Waiting for Daylight Part 3

It is not easy, and perhaps this summer it would not be right, to find the exact mood for a holiday. In the frame of mind which is more usual with us, I put Ecclesiastes--forsaken by a previous visitor, and used to lengthen a short leg of the dressing-table--in my pocket, and leave the quay to its harsh new thoughts, and to the devices by which it gets a bare sustenance out of the tides, the seasons, and the winds, complicated now with high explosives in cunning ambush; and go out to the headland, where wild goats among the rocks which litter the steep are the only life to blatter critical comment to high heaven. I left that holiday quay and its folk, and took with me a prayer which might go far to brace me to support the blattering of goats, if that, too, should be my luck even when in solitude. I pa.s.sed at the hill-top the last whitewashed wall of the village, where the open Atlantic is sighted, and stopped to glance at the latest official poster on the wall. That explained to me, while the west wind blew, what the penalties are for young men who are in the wrong because they are young, not having attained the middle-age which brings with it immunity for the holding of heroic notions. Yet how if those young men are not bellicose like their wise seniors? Why should they get the evil which their elders, who will it, take so much care to avoid?

The dust of official lorries in a hurry no longer made the wayside hedges appear aged. The wind was newly arrived from mid-ocean. I met it coming ash.o.r.e. It knew nothing about us, so far. In the distance, the village with its shipping was a faint blur, already a faded impress on earth, as though more than half forgotten in spite of its important problems. It was hardly more than a discoloration, and suggested nothing of consequence. The sun on the grey rocks was giving a hint that, should ever it be required, there was heat enough left to begin things anew. I realized in alarm that such a morning of re-birth might be beautiful; for I might not be there to sing _Laus Deo_. I might miss that fine morning.

There was a suggestion of leisure in the pattern of the lichen on the granite; it gave the idea of prolonged yet still merely tentative efforts at design. The lichen seemed to have complete a.s.surance that there was time enough for new work. The tough stems of the heather, into which I put my hand, felt like the sinews of a body that was as ancient as the other stars, but still so young that it was tranquilly fixed in the joy of its first awakening, knowing very little yet, guessing nothing of its beginning nor of its end; still infantile, with all life before it, its voice merely the tiny shrilling of a gra.s.shopper. The rocks were poised so precariously above the quivering plain of the sea that they appeared to tremble in mid-air, being things of no weight, in the rush of the planet. The distant headlands and moors dilated under the generating sun.

It was then that I pulled Ecclesiastes out of my pocket, leaned against the granite, and began:

"Vanity of vanities..."

I looked up again. There was a voice above me. An old goat, the venerable image of all-knowledge, of sneering and bearded sin, was contemplating me. It was a critical comment of his that I had heard.

Embarra.s.sed, I put away my book.

XII. An Autumn Morning

SEPTEMBER 28, 1918. The way to my suburban station and the morning train admonishes me sadly with its stream of season-ticket holders carrying dispatch-cases, and all of them anxious, their resolute pace makes it evident, for work. This morning two aeroplanes were over us in the blue, in mimic combat; they were, of course, getting into trim for the raid to-night, because the barometer is beautifully high and steady. But the people on their way to the 9.30 did not look up at the flight. Life is real, life is earnest. When I doubt that humanity knows what it is doing, I get comfort from watching our local brigadiers and Whitehall ladies on their way these tranquil Autumn mornings to give our planet another good shove towards the millennium. Progress, progress! I hear their feet overtaking me, brisk and resolute, as though a revelation had come to them overnight, and so now they know what to do, undiverted by any doubt.

There is a brief glimpse of a downcast face looking as though it had just chanted the Dies Irae through the mouthfuls of a hurried breakfast; and once more this laggard is pa.s.sed in the day's race towards the higher peak. The reproof goes home. It justly humiliates. But the weather is only a little west of south for one of the last fair days of the year; and the gloom of the yew in the churchyard--which stands over the obscure headstone of a man named Puplett--that yew which seems the residue of the dark past, has its antiquity full of little smouldering embers of new life again; and so a lazy man has reasons to doubt whether the millennium is worth all this hurry. As it is, we seem to have as much trouble as there is time to cla.s.sify before supper; by which time, from the look of the weather, there will be more. Then why hurry over it? The tombstone says Puplett was a "thrifty and industrious parent," and I can see what happened to him in 1727. What would I not give, I ask myself, as I pause by the yew, and listen to the aeroplanes overhead, for a few words from this Puplett on thrift, industry, and progress! Does he now know more than brigadiers?

