Chapter VIII: Part 8

I had heard this sort of Latin in many places, some lonely and some populous. I had heard it once from a chemist at Perpignan who dressed a wound of mine, and this was the first time I heard it. Very often after in the valleys of the Pyrenees, in the Cerdagne, and especially in Andorra, hundreds of men had spoken to me in Catalan. At Urgel, that notable city where there is only one shop and where the streets are quite narrow and Moorish, a woman and six or seven men had spoken Catalan to me for nearly one hour: it was in a cellar surrounded by great barrels, and I remember it well. So, also, on the River Noguera, coming up again into the hills, a girl who took the toll at the wooden bridge had spoken Catalan to me. But none of these had I ever answered so that they could understand, and on this account I was very grieved to hear the Catalan tongue, though I remembered that if I spoke to them with ordinary Spanish words or in French with a strong Southern accent they would usually have some idea of what I was saying.

As the evening fell the cables were slipped without songs, and with great dignity, rapidity, and order the ship was got away.

I knew a man once, a seafaring man, a Scotchman, with whom I travelled on a very slow old boat in the Atlantic, who told me that the Northern people of Europe were bravest in a unexpected danger, but the Southern in a danger long foreseen. He said he had known many of both kinds, and had served under them and commanded them. He said that in sudden accident the Northerner was the more reliable man, but that if an act of great danger had to be planned and coolly achieved, then the Southerner was strongest in doing what he had to do. He said that in taking the ground he would rather have a Northern, but in bringing in a short ship a Southern crew.

He was a man who observed closely, and never said a thing because he had read it. Indeed, he did not read, and he had in a little hanging shelf above his bunk only four or five tattered books, and even these were magazines. I remembered his testimony now as I watched these Catalans letting the ship go free, and I believed it, comparing it with history and the things I had myself seen. They did everything with such regularity and so silently that it was a different deck from what one would have had in the heave of the Channel. With Normans or Bretons, or Cornishmen or men of Kent, but especially with men from London river, there would have been all sorts of cursing and bellowing, and they could not have touched a rope without throwing themselves into attitudes of violence. But these men took the sea quite quietly, nor could you tell from their faces which was rich and which was poor.

It was not till the ship was out throbbing swiftly Over the smooth sea and darkness had fallen that they began to sing. Then those of them who were not working gathered together with a stringed instrument forward and sang of pity and of death. One of them said to me, "Knight, can your grace sing?" I told him that I could sing, certainly, but that my singing was unpleasing, and that I only knew foreign songs. He said that singing was a great solace, and desired to hear a song of my own country. So I sang them a song out of Sussex, to which they listened in deep silence, and when it was concluded their leader snapped and twanged at the strings again and began another song about the riding of horses in the hills.

So we passed the short night until the sky upon our quarter grew faintly pale and the little wind that rises before morning awakened the sea.

THE IDEA OF A PILGRIMAGE

A pilgrimage is, of course, an expedition to some venerated place to which a vivid memory of sacred things experienced, or a long and wonderful history of human experience in divine matters, or a personal attraction affecting the soul impels one. This is, I say, its essence. So a pilgrimage may be made to the tomb of Descartes, in Paris, or it may be a little walk uphill to a neighbouring and beloved grave, or a modern travel, even in luxury, on the impulse to see something that greatly calls one.

But there has always hung round the idea of a pilgrimage, with all people and at all times--I except those very rare and highly decadent generations of history in which no pilgrimages are made, nor any journeys, save for curiosity or greed--there has always hung round it, I say, something more than the mere objective. Just as in general worship you will have noble gowns, vivid colour, and majestic music (symbols, but necessary symbols of the great business you are at); so, in this particular case of worship, clothes, as it were, and accoutrements, gather round one's principal action. I will visit the grave of a saint or of a man whom I venerate privately for his virtues and deeds, but on my way I wish to do something a little difficult to show at what a price I hold communion with his resting-place, and also on toy way I will see all I can of men and things; for anything great and worthy is but an ordinary thing transfigured, and if I am about to venerate a humanity absorbed into the divine, so it behoves me on my journey to it to enter into and delight in the divine that is hidden in everything. Thus I may go upon a pilgrimage with no pack and nothing but a stick and my clothes, but I must get myself into the frame of mind that carries an invisible burden, an eye for happiness and suffering, humour, gladness at the beauty of the world, a readiness for raising the heart at the vastness of a wide view, and especially a readiness to give multitudinous praise to God; for a man that goes on a pilgrimage does best of all if he starts out (I say it of his temporal object only) with the heart of a wanderer, eager for the world as it is, forgetful of maps or descriptions, but hungry for real colours and men and the seeming of things. This desire for reality and contact is a kind of humility, this pleasure in it a kind of charity.

