Part 6 (1/2)
GOING AWAY
We stood on the steps of the old Scotch house as the carriage rolled her away. A last greeting from that delightful, unflagging voice; the misty flare of the lanterns round a corner; and then nothing but the darkness of the damp autumn night. There is to some foolish persons--myself especially--a strange and almost supernatural quality about the fact of departure, one's own or that of others, which constant repet.i.tion seems, if anything, merely to strengthen. I cannot become familiar with the fact that a moment, the time necessary for a carriage, as in this case, to turn a corner, or for those two steel muscles of the engine to play upon each other, can do so complete and wonderful a thing as to break the continuity of intercourse, to remove a living presence. The subst.i.tution of an image for a reality, the present broken off short and replaced by the past; enumerating this by no means gives the equivalent of that odd and unnatural word GONE. And the terror of death itself lies surely in its being the most sudden and utter act of _going away_.
I suppose there must be people who do not feel like this, as there are people also who do not feel, apparently, the mystery of change of place, of watching the familiar lines of hill or valley transform themselves, and the very sense of one's bearings, what was in front or to the other side, east or west, getting lost or hopelessly altered. Such people's lives must be (save for misfortune) funnily undramatic; and, trying to realize them, I understand why such enormous crowds require to go and see plays.
It is usually said that in such partings as these--partings with definite hope of meeting and with nothing humanly tragic about them, so that the last interchange of voice is expected to be a laugh or a joke--the sadder part is for those who stay. But I think this is mistaken. There is indeed a little sense of flatness--almost of something in one's chest--when the train is gone or the carriage rolled off; and one goes back into one's house or into the just-left room, throwing a glance all round as if to measure the emptiness. But the accustomed details--the book we left open, the order we had to give, the answer brought to the message, and breakfast and lunch and dinner and the postman, all the great eternities--gather round and close up the gap: close the gone one, and that piece of past, not merely _up_, but, alas! _out_.
It is the sense of this, secret even in the most fatuous breast, which makes things sadder for the goer. He knows from experience, and, if he have imagination, he feels, this process of closing him out, this rapid adaptation to doing without him. And meanwhile he, in his carriage or train, is being hurled into the void; for even the richest man and he of the most numerous clients, is turned adrift without possessions or friends, a mere poor nameless orphan, when on a solitary journey. There is, moreover, a sadder feeling than this in the heart of the more sentimental traveller, who has engaged the hospitality of friends. _He knows it is extended equally to others_; that this room, which he may have made peculiarly his own, filling it, perhaps, in proportion to the briefness of sojourn, with his own most personal experience; the landscape made his own through this window, the crucial conversation, receiving unexpected sympathies, held or (more potent still) thought over afterwards in that chair; he knows that this room will become, perhaps, O horror, within a few hours, another's!
The extraordinary hospitality of England, becoming, like all English things, rather too well done materially, rather systematic, and therefore heartless, inflicts, I have been told, some painful blows on sentimental aliens, particularly of Latin origin. There is a pang in finding on the hospitable door a label-holder with one's name in it: it saves losing one's way, but suggests that one is apt to lose it, is a stranger in the house; and it tells of other strangers, past and future, each with his name slipped in. Similarly the guest-book, imitated from nefarious foreign inns, so fearfully suggestive of human instability, with its close-packed signatures, and dates of arrival and departure.
And then the cruelty of housekeepers, and the ruthlessness of housemaids! Take heed, O Thestylis, dear Latin guardian of my hearth, take heed and imprint my urgent wishes in thy faithful heart: never, never, never, in my small southern home (not unlike, I sometimes fondly fancy, the Poet's _parva domus_), never let me surprise thee depositing thy freshly-whitened linen in heaps outside the door of the departing guest; and never, I conjure thee, offend his eye or nostril with mops, or _frotteur's_ rollers, or resinous scent of furniture-polish near his small chamber! For that chamber, kindly Handmaiden, is _his_. He is the Prophet it was made for; and the only Prophet conceivable as long as present. And when he takes departure, why, the void must follow, a long hiatus, darkness, and stacked-up furniture, and the scent of varnish within tight-closed shutters....
