And Even Now
first night of a visit I paid them in April, 1899, William, when we
were alone, told me news. I had been vaguely conscious, throughout the
evening, of some change; conscious that Mary had grown gayer, and less
gay--somehow different, somehow remote. William said that her child
would be born in September, if all went well. ‘She’s immensely happy,’
he told me. I realised that she was indeed happier than ever... ‘And
of course it would be a wonderful thing, for both of us,’ he said
presently, ‘to have a son--or a daughter.’ I asked him which he would
rather it were, a son or a daughter. ‘Oh, either,’ he answered wearily.
It was evident that he had misgivings and fears. I tried to reason him
out of them. He did not, I am thankful to say, ever let Mary suspect
them. She had no misgivings. But it was destined that her child should
live only for an hour, and that she should die in bearing it.
I had stayed again at the cottage in July, for some days. At the end of
that month I had gone to France, as was my custom, and a week later had
written to Mary. It was William that answered this letter, telling me of
Mary’s death and burial. I returned to England next day. William and I
wrote to each other several times. He had not left his home. He stayed
there, ‘trying,’ as he said in a grotesque and heart-rending phrase, ‘to
finish a novel.’ I saw him in the following January. He wrote to me from
the Charing Cross Hotel, asking me to lunch with him there. After our
first greetings, there was a silence. He wanted to talk of--what he
could not talk of. We stared helplessly at each other, and then, in the
English way, talked of things at large. England was engaged in the Boer
War. William was the sort of man whom one would have expected to be
violently Pro-Boer. I was surprised at his fervour for the stronger
side. He told me he had tried to enlist, but had been rejected on
account of his eyesight. But there was, he said, a good chance of his
being sent out, almost immediately, as one of the Daily --‘s special
correspondents. ‘And then,’ he exclaimed, ‘I shall see something of it.’
I had a presentiment that he would not return, and a belief that he did
not want to return. He did not return. Special correspondents were not
so carefully shepherded in that war as they have since been. They were
more at liberty to take risks, on behalf of the journals to which they
were accredited. William was killed a few weeks after he had landed at
Cape Town.
And there came, as I have said, a time when I did not think of William
and Mary often; and then a time when I did more often think of them. And
especially much did my mind hark back to them in the late autumn of
last year; for on the way to the place I was staying at I had passed the
little railway station whose name had always linked itself for me
with the names of those two friends. There were but four intervening
stations. It was not a difficult pilgrimage that I made some days
later--back towards the past, for that past’s sake and honour. I had
thought I should not remember the way, the three miles of way, from the
station to the cottage; but I found myself remembering it perfectly,
without a glance at the finger-posts. Rain had been falling heavily,
driving the late leaves off the trees; and everything looked rather
sodden and misty, though the sun was now shining. I had known this
landscape only in spring, summer, early autumn. Mary had held to a
theory that at other seasons I could not be acclimatised. But there were
groups of trees that I knew, even without their leaves; and farm-houses
and small stone bridges that had not at all changed. Only what mattered
was changed. Only what mattered was gone. Would what I had come to see
be there still? In comparison with what it had held, it was not much.
But I wished to see it, melancholy spectacle though it must be for me
if it were extant, and worse than melancholy if it held something new.
I began to be sure it had been demolished, built over. At the corner of
the lane that had led to it, I was almost minded to explore no further,
to turn back. But I went on, and suddenly I was at the four-barred iron
gate, that I remembered, between the laurels. It was rusty, and was
fastened with a rusty padlock, and beyond it there was grass where
a winding ‘drive’ had been. From the lane the cottage never had been
visible, even when these laurels were lower and sparser than they were
now. Was the cottage still standing? Presently, I climbed over the gate,
and walked through the long grass, and--yes, there was Mary’s cottage;
still there; William’s and Mary’s cottage. Trite enough, I have no
doubt, were the thoughts that possessed me as I stood gazing. There is
nothing new to be thought about the evanescence of human things; but
there is always much to be felt about it by one who encounters in his
maturity some such intimate instance and reminder as confronted me, in
that cold sunshine, across that small wilderness of long rank wet grass
and weeds.
Incredibly woebegone and lonesome the house would have looked even to
one for whom it contained no memories; all the more because in its utter
dereliction it looked so durable. Some of the stucco had fallen off the
walls of the two wings; thick flakes of it lay on the discoloured roof
of the veranda, and thick flakes of it could be seen lying in the grass
below. Otherwise, there were few signs of actual decay. The sash-window
and the French window of each wing were shuttered, and, from where I was
standing, the cream-coloured paint of those shutters behind the glass
looked almost fresh. The latticed windows between had all been boarded
up from within. The house was not to be let perish soon.
I did not want to go nearer to it; yet I did go nearer, step by step,
across the wilderness, right up to the edge of the veranda itself, and
within a yard of the front-door.
