2. DIES IRAE
THOSE memorable days that move in procession, their heads just
out of the mist of years long dead—the most of them are full-eyed as the dandelion that from dawn to shade has steeped itself
in sunlight. Here and there in their ranks, however, moves a
forlorn one who is blind—blind in the sense of the dulled
window-pane on which the pelting raindrops have mingled and run
down, obscuring sunshine and the circling birds, happy fields,
and storied garden; blind with the spatter of a misery uncomprehended,
unanalysed, only felt as something corporeal in its
buffeting effects.
Martha began it; and yet Martha was not really to blame.
Indeed, that was
half the trouble of it—no solid person stood full in view, to be
blamed and to make atonement. There was only a wretched,
impalpable condition to deal with. Breakfast was just over; the
sun was summoning us, imperious as a herald with clamour of
trumpet; I ran upstairs to her with a broken bootlace in my hand,
and there she was, crying in a corner, her head in her apron.
Nothing could be got from her but the same dismal succession of
sobs that would not have done, that struck and hurt like a
physical beating; and meanwhile the sun was getting impatient,
and I wanted my bootlace.
Inquiry below stairs revealed the cause. Martha's brother was
dead, it seemed—her sailor brother Billy; drowned in one of
those strange far-off seas it was our dream to navigate one day.
We had known Billy well, and appreciated him. When an
approaching visit of Billy to
his sister had been announced, we had counted the days to it.
When his cheery voice was at last heard in the kitchen and we had
descended with shouts, first of all he had to exhibit his
tattooed arms, always a subject for fresh delight and envy and
awe; then he was called upon for tricks, jugglings, and strange,
fearful gymnastics; and lastly came yarns, and more yarns, and
yarns till bedtime. There had never been any one like Billy in
his own particular sphere; and now he was drowned, they said, and
Martha was miserable, and—and I couldn't get a new bootlace.
They told me that Billy would never come back any more, and I
stared out of the window at the sun which came back, right
enough, every day, and their news conveyed nothing whatever to
me. Martha's sorrow hit home a little, but only because the
actual sight and sound of it gave me a dull, bad sort of pain low
down
inside—a pain not to be actually located. Moreover, I was still
wanting my bootlace.
This was a poor sort of a beginning to a day that, so far as
outside conditions went, had promised so well. I rigged up a
sort of jurymast of a bootlace with a bit of old string, and
wandered off to look up the girls, conscious of a jar and a
discordance in the scheme of things. The moment I entered the
schoolroom something in the air seemed to tell me that here, too,
matters were strained and awry. Selina was staring listlessly
out of the window, one foot curled round her leg. When I spoke
to her she jerked a shoulder testily, but did not condescend to
the civility of a reply. Charlotte, absolutely unoccupied,
sprawled in a chair, and there were signs of sniffles about her,
even at that early hour. It was but a trifling matter that had
caused all this electricity in the atmosphere, and
the girls' manner of taking it seemed to me most unreasonable.
Within the last few days the time had come round for the despatch
of a hamper to Edward at school. Only one hamper a term was
permitted him, so its preparation was a sort of blend of revelry
and religious ceremony. After the main corpus of the thing had
been carefully selected and safely bestowed—the pots of jam, the
cake, the sausages, and the apples that filled up corners so
nicely—after the last package had been wedged in, the girls had
deposited their own private and personal offerings on the top. I
forget their precise nature; anyhow, they were nothing of any
particular practical use to a boy. But they had involved some
contrivance and labour, some skimping of pocket money, and much
delightful cloud-building as to the effect on their enraptured
recipient. Well, yesterday
there had come a terse acknowledgment from Edward, heartily
commending the cakes and the jam, stamping the sausages with the
seal of Smith major's approval, and finally hinting that, fortified
as he now was, nothing more was necessary but a remittance
of five shillings in postage stamps to enable him to face the
world armed against every buffet of fate. That was all. Never a
word or a hint of the personal tributes or of his appreciation of
them. To us—to Harold and me, that is—the letter seemed
natural and sensible enough. After all, provender was the main
thing, and five shillings stood for a complete equipment against
the most unexpected turns of luck. The presents were very well
in their way—very nice, and so on—but life was a serious
matter, and the contest called for cakes and half crowns to carry
it on, not gew-gaws and
knitted mittens and the like. The girls, however, in their
obstinate way, persisted in taking their own view of the slight.
