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+Project Gutenberg's Quality and Other Studies and Essays, by John Galsworthy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Quality and Other Studies and Essays
+
+Author: John Galsworthy
+
+Release Date: September 25, 2004 [EBook #2904]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK QUALITY AND OTHER STUDIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+STUDIES AND ESSAYS
+
+By John Galsworthy
+
+
+          "Je vous dirai que l'exces est toujours un mal."
+                                        --ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+
+
+                         CONCERNING LIFE
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS:
+          QUALITY
+          THE GRAND JURY
+          GONE
+          THRESHING
+          THAT OLD-TIME PLACE
+          ROMANCE--THREE GLEAMS
+          MEMORIES
+          FELICITY
+
+
+
+
+STUDIES AND ESSAYS
+
+By John Galsworthy
+
+          "Je vous dirai que l'exces est toujours un mal."
+                                      --ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+
+
+
+                         CONCERNING LIFE
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS:
+          QUALITY
+          THE GRAND JURY
+          GONE
+          THRESHING
+          THAT OLD-TIME PLACE
+          ROMANCE--THREE GLEAMS
+          MEMORIES
+          FELICITY
+
+
+
+
+QUALITY
+
+I knew him from the days of my extreme youth, because he made my father's
+boots; inhabiting with his elder brother two little shops let into one,
+in a small by-street-now no more, but then most fashionably placed in the
+West End.
+
+That tenement had a certain quiet distinction; there was no sign upon its
+face that he made for any of the Royal Family--merely his own German name
+of Gessler Brothers; and in the window a few pairs of boots.  I remember
+that it always troubled me to account for those unvarying boots in the
+window, for he made only what was ordered, reaching nothing down, and it
+seemed so inconceivable that what he made could ever have failed to fit.
+Had he bought them to put there?  That, too, seemed inconceivable.  He
+would never have tolerated in his house leather on which he had not
+worked himself.  Besides, they were too beautiful--the pair of pumps, so
+inexpressibly slim, the patent leathers with cloth tops, making water
+come into one's mouth, the tall brown riding boots with marvellous sooty
+glow, as if, though new, they had been worn a hundred years.  Those pairs
+could only have been made by one who saw before him the Soul of Boot--so
+truly were they prototypes incarnating the very spirit of all foot-gear.
+These thoughts, of course, came to me later, though even when I was
+promoted to him, at the age of perhaps fourteen, some inkling haunted me
+of the dignity of himself and brother.  For to make boots--such boots as
+he made--seemed to me then, and still seems to me, mysterious and
+wonderful.
+
+I remember well my shy remark, one day, while stretching out to him my
+youthful foot:
+
+"Isn't it awfully hard to do, Mr. Gessler?"
+
+And his answer, given with a sudden smile from out of the sardonic
+redness of his beard: "Id is an Ardt!"
+
+Himself, he was a little as if made from leather, with his yellow crinkly
+face, and crinkly reddish hair and beard; and neat folds slanting down
+his cheeks to the corners of his mouth, and his guttural and one-toned
+voice; for leather is a sardonic substance, and stiff and slow of
+purpose.  And that was the character of his face, save that his eyes,
+which were grey-blue, had in them the simple gravity of one secretly
+possessed by the Ideal.  His elder brother was so very like him--though
+watery, paler in every way, with a great industry--that sometimes in
+early days I was not quite sure of him until the interview was over.
+Then I knew that it was he, if the words, "I will ask my brudder," had
+not been spoken; and that, if they had, it was his elder brother.
+
+When one grew old and wild and ran up bills, one somehow never ran them
+up with Gessler Brothers.  It would not have seemed becoming to go in
+there and stretch out one's foot to that blue iron-spectacled glance,
+owing him for more than--say--two pairs, just the comfortable reassurance
+that one was still his client.
+
+For it was not possible to go to him very often--his boots lasted
+terribly, having something beyond the temporary--some, as it were,
+essence of boot stitched into them.
+
+One went in, not as into most shops, in the mood of: "Please serve me,
+and let me go!" but restfully, as one enters a church; and, sitting on
+the single wooden chair, waited--for there was never anybody there.
+Soon, over the top edge of that sort of well--rather dark, and smelling
+soothingly of leather--which formed the shop, there would be seen his
+face, or that of his elder brother, peering down.  A guttural sound, and
+the tip-tap of bast slippers beating the narrow wooden stairs, and he
+would stand before one without coat, a little bent, in leather apron,
+with sleeves turned back, blinking--as if awakened from some dream of
+boots, or like an owl surprised in daylight and annoyed at this
+interruption.
+
+And I would say: "How do you do, Mr. Gessler?  Could you make me a pair
+of Russia leather boots?"
+
+Without a word he would leave me, retiring whence he came, or into the
+other portion of the shop, and I would, continue to rest in the wooden
+chair, inhaling the incense of his trade.  Soon he would come back,
+holding in his thin, veined hand a piece of gold-brown leather. With eyes
+fixed on it, he would remark: "What a beaudiful biece!" When I, too, had
+admired it, he would speak again.  "When do you wand dem?"  And I would
+answer: "Oh!  As soon as you conveniently can." And he would say:
+"To-morrow fordnighd?"  Or if he were his elder brother: "I will ask my
+brudder!"
+
+Then I would murmur: "Thank you!  Good-morning, Mr.  Gessler."
+"Goot-morning!" he would reply, still looking at the leather in his hand.
+And as I moved to the door, I would hear the tip-tap of his bast slippers
+restoring him, up the stairs, to his dream of boots.  But if it were some
+new kind of foot-gear that he had not yet made me, then indeed he would
+observe ceremony--divesting me of my boot and holding it long in his
+hand, looking at it with eyes at once critical and loving, as if
+recalling the glow with which he had created it, and rebuking the way in
+which one had disorganized this masterpiece. Then, placing my foot on a
+piece of paper, he would two or three times tickle the outer edges with a
+pencil and pass his nervous fingers over my toes, feeling himself into
+the heart of my requirements.
+
+I cannot forget that day on which I had occasion to say to him; "Mr.
+Gessler, that last pair of town walking-boots creaked, you know."
+
+He looked at me for a time without replying, as if expecting me to
+withdraw or qualify the statement, then said:
+
+"Id shouldn'd 'ave greaked."
+
+"It did, I'm afraid."
+
+"You goddem wed before dey found demselves?"
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+At that he lowered his eyes, as if hunting for memory of those boots, and
+I felt sorry I had mentioned this grave thing.
+
+"Zend dem back!" he said; "I will look at dem."
+
+A feeling of compassion for my creaking boots surged up in me, so well
+could I imagine the sorrowful long curiosity of regard which he would
+bend on them.
+
+"Zome boods," he said slowly, "are bad from birdt.  If I can do noding
+wid dem, I dake dem off your bill."
+
+Once (once only) I went absent-mindedly into his shop in a pair of boots
+bought in an emergency at some large firm's.  He took my order without
+showing me any leather, and I could feel his eyes penetrating the
+inferior integument of my foot.  At last he said:
+
+"Dose are nod my boods."
+
+The tone was not one of anger, nor of sorrow, not even of contempt, but
+there was in it something quiet that froze the blood.  He put his hand
+down and pressed a finger on the place where the left boot, endeavouring
+to be fashionable, was not quite comfortable.
+
+"Id 'urds you dere,", he said.  "Dose big virms 'ave no self-respect.
+Drash!"  And then, as if something had given way within him, he spoke
+long and bitterly.  It was the only time I ever heard him discuss the
+conditions and hardships of his trade.
+
+"Dey get id all," he said, "dey get id by adverdisement, nod by work. Dey
+dake it away from us, who lofe our boods.  Id gomes to this--bresently I
+haf no work.  Every year id gets less you will see."  And looking at his
+lined face I saw things I had never noticed before, bitter things and
+bitter struggle--and what a lot of grey hairs there seemed suddenly in
+his red beard!
+
+As best I could, I explained the circumstances of the purchase of those
+ill-omened boots.  But his face and voice made so deep impression that
+during the next few minutes I ordered many pairs. Nemesis fell!  They
+lasted more terribly than ever.  And I was not able conscientiously to go
+to him for nearly two years.
+
+When at last I went I was surprised to find that outside one of the two
+little windows of his shop another name was painted, also that of a
+bootmaker-making, of course, for the Royal Family.  The old familiar
+boots, no longer in dignified isolation, were huddled in the single
+window.  Inside, the now contracted well of the one little shop was more
+scented and darker than ever.  And it was longer than usual, too, before
+a face peered down, and the tip-tap of the bast slippers began.  At last
+he stood before me, and, gazing through those rusty iron spectacles,
+said:
+
+"Mr.-----, isn'd it?"
+
+"Ah!  Mr.  Gessler," I stammered, "but your boots are really too good,
+you know!  See, these are quite decent still!"  And I stretched out to
+him my foot.  He looked at it.
+
+"Yes," he said, "beople do nod wand good hoods, id seems."
+
+To get away from his reproachful eyes and voice I hastily remarked: "What
+have you done to your shop?"
+
+He answered quietly: "Id was too exbensif.  Do you wand some boods?"
+
+I ordered three pairs, though I had only wanted two, and quickly left.  I
+had, I do not know quite what feeling of being part, in his mind, of a
+conspiracy against him; or not perhaps so much against him as against his
+idea of boot.  One does not, I suppose, care to feel like that; for it
+was again many months before my next visit to his shop, paid, I remember,
+with the feeling: "Oh! well, I can't leave the old boy--so here goes!
+Perhaps it'll be his elder brother!"
+
+For his elder brother, I knew, had not character enough to reproach me,
+even dumbly.
+
+And, to my relief, in the shop there did appear to be his elder brother,
+handling a piece of leather.
+
+"Well, Mr.  Gessler," I said, "how are you?"
+
+He came close, and peered at me.
+
+"I am breddy well," he said slowly "but my elder brudder is dead."
+
+And I saw that it was indeed himself--but how aged and wan!  And never
+before had I heard him mention his brother.  Much shocked; I murmured:
+"Oh!  I am sorry!"
+
+"Yes," he answered, "he was a good man, he made a good bood; but he is
+dead."  And he touched the top of his head, where the hair had suddenly
+gone as thin as it had been on that of his poor brother, to indicate, I
+suppose, the cause of death.  "He could nod ged over losing de oder shop.
+Do you wand any hoods?"  And he held up the leather in his hand: "Id's a
+beaudiful biece."
+
+I ordered several pairs.  It was very long before they came--but they
+were better than ever.  One simply could not wear them out.  And soon
+after that I went abroad.
+
+It was over a year before I was again in London.  And the first shop I
+went to was my old friend's.  I had left a man of sixty, I came back to
+one of seventy-five, pinched and worn and tremulous, who genuinely, this
+time, did not at first know me.
+
+"Oh!  Mr. Gessler," I said, sick at heart; "how splendid your boots are!
+See, I've been wearing this pair nearly all the time I've been abroad;
+and they're not half worn out, are they?"
+
+He looked long at my boots--a pair of Russia leather, and his face seemed
+to regain steadiness.  Putting his hand on my instep, he said:
+
+"Do dey vid you here?  I 'ad drouble wid dat bair, I remember."
