Part 12

It is an ancient notion that the earth never forgets any of our thoughts and acts. When we leave home not to return, it bears us in mind. Man has long entertained this strange and disturbing thought. The old metaphysicians, who could always come to any conclusion they desired, hinted the same opinion, that we leave an impress on the air; or something as substantial as that. And why should we deny it? It would be unreasonable to expect a seal upon the invisible to be discernible, and just as unreasonable to deny its existence because it could not be seen. We cannot declare our record is not there; but it will never be apprehended by insensitive souls, we may safely assume, any more than the Absolute, or the other unseen abstractions which seem to shrink from the coarse contact of our senses. We may not expect a memory haunting a place to reveal itself even when our mood is right, and the hour. It may not be sought, we are told. Like Truth, it cannot be proved. It comes when we are not looking for it. It is never more precise than a sudden doubt, a wonder apparently unprovoked, a surmise which abruptly checks our well-ordered activities.

Well, it is a novel kind of ghost story, and perhaps it has as much in it as most ghost stories, for it was a sceptic who declared sadly that the trouble with a ghost is that there is no ghost. We know there are many people who do not rejoice in the thought that we leave no lasting impression on our circumstances. They do not consider the greater responsibility a certainty of this memory of earth for its children would put upon us. How we should have to sublimate even our emotions, if we would give an admirable impression! The nascent terror at the bare suggestion of it reminds us that the experience is not uncommon, on entering a strange room, or looking at an empty landscape, to feel there the shadow of an abiding but inexplicable remembering. We never know why. Mr. de la Mare, in his poem _The Listeners_, has given this sense of the memory of an old and abandoned house; and it would be as wrong to smile at the delicate intuitions of a poet because they are too subtle as to deny the revolutionary reasoning of Einstein because his argument moves on a plane beyond our attainment. It is unfortunately natural for us to limit the possibilities of the universe, the depth of its mystery, to what we are able to make of it; for the things we do not know can exist for us only when we do know them and so may admit they are there. When we declare we see clearly all there is to be seen it seldom occurs to us that, even then, we may be but confessing to a partial blindness.

It is true that the real mystery of the ghosts is not that they startle us but that they do not. Not worth the trouble? Perhaps they are aware we will maintain a vague belief in their presence only so long as they do not show themselves. I myself find it easy to accept Mr. de la Mare’s _Listeners_, but not the pair of evil souls who appear in Henry James’ _Turn of the Screw_. I have always felt that we ought not to have been allowed to see those maleficent spirits, and that it was a defect in the story, a concession to our crudity, that they were ever produced by their author as substance for his case. For we may suppose that anything so imponderable as a memory the impassive earth retains of the past will suggest itself only to the lucky, who may make of their luck what they will. Most probably they will give their good fortune a false interpretation. But what opportunities the notion offers! What entertaining history could be made of it, if there were anyone to write it! What poetry, if we were poets!

There is my own London suburb. After a walk round it, which would take too much time, and would be very wearying, we might estimate that, counting even its invisible shadows, it is not more than fifty years old. The taxpayers there have some right to suppose that they know the best and worst of it. It is an uproar of trams and motor-traffic in the midst of hotels, restaurants, and ornate drapers’ shops. An alien might suppose we devoted our whole lives to the buttoning and unbuttoning of clothes and getting something to eat, until he saw the gilded stucco in an Oriental style of architecture, the minarets and domes, of our many picture palaces; for, after all, we have our intellectual excitements, and the newsboys at the street-corners are anxious that we should never grow listless.

It would be foolish to deny it. Our suburb seems raw and loud. Yet in recent years it acquired an area where a shower of bombs fell from an airship. History at last? No, we have some history which is earlier than the airship, though less remarkable. We have some scholarly local insistence on Clive, who went to school near, and on Ruskin, whose grandmother kept a public-house near the High Street. We have a Fellmongers’ Yard, and a Coldharbour Lane, a tavern which can claim a Tudor reference, and a building, mainly of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and known to us as the Old Palace. Naturally, Queen Elizabeth slept there. She did in most places. Here, however, she really did sleep, and her most unqueenly ingratitude to her anxious host, expressed when she departed, is on record. We delight in the irregular mass of the Old Palace, with its little colony of rooks in the trees beside it; yet our delight in it comes, I think, because its memories of Tudor archbishops are associated, as we pass it, with the singing and the play of our neighbours’ children, for the Palace to-day is a school of theirs. We think more fondly of the children than of the old ecclesiasts. They give us something more beautiful to think about. Yet--the doubt is insistent--though we know well enough our libraries are full of the solemn nonsense which historians have made of their illusions and prejudices, is there a phantom more misleading than the visible Fata Morgana of our own day, our own illusion, which men of affairs call Things as They Are? For what are they? Dare we say we know more about them than we know of the Pyramids, the Cretans, and the wanderings of the Polynesians? Is the last comment on it all the laughter of children?

