Above the steep beach a dry flat opened out, reached only by gales and the highest of the spring tides, a wilderness of fine sand, hot and deep, its surface studded with the opaque blue of round pebbles and mussel sh.e.l.ls. It looked too arid to support life, but sea-rocket with fleshy emerald stems and lilac flowers was scattered about. Nothing moved in the waste but an impulsive small b.u.t.terfly, blue as a fragment of sky. The silence of the desert was that of a dream, but when listening to the quiet, a murmur which had been below hearing was imagined. The dunes were quivering with the intensity of some latent energy, and it might have been that one heard, or else it was the remembrance held by that strand of a storm which had pa.s.sed, or it might have been the ardent shafts of the sun. At the landward end of the waste, by the foot of the dunes, was an old beam of a ship, harsh with barnacles, its bolt-holes stopped with dust. A spinous shrub grew to one side of it. A solitary wasp, a slender creature in black and gold, quick and emotional, had made a cabin of one of the holes in the timber. For some reason that fragment of a barque was more eloquent of travel, and the work of seamen gone, than any of the craft moored at the quay I left that morning. I smoked a pipe on that timber--for all I knew, not for the first time--and did not feel at all lonely, nor that voyages for the discovery of fairer times were finished.
Now the dunes were close they appeared surprisingly high, and were formed, not like hills, but like the high Alps. They had the peaks and declivities of mountains. Their colour was of old ivory, and the long marram gra.s.s which grew on them spa.r.s.ely was as fine as green hair. The hollowed slope before me was so pale, s.p.a.cious, and immaculate that there was an instinctive hesitation about taking it. A dark ghost began slowly to traverse it with outspread arms, a shade so distinct on that virgin surface that not till the gull, whose shadow it was, had gone inland, following its shadow over the high yellow ridge, did I know that I had not been looking at the personality. But the surface had been darkened, and I could overcome my hesitation.
From the ridge, the country of the dunes opened inland with the enlarged likeness of a lunar landscape surveyed in a telescope. It merely appeared to be near. The sand-hills, with their acute outlines, and their shadows flung rigidly from their peaks across the pallor of their slopes, were the apparition of inviolable seclusion. They could have been waiting upon an event secret from our knowledge, larger than the measure of our experience; so they had still the aspect of a strange world, not only infinitely remote, but superior with a greater destiny. They were old, greatly older than the ancient village across the water. Ships left the village and went by them to sea gay with the bunting of a first voyage, with a fair wind, and on a fine morning; and when such a ship came back long after as an old plank bearded with sea moss, to the dunes under which it stranded the day was still the same, vestal and innocent; for they were on a voyage of greater length and import. They had buried many ships; but, as time moved to them, all on the same day.
Only when resting on a knoll of one of the slopes, where the shadows of a tuft of marram gra.s.s above my head lay as thin black wire on the sand, were the dunes caught in part of their secret. There was no sound. I heard the outer world from which I had come only as the whistle of a curlew. It was far away now. To this place, the news I had heard on the quay that morning would have sounded the same as Waterloo, which was yesterday, or the Armada, which was the same day--wasn"t it?--or the day before, or as the whistle of a curlew. Here we were outside time. Then I thought I heard a faint whisper, but when I looked round nothing had altered. The shadows of the gra.s.s formed a fixed metallic design on the sand. But I heard the whisper again, and with a side glance caught the dune stealthily on the move.
It was alive. When you were not attentive, some of its grains would start furtively, pour in increasing mobility fanwise, and rest instantly when looked at. This hill was fluid, and circulated. It preserved an outline that was fixed through the years, a known, named, and charted locality, only to those to whom one map would serve a lifetime. But it was really unknown. It was on its way. Like the ships that were pa.s.sing, it also was pa.s.sing. It was only taking its own time.
Secluded within the inner ranges were little valleys, where, for a while, the dunes had ceased to travel, and were at leisure. I got into a hollow which had a floor of h.o.a.ry lichen, with bronze hummocks of moss. In this moment of pause it had a.s.sumed a look of what we call antiquity. The valley was not abundant with vegetation, but enamelled and jewelled. A more concentrated, hectic, and volatile essence sent up stalks, blades, and sprays, with that direction and restraint which perfection needs. More than in a likelier and fecund spot, in this valley the ichor showed the ardour and flush of its early vitality.
Even now it could shape like this, and give these dyes! Chosen by an earth astringent and tonic, the forms were few and personal. Here you should see to what influences our planet is still subject. The shapes in that valley were more than coloured; they were rare jets of light, emerald, orange, blue, and scarlet. Life burned with an original force, a steady virtue. What is "good news"? It depends on the sort of evidence for which we look.
Just showing in the drift on the seaward side of the valley were some worked stones and a little brickwork. When the sandhill paused, it had almost covered a building where man once worshipped. I could find n.o.body afterwards who remembered the church, or had even heard of it.
Yet the doom of this temple, prolonged in its approach but inevitable, to those to whom the altar once had seemed as indestructible as hope, must on a day have struck the men who saw at last their temple"s end was near as a hint, vague but glacial, of the transience of all their affairs.
