Chapter V: Part 5

Sunshine began to shine more strongly on the wreck when Legs, two days afterwards, came downstairs, with the cheering remark that he felt so ill that he was sure he couldn’t be as ill as he felt. Soon after he burst into hoarse laughter.

‘I shall cheer up when I have counted ten,’ he remarked.

Well, on the whole, when it was put simply and firmly like that, it seemed the best thing to do. Legs took change of the cheering process, and ordered a basin, soap, and three churchwarden pipes, and we blew soap-bubbles, which, though it may not be in itself a work of high endeavour, had at least the result of making us do something, which is always a good thing. So, when that was over, in order to contribute to the wholesome atmosphere of employment, I brought in and read to him and Helen what I had written that morning, and had designed to appear in the book you I are now reading. It was--I will not deceive you--a string (a long one) of cheap and gloomy reflections on the mutability of life, the reality of suffering, and the certainty of death. I had taken some trouble with it, but the most poignant and searing sentences made Legs simply roll in his chair with laughter that was noiseless merely because his throat was in such a state of relaxation that it could not make sounds. But with eyes streaming and in a strangled whisper he said:

‘Oh, do stop a moment till I don’t hurt so much with laughing, and then read it again.’

I looked at Helen. She had a handkerchief to her face, and her shoulders shook with incontrollable laughter.

‘It’s much the funniest thing you ever wrote,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it, now? Begin again at “All the pain and sorrow with which we are surrounded”--oh, no, before that--something about “It is when we are racked with suffering ourselves.” Oh, Legs, isn’t it heavenly?’

Legs had recovered himself a little, but still drummed with his feet on the carpet.

‘I never knew I could feel so much better so quickly,’ he said. ‘I felt a mere worm when I proposed soap-bubbles. I want it all again from the beginning, where what you thought was sunlight was barred with strange shadows. O Lor!’

So I gave them this intellectual--or should I say spiritual?--treat once more, and then threw the manuscript into the fire, amid the shrill expostulations of the others. Legs made heroic attempts to save it, but fruitlessly, or, indeed, I would print it here, as a warning to those who do not feel very well to postpone their meditations upon life and death until they feel a little better. Also, I do not think that one’s reflections on any subject are likely to be of much value unless they are founded on some sort of experience, and, to be quite honest, I had founded my views that morning on the mutability of life and the anguish of the world on the depression which was the result of a feverish cold. They were depressing enough, but I do not think that they were of sufficiently solid foundations. They proved, it is true, extraordinarily cheering to Helen and Legs, but one cannot be certain that the rest of the world would be equally exhilarated. They might be taken seriously, though Helen says I need not have been afraid of that.

Every man, even a pessimist, is supposed to have a perfect right to form his own opinions, but if I had my way (there is not the least likelihood of it) I should establish a censorship of the press, which should be in the hands of six young and cheerful optimists, who should decide whether such opinions were fit for publication. Quite rightly literature of an indecent nature, and work which may be supposed to have a tendency encouraging to criminals, is not allowed to be disseminated. I should put a similar prohibition on the dissemination of discouraging books, books which might be expected to suggest or foster the opinion that the world is a poor sort of place, and that God isn’t in His heaven at all. Even if this was proved to be true, I would count it criminal to attempt to convince anybody of it; it would be a murderous assault on the happiness of private individuals. The law does not allow one to poison a man’s bread with impunity, so how much more stringently should it forbid the poisoning of the inward health of his soul! Nothing but harm ever came from the dissemination of depressing truths, nothing but good from the dissemination of innocent and joyful beliefs, even should it be proved that they had no foundation whatever. For if the world is a dreary and painful place, so much more need is there of courage and a high heart to render it the least tolerable, and if we are to be snuffed out like candles when we come to the end of our few and evil years, how much more is it the part of wisdom to snatch a little happiness out of the circumambient annihilation!

And to think that only this morning I had actually tried to commit this crime, and was only saved from it by Legs’ unutterable laughter. To be truthful, I felt a little offended when he first began to laugh, and inwardly hoped that he would soon grow depressed and thoughtful as I continued to tell my rosary of discouraging things. But I need not have indulged that hope; it was forlorn from the beginning.

Instead, it made both him and Helen feel much better. I am so content to leave it at that. I had hoped--I had, indeed--when I wrote those depressing pages (which I wish to Heaven I had not burned) that possible readers might see part of the serious side of things under the discouragement of my winged words. But now--two days later--I am far more content that those two darlings should have laughed at what was written with such seriousness, than that all those into whose hands the printed record of that manuscript might have fallen should have sighed once over my jaundiced views about life and death, and sickness and mutability.

