Escape, and Other Essays Part 8

"Yes," I said, "I like life--at least I am very much interested in it. I do not feel sure if I like it; I think you know that better than I do. Tell me, do I like it?"

"Yes," said the voice; "at least I do. You have guessed right for once; it matters more what I like than what you like. You see, I believe in G.o.d, for one thing."

"So do I," I said eagerly. "I have reached that point! I am sure He is there. It is largely a question of argument, and I have really no doubt, no doubt at all. There are difficulties of course-- difficulties about personality and intention; and then there is the origin of evil--I have thought much about that, and I have arrived at a solution; it is this. I can explain it best by an a.n.a.logy. . . ."

There came a laugh from the other side of the wall, not a scornful laugh or an idle laugh, but a laugh kind and compa.s.sionate, like a father with a child on his knee; and the voice said, "I have seen Him--I see Him! He is here all about us, and He is yonder. He is not coming to meet us, as you think. . . . Dear me, how young you must be. . . . I had forgotten."

This struck me dumb for an instant; then I said, "You frighten me!

Who are you, what are you, . . . WHERE are you?"

And then the voice said, in a tone of the deepest and sweetest love, as if surprised and a little pained, "My child!"

And then I heard it no more; and I went back to my cares and anxieties. But it was as the voice had said, and when the time came to decide, I had no doubt at all what to do.

Now I have told all this in the nearest and simplest words that I can find. I have had to use similitudes of voices and laughter and part.i.tion-walls, because one can only use the language which one knows. But it is all quite true and real, more real than a hundred talks which one holds with men and women whose face and dress one sees in rooms and streets, and with whom one bandies words about things for which one does not care. There was indeed some one present with me, whom I knew perfectly well though I could not discern him, whom I had known all my life, who had gone about with me and shared all my experiences, in so far as he chose. But before I go on to speak further, I will tell one more experience, which came at a time when I was very unhappy, longing to escape from life, looking forward mournfully to death.

It had been under similar circ.u.mstances--a dreadful argument proceeding in my mind as to what I could do to get back to happiness again, whom to consult, where to go, whether to give up my work, whether to add to it, what diet to use, how to get sleep which would not visit me.

"Can't you help me?" I said over and over again to the other person. At last the answer came, very faint and far away.

"I am sick," said the voice, "and I cannot come forth!"

That frightened me exceedingly, because I felt alone and weak. So I said, "Is it my fault? Is it anything that I have done?"

"I have had a blow," said the other voice. "You dealt it me--but it is not your fault--you did not know."

"What can I do?" I said.

"Ah, nothing," said the voice. "You must not disturb me! I am trying to recover, and I shall recover. Go on with your play, if you can, and do not heed me."

"My play!" I said scornfully. "Do you not know I am miserable?"

The voice gave a sigh. "You hurt me," it said. "I am weak and faint; but you can help me; be as brave as you can. Try not to think or grieve. I shall be able to help you again soon, but not now. . . . Ah, leave me to myself," it added. "I must sleep, a long sleep; it is your turn to help!"

And then I heard no more; till a day long after, when the voice came to me on a bright morning by the sea, with the clear waves breaking and hissing on the shingle; the voice came blithe and strong, "I am well again; you have done your part, dear one! Give me your burden, and I will carry it; it is your time of joy!"

And then for a long time after that I did not hear the voice, and I was full of delight, hour by hour, grudging even the time I must spend in sleep, because it kept me from the life I loved.

These then are some of the talks we have held together, that Other One and I. But I must say this, that he will not always come for being called. I sometimes call to him and get no answer; sometimes he cries out beside me suddenly in the air. He seems to have a life of his own, quite distinct from mine. Sometimes when I am fretted and vexed, he is quietly joyful and elate, and then my troubles die away, like the footsteps of the wind upon water; and sometimes when I would be happy and contented, he is heavy and displeased, and takes no heed of me; and then I too fall into sorrow and gloom. He is much the stronger, and it matters far more to me what he feels than what I feel. I do not know how he is occupied--very little, I think, and what is strangest of all, he changes somewhat; very slowly and imperceptibly; but he has changed more than I have in the course of my life. I do not change at all, I think. I can say better what I think, I am more accomplished and skilful; but the thought and motive is unaltered from what it was when I was a child. But he is different in some ways. I have only gone on perceiving and remembering, and sometimes forgetting. But he does not forget; and here I feel that I have helped him a little, as a servant can help his master to remember the little things he has to do.

