Chapter VI: Part 6

In this valley one day as I was drawing a picture of the woods I found a wandering Englishman who was in the oddest way. He seemed by the slight bend at his knees and the leaning forward of his head to have no very great care how much further he might go. He was in the clothes of an English tourist, which looked odd in such a place, as, for that matter, they do anywhere. He had upon his head a pork-pie hat which was of the same colour and texture as his clothes, a speckly brown. He carried a thick stick. He was a man over fifty years of age; his face was rather hollow and worn; his eyes were very simple and pale; he was bearded with a weak beard, and in his expression there appeared a constrained but kindly weariness. This was the man who came up to me as I was drawing my picture. I had heard him scrambling in the undergrowth of the woods just behind me.

He came out and walked to me across the few yards of meadow. The haying was over, so he did the grass no harm. He came and stood near me, irresolutely, looking vaguely up and across the valley towards the further woods, and then gently towards what I was drawing. When he had so stood still and so looked for a moment he asked me in French the name of the great house whose roof showed above the more ordered trees beyond the river, where a park emerged from and mixed with the forest. I told him the name of the house, whereupon he shook his head and said that he had once more come to the wrong place.

I asked him what he meant, and he told me, sitting down slowly and carefully upon the grass, this adventure:

"First," said he, "are you always quite sure whether a thing is really there or not?"

"I am always quite sure," said I; "I am always positive."

He sighed, and added: "Could you understand how a man might feel that things were really there when they were not?"

"Only," said I, "in some very vivid dream, and even then I think a man knows pretty well inside his own mind that he is dreaming." I said that it seemed to me rather like the question of the cunning of lunatics; most of them know at the bottom of their silly minds that they are cracked, as you may see by the way they plot and pretend.

"You are not sympathetic with me," he said slowly, "but I will nevertheless tell you what I want to tell you, for it will relieve me, and it will explain to you why I have again come into this valley." "Why do you say 'again'?" said I.

"Because," he answered gently, "whenever my work gives me the opportunity I do the same thing. I go up the valley of the Seine by train from Dieppe; I get out at the station at which I got out on that day, and I walk across these low hills, hoping that I may strike just the path and just the mood--but I never do."

"What path and what mood?" said I.

"I was telling you," he answered patiently, "only you were so brutal about reality." And then he sighed. He put his stick across his knees as he sat there on the grass, held it with a hand on either side of his knees, and so sitting bunched up began his tale once more.

"It was ten years ago, and I was extremely tired, for you must know that I am a Government servant, and I find my work most wearisome. It was just this time of year that I took a week's holiday. I intended to take it in Paris, but I thought on my way, as the weather was so fine, that I would do something new and that I would walk a little way off the track. I had often wondered what country lay behind the low and steep hills on the right of the railway line.

"I had crossed the Channel by night," he continued, a little sorry for himself, "to save the expense. It was dawn when reached Rouen, and there I very well remember drinking some coffee which I did not like, and eating some good bread which I did. I changed carriages at Rouen because the express did not stop at any of the little stations beyond. I took a slower train, which came immediately behind it, and stopped at most of the stations. I took my ticket rather at random for a little station between Pont de l'Arche and Mantes. I got out at that little station, and it was still early--only midway through the morning.

"I was in an odd mixture of fatigue and exhilaration: I had not slept and I would willingly have done so, but the freshness of the new day was upon me, and I have always had a very keen curiosity to see new sights and to know what lies behind the hills.

"The day was fine and already rather hot for June. I did not stop in the village near the station for more than half an hour, just the time to take some soup and a little wine; then I set out into the woods to cross over into this parallel valley. I knew that I should come to it and to the railway line that goes down it in a very few miles. I proposed when I came to that other railway line on the far side of the hills to walk quietly down it as nearly parallel to it as I could get, and at the first station to take the next train for Chartres, and then the next day to go from Chartres to Paris. That was my plan.

"The road up into the woods was one of those great French roads which sometimes frighten me and always weary me by their length and insistence: men seem to have taken so much trouble to make them, and they make me feel as though I had to take trouble myself; I avoid them when I walk. Therefore, so soon as this great road had struck the crest of the hills and was well into the woods (cutting through them like the trench of a fortification, with the tall trees on either side) I struck out into a ride which had been cut through them many years ago and was already half overgrown, and I went along this ride for several miles.