Our suburb seems so raw. It has been reduced to figures on a chart, which the Town Hall will supply. But I have long had a suspicion that it has secrets which it is not sharing with such latecomers as we are. This feeling has come over me, with chilling irrelevance, when I have been passing our parish church late at night. Nobody knows when a church first stood here, but it had a priest in 986. Late at night, our own suburb suggests oddly that it is not ours, that its real existence is in a dimension unknown to its sleeping citizens. I have wondered then whether it was possible to write the history of any place, of any time. Can we ever do more than make a few suggestive speculations? Perhaps the most important happenings are always omitted; the words with which we record an air-raid may not touch them. I know that the history of my own little street, during the few years of the war, could never be written, and if it were written it would be unbelievable. For no man could so translate my street of those years for all to see its significance, unless his imagination were like a morning sun which rose to reveal the earth that night had obscured. Our street doors are closed forever upon what happened behind them in those years. Unless their history is written on the invisible air, then it is lost.

For this unreasonable certainty I can offer no evidence more substantial than the last train home, and moonlight on the trees and battlements of the church, and the silence, and a gargoyle leering down at me from a porch. He might have been caught in the act of sardonic comment on what was passing below, out of a fuller knowledge, and a longer life. I can bring myself to believe that the gargoyle does not grin at me at night without reason. He knows something. He always did. But what is it? Why should he make me wonder whether I really know my own street? One comes home at midnight, with the mind revolving round London’s latest crisis; and for a wonder my suburb does not share the excitement of the city. It is sunk in an immemorial quiet. The church and the Old Palace might be the apparition of what was beyond us and above the anxieties which make our time spin so fast. It is not their time. Our contemporary bricks and mortar have assumed a startling look of venerable and meditative dignity. Our familiar place is free to compose itself in solitude, for we have withdrawn from it, noisy children who have gone to bed. It looks superior to me, when I surprise it at such a time, but it does not betray its knowledge. It spares no more than the ironic comment of the gargoyle.

I think I can guess a little of what is behind that imp’s grimace. Opposite to my house is a wall. It has no history. It is but a matured wall, and its top is hoary with lichens and moss. This year’s leaves are now littering the ground below. But I have seen our young men assemble there, and march off for the Yser. This year’s leaves are damp and sere on the path by the wall where the young men shuffled off in the ominous quiet of that forgotten winter dawn. But what do the new people in our street see when they gaze across to that old red brickwork on a bright autumn morning? There the dead leaves are. What is history? One may guess why the ancient imp by the church porch has that grin when chance wayfarers late at night look up, and find he is watching them pass. Does he know where they are going, and why, and is he grinning over his secret?

VIII. DROUGHT

The pond at the end of the row of cottages was reduced to little more than a margin of yellow mud, tough as putty. The mud framed an oval of green slime, which might have been solid, for several tin cans were resting on it, unable to sink. The cottages were hoary with the dust of constant motor-traffic, and the small strip of paled ground in front of each was a desert in which nothing but a few tall hollyhocks survived.

The market-gardener, whose tanned face made his beard as delicate as snow, and gave his pale blue eyes a disconcerting beauty, stood at the gate to the gardens just beyond the pond. Over the gardens, held aloft so that the passengers on the motor-buses from London could see it, was a new notice-board announcing that freehold building plots were for sale.

A stack of bricks was dumped on the potatoes near the notice-board. The gardener saw that I had observed this novelty in the village, and turned his head and glanced that way. He crinkled his eyes at the bricks in ironical disfavour. “That’s the first lot,” he said. “Can’t be stopped now. Better look round if you want to remember us. Wonderful how things move, once they start. One time, nothing much along here but farm wagons. Now you must hurry, crossing this here road. Specially Sundays. London ain’t far away now.”