Of course, death is an extremely solemn affair, but it seems to me now--we are all recovering fast, and are drinking hypophosphates, and beginning to be greedy again--that the solemnity of it ought to have been discounted long ago, if it is going to be solemn at all. Everyone, of course, is at liberty to take life solemnly from the time he begins to think at all. But whatever our attitude towards life is, the same ought to be our attitude towards death, whether we believe that there is a continuance of life afterwards, or whether we are so unfortunate as to believe that there is the quenched candle. For in the one case death is but the opening of a door into a fuller light, a thing, it is true, that may affect one for the moment, since from the weakness of the flesh we cling to what we know, while in the other death is just extinction, a consummation which no pessimist should fear, since while he lived he had held so poor an opinion of life. So whether we regard life as a pleasant interlude in something else, or whether we regard death--a thing unthinkable to me--as the extinction of consciousness, I cannot believe that he is not a guest who is welcome when he comes. Personally I do not want him to come for a long time, since I am delighted with the world, and it would be most annoying to die now when one is just recovering from influenza, and hopes to go to the Richter concert to-morrow. But whatever one’s belief about the future is, I cannot see that there is an essential horror about death. I can conjure up horror of some kind about going to the dentist, about looking up trains in a Bradshaw, since the print is so execrable and the connections so unruly, but I go my journey, or I go to the dentist, and get to my destination, or am relieved of a troublesome tooth. Life does not seem to me the least troublesome, it is true, but let us take it that by death I get to my destination, or in any case get nearer it.

Besides, how frightfully interesting!

I did not die, but went to the Richter concert instead. Legs wished to go, too, but that was clearly idiotic, and so Helen and I tossed up as to which of us should go, and which remain at home. I won, and went.

There was Isolde in his high chair. (Probably an intelligent critic will say that Isolde was a woman, and I mean Tristan. But I don’t.) He waved a little wand, and the spirit of the Meistersingers filled the hall. It was not, so it struck me, a remembrance only of their harmonious joviality, a mere picture of them; it was they who rollicked and made processions in the great thumping triads of their march. There they sat, each with his business, town clerk, and vintner burgomaster, and lawyer, and, best of all, the old tender-hearted shoemaker, on whose kindly face upturned to the sky one feather of the bird of love had fallen, though it had never come and nestled in his bosom. But it was not with bitterness that so great a loss had filled him; it had but refined him to a mellow kindliness that made all young things love him. There they all sat, so the band told me, over their songs and their sober carousing, till the others went home, and Sachs was left alone with music yet unsung echoing in his kind old head, and throbbing in his youthful heart. But he knew that such Divine melody was not to be realized by him; some master of music had yet to come and put into notes and audible harmony that which existed but in the temple of his dreams, in the garden of things a man may conceive, but may not realize. Then came there the gracious young knight, and Sachs heard that of which he had dreamed, the song taught by the birds and the choirs of Nature to the ardent heart of youth.

The triumph took wings and soared, lifting Sachs with it, him and his yearnings, and that fine old music, too, which was his. Inextricably mingled, they were knit one into each other, soaring into the sunrise.

* * * * *

Thereafter we were taken to the bleak mountain, where should gather the maidens of storm, who did the will of Wotan. It was high and exposed above the region of the trees, and shrill blew the winds over it, and the heavens streamed above it. Fast and thick rode the army of menacing clouds, for the tempest in which the Valkyries rejoice, riding their untamed steeds down the swift roadway of the winds, was broken out in mad fury. Yelling and screaming, it drove in mad circles of wrath round the place where the nine maidens should foregather that evening, each with the fruit of her day’s quest slung across her saddle, each with a hero who should drink that night of the wine of the gods, which should pour into his veins the fire of eternal life in place of the faint mortal blood that had beaten there before. Yet it was not love the maidens sought. It was danger and death and heroic enterprise that bore them so swiftly on their errands, and lit in them a fire brighter than love has ever kindled. Their wine was the buffet of the tempest, their meat the strong winds of God.

Then there was heard, faint at first, the beating of the immortal hoofs in the rush of flying steeds; from east and west there shone out remote fires in the bedlam of the clouds, increasing, getting nearer and more blinding, till through the darkness of the tempest could be seen the figures of the maidens gathering to their trysting-place, some at the gallop, some flying, and all drunk with adventure and swift deeds. Each that day had prospered, each had a hero at her saddle, swooning now in death, but soon to be restored to the fuller life.

So gathered they, but as yet one was still missing--Brünnhilde, the swiftest and best of them all, the dearest to the heart of Wotan, for, indeed, she was none other than his heart and his inviolable will. And while yet the others wondered at her tarrying, she came. But no hero had she. She but led a woman into the midst of her sisters, for pity had touched her fierce heart with so keen and intimate a pang that she had disobeyed the behest of Wotan, and saved her of the race which he had doomed to destruction.... The sorrow and the pain of the world had entered into her. Henceforth no more there would be for her the starry splendour of Valhalla, throned on the thunder and rosy with the light of eternal dawn. Soon for this her deed should another light shine on tower and palace wall--the light of the flames that consumed it.