"It did not matter to me how I went, since my design was so simple and since any direction more or less westward would enable me to fulfil it, that is, to come down upon the valley of the Eure and to find the single railway line which leads to Chartres. The woods were very pleasant on that June noon, and once or twice I was inclined to linger in their shade and sleep an hour. But--note this clearly--I did not sleep. I remember every moment of the way, though I confess my fatigue oppressed me somewhat as the miles continued.

"At last by the steepness of a new descent I recognized that I had crossed the watershed and was coming down into the valley of this river. The ride had dwindled to a path, and I was wondering where the path would lead me when I noticed that it was getting more orderly: there were patches of sand, and here and there a man had cut and trimmed the edges of the way. Then it became more orderly still. It was all sanded, and there were artificial bushes here and there--I mean bushes not native to the forest, until at last I was aware that my ramble had taken me into some one's own land, and that I was in a private ground.

"I saw no great harm in this, for a traveller, if he explains himself, will usually be excused; moreover, I had to continue, for I knew no other way, and this path led me westward also. Only, whether because my trespassing worried me or because I felt my own dishevelment more acutely, the lack of sleep and the strain upon me increased as I pursued those last hundred yards, until I came out suddenly from behind a screen of rosebushes upon a large lawn, and at the end of it there was a French country house with a moat round it, such as they often have, and a stone bridge over the moat.

"The château was simple and very grand. The mouldings upon it pleased me, and it was full of peace. Upon the further side of the lawn, so that I could hear it but not see it, a fountain was playing into a basin. By the sound it was one of those high French fountains which the people who built such houses as these two hundred years ago delighted in. The plash of it was very soothing, but I was so tired and drooping that at one moment it sounded much further than at the next.

"There was an iron bench at the edge of the screen of roses, and hardly knowing what I did,--for it was not the right thing to do in another person's place--I sat down on this bench, taking pleasure in the sight of the moat and the house with its noble roof, and the noise of the fountain. I think I should have gone to sleep there and at that moment--for I felt upon me worse than ever the strain of that long hot morning and that long night journey--had not a very curious thing happened."

Here the man looked up at me oddly, as though to see whether I disbelieved him or not; but I did not disbelieve him.

I was not even very much interested, for I was trying to make the trees to look different one from the other, which is an extremely difficult thing: I had not succeeded and I was niggling away. He continued with more assurance:

"The thing that happened was this: a young girl came out of the house dressed in white, with a blue scarf over her head and crossed round her neck. I knew her face as well as possible: it was a face I had known all my youth and early manhood--but for the life of me I could not remember her name!'

"When one is very tired," I said, "that does happen to one: a name one knows as well as one's own escapes one. It is especially the effect of lack of sleep."

"It is," said he, sighing profoundly; "but the oddness of my feeling it is impossible to describe, for there I was meeting the oldest and perhaps the dearest and certainly the most familiar of my friends, whom," he added, hesitating a moment, "I had not seen for many years. It was a very great pleasure ... it was a sort of comfort and an ending. I forgot, the moment I saw her, why I had come over the hills, and all about how I meant to get to Chartres.... And now I must tell you," added the man a little awkwardly, "that my name is Peter."

"No doubt," said I gravely, for I could not see why he should not bear that name.

"My Christian name," he continued hurriedly.

"Of course," said I, as sympathetically as I could. He seemed relieved that I had not even smiled at it.

"Yes," he went on rather quickly, "Peter--my name is Peter. Well, this lady came up to me and said, 'Why, Peter, we never thought you would come!' She did not seem very much astonished, but rather as though I had come earlier than she had expected. 'I will get Philip,' she said. 'You remember Philip?' Here I had another little trouble with my memory: I did remember that there was a Philip, but I could not place him. That was odd, you know. As for her, oh, I knew _her_ as well as the colour of the sky: it was her name that my brain missed, as it might have missed my own name or my mother's.

"Philip came out as she called him, and there was a familiarity between them that seemed natural to me at the time, but whether he was a brother or a lover or a husband, or what, I could not for the life of me remember.

"'You look tired,' he said to me in a kind voice that I liked very much and remembered clearly. 'I am,' said I, 'dog tired.' 'Come in with us,' he said, 'and we will give you some wine and water. When would you like to eat?' I said I would rather sleep than eat. He said that could easily be arranged.

"I strolled with them towards the house across that great lawn, hearing the noise of the fountain, now dimmer, now nearer; sometimes it seemed miles away and sometimes right in my ears. Whether it was their conversation or my familiarity with them or my fatigue, at any rate, as I crossed the moat I could no longer recall anything save their presence. I was not even troubled by the desire to recall anything; I was full of a complete contentment, and this surging up of familiar things, this surging up of it in a foreign place, without excuse or possible connexion or any explanation whatsoever, seemed to me as natural as breathing.

