First and Last (25 page)

But now, to tell you the very core of my decision, it is this: The years that pass carry with them an increasing weight at once sombre and majestic. There are things belonging to youth which habit continues strangely longer than the season to which they properly belong: if, when we discover them to be too prolonged as cling to their survival, why, then, we eat dust. So long as we possess the illusion and so long as the dearest things of youth maintain unchanged, in one chamber of our life at least, our twentieth year, so long all is well. But there is a cold river which we must pass in our advance towards nothingness and age. In the passage of that stream we change: and you and I have passed it. There is no more endurance in that young mood of ours than in any other human thing. One always wakes from it at last. One sees what it is. The soul sees and counts with hard eyes the price at which a continuance of such high dreams must be purchased, and the heart has a prevision of the evil that the happy cheat will work as maturity is reached by each of us, and as each of us fully takes on the burden of the world.

Therefore I must not return.

Foolishly and without thinking of real things, acting as though indeed that life of dream and of illusion were still possible to me, I yesterday cut with great care a rose, one from the many that have now grown almost wild upon the great wall overlooking the Danube. Then ... I could not but smile to myself when I remembered how by the time that rose should have reached you every petal would be wasted and fallen in the long week's ride. There is a fixed term of life for roses also as for men. I do not cite this to you by way of parable. I have no heart for tricks of the pen to-night; but the two images came together, and you will understand. If I do not return, it is for the same reason that I could not send the rose.

Everybody knows, I suppose, that kind of landscape in which hills seem to lie in a regular manner, fold on fold, one range behind the other, until, at last, behind them all some higher and grander range dominates and frames the whole.

The infinite variety of light and air and accident of soil provide all men save those who live in the great plains with examples of this sort. The traveller in the dry air of California or of Spain, watching great distances from the heights, will recollect such landscapes all his life. They were the reward of his long ascents and the visions which attended his effort as he climbed up to the ridge of his horizon. Such a landscape does a man see from the Western edges of the Guadarrama, looking eastward and south toward the very distant hills that guard Toledo and the Gulf of the Tagus. Such a landscape does a man see at sunrise from the highest of the Cevennes looking right eastward to the dawn as it comes up in the pure and cold air beyond the Alps, and shows you the falling of the foothills to the Rhone. And by such a landscape is a man gladdened when upon the escarpments of the Tuolumne he turns back and looks westward over the plain towards the vast range.

The experience of such a sight is one peculiar in travel, or, for that matter, if a man is lucky enough to enjoy it at home, insistent and reiterated upon the mind of the home-dwelling man. Such a landscape, for instance, makes a man praise God if his house is upon the height of Mendip, and he can look over falling hills right over the Vale of Severn toward the ridge above ridge of the Welsh solemnities beyond, until the straight line and high of the Black Mountains ends his view.

It is the character of these landscapes to suggest at once a vastness, diversity, and seclusion. When a man comes upon them unexpectedly he can forget the perpetual toil of men and imagine that those who dwell below in the near side before him are exempt from the necessities of this world. When such a landscape is part of a man's dwelling-place, though he well knows that the painful life of men within those hills is the same hard business that it is throughout the world, yet his knowledge is modified and comforted by the permanent glory of the thing he sees.

The distant and high range that bounds his view makes a sort of veiling, cutting it off and guarding it from whatever may be beyond. The succession of lower ranges suggests secluded valleys, and the reiterated woods, distant and more distant, convey an impression of fertility more powerful than that of corn in harvest upon the lowlands.

Sometimes it is a whole province that is thus grasped by the eye, sometimes in the summer haze but a few miles; always this scenery inspires the onlooker with a sense of completion and of repose, and at the same time, I think, with worship and with awe.

Now one such group of valleys there was, hill above hill, forest above forest, and beyond it a great noble range, unwooded and high against heaven, guarding it, which I for my part knew when first I knew anything of this world. There is a high place under fir trees, a place of sand and bracken, in South England whence such a view was always present to eye in childhood and "There," said I to myself (even in childhood) "a man should make his habitation." In those valleys is the proper off-set for man.

And so there was.

It was a little place which had grown up as my county grows. The house throwing out arms and layers. One room was panelled in the oak of the seventeenth century--but that had been a novelty in its time, for the walls upon which the panels stood were of the late fifteenth, oak and brick intermingled. Another room was large and light built in the manner of one hundred and fifty years ago, which people call Georgian. It had been thrown out south (which is quite against our older custom, for our older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to present a corner to the south-west and the storms. So they stand still). It had round it a solid cornice which the modern men of the towns would have called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then, further on this house had modern roominess stretching in one new wing after another; and it had a great steading and there was a copse and some six acres of land. Over a deep ravine looked the little town that was the mother of the place, and altogether it was enclosed, silent, and secure.

"The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm." If this is not a Chinese proverb it ought to be. That little farm and steading and those six acres, that ravine, those trees, that aspect of the little mothering town; the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range beyond, will not be mine.

For all I know, some man quite unacquainted with that land took them grumbling for a debt; or again, for all I know, they may have been bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man who, seeing them, perpetually regretted the flat marshes of the fens. One day, up high on Egdean Side, not thinking of such things, through a gap in the trees I saw again after so many years, set one behind the other, the forests wave upon wave, the summer heat, the high, bare range guarding all, and in the midst of that landscape, set like a toy, the little Sabine Farm.

Then I said to it, "Continue. Go and serve whom you will, my little Sabine Farm. You were not mine because you would not be, and you are not mine at all to-day. You will regret it perhaps, and perhaps you will not. There was verse in you, perhaps, or prose, or--infinitely more!--contentment for a man (for all I know). But you refused. You lost your chance. Goodbye." And with that I went on into the wood and beyond the gap, and saw the sight no more.