* * * * *

Tempest, and love, and sorrow, and the doom of the immortal gods all made audible in the eternal kingdom of the air! How is it that, when once one has heard a miracle like this, one can ever so far forget it as to go back to the meanness of little miry ways? There are so many big things in the world, and though one knows that, and has, according to one’s scale, seen and understood their size, yet we can still be so gross of perception that one can sit down, blear-eyed of vision, to write two-penny-halfpenny reflections about sorrow and mutability! (And be rather pleased with them, too, until Legs and Helen laughed themselves all out of shape.)

How large a place, too, in that which makes for size and the breeziness of living, does Art in some form or other occupy for most of us! Music and painting, literature and drama, are great doors flung wide to admit one to the sunshine of God. Often, even to the spiritually-minded, the avenues of prayer and directer communion seem somehow blocked; to others, the majority, they are never wholly open. But to any who have an appreciation at all of what is beautiful, it must be a dark hour indeed when that approach is altogether shrouded and black, when neither Angelo, nor Velasquez, nor Shelley, nor Wagner, has a candle to give one to light the way. Millions of beautiful minds have their approach here. To millions all idea of a personal God, to be approached directly, seems inconceivable, but it seems to me to be one of the perfectly certain things in this very uncertain world that the passionate worship of beauty, in whatever sort manifested, is no less a direct invocation than prayer and the bent knee. The study and the love for ‘whatsoever things are lovely’ is as royal a road, perhaps, as the other, for the passion for what is beautiful is no less than the passion for the only Beautiful, and by such as feel that, all that is filthy is as unerringly condemned as it is by those who call ‘filthy’ by another name--‘sinful.’ For the perception of anything beautiful has to the perceiver a force of purging, while to the gross sense it is a sealed thing.

‘O world as God has made it, all is beauty;
And knowing this is love, and love is duty,
What further can be sought for or declared?’

And to that I say ‘Amen.’

* * * * *

The ‘kennel,’ as that same magician of words said, is ‘a-yelp’ at this. Artists, of whatever sort, are supposed to be loose of life. Where that extraordinary delusion arose I have no idea, unless it had its origin in some superficial observer of the manners and ways in the Latin quarter of Paris. That things not technically parochial may have occurred there, who would deny? But for my part I think it just as un-Christian to nag, and to vex, and to be unkind as to be anything else under the sun. In fact, to put it broadly, I would as soon be a drunken and kind man as be a sour and total abstainer. Sour and total abstainers will turn on me their eyes of smiling pity and horror, but perhaps it is only a matter of taste.

But to be ‘nice’ to people seems so immensely important. You may lecture on the Lamentations of Jeremiah for hours together, with a battery of historical facts to help you, and yet do no particular good; but if you help a lame dog, canine or human, over a stile, you have been a far better Christian. I dare say that word offends some people, so I will cancel it, and say that you have been of far greater service in a world that has fortuitously come into being, and will as fortuitously go out of being. Whatever may be the truth about things seen and unseen, happiness is quite certainly better than misery, and laughter is better than the most edifying tears.

The finger of the gloomy moralist is pointed at me. I knew it was going to be pointed--and in a sepulchral voice he says: ‘What about death?’

The fact is that I don’t know (nor does he), and it is not my affair. While I am alive I prefer to drink deep of the joy of life than to speculate about what may come next. I can conjure up my death-bed as often as I choose, and make it a scene of moving pathos and dim vexed doubts. There is nothing so easy. I can without the slightest effort advance really profound problems as to ‘what it all means,’ since there is nothing so easy as asking unanswerable questions. What of the death of the wasp which I killed gleefully last August with a tennis-racquet? I haven’t the slightest idea. All I know is that if next August another ventures to buzz round my head when I am having tea on the lawn after a perspiring set, I shall, if possible, kill it again.

If only the gloomy moralist could give me a reasonable theory to show why I could not exterminate wasps, I would accept it. But he can’t. He only says it puzzles him. It puzzles me, too, but in the interval I kill the wasp.

The fact is (degrading though it may sound) that I do not really believe that we are any of us capable of understanding the mind of the Infinite God. Philosophers try to explain little bits of it, and in their explanation of the little bit of it bang their heads together like children playing hide-and-seek in the dark. _Hinc illæ lacrimæ_. The poor children have terrible headaches. I am extremely sorry, but it is, after all, their fault. Instead of playing hide-and-seek in the dark, they should go out and play in the light; then no heads would be hit together.

It is quite maddening to think of the energy expended over this hide-and-seek, when all the time the garden of the world’s beauty is ready waiting outside the door. If you have the instincts of a beast, perhaps it is better to grope in the dark; but if you have the rudiments of any other condition, go and play. All the beauty that the world holds is at your command. All that really matters in this world is to be enjoyed very cheaply. Most things worth reading can be bought for a shilling or two, and if that is not ‘handy,’ look at a tree instead, and absorb the life that shines in each growing twig of it. Or if you are musically minded, hear, as I have just heard, the glories of the maidens of the storm.