+
+I assured him that they had fitted beautifully.
+
+"Do you wand any boods?" he said.  "I can make dem quickly; id is a slack
+dime."
+
+I answered: "Please, please!  I want boots all round--every kind!"
+
+"I will make a vresh model.  Your food must be bigger."  And with utter
+slowness, he traced round my foot, and felt my toes, only once looking up
+to say:
+
+"Did I dell you my brudder was dead?"
+
+To watch him was painful, so feeble had he grown; I was glad to get away.
+
+I had given those boots up, when one evening they came.  Opening the
+parcel, I set the four pairs out in a row.  Then one by one I tried them
+on.  There was no doubt about it.  In shape and fit, in finish and
+quality of leather, they were the best he had ever made me.  And in the
+mouth of one of the Town walking-boots I found his bill.
+
+The amount was the same as usual, but it gave me quite a shock.  He had
+never before sent it in till quarter day.  I flew down-stairs, and wrote
+a cheque, and posted it at once with my own hand.
+
+A week later, passing the little street, I thought I would go in and tell
+him how splendidly the new boots fitted.  But when I came to where his
+shop had been, his name was gone.  Still there, in the window, were the
+slim pumps, the patent leathers with cloth tops, the sooty riding boots.
+
+I went in, very much disturbed.  In the two little shops--again made into
+one--was a young man with an English face.
+
+"Mr. Gessler in?" I said.
+
+He gave me a strange, ingratiating look.
+
+"No, sir," he said, "no.  But we can attend to anything with pleasure.
+We've taken the shop over.  You've seen our name, no doubt, next door.
+We make for some very good people."
+
+"Yes, Yes," I said; "but Mr. Gessler?"
+
+"Oh!" he answered; "dead."
+
+"Dead!  But I only received these boots from him last Wednesday week."
+
+"Ah!" he said; "a shockin' go.  Poor old man starved 'imself."
+
+"Good God!"
+
+"Slow starvation, the doctor called it!  You see he went to work in such
+a way!  Would keep the shop on; wouldn't have a soul touch his boots
+except himself.  When he got an order, it took him such a time. People
+won't wait.  He lost everybody.  And there he'd sit, goin' on and on--I
+will say that for him not a man in London made a better boot!  But look
+at the competition!  He never advertised!  Would 'ave the best leather,
+too, and do it all 'imself.  Well, there it is. What could you expect
+with his ideas?"
+
+"But starvation----!"
+
+"That may be a bit flowery, as the sayin' is--but I know myself he was
+sittin' over his boots day and night, to the very last.  You see I used
+to watch him.  Never gave 'imself time to eat; never had a penny in the
+house.  All went in rent and leather.  How he lived so long I don't know.
+He regular let his fire go out.  He was a character.  But he made good
+boots."
+
+"Yes," I said, "he made good boots."
+
+And I turned and went out quickly, for I did not want that youth to know
+that I could hardly see.
+1911
+
+
+
+
+THE GRAND JURY--IN TWO PANELS AND A FRAME
+
+Read that piece of paper, which summoned me to sit on the Grand Jury at
+the approaching Sessions, lying in a scoop of the shore close to the
+great rollers of the sea--that span of eternal freedom, deprived just
+there of too great liberty by the word "Atlantic."  And I remember
+thinking, as I read, that in each breaking wave was some particle which
+had visited every shore in all the world--that in each sparkle of hot
+sunlight stealing that bright water up into the sky, was the microcosm of
+all change, and of all unity.
+
+
+PANEL I
+
+In answer to that piece of paper, I presented myself at the proper place
+in due course and with a certain trepidation.  What was it that I was
+about to do?  For I had no experience of these things.  And, being too
+early, I walked a little to and fro, looking at all those my partners in
+this matter of the purification of Society. Prosecutors, witnesses,
+officials, policemen, detectives, undetected, pressmen, barristers,
+loafers, clerks, cadgers, jurymen.  And I remember having something of
+the feeling that one has when one looks into a sink without holding one's
+nose.  There was such uneasy hurry, so strange a disenchanted look, a
+sort of spiritual dirt, about all that place, and there were--faces!  And
+I thought: To them my face must seem as their faces seem to me!
+
+Soon I was taken with my accomplices to have my name called, and to be
+sworn.  I do not remember much about that process, too occupied with
+wondering what these companions of mine were like; but presently we all
+came to a long room with a long table, where nineteen lists of
+indictments and nineteen pieces of blotting paper were set alongside
+nineteen pens.  We did not, I recollect, speak much to one another, but
+sat down, and studied those nineteen lists.  We had eighty-seven cases on
+which to pronounce whether the bill was true or no; and the clerk assured
+us we should get through them in two days at most. Over the top of these
+indictments I regarded my eighteen fellows. There was in me a hunger of
+inquiry, as to what they thought about this business; and a sort of
+sorrowful affection for them, as if we were all a ship's company bound on
+some strange and awkward expedition.  I wondered, till I thought my
+wonder must be coming through my eyes, whether they had the same curious
+sensation that I was feeling, of doing something illegitimate, which I
+had not been born to do, together with a sense of self-importance, a sort
+of unholy interest in thus dealing with the lives of my fellow men.  And
+slowly, watching them, I came to the conclusion that I need not wonder.
+All with the exception perhaps of two, a painter and a Jew looked such
+good citizens.  I became gradually sure that they were not troubled with
+the lap and wash of speculation; unclogged by any devastating sense of
+unity; pure of doubt, and undefiled by an uneasy conscience.
+
+But now they began to bring us in the evidence.  They brought it quickly.
+And at first we looked at it, whatever it was, with a sort of solemn
+excitement.  Were we not arbiters of men's fates, purifiers of Society,
+more important by far than Judge or Common Jury?  For if we did not bring
+in a true bill there was an end; the accused would be discharged.
+
+We set to work, slowly at first, then faster and still faster, bringing
+in true bills; and after every one making a mark in our lists so that we
+might know where we were.  We brought in true bills for burglary, and
+false pretences, larceny, and fraud; we brought them in for manslaughter,
+rape, and arson.  When we had ten or so, two of us would get up and bear
+them away down to the Court below and lay them before the Judge.  "Thank
+you, gentlemen!" he would say, or words to that effect; and we would go
+up again, and go on bringing in true bills.  I noticed that at the
+evidence of each fresh bill we looked with a little less excitement, and
+a little less solemnity, making every time a shorter tick and a shorter
+note in the margin of our lists.  All the bills we had--fifty-seven--we
+brought in true. And the morning and the afternoon made that day, till we
+rested and went to our homes.
+
+Next day we were all back in our places at the appointed hour, and, not
+greeting each other much, at once began to bring in bills.  We brought
+them in, not quite so fast, as though some lurking megrim, some microbe
+of dissatisfaction with ourselves was at work within us. It was as if we
+wanted to throw one out, as if we felt our work too perfect.  And
+presently it came.  A case of defrauding one Sophie Liebermann, or
+Laubermann, or some such foreign name, by giving her one of those
+five-pound Christmas-card banknotes just then in fashion, and receiving
+from her, as she alleged, three real sovereigns change.  There was a
+certain piquancy about the matter, and I well remember noticing how we
+sat a little forward and turned in our seats when they brought in the
+prosecutrix to give evidence. Pale, self-possessed, dressed in black, and
+rather comely, neither brazen nor furtive, speaking but poor English, her
+broad, matter-of-fact face, with its wide-set grey eyes and thickish nose
+and lips, made on me, I recollect, an impression of rather stupid
+honesty.  I do not think they had told us in so many words what her
+calling was, nor do I remember whether she actually disclosed it, but by
+our demeanour I could tell that we had all realized what was the nature
+of the service rendered to the accused, in return for which he had given
+her this worthless note.  In her rather guttural but pleasant voice she
+answered all our questions--not very far from tears, I think, but saved
+by native stolidity, and perhaps a little by the fear that purifiers of
+Society might not be the proper audience for emotion.  When she had left
+us we recalled the detective, and still, as it were, touching the
+delicate matter with the tips of our tongues, so as not, being men of the
+world, to seem biassed against anything, we definitely elicited from him
+her profession and these words: "If she's speaking the truth, gentlemen;
+but, as you know, these women, they don't always, specially the foreign
+ones!"  When he, too, had gone, we looked at each other in unwonted
+silence.  None of us quite liked, it seemed, to be first to speak.  Then
+our foreman said: "There's no doubt, I think, that he gave her the
+note--mean trick, of course, but we can't have him on that alone--bit too
+irregular--no consideration in law, I take it."
+
+He smiled a little at our smiles, and then went on: "The question,
+gentlemen, really seems to be, are we to take her word that she actually
+gave him change?"  Again, for quite half a minute; we were silent, and
+then, the fattest one of us said, suddenly: "Very dangerous--goin' on the
+word of these women."
+
+And at once, as if he had released something in our souls, we all (save
+two or three) broke out.  It wouldn't do!  It wasn't safe!  Seeing what
+these women were!  It was exactly as if, without word said, we had each
+been swearing the other to some secret compact to protect Society.  As if
+we had been whispering to each other something like this: "These
+women--of course, we need them, but for all that we can't possibly
+recognise them as within the Law; we can't do that without endangering
+the safety of every one of us.  In this matter we are trustees for all
+men--indeed, even for ourselves, for who knows at what moment we might
+not ourselves require their services, and it would be exceedingly awkward
+if their word were considered the equal of our own!"  Not one of us,
+certainly said anything so crude as this; none the less did many of us
+feel it. Then the foreman, looking slowly round the table, said: "Well,
+gentlemen, I think we are all agreed to throw out this bill"; and all,
+except the painter, the Jew, and one other, murmured: "Yes." And, as
+though, in throwing out this bill we had cast some trouble off our minds,
+we went on with the greater speed, bringing in true bills.  About two
+o'clock we finished, and trooped down to the Court to be released.  On
+the stairway the Jew came close, and, having examined me a little sharply
+with his velvety slits of eyes, as if to see that he was not making a
+mistake, said: "Ith fonny--we bring in eighty thix bills true, and one we
+throw out, and the one we throw out we know it to be true, and the
+dirtieth job of the whole lot. Ith fonny!"  "Yes," I answered him, "our
+sense of respectability does seem excessive."  But just then we reached
+the Court, where, in his red robe and grey wig, with his clear-cut,
+handsome face, the judge seemed to shine and radiate, like sun through
+gloom.  "I thank you, gentlemen," he said, in a voice courteous and a
+little mocking, as though he had somewhere seen us before: "I thank you
+for the way in which you have performed your duties.  I have not the
+pleasure of assigning to you anything for your services except the
+privilege of going over a prison, where you will be able to see what sort
+of existence awaits many of those to whose cases you have devoted so much
+of your valuable time.  You are released, gentlemen."
+
+Looking at each, other a little hurriedly, and not taking too much
+farewell, for fear of having to meet again, we separated.