"As I crossed the bridge I wholly forgot whence I came or whither I was going, but I knew myself better than ever I had known myself, and every detail of the place was familiar to me.

"Here I had passed (I thought) many hours of my childhood and my boyhood and my early manhood also. I ceased considering the names and the relation of Philip and the girl.

"They gave me cold meat and bread and excellent wine, and water to mix with it, and as they continued to speak even the last adumbrations of care fell off me altogether, and my spirit seemed entirely released and free. My approaching sleep beckoned to me like an easy entrance into Paradise. I should wake from it quite simply into the perpetual enjoyment of this place and its companionship. Oh, it was an absolute repose!

"Philip took me to a little room on the ground floor fitted with the exquisite care and the simplicity of the French: there was a curtained bed, a thing I love. He lent me night clothes, though it was broad day, because he said that if I undressed and got into the bed I should be much more rested; they would keep everything quiet at that end of the house, and the gentle fall of the water into the moat outside would not disturb me. I said on the contrary it would soothe me, and I felt the benignity of the place possess me like a spell. Remember that I was very tired and had not slept for now thirty hours.

"I remember handling the white counterpane and noting the delicate French pattern upon it, and seeing at one corner the little red silk coronet embroidered, which made me smile. I remember putting my hand upon the cool linen of the pillow-case and smoothing it; then I got into that bed and fell asleep. It was broad noon, with the stillness that comes of a summer noon upon the woods; the air was cool and delicious above the water of the moat, and my windows were open to it.

"The last thing I heard as I dropped asleep was her voice calling to Philip in the corridor. I could have told the very place. I knew that corridor so well. We used to play there when we were children. We used to play at travelling, and we used to invent the names of railway stations for the various doors. Remembering this and smiling at the memory, I fell at once into a blessed sleep.

"...I do not want to annoy you," said the man apologetically, "but I really had to tell you this story, and I hardly know how to tell you the end of it."

"Go on," said I hurriedly, for I had gone and made two trees one exactly like the other (which in nature was never seen) and I was annoyed with myself.

"Well," said he, still hesitating and sighing with real sadness, "when I woke up I was in a third-class carriage; the light was that of late afternoon, and a man had woken me by tapping my shoulder and telling me that the next station was Chartres.... That's all."

He sighed again. He expected me to say something. So I did. I said without much originality: "You must have dreamed it."

"No," said he, very considerably put out, "that is the point! I didn't! I tell you I can remember exactly every stage from when I left the railway train in the Seine Valley until I got into that bed."

"It's all very odd," said I.

"Yes," said he, "and so was my mood; but it was real enough. It was the second or third most real thing that has ever happened to me. I am quite certain that it happened to me."

I remained silent, and rubbed out the top of one of my trees so as to invent a new top for it, since I could not draw it as it was. Then, as he wanted me to say something more, I said: "Well, you must have got into the train somehow."

"Of course," said he.

"Well, where did you get into the train?"

"I don't know."

"Your ticket would have told you that."

"I think I must have given it up to the man," he answered doubtfully, "the guard who told me that the next station was Chartres."

"Well, it's all very mysterious," I said.

"Yes," he said, getting up rather weakly to go on again, "it is." And he sighed again. "I come here every year. I hope," he added a little wistfully, "I hope, you see, that it may happen to me again ... but it never does."

"It will at last," said I to comfort him.

And, will you believe it, that simple sentence made him in a moment radiantly happy; his face beamed, and he positively thanked me, thanked me warmly.

"You speak like one inspired," he said. (I confess I did not feel like it at all.) "I shall go much lighter on my way after that sentence of yours."

He bade me good-bye with some ceremony and slouched off, with his eyes set towards the west and the more distant hills.

THE WAY TO FAIRYLAND

A child of four years old, having read of Fairyland and of the people in it, asked only two days ago, in a very popular attitude of doubt, whether there were any such place, and, if so, where it was; for she believed in her heart that the whole thing was a pack of lies.

I was happy to be able to tell her that her scepticism, though well founded, was extreme. The existence of Fairyland, I was able to point out to her both by documentary evidence from books and also by calling in the testimony of the aged, could not be doubted by any reasonable person. What was really difficult was the way to get there. Indeed, so obviously true was the existence of Fairyland, that every one in this world set out to go there as a matter of course, but so difficult was it to find the way that very few reached the place. Upon this the child very naturally asked me what sort of way the way was and why it was so difficult.