It may be that what Europe is suffering from in our time is the consequence of having worked too hard, since that unlucky day when Watt gave too much thought to a boiling kettle. We have worked too hard without knowing why we were doing it, or what our work would do with us.

We were never wise enough to loaf properly, to stop and glance casually around for our bearings. We went blindly on. Consider the newspapers, as they are now! A casual inspection of the mixture of their hard and congested sentences is enough to show that what is wanted by our writers famous for their virility, their power of "graphic description" as their outpour is called by their disciples, and their knowledge of what everybody ought to be doing, is perhaps no more than an occasional bromide. They would feel better for a long sleep. This direction by them of our destiny is an intoxicating pursuit, but it is as exhausting as would be any other indulgence. We might do quite well if they would only leave it to us. But they will never believe it. Ah! the Great Men of Action! What the world has suffered from their inspired efforts to shepherd humanity into worried flocks hurrying n.o.body knew whither, every schoolboy reads; and our strong men to-day, without whose names and portraits no periodical is considered attractive, would surely have been of greater benefit to us if they had remained absorbed in their earlier skittles. If the famous magician, who, with several others, is winning the war by suggestion, and that true soldier, General FitzChutney, and that earnest and eloquent publicist, Mr. Blufflerlow, had been persuaded to stick to marbles, what misleading excitement and unprofitable anxiety would have been spared to the commonweal! Boys should be warned against and protected from Great Careers. Better still if embryologists could discover something which would enable midwives unfailingly to recognize Strong Men at birth. It would be easy then to issue to those ladies secret but specific instructions.

There is a street which turns abruptly from my straight road to the station. It goes like a sudden resolution to get out of this daily hurry and excitement. It is a pre-war street. It is an ancient thoroughfare of ours, a rambling and unfrequented by-way. It is more than four years since it was a habit of mine to loiter through it, with a man with whom I shall do no more pleasant idling. We enjoyed its old and ruinous shops and its stalls, where all things could be bought at second-hand, excepting young doves, ferrets, and dogs. I saw it again this morning, and felt, somehow, that it was the first time I had noticed it since the world suddenly changed. Where had it been in the meantime? It was empty this morning, it was still, it was luminous. It might have been waiting, a place that was, for the return of what can never return. Its sunlight was different from the glare in the hurrying road to the station. It was the apparition of a light which has gone out. I stopped, and was a little fearful. Was that street really there? I thought its illumination might be a ghostly sunlight haunting an avenue leading only to the nowhere of the memory. Did the others who were pa.s.sing see that by-way? I do not think so. They never paused. They did not glance sideways in surprise, stare in an expectancy which changed almost at once into regret for what was good, but is not.

Who would not retire into the near past, and stay there, if it were possible? (What a weakness!) Retrospection was once a way of escape for those who had not the vitality to face their own fine day with its exacting demands. Yet who now can look squarely at the present, except officials, armament shareholders, and those in perambulators? This side-turning offered me a chance to dodge the calendar and enter the light of day not ours. The morning train of the day I saw in that street went before the War. I decided to lose it, and visit the shop at the top of the street, where once you could buy anything from a toddy gla.s.s to an emu's egg having a cameo on it of a ship in full sail. It was also a second-hand bookshop. Most lovers of such books would have despised it.