Of course, no one thing is the least more wonderful than any other. All that happens, if we look at it at all closely, is a marvellous conjuring-trick. Why don’t ducks come out of hen’s eggs? Is it not marvellous that chickens invariably issue? If you go a step farther back, and learn something about the continuance of type, it becomes even more wonderful. ‘How’ can be told us, but never ‘why.’ And so I am confident in the unanswerableness of my riddle. Why do sounds like those of the violin and the brass in the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ convey the essence of storm and tempest?

* * * * *

Another conjuring-trick of the most delightful kind occurred next morning. At twelve o’clock last night the streets of London had, without asking (thereby reversing the sad tale of Oliver Twist), been given a second helping of brown porridge. It was ankle-deep on the roadway of Sloane Street, thick brown porridge of mud; then during the night the temperature went down, and it froze. The result is that for the copious soup we are given a clean, dry roadway. There is no mud of any kind, not even frozen mud. The street is clear and dry, as if Oliver Twist had licked it. But where has gone that two inches of obfusc lather? Has the wood-pavement drunk it in? Has it gone into the air? Has some celestial housemaid, like the Awful Thing, been set to sweep the streets, even as she has swept the sky, and given us the invigoration of frost in exchange for the wet blanket of chilly cloud? Coming back from Richter last night, the streets were swimming; eight hours later (or it may be nine) one might walk barefoot across the road, or spread one’s dinner there, and get no taint. How it will be sparkling on the grasses and brave evergreens at home, turned to diamond spray by the red sun of frosty mornings!

* * * * *

‘O world as God has made it!’... How often involuntarily, as if coming from without, that line rings in my head! And how very little we, with all our jealousies, and depressions, and bickerings, and follies, are able to spoil or dim the beauty that is cast so broadly there. Puny as are our efforts for good, it really seems to me that our attempts at being evil are even more impotent and microscopic. We are often as tiresome and unpleasant as we know how to be, yet all the time we are swimming against that huge quiet tide of the beauty of the world as God made it, the knowledge of which is love, and beyond which there is no further declaration possible. Sometimes, if we are very active indeed, and exert ourselves very much, we can stand still or even move a little way in opposition to the great tide, but soon our efforts must relax, and we are swept down again with the current that eternally flows from the heart of the Infinite, and returns there again in those pulsations that are the life and the light of the world.

It is impossible, indeed, unless we say that evil is the vital principle of the world, to think otherwise. War there is between the two huge forces, but it is just Satanism, and nothing else whatever, that makes people say that the world is going from bad to worse. If you are so unfortunate as to be a Satanist, there is nothing more to be said, and I hope the devil will give you your due; but if otherwise, there can be no other conclusion than that good, all that is lovely and fine, is steadily gaining ground. For it does not seem reasonable to suppose that God contemplates some swift heady manœuvre which shall suddenly take evil in the rear, and in a moment rout the antagonism. At any rate, as far as we can possibly judge, it is by quiet processes that He deals with the sum of the world, even as He deals with the units that make it. For just as nobody has any right to expect that the evil in his nature will be suddenly expunged, even though the moment should be one of blinding revelation, so we should acquiesce in the slow progress of the sum-total. For there are only three possible alternatives--the first (namely, that the progress is from bad to worse), which is Satanism; the second, that there is now in the world (and will be) exactly the same amount of evil and good as there has always been, in which case you are confronted with the absurd proposition of two absolutely equal forces having made this scheme of things, which will war to all eternity; and the third, that good is stronger than evil, and is quietly gaining ground.

The objection to the first alternative is that it is Satanism--a very fatal objection. The objection to the second is that it is so stupendously dull. There cannot possibly be any point in anything if the two forces are equal. There can be no struggle in the mind as to whether one ought or ought not to do certain things, if whatever you do or don’t does not make any difference. There remains the third alternative. The objection to that is ... well, I can’t see there is any.

* * * * *

Hours ago this house has been asleep, the house in which I write on this early morning of the New Year, the house which is home to me, even as my own is; for it is the house--you will have guessed--where lives she who is neither dearer nor less dear than Helen, and where we always spend the week and a little more that begins before Christmas and finishes a little after the New Year has been swung from the voices of mellow bells. Before midnight we sat in the oak-panelled room and played the most heavenly games, charades, and insane gymnastic exercises, and table-turning, with terror when the dreadful table turned in a really unaccountable manner, all consecrated by love and laughter; and then, when the Old Year was to be numbered by minutes that the fingers could reckon, we drew nearer to the log fire and wished each other that which we all wanted for each. Legs’ triumphant entry into the Foreign Office was no longer capable of a wish, since it was already accomplished, so he was wished a wife; and--you will understand that we were all very intimate--my mother was wished freedom from all anxiety of whatever kind; and the old nurse of ninety years who had acted charades with us with astonishing power was wished her century; and I was wished the holding of the frost, so that I might skate--they were flippant again--and two cousins were respectively wished a microscope--one is of tender years--and a motor-car; and then, just as the clock jarred, telling us there was but a minute more to the New Year, it was Helen’s turn to be wished, and somebody said, ‘Your heart’s desire’; and she understood.