I stood looking at that door. I had never noticed it in the old days,
for then it had always stood open. But it asserted itself now, master of
the threshold.
It was a narrow door--narrow even for its height, which did not exceed
mine by more than two inches or so; a door that even when it was freshly
painted must have looked mean. How much meaner now, with its paint all
faded and mottled, cracked and blistered! It had no knocker, not even a
slit for letters. All that it had was a large-ish key-hole. On this my
eyes rested; and presently I moved to it, stooped down to it, peered
through it. I had a glimpse of--darkness impenetrable.
Strange it seemed to me, as I stood back, that there the Room was,
the remembered Room itself, separated from me by nothing but this
unremembered door...and a quarter of a century, yes. I saw it all, in
my mind’s eye, just as it had been: the way the sunlight came into it
through this same doorway and through the lattices of these same four
windows; the way the little bit of a staircase came down into it, so
crookedly yet so confidently; and how uneven the tiled floor was, and
how low the rafters were, and how littered the whole place was with
books brought in from his den by William, and how bright with flowers
brought in by Mary from her garden. The rafters, the stairs, the tiles,
were still existing, changeless in despite of cobwebs and dust and
darkness, all quite changeless on the other side of the door, so near to
me. I wondered how I should feel if by some enchantment the door slowly
turned on its hinges, letting in light. I should not enter, I felt, not
even look, so much must I hate to see those inner things lasting when
all that had given to them a meaning was gone from them, taken away from
them, finally. And yet, why blame them for their survival? And how
know that nothing of the past ever came to them, revisiting, hovering?
Something--sometimes--perhaps? One knew so little. How not be tender to
what, as it seemed to me, perhaps the dead loved?
So strong in me now was the wish to see again all those things, to touch
them and, as it were, commune with them, and so queerly may the mind be
wrought upon in a solitude among memories, that there were moments when
I almost expected that the door would obey my will. I was recalled to a
clearer sense of reality by something which I had not before noticed.
In the door-post to the right was a small knob of rusty iron--mocking
reminder that to gain admission to a house one does not ‘will’ the door:
one rings the bell--unless it is rusty and has quite obviously no one
to answer it; in which case one goes away. Yet I did not go away. The
movement that I made, in despite of myself, was towards the knob itself.
But, I hesitated, suppose I did what I half meant to do, and there were
no sound. That would be ghastly. And surely there would be no sound. And
if sound there were, wouldn’t that be worse still? My hand drew
back, wavered, suddenly closed on the knob. I heard the scrape of the
wire--and then, from somewhere within the heart of the shut house, a
tinkle.
It had been the weakest, the puniest of noises. It had been no more than
is a fledgling’s first attempt at a twitter. But I was not judging it by
its volume. Deafening peals from steeples had meant less to me than that
one single note breaking the silence--in there. In there, in the dark,
the bell that had answered me was still quivering, I supposed, on its
wire. But there was no one to answer it, no footstep to come hither from
those recesses, making prints in the dust. Well, I could answer it;
and again my hand closed on the knob, unhesitatingly this time, pulling
further. That was my answer; and the rejoinder to it was more than I
had thought to hear--a whole quick sequence of notes, faint but clear,
playful, yet poignantly sad, like a trill of laughter echoing out of the
past, or even merely out of this neighbouring darkness. It was so like
something I had known, so recognisable and, oh, recognising, that I was
lost in wonder. And long must I have remained standing at that door,
for I heard the sound often, often. I must have rung again and again,
tenaciously, vehemently, in my folly.
ON SPEAKING FRENCH 1919.
Wherever two Englishmen are speaking French to a Frenchman you may
safely diagnose in the breast of one of the two humiliation, envy,
ill-will, impotent rage, and a dull yearning for vengeance; and you
can take it that the degree of these emotions is in exact ratio to the
superiority of the other man’s performance. In the breast of this other
are contempt, malicious amusement, conceit, vanity, pity, and joy in
ostentation; these, also, exactly commensurable with his advantage.
Strange and sad that this should be so; but so it is. French brings out
the worst in all of us--all, I mean, but the few, the lamentably far too
few, who cannot aspire to stammer some colloquial phrases of it.
Even in Victorian days, when England was more than geographically, was
psychologically an island, French made mischief among us, and was one
of the Devil’s favourite ways of setting brother against brother. But in
those days the bitterness of the weaker brother was a little sweetened
with disapproval of the stronger. To speak French fluently and
idiomatically and with a good accent--or with an idiom and accent
which to other rough islanders seemed good--was a rather suspect
accomplishment, being somehow deemed incompatible with civic worth. Thus
the weaker ones had not to drain the last lees of their shame, and the
stronger could not wholly rejoice in their strength. But the old saving
prejudice has now died out (greatly to the delight of the Devil), and
there seems no chance that it will be revived.
Of other languages no harm comes. None of us--none, at any rate, outside
the diplomatic service--has a feeling that he ought to be master of