DIES IRAE
Those memorable days that move in procession, their heads just
out of the mist of years long dead--the most of them are
full-eyed as the dandelion that from dawn to shade has steeped
itself in sunlight. Here and there in their ranks, however, moves
a forlorn one who is blind--blind in the sense of the dulled
window-pane on which the pelting raindrops have mingled and run
down, obscuring sunshine and the circling birds, happy fields,
and storied garden; blind with the spatter of a misery
uncomprehended, unanalysed, only felt as something corporeal in
its buffeting effects.
Martha began it; and yet Martha was not really to blame.
Indeed, that was half the trouble of it--no solid person stood
full in view, to be blamed and to make atonement. There was only
a wretched, impalpable condition to deal with. Breakfast was just
over; the sun was summoning us, imperious as a herald with
clamour of trumpet; I ran upstairs to her with a broken bootlace
in my hand, and there she was, crying in a corner, her head in
her apron. Nothing could be got from her but the same dismal
succession of sobs that would not have done, that struck and hurt
like a physical beating; and meanwhile the sun was getting
impatient, and I wanted my bootlace.
Inquiry below stairs revealed the cause. Martha's brother was
dead, it seemed--her sailor brother Billy; drowned in one of
those strange far-off seas it was our dream to navigate one day.
We had known Billy well, and appreciated him. When an approaching
visit of Billy to his sister had been announced, we had counted
the days to it. When his cheery voice was at last heard in the
kitchen and we had descended with shouts, first of all he had to
exhibit his tattooed arms, always a subject for fresh delight and
envy and awe; then he was called upon for tricks, jugglings, and
strange, fearful gymnastics; and lastly came yarns, and more
yarns, and yarns till bedtime. There had never been any one like
Billy in his own particular sphere; and now he was drowned, they
said, and Martha was miserable, and--and I couldn't get a new
bootlace. They told me that Billy would never come back any more,
and I stared out of the window at the sun which came back, right
enough, every day, and their news conveyed nothing whatever to
me. Martha's sorrow hit home a little, but only because the
actual sight and sound of it gave me a dull, bad sort of pain low
down inside--a pain not to be actually located. Moreover, I was
still wanting my bootlace.
This was a poor sort of a beginning to a day that, so far as
outside conditions went, had promised so well. I rigged up a sort
of jurymast of a bootlace with a bit of old string, and wandered
off to look up the girls, conscious of a jar and a discordance in
the scheme of things. The moment I entered the schoolroom
something in the air seemed to tell me that here, too, matters
were strained and awry. Selina was staring listlessly out of the
window, one foot curled round her leg. When I spoke to her she
jerked a shoulder testily, but did not condescend to the civility
of a reply. Charlotte, absolutely unoccupied, sprawled in a
chair, and there were signs of sniffles about her, even at that
early hour. It was but a trifling matter that had caused all this
electricity in the atmosphere, and the girls' manner of taking it
seemed to me most unreasonable. Within the last few days the time
had come round for the despatch of a hamper to Edward at school.
Only one hamper a term was permitted him, so its preparation was
a sort of blend of revelry and religious ceremony. After the main
corpus of the thing had been carefully selected and safely
bestowed--the pots of jam, the cake, the sausages, and the apples
that filled up corners so nicely--after the last package had been
wedged in, the girls had deposited their own private and personal
offerings on the top. I forget their precise nature; anyhow, they
were nothing of any particular practical use to a boy. But they
had involved some contrivance and labour, some skimping of pocket
money, and much delightful cloud-building as to the effect on
their enraptured recipient. Well, yesterday there had come a
terse acknowledgment from Edward, heartily commending the cakes
and the jam, stamping the sausages with the seal of Smith major's
approval, and finally hinting that, fortified as he now was,
nothing more was necessary but a remittance of five shillings in
postage stamps to enable him to face the world armed against
every buffet of fate. That was all. Never a word or a hint of the
personal tributes or of his appreciation of them. To us--to
Harold and me, that is--the letter seemed natural and sensible
enough. After all, provender was the main thing, and five
shillings stood for a complete equipment against the most
unexpected turns of luck. The presents were very well in their
way--very nice, and so on--but life was a serious matter, and the
contest called for cakes and half-crowns to carry it on, not
gew-gaws and knitted mittens and the like. The girls, however, in
their obstinate way, persisted in taking their own view of the
slight. Hence it was that I received my second rebuff of the
morning.