It is surely in the essence of a pilgrimage that all vain imaginations are controlled by the greatness of our object. Thus, if a man should go to see the place where (as they say) St. Peter met our Lord on the Appian Way at dawn, he will not care very much for the niggling of pedants about this or that building, or for the rhetoric of posers about this or that beautiful picture. If a thing in his way seem to him frankly ugly he will easily treat it as a neutral, forget it and pass it by. If, on the contrary, he find a beautiful thing, whether done by God or by man, he will remember and love it. This is what children do, and to get the heart of a child is the end surely of any act of religion. In such a temper he will observe rather than read, and though on his way he cannot do other than remember the names of places, saying, "Why, these are the Alps of which I have read! Here is Florence, of which I have heard so many rich women talk!" yet he will never let himself argue and decide or put himself, so to speak, before an audience in his own mind--for that is pride which all of us moderns always fall into. He will, on the contrary, go into everything with curiosity and pleasure, and be a brother to the streets and trees and to all the new world he finds. The Alps that he sees with his eyes will be as much more than the names he reads about, the Florence of his desires as much more than the Florence of sickly-drawing-rooms; as beauty loved is more than beauty heard of, or as our own taste, smell, hearing, touch and sight are more than the vague relations of others. Nor does religion exercise in our common life any function more temporarily valuable than this, that it makes us be sure at least of realities, and look very much askance at philosophies and imaginaries and academic whimsies.

Look, then, how a pilgrimage ought to be nothing but a nobler kind of travel, in which, according to our age and inclination, we tell our tales, or draw our pictures, or compose our songs. It is a very great error, and one unknown before our most recent corruptions, that the religious spirit should be so superficial and so self-conscious as to dominate our method of action at special times and to be absent at others. It is better occasionally to travel in one way or another to some beloved place (or to some place wonderful and desired for its associations), haunted by our mission, yet falling into every ordinary levity, than to go about a common voyage in a chastened and devout spirit. I fear this is bad theology, and I propound it subject to authority. But, surely, if a man should say, "I will go to Redditch to buy needles cheap," and all the way take care to speak no evil of his neighbour, to keep very sober, to be punctual in his accounts, and to say his regular prayers with exactitude, though that would be a good work, yet if he is to be a _pilgrim_ (and the Church has a hundred gates), I would rather for the moment that he went off in a gay, tramping spirit, not oversure of his expenses, not very careful of all he said or did, but illuminated and increasingly informed by the great object of his voyage, which is here not to buy or sell needles, or what not, but to loose the mind and purge it in the ultimate contemplation of something divine.

There is, indeed, that kind of pilgrimage which some few sad men undertake because their minds are overburdened by a sin or tortured with some great care that is not of their own fault. These are excepted from the general rule, though even to these a very human spirit comes by the way, and the adventures of inns and foreign conversations broaden the world for them and lighten their burden. But this kind of pilgrimage is rare and special, having its peculiar virtues. The common sort (which how many men undertake under another name!) is a separate and human satisfaction of a need, the fulfilling of an instinct in us, the realisation of imagined horizons, the reaching of a goal. For whoever yet that was alive reached an end and could say he was satisfied? Yet who has not desired so to reach an end and to be satisfied? Well, pilgrimage is for the most a sort of prefiguring or rehearsal. A man says: "I will play in show (but a show stiffened with a real and just object) at that great part which is all we can ever play. Here I start from home, and there I reach a goal, and on the way I laugh and watch, sing and work. Now I am at ease and again hampered; now poor, now rich, weary towards the end and at last arrived at that end. So my great life is, and so this little chapter shall be." Thus he packs up the meaning of life into a little space to be able to look at it closely, as men carry with them small locket portraits of their birthplace or of those they love.

If a pilgrimage is all this, it is evident that however careless, it must not be untroublesome. It would be a contradiction of pilgrimage to seek to make the journey short and rapid, merely consuming the mind for nothing, as is our modern habit; for they seem to think nowadays that to remain as near as possible to what one was at starting, and to one's usual rut, is the great good of travel (as though a man should run through the _Iliad_ only to note the barbarous absurdity of the Greek characters, or through Catullus for the sake of discovering such words as were like enough to English). That is not the spirit of a pilgrimage at all. The pilgrim is humble and devout, and human and charitable, and ready to smile and admire; therefore he should comprehend the whole of his way, the people in it, and the hills and the clouds, and the habits of the various cities. And as to the method of doing this, we may go bicycling (though that is a little flurried) or driving (though that is luxurious and dangerous, because it brings us constantly against servants and flattery); but the best way of all is on foot, where one is a man like any other man, with the sky above one, and the road beneath, and the world on every side, and time to see all.