Hence it was that I received my second rebuff of the morning.
Somewhat disheartened, I made my way downstairs and out into
the sunlight, where I found Harold playing conspirators by
himself on the gravel. He had dug a small hole in the walk and
had laid an imaginary train of powder thereto; and, as he sought
refuge in the laurels from the inevitable explosion, I heard him
murmur: "`My God!' said the Czar, `my plans are frustrated!'"
It seemed an excellent occasion for being a black puma. Harold
liked black pumas, on the whole, as well as any animal we were
familiar with. So I launched myself on him, with the appropriate
howl, rolling him over on the gravel.
Life may be said to be composed of
things that come off and things that don't come off. This thing,
unfortunately, was one of the things that didn't come off. From
beneath me I heard a shrill cry of, "Oh, it's my sore knee!" And
Harold wriggled himself free from the puma's clutches, bellowing
dismally. Now, I honestly didn't know he had a sore knee, and,
what's more, he knew I didn't know he had a sore knee. According
to boy ethics, therefore, his attitude was wrong, sore knee or
not, and no apology was due from me. I made half-way advances,
however, suggesting we should lie in ambush by the edge of the
pond and cut off the ducks as they waddled down in simple,
unsuspecting single file; then hunt them as bisons flying
scattered over the vast prairie. A fascinating pursuit this, and
strictly illicit. But Harold would none of my overtures, and
retreated to the house wailing with full lungs.
Things were getting simply infernal. I struck out blindly for
the open country; and even as I made for the gate a shrill voice
from a window bade me keep off the flower-beds. When the gate
had swung to behind me with a vicious click I felt better, and
after ten minutes along the road it began to grow on me that some
radical change was needed, that I was in a blind alley, and that
this intolerable state of things must somehow cease. All that I
could do I had already done. As well-meaning a fellow as ever
stepped was pounding along the road that day, with an exceeding
sore heart; one who only wished to live and let live, in touch
with his fellows, and appreciating what joys life had to offer.
What was wanted now was a complete change of environment. Some
where in the world, I felt sure, justice and sympathy still
resided. There were places called pampas, for instance, that
sounded
well. League upon league of grass, with just an occasional wild
horse, and not a relation within the horizon! To a bruised
spirit this seemed a sane and a healing sort of existence. There
were other pleasant corners, again, where you dived for pearls
and stabbed sharks in the stomach with your big knife. No
relations would be likely to come interfering with you when thus
blissfully occupied. And yet I did not wish—just yet—to have
done with relations entirely. They should be made to feel their
position first, to see themselves as they really were, and to
wish—when it was too late—that they had behaved more properly.
Of all professions, the army seemed to lend itself the most
thoroughly to the scheme. You enlisted, you followed the drum,
you marched, fought, and ported arms, under strange skies,
through unrecorded years. At last, at long last, your
opportunity would come, when the horrors of war were flickering
through the quiet country-side where you were cradled and bred,
but where the memory of you had long been dim. Folk would run
together, clamorous, palsied with fear; and among the terror-stricken groups would figure certain aunts. "What hope is left
us?" they would ask themselves, "save in the clemency of the
General, the mysterious, invincible General, of whom men tell
such romantic tales?" And the army would march in, and the guns
would rattle and leap along the village street, and, last of all,
you—you, the General, the fabled hero—you would enter, on your
coal-black charger, your pale set face seamed by an interesting
sabre-cut. And then—but every boy has rehearsed this familiar
piece a score of times. You are magnanimous, in fine—that goes
without saying; you have a coal-black horse, and a sabre-cut, and
you can afford to be very magnanimous. But all the same you give
them a good talking-to.
