Part 11

He was amused, and touched his fair hair very lightly, for it was as accurately paraded as--I merely guess--his own platoon would be. His moustache was neat. His chin was in good taste. His eyes went seaward, where a turquoise space faded into a haze between two vague headlands, and at once he became alert and sat upright. He lifted his binoculars and scanned the Channel. “They’re destroyers out there, aren’t they?” he asked, as interested as though he hoped that truth had appeared in the offing. He carefully focussed his glasses. “And that’s a Dreadnought, I’m sure.” Yes, they seemed to be destroyers, and the other a battle cruiser.

The saturnine yachtsman, the best bridge-player in the hotel, in white duck trousers and a reefer jacket, whose yacht had not yet arrived, joined us. He said gravely, as though confirming news that was important, but till he spoke was improbable, that they were destroyers and a battle cruiser. They were, he remarked, of the latest type of destroyer. The French had nothing so good.

The lady with the dark lips left her dog and came to look seaward. “Are they really warships? How thrilling. What are they doing?”

We did not tell her. We did not know. But that cheerful and irrepressible fellow, who often intrudes an unfortunate comment which is always followed by his own laughter, though we never speak to him, blithely answered the lady. “What are they doing? Wasting taxes,” he said, and laughed, of course.

The yachtsman, whose ship was late, turned wearily and left us, the young man with the disciplined hair wound the strap round his glasses as though he had heard nothing, and the lady went to stop the noise her dog was making, for the old fellow sitting with his nurse was glaring malignantly at the spaniel over his shoulder.

“Only thing against this place is, one can’t get any golf,” my young friend complained, and began to hum a tune that was popular about the bandstand. He continued to look out to sea; his eyes avoided the asphalted promenade where the charabancs assembled. The beach was out of sight, but it must have been crowded, for a multitude of air-balloons swayed above it. Shrill far-off cries came from there. “Sounds as if the sea-serpent were among the girls,” said the young man. “Let’s go and look.”

We strolled over. We leaned on the iron rails of the concrete wall and looked down on the holiday-makers. The beach was sunk beneath deck chairs and recumbent forms. The incoming tide was compressing the multitude against the sea wall, and two more pleasure-seekers could have found no place down there.

“That nipper--that one in the red varnished breeches--he seems to have all the sand there is.” My friend pointed to a child with a toy bucket beneath. “Doesn’t look too golden, does it?”

Our eyes roved. “I say, look at this fellow,” pleaded my companion and nudged me. A man stood near us leaning on the rail. He was surveying the people from the cities taking their pleasure. It was a lumpy figure, in rough clothes, in old velveteen riding breeches, and leggings that were almost globular. His cap, perched well forward on a tousled black head, gave him a look of crafty loutishness. His jowl was purplish and enormous, and that morning’s razor had polished it. The light actually glinted on the health of that broad mask, which was as solid and placid as that of an animal.

“Pretty bovine, that fellow. Genuine bit of local clay all right,” my friend whispered. “Shouldn’t like to upset him, though. Look at his blessed arms!”

But I had, when they were bare. They are chestnut in colour, and swell in an extraordinary way when they haul on a seine net or a bogged wagon.

“If I knew how long it would take him to think about it I’d ask him what he thinks of this crowd. Anyhow, the poor fellow wouldn’t last five minutes in the place where these people come from.” Some joyous screams from the water appeared to confirm this. Perhaps the quick wits of the merry folk below had divined even our thoughts. The bovine face stared on, its chin projecting a pipe.

“He looks healthy enough,” commented my friend, “but the clay has got into his system. Do you think he has a rational opinion about anything? What makes him move about?” At that moment the man slowly raised his bulk, looked steadily at his pipe for some moments, then peered seawards, and went away, without a glance at us.

I saw him again some miles from the hotel, where he stood at the end of a path that led up to his farm, beside a patch of lusty hog-weed which was as tall as himself. He nodded, and grinned.

“Had enough of that place? I been back some time. Thought the wind was shifting.” He glanced up at the cirrus with his piggy eyes. “Ought to be mackerel in the bay this evening. Think I can smell ’em. Water looks like mackerel.... Are you passing Jimmy Higgs? Tell him to get the crew. Pretty good catch, unless I’m mistaken, and we’ll be the first boat.