"You must first understand," said I, "where Fairyland is: it lies a little way farther than the farthest hill you can see. It lies, in fact, just beyond that hill. The frontiers of it are sometimes a little doubtful in any landscape, because the landscape is confused, but if on the extreme limits of the horizon you see a long line of hills bounding your view exactly, then you may be perfectly certain that on the other side of those hills is Fairyland. There are times of the day and of the weather when the sky over Fairyland can be clearly perceived, for it has a different colour from any other kind of sky. That is where Fairyland is. It is not on an island, as some have pretended, still less is it under the earth--a ridiculous story, for there it is all dark."

"But how do you get there?" asked the child. "Do you get there by walking to the hills and going over?"

"No," said I, "that is just the bother of it. Several people have thought that that was the way of getting there; in fact, it looked plain common sense, but there is a trick about it; when you get to the hills everything changes, because the fairies have that power: the hills become ordinary, the people living on them turn into people just like you and me, and then when you get to the top of the hills, before you can say knife another common country just like ours has been stuck on the other side. On this account, through the power of the fairies, who hate particularly to be disturbed, no one can reach Fairyland in so simple a way as by walking towards it."

"Then," said the child to me, "I don't see how any one can get there"--for this child had good brains and common sense.

"But," said I, "you must have read in stories of people who get to Fairyland, and I think you will notice that in the stories written by people who know anything about it (and you know how easily these are distinguished from the others) there are always two ways of getting to Fairyland, and only two: one is by mistake, and the other is by a spell. In the first way to Fairyland is to lose your way, and this is one of the best ways of getting there; but it is dangerous, because if you get there that way you offend the fairies. It is better to get there by a spell. But the inconvenience of that is that you are blindfolded so as not to be allowed to remember the way there or back again. When you get there by a spell, one of the people from Fairyland takes you in charge. They prefer to do it when you are asleep, but they are quite game to do it at other times if they think it worth their while.

"Why do they do it?" said the child.

"They do it," said I, "because it annoys the fairies very much to think that people are stopping believing in them. They are very proud people, and think a lot of themselves. They can, if they like, do us good, and they think us ungrateful when we forget about them. Sometimes in the past people have gone on forgetting about fairies more and more and more, until at last they have stopped believing in them altogether. The fairies meanwhile have been looking after their own affairs, and it is their fault more than ours when we forget about them. But when this has gone on for too long a time the fairies wake up and find out by a way they have that men have stopped believing in them, and get very much annoyed. Then some fairy proposes that a map of the way to Fairyland should be drawn up and given to the people; but this is always voted down; and at last they make up their minds to wake people up to Fairyland by going and visiting this world, and by spells bringing several people into their kingdom and so getting witnesses. For, as you can imagine, it is a most unpleasant thing to be really important and for other people not to know it."

"Yes," said the child, who had had this unpleasant experience, and greatly sympathized with the fairies when I explained how much they disliked it. Then the child asked me again:

"Why do the fairies let us forget about them?"

"It is," said I, "because they get so excited about their own affairs. Rather more than a hundred years ago, for instance, a war broke out in Fairyland because the King of the Fairies, whose name is Oberon, and the Queen of the Fairies, whose name is Titania, had asked the Trolls to dinner. The Gnomes were very much annoyed at this, and the Elves still more so, for the chief glory of the Elves was that being elfish got you to know people; and it was universally admitted that the Trolls ought never to be asked out, because they were trollish. King Oberon said that all that was a wicked prejudice, and that the Trolls ought to be asked out to dinner just as much as the Elves, in common justice. But his real reason was that he was bored by the perpetual elfishness of the Elves, and wanted to see the great ugly Trolls trying to behave like gentlemen for a change. So the Trolls came and tied their napkins round their necks, and ate such enormous quantities at dinner that King Oberon and his Queen almost died of laughing. The Elves were frightfully jealous, and so the war began. And while it was going on everybody in Earthland forgot more and more about Fairyland, until at last some people went so far as to say, like you, that Fairyland did not exist."

"I did not say so," said the child, "I only asked."

"But," I answered severely, "asking about such things is the beginning of doubting them. Anyhow, the fairies woke up one fine day about the time when your great-grandfather got married, to discover that they were not believed in, so they patched up their quarrel and they sent fairies to cast spells, and any amount of people began to be taken to Fairyland, until at last every one was forced to believe their evidence and to say that Fairyland existed."

"Were they glad?" said the child.

"Who?" said I; "the witnesses who were thus taken away and shown Fairyland?"