Immediately afterwards the clock struck, and everybody kissed everybody else, and said ‘Happy New Year,’ and no more. For you must not say anything more than that: you _must not_ even say ‘Good-night,’ else the charm is broken. So in dead silence we lighted bedroom candles, for the ritual was well known, and separated. And who knows but that all about the house, as in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ the dances of the fairies circled up and down by the light of drowsy fires?

JANUARY

A hundred pounds have suddenly and unexpectedly appeared on the horizon. People who are very rich have not the slightest idea what that means to us. People who are very poor have not the slightest idea either, because they would probably buy a public-house, or goodwill, or something of that nature, and never have any fun out of it at all. But to people who ‘jog along’ a hundred pounds is a treat which neither rich people nor poor can form any conception of. To those who just pay their way, as we do, it means several weeks somewhere. The only question is ‘Where?’ At this point in our argument it was impossible to proceed. Helen and I were both being so unselfish that we couldn’t go on. She said she longed to have two or three weeks in Switzerland; I said that what I really wanted was to go to the Riviera for a fortnight. Then, as always happens, these subterfuges broke down, and we both confessed that we neither of us really wanted to go where we said we did. She wanted to go to Nice; I wanted to go to the high altitudes. So, with the understanding that we were to go where the coin said we should, and not otherwise, we tossed up. It was high altitudes.

His country put in a claim for Legs at the Foreign Office, unfortunately, and he should not come with us; but we felt, when we observed the urbanity of the French customs-house officials, who obligingly shut their eyes to the presence of large quantities of tobacco, and the politeness of the railway officials, that Legs had probably made himself felt in our foreign relations already, and that he was responsible for all this very civil behaviour. At Bâle, however, where we had to change at the awful hour in the morning which is neither night nor day, we found that Legs’ diplomacy had not yet had time to make itself felt, for we were subjected to a searching scrutiny. Luckily I had had experience of the manners and customs-house officials of Bâle before, and had transferred my tobacco into my coat pockets, thus frustrating the baffled Teuton. But I am afraid it gave certain secret glee to observe that my travelling companion of the night before--a stout white man, with a name on his labels so long that I could not read it, who had snored all the time--was caught, and his rich stores of cigarettes taken from him, to be sent, I suppose, to Berne, for the delectation of the President of the Republic.

Switzerland is a land that always arouses curiosity as to how it came about that a country in which the people are so small, so ‘toy,’ should in itself be on so gigantic and marvellous a scale. Is it that the living among these stupendous surroundings has somehow dwarfed the people, or has Nature, by one of her inimitable contrasts, made the human part of Switzerland so insignificant in order to set off the vastness of peak and snowfield? Certainly the glib commonplace that national character is influenced and formed by national surroundings is here gloriously contradicted, since, as far as I am aware, no Swiss has ever attained to eminence in anything. They are a little toy people, who live in little toy towns, and make excellent chocolate, and run innumerable hotels on the most economical principles. But even then they do not (as one would expect) get very rich. They are never ‘very’ anything. ‘But the chocolate is excellent,’ said Helen to these speculations.

It requires faith this morning to believe that in a few hours we shall be crunching the dry, powdery snow beneath our feet, and before sunset be skating or gliding down the white frozen road, with puffs of snow coming from the bows of the toboggan, for here all down the shore of the Lake of Thun the country is brown and grey, with scarce a streak of white to show that it is winter. Low overhead are fat masses of dirty-looking cloud, but between them (and this is the door where faith enters) are glimpses of the perfect azure which we expect up above. Now and then the sun strikes some distant hillside, or, like a flashlight, is turned on to the waters of the lake, making of them a sudden aquamarine of luminous green. But the weather is undoubtedly mild; the eaves of the wooden toy-stations drip with discouraging moisture, and Interlaken, when we reach it, wears a dreadful spring-like aspect, and people are sitting out of doors at the cafés, and appear to find it relaxing.

Then the first of these wonderful winter miracles happened. There was the flat alluvial land at the end of the lake, across which ran the fussy little light railway which should take us above (so we hoped) the region of cloudland. Grey and puddle-strewn was it, with here and there a patch of dirty snow stained through with the earthy moistness beneath. A low-lying mist was spread over the nearer distance, which melted into the thicker clouds of the sky itself. It was just such a view as you shall see anywhere in the English fen-land during February.

We were looking at this with, I am bound to say, a certain despondency. It seemed almost certain that we should find dull weather (which means thaw) up above, when a sudden draught from some funnel of the hills came down, making agitation and disturbance both among the low-lying mist and the higher clouds. The former was vanquished first, and, torn to ribbons by the wind, and scorched up by a sudden divine gleam of sun that smote downwards, disclosed in its vanishing the long, piney sides of an upward-leading gorge. The higher clouds, being thicker, took longer to disperse, I suppose, for at its farther end the gorge was still full of scudding vapours. Then suddenly they cleared, and high, high above, a vignette of fairyland--the Jungfrau herself, queen of the snows--stood out in glacier, and snowfield, and peak, against a sky of incredible blue. There she stood in full blaze of sunshine, the silver-crystal maiden, donned in blue, enough to open the eyes of the blind and make the dumb mouth sing.