But, alas! alas! not all kind Thestylis's doing and refraining is able to dispel the natural sense of coming and going: one's bed re-made, one's self replaced, new boxes brought and unpacked, metaphorically as well as literally; fresh adjustments, new subjects of discourse, new sympathies: and the poor previous occupant meanwhile _rolling_, as the French put it. Rolling! how well the word expresses that sense of smooth and empty nowhere, with nothing to catch on or keep, which plays so large a part in all our earthly experience; as, for the rest, is natural, seeing that the earth is only a ball, at least the astronomers say so.
But let us turn from this painful side of _going away_; and insist rather on certain charming impressions sometimes connected with it. For there is something charming and almost romantic, when, as in the case I mentioned, the friend leaves friends late in the evening. There is the whole pleasant day intact, with leisurely afternoon stroll when all is packed and ready: watching the sunset up the estuary, picking some flowers in the garden; sometimes even seeing the first stars p.r.i.c.k themselves upon the sky, and mild sheet-lightnings, auguring good, play round the house, disclosing distant hills and villages. And the orderly dinner, seeming more swept and garnished for the antic.i.p.ation of bustle, the light on the cloth, the sheen on the silver, the grace and fragrance of fruit and flowers, and the gracious faces above it, remains a wide and steady luminous vision on the black background of midnight travel, of the train rus.h.i.+ng through nothingness. Most charming of all, when after the early evening on the balcony, the traveller leaves the south, to hurtle by night, conscious only of the last impression of supper with kind friends at Milan or the lakes, and the glimpse, in the station light, of heads covered with veils, and flowers in the hands, and southern evening dresses. These are the occasional gracious compensations for that bad thing called going away.
COMING BACK
Most people tell you that to return to places where one has been exceptionally happy is an unwise proceeding. But this, I venture to conceive, is what poor Alfred de Musset called ”une insulte au bonheur.”
It shows, at all events, a lack of appreciation of the particular nature, permanent, and, in a manner, radiating, of happy experiences. Of course, I am not speaking of the cases where the happy past has been severed from indifferent present and future by some dreadful calamity; poetry alone is consolatory and also aloof enough to deal decorously with such tragic things, and they are no concern of the essayist. There is, besides, a very individual and variable character about great misfortunes, no two natures being affected by them quite alike, so that discussion and generalization are not merely intrusive, but also mostly fruitless. Therefore the question is not whether people are wise or unwise in avoiding places where they have been happy, after events which have shattered their happiness. And the only loss I have to deal with is the loss--if it really is one, as we shall examine--of the actual circ.u.mstances which accompanied a happy experience; the loss of the _then_ as opposed to the _now_, and, in a measure of the irrecoverable time, years or months, and of the small luggage of expectations and illusions which has got inevitably mislaid or scattered in the interval.
And the question arises whether 'tis wiser, in a sense whether it is more delicately epicurean, to avoid the places which bring all that, together with the sense of the happy gone-by days, vividly home to one; or whether, as I contend, past happiness ought not to be used as an essential element in the happiness of the present.
I have had, lately, the experience of returning to a part of the world which I had not seen for many, many years, and where I had spent the drowsy long days of a long illness, and the dreamy sweet days of a longer convalescence. It made a day's journey, without any especial resting-place for the soles of my feet, and undertaken, I can scarcely tell why, with a little shyness and fear. I did not go to the house where I had lived, but to one in the neighbourhood, whither I had often been taken all those years ago; and I did not even take the precaution--or perhaps took the contrary one--of securing the presence of the owners. The ladies were out; gone to one of the little fis.h.i.+ng towns which are strung all around the Forth, and they would not be back till teatime. But the benevolent Scottish housemaid, noticing perhaps a shadow of disappointment, suggested my going in and waiting.
The little old castle, which had got a little blurred in my recollection, seemed suddenly remembered and familiar, even as had been the case with the country I had driven along from the station; the undulating turnip-fields and fields of pale stooked corn, the reaping-machines and the women tying up the bean-straw, the white line of the Forth, and the whole pale, delicate country under the low, tender, _intimate_ northern sky. Even the smell, sweet and pungent, of the withered potatoes, bringing the sense of knowing it all, turnings of roads and of the land, so well. And similarly inside the castle, where I lingered on the pretext of writing a note to those ladies. It was all unchanged; the escutcheons in relief on the ceiling, the view of cornfield and thin beech belts, and distant sea from the windows, the lavender and _pot-pourri_ in the bowls, and almost the t.i.tles of the books, seemed quietly, at the touch of reality, to open out in remembrance. I did not stay till the return of the ladies, but went back to the station, and waited on the bridge for my train, which was a good half-hour late. I looked down from that bridge on the kind and gentle country in the veiled suns.h.i.+ne. The hill to the back of the house where I had lived, in the distance, the red roofs of the fis.h.i.+ng villages, the little spire of the smallest of them barely projecting, as it always did, above the freshly reaped fields. And I felt, as I leaned against the parapet watching for my train's smoke coming towards me, not the loss, but rather the inestimable gain which a kindly past represents.