It was of little use to go there for valuable editions, or even for such works as Sowerby's _Botany_. But when last the other man and myself rummaged in it we found the first volume of the _Boy's Own Paper_, and an excellent lens for our landscape camera. An alligator, sadly in need of upholstering, stood at the door, holding old umbrellas and walking-sticks in its arms. The proprietor, with a sombre nature and a black beard so like the established shadows of his lumbered premises that he could have been overlooked for part of the unsalable stock, read Swedenborg, Plato, Plutarch, and Young's _Night Thoughts_--the latter an edition of the eighteenth century in which an Edinburgh parson had made frail marginal comments, yellow and barely discernible, such as: "How True!" This dealer in lumber read through large goggles, and when he had decided to admit he knew you were in his shop he bent his head, and questioned you steadily but without a word over the top of his spectacles. If you showed no real interest in what you proposed to buy he would refuse to sell it.

There I found him again, still reading--Swedenborg this time--with most of the old things about him, including the Duck-billed Platypus; for n.o.body, apparently, had shown sufficient interest in them. The shop, therefore, was as I have always known it. There was a spark of a summer's day of 1914 still burning in the heart of a necromancer's crystal ball on the upper shelf by the window.

The curio there which was really animated put down his book after I had been in the shop for some minutes, regarded me deliberately as though looking to see what change had come to me in four such years, and then glanced up and nodded to the soothsayer's crystal. "It's a pity," he said, "that those things won't really work." He asked no questions. He did not inquire after my friend. He did not refer to those problems which the crowds in the morning trains were eagerly discussing at that moment.

He sat on a heap of forgotten magazines, and remained apart with Swedenborg. I loafed in the fertile dust and quiet among old prints, geological specimens, antlers, pewter, bed-warmers, amphorae, and books.

The proprietor presided over the dim litter of his world, bowed, pensive, and silent, suggesting in his aloofness not indifference but a retired sadness for those for whom the mysteries could be made plain, but who are wilful in their blindness, and so cannot be helped.

I came upon a copy of _Walden_, in its earliest Camelot dress (price sixpence), and remembered that one who was not there had once said he was looking for it in that edition. I turned to the last page and read: "Only that day dawns to which we are awake..."

I reserved the book for him at once, though knowing I could not give it to him. But what is the good of cold reason? Are we awake in such dawns as we now witness? Or has there been no dawn yet because we are only restless in our sleep? It might be either way, and in such a perplexity reason cannot help us. I thought that perhaps I might now be stirring, on the point of actually rousing. There, in any case, was the evidence of that fugitive spark of the early summer of 1914 still imprisoned in its crystal, proof that the world had experienced a dawn or two. An entirely unreasonable serenity possessed me--perhaps because I was not fully roused--because of the indestructibility of those few voiceless hopes we cherish that seem as fugitive as the glint in the crystal ball, hopes without which our existence would have no meaning, for if we lost them we should know the universe was a witless jest, with n.o.body to laugh at it.

"I want this book," I said to the shopman.

"I know," he answered, without looking up. "I've kept it for you."

XIII. News from the Front

OCTOBER 12, 1918. My remembrance of the man, when I got his letter from France--and it was approved, apparently, by one of his regimental officers, for a censorial signature, was upon its envelope--was a regrettable and embarra.s.sing check to my impulse to cry Victory. I found it hard, nevertheless, in the moment when victory was near, to forgive the curious lapse that letter betrayed in a fellow who did not try for exemption but volunteered for the infantry, and afterwards declined a post which would have saved him from the trenches. He was the sort of curious soldier that we civilians will never understand. He aided the enemy he was fighting. His platoon officer reported that fact as characteristic and admirable. He had gone out under fire to hold up a wounded German and give him water. He did not die then, but soon after, on the Hindenburg Line, because, chosen as a good man who was expert in killing others with a deadly mechanism, he was leading in an attack. This last letter of his, which arrived after the telegram warning us, in effect, that there could be no more correspondence with him, alluded in contempt to his n.o.ble profession and task, and ended with a quotation from Drum Taps which he prayed I would understand.