So also I designed to walk, and did, when I visited the tombs of the Apostles.

THE ARENA

It was in Paris, in his room on the hill of the University, that a traveller woke and wondered what he should do with his day. In some way--I cannot tell how--ephemeral things had captured his mind in the few hours he had already spent in the city. There is no civilisation where the various parts stand so separate as they do with the French. You may live in Paris all your life and never suspect that there is a garrison of eighty thousand men within call. You may spend a year in a provincial town and never hear that the large building you see daily is a bishop's palace. Or you may be the guest of the bishop for a month, and remain under the impression that somewhere, hidden away in the place, there is a powerful clique of governing atheists whom, somehow, you never run across. And so this traveller, who knew Paris like his pocket, and had known it since he could speak plain, had managed to gather up in this particular visit all the impressions which are least characteristic of the town. He had dined with a friend at Pousset's; he had passed the evening at the Exhibition, and he had had a bare touch of the real thing in the Rue de Tournon; but even there it was in the company of foreigners. Therefore, I repeat, he woke up next morning wondering what he should do, for the veneer of Paris is the thinnest in the world, and he had exhausted it in one feverish day.

Luckily for him, the room in which he lay was French, and had been French for a hundred years. You looked out of the window into a sky cut by the tall Mansard roofs of the eighteenth century; and over the stones of what had been the Scotch College you could see below you at the foot of the hill all the higher points of the island--especially the Sainte Chapelle and the vast towers of the Cathedral. Then it suddenly struck him that the air was full of bells. Now, it is a curious thing, and one that every traveller will bear me out in, that you associate a country place with the sound of bells, but a capital never. Caen is noisy enough and Rouen big enough, one would think, to drown the memory of music; yet any one who has lived in his Normandy remembers their perpetual bells; and as for the admirable town of Chinon, where no one ever goes, I believe it is Ringing Island itself. But Paris one never thinks of as a place of bells. And yet there are bells enough there to take a man right into the past, and from there through fairyland to hell and out and back again.

If I were writing of the bells, I could make you a list of all the famous bells, living and dead, that haunt the city, and the tale of what they have done would be a history of France. The bell of the St. Bartholomew over against the Louvre, the tocsin of the Hotel de Ville that rang the knell of the Monarchy, the bell of St. Julien that is as old as the University, the old Bourdon of Notre Dame that first rang when St. Louis brought in the crown of thorns, and the peal that saluted Napoleon, and the new Bourdon that is made of the guns of Sebastopol, and the Savoyarde up on Montmartre, a new bell much larger than the rest. This morning the air was full of them. They came up to the height on which the traveller lay listening; they came clear and innumerable over the distant surge of the streets; he spent an hour wondering at such an unusual Parliament and General Council of Bells. Then he said to himself: "It must be some great feast of the Church." He was in a world he had never known before. He was like a man who gets into a strange country in a dream and follows his own imagination instead of suffering the pressure of outer things; or like a boy who wanders by a known river till he comes to unknown gardens.

So anxious was he to take possession at once of this discovery of his that he went off hurriedly without eating or drinking, thinking only of what he might find. He desired to embrace at one sight all that Paris was doing on a day which was full of St. Louis and of resurrection. The thoughts upon thoughts that flow into the mind from its impression, as water creams up out of a stone fountain at a river head, disturbed him, swelling beyond the possibility of fulfilment. He wished to see at once the fashionables in St. Clotilde and the Greek Uniates at St. Julien, and the empty Sorbonne and the great crowd of boys at Stanislas; but what he was going to see never occurred to him, for he thought he knew Paris too well to approach the cathedral.

Notre Dame is jealously set apart for special and well-advertised official things. If you know the official world you know the great church, and unless some great man had died, or some victory had been won, you would never go there to see how Paris took its religion. No midnight Mass is said in it; for the lovely carols of the Middle Ages you must go to St. Gervais, and for the pomp of the Counter-Reformation to the Madeleine, for soldiers to St. Augustin, for pilgrims to St. Etienne. Therefore no one would, ever have thought of going to the cathedral on this day, when an instinct and revelation of Paris at prayer filled the mind. Nevertheless, the traveller's feet went, of their own accord, towards the seven bridges, because the Island draws all Paris to it, and was drawing him along with the rest. He had meant perhaps to go the way that all the world has gone since men began to live on this river, and to follow up the Roman way across the Seine--a vague intention of getting a Mass at St. Merry or St. Laurent. But he was going as a dream sent him, without purpose or direction.