I think that many people must have similar experiences to this.

Tennyson had, when he wrote "The Two Voices," and I have seen hints of the same thing in a dozen books. The strange thing is that it does not help one more to be strong and brave, because I know this, if I know anything, that when the anxious and careful part of me lies down at last to rest, I shall slip past the wall which now divides us, and be clasped close in the arms of that Other One; nay, it will be more than that! I shall be merged with him, as the quivering water-drop is merged with the fountain; that will be a blessed peace; and I shall know, I think, without any questioning or wondering, many things that are obscure to me now, under these low-hung skies, which after all I love so well. . . .

XII

SCHOOLDAYS

1

It certainly seems, looking back to the early years, that I have altered very little--hardly at all, in fact! The little thing, whatever it is, that sits at the heart of the machine, the speck of soul-stuff that is really ME, is very much the same creature, neither old nor young; confident, imperturbable, with a strange insouciance of its own, knowing what it has to do. I have done many things, gathered many impressions, ransacked experience, enjoyed, suffered; but whatever I have argued, expressed, tried to believe, aimed at, hoped, feared, has hardly affected that central core of life at all. And I feel as though that strange, dumb, cheerful self--it is always cheerful, I think--had played the part all along of a silent and not very critical spectator of all I have tried to be. The mind, the reason, the emotion, have each of them expanded, acquired knowledge, learned skill, but that innermost cell has lain there, sleepless, perceptive, dreaming head on hand, watching, seldom making a sign of either approval or disapproval.

In childhood it was more dominant than it is now, perhaps. It went its way more securely, because, in my case at least, the mind was, in those far-off days, strangely inactive. The whole nature was bent upon observation. Ruskin is the only writer who has described what was precisely my own experience, when he says that as a child he lived almost entirely in the region of SIGHT. It was the only part of me, the eye, that was then furiously and untiringly awake.

Taste, smell, touch, had each of them at moments a sharp consciousness; but it was the shape, the form, the appearance of things, that interested me, took up most of my time and energy, occupied me unceasingly. Even now my memory ranges, with lively precision, over the home, the garden, the heathery moorland, the firwoods, the neighbouring houses of the scene where I lived. I can see the winding walks, the larch shrubberies, the flower-borders, the very grain of the brickwork; while in the house itself, the wall papers, the furniture, the patterns of carpets and chintzes, are all absolutely clear to the memory.

Thus I lived, from day to day and from year to year, in the moment as it pa.s.sed; but I remember no touch of speculation or curiosity as to how or why things existed as they did. The house, the arrangements, the servants, the meal-times, the occupations were all simply accepted as they were, just the will of my parents taking shape. I never thought of interrogating or altering anything. Life came to me just so. I remember no sharp emotions, no dominant affections. My parents seemed to me kind and powerful; but it did not occur to me that, if I had died, they would feel any particular grief. I was just a part of their arrangements; and my idea of life was simply to manage so that I should be as little interfered with as possible, and go my way, annexing such little property as I could, and learning the appearance of the things that were too large to be annexed.

Then my elder brother went off to school. I do not remember being sorry, or missing his company; in fact, I rather welcomed the additional independence it gave me. I was glad in a mild way when he came back for the holidays; but I do not recollect the faintest curiosity about what he did at school, or what it was all like. He told us some stories about boys and masters; but it was all quite remote, like a fairy-tale; and then the time gradually drew near when I too was to go to school; but I remember neither interest or curiosity or excitement or anxiety. I think I rather enjoyed a few extra presents, and the packing of my school-box with a consciousness of proprietorship. And then the day came, and I drifted off like thistledown into the big world.

2

My father and mother took us down to school. It was a fine place at Mortlake, called Temple Grove, near Richmond Park. Mortlake was hardly more than an old-fashioned village then, in the country, not joined to London as it is now by streets and rows of villas. It was a place of big suburban mansions, with high walls everywhere, cedars looking over, towering chestnuts, big cla.s.sical gate-posts.