Years gone by? Nay, rather years which make endurable, which furnish and warm the present, giving it sweetness and significance. How very poor we must be in our early youth, with no possessions like these; and how rich in our later life, with many years distilled into the essence of a single to-day!
As I stood on the railway bridge thinking or feeling in this manner, I heard wheels, and saw a pony-cart, with an elderly lady, and a younger one driving her, coming towards me. It was the ladies who had been so kind to me all those years back, returning to the little castle. I turned my back, leaned on the parapet, and let them pa.s.s me, unnoticing.
I wanted to keep them also in that dim and dear kind past.
For we must be discreet as well as grateful-hearted if we would enjoy the Past's full gifts....
The Past's gifts; and to these I would add, or among them rather I would include, an item which I find a difficulty in naming properly, and which, of course, I hesitate a little to speak about. I mean the gifts, odd as it sounds, of Death. For Death, while in his main function the cruel taker-away, the violent or stealthy robber, has also a less important side to his character, and is a giver of gifts, if only we know how to receive them. And he is this even apart from his power (for which one might imagine that the Greeks gave him, in certain terra cottas and reliefs, so very gentle and beautiful an aspect) of bringing light and loving-kindness into poor human creatures' judgments, and teaching them to understand and pardon; apart also from that mystic relations.h.i.+p, felt by Dante and all the poets, which he bears to the genius of imaginative love. What I allude to is a more humble, but quite as gracious function, of leading those he takes away (with the infinitely tender gesture of the antique funereal Hermes), not into vacuity and the horrid blackness of oblivion, but into a place of safe and serene memory. In this capacity Death can be, even like his master, Time, a giver of gifts to us. For those _are_ gifts to us, those friends he gathers together under hazier, tenderer skies into our thoughts which have the autumn warmth and stillness of late-reaped fields. Nay, the gift is greater, for there are added certain half-strangers, towards whom we lose all shyness, and who turn to real friends when introduced by death and worked into our past; dear such-an-one, whom we scarcely knew, barely more than face and name _then_, but know and have the right to care for now. So that I think that we might extract and take with happy interpretation those two last lines of the old, old Goethe's heartbreaking dedication to the generations whom he had outlived:--
”Was ich besitze, seh' ich wie im Weiten, Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten.”
For all which reasons let us never be afraid of going back to places where we have been exceptionally happy; not even in the cases where we recognize that such former happiness was due, in part, to some dispelled illusion. For if we can but learn to be glad of the Past and receive its gift with grat.i.tude, may not the remembrance of a dear illusion, brought home with the sight of the places which we filled with it, be merely another blessing; a possession which nothing can rob us of, and by which our spirit is the richer?
LOSING ONE'S TRAIN
The clocks up at the villa must have been all wrong, or else my watch did not go with them, or else I had not looked often enough at it while rambling about the town on my way to the station. Certain it is that when I got there, at the gallop of my cab-horse, the express was gone.
There is something hatefully inexorable about expresses: it is useless to run after them, even in Italy. The next train took an hour and a quarter instead of forty minutes to cover the nineteen miles between Pistoia and Florence. Moreover, that next train was not till eight in the evening, and it was now half-past five.
I felt all it was proper to feel on the occasion, and said, if anything, rather more. Missing a train is a terrible business, even if you miss nothing else in consequence; and the inner disarray, the blow and wrench to thoughts and feelings, is most often far worse than any mere upsetting of arrangements. A chasm suddenly gapes between present and future, and the river of life flows backwards, if but for a second. It is most fit and natural to lose one's temper; but the throwing out of so much moral ballast does not help one to overtake that train. I mention this, lest I should pa.s.s for heartless; and now proceed to say that, after a few minutes given to wrath and lamentation, I called the cab back and went in search of a certain very ancient church, containing a very ancient pulpit, which I had never succeeded in seeing before.