Chapter III: Part 3

I sat there with this column of stupid twaddle in my hands, and Conscience watched me with its bright bird-like eye. Much as I like birds, I hate their eyes, because they remind me of Conscience. They are beady and absolutely unsympathetic, frightfully quick to see, and without a particle of pity in them. Conscience never pities one at all; it is the foe that is of a man’s household. It always gloats over one’s mistakes, and things that are more than mistakes, and only says:

‘Here comes the master with the whip. A new lash, I see, this time. And what a thin shirt you have got on!’

Nor, when the whipping is over, does Conscience sympathize.

‘I told you so; I told you so,’ it says. ‘No, there is no soothing ointment of any kind in the house. I ate it all up. Wasn’t that a beautiful new lash?’

* * * * *

Well, I tore that dreadful nonsense up, and wrote another apologetic letter. I am getting quite good at them. But to-morrow--this is what makes Conscience mad--I shall tell Helen about it. The telling is not pleasant; it never is. But as soon as Helen knows, Conscience has simply to retire. It does not understand why it suddenly becomes so unimportant, and that gives it a fit of impotent rage. Nor do I quite understand, though I am nearer to the explanation than Conscience is. But she understands. At least, I suppose so, or else she would not be able to put the green-baize cover on again.

And then, what with apologetic letters, and the drawing of two or three cheques, and the stupid attempts, in this matter of the dishonest article, to produce something out of nothing, by covering up the nothingness by more ornamental expressions, and the eventual destruction of it all, I found that the two hours were gone, and that I had kept my promise to the idiotic canary. It had ceased chirping from experience when I told it I was going to confess to Helen.

The night was intensely hot, and through the long open windows of the room in which I had been working no breeze entered. Though September had but a quarter more of its course to run, it was like some sultry July midnight, portending storm, for when I went out to take the night-breath the sky was thickly overcast, so that no direct ray either of moonlight or of starshine, came earthwards. The serrated outline of the elms at the end of the lawn was scarce distinguishable against the scape of the clouds, and the low land of the water-meadows was blanketed in a mist that was only just visible by its whiteness against the black blot of the hills behind. Fifi, who had very sensibly decided to sleep on the veranda, did not stir when I came out, though I heard the instinctive thump of her short tail on the tiles, the natural politeness of the dear dog, though she really could not stand on ceremony with me to the length of getting up. So, maliciously, I am afraid, since I thought this slightly cavalier conduct, I said ‘Puss,’ though there was no Puss of any sort, as far as I was aware. But my malice was again thwarted, for Fifi just tapped again with her tail, in courteous recognition of a stale old joke, just to show that she appreciated my intention, but she made not the smallest further effort towards activity.

So she was half asleep, and all the world, this dear, blessed world, which is so full of merriness and simple, innocent pleasure, despite the fulminations of fashionable priests, was quite asleep, not stirring, scarcely breathing, just sleeping, sleeping. It was not yet the hour when, just before the hold of the night begins to tremble and be weakened in the sky, all living things wake for a moment--that mysterious moment, when sheep take a bite of grass and cows twitch their grave ears, and horses stand up for a minute before they settle down to the light morning sleep which dissolves with day, and when even indoors, if you sleep with a dog in your room, and happen yourself to be awake, you will hear a stretching of limbs on your bed or on the carpet, and a long sigh breathed into the blankets. Plants and flowers, so I truly believe, feel the same thing; and though there may be no wind perceptible to you if you are abroad, as sometimes I am, at that hour, you will hear, just at the moment when cattle move and sheep take their bite of grass, a stir go through the trees, and a hushed whisper lisp in the flower-beds. At that moment, too (you need not credit this, though it is absolutely true), though it has rained all night till then, and will rain thereafter, steadily, soakingly till morning, the rain ceases, as suddenly as if a tap was turned off. Time and again I have tested that.

But, as I have said, that mysterious moment was not due yet. It was still two hours short of it, and everything was still asleep. Even in the last minute or two Fifi had fallen fast asleep, too, after I had sat down in a wicker chair on the veranda, for when I called her there was no tap of response. To-night, too, the sleep of the world seemed to me (feeling it as one does by that sixth sense, which still exists dormant in us, and is most awake at night) to be extraordinarily deep. It was the sleep of a world that was very tired with this long hot summer. There seemed no pulse stirring in it at all, as you may find it stir in the light sleep in which Nature indulges in June, or still more in the dark, wet nights of spring, when the secret boiling up of life begins again from hidden root to budding tendril, so that if you lay your ear to the trunk of a tree it seems that the effervescence of the young year is audible, and sings within it, even as the telegraph poles are resonant with the wind that hums in the wires. Nor could I hear, when I rose and walked across the lawn, even though the dew was heavy on the grass, the hiss of startled worms, withdrawing from the approaching footfall. Black, too, and lifeless, was the oblong of the house except where the lights burned in the room in which I had been trying to be honest. The long herbaceous hedge was black, the lawn was black, Helen’s windows and Legs’ were black.

