Many furrows

by A. G. Gardiner

DREAM JOURNEYS

I had a singular dream last night. I found myself on Robinson Crusoe's Island and, curiously enough, in Robinson Crusoe's rôle. In the bright sunshine, by the sea-shore. I was turning over the stores of eatables, chiefly bags of potatoes, it seemed to me, that were lying about. There was abundance to go on with and I did not feel at all disturbed at the prospect of not being called for for many a long day. I was alone, but without the sense of solitude. Indeed, I was entirely happy and free from care. I feel, even now that I am awake, the glow of the warm sunshine and the peace of the sands and the sea. Most dreams are easily traceable to some waking circumstance, and this quite enjoyable spiritual experience was, I suppose, due to a conversation I had had about Honolulu and my regret that I was never likely to see the islands of the Pacific. The friendly spirit who has charge of my dreams evidently took the hint and wafted me away to Juan Fernandez. I am half-disposed, so pleasant is the memory, to regret that he did not leave me there, wrapped in immortal dreams of plenty, peace and sunshine.

I shall repeat the experiment of nudging my amiable djinn into agreeable activity. I have a great many schemes to put before him, and if my friends discover that I am talking with enthusiasm about Pizarro they will know that I am putting in a plea with the director of dreams for a trip to Peru, and that if I am unusually concerned, even distressed, about the fate of Mummery, or the importance of conquering Mount Everest, I have in mind the possibility of a climbing excursion in the Himalayas. It is an excellent way of filling up the blanks in one's experience.

As we get on in years we become conscious of those blanks. We feel that we are in danger of missing much of the show we came to see. While we are young, say, up to fifty, we are not troubled. There seems plenty of time still to do everything worth doing, and see everything worth seeing. But after fifty the horizon shrinks most alarmingly, or perhaps it would be truer to say that it expands most alarmingly, and we find that, not only is Heaven, as Hood said, farther off than it seems in childhood, but that the desirable places of the earth have become more inaccessible. When I was a boy and had my imagination stirred by tales of the backwoods and Russell's songs about

The land of the free
Where the mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea,

I had no doubt that I should one day roll down with it, probably in a canoe, with a friendly Indian. Everything seemed possible then. Life was so enormously long an affair that the only disturbing thought was how you would be able to fill it up, and you had no more idea of missing a trip up the Amazon or seeing the Rockies and Niagara and the Grand Cañon when you grew up than of not being privileged to smoke a pipe or to have a latchkey or to go to Lord's or the Oval and see Grace whenever you felt inclined.

In this comfortable conviction that we shall do everything in good time we jog along doing nothing in particular, getting more and more like the donkey we used to see at Carisbrooke Castle years ago, tramping round and round its tread-mill without ever reaching anywhere. We are not disquieted. We feel that any day in the infinite days before us we shall be threading the Thousand Islands or climbing the Heights of Abraham, or seeing the sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset in Venice, or the dawn coming up like thunder on the road to Mandalay, or standing in the Coliseum at Rome or among the ruins of Carthage or Timgad, or sailing among the isles of Greece or catching the spicy breezes that, according to the hymn of the good Bishop Heber, whom we could not suspect of romancing, come from Ceylon's favoured isle.

And so with other things. One day, assuredly, we shall take to horse-riding, and canter gaily round Rotten Row, or we shall go yachting in the Mediterranean or shooting in Scotland. And think of the books we shall read in the enormous leisure that lies before us. There is that fellow Karl Marx, for example. He certainly must be read—some day. It is absurd not to know what he said, when all the world goes on babbling so learnedly about him. No doubt he is a dull fellow, but we cannot, of course, leave the world without knowing why he created such a hubbub. And there are a lot of other high-brows that we shall become acquainted with in good time. We shall really study those categorical imperatives of the illustrious Kant, and the monism of Spinoza, and the Leviathan and the Novum Organum, and a score of other solemn books that ought to be read and must be read—some day. We are not worried about these things. We have years and years before us, and shall need some stout fellows like these to make the time pass by.

That is how we drift until, somewhere in the fifties, we begin to suspect that we are cutting it rather fine, and that all those riches of experience that we confidently expected to enjoy and those intellectual conquests that we intended to make are slipping beyond our grasp. Karl Marx is still joyfully unthumbed, the Novum Organum still beckons us unavailingly from the abode where the eternal are, and we are still hazy about the categorical imperatives of the illustrious Kant. The call of the mighty Missouri falls faint on our ears, and Ceylon's spicy breezes we have to take at second-hand from the saintly Heber. We are chained to the No. 16 bus to Cricklewood or the tube to Shepherd's Bush, and when we break loose we find ourselves on the pier at Brighton or heroically scaling Beachy Head. We pass our dreams of adventure on to hopeful and undazzled youth, browsing greedily in the breathless pages of Prescott. We are not even sure that we want to go now, so habituated have we become to the familiar tread-mill. I daresay the Carisbrooke donkey would have been broken-hearted at the idea of a trip to Cowes. We are like Johnson when he was asked if he would not like to see Giant's Causeway. "Sir, I should like to see it, but I should not like to go to see it."

It would be pleasant if we could educate our dreams to spirit us away without all the trouble of tickets and luggage and travel to the sights and experiences we have missed. Do not tell me it would be an idle illusion. There was no illusion in my island. I can see it in my mind as clearly as any place I ever visited in the flesh, and if I had the skill I could draw its hills and paint its tranquil sea and sunny sands for you. To-night I hope to spend with Mummery in the Alps.