+
+I was, then, free--free of the injunction of that piece of paper reposing
+in my pocket.  Yet its influence was still upon me.  I did not hurry
+away, but lingered in the courts, fascinated by the notion that the fate
+of each prisoner had first passed through my hands.  At last I made an
+effort, and went out into the corridor.  There I passed a woman whose
+figure seemed familiar.  She was sitting with her hands in her lap
+looking straight before her, pale-faced and not uncomely, with thickish
+mouth and nose--the woman whose bill we had thrown out.  Why was she
+sitting there?  Had she not then realised that we had quashed her claim;
+or was she, like myself, kept here by mere attraction of the Law?
+Following I know not what impulse, I said: "Your case was dismissed,
+wasn't it?"  She looked up at me stolidly, and a tear, which had
+evidently been long gathering, dropped at the movement.  "I do nod know;
+I waid to see," she said in her thick voice; "I tink there has been
+mistake."  My face, no doubt, betrayed something of my sentiments about
+her case, for the thick tears began rolling fast down her pasty cheeks,
+and her pent-up feeling suddenly flowed forth in words: "I work 'ard;
+Gott! how I work hard!  And there gomes dis liddle beastly man, and rob
+me.  And they say: 'Ah! yes; but you are a bad woman, we don' trust
+you--you speak lie.'  But I speak druth, I am nod a bad woman--I gome
+from Hamburg."  "Yes, yes," I murmured; "yes, yes."  "I do not know this
+country well, sir.  I speak bad English.  Is that why they do not drust
+my word?"  She was silent for a moment, searching my face, then broke out
+again: "It is all 'ard work in my profession, I make very liddle, I
+cannot afford to be rob.  Without the men I cannod make my living, I must
+drust them--and they rob me like this, it is too 'ard."  And the slow
+tears rolled faster and faster from her eyes on to her hands and her
+black lap.  Then quietly, and looking for a moment singularly like a big,
+unhappy child, she asked: "Will you blease dell me, sir, why they will
+not give me the law of that dirty little man?"
+
+I knew--and too well; but I could not tell her.
+
+"You see," I said, "it's just a case of your word against his."  "Oh! no;
+but," she said eagerly, "he give me the note--I would not have taken it
+if I 'ad not thought it good, would I?  That is sure, isn't it?  But five
+pounds it is not my price.  It must that I give 'im change!  Those
+gentlemen that heard my case, they are men of business, they must know
+that it is not my price.  If I could tell the judge--I think he is a man
+of business too he would know that too, for sure.  I am not so young.  I
+am not so veree beautiful as all that; he must see, mustn't he, sir?"
+
+At my wits' end how to answer that most strange question, I stammered
+out: "But, you know, your profession is outside the law."
+
+At that a slow anger dyed her face.  She looked down; then, suddenly
+lifting one of her dirty, ungloved hands, she laid it on her breast with
+the gesture of one baring to me the truth in her heart.  "I am not a bad
+woman," she said: "Dat beastly little man, he do the same as me--I am
+free-woman, I am not a slave bound to do the same to-morrow night, no
+more than he.  Such like him make me what I am; he have all the pleasure,
+I have all the work.  He give me noding--he rob my poor money, and he
+make me seem to strangers a bad woman.  Oh, dear!  I am not happy!"
+
+The impulse I had been having to press on her the money, died within me;
+I felt suddenly it would be another insult.  From the movement of her
+fingers about her heart I could not but see that this grief of hers was
+not about the money.  It was the inarticulate outburst of a bitter sense
+of deep injustice; of all the dumb wondering at her own fate that went
+about with her behind that broad stolid face and bosom.  This loss of the
+money was but a symbol of the furtive, hopeless insecurity she lived with
+day and night, now forced into the light, for herself and all the world
+to see.  She felt it suddenly a bitter, unfair thing.  This beastly
+little man did not share her insecurity.  None of us shared it--none of
+us, who had brought her down to this.  And, quite unable to explain to
+her how natural and proper it all was, I only murmured: "I am sorry,
+awfully sorry," and fled away.
+
+
+PANEL II
+
+It was just a week later when, having for passport my Grand Jury summons,
+I presented myself at that prison where we had the privilege of seeing
+the existence to which we had assisted so many of the eighty-six.
+
+"I'm afraid," I said to the guardian of the gate, "that I am rather late
+in availing myself--the others, no doubt----?"
+
+"Not at all, sir," he said, smiling.  "You're the first, and if you'll
+excuse me, I think you'll be the last.  Will you wait in here while I
+send for the chief warder to take you over?"
+
+He showed me then to what he called the Warder's Library--an iron-barred
+room, more bare and brown than any I had seen since I left school.  While
+I stood there waiting and staring out into the prison court-yard, there
+came, rolling and rumbling in, a Black Maria.  It drew up with a clatter,
+and I saw through the barred door the single prisoner--a young girl of
+perhaps eighteen--dressed in rusty black. She was resting her forehead
+against a bar and looking out, her quick, narrow dark eyes taking in her
+new surroundings with a sort of sharp, restless indifference; and her
+pale, thin-upped, oval face quite expressionless.  Behind those bars she
+seemed to me for all the world like a little animal of the cat tribe
+being brought in to her Zoo.  Me she did not see, but if she had I felt
+she would not shrink--only give me the same sharp, indifferent look she
+was giving all else.  The policeman on the step behind had disappeared at
+once, and the driver now got down from his perch and, coming round, began
+to gossip with her.  I saw her slink her eyes and smile at him, and he
+smiled back; a large man; not unkindly.  Then he returned to his horses,
+and she stayed as before, with her forehead against the bars, just
+staring out.  Watching her like that, unseen, I seemed to be able to see
+right through that tight-lipped, lynx-eyed mask.  I seemed to know that
+little creature through and through, as one knows anything that one
+surprises off its guard, sunk in its most private moods.  I seemed to see
+her little restless, furtive, utterly unmoral soul, so stripped of all
+defence, as if she had taken it from her heart and handed it out to me.
+I saw that she was one of those whose hands slip as indifferently into
+others' pockets as into their own; incapable of fidelity, and incapable
+of trusting; quick as cats, and as devoid of application; ready to
+scratch, ready to purr, ready to scratch again; quick to change, and
+secretly as unchangeable as a little pebble.  And I thought: "Here we
+are, taking her to the Zoo (by no means for the first time, if demeanour
+be any guide), and we shall put her in a cage, and make her sew, and give
+her good books which she will not read; and she will sew, and walk up and
+down, until we let her out; then she will return to her old haunts, and
+at once go prowling and do exactly the same again, what ever it was,
+until we catch her and lock her up once more.  And in this way we shall
+go on purifying Society until she dies."  And I thought: If indeed she had
+been created cat in body as well as in soul, we should not have treated
+her thus, but should have said: 'Go on, little cat, you scratch us
+sometimes, you steal often, you are as sensual as the night.  All this we
+cannot help.  It is your nature.  So were you made--we know you cannot
+change--you amuse us!  Go on, little cat!' Would it not then be better,
+and less savoury of humbug if we said the same to her whose cat-soul has
+chanced into this human shape?  For assuredly she will but pilfer, and
+scratch a little, and be mildly vicious, in her little life, and do no
+desperate harm, having but poor capacity for evil behind that petty,
+thin-upped mask.  What is the good of all this padlock business for such
+as she; are we not making mountains out of her mole hills?  Where is our
+sense of proportion, and our sense of humour?  Why try to alter the make
+and shape of Nature with our petty chisels?  Or, if we must take care of
+her, to save ourselves, in the name of Heaven let us do it in a better
+way than this!  And suddenly I remembered that I was a Grand Juryman, a
+purifier of Society, who had brought her bill in true; and, that I might
+not think these thoughts unworthy of a good citizen, I turned my eyes
+away from her and took up my list of indictments.  Yes, there she was, at
+least so I decided: Number 42, "Pilson, Jenny: Larceny, pocket-picking."
+And I turned my memory back to the evidence about her case, but I could
+not remember a single word.  In the margin I had noted: "Incorrigible
+from a child up; bad surroundings."  And a mad impulse came over me to go
+back to my window and call through the bars to her: "Jenny Pilson!  Jenny
+Pilson!  It was I who bred you and surrounded you with evil!  It was I
+who caught you for being what I made you!  I brought your bill in true!
+I judged you, and I caged you!  Jenny Pilson!  Jenny Pilson!" But just as
+I reached the window, the door of my waiting-room was fortunately opened,
+and a voice said: "Now, sir; at your service!"...
+
+I sat again in that scoop of the shore by the long rolling seas, burying
+in the sand the piece of paper which had summoned me away to my Grand
+Jury; and the same thoughts came to me with the breaking of the waves
+that had come to me before: How, in every wave was a particle that had
+known the shore of every land; and in each sparkle of the hot sunlight
+stealing up that bright water into the sky, the microcosm of all change
+and of all unity!
+1912.
+
+
+
+
+GONE
+
+Not possible to conceive of rarer beauty than that which clung about the
+summer day three years ago when first we had the news of the poor Herds.
+Loveliness was a net of golden filaments in which the world was caught.
+It was gravity itself, so tranquil; and it was a sort of intoxicating
+laughter.  From the top field that we crossed to go down to their
+cottage, all the far sweep of those outstretched wings of beauty could be
+seen.  Very wonderful was the poise of the sacred bird, that moved
+nowhere but in our hearts.  The lime-tree scent was just stealing out
+into air for some days already bereft of the scent of hay; and the sun
+was falling to his evening home behind our pines and beeches.  It was no
+more than radiant warm.  And, as we went, we wondered why we had not been
+told before that Mrs. Herd was so very ill.  It was foolish to
+wonder--these people do not speak of suffering till it is late.  To
+speak, when it means what this meant loss of wife and mother--was to
+flatter reality too much.  To be healthy, or--die!  That is their creed.
+To go on till they drop--then very soon pass away!  What room for states
+between--on their poor wage, in their poor cottages?
+
+We crossed the mill-stream in the hollow--to their white, thatched
+dwelling; silent, already awed, almost resentful of this so-varying
+Scheme of Things.  At the gateway Herd himself was standing, just in from
+his work.  For work in the country does not wait on illness--even death
+claims from its onlookers but a few hours, birth none at all, and it is
+as well; for what must be must, and in work alone man rests from grief.
+Sorrow and anxiety had made strange alteration already in Herd's face.
+Through every crevice of the rough, stolid mask the spirit was peeping, a
+sort of quivering suppliant, that seemed to ask all the time: "Is it
+true?"  A regular cottager's figure, this of Herd's--a labourer of these
+parts--strong, slow, but active, with just a touch of the untamed
+somewhere, about the swing and carriage of him, about the strong jaw, and
+wide thick-lipped mouth; just that something independent, which, in great
+variety, clings to the natives of these still remote, half-pagan valleys
+by the moor.
+
+We all moved silently to the lee of the outer wall, so that our voices
+might not carry up to the sick woman lying there under the eaves, almost
+within hand reach.  "Yes, sir."  "No, sir."  "Yes, ma'am."  This, and the
+constant, unforgettable supplication of his eyes, was all that came from
+him; yet he seemed loath to let us go, as though he thought we had some
+mysterious power to help him--the magic, perhaps, of money, to those who
+have none.  Grateful at our promise of another doctor, a specialist, he
+yet seemed with his eyes to say that he knew that such were only
+embroideries of Fate.  And when we had wrung his hand and gone, we heard
+him coming after us: His wife had said she would like to see us, please.