Somewhat disheartened, I made my way downstairs and out into
the sunlight, where I found Harold playing conspirators by
himself on the gravel. He had dug a small hole in the walk and
had laid an imaginary train of powder thereto; and, as he sought
refuge in the laurels from the inevitable explosion, I heard him
murmur: "'My God!' said the Czar, 'my plans are frustrated!'" It
seemed an excellent occasion for being a black puma. Harold liked
black pumas, on the whole, as well as any animal we were familiar
with. So I launched myself on him, with the appropriate howl,
rolling him over on the gravel.
Life may be said to be composed of things that come off and
things that don't come off. This thing, unfortunately, was one of
the things that didn't come off. From beneath me I heard a shrill
cry of, "Oh, it's my sore knee!" And Harold wriggled himself free
from the puma's clutches, bellowing dismally. Now, I honestly
didn't know he had a sore knee, and, what's more, he knew I
didn't know he had a sore knee. According to boy-ethics,
therefore, his attitude was wrong, sore knee or not, and no
apology was due from me. I made half-way advances, however,
suggesting we should lie in ambush by the edge of the pond and
cut off the ducks as they waddled down in simple, unsuspecting
single file; then hunt them as bisons flying scattered over the
vast prairie. A fascinating pursuit this, and strictly illicit.
But Harold would none of my overtures, and retreated to the house
wailing with full lungs.
Things were getting simply infernal. I struck out blindly for
the open country; and even as I made for the gate a shrill voice
from a window bade me keep off the flower-beds. When the gate had
swung to behind me with a vicious click I felt better, and after
ten minutes along the road it began to grow on me that some
radical change was needed, that I was in a blind alley, and that
this intolerable state of things must somehow cease. All that I
could do I had already done. As well-meaning a fellow as ever
stepped was pounding along the road that day, with an exceeding
sore heart; one who only wished to live and let live, in touch
with his fellows, and appreciating what joys life had to offer.
What was wanted now was a complete change of environment.
Somewhere in the world, I felt sure, justice and sympathy still
resided. There were places called pampas, for instance, that
sounded well. League upon league of grass, with just an
occasional wild horse, and not a relation within the horizon! To
a bruised spirit this seemed a sane and a healing sort of
existence. There were other pleasant corners, again, where you
dived for pearls and stabbed sharks in the stomach with your big
knife. No relations would be likely to come interfering with you
when thus blissfully occupied. And yet I did not wish--just yet--
to have done with relations entirely. They should be made to feel
their position first, to see themselves as they really were, and
to wish--when it was too late--that they had behaved more
properly.
Of all professions, the army seemed to lend itself the most
thoroughly to the scheme. You enlisted, you followed the drum,
you marched, fought, and ported arms, under strange skies,
through unrecorded years. At last, at long last, your
opportunity would come, when the horrors of war were flickering
through the quiet country-side where you were cradled and bred,
but where the memory of you had long been dim. Folk would run
together, clamorous, palsied with fear; and among the terror-
stricken groups would figure certain aunts. "What hope is left
us?" they would ask themselves, "save in the clemency of the
General, the mysterious, invincible General, of whom men tell
such romantic tales?" And the army would march in, and the guns
would rattle and leap along the village street, and, last of all,
you--you, the General, the fabled hero--you would enter, on your
coal-black charger, your pale set face seamed by an interesting
sabre-cut. And then--but every boy has rehearsed this familiar
piece a score of times. You are magnanimous, in fine--that goes
without saying; you have a coal-black horse, and a sabre-cut, and
you can afford to be very magnanimous. But all the same you give
them a good talking-to.