But what were their affairs? We should have to know them before we could regret the dry sand which buried them. The valley looked very well as it was. It showed no sign of failure. Over one of the stones of the forgotten altar was a casual weed which stood like a sign of success and continuance. It was as indecipherable as the stone, but the blue of its flowers, still and deep as rapture, surprising and satisfying as an unexpected revelation of good, would have been better worth reading for a knowledge of the heart from which could be drawn the temper and intensity of that faith.
_August 1917._
XVII. Binding a Spell
You may never have addressed a meeting of the public, but you have long cherished a vision of a figure (well known to your private mirror) standing where it overlooks an intent and silent mult.i.tude to which it communicates with apt and fluent words those things not seen by mortal eyes, the dream of a world not ours.... You know what I mean. (Loud and prolonged applause.)
"I should be glad," wrote one who is still unashamed to call himself my friend, "if you could run down here one evening and address a meeting on your experiences. Just conversationally, you know."
A casual sort of letter. Designedly so. But I could see through it. It was an invitation which did not wish to scare me from accepting it. I smiled with serene amus.e.m.e.nt at its concluding sentence.
Conversationally! Why, that would be merely talking; tongue-work; keeping on and on after one usually, if merciful to a friend, lets him off. I felt instantly that for once it might be even more pleasant to entertain an audience than to be one of the crowd and bored. And it happened that my experiences really did give me something to say, and were exactly what an audience, in war-time, might be glad to hear. I therefore wrote a brief note of acceptance, as one to whom this sort of thing comes ten times a day; and thought no more about it.
No more, that is to say, till I saw the local paper announced me as a coming event, a treat in store. I was on the list. There were those that evening who, instead of going to a theatre, a concert, or to see Vesta Tilley, would come to hear me. I felt then the first cold underdraught of doubt, the chilling intimation from the bleak unknown, where it is your own affair entirely whether you flourish or perish.
What a draught! I got up, shut the door, and looked at the day of the month.
That was all right; yet another fortnight!
But what weakness was this? Anybody, could do it, if they knew as much of my subject as did I. Many men would do it, without a tremor, without shame, if they knew next to nothing about it. Look at old Brown, for example, whose only emotions are evoked by being late for dinner, the price of building materials, the scandalous incapacity of workmen, and the restriction of the liberty of the subject by trade unions! He will sit, everybody knows, while wearing plaid trousers and side-whiskers, on the right hand of a peer, in full view of thousands, at a political meeting, untroubled, bland, conscious of his worth, and will rise at the word, thumbs carelessly thrust into his waistcoat pockets, begin with a jest (the same one), and for an hour make aspirates as uncommon as are bathrooms in his many houses.
He has nothing to say, and could not say it if he had; but he can speak in public. You will observe the inference is obvious. One who is really capable of constructive thought (like you and me); who has a wide range of words to choose from even when running; who is touched, by events, to admiration, to indignation, to alarm, to--to all that sort of thing, he could ... the plastic audience would be in his skilful hands, there is no doubt. (Hear, hear!)
Time pa.s.sed. As Mr. A. Ward once pointed out, it is a way time has. The night came, as at last I began to fear it would. My brief notes were in my pocket, for I had resolutely put from me the dishonourable and barren safety of a written lecture. In the train--how cold was the night--I wished I had gone more fully into the matter. Slightly shivering, I tried to recall the dry humour of those carefully prepared opening sentences which shortly would prove to my audience that I had their measure, and was at ease; would prove that my elevation on the platform was not merely through four feet of deal planking, but was a real overlooking. But those delicate sentences had broken somehow. They were shards, and not a glitter of humour was sticking to the fragments.
I felt I would rather again approach one of those towns in France, where it was likely you would run into the Uhlans, than go to that lecture hall. No doubt, too, my friend had explained to them what a clever fellow I was, in order to get some reflected glory out of it.
Then it would serve him right; there would be two of us.
The hall was nearly full. What surprises one is to find so many ladies present. A most disquieting fact, entirely unforeseen. They sit in the front rows and wait, evidently in a tranquil, alert, and mirthful mind, for you to begin. I could hear their leisurely converse and occasional subdued laughter (about what?) even where, in a sort of frozen, lucid calm, indifferent to my fate, the mood of all Englishmen in moments of extreme peril, I was handing my hat and coat to my friend in a room behind the platform. All those people out there were waiting for me.
When we got on the platform the chairman told them something about me, I don"t know what, but when I looked up it was to find, like the soul in torment, that a mult.i.tude of bodiless eyes had fixed me--eyes intent, curious, pa.s.sionless.
"I call upon--" said the chairman.
I stood up. The sound of my voice uplifted in that silence was the most startling sound I have ever heard. Shortly after that there came the paralysing discovery that it is a gift to be able to think while hundreds wait patiently to see what the thought is like when it comes.
This made my brow hot. There was a boy in an Eton suit, sitting in front with his legs wide apart, who was grinning at me through his spectacles. How he got there I don"t know. I think he was the gift of the G.o.ds. His smile so annoyed me that I forgot myself, which saved me.