+Would we come up?
+
+An old woman and Mrs. Herd's sister were in the sitting-room; they showed
+us to the crazy, narrow stairway.  Though we lived distant but four
+hundred yards of a crow's flight, we had never seen Mrs. Herd before, for
+that is the way of things in this land of minding one's own business--a
+slight, dark, girlish-looking woman, almost quite refined away, and with
+those eyes of the dying, where the spirit is coming through, as it only
+does when it knows that all is over except just the passing.  She lay in
+a double bed, with clean white sheets. A white-washed room, so low that
+the ceiling almost touched our heads, some flowers in a bowl, the small
+lattice window open.  Though it was hot in there, it was better far than
+the rooms of most families in towns, living on a wage of twice as much;
+for here was no sign of defeat in decency or cleanliness.  In her face,
+as in poor Herd's, was that same strange mingling of resigned despair and
+almost eager appeal, so terrible to disappoint.  Yet, trying not to
+disappoint it, one felt guilty of treachery: What was the good, the
+kindness, in making this poor bird flutter still with hope against the
+bars, when fast prison had so surely closed in round her?  But what else
+could we do?  We could not give her those glib assurances that naive
+souls make so easily to others concerning their after state.
+
+Secretly, I think, we knew that her philosophy of calm reality, that
+queer and unbidden growing tranquillity which precedes death, was nearer
+to our own belief, than would be any gilt-edged orthodoxy; but
+nevertheless (such is the strength of what is expected), we felt it
+dreadful that we could not console her with the ordinary presumptions.
+
+"You mustn't give up hope," we kept on saying: "The new doctor will do a
+lot for you; he's a specialist--a very clever man."
+
+And she kept on answering: "Yes, sir."  "Yes, ma'am."  But still her eyes
+went on asking, as if there were something else she wanted.  And then to
+one of us came an inspiration:
+
+"You mustn't let your husband worry about expense.  That will be all
+right."
+
+She smiled then, as if the chief cloud on her soul had been the thought
+of the arrears her illness and death would leave weighing on him with
+whom she had shared this bed ten years and more.  And with that smile
+warming the memory of those spirit-haunted eyes, we crept down-stairs
+again, and out into the fields.
+
+It was more beautiful than ever, just touched already with evening
+mystery--it was better than ever to be alive.  And the immortal wonder
+that has haunted man since first he became man, and haunts, I think, even
+the animals--the unanswerable question,--why joy and beauty must ever be
+walking hand in hand with ugliness and pain haunted us across those
+fields of life and loveliness.  It was all right, no doubt, even
+reasonable, since without dark there is no light.  It was part of that
+unending sum whose answer is not given; the merest little swing of the
+great pendulum!  And yet----!  To accept this violent contrast without a
+sigh of revolt, without a question!  No sirs, it was not so jolly as all
+that!  That she should be dying there at thirty, of a creeping malady
+which she might have checked, perhaps, if she had not had too many things
+to do for the children and husband, to do anything for herself--if she
+had not been forced to hold the creed: Be healthy, or die!  This was no
+doubt perfectly explicable and in accordance with the Supreme Equation;
+yet we, enjoying life, and health, and ease of money, felt horror and
+revolt on, this evening of such beauty.  Nor at the moment did we derive
+great comfort from the thought that life slips in and out of sheath, like
+sun-sparks on water, and that of all the cloud of summer midges dancing
+in the last gleam, not one would be alive to-morrow.
+
+It was three evenings later that we heard uncertain footfalls on the
+flagstones of the verandah, then a sort of brushing sound against the
+wood of the long, open window.  Drawing aside the curtain, one of us
+looked out.  Herd was standing there in the bright moonlight, bareheaded,
+with roughened hair.  He came in, and seeming not to know quite where he
+went, took stand by the hearth, and putting up his dark hand, gripped the
+mantelshelf.  Then, as if recollecting himself, he said: "Gude evenin',
+sir; beg pardon, M'm."  No more for a full minute; but his hand, taking
+some little china thing, turned it over and over without ceasing, and
+down his broken face tears ran. Then, very suddenly, he said: "She's
+gone."  And his hand turned over and over that little china thing, and
+the tears went on rolling down. Then, stumbling, and swaying like a man
+in drink, he made his way out again into the moonlight.  We watched him
+across the lawn and path, and through the gate, till his footfalls died
+out there in the field, and his figure was lost in the black shadow of
+the holly hedge.
+
+And the night was so beautiful, so utterly, glamourously beautiful, with
+its star-flowers, and its silence, and its trees clothed in moonlight.
+All was tranquil as a dream of sleep.  But it was long before our hearts,
+wandering with poor Herd, would let us remember that she had slipped away
+into so beautiful a dream.
+
+The dead do not suffer from their rest in beauty.  But the living---!
+1911.
+
+
+
+
+THRESHING
+
+When the drone of the thresher breaks through the autumn sighing of trees
+and wind, or through that stillness of the first frost, I get restless
+and more restless, till, throwing down my pen, I have gone out to see.
+For there is nothing like the sight of threshing for making one feel
+good--not in the sense of comfort, but at heart. There, under the pines
+and the already leafless elms and beech-trees, close to the great stacks,
+is the big, busy creature, with its small black puffing engine astern;
+and there, all around it, is that conglomeration of unsentimental labour
+which invests all the crises of farm work with such fascination.  The
+crew of the farm is only five all told, but to-day they are fifteen, and
+none strangers, save the owners of the travelling thresher.
+
+They are working without respite and with little speech, not at all as if
+they had been brought together for the benefit of some one else's corn,
+but as though they, one and all, had a private grudge against Time and a
+personal pleasure in finishing this job, which, while it lasts, is
+bringing them extra pay and most excellent free feeding.  Just as after a
+dilatory voyage a crew will brace themselves for the run in, recording
+with sudden energy their consciousness of triumph over the elements, so
+on a farm the harvests of hay and corn, sheep-shearing, and threshing
+will bring out in all a common sentiment, a kind of sporting energy, a
+defiant spurt, as it were, to score off Nature; for it is only a
+philosopher here and there among them, I think, who sees that Nature is
+eager to be scored off in this fashion, being anxious that some one
+should eat her kindly fruits.
+
+With ceremonial as grave as that which is at work within the thresher
+itself, the tasks have been divided.  At the root of all things,
+pitchforking from the stack, stands--the farmer, moustached, and always
+upright was he not in the Yeomanry?--dignified in a hard black hat, no
+waistcoat, and his working coat so ragged that it would never cling to
+him but for pure affection.  Between him and the body of the machine are
+five more pitch forks, directing the pale flood of raw material.  There,
+amongst them, is poor Herd, still so sad from his summer loss, plodding
+doggedly away.  To watch him even now makes one feel how terrible is that
+dumb grief which has never learned to moan. And there is George Yeoford,
+almost too sober; and Murdon plying his pitchfork with a supernatural
+regularity that cannot quite dim his queer brigand's face of dark, soft
+gloom shot with sudden humours, his soft, dark corduroys and battered
+hat.  Occasionally he stops, and taking off that hat, wipes his
+corrugated brow under black hair, and seems to brood over his own
+regularity.
+
+Down here, too, where I stand, each separate function of the thresher has
+its appointed slave.  Here Cedric rakes the chaff pouring from the side
+down into the chaff-shed.  Carting the straw that streams from the
+thresher bows, are Michelmore and Neck--the little man who cannot read,
+but can milk and whistle the hearts out of his cows till they follow him
+like dogs.  At the thresher's stern is Morris, the driver, selected
+because of that utter reliability which radiates from his broad, handsome
+face.  His part is to attend the sacking of the three kinds of grain for
+ever sieving out.  He murmurs: "Busy work, sir!" and opens a little door
+to show me how "the machinery does it all," holding a sack between his
+knees and some string in his white teeth.  Then away goes the sack--four
+bushels, one hundred and sixty pounds of "genuines, seconds, or
+seed"--wheeled by Cedric on a little trolley thing, to where
+George-the-Gaul or Jim-the-Early-Saxon is waiting to bear it on his back
+up the stone steps into the corn-chamber.
+
+It has been raining in the night; the ground is a churn of straw and mud,
+and the trees still drip; but now there is sunlight, a sweet air, and
+clear sky, wine-coloured through the red, naked, beechtwigs tipped with
+white untimely buds.  Nothing can be more lovely than this late autumn
+day, so still, save for the droning of the thresher and the constant
+tinny chuckle of the grey, thin-headed Guinea-fowl, driven by this
+business away from their usual haunts.
+
+And soon the feeling that I knew would come begins creeping over me, the
+sense of an extraordinary sanity in this never-ceasing harmonious labour
+pursued in the autumn air faintly perfumed with wood-smoke, with the
+scent of chaff, and whiffs from that black puffing-Billy; the sense that
+there is nothing between this clean toil--not too hard but hard
+enough--and the clean consumption of its clean results; the sense that
+nobody except myself is in the least conscious of how sane it all is.
+The brains of these sane ones are all too busy with the real affairs of
+life, the disposition of their wages, anticipation of dinner, some girl,
+some junketing, some wager, the last rifle match, and, more than all,
+with that pleasant rhythmic nothingness, companion of the busy swing and
+play of muscles, which of all states is secretly most akin to the deep
+unconsciousness of life itself. Thus to work in the free air for the good
+of all and the hurt of none, without worry or the breath of
+acrimony--surely no phase of human life so nears the life of the truly
+civilised community--the life of a hive of bees.  Not one of these
+working so sanely--unless it be Morris, who will spend his Sunday
+afternoon on some high rock just watching sunlight and shadow drifting on
+the moors--not one, I think, is distraught by perception of his own
+sanity, by knowledge of how near he is to Harmony, not even by
+appreciation of the still radiance of this day, or its innumerable fine
+shades of colour.  It is all work, and no moody consciousness--all work,
+and will end in sleep.
+
+I leave them soon, and make my way up the stone steps to the "corn
+chamber," where tranquillity is crowned.  In the whitewashed room the
+corn lies in drifts and ridges, three to four feet deep, all silvery-dun,
+like some remote sand desert, lifeless beneath the moon.  Here it lies,
+and into it, staggering under the sacks, George-the-Gaul and
+Jim-the-Early Saxon tramp up to their knees, spill the sacks over their
+heads, and out again; and above where their feet have plunged the patient
+surface closes again, smooth.  And as I stand there in the doorway,
+looking at that silvery corn drift, I think of the whole process, from
+seed sown to the last sieving into this tranquil resting-place.  I think
+of the slow, dogged ploughman, with the crows above him on the wind; of
+the swing of the sower's arm, dark up against grey sky on the steep
+field.  I think of the seed snug-burrowing for safety, and its mysterious
+ferment under the warm Spring rain, of the soft green shoots tapering up
+so shyly toward the first sun, and hardening in air to thin wiry stalk.