The sun was already very hot and the Parvis was blinding with light when he crossed the little bridge. Then he noticed that the open place had dotted about it little groups of people making eastward. The Parvis is so large that you could have a multitude scattered in it and only notice that the square was not deserted. There were no more than a thousand, perhaps, going separately to Notre Dame, and a thousand made no show in such a square. But when he went in through the doors he saw there something he had never seen before, and that he thought did not exist. It was as though the vague interior visions of which the morning had been so full had taken on reality.

You may sometimes see in modern picture galleries an attempt to combine the story from which proceeds the nourishing flame of Christianity with the crudities and the shameful ugliness of our decline. Thus, with others, a picture of our Lord and Mary Magdalen; all the figures except that of our Lord were dressed in the modern way. I remember another of our Lord and the little children, where the scene is put into a village school. Now, if you can imagine (which it is not easy to do) such an attempt to be successful, untouched by the love of display and eccentricity, and informing--as it commonly pretends to inform--our time with an idea, then you will understand what the traveller saw that morning in Notre Dame. The church seemed the vastest cavern that had ever been built for worship. Coming in from the high morning, the half-light alone, with which we always connect a certain majesty and presence, seemed to have taken on amplitude as well. The incense veiled what appeared to be an infinite lift of roof, and the third great measurement--the length of nave that leads like a forest ride to the lights of the choir--were drawn out into an immeasurable perspective by reason of a countless crowd of men and women divided by the narrow path of the procession. So full was this great place that a man moved slowly and with difficulty, edging through such a mass of folk as you may find at holiday time in a railway station, or outside a theatre--never surely before was a church like this, unless, indeed, some very rich or very famous man happened to be gracing it. But here to-day, for nothing but the function proper to the feast, the cathedral was paved and floored with human beings. In the galilee there was a kind of movement so that a man could get up further, and at last the traveller found a place to stand in just on the edge of the open gangway, at the very end of the nave. He peered up this, and saw from the further end, near the altar, the head of the procession approaching, which was (in his fancy of that morning) like the line of the Faith, still living and returning in a perpetual circle to revivify the world. Moreover, there was in the advent of the procession a kind of climax. As it came nearer, the great crowd moved more quickly towards it; children were lifted up, and by one of Sully's wide pillars a group of three young soldiers climbed on a rail to see the great sight better. The Cardinal-Archbishop, very old and supported by his priests, half walked and half tottered down the length of the people; his head, grown weary with age, barely supported the mitre, from which great jewels, false or true, were flashing. In his hand he had a crozier that was studded in the same way with gems, and that seemed to be made of gold; the same hands had twisted the metal of it as had hammered the hinges of the cathedral doors. Certainly there here appeared one of the resurrections of Europe. The matter of life seemed to take on a fuller stuff and to lift into a dimension above that in which it ordinarily moves. The thin, narrow, and unfruitful experience of to-day and yesterday was amplified by all the lives that had made our life, and the blood of which we are only a last expression, the race that is older even than Rome seemed in this revelation of continuity to be gathered up into one intense and passionate moment. The pagan altar of Tiberius, the legend of Dionysius, the whole circle of the wars came into this one pageant, and the old man in his office and his blessing was understood by all the crowd before him to transmit the centuries. A rich woman thrust a young child forward, and he stopped and stooped with difficulty to touch its hair. As he approached the traveller it was as though there had come great and sudden news to him, or the sound of unexpected and absorbing music.

The procession went on and closed; the High Mass followed; it lasted a very long time, and the traveller went out before the crowd had moved and found himself again in the glare of the sun on the Parvis.

He went over the bridge to find his eating-shop near the archives, and eat the first food of that day, thinking as he went that certainly there are an infinity of lives side by side in our cities, and each ignores the rest; and yet, that to pass from what we know of these to what we do not--though it is the most wonderful journey in the world--is one that no one undertakes unless accident or a good fortune pushes him on. He desired to make another such journey.

He came back to find me in London, and spoke to me of Paris as of a city newly discovered: as I listened I thought I saw an arena.

In a plain of the north, undistinguished by great hills, open to the torment of the sky, the gods had traced an arena wherein were to be fought out the principal battles of a later age.

* * * * *

Spirits lower than the divine, spirits intermediate, have been imagined by men wiser than ourselves to have some power over the world--a power which we might vanquish in a special manner, but still a power. To such conceptions the best races of Europe cling; upon such a soil are grown the legends that tell us most about our dark, and yet enormous, human fate. These intermediate spirits have been called in all the older creeds "the gods." It is in the nature of the Church to frown upon these dreams; but I, as I listened to him, saw clearly that plain wherein the gods had marked out an arena for mankind.