“It never was very far, was it?”

“It was all right where it was. I never thought,” he mumbled, “that anyone ’ud want to live here, except us folks. I almost wish I’d guessed it long ago. Might have bought this field. Never gave it a thought. Rent was cheap. I could only think of the green stuff, and that’s how we get caught, attending to one thing. You city folks are too quick.”

“No, we’re not. It’s the years that are quick. We get hurried along and pushed out, and most of the time we don’t know where we are.”

“Well. Maybe. But here you are. Seems as though them motor-buses blasted even the taters. ’Tisn’t only the dry summer. Everything lost heart after they put up that notice-board there. This place is different.”

The old man took off his cap and put it on again. “Well, you come in and have a cup of tea, on the way down. Don’t go to the village hall and ask the young ’uns whether they like the difference. Sometimes I fancy the motors have served them like the taters.”

At the end of the market gardens, where the contractors are assembling their material, a footpath passes some recent villas built in the Tudor style, with black planks, to represent timber work, embedded in cement, and begins a long ascent of the open downs. Above the last house you can see the upward track dwindle in the distance to a white thread, which is occasionally lost to sight. And, beyond, where that thread vanishes, a wood is a dark crown to the downs, but so remote, so near to the glaring sky, that the eye says it is inaccessible.

The lower slopes of the upland have been worn by the holiday-makers. The relics of the last week-end picnic littered the dry grass. Nobody was in sight then. Nothing moved, except the air over the warm ground in the distance: the down, a light inflation of chalk, vast and still, might have been quivering under its spell. At least there was a hint of its eager and tremulous spirit under the iron control of its enchantment. You thought, when watching it, that you might presently see the earth change more rapidly, and that dilation increase or collapse. For the chalk country, with its faint hues and its clean rondures, gives a curious sense of buoyancy and volatility. That high and distant clump, that dark raft of trees, could be sweeping forward on an immense green billow. It might slither over and vanish.

Above the litter of the picnic-makers the hill rose at a sharper angle. The dry herbage was as slippery as ice. That sharp slope appeared to be a barrier to the holiday folk. Their tide does not rise above it. Above that escarpment the life of the valley never flows; and, looking down from it, the market gardens in the valley bottom, with the tiny mark which was a notice-board adding insult to the injury of the potatoes in a dry season, were seen to be the less significant. They were of no extent. The village itself, even with the bright red rectangles of the villas which betrayed its growth, was obviously incidental. Above the escarpment, too, the wild crops on the down were superior to anything which afflicts cabbages. They knew nothing of a drought. As a cooling breeze passed over the body of the hill the silky herbage stirred like long brown fur. The skin of the earth was soft and healthy. It smelt of thyme and marjoram.

And the wood, that raft on the crest of the billow of chalk, was reached at last. No drought was there. There was an outer wild of the smaller trees, guelder, wayfarer’s tree, white beam, holly, cornel and alder buckthorn, bound together with wild clematis, and brambles that sounded like dynamos with a multitude of bees. Inside the wood, wherever there was a clearing in the timber on a slope, the colours of the wild flowers fell away in a cascade. That seclusion might have been tranquil and confident with a knowledge kept secret from the fearful and anxious. Its life sang and hummed in innumerable tiny voices. It will last a long time, and it will not need to change. A yew kept a space for itself, a twilight area through which fell rods of light. One side of the yew was splashed by the sun, and then the sooty trunk was seen to be of madder and myrtle green. Its life, though ancient, could not have been more robust. In the shade of it a company of hover-flies were at play, as though they had been doing that from the beginning, and would do it forever. They poised motionless or slightly undulated, and gyrated sideways and vanished, to reappear instantly in the same place, atoms joyous and sure in a changeless world. Sometimes one of them was caught in a beam of light and then that morsel of life became a bubble of gold in the air. It went out. It appeared again. It could shine when it pleased.

The ship of trees was actually afloat. Its course was set high in the tides of the ether. It only seemed motionless. The murmuring of its secret power could be heard, if you listened for it.