I went back to the seat I had just left, and lit a cigarette, meaning to go upstairs to bed when I had smoked it. Fifi still lay motionless, though generally any excursion into the garden at any time of day or night sets her scampering. And then, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, for nothing was further from my thoughts, I became aware that, though the physical world was asleep, there was some enormous stir and activity going on in the occult world which surrounds and permeates us. Yet that is perhaps a wrong expression, for the same activity and stir always goes on in that unsleeping realm; and I must express it more accurately by saying that the part of me which was able to perceive it was suddenly quickened. It is possible, of course, since I confess to being able to go to sleep whenever I choose, and often without delay, when I do not, that at that moment I fell asleep. But whether I fell asleep or not, does not make the slightest difference, for there was clearly some part of my brain awake, and it made my eyes think that they saw, and my ears think that they heard, that which immediately followed.

As far as I am aware, in any case, I sat down again in a rather creaky basket-chair and lit a cigarette. The match with which I lit it, I threw on to the gravel path in front of me, and, since I required it no further, it proceeded to burn prosperously. By its light I could see Fifi with her nose between her paws. I saw, also, that my shoe-lace was untied.

And then I heard my name called from the garden, in a voice that was perfectly familiar to me, though for the moment I could not say, so elusive is the ear, whose voice it was that called. It was not Helen’s, it was not Legs’, it was not ... and then I remembered whose voice it was. It called me by name, once only, in the voice that had said, ‘It is from the cross that He smiles at us all.’

I do not think I was frightened, but simply for the purely personal reason, that to me there was nothing to be frightened at. The match still burned on the gravel path, so short had been the measurement of this in the world of time, and I could still see Fifi’s nose buried between her paws. Then she raised it, looked out into the garden with terrified scrutinizing eyes, focussing them on something, invisible to me, and gave one long howl. But there was no moon. It was at something else she howled.

Then, I confess, as if some bomb had burst within me, terror flooded my whole mind, submerging it, and I sprang up. Simultaneously I heard a sort of strangled scream from the room above, and the scurry of unshod feet overhead. Next moment the sound of an opening door came to my ears, and a quick stumbling tread on the stairs. I ran indoors, and reached the door leading from my room into the hall, just as the handle was seized and shaken by someone on the other side of it, and Legs burst into the room, his hair all tumbled and erect, and his face wearing such a mask of terror that for the moment I recognized him only because it must be he.

‘Who is that in the garden?’ he said. ‘Someone in white, who looked up at my window? And Fifi howled at her.’

This would never do. Nerves, terror are the most infectious things in the world, and unless I took steps, there would, I knew, be standing here two babbling lunatics.

‘I was dozing in the veranda,’ I said, ‘and Fifi woke me by howling. She woke you, too! Legs, don’t be an ass! Pull yourself together. If there had been anything, I should have seen it.’

Legs was as white as a sheet. The whiteness somehow showed through his freckled sun-tanned skin. He was swaying to and fro on his feet, as if he would fall, and I put my arm around him, and deposited him in a chair. Then I poured out a wineglassful of neat whisky.

‘Don’t speak another word till you have drunk that,’ I said. ‘Then I shall count ten slowly, and then you may speak.’

Fifi had followed me in, and sat close to the door whimpering. With my heart in my mouth and a perspiring forehead, I went across to the window as I counted, shut and locked it, and pulled down the blind.

‘Nine, ten,’ I said.

A little colour had begun to come back to Leg’s face. He had drunk the whisky, a beverage which he detested, like water, and the frozen fear of his eyes was less biting. And then, as suddenly as it had come on, my terror left me. Whatever it was that I had heard, whatever it was that Legs had seen and Fifi perceived, there was nothing to terrify. Besides, within myself, now that the cowardly disorder of my nerves had passed, I believed I knew what it was that had made its presence so strangely perceived by us all. The mortal suffering of a dear friend was over. Already I was ashamed of having told Legs that I had been asleep and had neither seen nor heard anything.

‘Legs, I lied just now,’ I said. ‘I heard my name called from the garden in Margaret’s voice.’

‘You mean she is dead?’ asked he gently. ‘The last accounts had been better, I thought.’

‘I’m sure she is.’

Then for a moment, like a sudden squall, the white terror passed over Legs’ face again.

‘It was not her I saw,’ he said hoarsely; ‘it was Death. I thought she had come for me. Fifi saw her too.’

I sat down on the arm of his chair.

‘Yes, old boy,’ I said, ‘I think that you and Fifi both saw some manifestation of what I heard. But there is nothing to be frightened at. But how was it you were at your window? You had gone to bed hours ago.’

‘I know, but I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and sat by the window.’

* * * * *

We sat there for some time after that, and by degrees Legs recovered from his collapse, and soon, instead of terror, mere sleepiness invaded his face. Once or twice he stifled a yawn, and at length he got up.

‘I am dead sleepy,’ he said. ‘I think I shall go to bed.’