It was oval, as should be a theatre for any show, with heights around it insignificant, but offering a vantage ground whence could be watched the struggle in the midst. There was a sacred centre--an island and a mount--and, within the lines, so great a concourse of gladiatorial souls as befits the greatest of spectacles. I say, I do not know how far such visions are permitted, nor how far the right reason of the Church condemns them; but the dream returned to me very powerfully, recalling my boyhood, when the traveller told me his story. I also therefore went and caught the fresh gale of the stream of the Seine in flood, and saw the many roofs of Paris quite clear after the rain, and read the writings of the men I mixed with and heard the noise of the city.

* * * * *

It is not upon the paltry level of negations or of decent philosophies, it is in the action and hot mood of creative certitudes that the French battle is engaged. The little sophists are dumb and terrified, their books are quite forgotten. I myself forgot (in those few days by that water and in that city) the thin and ineffectual bodies of ignorant men who live quite beyond any knowledge of such fires. The printed things which tired and poor writers put down for pay no longer even disturbed me; the reflections, the mere phantasms of reality, with which in a secluded measure we please our intellect, faded. I was like a man who was in the centre of two lines that meet in war; to such a man this fellow's prose on fighting and that one's verse, this theory of strategy, or that essay upon arms, are not for one moment remembered. Here (in the narrow street which I knew and was now following) St. Bernard had upheld the sacrament in the shock of the first awakening--in that twelfth century, when Julian stirred in his sleep. Beyond the bridge, in Roman walls that still stand carefully preserved, the Church of Gaul had sustained Athanasius, and determined the course of the Christian centuries. I had passed upon my way the vast and empty room where had been established the Terror; where had been forced by an angry and compelling force the full return of equal laws upon Europe. Who could remember in such an air the follies and the pottering of men who analyse and put in categories and explain the follies of wealth and of old age?

Good Lord, how little the academies became! I remembered the phrases upon one side and upon the other which still live in the stones of the city, carved and deep, but more lasting than are even the letters of their inscription. I remembered the defiant sentence of Mad Dolet on his statue there in the Quarter, the deliberate perversion of Plato, "And when you are dead you shall no more be anything at all." I remembered the "Ave Crux spes Unica"; and St. Just's "The words that we have spoken will never be lost on earth"; and Danton's "Continual Daring," and the scribbled Greek on the walls of the cathedral towers. For not only are the air and the voice, but the very material of this town is filled with words that remain. Certainly the philosophies and the negations dwindled to be so small as at last to disappear, and to leave only the two antagonists. Passion brooded over the silence of the morning; there was great energy in the cool of the spring air, and up above, the forms the clouds were taking were forms of gigantic powers.

I came, as the traveller had come, into the cathedral. It was not yet within half an hour of the feast. There was still room to be found, though with every moment the nave and the aisles grew fuller, until one doubted how at the end so great a throng could be dismissed. They were of all kinds. Some few were strangers holding in their hands books about the building. Some few were devout men on travel, and praying at this great office on the way: men from the islands, men from the places that Spain has redeemed for the future in the new world. I saw an Irishman near me, and two West Indians also, half negro, like the third of the kings that came to worship at the manger where Our Lord was born. For two hours and nearly three I saw and wondered at that immense concourse. The tribunes were full, the whole choir was black, moving with the celebrants, and all the church floor beyond and around me was covered and dark with expectant men.

The Bourdon that had summoned the traveller and driven mad so many despairs, sounded above me upon this day with amplitude and yet with menace. The silence was a solace when it ceased to boom. The Creed, the oldest of our chaunts, filled and completed those walls; it was as though at last a battle had been joined, and in that issue a great relief ran through the crowd.

* * * * *

From such a temple I came out at last. They had thrown the western doors wide open, the doors whose hinges man scarcely could have hammered and to whose miracle legend has lent its aid; the midday, now captured by the sun, came right into the hollow simplicity of the nave, and caught the river of people as they flowed outwards; but even that and the cry of the Benediction from the altar gave no greater peace than an appeal to combat. In the air outside that other power stood waiting to conquer or to fail.

I came out, as from a camp, into the civilian debate, the atmosphere of the spectators. The permanent and toppling influence against which this bulwark of ours, the Faith, was reared (as we say) by God Himself, shouted in half the prints, in half the houses. I sat down to read and compare (as it should be one's custom when one is among real and determining things) the writings of the extreme, that is of the leading men. I chose the two pamphleteers who are of equal weight in this war, but of whom one only is known as yet to us in England, and that the least.