IX. A RIDE ON A COMET

In the beginning, I know there was nothing more unusual in the things about me than a motor-car standing by the entrance to a dull, palatial, and expensive hotel on the Devon coast. The time was near midnight. The world was only the hotel lights and the moan of the sea. I had been to an enthusiastic political meeting; so my complete adhesion, at first, to common clay, is proved. There was another town, thirty miles away in the dark of the moors, and thither would we go, if it could be done. I did not think it could, though I did not think much about it, being too tired.

Standing near the car, which had a nose like a torpedo, was a young man; what resembled a young man. I must be careful, for I had never seen the fellow by daylight, and am now uncertain whether or not he could be seen by daylight. He was pulling on great fur gloves and, speaking quietly with suspicious modesty, he stinted nothing of his ability to get to any old place in these islands before the next dawn. He spoke with the calm certitude of a god who takes the sunward hemisphere of this earth in one glance, and takes that side of it which is lost to mortals sleeping there at night as but a span of his thumb in the stars.

I asked him if he had ever been on this road before, for a doubt of the omnipresence of this dubious man prompted me. I knew what hills and bad places, even by day, lay between me and the town where I fain would be. “I expect so,” he murmured, as though disguising his voice; “I expect so, some time or another.” The matter then dropped. I asked no more questions. There were no more to ask, except concerning those exactions of time and space which mortals never question. With the soft indifference of the sleepy mind, I was willing to believe that some time or another, in eternity, the timeless being beside me had included in his planetary orbits this bit of country. His wheels had taken this ugly length of night road, which awed a pedestrian mortal like me, in a single revolution, while belated wayfarers there, horror-stricken, had listened open-mouthed (backs up against the hedge-banks) to the swift diminuendo of earthquake and eclipse.

Yet I lifted my tired eyes for a glance at this young man to catch, if it were there, an unguarded hint of his inhuman origin. There was but a half-smile on his lean face, which should have warned me, but did not. He stood by the black bulk of his impassive chariot. A tremor did come over me; and so, while my homely feet were still planted indubitably on good mother earth, I looked about me there for the last time. Nothing stirred. There was nothing unusual; no omen, no portent. Earth was deeply embedded and asleep in night. It seemed so certain (and here I turned to my charioteer again to see his face) that, from where I stood, the other town was as sundered from me as one of the asteroids. Its glint was too remote in the void to be seen. Suddenly then I became awake and afraid, and would have pushed the Tempter from me, saying that I’d find a bed where I was for the night. But I was given no time to speak.

“Get in,” said the uncertain smile; and I dropped into the soft cloud of his immaterial car. What had only looked like a dim carriage instantly shook with the suppressed dynamics of many horses, and shot a vast ray into the night, as might have been expected from a comet. The smile slipped in beside me. He moved his hand swiftly. We got off the earth.

If any abroad there at that late hour saw a meteor falling, tail first, athwart the North Devon hills, they would have been surprised to know there was one mortal man astride that flying light, conscious, too, of his mortality, and wondering how deep his bones would be found when the aerolite was dug out afterwards by the curious. From my stellar seat--we flew low down over the earth--what I saw on my right hand was the huge shadow of a hill, with the thin bright rind of the new moon just above it. Very little below us was the shine of our comet, revealing a pale road pouring past, a road which made flying leaps upward at us, but never touched us. There was also a luminous, pale-green haze, streaming in the wind which roared past. I think it was hedges. It went by in never-ceasing undulations. We were always about to tear through it, but miraculously it avoided us. The paring of moon remained above the high shadow on the right. Sometimes the transparent apparitions of trees shaped before us; we were skimming the dark planet too close. Sometimes we were so low in our flight that we had to dive, roaring, under their lower ghostly branches, and soared when through them into the silence of the outer dark again.

Once we alighted on earth, just brushing it in a swoop on the upslope of a hill, and then rolled up gently in a great light. It was then that, instead of flying luminous streaks, I could see stones and clods, rooted trees and hedges growing where they stood, and they all looked like handpainted scenery by limelight. We reached the hill-top, the smile beside me gave a demoniac hoot, and we shot out into space like a projectile, falling sheer to the nether stars. My hair rose on end in the upward rush of wind. I had had about enough of it. If we hit another body in the sky larger than ourselves....