This pleasant conceit simply ravished my soul for some twenty
minutes, and then the old sense of injury began to well up
afresh, and to call for new plasters and soothing syrups. This
time I took refuge in happy thoughts of the sea. The sea was my
real sphere, after all. On the sea, in especial, you could
combine distinction with lawlessness, whereas the army seemed to
be always weighted by a certain plodding submission to
discipline. To be sure, by all accounts, the life was at first a
rough one. But just then I wanted to suffer keenly; I wanted to
be a poor devil of a cabin boy, kicked, beaten, and sworn at--
for a time. Perhaps some hint, some inkling of my sufferings
might reach their ears. In due course the sloop or felucca would
turn up--it always did--the rakish-looking craft, black of hull,
low in the water, and bristling with guns; the jolly Roger
flapping overhead, and myself for sole commander. By and by, as
usually happened, an East Indiaman would come sailing along full
of relations--not a necessary relation would be missing. And the
crew should walk the plank, and the captain should dance from his
own yardarm, and then I would take the passengers in hand--that
miserable group of well-known figures cowering on the
quarterdeck!--and then--and then the same old performance: the
air thick with magnanimity. In all the repertory of heroes, none
is more truly magnanimous than your pirate chief.
When at last I brought myself back from the future to the
actual present, I found that these delectable visions had helped
me over a longer stretch of road than I had imagined; and I
looked around and took my bearings. To the right of me was a long
low building of grey stone, new, and yet not smugly so; new, and
yet possessing distinction, marked with a character that did not
depend on lichen or on crumbling semi-effacement of moulding and
mullion. Strangers might have been puzzled to classify it; to
me, an explorer from earliest years, the place was familiar
enough. Most folk called it "The Settlement"; others, with quite
sufficient conciseness for our neighbourhood, spoke of "them
there fellows up by Halliday's"; others again, with a hint of
derision, named them the "monks." This last title I supposed to
be intended for satire, and knew to be fatuously wrong. I was
thoroughly acquainted with monks--in books--and well knew the cut
of their long frocks, their shaven polls, and their fascinating
big dogs, with brandy-bottles round their necks, incessantly
hauling happy travellers out of the snow. The only dog at the
settlement was an Irish terrier, and the good fellows who owned
him, and were owned by him, in common, wore clothes of the most
nondescript order, and mostly cultivated side-whiskers. I had
wandered up there one day, searching (as usual) for something I
never found, and had been taken in by them and treated as friend
and comrade. They had made me free of their ideal little rooms,
full of books and pictures, and clean of the antimacassar taint;
they had shown me their chapel, high, hushed, and faintly
scented, beautiful with a strange new beauty born both of what it
had and what it had not--that too familiar dowdiness of common
places of worship. They had also fed me in their dining-hall,
where a long table stood on trestles plain to view, and all the
woodwork was natural, unpainted, healthily scrubbed, and redolent
of the forest it came from. I brought away from that visit, and
kept by me for many days, a sense of cleanness, of the freshness
that pricks the senses--the freshness of cool spring water; and
the large swept spaces of the rooms, the red tiles, and the oaken
settles, suggested a comfort that had no connection with padded
upholstery.
On this particular morning I was in much too unsociable a mind
for paying friendly calls. Still, something in the aspect of the
place harmonized with my humour, and I worked my way round to the
back, where the ground, after affording level enough for a
kitchen-garden, broke steeply away. Both the word Gothic and the
thing itself were still unknown to me, yet doubtless the
architecture of the place, consistent throughout, accounted for
its sense of comradeship in my hour of disheartenment. As I mused
there, with the low, grey, Purposeful-looking building before me,
and thought of my pleasant friends within, and what good times
they always seemed to be having, and how they larked with the
Irish terrier, whose footing was one of a perfect equality, I
thought of a certain look in their faces, as if they had a common
purpose and a business, and were acting under orders thoroughly
recognized and understood. I remembered, too, something that
Martha had told me, about these same fellows doing "a power o'
good," and other hints I had collected vaguely, of renouncements,
rules, self-denials, and the like. Thereupon, out of the depths
of my morbid soul swam up a new and fascinating idea; and at
once the career of arms seemed over-acted and stale, and piracy,
as a profession, flat and unprofitable. This, then, or something
like it, should be my vocation and my revenge. A severer line of
business, perhaps, such as I had read of; something that included
black bread and a hair-shirt. There should be vows, too--
irrevocable, blood-curdling vows; and an iron grating. This iron