I read their battle-cries. Their style was excellent; their good faith shone even in their style.

Since I had been upon phrases all these hours I separated and remembered the principal words of each. One said: "They will break their teeth against it. The Catholic Church is not to perish, for she has allies from outside Time." The other said: "How long will the death of this crucified god linger? How long will his agony crush men with its despair?"

But I read these two writers for my entertainment only, and in order to be acquainted with men around me; for on the quarrel between them I had long ago made up my mind.

AT THE SIGN OF THE LION

It was late, and the day was already falling when I came, sitting my horse Monster, to a rise of land. We were at a walk, for we had gone very far since early morning, and were now off the turf upon the hard road; moreover, the hill, though gentle, had been prolonged. From its summit I saw before me, as I had seen it a hundred times, the whole of the weald.

But now that landscape was transfigured, because many influences had met to make it, for the moment, an enchanted land. The autumn, coming late, had crowded it with colours; a slight mist drew out the distances, and along the horizon stood out, quite even and grey like mountains, the solemn presence of the Downs. Over all this the sky was full of storm.

In some manner which language cannot express, and hardly music, the vision was unearthly. All the lesser heights of the plain ministered to one effect, a picture which was to other pictures what the marvellous is to the experience of common things. The distant mills, the edges of heath and the pine trees, were as though they had not before been caught by the eyes of travellers, and would not, after the brief space of their apparition, be seen again. Here was a countryside whose every outline was familiar; and yet it was pervaded by a general quality of the uplifted and the strange. And for that one hour under the sunset the county did not seem to me a thing well known, but rather adored.

The glow of evening, which had seemed to put this horizon into another place and time than ours, warned me of darkness; and I made off the road to the right for an inn I knew of, that stands close to the upper Arun and is very good. Here an old man and his wife live easily, and have so lived for at least thirty years, proving how accessible is content. Their children are in service beyond the boundaries of the county, and are thus provided with sufficiency; and they themselves, the old people, enjoy a small possession which at least does not diminish, for, thank God, their land is free. It is a square of pasture bordered by great elms upon three sides of it, but on the fourth, towards the water, a line of pollard willows; and off a little way before the house runs Arun, sliding as smooth as Mincius, and still so young that he can remember the lake in the forest where he rose.

On such ancestral land these two people await without anxiety what they believe will be a kindly death. Nor is their piety of that violent and tortured kind which is associated with fear and with distress of earlier life; but they remain peasants, drawing from the earth they have always known as much sustenance for the soul as even their religion can afford them, and mixing that religion so intimately with their experience of the soil that, were they not isolated in an evil time, they would have set up some shrine about the place to sanctify it.

The passion and the strain which must accompany (even in the happiest and most secluded) the working years of life, have so far disappeared from them, that now they can no longer recall any circumstances other than those which they enjoy; so that their presence in a room about one, as they set rood before one or meet one at the door, is in itself an influence of peace.

In such a place, and with such hosts to serve him, be wears of the world retire for a little time, from an evening to a morning; and a man can enjoy a great refreshment. In such a place he will eat strongly and drink largely, and sleep well and deeply, and, when he saddles again for his journey, he will take the whole world new; nor are those intervals without their future value, for the memory of a complete repose is a sort of sacrament, and a viaticum for the weary lengths of the way.

The stable of this place is made of oak entirely, and, after more than a hundred years, the woodwork is still sound, save that the roof now falls in waves where the great beams have sagged a little under the pressure of the tiles. And these tiles are of that old hand-made kind which, whenever you find them, you will do well to buy; for they have a slight downward curve to them, and so they fit closer and shed the rain better than if they were flat. Also they do not slip, and thus they put less strain upon the timber. This excellent stable has no flooring but a packed layer of chalk laid on the ground; and the wooden manger is all polished and shining, where it has been rubbed by the noses of ten thousand horses since the great war. That polishing was helped, perhaps, by the nose of Percy's horse, and perhaps by the nose of some wheeler who in his time had dragged the guns back aboard, retreating through the night after Corunna. It is in every way a stable that a small peasant should put up for himself, without seeking money from other men. It is, therefore, a stable which your gaping scientists would condemn; and though as yet they have not got their ugly hands upon the dwellings of beasts as they have upon those of men, yet I often fear for this stable, and am always glad when I come back and find it there. For the men who make our laws are the same as those that sell us our bricks and our land and our metals; and they make the laws so that rebuilding shall go on: and vile rebuilding too.