+I think of the unnumerable tiny beasts that have jangled in that pale
+forest; of the winged blue jewels of butterfly risen from it to hover on
+the wild-rustling blades; of that continual music played there by the
+wind; of the chicory and poppy flowers that have been its lights-o' love,
+as it grew tawny and full of life, before the appointed date when it
+should return to its captivity.  I think of that slow-travelling hum and
+swish which laid it low, of the gathering to stack, and the long waiting
+under the rustle and drip of the sheltering trees, until yesterday the
+hoot of the thresher blew, and there began the falling into this dun
+silvery peace.  Here it will lie with the pale sun narrowly filtering in
+on it, and by night the pale moon, till slowly, week by week, it is
+stolen away, and its ridges and drifts sink and sink, and the beasts have
+eaten it all....
+
+When the dusk is falling, I go out to them again.  They have nearly
+finished now; the chaff in the chaff-shed is mounting hillock-high; only
+the little barley stack remains unthreshed.  Mrs.  George-the-Gaul is
+standing with a jug to give drink to the tired ones.  Some stars are
+already netted in the branches of the pines; the Guinea-fowl are silent.
+But still the harmonious thresher hums and showers from three sides the
+straw, the chaff, the corn; and the men fork, and rake, and cart, and
+carry, sleep growing in their muscles, silence on their tongues, and the
+tranquillity of the long day nearly ended in their souls.  They will go
+on till it is quite dark.
+1911.
+
+
+
+
+THAT OLD-TIME PLACE
+
+"Yes, suh--here we are at that old-time place!"  And our dark driver drew
+up his little victoria gently.
+
+Through the open doorway, into a dim, cavernous, ruined house of New
+Orleans we passed.  The mildew and dirt, the dark denuded dankness of
+that old hostel, rotting down with damp and time!
+
+And our guide, the tall, thin, grey-haired dame, who came forward with
+such native ease and moved before us, touching this fungused wall, that
+rusting stairway, and telling, as it were, no one in her soft, slow
+speech, things that any one could see--what a strange and fitting figure!
+
+Before the smell of the deserted, oozing rooms, before that old creature
+leading us on and on, negligent of all our questions, and talking to the
+air, as though we were not, we felt such discomfort that we soon made to
+go out again into such freshness as there was on that day of dismal heat.
+Then realising, it seemed, that she was losing us, our old guide turned;
+for the first time looking in our faces, she smiled, and said in her
+sweet, weak voice, like the sound from the strings of a spinet long
+unplayed on: "Don' you wahnd to see the dome-room: an' all the other
+rooms right here, of this old-time place?"
+
+Again those words!  We had not the hearts to disappoint her.  And as we
+followed on and on, along the mouldering corridors and rooms where the
+black peeling papers hung like stalactites, the dominance of our senses
+gradually dropped from us, and with our souls we saw its soul--the soul
+of this old-time place; this mustering house of the old South, bereft of
+all but ghosts and the grey pigeons niched in the rotting gallery round a
+narrow courtyard open to the sky.
+
+"This is the dome-room, suh and lady; right over the slave-market it is.
+Here they did the business of the State--sure; old-time heroes up therein
+the roof--Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Davis, Lee--there they are!
+All gone--now!  Yes, suh!"
+
+A fine--yea, even a splendid room, of great height, and carved grandeur,
+with hand-wrought bronze sconces and a band of metal bordering, all
+blackened with oblivion.  And the faces of those old heroes encircling
+that domed ceiling were blackened too, and scarred with damp, beyond
+recognition.  Here, beneath their gaze, men had banqueted and danced and
+ruled.  The pride and might and vivid strength of things still fluttered
+their uneasy flags of spirit, moved disherited wings!  Those old-time
+feasts and grave discussions--we seemed to see them printed on the thick
+air, imprisoned in this great chamber built above their dark foundations.
+The pride and the might and the vivid strength of things--gone, all gone!
+
+We became conscious again of that soft, weak voice.
+
+"Not hearing very well, suh, I have it all printed, lady--beautifully
+told here--yes, indeed!"
+
+She was putting cards into our hands; then, impassive, maintaining ever
+her impersonal chant, the guardian of past glory led us on.
+
+"Now we shall see the slave-market--downstairs, underneath!  It's wet for
+the lady the water comes in now yes, suh!"
+
+On the crumbling black and white marble floorings the water indeed was
+trickling into pools.  And down in the halls there came to us
+wandering--strangest thing that ever strayed through deserted grandeur--a
+brown, broken horse, lean, with a sore flank and a head of tremendous
+age.  It stopped and gazed at us, as though we might be going to give it
+things to eat, then passed on, stumbling over the ruined marbles.  For a
+moment we had thought him ghost--one of the many.  But he was not, since
+his hoofs sounded.  The scrambling clatter of them had died out into
+silence before we came to that dark, crypt-like chamber whose marble
+columns were ringed in iron, veritable pillars of foundation.  And then
+we saw that our old guide's hands were full of newspapers.  She struck a
+match; they caught fire and blazed.  Holding high that torch, she said:
+"See!  Up there's his name, above where he stood.  The auctioneer.  Oh
+yes, indeed!  Here's where they sold them!"
+
+Below that name, decaying on the wall, we had the slow, uncanny feeling
+of some one standing there in the gleam and flicker from that paper
+torch.  For a moment the whole shadowy room seemed full of forms and
+faces.  Then the torch lied out, and our old guide, pointing through an
+archway with the blackened stump of it, said:
+
+"'Twas here they kept them indeed, yes!"
+
+We saw before us a sort of vault, stone-built, and low, and long. The
+light there was too dim for us to make out anything but walls and heaps
+of rusting scrap-iron cast away there and mouldering own.  But trying to
+pierce that darkness we became conscious, as it seemed, of innumerable
+eyes gazing, not at us, but through the archway where we stood;
+innumerable white eyeballs gleaming out of blackness.  From behind us
+came a little laugh.  It floated past through the archway, toward those
+eyes.  Who was that?  Who laughed in there?  The old South itself--that
+incredible, fine, lost soul!  That "old-time" thing of old ideals,
+blindfolded by its own history!  That queer proud blend of simple
+chivalry and tyranny, of piety and the abhorrent thing!  Who was it
+laughed there in the old slave-market--laughed at these white eyeballs
+glaring from out of the blackness of their dark cattle-pen?  What poor
+departed soul in this House of Melancholy?  But there was no ghost when
+we turned to look--only our old guide with her sweet smile.
+
+"Yes, suh.  Here they all came--'twas the finest hotel--before the
+war-time; old Southern families--buyin' an' sellin' their property. Yes,
+ma'am, very interesting!  This way!  And here were the bells to all the
+rooms.  Broken, you see--all broken!"
+
+And rather quickly we passed away, out of that "old-time place"; where
+something had laughed, and the drip, drip, drip of water down the walls
+was as the sound of a spirit grieving.
+1912.
+
+
+
+
+ROMANCE--THREE GLEAMS
+
+On that New Year's morning when I drew up the blind it was still nearly
+dark, but for the faintest pink flush glancing out there on the horizon
+of black water.  The far shore of the river's mouth was just soft dusk;
+and the dim trees below me were in perfect stillness. There was no lap of
+water.  And then--I saw her, drifting in on the tide-the little ship,
+passaging below me, a happy ghost.  Like no thing of this world she came,
+ending her flight, with sail-wings closing and her glowing lantern eyes.
+There was I know not what of stealthy joy about her thus creeping in to
+the unexpecting land.  And I wished she would never pass,  but go on
+gliding by down there for ever with her dark ropes, and her bright
+lanterns, and her mysterious felicity, so that I might have for ever in
+my heart the blessed feeling she brought me, coming like this out of that
+great mystery the sea.  If only she need not change to solidity, but ever
+be this visitor from the unknown, this sacred bird, telling with her
+half-seen, trailing-down plume--sails the story of uncharted wonder.  If
+only I might go on trembling, as I was, with the rapture of all I did not
+know and could not see, yet felt pressing against me and touching my face
+with its lips!  To think of her at anchor in cold light was like
+flinging-to a door in the face of happiness.  And just then she struck
+her bell; the faint silvery far-down sound fled away before her, and to
+every side, out into the utter hush, to discover echo. But nothing
+answered, as if fearing to break the spell of her coming, to brush with
+reality the dark sea dew from her sail-wings.  But within me, in
+response, there began the song of all unknown things; the song so
+tenuous, so ecstatic, that seems to sweep and quiver across such thin
+golden strings, and like an eager dream dies too soon.  The song of the
+secret-knowing wind that has peered through so great forests and over
+such wild sea; blown on so many faces, and in the jungles of the grass
+the song of all that the wind has seen and felt.  The song of lives that
+I should never live; of the loves that I should never love singlng to me
+as though I should!  And suddenly I felt that I could not bear my little
+ship of dreams to grow hard and grey, her bright lanterns drowned in the
+cold light, her dark ropes spidery and taut, her sea-wan sails all
+furled, and she no more en chanted; and turning away I let fall the
+curtain.
+
+
+II.
+
+Then what happens to the moon?  She, who, shy and veiled, slips out
+before dusk to take the air of heaven, wandering timidly among the
+columned clouds, and fugitive from the staring of the sun; she, who, when
+dusk has come, rules the sentient night with such chaste and icy
+spell--whither and how does she retreat?
+
+I came on her one morning--I surprised her.  She was stealing into a dark
+wintry wood, and five little stars were chasing her.  She was
+orange-hooded, a light-o'-love dismissed--unashamed and unfatigued,
+having taken--all.  And she was looking back with her almond eyes, across
+her dark-ivory shoulder, at Night where he still lay drowned in the sleep
+she had brought him.  What a strange, slow, mocking look!  So might
+Aphrodite herself have looked back at some weary lover, remembering the
+fire of his first embrace.  Insatiate, smiling creature, slipping down to
+the rim of the world to her bath in the sweet waters of dawn, whence
+emerging, pure as a water lily, she would float in the cool sky till
+evening came again!  And just then she saw me looking, and hid behind a
+holm-oak tree; but I could still see the gleam of one shoulder and her
+long narrow eyes pursuing me. I went up to the tree and parted its dark
+boughs to take her; but she had slipped behind another.  I called to her
+to stand, if only for one moment.  But she smiled and went slip ping on,
+and I ran thrusting through the wet bushes, leaping the fallen trunks.
+The scent of rotting leaves disturbed by my feet leaped out into the
+darkness, and birds, surprised, fluttered away.  And still I ran--she
+slipping ever further into the grove, and ever looking back at me. And I
+thought: But I will catch you yet, you nymph of perdition!  The wood will
+soon be passed, you will have no cover then!  And from her eyes, and the
+scanty gleam of her flying limbs, I never looked away, not even when I
+stumbled or ran against tree trunks in my blind haste.  And at every
+clearing I flew more furiously, thinking to seize all of her with my gaze
+before she could cross the glade; but ever she found some little low
+tree, some bush of birch ungrown, or the far top branches of the next
+grove to screen her flying body and preserve allurement.  And all the
+time she was dipping, dipping to the rim of the world.  And then I
+tripped; but, as I rose, I saw that she had lingered for me; her long
+sliding eyes were full, it seemed to me, of pity, as if she would have
+liked for me to have enjoyed the sight of her.  I stood still,
+breathless, thinking that at last she would consent; but flinging back,
+up into the air, one dark-ivory arm, she sighed and vanished.  And the
+breath of her sigh stirred all the birch-tree twigs just coloured with
+the dawn.  Long I stood in that thicket gazing at the spot where she had
+leapt from me over the edge of the world-my heart quivering.