It was ten years since I had seen it last. It may be ten years before I see it again, or it may be for ever. But as I went through the woods saying to myself:

"You lost your chance, my little Sabine Farm, you lost your chance!" another part of me at once replied:

"Ah! And so did
you
!"

Then, by way of riposte, I answered in my mind:

"Not at all, for the chance I never had, but what I lost was my desire."

"No, not your desire," said the voice to me within, "but the fulfilment of it, in which you would have lost your desire." And when that reply came I naturally turned as all men do on hearing such interior replies, to a general consideration of regret, and was prepared, if any honest publisher should have come whistling through that wood, with an offer proper to the occasion, namely, to produce no less than five volumes on the Nature of Regret, its mortal sting, its bitter-sweetness, its power to keep alive in man the pure passions of the soul, its hints at immortality, its memory of Heaven. But the wood was empty of publishers. The offer did not come. The moment was lost. The five volumes will hardly now be written. In place of them I offer poor this, which you may take or leave. But I beg leave before I end to cite certain words very nobly attached to that great inn "The Griffin," which has its foundation set far off in another place, in the town of March, in the Fen Land:

"England my desire, what have you not refused?"

One day I met a man who was sitting quite silent near Whitney, in the Thames Valley, in a very large, long, low inn that stands in those parts, or at least stood then, for whether it stands now or not depends upon the Fussyites, whose business it is to Fuss, and in their Fussing to disturb mankind.

He had nothing to say for himself at all, and he looked not gloomy but sad. He was tall and thin, with high cheekbones. His face was the colour of leather that has been some time in the weather, and he despised us altogether: he would not say a word to us, until one of the company said, rising from his meat and drink: "Very well, there's a thing we shall never know till the end of the world" (he was talking about some discussion or other which the young men had been holding together). "There's a thing we shall never know till the end of the world--and about that nobody knows!"

"You will pardon me," said the tall, thin, and elderly man with a face like leather that has been exposed to the weather, "I know about the End of the World, for I have been there."

This was so interesting that we all sat down again to listen.

"I wasn't talking of place, but of time," murmured the young man whom the stranger had answered.

"I cannot help that," said the stranger decisively; "the End of the World is the End of the World, and whether you are talking of space or of time it does not matter, for when you have got to the end you have got to the end, as may be proved in several ways."

"How did you get to it?" said one of our companions.

"That is very simply answered," said the elder man; "you get to it by walking straight in front of you."

"Anyone could do that," said the other.

"Anyone could," said the elder man, "but nobody does. I did.... When I was quite a boy in my father's parsonage (for my father was a parson), having heard so much about the End of the World and seeing that people's descriptions of it differed so much and that everybody was quite sure of his own, I used to take my father's friends and guests aside privately, for I was afraid to take my father himself, and I used to ask them how they knew what the End of the World was really like, and whether they had seen it. Some laughed, others were silent, and others were angry; but no one gave me any information. At last I decided (and it was very wise of me) that the only way to find out a thing of that sort was to find it out for one's self, and not to go by hearsay, so I determined to go straight on without stopping until I got to the End of the World."

"Which way did you walk?" said yet another of my companions.

"Young man," said the stranger, with solemnity, "I walked westward toward the setting sun ... I walked and I walked and I walked, day after day and year after year. Whenever I came to the seacoast I would take work on board a ship--and remember it is always easy to get work if you will take the wages that are offered, and always difficult to get it if you will not. Well, then, I went in this way through all known lands and over all known seas, until at last I came to the shore of a sea beyond which (so the people told me who lived there) there was no further shore. 'I cannot help that,' said I; 'I have not yet come to the End of the World, and it is common sense that such a lot of water must have something at the back of it to hold it up; besides which there is a strong wind blowing out of the gates of the west and from the sunset. Now that wind must rise somewhere, and I am going on to see where it rises.' One of them was kind enough to lend me a boat with oars; I thanked him prettily, and then I set out to row toward the End of the World, taking with me two or three days' provisions.

"When I had rowed a long time I went asleep, and when I woke up next morning I rowed again all day until the second night I went to sleep. On the third day I rowed again: a little before sunset on the third day I saw before me high hills, all in peaks like a great saw. On the very highest of the peaks there were streaks of snow, and at about six o'clock in the afternoon I grounded my boat upon that gravelly shore and pulled it up upon the shingle, though it was evident either that the tide was high or that there was no tide in these silent places.

"I offered up a prayer to the genius of the land, and tied the painter of the boat to two great stones, so that no wave reaching it might move it, and then I went on inland. When I had gone a little way I saw a signpost on which was written, 'To the End of the World One Mile' and there was a rough track along which it pointed. I went along this track. Everything was completely silent. There were no birds, there was no wind, there was nothing in the sky. But one thing I did notice, which was that the sun was much larger than it used to be, and that as I went along this last mile or so it seemed to get larger still--but that may have been my imagination, for I must tell you my imagination is pretty strong.

"Well then, gentlemen, when I had gone a mile or so I saw another signpost, on which there was a large board marked 'Danger,' and a hundred yards beyond the track went between two great dark rocks--and there I was! The road had stopped short; it was broken off, jagged, just like a torn bit of paper ... and there was the End of the World."

"How do you mean?" said one of the younger men in an awed tone.

"What I say," said the stranger decidedly. "I had come to the end; there was nothing beyond. You looked down over a precipice where there was moss and steep grass, and on the ledges trees far below, and then more precipice, and then--oh, miles below--a few more trees or so clinging to the steep, then more precipice, and then darkness; and far away before me was the whole expanse of sky; and in the midst of it I saw the broad red sun setting into the brume; it was not yet dark enough to see the stars, and there was no moon in the sky.