“I’ll be along by the time you’re ready,” he said, turning away. “Got the cows to see to now.” He jerked his thumb towards the distant holiday-makers. “Nothing for them to eat unless we see to it.”

VII

The farmhouse with its outbuildings, all built of a mellowed limestone, from a little distance could have been only an exposure of the bare bones of the hillside. The group of grey structures were formless till the sun was through the mist that morning and touched the lichened roof of the house into a rectangle of orange light. That was the sign that it was a human habitation, for weathered buttresses and grey hummocks of rock are not infrequent on the slope above our walled garden by the shingle. The gaunt ribs of the earth show through its thin turf and shaggy tufts of furze and bracken. It surprises a visitor that England should look so abandoned and desolate, yet so bright and tranquil.

But desolation is not the same as darkness. The life on those steep and barren uplands is abundant; and, though useless, it evidently springs from the original fount, which seems to be as full as at the beginning. Nothing, we discovered, as we climbed to the moor, had been withheld from the bracken because it is an unprofitable crop. It was a maze, too, of the dry tracks of wild creatures, as though it were a busy metropolis the citizens of which were all absent for the day. The day now was radiant. The furze, which made vivid islands of new green and gold in wide lakes of purple, for the heather was in bloom, suggested that we have yet to learn the full meaning of profit. It was tough as well as effulgent, and hinted of staple crops for uses beyond any that figured in the news of the day. Those crops are not quoted. Perhaps we know less about markets than we thought. The morning was so good that one felt nonsensical.

Yet, as the visitor from London said to me: “What markets are you talking about? Don’t be absurd. And what good would they be to us if we knew them?” He wanted no transcendental nonsense, which was only a lazy trick to escape from the facts. Bracken and furze, in modern society, were enemies to be abolished. They were in the way. They ought to be mutton and butter. He regarded any other view of them as a fantasy, which had no validity except to the sentimental. “Of course,” he said, pausing, as we reached the height, at the surprise of broad valleys and hills beyond, “I enjoy this as much as you do. It’s a fine day, so far--though something is working up in the southwest, by the look of it.” He swept an arm of happy understanding over the peace and splendour of the earth. “All that is lovely merely because we have agreed to call it so. That’s its full title to loveliness. It does not exist in its own right. When we choose to change it into something different we shall. That right belongs to us. The dyes of those flowers come of fortuitous chemistry, and the forms of those hills of the chance of upheaval, the textures of the rocks, and the weather. We call the colours lovely and the forms of the hills noble. That is only our view of it. They are promoted to the titles we give them.” We strode on, the gods of the earth to which we could give any shape we chose. It certainly was a fine day.

He thought, indeed, this visitor, that the fact that we enjoyed a fine day was its sole justification. As to the gold of the furze, those bushes would as soon see us perish of exposure under their thorns as exhilarate us with their new gold. And we could please ourselves about it. It did not matter to the furze bushes whether we perished or admired. And those cushions of rosy heath, pendant in half-circles over a scar in the ground where white flints were set in buff-coloured earth which seemed self-luminous, what were they but an aesthetic arrangement of our own? In themselves they were nothing. They were not related to anything, except to what was in our own minds. We made them rational because we preferred them so. But the moor was not anything in reason at all. Perhaps that lovely arrangement had never been noticed before, and the chance brush-work of the next storm might obliterate the beautiful irrelevancy for ever. Then where would it be?

I had no answer to make. There is no answer to be made that is valid for all of us. The arrangement of rose, white and buff continued its irrelevant appeal, without any additional emphasis to assist its dumb case. The sun was warm. The air, when it stirred, smelt of herbs. The critic’s little daughter, who might have been listening to her seniors giving this world the reasons for its existence, she, too, made no sign. She was merely unquestionably bright and good, like the rose and gold, and smiled like the sun, without a word.

Possibly the critic was right. There was no sense in it all. Only our own well-being assured us the moorland was good; the coincidence was happy. “Wait and see what the place is like when the weather changes,” he said.