"Yes," said the child. "They ought to have been glad."

"Well, they _weren't_!" said I. "They were as sick as dogs. Not one of them but got into some dreadful trouble. From one his wife ran away, another starved to death, a third killed himself, a fourth was drowned and then burned upon the seashore, a fifth went mad (and so did several others), and as for poverty, and all the misfortunes that go with it, it simply rained upon the people who had been to Fairyland."

"Why?" said the child, greatly troubled.

"Ah!" said I, "that is what none of us know, but so it is, if they take you to Fairyland you are in for a very bad business indeed. There is only one way out of it."

"And what is that?" said the child, interested.

"Washing," said I, "washing in cold water. It has been proved over and over again."

"Then," said the child happily, "they can take me to Fairyland as often as they like, and I shall not be the worse for it, for I am washed in cold water every day. What about the other way to Fairyland?"

"Oh _that_," said I, "that, I think, is much the best way; I've gone there myself."

"Have you really?" said the child, now intensely interested. "That _is_ good! How often have you been there?"

"Oh I can't tell you," I said carelessly, "but at least eight times, and perhaps more, and the dodge is, as I told you, to lose your way; only the great trouble is that no one can lose his way on purpose. At first I used to think that one had to follow signs. There was an omnibus going down the King's Road which had 'To the World's End' painted on it. I got into this one day, and after I had gone some miles I said to the man, 'When do we get to the World's End?' 'Oh,' said he, 'you have passed it long ago,' and he rang a little bell to make me get out. So it was a fraud. Another time I saw another omnibus with the words, 'To the Monster,' and I got into that, but I heard that it was only a sort of joke, and that though the Monster was there all right, he was not in Fairyland. This omnibus went through a very uninteresting part of London, and Fairyland was nowhere in the neighbourhood. Another time in the country of France I came upon a printed placard which said: 'The excursion will pass by the Seven Winds, the Foolish Heath, and St. Martin under Heaven.' This time also I thought I had got it, but when I looked at the date on the placard I saw that the excursion had started several days before, so I missed it again. Another time up in Scotland I saw a signpost on which there was, 'To the King's House seven miles.' And some one had written underneath in pencil: 'And to the Dragon's Cave eleven.' But nothing came of it. It was a false lane. After that I gave up believing that one could get to Fairyland by signposts or omnibuses, until one day, quite by mistake, I chanced on the dodge of losing one's way."

"How is that done?" said the child.

"That is what no one can tell you," said I. "If people knew how it was done everybody would do it, but the whole point of losing your way is that you do it by mistake. You must be quite certain that you have not lost your way or it is no good. You walk along, and you walk along, and you wonder how long it will be before you get to the town, and then instead of getting to the town at all, there you are in Fairyland."

"How do you know that you are in Fairyland?" said the little child.

"It depends how far you get in," said I. "If you get in far enough trees and rocks change into men, rivers talk, and voices of people whom you cannot see tell you all sorts of things in loud and clear tones close to your ear. But if you only get a little way inside then you know that you are there by a sort of wonderment. The things ought to be like the things you see every day, but they are a little different, notably the trees. It happened to me once in a town called Lanchester. A part of that town (though no one would think of it to look at it) happens to be in Fairyland. And there I was received by three fairies, who gave me supper in an inn. And it happened to me once in the mountains and once it happened to me at sea. I lost my way and came upon a beach which was in Fairyland. Another time it happened to me between Goodwood and Upwaltham in Sussex."

At this moment the child's nurse came in to take it away, so she came to the point:

"How did you know you were in Fairyland?' she said doubtfully." Perhaps you are making all this up."

"Nonsense!" I said reprovingly, "the only people who make things up are little children, for they always tell lies. Grown-up people never tell lies. Let me tell you that one always knows when one has been in Fairyland by the feeling afterwards, and because it is impossible to find it again."

The child said, "Very well, I will believe you," but I could see from the expression of her eyes that she was not wholly convinced, and that in the bottom of her heart she does not believe there is any such place. She will, however, if she can hang on another forty years, and then I shall have my revenge.

THE PORTRAIT OF A CHILD

In a garden which must, I think, lie somewhat apart and enclosed in one of the valleys of central England, you came across the English grass in summer beneath the shade of a tree; you were running, but your arms were stretched before you in a sort of dance and balance as though you rather belonged to the air and to the growing things about you and above you than to the earth over which you passed; and you were not three years old.

