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+Project Gutenberg's Etext Studies and Essays: Quality and Others
+#17 in our series by John Galsworthy
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+Title: Studies and Essays: Quality and Others
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+Author: John Galsworthy
+
+Release Date:  November, 2001  [Etext #2904]
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+Project Gutenberg's Etext Studies and Essays: Quality and Others
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+
+
+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 goon 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 n 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 Project Gutenberg's Etext Studies and Essays: Quality and Others
+