His prayer was in vain. I did not understand. I read that quotation at breakfast, just after finishing my fierce and terrible _Daily Dustpan_, and the quotation, therefore, was at once repugnant and unfortunate. For clearly the leader-writer of the _Dustpan_ was a bolder and more martial man. It is but fair to a.s.sume, however, that as that journalist in the normal routine of a day devoted to his country had not had the good fortune to run up against the machine guns of the Hindenburg trenches, naturally he was better able to speak than a soldier who was idly swinging in the wire there. The quotation, strange for a Guardsman to make, is worth examining as an example of the baleful influence war has upon those who must do the fighting which journalists have the hard fate merely to indicate is the duty of others. The verse actually is called Reconciliation. After a partial recovery from the shame of the revelation of my correspondent's unsoldierly spirit, a shame which was a little softened by the thought that anyhow he was dead, I went to _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ for the first time for some years, to see whether Drum Taps accorded with war as we know it.

And now I am forced to confess that we may no longer accuse the Americans of coming late into the War. They appear to have been in it, if the date of Drum Taps is ignored, longer even than Fleet Street. I cannot see that we have contributed anything out of our experiences of battle which can compare with Whitman's poems. He appears to have known of war in essential episodes and incidents, as well as from a high vision of it, in a measure which the literature of our own tragedy does not compa.s.s.

A minor poet told me once that he could not read Whitman. He declared it was like chewing gla.s.s. When we criticize others, the instant penalty is that we unwittingly confess what we are ourselves. We know the reception of _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ was of the kind which not seldom greets the appearance of an exceptional book, though Emerson recognized its worth.

So when occasionally we admit, shyly and apologetically, as is our habit (in the way we confess that once we enjoyed sugar candy), that long ago we used to read Emerson, it would do our superior culture no harm to remember that Emerson was at least the first of the world of letters to tell the new poet that his _Leaves_ was "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet produced." Nothing in all his writing proves the quality of Emerson's mind so well as his instant and full knowledge of Whitman, when others felt that what Whitman was really inviting was laughter and abuse. I suppose what the young poet meant when he said reading Whitman was like a mouthful of gla.s.s was that Whitman has no music, and so cannot be read aloud. There is always a fair quant.i.ty of any poet's work which would do much to make this world a cold and unfriendly place if we persevered in reading it aloud. In some circ.u.mstances even Shakespeare might cause blasphemy. Perhaps he has. And Whitman, like summer-time, and all of us, is not always at his best. But I think it is possible that many people to-day will know the music and the solace of the great dirge beginning "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd." And again, if capturing with words those surmises which intermittently and faintly show in the darkness of our speculations and are at once gone, if the making of a fixed star of such wayward glints is the mark of a poet, then Whitman gave us "On the beach at night."

I had never thought Whitman so good till that soldier's letter accidentally discovered it to me. If Whitman had been through the campaign across the narrow straits, if Ypres, Vimy, and Cambrai had been in his own experience, he could have added little to Drum Taps. For there is nothing that is new in war. It is only the campaign that is new, and the men who are young. Yet all has happened before. But each young soldier in a new campaign feels that his experience is strangely personal. He will have the truth revealed to him, and will think that it is an intimacy for his soul alone; yet others, too, have seen it, but are dead. The survivors of this War will imagine their experiences unique, admonitory, terrible, and that if they had the words to tell us their knowledge they would not be believed or understood. That is why the succeeding generation, too, gets caught. Yet there is enough of this War in Drum Taps to have stopped it more than two years ago if only one European in ten had had so much imagination and enterprise as would take a man through a strange field gate when he was convinced it was in that direction he should go, and enough of charity in his heart to stay him from throwing stones at the sheep while on his way.

XIV. Authors and Soldiers

OCTOBER 26, 1918. If a man who knew no books, but who became serious when told of his emptiness, and showed eagerness to begin to fill it, were confronted with the awful strata in the library of the British Museum, and were told that that was his task, he might fall unconscious. But what cruelty! He could be warned that the threat has little in it; that the ma.s.sed legions of books could do him no harm, if he did not disturb them.

It could be whispered to the illiterate man--whose wisdom, it might chance, was better than much scholarship--that it is possible to read the best of the world's drama in a few months, and that in the remainder of the year he could read its finest poetry, history, and philosophy. I am but paraphrasing what was said recently by an Oxford professor. I would not dare to give it as my own opinion, within hearing of the high priests.

Yet the professor's declaration may be not only outrageous, but right.