I just talked to that boy.
Once there was loud laughter. Why? It is inexplicable. I talked for about an hour. About what? Heaven knows. The chairman kindly let me out through a side entrance.
XVIII. A Division on the March
We pa.s.sed a division on the march the other day. Though the British occupy this country, it is not often one sees them as a mult.i.tude. When in the trenches, you are concerned with but a handful of your fellows.
But just then an interminable river of steel helmets poured along in regular waves.
It is something to be able to say you have seen a British army moving down the straight leagues of a French road through its guarding avenue of trees. My own brother may have been in that host.... Yet I never thought of him. A torrent of sounds swamped and submerged my thoughts--the clangour of chains, the rumbling of wheels, the deep growling of guns; and that most ominous and subduing sound in war, the ceaseless rhythmic tramp of armed men marching without music or song, men who, except the menace of their measured progress, that intimation of destiny and fate irresistible, are but a mult.i.tude of expressionless masks that glance at you, and pa.s.s.
These men are all dressed alike; they are a tide of men. They all look alike. Their mouths are set. They move together with the common, irresistible, uncritical urge of migratory animals. Their eyes fix you in a single ceaseless interrogation. About what?
There is no knowing. Don"t ask me what the men are thinking in Flanders; I don"t know, and I have been with them since the beginning.
And I don"t think any one else does.
But once, as this division was pa.s.sing, one of those little go-carts on perambulator wheels in which the men, holding drag-ropes, transport their own personal belongings, upset a few books. You would have recognized their popular covers; and the anxiety, instantly shown, to recover those treasures, broke up the formation there for a few moments into something human and understandable. The wind took a few escaped leaves and blew them to me. The _Pickwick Papers_!
It was as though the inscrutable eye of the army had tipped me a wink.
I got the hint that I was, in the right sense, on the same road as these men. My brother was certainly there. For sometimes, you know, one has a bleak sense of doubt about that, a feeling of extreme isolation and polar loneliness. You wonder, at times, mixed up here in the mysterious complexities of that elemental impulse which is visible as ceaseless clouds of fire on the Somme, whether you are the last man, witnessing in helpless and mute horror the motiveless upheaval of earth in final ruin.
So that, even as I write this, and glance, safe for tonight, at the strangeness of this French house, I see everything about me with astonishment, and feel I may wake at any moment to the familiar things of that home in which I fell asleep to dream of calamity.
Moving about this dubious and unauthentic scene of war, an atom of a fortuitous host, each one of the host glancing at me with inscrutable eyes which seem to show in pa.s.sing--if they show anything at all--a faint hint of reproach, the interruption of war by the page of a familiar book, and the sudden anxious effort by one of the uniformed phantoms to recover words which you remember well enough were once worth hearing, was like momentary recovery. An unexpected revelation.
For a moment I saw the same old enduring earth under us. All was well.
I often doubt here the existence of a man who is talking to me. He seems altogether incredible. He might be talking across the Styx; and I am not sure at the moment on which side of that river I stand. Is he on the right side or am I? Which of us has got the place where a daily sun still rises? Yes, it is the living men here who are the uncanny spectres.
I have come in a lonely spot upon a little cross by the wayside, and have been stopped by a familiar name on it. Dead? No. There, right enough, is my veritable friend, as I knew and admired him. He cannot be dead. But those men in muddy clothes who sometimes consort with me round the burning logs on the hearth of an old chateau at night, I look across the floor at them as across countless ages, and listen to their voices till they sound unintelligibly from a remote and alien past. I do not know what they say to me. I am encompa.s.sed by dark and insoluble magic, and have forgotten the Open Sesame, though I try hard to remember it; for these present circ.u.mstances and the beings who move in them are of a world unreal and unreasonable.
I get up from the talk of war by that fireside of an old chateau built on a still more ancient field where English archers fought a famous battle six hundred years ago. A candle stands on a bracket beneath a portrait of a lady. The lady is in the dress of the days of the French Revolution. She is young and vivid, and looks down at me under lowered eyelids in amused and enticing scrutiny. Her little mouth has the faintest trace of a contemplative smile; and as I look at her I could swear the corners of her mouth twitch, as if in the restraint of complete understanding.
She is long gone. She was executed at Arras. But I know her well. The chateau is less cold and lonely than it was.
Old stairs wind upwards to a long corridor, the distant ends of which are unseen. A few candles gutter in the draughts. The shadows leap. The place is so still that I can hear the antique timbers talking. But something is without which is not the noise of the wind. I listen, and hear it again, the darkness throbbing; the badly adjusted horizon of outer night thudding on the earth--the incessant guns of the great war.
And I come, for this night at least, to my room. On the wall is a tiny silver Christ on a crucifix; and above that the portrait of a child, who fixes me in the surprise of innocence, questioning and loveable, the very look of warm April and timid but confiding light. I sleep with the knowledge of that over me, an a.s.surance greater than that of all the guns of all the hosts. It is a promise. I may wake to the earth I used to know in the morning.
_Winter 1917._