Chapter XIV: Conclusion

_Perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world_,
_except for those phlegmatic natures_, _who_, _I suspect_, _would in
any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking_.
_They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope_, _and
even in railway carriages_: _what banishes them is the vacuum in
gentleman and lady passengers_. _How should all the apparatus of
heaven and earth_, _from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of
the mother who nourished us_, _make poetry for a mind that has no
movements of awe and tenderness_, _no sense of fellowship which
thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant
to the near_?

GEORGE ELIOT.

[Greek verse]

ANTIGONE.

All is over now; April was just a twelfth-night old when the school departed. Some of our company have lingered on for business, a few from reluctance to have done with it. But to-day the last group has taken wing for the Midlands. Old "Borth," the colley dog, followed them to the station, and poked his nose into the carriage to take his leave. Old Borth--we had almost forgotten him, and that had been deep ingratitude for he was not the least warm-hearted of our friends in Wales. His master lived two miles away; but soon after our arrival, Borth had come down from the hills to attach himself to our fortunes, and henceforth became, as it were, our familiar, the pet of the regiment, like the goat of the "23rd." He knew his position, and was a stickler for formalities; he had a wag of the tail for every boy who wore the image of the venerable schoolmaster upon his cap; but if he met him bare-headed, or, by any chance, in an indistinctive head-gear, he would cut that boy dead, were he never so much the same urchin from whose hand he had yesterday eaten a cheese-cake. That was his official rebuke for the irregularity. By day, Borth would bask in some sunny corner of our quarters; at night, he has been known to venture on a nearer intimacy where doors were left open. We found you once ourselves, Borth, curled up and asleep upon our own bed. You woke up, shook yourself with a modest, but not startled manner, and walked quietly away, like a gentleman.

Ah! kind friend, you showed us the sincerest of flatteries, that of imitation. You left a comfortable home for chance quarters and uncertain fare, that you might be one of us, an outcast among outcasts. Now we must part, for our home will spare us no longer, as neither will yours spare you. And so the last good-bye is said, and you are limping away to your hills again, with dejection expressed in every fibre of your frame, from the drooping ears to the last hair on your tail.

All is over, and the place is very silent, except for the clink of hammers where they are breaking down our wooden walls, and, seaward, the cry and splash of gull and tern dipping for their prey in the shoal of herring-fry which is wandering about the bay. Close inshore a porpoise is wallowing, like the jolly sea-pig that he is, in his berth of glistening water. The wild creatures seem to have grown tamer since there are no strollers to keep them aloof. This morning, as we passed his pool, the stately heron let us come within twenty yards of him before he got leisurely upon the wing. The village seems even quieter; the people at their doors betray, to our fancy, a certain lassitude as if, like merrymakers on the morrow of a revel, they felt somewhat sleepy and sorry, now that the stirring social year is over, and the little fishing town has returned to its "old solitary nothingness."

Yes, the silence has come down again; but it is a silence full of voices. For, as it often happens that, when things without are stillest, men hear most audibly the tumult of their own brains, so is it now with us. Action is ended, and memory begins to work. Into the vacuum which the silence makes, the stream of our little history pours in a long backwater. Our thoughts go back to the beginning of it, the hour when, as we were sailing prosperously under press of canvas, the blast struck us suddenly out of a sunny sky. We live again the slow months of enforced vacation, and the brief spell of apparent security, broken by the second stroke. We recall the slow and painful sickening of hope, amid the frustration of attempted remedies; the watchings and communings by late firesides; the morning questionings and bulletins; the deepening of fears, until the moment when the sharp pressure of calamity became the liberating touch, and made a hazardous adventure seem a welcome alternative. Not less distinctly we remember the zest with which the wretched waiting for evil tidings was exchanged for hopeful activity; the rush of preparations; the anxiety which watched their passage through the ordeal of practice; the growing sense of security; the mellowing down of novelty and privation into routine and ease; the contrast, all the while, between the outward peace of the colony, and the secret difficulties of finance and commissariat; the long intermittent crisis which gave the administrative no rest; the hopes and efforts for our return home, and the reversal of them; all this, and--and--very much else as well, which was of acutest interest at the time, and which it will become convenient to describe only when it will be of interest to no one. All this passes before us in the series of a long dissolving view, full of bright lights, and only less full of unlovely shadows.

And, somehow, as we review the past this evening, pacing the beach in the twilight, the fact accomplished seems to us not smaller, but greater than when we lived in it. There are moments some would say of illusion, some of vision--when the things most familiar to our eyes and thoughts, whether in nature or human society, surprise us with a dignity and beauty not discovered in them before. That glamour is in the air this evening. Perhaps the night-wind, which creeps to us from over the grassy tomb of Taliesin, warrior and bard has touched the fancy with a breath out of his heroic days. What wonder if it were so? Thirteen centuries ago the hero became the guardian of the shore; but the story which ends to-day is, perhaps, as worthy note as any he has watched from his hill-side. Those who rate the dignity of human action by other standards than the breadth and conspicuousness of its stage, will not mock us because we find some stuff of romance in the homely circumstance and not always epic passages of this modern episode of school.

But if the stranger who may read the tale will spare his scorn--those for whom we shall tell it would forgive even a bolder word; for some of them were themselves a part of it, and others will make it a part of their heritage in the past. English schools have always honoured their traditions, counting them the better part of their wealth. Some have majestic memories of royal benefactors, or can point to a muster-roll of splendid names, whose greatness was cradled in their walls. Such traditions are not ours. A past, not brief, but not memorable, has denied us these. But a tradition we have henceforward which is all our own and wholly single in its kind. We persuade ourselves that in far-off years those who bear our name will say that, in the memory of a great disaster overcome, no mean heirloom has been left them. They will not be ashamed of a generation which, in an hour of extreme peril, did not despair of the commonwealth, but dared to trust their faith in a further destiny, and saved for those who should come after them a cause which must else have perished in the dark. _Stet fortuna domus_. And stand it will if there is assurance in augury. For the fairy legend has a truth in fact, and the luck of a house, grasped daringly and held fast in an act of venturous hardihood, will not break or be lost again until the sons forget to guard it.

Here and there, at any rate, among the posterity which will sometime fill our ranks, there will not be wanting generous and gifted spirits, _illustres animae nostrumque in nomen iturae_, who will rejoice in making good the forecast that the venture was not made in vain. They will possess more worthily the good which an elder race foresaw and laboured not all unworthily to preserve. To their safe keeping we commend as under a seal, the legacy of hopes which are better left unspoken now.