It is a terrible thought, except to those who are merely bibliophiles just as some little boys are lovers of old postage stamps. I think he may be right, for I have a catalogue of all the books and doc.u.ments prompted by the War and published before June, 1916. It runs to 180 pages of small type. It contains the names of about 3500 books and pamphlets. Now, let us suppose a student wished to know the truth about the War, for perhaps a very youthful student could imagine it was possible to get the truth about it. The truth may be somewhere in that catalogue; but I know, for I have tried, that it has no significant name to betray its pure gold, no strange brilliance to make the type dance on that page as one turns the leaves with a hopeless eye. There are, however, two certainties about the catalogue. One is that it would require a long life, a buoyant disposition, and a freedom from domestic cares, to read every book in it.

And the other is that there are no more books in it--which we ought to count as books--than one evening would see us through, interruptions and all. The books in that ma.s.s are as dead as the leaves of their June of the War.

I must confess, though, that I am a bibliophile with War books. Any book about the Great War is good enough for me. I am to that cla.s.s of literature what little boys are to stamps. Yes; I know well the dread implication. I am aware of the worm in the mind; that I probe a wound; that I surrender to an impulse to peer into the darkness of the pit; that I encourage a thought which steals in with the quiet of midnight, and that it keeps me awake while the household sleeps. I know I consort with ghosts in a region of evil. I get the horrors, and I do not repel them.

For some reason I like those ghosts. Most of them have no names for me, but I count them as old friends of mine; and where should I meet them again, at night, but amid the scenes we knew?

And what do I look for in these War books? It is not easy to say. It is a private matter. Songs the soldiers used to sing on French roads are often in my head. I am like the man who was once bewitched, and saw and heard things in another place which n.o.body will believe, and who goes aside, therefore, unsociable and morose, to brood on what is not of this world.

I am confessing this but to those who themselves have been lost in the dark, and are now awake again. The others will not know. They will only answer something about "Cheering up," or--and this is the strangest thing to hear--"to forget it." I don't want to forget it. So if in a book I see names like Chateau Thierry, Crepy-en-Valois, d.i.c.kebusch, Hooge, Vermelles, Hulluch, Festubert, Notre Dame de Lorette, Ligny-Tilloy, Sailly-Saillisel, Croiselles, Thiepval, Contalmaison, Dompierre, then I am caught. I do not try to escape.

Yet these books rarely satisfy me. Is it not remarkable that soldiers who could face the sh.e.l.ls with an excellent imitation of indifference should falter in their books, intimidated by the opinions of those who stayed at home? They rarely summon the courage to attack those heroic dummies which are not soldiers but idols set up in a glorious battlefield that never existed except as a romance among the unimaginative; the fine figures and the splendid war that were air-built of a rapture. These authors who were soldiers faced the real War, but they dare not deride the n.o.ble and popular figments which lived but in the transports of the exalted. They write in whispers, as it were, embarra.s.sed by a knowledge which they would communicate, but fear they may not. To shatter a cherished illusion, to expose the truth to a proud memory, that, I will confess, is always a task before which a sensitive man will hesitate. Yet it is also part of the test of a writer's courage; by his hesitation a soldier-author may know that he is in danger of failing in his duty. Yet the opinion of the public, which intimidates us, is no mere bugbear. It is very serious. People do not enjoy the destruction of their cherished illusions. They do not crown the defamers of their idols. What is it that balks a soldier's judgment when he begins to write about the War? He is astonished by the reflection that if he were to reproduce with enjoyment the talk of the heroes which was usual in France, then many excellent ladies might denounce it indignantly as unmanly. Unmanly! But he is right. They not only might, but they would. How often have I listened to the cool and haughty contralto of ladies of education and refinement who were clearly unaware that what they were encouraging, what to them afforded so much pride, what deepened their conviction of righteous sacrifice, was but an obscene outrage on the souls and bodies of young men. How is one to convey that to ladies? All that a timid writer may do is to regret the awful need to challenge the pious a.s.surance of Christians which is sure to be turned to anger by the realities.