It changed. A fog drifted in from the sea. One hill-slope would be shining and its neighbour expunged. The time came when all the distant view had dissolved. The light went out of the colours. As we tried to find our way home in the growing murk it was noticeable that there were more thorns than gold to the furze. The tracks confused us. They were not made by creatures having our rational impulses. They lead nowhere. As we came round an old tumulus an object moved ahead of us. It vanished, unrecognised, in the mist. It left behind a dead rabbit. We were sorry to have missed a sight of that fox.

Its victim had only just died. Its moist eye looked up at us, apparently in bright understanding. We examined it, admired its soft, warm fur, and then we left it, in an unattractive huddle, on the turf. “We could continue our little discussion on nature,” he said, “with that murdered rabbit as a text, couldn’t we? Not so pretty as the purple heather?” He smiled while waiting for my answer.

I looked back at the victim. The critic’s little daughter was stooping over it, tenderly setting bunny in comfort under the shelter of a bush. Her compassionate figure was all I could see in the fog behind us.

VIII

What particularly attracted me, this autumn morning, was a blade of grass under the tamarisk hedge. There are not many such mornings, even in the best of years. It was as though the earth were trying to restore one’s faith completely for the winter, so that the soul should hibernate in security and repose--live through hard times, as it were, on the bounty of this gift of fat. The branches of the tamarisk, usually troubled, for they face the Atlantic, were in complete repose. Their green feathers were on young stems of shining coral. The sea was as placid as a lower sky. On some days here, even a modern destroyer, making for shelter, looks a poor little thing, utterly insignificant, an item of pathetic flotsam in a world which treats it with violent derision; indeed, the treatment is greatly worse than that, for it comes obviously of magnificent indifference to man the disturber and destroyer. It is as much as you can do to keep your glasses fixed in concern on that warship, which now and then is cruelly effaced. For our English seas are as fickle as is faith in the winds of doctrine.

But on this morning a sheldrake, diving about in five fathoms just off shore, was more noticeable than a fleet of ships would be on other days. When he dived he sent rings over the blue glass. The sea was like that. The distant cliffs were only something about which you were quite sure, yet but faintly remembered. It was easy to believe news had arrived that morning which we should all be glad to hear, and that somehow the sheldrake had heard the word already. And there was that blade of grass under the tamarisk. There were many blades of grass there, of course, but this one stood out. It topped the rest. It was arched above its fellows. Its blade, of bluish green, was set with minute beads of dew, and the angle of the sunlight was lucky. The blade was iridescent. It glittered from many minute suns. It flashed at times in a way to which grass has no right, and the flashes were of ruby and emerald. You may search up and down Bond Street with the ready money in your pocket, and you will not find anything so good. Yet I could not collect my treasure. I had to leave it where I found it. Is treasure always like that?

I abandoned it, feeling much more confident and refreshed than ever I do when a book of philosophy confirms, with irrefragable arguments, some of my private prejudices, and sat on a hummock of thyme to watch the sheldrake. Then a man of letters came and sat beside me. I did not tell him about my feast of grass. What would have been the good? I did not recall that that kind of refreshment is down in any book; for Nebuchadnezzar’s attempt on grass, we may recall, was somewhat different. We began, instead, to talk of Bond Street, or rather, of literary criticism, about which I know nothing but my prejudices; and they, possibly, were found somewhere in the neighbourhood of that street, and therefore have no relationship to the morning dew. I noticed that the critic himself seemed unsettled that morning, though whether the blue of the sky had got into his head to change the Oxford blue, or whether he, too, had been feeding on honeydew, it is not for me to say. One should never, except with a full sense of the awful implication, call another person mad; for the improvident beauty of the world, placed where we either miss it, or destroy it, might serve as evidence of the madness of God. It is possible that we may even lightly blaspheme when we call a strange fellow a little mad. Nevertheless, the critic’s words at least startled me. He was tying a knot in a stalk of thrift, and he remarked casually: “It seems to me you can bring all art down to one test.” He gave me that test, which is a passage beginning “Consider the lilies of the field.”

