-century tomb in a corner, with a huge slab of black basalt on the top, and a heraldic shield and a very obsequious inscription, which might apply to anyone, and yet could be true of n.o.body. Why the particular old gentleman should want to sleep there, or who was willing to spend so much on his lying in state, no one knows, and I fear that no one cares except myself.

There are a few little bits of old gla.s.s in the church, in the traceries of the windows, just enough to show that some one liked making pretty things, and that some one else cared enough to pay for them. And then there is a solid rectory by the church, inhabited for centuries by fellows of a certain Cambridge college.

I do not expect that they lived there very much. Probably they rode over on Sundays, read two services, and had a cold luncheon in between; perhaps they visited a sick parishioner, and even came over on a week-day for a marriage or a funeral; and I daresay that in the summer, when the college was deserted, they came and lived there for a few weeks, rather bored, and longing for the warm combination room and the college port and the gossip and stir of the place.

That is really all, I think. And what is there to love in all that?

Well, it is a little s.p.a.ce of earth in which life has been going on for I daresay a thousand years. The whole place has grown slowly up out of the love and care and work of man. Perhaps there were nothing but little huts and hovels at first, with a tiny rubble church; then the houses grew a little bigger and better. Perhaps it was emptied again by the Black Death, which took a long toll of victims hereabouts. Shepherds, ploughmen, hedgers, ditchers, farmers, an ale-house-keeper, a shopkeeper or two, and a priest-- that has been the village for a thousand years. Patient, stupid, toilsome, unimaginative, kindly little lives, I daresay. Not much interested in one another, ill educated, gossipy, brutish, superst.i.tious, but surprised perhaps into sudden pa.s.sions of love, and still more surprised perhaps by the joys of fatherhood and motherhood; with children of all ages growing up, pretty and engaging and dirty and amusing and naughty, fading one by one into dull and sober age, and into decrepitude, and the churchyard at the end of all!

Well, I think all that pathetic and mysterious, and beautiful with the beauty that reality has. I want to know who all the folks were, what they looked like, what they cared about or thought about, how they made terms with pain and death, what they hoped, expected, feared, and what has become of them. Everyone as urgently and vehemently and interestedly alive as I myself, and yet none of them with the slightest idea of how they got there or whither they were going--the great, helpless, good-natured, pa.s.sive army of men and women, pouring like a stream through the world, and borne away on the wings of the wind. They were glad to be alive, no doubt, when the sun fell on the apple-orchard, and the scent of the fruit was in the air, and the bees hummed round the blossoms, when people smile at each other and say kind and meaningless things; they were afraid, no doubt, as they lay in pain in the stuffy attics, with the night wind bl.u.s.tering round the chimney-stack, and hoped to be well again. Then there were occasions and treats, the Sunday dinner, the wedding, the ride in the farm-cart to Cambridge, the visit of the married sister from her home close by. I do not suppose they knew or cared what was happening in the world. War and politics made little difference to them. They knew about the weather, they cared perhaps about their work, they liked the Sunday holiday--all very dim and simple, thoughts not expressed, feelings not uttered, experience summed up in little bits of phrases. Yet I like to think that they were pleased with the look of the place without knowing why. I don't deceive myself about all this, or make it out as idyllic. I don't exactly wish to have lived thus, and I expect it was coa.r.s.e, greedy, dull, ugly, a great deal of it; but though I can think fine thoughts about it, and put my thoughts into musical words, I do not honestly believe that my life, my hopes, my feelings differ very much from the experience of these old people.

Of course I have books and pictures and intellectual fancies and ideas; but that is only an elaborate game that I play, the things I notice and recognise: but I expect the old hearts and minds were at work, too, noticing and observing and recording; and all my flourish of talk and thought is only a superficial affair.

And what consecrates and lights up the little place for me, touches it with golden hues, makes it moving, touching, beautiful, is the thought of all that strange, unconscious life, the love and hate, the fear and the content, the joy and sorrow, that has surged to and fro among the thatched roofs and apple-orchards so many centuries before I came into being, and will continue when I am trodden into the dust.