+ 
+
+III.
+
+We embarked on the estuary steamer that winter morning just as daylight
+came full.  The sun was on the wing scattering little white clouds, as an
+eagle might scatter doves.  They scurried up before him with their broken
+feathers tipped and tinged with gold.  In the air was a touch of frost,
+and a smoky mist-drift clung here and there above the reeds, blurring the
+shores of the lagoon so that we seemed to be steaming across boundless
+water, till some clump of trees would fling its top out of the fog, then
+fall back into whiteness.
+
+And then, in that thick vapour, rounding I suppose some curve, we came
+suddenly into we knew not what--all white and moving it was, as if the
+mist were crazed; murmuring, too, with a sort of restless beating.  We
+seemed to be passing through a ghost--the ghost of all the life that had
+sprung from this water and its shores; we seemed to have left reality,
+to be travelling through live wonder.
+
+And the fantastic thought sprang into my mind: I have died.  This is the
+voyage of my soul in the wild.  I am in the final wilderness of
+spirits--lost in the ghost robe that wraps the earth.  There seemed in
+all this white murmuration to be millions of tiny hands stretching out to
+me, millions of whispering voices, of wistful eyes.  I had no fear, but a
+curious baked eagerness, the strangest feeling of having lost myself and
+become part of this around me; exactly as if my own hands and voice and
+eyes had left me and were groping, and whispering, and gazing out there
+in the eeriness.  I was no longer a man on an estuary steamer, but part
+of sentient ghostliness.  Nor did I feel unhappy; it seemed as though I
+had never been anything but this Bedouin spirit wandering.
+
+We passed through again into the stillness of plain mist, and all those
+eerie sensations went, leaving nothing but curiosity to know what this
+was that we had traversed.  Then suddenly the sun came flaring out, and
+we saw behind us thousands and thousands of white gulls dipping,
+wheeling, brushing the water with their wings, bewitched with sun and
+mist.  That was all.  And yet that white-winged legion through whom we
+had ploughed our way were not, could never be, to me just gulls--there
+was more than mere sun-glamour gilding their misty plumes; there was the
+wizardry of my past wonder, the enchantment of romance.
+1912.
+
+
+
+
+MEMORIES
+
+We set out to meet him at Waterloo Station on a dull day of February--I,
+who had owned his impetuous mother, knowing a little what to expect,
+while to my companion he would be all original.  We stood there waiting
+(for the Salisbury train was late), and wondering with a warm,
+half-fearful eagerness what sort of new thread Life was going to twine
+into our skein.  I think our chief dread was that he might have light
+eyes--those yellow Chinese eyes of the common, parti-coloured spaniel.
+And each new minute of the train's tardiness increased our anxious
+compassion: His first journey; his first separation from his mother; this
+black two-months' baby!  Then the train ran in, and we hastened to look
+for him.  "Have you a dog for us?"
+
+"A dog!  Not in this van.  Ask the rearguard."
+
+"Have you a dog for us?"
+
+"That's right.  From Salisbury.  Here's your wild beast, Sir!"
+
+From behind a wooden crate we saw a long black muzzled nose poking round
+at us, and heard a faint hoarse whimpering.
+
+I remember my first thought:
+
+"Isn't his nose too long?"
+
+But to my companion's heart it went at once, because it was swollen from
+crying and being pressed against things that he could not see through.
+We took him out--soft, wobbly, tearful; set him down on his four, as yet
+not quite simultaneous legs, and regarded him.  Or, rather, my companion
+did, having her head on one side, and a quavering smile; and I regarded
+her, knowing that I should thereby get a truer impression of him.
+
+He wandered a little round our legs, neither wagging his tail nor licking
+at our hands; then he looked up, and my companion said: "He's an angel!"
+
+I was not so certain.  He seemed hammer-headed, with no eyes at all, and
+little connection between his head, his body, and his legs.  His ears
+were very long, as long as his poor nose; and gleaming down in the
+blackness of him I could see the same white star that disgraced his
+mother's chest.
+
+Picking him up, we carried him to a four-wheeled cab, and took his muzzle
+off.  His little dark-brown eyes were resolutely fixed on distance, and
+by his refusal to even smell the biscuits we had brought to make him
+happy, we knew that the human being had not yet come into a life that had
+contained so far only a mother, a wood-shed, and four other soft, wobbly,
+black, hammer-headed angels, smelling of themselves, and warmth, and wood
+shavings.  It was pleasant to feel that to us he would surrender an
+untouched love, that is, if he would surrender anything.  Suppose he did
+not take to us!
+
+And just then something must have stirred in him, for he turned up his
+swollen nose and stared at my companion, and a little later rubbed the
+dry pinkness of his tongue against my thumb.  In that look, and that
+unconscious restless lick; he was trying hard to leave unhappiness
+behind, trying hard to feel that these new creatures with stroking paws
+and queer scents, were his mother; yet all the time he knew, I am sure,
+that they were something bigger, more permanently, desperately, his.  The
+first sense of being owned, perhaps (who knows) of owning, had stirred in
+him.  He would never again be quite the same unconscious creature.
+
+A little way from the end of our journey we got out and dismissed the
+cab.  He could not too soon know the scents and pavements of this London
+where the chief of his life must pass.  I can see now his first bumble
+down that wide, back-water of a street, how continually and suddenly he
+sat down to make sure of his own legs, how continually he lost our heels.
+He showed us then in full perfection what was afterwards to be an
+inconvenient--if endearing--characteristic: At any call or whistle he
+would look in precisely the opposite direction.  How many times all
+through his life have I not seen him, at my whistle, start violently and
+turn his tail to me, then, with nose thrown searchingly from side to
+side, begin to canter toward the horizon.
+
+In that first walk, we met, fortunately, but one vehicle, a brewer's
+dray; he chose that moment to attend to the more serious affairs of life,
+sitting quietly before the horses' feet and requiring to be moved by
+hand.  From the beginning he had his dignity, and was extremely difficult
+to lift, owing to the length of his middle distance.
+
+What strange feelings must have stirred in his little white soul when he
+first smelled carpet!  But it was all so strange to him that day--I
+doubt if he felt more than I did when I first travelled to my private
+school, reading "Tales of a Grandfather," and plied with tracts and
+sherry by my 'father's man of business.
+
+That night, indeed, for several nights, he slept with me, keeping me too
+warm down my back, and waking me now and then with quaint sleepy
+whimperings.  Indeed, all through his life he flew a good deal in his
+sleep, fighting dogs and seeing ghosts, running after rabbits and thrown
+sticks; and to the last one never quite knew whether or no to rouse him
+when his four black feet began to jerk and quiver.  His dreams were like
+our dreams, both good and bad; happy sometimes, sometimes tragic to
+weeping point.
+
+He ceased to sleep with me the day we discovered that he was a perfect
+little colony, whose settlers were of an active species which I have
+never seen again.  After that he had many beds, for circumstance ordained
+that his life should be nomadic, and it is to this I trace that
+philosophic indifference to place or property, which marked him out from
+most of his own kind.  He learned early that for a black dog with long
+silky ears, a feathered tail, and head of great dignity, there was no
+home whatsoever, away from those creatures with special scents, who took
+liberties with his name, and alone of all created things were privileged
+to smack him with a slipper.  He would sleep anywhere, so long as it was
+in their room, or so close outside it as to make no matter, for it was
+with him a principle that what he did not smell did not exist.  I would I
+could hear again those long rubber-lipped snufflings of recognition
+underneath the door, with which each morning he would regale and reassure
+a spirit that grew with age more and more nervous and delicate about this
+matter of propinquity!  For he was a dog of fixed ideas, things stamped
+on his mind were indelible; as, for example, his duty toward cats, for
+whom he had really a perverse affection, which had led to that first
+disastrous moment of his life, when he was brought up, poor bewildered
+puppy, from a brief excursion to the kitchen, with one eye closed and his
+cheek torn!  He bore to his grave that jagged scratch across the eye.  It
+was in dread of a repetition of this tragedy that he was instructed at
+the word "Cats" to rush forward with a special "tow-row-rowing," which he
+never used toward any other form of creature.  To the end he cherished a
+hope that he would reach the cat; but never did; and if he had, we knew
+he would only have stood and wagged his tail; but I well remember once,
+when he returned, important, from some such sally, how dreadfully my
+companion startled a cat-loving friend by murmuring in her most honeyed
+voice: "Well, my darling, have you been killing pussies in the garden?"
+
+His eye and nose were impeccable in their sense of form; indeed, he was
+very English in that matter: People must be just so; things smell
+properly; and affairs go on in the one right way.  He could tolerate
+neither creatures in ragged clothes, nor children on their hands and
+knees, nor postmen, because, with their bags, they swelled-up on one
+side, and carried lanterns on their stomachs.  He would never let the
+harmless creatures pass without religious barks.  Naturally a believer in
+authority and routine, and distrusting spiritual adventure, he yet had
+curious fads that seemed to have nested in him, quite outside of all
+principle.  He would, for instance, follow neither carriages nor horses,
+and if we tried to make him, at once left for home, where he would sit
+with nose raised to Heaven, emitting through it a most lugubrious, shrill
+noise.  Then again, one must not place a stick, a slipper, a glove, or
+anything with which he could play, upon one's head--since such an action
+reduced him at once to frenzy.  For so conservative a dog, his
+environment was sadly anarchistic.  He never complained in words of our
+shifting habits, but curled his head round over his left paw and pressed
+his chin very hard against the ground whenever he smelled packing.  What
+necessity, he seemed continually to be saying, what real necessity is
+there for change of any kind whatever?  Here we were all together, and
+one day was like another, so that I knew where I was--and now you only
+know what will happen next; and I--I can't tell you whether I shall be
+with you when it happens!  What strange, grieving minutes a dog passes at
+such times in the underground of his subconsciousness, refusing
+realisation, yet all the time only too well divining.  Some careless
+word, some unmuted compassion in voice, the stealthy wrapping of a pair
+of boots, the unaccustomed shutting of a door that ought to be open, the
+removal from a down-stair room of an object always there--one tiny thing,
+and he knows for certain that he is not going too.  He fights against the
+knowledge just as we do against what we cannot bear; he gives up hope,
+but not effort, protesting in the only way he knows of, and now and then
+heaving a great sigh. Those sighs of a dog!  They go to the heart so much
+more deeply than the sighs of our own kind, because they are utterly
+unintended, regardless of effect, emerging from one who, heaving them,
+knows not that they have escaped him!
+
+The words: "Yes--going too!" spoken in a certain tone, would call up in
+his eyes a still-questioning half-happiness, and from his tail a quiet
+flutter, but did not quite serve to put to rest either his doubt or his
+feeling that it was all unnecessary--until the cab arrived.  Then he
+would pour himself out of door or window, and be found in the bottom of
+the vehicle, looking severely away from an admiring cabman.  Once settled
+on our feet he travelled with philosophy, but no digestion.