Anyhow, this stable yet stands; and in none does the horse, Monster, take a greater delight, for he also is open to the influence of holiness. So I led him in, and tied him by the ancient headstall, and I rubbed him down, and I washed his feet and covered him with the rough rug that lay there. And when I had done all that, I got him oats from the neighbouring bin; for the place knew me well, and I could always tend to my own beast when I came there. And as he ate his oats, I said to him: "Monster, my horse, is there any place on earth where a man, even for a little time, can be as happy as the brutes? If there is, it is here at the Sign of The Lion." And Monster answered: "There is a tradition among us that, of all creatures that creep upon the earth, man is the fullest of sorrow."

I left him then, and went towards the house. It was quite dark, and the windows, with their square, large panes and true proportions, shone out and made it home. The room within received me like a friend. The open chimney at its end, round which the house is built, was filled with beech logs burning; and the candles, which were set in brass, mixed their yellow light with that of the fire. The long ceiling was low, as are the ceilings of Heaven. And oak was here everywhere also: in the beams and the shelves and the mighty table. For oak was, and will be again, the chief wood of the weald.

When they put food and ale before me, it was of the kind which has been English ever since England began, and which perhaps good fortune will preserve over the breakdown of our generation, until we have England back again. One could see the hops in the tankard, and one could taste the barley, until, more and more sunk into the plenitude of this good house, one could dare to contemplate, as though from a distant standpoint, the corruption and the imminent danger of the time through which we must lead our lives. And, as I so considered the ruin of the great cities and their slime, I felt as though I were in a fortress of virtue and of health, which could hold out through the pressure of the war. And I thought to myself: "Perhaps even before our children are men, these parts which survive from a better order will be accepted as models, and England will be built again."

This fantasy had not time, tenuous as it was, to disappear, before there came into that room a man whose gesture and bearing promised him to be an excellent companion, but in whose eyes I also perceived some light not ordinary. He was of middle age, fifty or more; his hair was crisp and grey, his face brown, as though he had been much upon the sea. He was tall in stature, and of some strength. He saluted me, and, when he had eaten, asked me if I also were familiar with this inn.

"Very familiar," I said; "and since I can enter it at any hour freely, it is now more familiar to me even than the houses that were once my homes. For nowadays we, who work in the State and are not idle, must be driven from one place to another; and only the very rich have certitude and continuity. But to them it is of no service; for they are too idle to take root in the soil."

"Yet I was of their blood," he said; "and there is in this county a home which should be mine. But nothing to-day is capable of endurance. I have not seen my home (though it is but ten miles from here) since I left it in my thirtieth year; and I too would rather come to this inn, which I know as you know it, than to any house in England; because I am certain of entry, and because I know what I shall find, and because what I find is what any man of this county should find, if the soul of it is not to disappear."

"You, then," I answered (we were now seated side by side before the fire with but one flickering candle behind us, and on the floor between us a port just younger than the host), "you, then, come here for much the same reason as do I?"

"And what is that?" said he.

"Why," said I, "to enjoy the illusion that Change can somewhere be arrested, and that, in some shape, a part at least of the things we love remains. For, since I was a boy and almost since I can remember, everything in this house has been the same; and here I escape from the threats of the society we know."

When I had said this, he was grave and silent for a little while; and then he answered:

"It is impossible, I think, after many years to recover any such illusion. Just as a young man can no longer think himself (as children do) the actor in any drama of his own choosing, so a man growing old (as am I) can no longer expect of any society--and least of all of his own--the gladness that comes from an illusion of permanence."

"For my part," I answered in turn, "I know very well, though I can conjure up this feeling of security, that it is very flimsy stuff; and I take it rather as men take symbols. For though these good people will at last perish, and some brewer--a Colonel of Volunteers as like as not--will buy this little field, and though for the port we are drinking there will be imperial port, and for the beer we have just drunk something as noisome as that port, and though thistles will grow up in the good pasture ground, and though, in a word, this inn will become a hotel and will perish, nevertheless I cannot but believe that England remains, and I do not think it the taking of a drug or a deliberate cheating of oneself to come and steep one's soul in what has already endured so long because it was proper to our country."

"All that you say," he answered, "is but part of the attempt to escape Necessity. Your very frame is of that substance for which permanence means death; and every one of all the emotions that you know is of its nature momentary, and must be so if it is to be alive."

"Yet there is a divine thirst," I said, "for something that will not so perish. If there were no such thirst, why should you and I debate such things, or come here to The Lion either of us, to taste antiquity? And if that thirst is there, it is a proof that there is for us some End and some such satisfaction. For my part, as I know of nothing else, I cannot but seek it in this visible good world. I seek it in Sussex, in the nature of my home, and in the tradition of my blood."