I have read in very few books anything that was as good as the gossip one could hear by chance in France. The intimate yarn of the observant soldier home on leave, who could trust his listener, is superior to much one sees in print. In that way I heard the best story of the War. If it could be put down as it was given to me it would be a masterpiece. But it cannot be reproduced. It came as I heard it because, remembering his incredible experience, the narrator found himself in secure and familiar circ.u.mstances again, was confident of his audience, and was thinking only of his story. His mind was released, he was comfortable, and he was looking backward in a grim humour which did not quite disguise his sadness. His smile was comical, but it could move no answering smile.

These intelligent soldiers, who tell us the stories we never see in print, are not thinking about their style, or of the way the other men have told such tales, but only of what happened to themselves. They are as artless as the child who at breakfast so tells its dream of the night before that one wants to listen, and Tolstoy says that is art. The child has heard nothing of the apocalyptic visions, and does not know Poe, Ambrose Bierce, or Kipling. He is concerned only with his own sensations, and you listen to him because you have had such dreams, and he recalls a dark adventure you had forgotten.

But the difficulty in the writing of such stories is that the narrator, as soon as he begins, becomes conscious of the successful methods of other men. I have been reading a number of War stories published recently, and it was painful to see how many were ruined by Kipling before this War began. Kipling was original, and his tricks of manner, often irritating, and his deplorable views of human society, were usually carried off by his genius for observation, and the spontaneity of the drama of his stories. But when his story was thin, and he was wandering in an excursion with his childish philosophy, he was usually facetious.

As an obvious and easily imitable trick for dull evenings, this elaborate jocularity seems to have been more enjoyed by his disciples than his genius for narrative when he was happy, and his material was full and sound. Yet his false and vulgar fun has spoiled many of these volumes pollinated from India. They have another defect, too, though it would be unfair to blame Kipling for that when it may be seen blossoming with the una.s.suming modesty of a tulip in any number of _Punch_. I mean that amusing gravity of the sn.o.b who is sure of the exclusive superiority of his caste mark, with not the trace of a smile on his face, and at a time when all Europe is awakening to the fact that it sentenced itself to ruin when it gave great privileges to his kind of folk in return for the guidance of what it thought was a finer culture, but was no more than a different accent. It was, we are now aware, the mere n.o.bodies who won the War for us; and yet we still meekly accept as the artistic representation of the British soldier or sailor an embarra.s.sing guy that would disgrace pantomime. And how the men who won must enjoy it!

XV. Waiting for Daylight

NOVEMBER 9, 1918. I read again my friend's last field service postcard, brief and enigmatic, and now six weeks old. I could find in it no more than when it first came. Midnight struck, and I went to the outer gate.

The midnight had nothing to tell me. Not that it was silent; we would not call it mere silence, that brooding and impenetrable darkness charged with doom unrevealed, which is now our silent night, unrelenting to lonely watchers.

Near my gate is a laburnum tree. Once upon a time, on nights of rain such as this, the shower caught in it would turn to stars, and somehow from the brightness of that transient constellation I could get my bearings. I knew where I was. One noticed those small matters in the past, and was innocently thankful for them. Those lights sufficed us. There was something companionable even in the street lamp. But what is it now? You see it, when you are accustomed to the midnight gloom of war, shrouded, a funeral smear of purple in a black world. No bearing can be got from it now. What one looks into is the lightless unknown. I peer into the night and rain for some familiar and reasonable shape to loom--I am permitted to do this, for so far the police do not object to a citizen cherishing a hopeful though fatuous disposition--but my usual reward is but the sound of unseen drainage, as though I were listening to my old landmarks in dissolution. I feel I should not be surprised, when daylight came, to find that the appearance of my neighbourhood had become like Spitzbergen's.

That is why I soon retreat now from my gate, no wiser, bringing in with me on these nights of rain little more than the certainty that we need expect no maroons or bombs; and then, because the act is most unpatriotic in a time of shortage, put on more coal with my fingers, as this makes less noise than a shovel. I choose a pipe, the one I bought in a hurry at Amiens. I choose it for that reason, and because it holds more tobacco than the others; watch the flames, and take stock.