grating was the most necessary feature of all, for I intended
that on the other side of it my relations should range
themselves--I mentally ran over the catalogue, and saw that the
whole gang was present, all in their proper places--a sad-eyed
row, combined in tristful appeal. "We see our error now," they
would say; "we were always dull dogs, slow to catch--especially
in those akin to us--the finer qualities of soul! We
misunderstood you, misappreciated you, and we own up to it. And
now "Alas, my dear friends," I would strike in here, waving
towards them an ascetic hand--one of the emaciated sort, that
lets the light shine through at the fingertips--" Alas, you come
too late! This conduct is fitting and meritorious on your part,
and indeed I always expected it of you, sooner or later; but the
die is cast, and you may go home again and bewail at your leisure
this too tardy repentance of yours. For me, I am vowed and
dedicated, and my relations henceforth are austerity and holy
works. Once a month, should you wish it, it shall be your
privilege to come and gaze at me through this very solid grating;
but--" Whack! A well-aimed clod of garden soil, whizzing just
past my ear, starred on a tree-trunk behind, spattering me with
dirt, The present came back to me in a flash, and I nimbly took
cover behind the trees, realizing that the enemy was up and
abroad, with ambuscades, alarms, and thrilling sallies. It was
the gardener's boy, I knew well enough; a red proletariat, who
hated me just because I was a gentleman. Hastily picking up a
nice sticky clod in one hand, with the other I delicately
projected my hat beyond the shelter of the tree-trunk. I had not
fought with Red-skins all these years for nothing. As I had
expected, another clod, of the first class for size and
stickiness, took my poor hat full in the centre. Then, Ajax-like,
shouting terribly, I issued from shelter and discharged my
ammunition. Woe then for the gardener's boy, who, unprepared,
skipping in premature triumph, took the clod full in his stomach!
He, the foolish one, witless on whose side the gods were fighting
that day, discharged yet other missiles, wavering and wide of the
mark; for his wind had been taken with the first clod, and he
shot wildly, as one already desperate and in flight. I got
another clod in at short range; we clinched on the brow of the
hill, and rolled down to the bottom together. When he had shaken
himself free and regained his legs, he trotted smartly off in the
direction of his mother's cottage; but over his shoulder he
discharged at me both imprecation and deprecation, menace mixed
up with an under-current of tears.
But as for me, I made off smartly for the road, my frame
tingling, my head high, with never a backward look at the
Settlement of suggestive aspect, or at my well-planned future
which lay in fragments around it. Life had its jollities, then;
life was action, contest, victory! The present was rosy once
more, surprises lurked on every side, and I was beginning to feel
villainously hungry.
Just as I gained the road a cart came rattling by, and I rushed
for it, caught the chain that hung below, and swung thrillingly
between the dizzy wheels, choked and blinded with delicious-
smelling dust, the world slipping by me like a streaky ribbon
below, till the driver licked at me with his whip, and I had to
descend to earth again. Abandoning the beaten track, I then
struck homewards through the fields; not that the way was very
much shorter, but rather because on that route one avoided the
bridge, and had to splash through the stream and get refreshingly
wet. Bridges were made for narrow folk, for people with aims and
vocations which compelled abandonment of many of life's highest
pleasures. Truly wise men called on each element alike to
minister to their joy, and while the touch of sun-bathed air, the
fragrance of garden soil, the ductible qualities of mud, and the
spark-whirling rapture of playing with fire, had each their
special charm, they did not overlook the bliss of getting their
feet wet. As I came forth on the common Harold broke out of an
adjoining copse and ran to meet me, the morning rain-clouds all
blown away from his face. He had made a new squirrel-stick, it
seemed. Made it all himself; melted the lead and everything! I
examined the instrument critically, and pronounced it absolutely
magnificent. As we passed in at our gate the girls were distantly
visible, gardening with a zeal in cheerful contrast to their
heartsick lassitude of the morning.
"There's bin another letter come toÄday," Harold explained,
"and the hamper got joggled about on the journey, and the
presents worked down into the straw and all over the place. One
of 'em turned up inside the cold duck. And that's why they
weren't found at first. And Edward said, Thanks awfully!"
I did not see Martha again until we were all re-assembled at
tea-time, when she seemed red-eyed and strangely silent, neither
scolding nor finding fault with anything. Instead, she was very
kind and thoughtful with jams and things, feverishly pressing
unwonted delicacies on us, who wanted little pressing enough.
Then suddenly, when I was busiest, she disappeared; and Charlotte
whispered me presently that she had heard her go to her room and
lock herself in. This struck me as a funny sort of proceeding.