‘You are not frightened any longer, are you?’ I asked.

Legs looked at me out of drooping eyelids, and he seemed puzzled.

‘Frightened? What about?’ he said. ‘Good-night.’

* * * * *

I was very late down next morning, and found that Helen and Legs had nearly finished breakfast. As I came in he jumped up.

‘Ah, here he is!’ he cried. ‘Now, did you sit up very late last night?’

When he asked that I began to have some suspicion of what was coming next.

‘Yes, very. Why?’

‘Well, were you talking to yourself? Helen and I both woke in the night, and heard talking in your room. I had had some dream that frightened me, and I nearly came downstairs for human companionship.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I was too sleepy. But--were you talking?’

‘No. You were dreaming. So was Helen. I may have groaned now and then over proofs, but not more than that.’

* * * * *

Legs nodded at Helen.

‘I told you it was ghosts,’ he said.

‘And you heard voices too?’ I asked Helen.

‘Yes; at least, I thought so. But I was very sleepy. I thought also I heard Fifi howl.’

* * * * *

So, you see, there is no corroboration of my story, and if I dreamed it at all, or made it up, there is no one to whom I can appeal for confirmation of its verity. But there is just this little bit of evidence--namely, that though Legs had finished breakfast, he went on drinking cup after cup of tea. When Helen left us he explained this to me.

‘I woke with a mouth like a lime-kiln,’ he said--‘just as if I had been drinking that dreadful whisky of yours. I drank most of my jug, too, and they had to bring me more water to wash in.’

What happened last night, then, had been wiped clean off Legs’ brain again. Whatever it was that he had seen, that which made him stumble white-faced downstairs, had gone. But an hour or two later, while we were out playing croquet in the garden, some faint echo of it, I think, crossed him again. A telegram was brought out for me, which contained what I knew it would contain, and I handed it to him when I had read it. Then we went quietly indoors.

Just as we got into my room again, he said:

‘How odd that sensation is of feeling that something has happened before! When you handed me the telegram, I felt I knew what was in it. And during the last week she had been rather better, had she not?’

OCTOBER

The business of the dining-room carpet (a case of conscience makes the whole world kin, so I confidently return to this matter) was settled more beautifully than I had thought possible. I told Helen all about it, and she said:

‘Thank goodness you tore the thing up! Dear, you _are_ such a silly ass! There’s nothing whatever more to be said. You are, aren’t you?’

‘There’s nothing more to be said, I believe you remarked.’

‘Well, you may just say “Yes,”’ said she.

So I said ‘Yes.’ It was a variant of the woman’s last word, spoken by a man instead.

‘There, now we’ll go and quarrel about the rose-garden,’ said she.

We went and quarrelled. She was flushed with triumph over making me say ‘Yes,’ and in consequence I got my way about several disputed points, which to-day the darling thinks she chose herself.

The rose-garden is a design of unparalleled audacity, and when it grows up, it will be nothing short of stupendous. For between us Helen and I are territorial magnates, and beyond this house and garden, which are hers, I am owner of two fields, and limitless possibilities. I bought them a year ago, in a sudden flush of extravagance, and for six months we maintained there (at staggering loss) a poultry-yard in one corner and a cow over the rest. The original design, of course, was to make a sound investment in land, which, in addition to the fathomless pleasure of owning it, would keep us in butter, eggs, chickens to eat (not to mention, as I hasten to do, savouries of chicken liver on toast), and possibly beef. If one considers the question closely, it is difficult to see how a cow can (1) give milk, and (2) give beef; but Helen, in visionary enthusiasm, said we should have oxen as well, and why not pigs in the farther corner? I did not at once see why not, and I bought the two fields with the same unconcern as I should have bought a box of matches, which yield so sure an enjoyment in the matter of lighting cigarettes.

Then we both began to learn that, though we might be gardeners, we were not farmers. The poultry-yard was (mistakenly, no doubt) erected at the corner of the field nearest the house, and morning after morning we were awakened at dead and timeless hours. Helen said that when a hen made a long clucking noise, it meant she had laid an egg, and that, till the thing became incredible, consoled me. For if she was right, it was clear that hens laid invisible eggs, or that they were doing tiresome conjuring tricks, and that the long-drawn crow meant, ‘I have laid an egg, but see if you can find it. I am the mother of this disappearing egg.’ We usually were not able to do so, but sometimes an egg was found in a hedge, or in a ditch, which when found was totally uneatable, except by the Chinese. Personally, I believe that by some unhappy mischance we had bought celibate and barren poultry, whose customs drove us daily nearer Bedlam; in fact, it the pig that was our hellebore.

The pig was not a pig, but a sow. She went mad, too--or so I must believe--jumped the pigsty in the opposite corner, made a bee-line for the poultry-yard, went through our beautiful wire-fencing as if it had been a paper hoop in a circus, and ate two hens. The cock beat a masterly retreat, and was never heard of again. The other four hens followed him. And the sow, dripping with gore, lay down in the hen-house and slept. Almost before she woke, she was sold for a song.