Then afterwards, as the little Turkish bath of a train went heavenwards, how magical and divine a change happened! Inside the steamy carriages, smelling of railway-bags, and rugs, and forgotten sandwiches, it was not possible to see through the condensation on the window-panes, but the blood that trots through the body knew the change, and took a more staccato note. Then--I suppose that travelling stupidity had seized us both--it suddenly occurred to Helen that we might, without fear of prosecution, put the windows down, though by a printed notice of by-laws of the railway it was still defended that we should not agitate ourselves out of it. Once a ticket-puncher, exactly like a figure out of Noah’s ark, put them scowlingly up again; but with the boldness that this whiff of mountain-air supplied, we again lowered them, after a further consultation of the by-laws.

The ineffable change had begun. Soon for the moistness of the lowland there was exchanged a hint of frost--something that made outlines a little more determinate, a little crisper. Then, as we mounted higher, there was further change. For dripping twigs of the trees there were trees that showed a hard, white outline of frost; for the sullen muddy stream there was clearer water, that went on its way beneath half-formed lids of ice; and thinner and thinner above our heads grew the grey blanket of cloud.

Then that, too, was folded away, and above is was the sun and the sparkling of the unending firmament. Below it had been like a London fog, when you cannot see the tops of the shrouded houses; now we saw the roofs of the world, the Queen Anne’s mansion of Europe, all clean, all clear, just as they were when I saw this land three years ago. No tile had slipped, no chimney-pot required repairs. The top of the world was good. Oh, how good!

The clear dry air, the sunset lights on the peaks, the liquid twilight (keen as snuff to the nostril), from which the sun had gone! There was the rose-tinted Wetterhorn, black Eiger, flaming finger of Finster-Aarhorn; or, on more human plane, the hiss of skates over the perfect ice, the passage of a toboggan, with a little Swiss girl holding in front of her a baby sister, and steering with her heels, and shrilly shouting ‘_Achtung!_’ There was ‘Madame’ who keeps a restaurant (I do not know her name), standing to see the train-passengers come in, and shaking hands, and saying, ‘You shall have wings to-morrow, no legs’ (alluding to an amiable altercation of three years ago, when I drew a kind but firm sort of line about eating chickens’ legs for lunch on four consecutive days); and there was the beerman, whose admirable beverage I always drank at 11.30 a.m., being thirsty with skating; and there was a skater I knew, who attempted a rather swift back-bracket for the admiration of the new arrivals by the train to see, and fell down in a particularly complicated manner in the middle of it; and there was the barrack of an hotel which always smells of roasting leather, because people put their skates and boots on the hot-water pipes, and right above it was the Mettelhorn; and to the left was the Lady Wetterhorn; and to the right the smooth, steely-looking toboggan-run down into the valley. ‘Oh, world----’ I beg your pardon.

I have omitted to mention the magic word on our luggage-labels, ‘Grindelwald.’

Three years ago, I must tell you, among other foolish and futile deeds, I made a _cache_ underneath a particular tree on the path leading to the Scheidegg, consisting, as far as I remember, of chocolate, coins, and matches. These insignificant facts I published in another place, and since then I have received every winter mysterious letters from Grindelwald, showing that other people are as absurd as myself. My _cache_, in fact, has been found (I gave directions which I hoped would be sufficient), and it has been, so these letters tell me, enriched by other secret and beautiful things. There has been placed there, on separate occasions, by separate passionate pilgrims, all manner of store, and the very next morning, instead of going to skate, Helen and I skulked off with a toboggan to see what we should find. A poem on the Wetterhorn, so I had been informed, was there, to form the nucleus of a library; there were a tin of potted meat and some caramels for the larder; and furniture had been added by a third person in the shape of a lead soldier and an ink-bottle; while the exchequer, I knew, also had been enriched by at least half a franc in nickel pieces. We had debated earnestly last night as to what to add to the establishment, if we found it, and eventually decided on a handkerchief, which is to be regarded by passionate pilgrims as a tablecloth, a reel of cotton, and a copy of ‘Shirley’ in the sixpenny edition, to swell the library shelves. This latter was in a small linen bag, to keep it from the wet.

Of course, we did not expect to find all the objects that I had been informed had been placed there from time to time, for the rule of the _cache_ is that you may use what you find there, provided only you replace it with something else. The potted meat, for instance, one could not expect to go undiscussed, and I cannot personally conceive leaving caramels uneaten. But in place of those, if only passionate pilgrims had played the game, we should find other objects. Thus the _cache_ becomes a sort of exchange and mart--a reciprocal table laid in the wilderness, where you take one dish and replace it with another.