As, in jest, this charming vision was recorded by a camera which some guest had with him, a happy accident (designed, for all we know, by whatever powers arrange such things, an accident of the instrument or of the plate upon which your small, happy, advancing figure was recorded) so chanced that your figure, when the picture was printed, shone all around with light.

I cannot, as I look at it now before me and as I write these words, express, however much I may seek for expression, how great a meaning underlies that accident nor how full of fate and of reason and of suggested truth that aureole grows as I gaze. Your innocence is beatified by it, and takes on with majesty the glory which lies behind all innocence, but which our eyes can never see. Your happiness seems in that mist of light to be removed and permanent; the common world in which you are moving passes, through this trick of the lens, into a stronger world more apt for such a sight, and one in which I am half persuaded (as I still look upon the picture) blessedness is not a rare adventure, but something native and secure.

Little child, the trick which the camera has played means more and more as I still watch your picture, for there is present in that light not only blessedness, but holiness as well. The lightness of your movement and of your poise (as though you were blown like a blossom along the tops of the grass) is shone through, and your face, especially its ready and wondering laughter, is inspired, as though the Light had filled it from within; so that, looking thus, I look not on, but through. I say that in this portrait which I treasure there is not only blessedness, but holiness as well--holiness which is the cause of blessedness and which contains it, and by which secretly all this world is sustained.

Now there is a third thing in your portrait, little child. That accident of light, light all about you and shining through your face, is not only blessed nor only holy, but it is also sacred, and with that thought there returns to me as I look what always should return to man if he is to find any stuff or profit in his consideration of divine things. In blessedness there is joy for which here we are not made, so that we catch it only in glimpses or in adumbrations. And in holiness, when we perceive it we perceive something far off; it is that from which we came and to which we should return; yet holiness is not a human thing. But things sacred--things devoted to a purpose, things about which there lies an awful necessity of sacrifice, things devoted and necessarily suffering some doom--these are certainly of this world; that, indeed, all men know well at last, and find it part of the business through which they needs must pass. Human memories, since they are only memories; human attachments, since they are offered up and end; great human fears and hopeless human longings--these are sacred things attached to a victim and to a sacrifice; and in this picture of yours, with the light so glorifying you all round, no one can doubt who sees it but that the sacredness of human life will be yours also; that is, you must learn how it is offered up to some end and what a sacrifice is there.

I could wish, as I consider this, that the camera had played no such trick, and had not revealed in that haze of awful meaning all that lies beyond the nature of you, child. But it is a truth which is so revealed; and we may not, upon a penalty more terrible than death, neglect any ultimate truth concerning our mortal way.

Your feet, which now do not seem to press upon the lawn across which they run, have to go more miles than you can dream of, through more places than you could bear to hear, and they must be directed to a goal which will not in your very young delight be mentioned before you, or of which, if it is mentioned, you will not understand by name; and your little hands which you bear before you with the little gesture of flying things, will grasp most tightly that which can least remain and will attempt to fashion what can never be completed, and will caress that which will not respond to the caress. Your eyes, which are now so principally filled with innocence that that bright quality drowns all the rest, will look upon so much of deadly suffering and of misuse in men, that they will very early change themselves in kind; and all your face, which now vaguely remembers nothing but the early vision from which childhood proceeds, will grow drawn and self-guarded, and will suffer some agonies, a few despairs, innumerable fatigues, until it has become the face of a woman grown. Nor will this sacred doom about you, which is that of all mankind, cease or grow less or be mitigated in any way; it will increase as surely and as steadily as increase the number of the years, until at last you will lay down the daylight and the knowledge of day-lit things as gladly as now you wake from sleep to see them.

For you are sacred, and all those elders about you, whose solemn demeanour now and then startles you into a pretty perplexity which soon calls back their smiles, have hearts only quite different from your quite careless heart, because they have known the things to which, in the manner of victims, they are consecrated.

All that by which we painfully may earn rectitude and a proper balance in the conduct of our short affairs I must believe that you will practise; and I must believe, as I look here into your face, seeing your confident advance (as though you were flying out from your babyhood into young life without any fear), that the virtues which now surround you in a crowd and make a sort of court for you and are your angels every way, will go along with you and will stand by you to the end. Even so, and the more so, you will find (if you read this some years hence) how truly it is written. By contrast with your demeanour, with your immortal hopes, and with your pious efforts the world about you will seem darker and less secure with every passing harvest, and in proportion as you remember the childhood which has led me so to write of you, in proportion as you remember gladness and innocence with its completed joy, in that proportion will you find at least a breaking burden in the weight of this world.