This pleasant conceit simply ravished my soul for some twenty
minutes, and then the old sense of injury began to well up
afresh, and to call for new plasters and soothing syrups. This
time I took refuge in happy thoughts of the sea. The sea was my
real sphere, after all. On the sea, in especial, you could
combine distinction with lawlessness, whereas the army seemed to
be always weighted by a certain plodding submission to
discipline. To be sure, by all accounts, the life was at first a
rough one. But just then I wanted to suffer keenly; I wanted to
be a poor devil of a cabin boy, kicked, beaten, and sworn at—for
a time. Perhaps some hint, some inkling of my sufferings might
reach their ears. In due course the sloop or felucca would turn
up—it always did—the
rakish-looking craft, black of hull, low in the water, and
bristling with guns; the jolly Roger flapping overhead, and myself
for sole commander. By and by, as usually happened, an East
Indiaman would come sailing along full of relations—not a
necessary relation would be missing. And the crew should walk
the plank, and the captain should dance from his own yardarm, and
then I would take the passengers in hand—that miserable group of
well-known figures cowering on the quarter-deck!—and then—and
then the same old performance: the air thick with magnanimity.
In all the repertory of heroes, none is more truly magnanimous
than your pirate chief.
When at last I brought myself back from the future to the
actual present, I found that these delectable visions had helped
me over a longer stretch of road than I had imagined; and I
looked
around and took my bearings. To the right of me was a long low
building of grey stone, new, and yet not smugly so; new, and yet
possessing distinction, marked with a character that did not
depend on lichen or on crumbling semi-effacement of moulding and
mullion. Strangers might have been puzzled to classify it; to
me, an explorer from earliest years, the place was familiar
enough. Most folk called it "The Settlement"; others, with quite
sufficient conciseness for our neighbourhood, spoke of "them
there fellows up by Halliday's"; others again, with a hint of
derision, named them the "monks." This last title I supposed to
be intended for satire, and knew to be fatuously wrong. I was
thoroughly acquainted with monks—in books—and well knew the cut
of their long frocks, their shaven polls, and their fascinating
big dogs, with brandy-bottles round their
necks, incessantly hauling happy travellers out of the snow. The
only dog at the settlement was an Irish terrier, and the good
fellows who owned him, and were owned by him, in common, wore
clothes of the most nondescript order, and mostly cultivated
side-whiskers. I had wandered up there one day, searching (as
usual) for something I never found, and had been taken in by them
and treated as friend and comrade. They had made me free of
their ideal little rooms, full of books and pictures, and clean
of the antimacassar taint; they had shown me their chapel, high,
hushed; and faintly scented, beautiful with a strange new beauty
born both of what it had and what it had not—that too familiar
dowdiness of common places of worship. They had also fed me in
their dining-hall, where a long table stood on trestles plain to
view, and all the woodwork was natural, unpainted, healthily
scrubbed, and redolent of the forest it came from. I brought
away from that visit, and kept by me for many days, a sense of
cleanness, of the freshness that pricks the senses—the freshness
of cool spring water; and the large swept spaces of the rooms,
the red tiles, and the oaken settles, suggested a comfort that
had no connexion with padded upholstery.
On this particular morning I was in much too unsociable a mind
for paying friendly calls. Still, something in the aspect of the
place harmonised with my humour, and I worked my way round to the
back, where the ground, after affording level enough for a
kitchen-garden, broke steeply away. Both the word Gothic and the
thing itself were still unknown to me; yet doubtless the
architecture of the place, consistent throughout, accounted for
its sense of comradeship in my hour of disheartenment. As I
mused there, with
the low, grey, purposeful-looking building before me, and thought
of my pleasant friends within, and what good times they always
seemed to be having, and how they larked with the Irish terrier,
whose footing was one of a perfect equality, I thought of a
certain look in their faces, as if they had a common purpose and
a business, and were acting under orders thoroughly recognised
and understood. I remembered, too, something that Martha had
told me, about these same fellows doing "a power o' good," and
other hints I had collected vaguely, of renouncements, rules,
self-denials, and the like. Thereupon, out of the depths of my
morbid soul swam up a new and fascinating idea; and at once the
career of arms seemed over-acted and stale, and piracy, as a
profession, flat and unprofitable. This, then, or something like
it, should be my vocation and my revenge. A
severer line of business, perhaps, such as I had read of;
something that included black bread and a hair-shirt. There
should be vows, too—irrevocable, blood curdling vows; and an
iron grating. This iron grating was the most necessary feature
of all, for I intended that on the other side of it my relations
should range themselves—I mentally ran over the catalogue, and
saw that the whole gang was present, all in their proper places—
a sad-eyed row, combined in tristful appeal. "We see our error
now," they would say; "we were always dull dogs, slow to catch—
especially in those akin to us—the finer qualities of soul! We
misunderstood you, misappreciated you, and we own up to it. And
now—" "Alas, my dear friends," I would strike in here, waving
towards them an ascetic hand—one of the emaciated sort, that
lets the light shine through at the fingertips—
"Alas, you come too late! This conduct is fitting and
meritorious on your part, and indeed I always expected it of you,
sooner or later; but the die is cast, and you may go home again
and bewail at your leisure this too tardy repentance of yours.