How it all savours of romance to the childish mind! With agitated fingers you scoop away the earth and moss which form the entrance to the _cache_, under a pine tree on the empty, frozen hillside, and you know you will find treasure of some kind, but what it is you cannot possibly tell. And inviolable secrecy must surround and embellish your manœuvres; the _cache_ should not be mentioned at all except discreetly to the elect, for it partakes of Freemasonry, the masons of which are those who delight in idiotic proceedings. But just as three years ago I gave the inventory of the _cache_ as it was then, so in the minds of the idiotic there may be felt some interest as to its inventory when the founder again revisited it. _Caches_, of course, are socialistic in spirit, and anybody may appropriate whatever he chooses; but I should be glad if the copy of ‘Shirley’ is left there. It is such a pleasant book to read after lunch, if you are tobogganing alone. A book, at any rate, is rather a good thing to have in a _cache_, and the wishes of the founder will be satisfied if another book is put there instead. But let us have a book. I should prefer that it should not be the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’

The morning, I think, must have been ordered on purpose, for I can imagine nothing so exquisite being served up in the ordinary way, _à la carte_; such weather must have been specially chosen. Not a single ripple of air stirred; an unflecked sky was overhead, and the sun, as we set off, just topped the hills to the south-east, and sat like a huge golden bandbox on the rim of them. The frost had been severe in the night, but in this windlessness and entire absence of moisture no feeling of cold reached one. There was in the air a briskness of quality more than magical; it was as if made of ice and fire and wine, and in a sort of intoxication we slid down into the valley. Then, crossing the stream, since there was water about, it suddenly seemed desperately chill; but no sooner had we mounted a dozen yards of ascent again than the same dry kindling of the blood reasserted itself. Toboggans will not run of their own accord uphill, so I put ours under my arm, and for a hundred yards we danced a _pas de quatre_ up the trodden snow. We both sang all the time, different tunes, when suddenly we saw a clergyman observing us from a few yards ahead. He had a wildish and severe eye, and we stopped. David before the Ark would have stopped if he had unexpectedly come on that man. He was sitting in the snow, and wore a black hat, black coat, and black trousers, but he had yellow boots. He kept his eye on us all the time that we were within sight, and seemed to have no other occupation. We neither of us dared to look round till we had left him some way behind, neither did we dare to dance again. Eventually I turned my head to look at him from behind a tree. He was still sitting in the snow, not on a rug, you understand, nor on a toboggan, nor on any of the things upon which you usually sit in the snow. He was not breakfasting or lunching or looking at the view. He was sitting in the snow, and that was all. I have no explanation of any kind to offer about this unusual incident. Helen thinks he was mad. That very likely is the case, but it is an interesting form of mania. Perhaps by-and-by we shall have an asylum for snow-sitters. Or is it a new kind of rest-cure?

It is astonishing how you can argue about things of which you know nothing. Indeed, I think that all proper arguments are based on ignorance. If you know anything whatever on the subject of which you are talking, you produce a fact of some kind, which knocks argument flat. It is only possible to reason rightly on those subjects concerning which no fact, except the phenomenon itself, is ascertainable. Had we asked the clergyman why he sat in the snow, he would probably have told us, and the subject would have ceased to interest us conversationally. As it was, we held heated debate upon him, just as if he was the Education Bill, for a long time. But the unusualness of it merited attention and conjecture. And think how divine an opening for conversation at dinner-parties, if you know nothing of your neighbour, and have not caught her name.

‘Did you ever see a clergyman sitting in the snow?’

That, in fact, was the outcome of our argument. No theory about him would really hold water. He was probably a conversational gambit, which might lead to much. For instance, in answer to your question, your interlocutor might reply in five obvious ways:

1. ‘I once saw a clergyman, but he was not sitting in the snow.’

2. ‘I have seen snow, but I never saw a clergyman sitting in it.’

3. ‘I once saw a clergyman being snowballed.’

4. ‘Yes. What are your views about the best treatment for the insane?’

5. ‘Such strange things happen at Grindelwald. Did you know----’

Yes; he was probably a conversational opening made manifest to mortal eyes. Anyhow, when we returned he was not sitting there. If he had been real, he probably would have been--at least, if you once sit in the snow there is no reason why you should ever get up. Obviously it is your _métier_.