Temple Grove, so called from the statesman, the patron of Swift, was a large, solid, handsome house with fine rooms, and large grounds well timbered. Schoolrooms and dormitories had been tacked on to the house, but all built in a solid, s.p.a.cious way. It was dignified, but bare and austere. We arrived, and went in to see the headmaster, Mr. Waterfield, a tall, handsome, extremely alarming man, with curled hair and beard and flashing eyes. He was a fine gentleman, a brilliant talker, and an excellent teacher, though unnecessarily severe. I had been used to see my father, who was then himself headmaster of Wellington College, treated with obvious deference; but Waterfield, who was an old family friend, met him with a dignified sort of equality. My parents went in to luncheon with the family. My brother and I crawled off to the school dinner; he of course had many friends, and I was plunged, shy and bewildered, into the middle of them. There were over a hundred boys there. Some of them seemed to me alarmingly old and strong; but my brother's friends were kind to me, and I remember thinking at first that it was going to be a very pleasant sort of place. Then in the early afternoon my parents went off; we went to the station with them, and I said good-bye without any particular emotion. It seemed to me a nice easy kind of life. But as my brother and I walked away, between the high-walled gardens, back to the school, the first shadow fell. He was strangely silent and dull, I thought; and then he turned to me, and in an accent of tragedy which I had never heard him use before, he said, "Thirteen weeks at this beastly place!"

I took a high place for my age, and after due examination in the big schoolroom, where four masters were teaching at estrades, with little rows of lockered desks much hacked and carved, arranged symmetrically round each, the big fireplace guarded with high iron bars, I was led across the room, and committed to the care of a little, pompous, stout man, with big side-whiskers, a reddish nose, and an air half irritable, half good-natured, in a short gown, who was holding forth to a cla.s.s. It was all complete: I had my place and my duty before me; and then gradually day by day the life shaped itself. I had a little cubicle in a high dormitory. There was the big, rather frowsy dining-room, where we took our meals; a large comfortable library where we could sit and read; outside there were two or three cricket fields, a gravelled yard for drill, a gymnasium; and beyond that stretched what were called "the grounds," which seemed to me then and still seem a really beautiful place. It had all been elaborately laid out; there was a big lawn, low-lying, where there had once been a lake, shrubberies and winding walks, a ruinous building, with a cla.s.sical portico, on the top of a wooded mound, a kitchen garden and paddocks for cows beyond; and on each side the walls and palings of other big mansions, all rather grand and mysterious. And there within that little s.p.a.ce my life was to be spent.

The only sight we ever had of the outer world was that we went on Sundays to an extraordinarily ugly and tasteless modern church, where the services were hideously performed; and occasionally we were allowed to go over to Richmond with a shilling or two of pocket-money to shop; and sometimes there were walks, a dozen boys with a good-natured master rambling about Richmond Park, with its forest clumps and its wandering herds of deer, all very dim and beautiful to me.

Very soon I settled in my own mind that it was a detestable place.

Yet I was never bullied or molested in any way. The tone of the place was incredibly good; not one word or hint of moral evil did I ever hear there during the whole two years I spent there, so that I left the school as innocent as I had entered it.

But it was a place of terrors and solitude. There were rules which one did not know, and might unawares break. I did not, I believe, make a single real friend there. I liked a few of the boys, but was wholly bent on guarding my inner life from everyone. The work was always easy to me, the masters were good-natured and efficient. But I lived entirely in dreams of the holidays--home had become a distant heavenly place; and I recollect waking early in the summer mornings, hearing the scream of peac.o.c.ks in a neighbouring pleasaunce, and thinking with a sickening disgust of the strict, ordered routine of the place, no one to care about, dull work to be done, nothing to enjoy or to be interested in. There were games, but they were not much organised, and I seldom played them. I wandered about in free times in the grounds, and the only times of delight that I recollect were when one buried oneself in a book in the library, and dived into imaginations.

The place was well managed; we were wholesomely fed; but there had grown up a strange kind of taboo about many of the things we were supposed to eat. I had a healthy appet.i.te, but the tradition was that all the food was unutterably bad, adulterated, hocussed. The theory was that one must just eat enough to sustain life. There was, for instance, an excellent tapioca pudding served on certain days; but no one was allowed to eat it. The law was that it had to be shovelled into envelopes and afterwards cast away in the playground. I do not know if the masters saw this--it was never adverted upon--and I did it ruefully enough. The consequence was that one lived hungrily in the midst of plenty, and food became the one prepossession of life.