Now you may say to me, little child (not now, but later on), to what purpose is all this complaint, and why should you tell me these things?

It is because in the portrait before me the holiness, the blessedness, and therefore the sacredness are apparent that I am writing as I do. For you must know that there is a false way out and a seeming relief for the rack of human affairs, and that this way is taken by many. Since you are sacred do not take it, but bear the burden. It is the character of whatever is sacred that it does not take that way; but, like a true victim, remains to the end, ready to complete the sacrifice.

The way out is to forget that one is sacred, and this men and women do in many ways. The most of them by way of treason. They betray. They break at first uneasily, later easily, and at last unconsciously, the word which each of us has passed before He was born in Paradise. All men and all women are conscious of that word, for though their lips cannot frame it here, and though the terms of the pledge are forgotten, the memory of its obligation fills the mind. But there comes a day, and that soon in the lives of many, when to break it once is to be much refreshed and to seem to drop the burden; and in the second and the third time it is done, and the fourth it is done more easily--until at last there is no more need for a man or a woman to break that pledged word again and once again; it is broken for good and for all. This is one most common way in which the sacred quality is lost: the way of treason. Round about such as choose this kind of relief grows a habit and an air of treason. They betray all things at last, and even common friendship is at last no longer theirs. The end of this false issue is despair.

Another way is to take refuge from ourselves in pleasures, and this is easily done, not by the worse, but by the better sort; for there are some, some few, who would never betray nor break their ancient word, but who, seeing no meaning in a sacrifice nor in a burden, escape from it through pleasure as through a drug, and this pleasure they find in all manner of things, and always that spirit near them which would destroy their sacred mark, persuades them that they are right, and that in such pursuits the sacrifice is evaded. So some will steep themselves in rhyme, some in landscapes, some in pictures, some in the watching of the complexity and change of things, some in music, some in action, some in mere ease. It seems as though the men and women who would thus forget their sacredness are better loved and better warned than those who take the other path, for they never forget certain gracious things which should be proper to the mind, nor do they lose their friends. But that they have taken a wrong path you may easily perceive from this sign: that these pleasures, like any other drug, do not feed or satisfy, but must be increased with every dose, and even so soon pall and are continued not because they are pleasures any longer, but because, dull though they have become, without them there is active pain.

Take neither the one path nor the other, but retain, I beseech you, when the time comes, that quality of sacredness of which I speak, for there is no alternative. Some trouble fell upon our race, and all of us must take upon ourselves the business and the burden. If you will attempt any way out at all it will but lead you to some worse thing. We have not all choices before us, but only one of very few, and each of those few choices is mortal, and all but one is evil.

You should remember this also, dear little child, that at the beginning--oh, only at the very beginning of life--even your reason that God gave may lead you wrong. For with those memories strong upon you of perfect will, of clear intelligence, and of harmonious beauty all about, you will believe the world in which you stand to be the world from which you have come and to which you are also destined. You have but to treat this world for but a very little while as though it were the thing you think it to find it is not so.

Do you know that that which smells most strongly in this life of immortality, and which a poet has called "the ultimate outpost of eternity," is insecure and perishes? I mean the passionate affection of early youth. If that does not remain, what then do you think can remain? I tell you that nothing which you take to be permanent round about you when you are very young is more than the symbol or clothes of permanence. Another poet has written, speaking of the chalk hills:--

Only a little while remain
The Downs in their solemnity.

Nor is this saying forced. Men and women cannot attach themselves even to the hills where they first played.

Some men, wise but unillumined, and not conscious of that light which I here physically see shining all round and through you in the picture which is before my eyes as I write, have said that to die young and to end the business early was a great blessing. We do not know. But we do know that to die long after and to have gone through the business must be blessed, since blessedness and holiness and sacredness are bound together in one.

But, of these three, be certain that sacredness is your chief business, blessedness after your first childhood you will never know, and holiness you may only see as men see distant mountains lifted beyond a plain; it cannot be your habitation. Sacredness, which is the mark of that purpose whose heir is blessedness, whose end is holiness, will be upon you until you die; maintain it, and let it be your chief concern, for though you neglect it, it will remain and avenge itself.

All this I have seen in your picture as you go across the grass, and it was an accident of the camera that did it. If any one shall say these things do not attach to the portrait of a child, let him ask himself whether they do not attach to the portrait that might be drawn, did human skill suffice, of the life of a woman or a man which springs from the demeanour of childhood; or let him ask himself whether, if a face in old age and that same face in childhood were equally and as by a revelation set down each in its full truth, and the growth of the one into the other were interpreted by a profound intelligence, what I have said would not be true of all that little passage of ours through the daylight.