Then the cow came. I do not wish to libel her, but I think I may safely say that she was milkless and excitable, and had a wild eye. She roamed over my fields (mine, I had bought them) as if they were her own. Had not Legs been so agile and swift, she might have tossed him. As it was, she ran into the brick wall at the lower end of the garden, and made her nose bleed. As far as I know, that was the only liquor that she parted with. She was probably mad also, for she used to low in the middle of the night, when all proper cows are fast asleep. Asleep or awake, however, now she makes her fantasias elsewhere. I almost hope she is dead, for it requires a larger optimism than I possess to believe that she will ever become a proper cow, for she was more of a steed for Mazeppa. Perhaps she was a horse after all, a horned horse. I wish we had thought of that at the time. As it was, we sold her at outrageous loss, as a cow. And with her we parted with any idea of keeping farmyard animals for purposes of gain. Perhaps we were not serious enough about it, and the animals saw that.

* * * * *

Through last spring and summer the fields rested after this invasion of outrageous animals, and about the middle of May it struck Helen and me simultaneously that we were going to have a crop of hay. That was delightful, and much less harassing than hens. Hay would not wake one at timeless hours, nor would it go mad, and have to be sold at a quarter of the price we gave for it, since we gave nothing for it at all. It was the pound of tea thrown in with the fields we had bought, or the _Times_ newspaper thrown in with your subscription to that extraordinary library.

From this there was born the scheme of giving a haymaking party, to which we originally planned to ask everybody we knew, amended that to asking all the children we knew, and afterwards (this was Helen’s amendment) decided not to ask anybody at all, partly because children were so serious, but chiefly because there might not be enough hay to go round. We neither of us knew how many square yards of hay it was reasonable to supply to each person, and it would be dreadful if there was not enough. Either Helen or I, or both of us, would have to go without, and it was safer to give the haymaking party to each other. We were in town all May, and the first half of June, but had left word with the gardener to send us a postcard when the hay was ready. The weather throughout these weeks was gloriously sunny, and in our mind’s eye we saw the crop growing taller and thicker with each blazing day.

Then one evening came the memorable postcard:

‘A reddy.’

We flew to the ‘A.’ In the middle of the largest field was a small haycock like a penwiper. One not quite so large and round at the top, more like a pincushion, was visible in the next field.

* * * * *

It was clear after this that the Powers that Are willed that our fields should not be used for utilitarian purposes. Hence the inception of the rose-garden.

A brick wall (the one against which the insane cow had blooded her nose) bounded the garden. From there the ground declined steeply away into the middle of the larger field, which was cup-shaped, the ground rising on all sides of it. (It was at the centre of the cup, where the sugar is, that the penwiper had been raked together.) To-day a flight of steps made of broken paving-stones--an entrancing material--led down the side of the cup from the garden-gate, and up the opposite slope. Standing where the sugar is, therefore, you saw on every side of you rising ground, which had been terraced, and walks of broken paving-stone, communicating with the two staircases, lay concentrically round. And the Herculean labour which had already occupied us so many rapturous afternoons was to plant the whole cup with rose-trees, so that, standing in the centre, there was nothing visible except sky and roses. That was practically done; and to-day what occupied us was the consideration of the level remainder of the field, of which there was some half acre. It was rough, coarse grass, starred with dandelion, which gave the first hint. We wanted to get rid of the dandelion, and----

At last I got Helen to agree, and I mixed together in a wheelbarrow an infinity of bulbs, and other delectable roots. There were big onion-like daffodils, neat crocuses with an impatient little yellow horn sticking up, fritillary roots, bottle-shaped tulips, the corms of anemones, and the orris of the iris. Then, trowel in hand, each with a bag of bulbs taken haphazard out of the wheelbarrow and with a bag of sand to make a delectable sprouting-place for the roots, we started. Every dandelion encountered was to be dug up with honesty and thoroughness, and where the dandelion had been there was to be planted a bulb taken at random out of the bag. Helen said it would take ten years. Personally, when I looked, I thought longer, but I did not say so, for I practice reticence on discouraging occasions.

I wonder how many people know the extraordinary delight of doing a thing for oneself, starting from the beginning. I do not say that it gives me the smallest pleasure to black my boots or brush my clothes, since somebody has already made those boots and woven the cloth. But there is nothing more entrancing than to deal first-hand with Nature, to make holes in the earth, and put in them roots, the farthest back that we can go with regard to vegetable life. Rightly or wrongly, it seems to me a pleasure as clean and as elemental as the joy of creation itself. Whether we write a book, or paint a picture, or carve a statue, we, though we do not really create, but only arrange what is in existence already, are going back as far as we can, taking just the root-thoughts and translating them to song or shape. And though we do not really create at all, but only use and arrange, as I have said, the already existing facts of the world, passing them, it may be, through the crucible of the mind, we get quite as near to Nature, if not nearer, when we go a-bulb-planting. The bulbs are our thoughts, our pigments, what you will, and when in spring-time we shall see them making a meadow of Fra Angelico, it will be because we have actually planted these things ourselves that the joy of creation will be ours. Not to do that would be as if an artist laid no brush on the canvas himself, but merely dictated to a dependent where such a colour should be spread. But given that he had a slave so intelligent and so obedient that he could follow to a hair’s-breadth the directions given him, can you imagine the artist feeling the possessive joy of creation in the result, even though it realized the conception to the uttermost? Not I; nor, in the garden, do I care, like that, to see what others have done. It is not sufficient to direct; one has to do it oneself.