+
+I think no dog was ever more indifferent to an outside world of human
+creatures; yet few dogs have made more conquests--especially among
+strange women, through whom, however, he had a habit of looking--very
+discouraging.  He had, natheless, one or two particular friends, such as
+him to whom this book is dedicated, and a few persons whom he knew he had
+seen before, but, broadly speaking, there were in his world of men, only
+his mistress, and--the almighty.
+
+Each August, till he was six, he was sent for health, and the assuagement
+of his hereditary instincts, up to a Scotch shooting, where he carried
+many birds in a very tender manner.  Once he was compelled by Fate to
+remain there nearly a year; and we went up ourselves to fetch him home.
+Down the long avenue toward the keeper's cottage we walked: It was high
+autumn; there had been frost already, for the ground was fine with red
+and yellow leaves; and presently we saw himself coming; professionally
+questing among those leaves, and preceding his dear keeper with the
+businesslike self-containment of a sportsman; not too fat, glossy as a
+raven's wing, swinging his ears and sporran like a little Highlander.  We
+approached him silently.  Suddenly his nose went up from its imagined
+trail, and he came rushing at our legs.  From him, as a garment drops
+from a man, dropped all his strange soberness; he became in a single
+instant one fluttering eagerness.  He leaped from life to life in one
+bound, without hesitation, without regret.  Not one sigh, not one look
+back, not the faintest token of gratitude or regret at leaving those good
+people who had tended him for a whole year, buttered oat-cake for him,
+allowed him to choose each night exactly where he would sleep.  No, he
+just marched out beside us, as close as ever he could get, drawing us on
+in spirit, and not even attending to the scents, until the lodge gates
+were passed.
+
+It was strictly in accordance with the perversity of things, and
+something in the nature of calamity that he had not been ours one year,
+when there came over me a dreadful but overmastering aversion from
+killing those birds and creatures of which he was so fond as soon as they
+were dead.  And so I never knew him as a sportsman; for during that first
+year he was only an unbroken puppy, tied to my waist for fear of
+accidents, and carefully pulling me off every shot. They tell me he
+developed a lovely nose and perfect mouth, large enough to hold gingerly
+the biggest hare.  I well believe it, remembering the qualities of his
+mother, whose character, however, in stability he far surpassed.  But, as
+he grew every year more devoted to dead grouse and birds and rabbits, I
+liked them more and more alive; it was the only real breach between us,
+and we kept it out of sight.  Ah! well; it is consoling to reflect that I
+should infallibly have ruined his sporting qualities, lacking that
+peculiar habit of meaning what one says, so necessary to keep dogs
+virtuous.  But surely to have had him with me, quivering and alert, with
+his solemn, eager face, would have given a new joy to those crisp
+mornings when the hope of wings coming to the gun makes poignant in the
+sports man as nothing else will, an almost sensual love of Nature, a
+fierce delight in the soft glow of leaves, in the white birch stems and
+tracery of sparse twigs against blue sky, in the scents of sap and grass
+and gum and heather flowers; stivers the hair of him with keenness for
+interpreting each sound, and fills the very fern or moss he kneels on,
+the very trunk he leans against, with strange vibration.
+
+Slowly Fate prepares for each of us the religion that lies coiled in our
+most secret nerves; with such we cannot trifle, we do not even try!  But
+how shall a man grudge any one sensations he has so keenly felt?  Let
+such as have never known those curious delights, uphold the hand of
+horror--for me there can be no such luxury.  If I could, I would still
+perhaps be knowing them; but when once the joy of life in those winged
+and furry things has knocked at the very portals of one's spirit, the
+thought that by pressing a little iron twig one will rive that joy out of
+their vitals, is too hard to bear.  Call it aestheticism, squeamishness,
+namby-pamby sentimentalism, what you will it is stronger than oneself!
+
+Yes, after one had once watched with an eye that did not merely see, the
+thirsty gaping of a slowly dying bird, or a rabbit dragging a broken leg
+to a hole where he would lie for hours thinking of the fern to which he
+should never more come forth--after that, there was always the following
+little matter of arithmetic: Given, that all those who had been shooting
+were "good-fair" shots--which, Heaven knew, they never were--they yet
+missed one at least in four, and did not miss it very much; so that if
+seventy-five things were slain, there were also twenty-five that had been
+fired at, and, of those twenty-five, twelve and a half had "gotten it"
+somewhere in their bodies, and would "likely" die at their great leisure.
+
+This was the sum that brought about the only cleavage in our lives; and
+so, as he grew older, and trying to part from each other we no longer
+could, he ceased going to Scotland.  But after that I often felt, and
+especially when we heard guns, how the best and most secret instincts of
+him were being stifled.  But what was to be done?  In that which was left
+of a clay pigeon he would take not the faintest interest--the scent of it
+was paltry.  Yet always, even in his most cosseted and idle days, he
+managed to preserve the grave preoccupation of one professionally
+concerned with retrieving things that smell; and consoled himself with
+pastimes such as cricket, which he played in a manner highly specialised,
+following the ball up the moment it left the bowler's hand, and sometimes
+retrieving it before it reached the batsman.  When remonstrated with, he
+would consider a little, hanging out a pink tongue and looking rather too
+eagerly at the ball, then canter slowly out to a sort of forward short
+leg.  Why he always chose that particular position it is difficult to
+say; possibly he could lurk there better than anywhere else, the
+batsman's eye not being on him, and the bowler's not too much.  As a
+fieldsman he was perfect, but for an occasional belief that he was not
+merely short leg, but slip, point, midoff, and wicket-keep; and perhaps a
+tendency to make the ball a little "jubey."  But he worked tremendously,
+watching every movement; for he knew the game thoroughly, and seldom
+delayed it more than three minutes when he secured the ball.  And if that
+ball were really lost, then indeed he took over the proceedings with an
+intensity and quiet vigour that destroyed many shrubs, and the solemn
+satisfaction which comes from being in the very centre of the stage.
+
+But his most passionate delight was swimming in anything except the sea,
+for which, with its unpleasant noise and habit of tasting salt, he had
+little affection.  I see him now, cleaving the Serpentine, with his air
+of "the world well lost," striving to reach my stick before it had
+touched water.  Being only a large spaniel, too small for mere heroism,
+he saved no lives in the water but his own--and that, on one occasion,
+before our very eyes, from a dark trout stream, which was trying to wash
+him down into a black hole among the boulders.
+
+The call of the wild-Spring running--whatever it is--that besets men and
+dogs, seldom attained full mastery over him; but one could often see it
+struggling against his devotion to the scent of us, and, watching that
+dumb contest, I have time and again wondered how far this civilisation of
+ours was justifiably imposed on him; how far the love for us that we had
+so carefully implanted could ever replace in him the satisfaction of his
+primitive wild yearnings: He was like a man, naturally polygamous,
+married to one loved woman.
+
+It was surely not for nothing that Rover is dog's most common name, and
+would be ours, but for our too tenacious fear of losing something, to
+admit, even to ourselves, that we are hankering.  There was a man who
+said: Strange that two such queerly opposite qualities as courage and
+hypocrisy are the leading characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon!  But is not
+hypocrisy just a product of tenacity, which is again the lower part of
+courage?  Is not hypocrisy but an active sense of property in one's good
+name, the clutching close of respectability at any price, the feeling
+that one must not part, even at the cost of truth, with what he has
+sweated so to gain?  And so we Anglo-Saxons will not answer to the name
+of Rover, and treat our dogs so that they, too, hardly know their
+natures.
+
+The history of his one wandering, for which no respectable reason can be
+assigned, will never, of course, be known.  It was in London, of an
+October evening, when we were told he had slipped out and was not
+anywhere.  Then began those four distressful hours of searching for that
+black needle in that blacker bundle of hay.  Hours of real dismay and
+suffering for it is suffering, indeed, to feel a loved thing swallowed up
+in that hopeless haze of London streets.  Stolen or run over?  Which was
+worst?  The neighbouring police stations visited, the Dog's Home
+notified, an order of five hundred "Lost Dog" bills placed in the
+printer's hands, the streets patrolled!  And then, in a lull snatched for
+food, and still endeavouring to preserve some aspect of assurance, we
+heard the bark which meant: "Here is a door I cannot open!"  We hurried
+forth, and there he was on the top doorstep--busy, unashamed, giving no
+explanations, asking for his supper; and very shortly after him came his
+five hundred "Lost Dog" bills.  Long I sat looking at him that night
+after my companion had gone up, thinking of the evening, some years
+before, when there followed as that shadow of a spaniel who had been lost
+for eleven days.  And my heart turned over within me. But he!  He was
+asleep, for he knew not remorse.
+
+Ah! and there was that other time, when it was reported to me, returning
+home at night, that he had gone out to find me; and I went forth again,
+disturbed, and whistling his special call to the empty fields.  Suddenly
+out of the darkness I heard a rushing, and he came furiously dashing
+against my heels from he alone knew where he had been lurking and saying
+to himself: I will not go in till he comes!  I could not scold, there was
+something too lyrical in the return of that live, lonely, rushing piece
+of blackness through the blacker night.  After all, the vagary was but a
+variation in his practice when one was away at bed-time, of passionately
+scratching up his bed in protest, till it resembled nothing; for, in
+spite of his long and solemn face and the silkiness of his ears, there
+was much in him yet of the cave bear--he dug graves on the smallest
+provocations, in which he never buried anything.  He was not a "clever"
+dog; and guiltless of all tricks.  Nor was he ever "shown."  We did not
+even dream of subjecting him to this indignity.  Was our dog a clown, a
+hobby, a fad, a fashion, a feather in our caps that we should subject him
+to periodic pennings in stuffy halls, that we should harry his faithful
+soul with such tomfoolery?  He never even heard us talk about his
+lineage, deplore the length of his nose, or call him "clever-looking."
+We should have been ashamed to let him smell about us the tar-brush of a
+sense of property, to let him think we looked on him as an asset to earn
+us pelf or glory.  We wished that there should be between us the spirit
+that was between the sheep dog and that farmer, who, when asked his dog's
+age, touched the old creature's head, and answered thus: "Teresa" (his
+daughter) "was born in November, and this one in August."  That sheep dog
+had seen eighteen years when the great white day came for him, and his
+spirit passed away up, to cling with the wood-smoke round the dark
+rafters of the kitchen where he had lain so vast a time beside his
+master's boots.  No, no!  If a man does not soon pass beyond the thought
+"By what shall this dog profit me?" into the large state of simple
+gladness to be with dog, he shall never know the very essence of that
+companion ship which depends not on the points of dog, but on some
+strange and subtle mingling of mute spirits.  For it is by muteness that
+a dog becomes for one so utterly beyond value; with him one is at peace,
+where words play no torturing tricks. When he just sits, loving, and
+knows that he is being loved, those are the moments that I think are
+precious to a dog; when, with his adoring soul coming through his eyes,
+he feels that you are really thinking of him.  But he is touchingly
+tolerant of one's other occupations.  The subject of these memories
+always knew when one was too absorbed in work to be so close to him as he
+thought proper; yet he never tried to hinder or distract, or asked for
+attention.  It dinged his mood, of course, so that the red under his eyes
+and the folds of his crumply cheeks--which seemed to speak of a touch of
+bloodhound introduced a long way back into his breeding--drew deeper and
+more manifest.  If he could have spoken at such times, he would have
+said: "I have been a long time alone, and I cannot always be asleep; but
+you know best, and I must not criticise."