Perhaps we had better not. Perhaps a consideration which began with a lily might tarnish, if it were allowed, more than the glory of wise kings. To begin with such a challenge to one’s opinions is unwise, because it would not allow the consequent argument a chance to find approval for the things we most admire. But evidently those lilies of the field were of importance to the commentator who once begged his fellow-men to consider them, or objects so common by the wayside could not have been marked by him in favour. He so exalted those common weeds that they diminished, though that was not their aim, the cherished national tradition of a great monarch. Is that an approach to a just criticism of art? It may be so. After that accidental discovery of the wasted treasure behind me it was impossible to reject at once so disastrous a theory. I am almost prepared to believe there may be something in it. It is possible that scientific critics, who judge by fixed criteria of analysis and comparison, and who are startled as much by a show of life in a book as an anatomist would be if the corpse moved under his knife, had better regard it; unless, like the girl in melodrama, they would prefer to take the wrong turning. I heard a farmer the other day calling this a bad year. But what did he want? If he had climbed out of his fields to where the young green and gold of the furze was among the purple heather he would have seen that the fount of life was just as full as ever.

Seaward there is only light, and the smoke of a distant steamer low down. The westerly gales have ceased at last, as if there were no more reason to bring ships home to a land that not long ago was populous, but now is not. The smoke of that steamer in the southwest remains as a dark blur, the slowly fading memory of a busy past, long after she must have lifted another landmark. In all the wide world, from the beach as it is to-day, that distant trace of smoke is the only sign of human activity.

In the frail shine of this autumn morning, reminiscent and tranquil, the broad ridge of shingle, miles long, the product of centuries of storms, appears unsubstantial. There are, on its summit and terraces, mirages of blue pools and lakes where no water can be. No breakers explode on it to-day. The sea is a rigid mirror. The high downs behind the shingle, that have been dark with an antiquity of heather, tumuli, and frowning weather, are happily released to the sky, and are buoyant as though raised by an inner glow.

Not many days in the year are like this. Two, or three? And the resemblance of our own coast to a southern shore is now remarkable. The old wall of the steading behind the beach is not merely whitewashed. That wall’s brightness this morning might be, like moonshine, the assurance of what once stood there. Only the dark feathers of tamarisk above it pretend to substance, and they are drowsy after the buffeting of a wild summer, and bend asleep over the wall. That secluded place has grown familiar to me, but on a day like this, with the strong smell of decaying sea litter--long cables of pulse have been laid along the shingle by continual hard weather--and my footsteps the only sound, I approach that wall as if it were an undiscovered secret on an unfrequented strand of the Tortugas. No need to go out of England for adventure. Adventure is never anywhere unless we make it. Chance releases it; some unexpected incidence of little things. The trouble is to know it in time, when we see it. If we are not ready for it, then it is not there.

This morning I had the feeling that I was much nearer that fellow in the round barrow above the steading, whoever he used to be, than ever I felt on a glum day. Such autumn light as this is mocking. When the weather is overcast the tumulus is deeply sundered by time, but a September sun makes yesterday of it. Almost hidden in the fig-wort and hemp-agrimony of a dry ditch behind the shingle is a rusty globe, a dead mine of the war, and from an embankment above it I picked out a flint arrowhead; or rather, to-day’s odd and revealing shine betrayed it to me there. But in the gay and mocking light of such a morning both weapons belong to the same time in man’s short history. They were used in the same war. They will be separate from us, and both will become equally ancient, when we are of another mind and temper. When will that be? We may have to maintain ourselves in such light as this, regardless of the weather.

For what this oblique light makes clear is that there is a life and a tendency which goes on outside our own, and is indifferent to our most important crises. It is not affected by them. No doubt it affects us; but we do not often surmise that. It is lusty and valid, and we may suppose that it knows exactly what it is about. We may be too proud in our assurance that this other life has a less authentic word about its destiny than has been given to us. At sunrise to-day, on the high ridge of the shingle which rose between me and the sea, six herons stood motionless in a row, like immense figures of bronze. They were gigantic and ominous in that light. They stood in another world. They were like a warning of what once was, and could be again, huge and threatening, magnified out of all resemblance to birds, legendary figures which closed vast gulfs of time at a glance and put the familiar shingle in another geological epoch. When they rose and slowly beat the air with concave pinions I thought the very Heaven was undulating. With those grotesque black monsters shaking the sky, it looked as though man had not yet arrived. Anyhow, he was a mere circumstance--he could come and go--but a life not his persisted, and was in closer accord with whatever power it is that has no need to reckon time and space, but alters seas and continents at leisure.

VII. THE PLACE WE KNOW BEST