I was a delicate boy in those days, and used often to be sent off to the sanatorium with bad throats and other ailments. It was a little, old-fashioned house in Mortlake, and the matron of it had been an old servant of our own. She was the only person there whom I regarded with real affection, and to go to the sanatorium was like heaven. One had a comfortable room, and dear Louisa used to embrace and kiss me stealthily, provide little treats for me, take me out walks. I have spent many hours happily in the little walled garden there, with its big box trees, or gazing from a window into the street, watching the grocer over the way set out his shop- window.

Of incidents, tragic or comic, I remember but few. I saw a stupid boy vigorously caned with a sickening extremity of horror. I recollect a "school licking" being given to an ill-conditioned boy for a nasty piece of bullying. The boys ranged themselves down the big schoolroom, and the culprit had to run the gauntlet. I can see his ugly, tear-stained face coming slowly along among a shower of blows. I joined in with a will, I remember, though I hardly knew what he had done. I remember a few afternoons spent at the houses of friendly masters; but otherwise it was all a drab starved sort of level, a life lived by a rule, with no friendships, no adventures; I marked off the days before the holidays on a little calendar, simply bent on hiding what I was or thought or felt from everyone, with a fort.i.tude that was not in the least stoical. What I was afraid of I hardly know; my aim was to be absolutely inoffensive and ordinary, to do what everyone else did, to avoid any sort of notice. I was a strange mixture of indifference and sensitiveness. I did not in the least care how I was regarded, I had no ambitions of any kind, did not want to be liked, or to succeed, or to make an impression; while I was very sensitive to the slightest comment or ridicule. It seems strange to me now that I should have hated the life with such an intensity of repugnance, for no harm or ill-usage ever befell me; but if that was life, well, I did not like it! I trusted no one; I neither wanted nor gave confidences. The term was just a dreary interlude in home life, to be lived through with such indifference as one could muster.

I spent two years there; and remember my final departure with my brother. I never wanted to see or hear of anyone there again-- masters, servants, or boys. It was a case of good-bye for ever, and thank G.o.d! And I remember with what savage glee and delicious antic.i.p.ation I saw the last of the high-walled house, with its roofs and wings, its great gate-posts and splendid cedars. I could laugh at its dim terrors on regaining my freedom; but I had not the least spark of grat.i.tude or loyalty; such kindnesses as I received I had taken dumbly, never thinking that they arose out of any affection or interest, but treating them as the unaccountable choice of my elders;--we stopped for an instant at the little sanatorium--that had been a happy place at least--and I was tearfully hugged to Louisa's ample bosom, Louisa alone being a little sorry that I should be so glad to get away.

I do not think that the life there, sensible, healthy, and well- ordered as it was, did me much good. I was a happy enough boy in home life, but had little animal spirits, and none of the boisterous, rough-and-tumble ebullience of boyhood. I was shy and sensitive; but I doubt if it was well that interest, enjoyment, emotion, should all have been so utterly starved as they were. It made me suspicious of life, and incurious about it; I did not like its loud sounds, its combative merriment, its coa.r.s.e flavours; the real life, that of observation, imagination, dreams, fancies, had been hunted into a corner; and the sense that one might incur ridicule, enmity, severity, dislike, harshness, had filled the air with uneasy terrors. I came away selfish, able--I had won a scholarship at Eton with entire ease--innocent, childish, bewildered, wholly unambitious. The world seemed to me a big, noisy, stupid place, in which there was no place for me. The little inner sense of which I have spoken was hardly awake; it had had its first sight of humanity, and it disliked it; it was still solitary and silent, finding its own way, and quite unaware that it need have any relation with other human beings.

3

Then came Eton. Into which big place I drifted again in a state of mild bewilderment. But big as Eton is--it was close on a thousand boys, when I went there--at no time was I in the least degree conscious of its size as an uncomfortable element. The truth is that Eton runs itself on lines far more like a university than a school: each house is like a college, with its own traditions and its own authority. There is very little intercourse between the younger boys at different houses, and there is an instinctive disapproval among the boys themselves of external relations. The younger boys of a house play together, to a large extent work together, and live a common life. It is tacitly understood that a boy throws in his lot with his own house, and if he makes many friends outside he is generally unpopular, on the ground that he is thought to find his natural companions not good enough for him.