For me, I am vowed and dedicated, and my relations henceforth are
austerity and holy works. Once a month, should you wish it, it
shall be your privilege to come and gaze at me through this very
solid grating; but—"
Whack!
A well-aimed clod of garden soil, whizzing just past my ear,
starred on a tree-trunk behind, spattering me with dirt. The
present came back to me in a flash, and I nimbly took cover
behind the trees, realising that the enemy was up and abroad,
with ambuscades, alarms, and thrilling sallies. It was the
gardener's boy, I knew well enough; a red proletariat, who hated
me just because I was
a gentleman. Hastily picking up a nice sticky clod in one hand,
with the other I delicately projected my hat beyond the shelter
of the tree-trunk. I had not fought with Red-skins all these
years for nothing.
As I had expected, another clod, of the first class for size
and stickiness, took my poor hat full in the centre. Then, Ajax-like, shouting terribly, I issued from shelter and discharged my
ammunition. Woe then for the gardener's boy, who, unprepared,
skipping in premature triumph, took the clod full in his stomach!
He, the foolish one, witless on whose side the gods were fighting
that day, discharged yet other missiles, wavering and wide of the
mark; for his wind had been taken with the first clod, and he
shot wildly, as one already desperate and in flight. I got
another clod in at short range; we clinched on the brow of the
hill, and rolled down to the bottom together. When he
had shaken himself free and regained his legs, he trotted smartly
off in the direction of his mother's cottage; but over his
shoulder he discharged at me both imprecation and deprecation,
menace mixed up with an under-current of tears.
But as for me, I made off smartly for the road, my frame
tingling, my head high, with never a backward look at the
Settlement of suggestive aspect, or at my well-planned future
which lay in fragments around it. Life had its jollities, then;
life was action, contest, victory! The present was rosy once
more, surprises lurked on every side, and I was beginning to feel
villainously hungry.
Just as I gained the road a cart came rattling by, and I
rushed for it, caught the chain that hung below, and swung
thrillingly between the dizzy wheels, choked and blinded with
delicious-smelling dust, the world slipping by me like a streaky
ribbon below, till the driver licked at me with his whip, and I
had to descend to earth again. Abandoning the beaten track, I
then struck homewards through the fields; not that the way was
very much shorter, but rather because on that route one avoided
the bridge, and had to splash through the stream and get
refreshingly wet. Bridges were made for narrow folk, for people
with aims and vocations which compelled abandonment of many of
life's highest pleasures. Truly wise men called on each element
alike to minister to their joy, and while the touch of sun-bathed
air, the fragrance of garden soil, the ductible qualities of mud,
and the spark-whirling rapture of playing with fire, had each
their special charm, they did not overlook the bliss of getting
their feet wet. As I came forth on the common Harold broke out
of an adjoining copse and ran to meet me, the morning
rain-clouds all blown away from his face. He had made a new
squirrel-stick, it seemed. Made it all himself; melted the lead
and everything! I examined the instrument critically, and
pronounced it absolutely magnificent. As we passed in at our
gate the girls were distantly visible, gardening with a zeal in
cheerful contrast to their heartsick lassitude of the morning.
"There's bin another letter come to-day," Harold explained, "and
the hamper got joggled about on the journey, and the presents
worked down into the straw and all over the place. One of 'em
turned up inside the cold duck. And that's why they weren't
found at first. And Edward said, Thanks
awfully!"
I did not see Martha again until we were all re-assembled at
tea-time, when she seemed red-eyed and strangely silent, neither
scolding nor finding fault with anything. Instead, she was very
kind and
thoughtful with jams and things, feverishly pressing unwonted
delicacies on us, who wanted little pressing enough. Then
suddenly, when I was busiest, she disappeared; and Charlotte
whispered me presently that she had heard her go to her room and
lock herself in. This struck me as a funny sort of proceeding.