I love, too, and cannot conceive not loving, getting hot and dirty over the wrestling with the clean, black earth. A great deal of nonsense is talked about the dignity of labour, but it is chiefly talked by those whose labour lies indoors, who, excellent craftsmen as they may be, go spudding about in the intangible realms of the mind. I doubt, indeed, whether any market-gardener has ever spoken of the dignity of labour. We leave that to those who only know it by repute. But I long to put down the manner of the transaction. I do not in the least think it dignified, but it is such fun.

* * * * *

The green had mostly faded from the grass, leaving the meadow, as is always the case in October, far more grey than green. Certain plants, however, were still of varnished brightness, and the dandelion leaf was one. There was no need to pick and choose, and without moving a step, I dug the trowel down into the earth, loosened it all round the vegetable enemy, and lifted it. An ominous muffled snap came from inches down in the earth, which I tried to pretend I had not heard. But one could not cheat the eye also. There, at the bottom of my excavation, was a milky root, showing a danger-signal of white against the brown loam. I had to go deeper yet: the whole of the tap-root must be exhumed. Another dig, another snap, a raw-looking worm recoiled from the trowel, only just in time, and eventually up came the remotest fibre. How good the earth smelt! How reeking with the life of the world! Cold, clammy, rich earth, ever drawn upon by the needs of the Bank of Life, ever renewed by that which life paid back to it. A thousand years had gone to the formation of my trowelful, and a few inches below was the chalk, where a million lives a million years ago had spent themselves on the square inch of it. Slowly, by work of the myriad sea-beasts, this shoulder of chalk was heaved from the sea, the myriad lives became a myriad myriad, and here I had the little lump of chalk borne up on the end of the trowel which told of the labourers of the unnumbered years. Then, in a spoonful of sand, I put the sign, the evidence of another decade of millions on the top of them, and stuck thereon an onion-like daffodil root that was born last year. In a fortnight’s time that child of to-day will have reached downwards, feeling with delicate, pleased touch the sand of a thousand years ago, will delve through the time of the pyramids of Egypt, will draw moisture from the chalk that was old when our computation of time was not yet born, and will blossom next April, feeding its sap on the primeval years. And for what? To make Helen and Legs and me say, ‘Oh, what a beautiful Horsfeldii!’ Then we shall look at the fritillary that prospers a yard away.

The eternal romance of it all! To the right-minded there is nothing that is not a fairy-story. Like children, we crowd round the knees of the wonderful teller of it, and say, ‘Is it true? Is it all true?’ And He can’t tell lies. Sometimes, when we have a sort of moral toothache, we sit apart, and sniff. We say that scientifically we have proved there is no God. So said the fool in his heart. But nowadays the fools write it down in their damned books, and correct the proofs of it, and choose the bindings of it, and read, with gusto, the thoughtful reviews of it. And, God forgive them, they think they are very clever people, if I may be excused for mentioning them at all.

But fairy-stories! How surprising and entrancing are even those which people make up and put in books, while round us every day a fairy-story far more wonderful is being told not only for us to read, but enacted for us to see. It is only familiarity with it which robs us of the sense of its wonder, for imagine, if we could make ourselves ignorant again of what happens to bulbs when we put them in the earth, how the possibilities of flying-machines would grow flat and stale before the opening of the daffodil. For a man’s capacity for happiness is in great measure the same as his capacity for wonder and interest, and considering that there is absolutely nothing round us which does not teem with wonder if only we had the sense to see it, it argues very ill for our----

A wild shriek from the hillside opposite (distance forty yards) interrupted me.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ cried Helen; ‘but I cut a centipede in half. They are going in opposite directions.’

‘Dig another hole!’ I shouted. ‘Then go back when the halves have gone away. Yes, very distressing, but you can’t avoid everything.’

‘Murderer!’ said Helen.

This was feminine logic. I had not cut the centipede in half!

