So after breakfast he set off alone, with a packet of sandwiches in one pocket and the forbidden book in the other. He followed the little track amidst the bracken, and, having mounted, looked down on the watered valley and across it at the opposing hills, and his love and need of the place leaped in him like a thing alive, and mingled with the steady happiness of doing his chosen work.
He remembered the summer evening of the year before, when he had come home from Oxford for the last time. He returned, having done the thing he meant to do, and his degree was not a disappointment even to himself, but neither was it a surprise; and if it was possible to have a deeper satisfaction than that of holding the thing for which he had reached out, it was in the sure knowledge of the use to which that thing must be put. An earlier generation might have made a preacher of him, his own pointed to the school and not the church. He believed he had been born to teach; he found his most potent temptation in his lust for giving knowledge, and though not the least worthy of desires, it was none the less a self-indulgence. But its gratification was not always pleasant, and after suffering some of the sharp pangs that youth knows how to inflict on youth, he learnt to hold his tongue among his peers. He had that cruel lesson in his first year, and for the other three he contented himself with listening. The power of observation taught by loneliness was turned on the men who seemed so light-heartedly young to him. He liked them, he had a kind of envy of them, and watched the gambols of their minds and bodies with the melancholy pleasure of an old sheep looking on the lambs of spring. He had the good sense not to try imitation, but he spent on them the study which he was incapable of withholding from anything that fronted him, and if he saw little of women during those years, he had, at the end of them, as good an understanding of men as his youth could compass, and one that steadied his belief that there was no higher calling than the one he meant to follow. The contest in his mind, as he walked homeward that night, a year ago, had been between ambition and a duty whose existence he did not disclaim. Here was his mother and her need of a sane being in her house, and beyond there was a large world with a place in it for his ability. With all the garnered control of his strength he wanted to find that place and fill it, yet it seemed the gods willed otherwise, for in his pocket there lay a letter offering him a mastership at his old Grammar School, and it was pressing against his side with the urgency of a command, pricking him with a pointed question. Was it the personal ambition or the impersonal ideal on which his eyes were set? It was easy to entangle the two so that the answer fitted with his will, and he walked bewildered. He found there were many sides to duty, that inclination is not perforce opposed to it, and he was still struggling for clearness when he turned the corner of the road and saw the hills. Their calm mocked his restlessness, and their splendour made a little thing of him. He stood and fed on them.
Against the tender colour of the sky they held the darkness of the coming night, and soon their arms would open to let forth a dusky coverlet for the world. Proud of that burden, they lifted serene heads above it and waited for the stars, and after them the day, and then the night once more, and all the buffetings that time, and wind and rain might bring them. Their beauty and strength and patience were holy to Alexander, and at the sight of them he was ready for any sacrifice of his ambition, while his mind was confused with longing to express his gratitude and praise. This was more than the appeal of the æsthetic: through nature he was half consciously trying to find God, and his troubles left him and went like winged things to the heights.
He walked on: he had a conviction that his way would be made clear. This was strange to a mind that only came to its conclusions after fierce wrestling; but he did not question it, and, rejoicing in this new submission and in the clang of his boots on the hard road, he marched on until the hills drew more closely round him and the lake narrowed to receive its feeding streams. Green rushes grew in the shallows and were stirred by the water's gentle surge, and among them, unseen, Alexander thought the reedy pipe was played. The music woke such echoes in his heart that his stern self-control tried to refuse it hearing; but the hour was victor and the hills were its allies. In the perfection of impulse they swept upwards from the valley, and it was amazing that the dark and stunted yews round the little church, the scattered houses and the grazing cattle should have been allowed to keep the places men had given them, for the curves of the mountain's mysterious sides had the fatality of a wave. But they had the placidity of their own strength: themselves the victims of Nature's ruthlessness, they had learnt ruthlessness from her, yet remained benign, and in the face of their serenity the man was willing to distrust the efforts of his own mind. But only for this moment was he the yielding child of these numerous and mighty parents, ready to let his future be what they decreed: and only because he was aware of his waiting will, did he find this happiness in obedience to the evening and the hills.
With the fluty song beguiling him, he left the road and walked by the banks of the Broad Beck, until his bathing pool shone out among the birches. He saw himself mirrored dimly in the water, and the blurred image appeared to him as the true presentment of the thing he was, vague and incomplete, the rough shape his soul must perfect. The trees, in their drooping, veiled the fading light and curtained Alexander from the rest of the world, but he felt the Blue Hill behind him and fancied he could hear its breathing.
He had meant to take the bath that was always like a new baptism into the life of the hills, but the shadowy form prayed him not to shatter it, and the hanging stillness of the wood forbade disturbance, so he shouldered the knapsack he had laid aside, and treading softly, struck across the fields for home.
He found Janet sitting on the horse-block.
"You're here!" she said. "What way did you come?"
"By the beck. The water drew me."
"And I've been listening for the sound of your feet on the road. More than an hour I've been here."