ON EXPERIENCE

There are three phases in the life of man, so far as his thoughts upon his surroundings are concerned.

The first of these is the phase of youth, in which he takes certain matured things for granted, and whether he realizes his illusion or no, believes them to be eternal. This phase ends sharply with every man, by the action of one blow. Some essence is dissolved, some binding cordage snaps, or some one dies.

I say no matter how clearly the reason of a man tells him that all about him is changeable, and that perfect and matured things and characters upon whose perfection and maturity he reposes for his peace must disappear, his attitude in youth towards those things is one of a complete security as towards things eternal. For the young man, convinced as he is that his youth and he himself are there for ever, sees in one lasting framework his father's garden, his mother's face, the landscape from his windows, his friendships, and even his life; the very details of food, of clothing, and of lesser custom, all these are fixed for him. Fixed also are the mature and perfect things. This aged friend, in whose excellent humour and universal science he takes so continual a delight, is there for ever. That considered judgment of mankind upon such and such a troubling matter, of sex, of property, or of political right, is anchored or rooted in eternity. There comes a day when by some one experience he is startled out of that morning dream. It is not the first death, perhaps, that strikes him, nor the first loss--no, not even, perhaps, the first discovery that human affection also passes (though that should be for every man the deepest lesson of all). What wakes him to the reality which is for some dreadful, for others august, and for the faithful divine, is always an accident. One death, one change, one loss, among so many, unseals his judgment, and he sees thenceforward, nay, often from one particular moment upon which he can put his finger, the doom which lies upon all things whatsoever that live by a material change.

The second phase which he next enters is for a thoughtful man in a sceptical and corrupted age the crucial phase, whereby will be determined, not indeed the fate of his soul, but the justice, and therefore the advantage to others, of his philosophy.

He has done with all illusions of permanence and repose. Henceforward he sees for himself a definite end, and the road which used to lead over the hills and to be lost beyond in the haze of summer plains now leads directly to a visible place; that place is a cavern in the mountain side, dark and without issue. He must die. Henceforward he expects the passing of all to which he is attached, and he is braced against loss by something lent to him which is to despair as an angel is to a demon; something in the same category of emotion, but just and fortifying, instead of void and vain and tempting and without an end. A man sees in this second phase of his experience that he must lose. Oh, he does not lose in a gamble! It is not a question of winning a stake or forfeiting it, as the vulgar falsehood of commercial analogy would try to make our time believe. He knows henceforward that there is no success, no final attainment of desire, because there is no fixity in any material thing. As he sits at table with the wisest and keenest of his time, especially with the old, hearing true stories of the great men who came before him, looking at well-painted pictures, admiring the proper printing of collected books, and praising the just balance of some classical verse or music which time has judged and made worthy, he so admires and enjoys with a full consciousness that these things are flowing past him. He cannot rely; he attempts no foothold. The equilibrium of his soul is only to be discovered in marching and continually marching. He now knows that he must go onward, he may not stand, for if he did he would fall. He must go forward and see the river of things run by. He must go forward--but to what goal?

There is a third phase, in which (as the experience of twenty Christian centuries determines) that goal also is discovered, and for some who so discover it the experience of loss begins to possess a meaning.

What this third phase is I confess I do not know, and as I have not felt it I cannot describe it, but when that third phase is used as I have suggested a character of wisdom enters into those so using it; a character of wisdom which is the nearest thing our dull time can show to inspiration and to prophecy.

It is to be noted also that in this third phase of man's experience of doom those who are not wise are most unwise indeed; and that where the age of experience has not produced this sort of clear maturity in the spirit, then it produces either despair or folly, or an exaggerated shirking of reality, which, being a falsehood, is wickeder than despair, and far more inhuman than mere foolishness. Thus those who in the third phase of which I speak have not attained the wisdom which I here recognize will often sink into a passion of avarice, accumulating wealth which they cannot conceivably enjoy; a stupidity so manifest that every age of satire has found it the most facile of commonplaces. Or, again, those who fail to find wisdom in that last phase will constantly pretend an unreal world, making plans for a future that cannot be there. So did a man eleven years ago in the neighbourhood of Regent Street, for this man, being eighty-seven years of age, wealthy, and wholly devoid of friends, or near kindred, took a flat, but he insisted that the lease should be one of not less than sixty years. In a hundred ways this last phase if it is degraded is most degraded; and, though it is not worst, it is most sterile when it falls to a mere regret for the past.