* * * * *

It was one of those golden October days of which we have now had some half-dozen. Every night there is a little frost, so that morning both looks and smells exquisitely clean, and it is hardly possible to regret the turn of the year; though dahlias are blackened, the trees blaze with copper and gold, for in this week of windless days scarce a leaf has fallen, and the stems are as thick with foliage as they were in the summer, and to my mind doubly beautiful. And this work of bulb-planting seems to bridge over the winter, for we are already at work on spring. But in November, Helen and I mean to turn our faces townwards again, for it is possible there to be unaware of the transition to winter, which is so patently before one’s eyes in the country, and which, with the best will in the world, it is impossible not to find rather depressing. Some people, I know, label the squalls of February March as execrable, and flee the country then. But we both love them. These are the last despairing efforts of winter. His hand is already loosed from the earth; he strikes wildly, knowing that there are but few blows left in him. But in the autumn he is gaining strength every day: it is life whose hold is being loosed. And that is not exhilarating to watch. True, it is only a mimic death-bed, but personally we don’t want to sit by the bedside. In London there is no bedside. The shorter the day, the earlier the lamps are lit. Those avenues of shining eyes, which are not shocked whatever they see.... And the fogs--the mysterious fogs! I suppose we are Cockneys.

* * * * *

Helen gave out first in the matter of bulbs, and came and sat by me.

‘How very dirty you are!’ she said. ‘And have you been planting bulbs with your nose?’

‘Not at present. But it tickled, and so I rubbed it.’

‘Well, let’s stop now. I want to go for a walk. My back aches with bending, and though I haven’t got toothache, I feel as if I might have, and the kitchen-maid has given notice, and I don’t think anybody loves me, and if Legs marries that awful girl, I will never speak to you again. And they are coming to dinner to-night! I pray Heaven that Legs may miss his train, and not get here till late.’

‘So do I. Yes; let’s go for a real tramp on the downs. Hadn’t I better go and wash my face first?’

‘Oh no; what does it matter? But are you sure you don’t want to go on bulbing?’

‘Quite sure. I think we won’t go by the road, do you know. We can strike across the meadows and up the beacon.’

Helen gave a little purr--a querulous rumble of the throat.

‘I have the blues,’ she said, with great distinctness. ‘I was as happy as possible till ten minutes ago, and then they came on like--like a thunderstorm. Everything ached. I groaned aloud: my mind hurt me like lumbago. It hurts still. Oh, do rub something on it.’

That is one of the heavenly things about Helen. If she ‘feels bad,’ she comes and tells me about it like a child. She scolds me for all sorts of things of which I am perfectly innocent, because she knows I don’t mind one scrap (I love it, really, but I don’t tell her that), and it makes her feel better. She scolded now, even when we had passed the water-meadow and began a really steep ascent of the flanking hills.

‘I knew the kitchen-maid wouldn’t stop,’ she said, ‘because those London girls hate the country. So do I. And it was all your fault. You engaged her; I had nothing to do with it. And we never _had_ such a kitchen-maid. She cooks better than the cook, and does everybody else’s work as well. You might have known she wouldn’t stand the country.’

‘Go on,’ said I. ‘My fault entirely. So is the toothache, isn’t it?’

‘I haven’t got one, but I might have. And that’s your fault, too. I wanted to go to the dentist as I passed through London, and you persuaded me to come down here without stopping. It did ache just then--it did.’

The hill got rather steeper.

‘Go on,’ said I. ‘How slowly you walk!’

‘Yes, but I have to do all the talking. You have no conversation. Oh dear, what a devil I am! Aren’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘There! I told you nobody loved me. Oh, look! we are going to have a real red sunset. All the hills are getting molten, as if they were red-hot and glowing.’

She was feeling a little better--not much, but a little. We had come up the two hundred feet of steep down-side as if we had been storming a breach. To walk very fast up a hill makes all proper people feel better, unless they have heart disease, in which case they die, and so, we hope, feel better also. But for those who have not heart disease, and want to feel better, the prescription is confidently recommended.

‘And then that awful girl!’ she went on. ‘You insisted on being neighbourly, as you call it, with the Ampses, and this is the result.’

‘There has been none at present.’

‘No; but you tell me to ask the family to dinner on the very day that Legs comes down. Oh dear, what a heavenly evening! I should so enjoy it if everything wasn’t wrong. Look at the sky! Fifty thousand little pink, fluffy angels floating about in it! Do you want to go right to the top of the hill?’

‘Yes, right to the top. Then I shall begin to answer you back.’

Helen laughed.

‘Oh no, don’t,’ she said. ‘It is no fun plaguing you if you dispute my facts. So tell me quickly: isn’t everything your fault, and not mine? Please pull me, if you intend to go that pace.’

So I pulled her, she holding the end of my stick, and we arrived at the very top of all. Sunset was below us, evening stars were above us, and on the huge expanse of down there was no one else. It was the loneliness I love.

‘The devil has gone,’ she said, after a while. ‘You are rather nice to me. And I don’t think I have toothache, and--well, you thought that Charlotte was a little Ampsy before I did. And even if nobody loves me--oh, how dirty your nose is!’

That was true, anyhow.