+
+He did not at all mind one's being absorbed in other humans; he seemed to
+enjoy the sounds of conversation lifting round him, and to know when they
+were sensible.  He could not, for instance, stand actors or actresses
+giving readings of their parts, perceiving at once that the same had no
+connection with the minds and real feelings of the speakers; and, having
+wandered a little to show his disapproval, he would go to the door and
+stare at it till it opened and let him out.  Once or twice, it is true,
+when an actor of large voice was declaiming an emotional passage, he so
+far relented as to go up to him and pant in his face.  Music, too, made
+him restless, inclined to sigh, and to ask questions.  Sometimes, at its
+first sound, he would cross to the window and remain there looking for
+Her. At others, he would simply go and lie on the loud pedal, and we
+never could tell whether it was from sentiment, or because he thought
+that in this way he heard less.  At one special Nocturne of Chopin's he
+always whimpered.  He was, indeed, of rather Polish temperament--very gay
+when he was gay, dark and brooding when he was not.
+
+On the whole, perhaps his life was uneventful for so far-travelling a
+dog, though it held its moments of eccentricity, as when he leaped
+through the window of a four-wheeler into Kensington, or sat on a
+Dartmoor adder.  But that was fortunately of a Sunday afternoon--when
+adder and all were torpid, so nothing happened, till a friend, who was
+following, lifted him off the creature with his large boot.
+
+If only one could have known more of his private life--more of his
+relations with his own kind!  I fancy he was always rather a dark dog to
+them, having so many thoughts about us that he could not share with any
+one, and being naturally fastidious, except with ladies, for whom he had
+a chivalrous and catholic taste, so that they often turned and snapped at
+him.  He had, however, but one lasting love affair, for a liver-coloured
+lass of our village, not quite of his own caste, but a wholesome if
+somewhat elderly girl, with loving and sphinx-like eyes.  Their children,
+alas, were not for this world, and soon departed.
+
+Nor was he a fighting dog; but once attacked, he lacked a sense of
+values, being unable to distinguish between dogs that he could beat and
+dogs with whom he had "no earthly."  It was, in fact, as well to
+interfere at once, especially in the matter of retrievers, for he never
+forgot having in his youth been attacked by a retriever from behind.  No,
+he never forgot, and never forgave, an enemy.  Only a month before that
+day of which I cannot speak, being very old and ill, he engaged an Irish
+terrier on whose impudence he had long had his eye, and routed him.  And
+how a battle cheered his spirit!  He was certainly no Christian; but,
+allowing for essential dog, he was very much a gentleman.  And I do think
+that most of us who live on this earth these days would rather leave it
+with that label on us than the other.  For to be a Christian, as Tolstoy
+understood the word--and no one else in our time has had logic and love
+of truth enough to give it coherent meaning--is (to be quite sincere) not
+suited to men of Western blood.  Whereas--to be a gentleman!  It is a far
+cry, but perhaps it can be done.  In him, at all events, there was no
+pettiness, no meanness, and no cruelty, and though he fell below his
+ideal at times, this never altered the true look of his eyes, nor the
+simple loyalty in his soul.
+
+But what a crowd of memories come back, bringing with them the perfume of
+fallen days!  What delights and glamour, what long hours of effort,
+discouragements, and secret fears did he not watch over--our black
+familiar; and with the sight and scent and touch of him, deepen or
+assuage!  How many thousand walks did we not go together, so that we
+still turn to see if he is following at his padding gait, attentive to
+the invisible trails.  Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from
+us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years
+of our own lives.  Yet, if they find warmth therein, who would grudge
+them those years that they have so guarded?  Nothing else of us can they
+take to lie upon with outstretched paws and chin pressed to the ground;
+and, whatever they take, be sure they have deserved.
+
+Do they know, as we do, that their time must come?  Yes, they know, at
+rare moments.  No other way can I interpret those pauses of his latter
+life, when, propped on his forefeet, he would sit for long minutes quite
+motionless--his head drooped, utterly withdrawn; then turn those eyes of
+his and look at me.  That look said more plainly than all words could:
+"Yes, I know that I must go!"  If we have spirits that persist--they
+have.  If we know after our departure, who we were they do.  No one, I
+think, who really longs for truth, can ever glibly say which it will be
+for dog and man persistence or extinction of our consciousness.  There is
+but one thing certain--the childishness of fretting over that eternal
+question.  Whichever it be, it must be right, the only possible thing.
+He felt that too, I know; but then, like his master, he was what is
+called a pessimist.
+
+My companion tells me that, since he left us, he has once come back. It
+was Old Year's Night, and she was sad, when he came to her in visible
+shape of his black body, passing round the dining-table from the
+window-end, to his proper place beneath the table, at her feet. She saw
+him quite clearly; she heard the padding tap-tap of his paws and very
+toe-nails; she felt his warmth brushing hard against the front of her
+skirt.  She thought then that he would settle down upon her feet, but
+something disturbed him, and he stood pausing, pressed against her, then
+moved out toward where I generally sit, but was not sitting that night.
+
+She saw him stand there, as if considering; then at some sound or laugh,
+she became self-conscious, and slowly, very slowly, he was no longer
+there.  Had he some message, some counsel to give, something he would
+say, that last night of the last year of all those he had watched over
+us?  Will he come back again?
+
+No stone stands over where he lies.  It is on our hearts that his life is
+engraved.
+1912.
+
+
+
+
+FELICITY
+
+When God is so good to the fields, of what use are words--those poor
+husks of sentiment!  There is no painting Felicity on the wing!  No way
+of bringing on to the canvas the flying glory of things!  A single
+buttercup of the twenty million in one field is worth all these dry
+symbols--that can never body forth the very spirit of that froth of May
+breaking over the hedges, the choir of birds and bees, the
+lost-travelling down of the wind flowers, the white-throated swallows in
+their Odysseys.  Just here there are no skylarks, but what joy of song
+and leaf; of lanes lighted with bright trees, the few oaks still golden
+brown, and the ashes still spiritual!  Only the blackbirds and thrushes
+can sing-up this day, and cuckoos over the hill.  The year has flown so
+fast that the apple-trees have dropped nearly all their bloom, and in
+"long meadow" the "daggers" are out early, beside the narrow bright
+streams.  Orpheus sits there on a stone, when nobody is by, and pipes to
+the ponies; and Pan can often be seen dancing with his nymphs in the
+raised beech-grove where it is always twilight, if you lie still enough
+against the far bank.
+
+Who can believe in growing old, so long as we are wrapped in this cloak
+of colour and wings and song; so long as this unimaginable vision is here
+for us to gaze at--the soft-faced sheep about us, and the wool-bags
+drying out along the fence, and great numbers of tiny ducks, so trustful
+that the crows have taken several.
+
+Blue is the colour of youth, and all the blue flowers have a "fey" look.
+Everything seems young too young to work.  There is but one thing busy, a
+starling, fetching grubs for its little family, above my head--it must
+take that flight at least two hundred times a day. The children should be
+very fat.
+
+When the sky is so happy, and the flowers so luminous, it does not seem
+possible that the bright angels of this day shall pass into dark night,
+that slowly these wings shall close, and the cuckoo praise himself to
+sleep, mad midges dance-in the evening; the grass shiver with dew, wind
+die, and no bird sing .  .  .  .
+
+Yet so it is.  Day has gone--the song and glamour and swoop of wings.
+Slowly, has passed the daily miracle.  It is night.  But Felicity has not
+withdrawn; she has but changed her robe for silence, velvet, and the
+pearl fan of the moon.  Everything is sleeping, save only a single star,
+and the pansies.  Why they should be more wakeful than the other flowers,
+I do not know.  The expressions of their faces, if one bends down into
+the dusk, are sweeter and more cunning than ever. They have some compact,
+no doubt, in hand.
+
+What a number of voices have given up the ghost to this night of but one
+voice--the murmur of the stream out there in darkness!
+
+With what religion all has been done!  Not one buttercup open; the
+yew-trees already with shadows flung down!  No moths are abroad yet; it
+is too early in the year for nightjars; and the owls are quiet. But who
+shall say that in this silence, in this hovering wan light, in this air
+bereft of wings, and of all scent save freshness, there is less of the
+ineffable, less of that before which words are dumb?
+
+It is strange how this tranquillity of night, that seems so final, is
+inhabited, if one keeps still enough.  A lamb is bleating out there on
+the dim moor; a bird somewhere, a little one, about three fields away,
+makes the sweetest kind of chirruping; some cows are still cropping.
+There is a scent, too, underneath the freshness-sweet-brier, I think, and
+our Dutch honeysuckle; nothing else could so delicately twine itself with
+air.  And even in this darkness the roses have colour, more beautiful
+perhaps than ever.  If colour be, as they say, but the effect of light on
+various fibre, one may think of it as a tune, the song of thanksgiving
+that each form puts forth, to sun and moon and stars and fire.  These
+moon-coloured roses are singing a most quiet song.  I see all of a sudden
+that there are many more stars beside that one so red and watchful.  The
+flown kite is there with its seven pale worlds; it has adventured very
+high and far to-night-with a company of others remoter still. . . .
+
+This serenity of night!  What could seem less likely ever more to move,
+and change again to day?  Surely now the world has found its long sleep;
+and the pearly glimmer from the moon will last, and the precious silence
+never again yield to clamour; the grape-bloom of this mystery never more
+pale out into gold .  .  .  .
+
+And yet it is not so.  The nightly miracle has passed.  It is dawn. Faint
+light has come.  I am waiting for the first sound.  The sky as yet is
+like nothing but grey paper, with the shadows of wild geese passing.  The
+trees are phantoms.  And then it comes--that first call of a bird,
+startled at discovering day!  Just one call--and now, here, there, on all
+the trees, the sudden answers swelling, of that most sweet and careless
+choir.  Was irresponsibility ever so divine as this, of birds waking?
+Then--saffron into the sky, and once more silence!  What is it birds do
+after the first Chorale?  Think of their sins and business?  Or just
+sleep again?  The trees are fast dropping unreality, and the cuckoos
+begin calling.  Colour is burning up in the flowers already; the dew
+smells of them.
+
+The miracle is ended, for the starling has begun its job; and the sun is
+fretting those dark, busy wings with gold.  Full day has come again.  But
+the face of it is a little strange, it is not like yesterday.  Queer-to
+think, no day is like to a day that's past and no night like a night
+that's coming!  Why, then, fear death, which is but night?  Why care, if
+next day have different face and spirit?  The sun has lighted
+buttercup-field now, the wind touches the lime-tree.  Something passes
+over me away up there.
+
+It is Felicity on her wings!
+1912.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Quality and Other Studies and Essays
+by John Galsworthy
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