But he answered: "No; it is not thus to be attained, the end of which you speak. And that thirst, which surely is divine, is to be quenched in no stream that we can find by journeying, not even in the little rivers that run here under the combes of home."

MYSELF: "Well, then, what is the End?"

HE: "I have sometimes seen it clearly, that when the disappointed quest was over, all this journeying would turn out to be but the beginning of a much greater adventure, and that I should set out towards another place where every sense should be fulfilled, and where the fear of mutation should be set at rest."

MYSELF: "No one denies that such a picture in the mind haunts men their whole lives through, though, after they have once experienced loss and incompletion, and especially when they have caught sight a long way off of the Barrier which ends all our experience, they recognise that picture for a cheat; and surely nothing can save it? That which reasons in us may be absolute and undying; for it is outside Time. It escapes the gropings of the learned, and it has nothing to do with material things. But as for all those functions which we but half fulfil in life, surely elsewhere they cannot be fulfilled at all? Colour is for the eyes and music is for the ears; and all that we love so much comes in by channels that do not remain."

He: "Yet the Desire can only be for things that we have known; and the Desire, as you have said, is a proof of the thing desired, and, but for these things which we know, the words 'joy' and 'contentment' and 'fulfilment' would have no meaning."

MYSELF: "Why yes; but, though desires are the strongest evidence of truth, yet there is also desire for illusions, as there is a waking demand for things attainable, and a demand in dreams for things fantastic and unreal. Every analogy increasingly persuades us, and so does the whole scheme of things as we learn it, that, with our passing, there shall also pass speech and comfortable fires and fields and the voices of our children, and that, when they pass, we lose them for ever."

He: "Yet these things would not be, but for the mind which receives them; and how can we make sure what channels are necessary for the mind? and may not the mind stretch on? And you, since you reject my guess at what may be reserved for us, tell me, what is the End which we shall attain?"

MYSELF: "_Salva fide_, I cannot tell."

Then he continued and said: "I have too long considered these matters for any opposition between one experience and another to affect my spirit, and I know that a long and careful inquiry into any matter must lead the same man to opposing conclusions; but, for my part, I shall confidently expect throughout that old age, which is not far from me, that, when it ceases, I shall find beyond it things similar to those which I have known. For all I here enjoy is of one nature; and if the life of a man be bereft of them at last, then it is falsehood or metaphor to use the word 'eternal.'"

"You think, then," said I, "that some immortal part in us is concerned not only with our knowledge, but with our every feeling, and that our final satisfaction will include a sensual pleasure: fragrance, and landscape, and a visible home that shall be dearer even than these dear hills?"

"Something of the sort," he said, and slightly shrugged his shoulders. They were broad, as he sat beside me staring at the fire. They conveyed in their attitude that effect of mingled strength and weariness which is common to all who have travelled far and with great purpose, perpetually seeking some worthy thing which they could never find.

The fire had fallen. Flames no longer leapt from the beech logs; but on their under side, where a glow still lingered, embers fell.

THE AUTUMN AND THE FALL OF LEAVES

It is not true that the close of a life which ends in a natural fashion--life which is permitted to put on the pomp of death and to go out in glory--inclines the mind to repose. It is not true of a day ending nor the passing of the year, nor of the fall of leaves. Whatever permanent, uneasy question is native to men, comes forward most insistent and most loud at such times.

There is a house in my own county which is built of stone, whose gardens are fitted to the autumn. It has level alleys standing high and banked with stone. Their ornaments were carved under the influence of that restraint which marked the Stuarts. They stand above old ponds, and are strewn at this moment with the leaves of elms. These walks are like the Mailles of the Flemish cities, the walls of the French towns or the terraces of the Loire. They are enjoyed to-day by whoever has seen all our time go racing by; they are the proper resting-places of the aged, and their spirit is felt especially in the fall of leaves.

At this season a sky which is of so delicate and faint a blue as to contain something of gentle mockery, and certainly more of tenderness, presides at the fall of leaves. There is no air, no breath at all. The leaves are so light that they sidle on their going downward, hesitating in that which is not void to them, and touching at last so imperceptibly the earth with which they are to mingle, that the gesture is much gentler than a salutation, and even more discreet than a discreet caress.

They make a little sound, less than the least of sounds. No bird at night in the marshes rustles so slightly; no man, though men are the subtlest of living beings, put so evanescent a stress upon their sacred whispers or their prayers. The leaves are hardly heard, but they are heard just so much that men also, who are destined at the end to grow glorious and to die, look up and hear them falling.

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