An extraordinary phenomenon in country towns is that, though nobody has anything to do, everyone feels extremely busy; whereas in town, though you have got an enormous deal to do, you never feel busy at all, and can, without fail, find time for anything else. I think there must be some microbe which cannot live in London, but thrives elsewhere, which produces the illusion of being rushed. Personally, I know it well: it is not an old enemy of mine, nor is it an old friend, but it is a pleasant old humbug, which I am afraid I rather encourage. This evening, for instance, when I went to my room after tea, I encouraged it, and argued that one never had a moment to oneself. I had two hours in front of me now, as a matter of fact, in which I should be undisturbed; but the Old Humbug said that it was all very well to think about the future. All he knew was that he--that is, I--had been rushed--yes, rushed--all day and all yesterday, and ever since we came down to this dear, sleepy old town. To-day was Tuesday, and people were coming to dinner. We had gone out to lunch yesterday, and had dined out twice last week. Also, there was the garden to attend to, and a little golf (almost every day, as a matter of fact) was necessary for the health, and what with letters to write and cigarettes to smoke, and the Meistersinger overture to learn, in order to play it with Legs, I was a victim of this hurrying, bustling mode of life, which in a generation or so more would assuredly send everybody off their heads.

I made myself quite comfortable in my chair, and proceeded to think about it seriously, because I had two hours in front of me. It was all quite true (I was encouraging the Old Humbug, you will understand), and the modern mode of life was insane. London, anyhow, was insane, and in a little while I should probably get to agree with the Old Humbug that I was rushed and driven in the country also. But, to encourage credulity, I took London first. There one certainly was busy--all the hours, that is to say, of a day that began quite early and ended next morning were full, and I reconstructed one such as I often spend, and hope to spend many times more. I do not give it, because it seems to me the least edifying, and all stern moralists (the Old Humbug is an awfully stern moralist) would--as, indeed, they have done--shake their heads over it, and say, ‘To what purpose?’ I will tell you that afterwards.

I was called, let me say, at half-past seven, and after a few incredulous groans got up. I shaved, washed a little--not much, for reasons that will appear--drank some tea, and in a quarter of an hour was wildly bicycling towards the Park. When things flourished very much, and money flowed, Helen and I rode champing steeds; but just now things were what is called fluctuating, and I rode a bicycle, and she stayed in bed. An hour and a half of frantic pedalling on a hot June morning produces excellent physical results; and at half-past nine I was in the swimming-bath at the Bath Club, where I became cool and clean. I changed into another suit of flannels there, rode sedately home, and had breakfast at precisely a quarter-past ten. By eleven I had eaten breakfast, read the _Daily Mail_, and smoked a cigarette, and was about to spend a quiet, studious morning until half-past one (for we were lunching out at two), when Helen came in.

‘Do come to Lord’s,’ she said; ‘it’s Gentlemen and Players, and we can sit there till lunch. We can’t go this afternoon, and you are playing golf at Woking to-morrow.’

‘I can’t. Not time.’

‘Oh, just this once.’

Just this once, then, we went. It was too heavenly, and we were late for lunch.

It was one of the rather long lunches, and it was nearly four when we left the house. Then, as we had neither of us seen the Sargents at the Academy, we went there, since the afternoon was already gone, and got home about six; and as we had been given a box at the opera for ‘Tristan,’ which began at half-past seven, it was necessary to dine at half-past six--a terrible hour, but true. At the opera Legs picked Helen up to go to a ball, and I went home to answer my morning’s post, which I had not yet read.

But, it will be objected, Gentlemen and Players, and the one necessary visit to the Academy, and ‘Tristan’ does not occur every day. Quite true; but something else always does, and the Old Humbug, who had got quite large and important during this short survey, said in those canting tones which I knew so well: ‘You are wasting your life over this insensate rush and hurry. And you do no better down here. What have you done to-day? Planted bulbs, and written two or three pages of your silly book. What will you do to-morrow? You won’t even write your silly book, because you are going to play golf with Legs in the morning, and you say you can’t work after lunch. And the days will make themselves into months, and the months into years’ (here he dropped into poetry), ‘and you will ever be a name of scorn--at least, you would if ten minutes after you were dead anybody remembered what your name was. But you will have gone to your account.’