Now, everybody who lives in fogs and rainy places will fail to understand anything of these last deplorable pages. But if they go to the thin clear air of Alps in winter, they will know that this sort of thing (given you have the luck to see a clergyman sitting in the snow) is invested with supreme importance. When the hot sun shines on ice, it produces some kindly confusion of the brain; there is no longer any point in trying to be clever or well-informed, or witty, or any of those things that are supposed to convey distinction down below to their fortunate possessors: you go back to mere existence and joy of life. It is a trouble to be consecutive or conduct a reasonable argument; instead, you open your mouth and say anything that happens to come out of it. Most frequently what issues is laughter, but apart from that, the only conversation you can indulge in is preposterous and the only behaviour possible is childish. That is why I love these roofs of the world. The intoxication of interstellar space is in the air. Everything is so light--you, your body, your mind, your tongue, your aims and objects. The only things that you take seriously are the things that do not matter: the snow-sitter was one, the _cache_ was another. But as we got nearer the _cache_, we became even more solemn than on the question of the snow-sitter. There was no telling what we should find there, even if we found the place at all. The tree might have been cut down since last year; the whole _cache_ might have been rifled by some imperceptive hand. There was no end to the list of untoward circumstances that might have despoiled us.

And so we went through the wood: we came to the end of it, and there was a tree--‘of many one,’ as Mr. Wordsworth prophetically remarked. On its roots were cut my humble initials: it was certainly The Tree.

‘Oh, quick, quick!’ said Helen; ‘let us know the worst!’

The root had arched a little since I saw it last. Moss and snow were plastered on it in a manner scarcely natural. I plucked the bandage away with hands that trembled. We found:

1. A pencil.

2. Something sticky, which I believe to have been the caramels.

3. An empty potted-meat tin, with a wisp of paper inside it, on which was written: ‘I ate it. Quite excellent.’

4. A candle-end.

5. The famous poem on the Wetterhorn done up in canvas. (How laudable!)

6. A Jock-Scot, salmon-trout size.

7. A paper on which was written: ‘What’s the point?’

8. A cigarette, very sloppy.

9. A five-franc piece, wrapped up in paper, on which was written: ‘I took 4.50 away.’

10. A little wooden pill-box containing a very small moonstone.

I think we were very moderate in our exchanges, which is right, since you must always leave the _cache_ richer for your presence, and we merely took away the pencil and the poem on the Wetterhorn, leaving our handkerchief, the reel of cotton, and the copy of ‘Shirley.’ Below the question ‘What’s the point?’ we wrote, ‘None, if you can’t see it,’ and added, ‘The founder and his wife visited the _cache_ on January 12, 1907. They saw a clergyman sitting in the snow. Selah.’

Then an awful thing happened. Even while these treasures were openly and sumptuously spread round us, down the path there came a merry Swiss peasant about a hundred years old. He looked at us and the treasures with curiosity and contempt, and then burst into a perfect flood of speech, of which neither of us understood one single word. When he stopped, I said politely, ‘Ich weiss nicht,’ just like Parsifal, and he began it, or something like it, all over again, with gesticulations added, and in a rather louder tone, as if he was talking to a deaf man. Until this torrent of gibberish was let loose on me, I had no idea how much there was in the world that I did not know; so with the desire to reduce _his_ opinion of himself also, I addressed him in English. I said ‘God save the King’ right through, as much as I could remember of ‘To be or not to be’ from the play called ‘Hamlet,’ and had just begun on ‘When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,’ when he suddenly turned pale, crossed himself (though it was a Protestant canton), and fairly fled down the path. I make no doubt that he thought he had met the devil. Anyhow, he had met his match at unintelligible conversation.

But it was clearly no use running risks, for more of the merry Swiss might come down the path, who, it was conceivable, might not be so much impressed by unintelligible sounds, and we hurriedly reburied the treasure, ate our lunch, and turned the bow of the toboggan homewards, since we proposed to skate all afternoon. It was a year since I had been shod with steel. I burned for the frozen surface. But it was right to see to the _cache_ first. There are some things you cannot wait for.

We spent three weeks in these divine futilities, if anything so utterly enjoyable can be considered futile. For my part, I do not believe it can, since, as I have already said, to enjoy a thing very much, supposing always that it does not injure anybody else, is a gilt-edged investment of your time; for enjoyment is not (as is falsely supposed) finished with when the thing itself is done and over, for it is just then that the high interest of it (though gilt-edged) begins to be paid. Until one forgets about it (and by a merciful dispensation one remembers what is pleasant far longer and far more keenly than what is painful), subsequent days and hours are all enriched, and therefore made more productive, by these pleasurable memories. It is here, I think, that a wonderfully fresh and vivid student of the human mind--namely, R. L. Stevenson--goes all wrong when he says that the past is all of one texture. It seems to me--one is only responsible for one’s own experience--to be of two textures, one strong and the other weak; and the strong one is the memory of things you have enjoyed, of happy days; the other of times when, for some reason or other--pain, or anxiety, or fear--the lights have been low, and the sound of the grinding not low, but loud. The human mind, in fact, is more retentive of its pleasures than of its pain. In the moment of the happening either may seem the top note of acuteness, but the echoes of the one indisputably live longer than the echoes of the other; and though our consciousness, if you care to look at it that way, is largely a haunted house of the dead hours, yet happy ghosts are in preponderance, and seem solider than the shadows of its dark places; also (and this, I think, too, is indubitable) the anticipation of happiness is more acute than the anticipation of a corresponding pain. In the future there are two textures also, as in the past.