Well, I join issue with the Old Humbug over this. For my part, I assert that it was perfectly right for me to go to the Gentlemen and Players, and to the opera, and to plant bulbs, and to play golf with Legs to-morrow morning if fine. And as for his objection to what he calls ‘rush,’ why, I fling it in his face, since I must rush. If I set apart a certain time every day for private meditation, I should be simply bored. I should get--I suppose this must be the proposed practical effect of the plan--no great and ennobling thoughts out of my solitary meditations, and instead of feeling that I had spent the morning to some serious purpose, I should feel, and I think rightly, that I had merely wasted it. But if I have planted bulbs all morning, I haven’t wasted it. I will assert that on the Day of Judgment; for I have been busy walking along the path I feel sure I was meant to walk on. There are a thousand other paths all leading to the central and celestial light, and they are for other people to walk on. It would, of course, be a terrible waste of time for one who by nature was a meditative recluse to go to the match between the Gentlemen and Players, or for a deaf man to go to ‘Tristan,’ or for a blind one to lie on his back and look at the filtering sunlight between the leaves of beech-trees in June. But the point for everybody is to get into touch with life as continually as he can, and at as many points as he can. This is gospel. I would I had the palate of a wine-taster to get into touch with life there; the prehensile toe and sense of balance of a tight-rope walker to get into touch there, the mathematical head of the astronomer to learn the orbit of a star that has never been seen, but only conjectured; or I wish very much indeed that I had the missionary spirit. Indeed, then I would go to the nearest cannibal islands and (probably a good thing, too) be cheerfully devoured; or, again, if I had it in a lesser degree, I would go and teach in the Sunday-school, and have a class for boys in the evening. I did try the Sunday-school when first I lived here, and for four unhallowed Sundays I passed a feverish hour surrounded by mystified infants and intolerable lithographs. You never saw such a failure as I was: I dreaded those hours so much that I thought my reason would be unhinged. And the children used to regard me, I am sure, as they would have regarded some queer, though harmless, creature of the menagerie. I couldn’t do that sort of thing.

* * * * *

I neither made them happy nor could I teach them anything. That latter was quite proved when, on the Sunday succeeding my fourth lesson, an Archdeacon came round and examined all the classes in turn. I think I shall never get over the nightmare horror of that scrutiny when he sat in my arm-chair at the desk, and I, the trembling instructor, stood by the side while he asked my idiot flock who Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel ware, and other really elementary things. One child said that Eve was God’s wife, and I wished the earth might open and swallow me up. Then he came to the Catechism, and it really seemed as if nobody knew his own name. And it was for that nightmare that I had spent four feverish Sunday afternoons and a parody of days between, for every moment Sunday was coming nearer.

No; I give more happiness to Legs by being soundly beaten by him at golf, or by wasting (so says the Old Humbug) a morning in taking Helen up to Lord’s to see the Gentlemen and Players. Also--I hasten to forestall criticism--I like it much better myself; and though you may, if you like, call it selfish, I hereby state that to like doing anything is a very good and Christian reason for doing it. Behold the gauntlet!

For we poor folk who really cannot teach in Sunday-schools, and are not employed in making discoveries which will alleviate painful diseases, and do not serve our constituency or our King, and sneakingly throw pamphlets about the Education Bill into the fire without reading them, because we know we don’t actually care one pin what happens, and are in every single respect quite unsatisfactory and useless and unornamental, have yet, somehow (there can be no doubt of this), to add if we can to the happiness, anyhow, of those dear folk among whom our lot has been so graciously cast. We have no great gifts of any description; we are neither wise nor witty, and there has been only one talent given us, which is the power of enjoyment. Well, that is a very little one, you may say, and a very selfish one to cultivate, but if we have nothing else at all, had we not better try to make some use of that?

For the fact remains that it can be made some use of. Every one feels better for seeing one of these drones, who are neither soldiers, nor sailors, nor politicians, nor teachers, enjoy himself. Enjoyment in the air is like oxygen in the air: it quickens everybody, and in its way makes them happier. The poor drones can neither teach nor fight, nor make anybody good, but they can in their humdrum way make people a little more cheerful for a few minutes. For they have--this is what I mean by drones--a happy temperament, and as they are no good at all in any other direction, it is indeed time that they should be done to death by the workers of the hive if they do not exert themselves in the mere exercise of their temperament. And just as the drone of the hive lives immersed in the honey of his flowers and in the garnered stuff that the workers have brought home, so the drone man must continue to take active and continual pleasure in all the delightful things of this world. He must pounce on enjoyment with eager zeal, and glut himself on it till he reels with the stupefaction of pleasure; he must keep himself keen and alert for the smallest humorous or engrossing detail that is within his horizons: it is shameful if he does not go to bed every night tired with his own laughter and enjoyment. And woe to him if he invests his pleasures with the serious garb of duty! The leader of the delectable life who says that he plays golf because he finds exercise so important for his health, or who sits out all afternoon to watch other people playing other games, and explains that his doctor (his doctor, forsooth!) tells him to have plenty of fresh air, or who drinks his delicious wine and says that it is good for his digestion, is a mere scampish hypocrite. He plays games because they are such fun; he watches other people play because it amuses him; he drinks wine because it tastes so nice.

And he must never falter on his primrose path; the high gods have given him but one little talent, and all that is asked of him is that he should enjoy life enormously. He has got to do that, then. The soldier and sailor may not, perhaps, enjoy life, but they are useful in other ways. The drone is only useful in this one. He must never remit his efforts, and must never want to; he must ‘rush,’ as the Old Humbug said, all the time, for if he ceases to rush he ceases to justify his existence at all. And--a heavenly destiny, one, too, beyond all desert of his--he does, if he is at all a conscientious drone, make other people a shade more cheerfully disposed than they would otherwise have been.