I FORGOT to record quite an unlooked-for little pleasure which befell me on my way home this afternoon; one of those little incidents which are nothing in themselves, yet which mean much to us, and never more so than when life is going ill.
I had got as far as the grassy entrance to our copse when a sudden dazzling gleam of sunlight shot across it, sweeping over the fields beyond, and away up to the top of the downs. Though the day had been fairly fine for the time of year, the expectation of so dramatic a finale to it had never for a moment crossed my mind, and I stood gazing about me almost as if something had happened; feeling in fact as if something desirable and unlooked for had happened.
The yellow oak scrub—withered but not leafless—glowed with a sudden russet splendour. Upon the little garden wall the terra-cotta pots shone with a momentary reminiscence of that Italy where they were born and baked. The air seemed to tingle; the tall birches glistened, one sheen of feathery silver up to their tiniest towering twigs. It was a kindly thought of whichever divinity sent that most unexpected and satisfactory beam to cheer this particular day. It did not last long of course, and the gloom of a winter’s night has followed quickly. For all that Christmas 1899 will never seem quite so dark, never so absolutely despairing in the retrospect, as it would have done without that last benevolent gleam at eventide.
January 3, 1900
THE satisfactions of intercourse are apt to be overrated, yet there are times when they are certainly not without their uses. Living for the moment alone—if anyone can be said to be alone who possesses a few good neighbours, and one kind dog—I find myself in an oddly dualistic condition of mind. In bodily presence I am here at H——, engaged in sundry important avocations. I am path making; copse cutting; plant protecting; I am even bricks-and-mortar superintending in a small way. To my own private consciousness I am really engaged in quite another set of preoccupations, and a very long way from these green downs, and rustling oak copses of ours. The experience does not pretend to be particularly original, seeing that a large number of other people’s experience would probably just now bear it out. Solitude however emphasises these sort of odd dualities, and endows them with an air of greater distinction. Are mortals better and wiser, or worse and more foolish when they are alone?
The wisdom of the ages has hitherto declined to answer that question, a fact which probably proves its wisdom. Better or not, one thing is at least certain, and that is that they are extremely different. “Men descend to meet,” says Emerson, and he may be right. I am inclined myself however to think that that profundity, that peculiar mental greatness of which, like others, I am perfectly conscious when I am alone, is less a solid than a gaseous greatness; a sort of exaltation, dependent for the most part upon the fact of there being no one to contradict me. We are all of us at all times microcosms, but never are we so completely microcosms as when we are quite by ourselves. Then we seem to swell into a perfectly multitudinous host, all the members of which exhibit a singular unanimity, and moreover a touching desire to endorse our own views, however often these may contradict one another!
Like many other honest-minded civilians, my thoughts have of late been considerably taken up with schemes of amateur strategy. The plans of campaign that I have formulated in the course of the last two months would have puzzled Von Moltke, and might even have gone far to surprise Napoleon! If I have not forwarded any of them to our Generals in South Africa it has been mainly because I felt that it might be kinder to allow them to go on in their own way without any assistance of mine. I heard lately of someone, by the way, who actually had telegraphed out her recommendations to Sir Redvers Buller. As the story reached me the telegram took this form: “Please try to relieve Ladysmith.” I hope for the credit of human nature that the tale is true, but if so there is a simple innocence about this form of admonition of which I fear that I should have been personally quite incapable. My own ideas, my own forms of suggestion, are entirely different. They are large, nay grandiose, and moreover they are extremely intricate. As I walk about over these lanes and downs I see strategical possibilities in all directions, which cause me to thrill over the magnitude of my own conceptions.
Towards evening, especially, the sense of what might be,—of what, for aught anyone can say to the contrary, still may be,—rises almost palpably; a beckoning ghostly phantom of the Great Coming Invasion. Dorking—that scene of crushing British disaster—is not far off; were I to clamber up the opposite ridge I should be looking down on it. Moreover, between one landscape and another the difference becomes much less when all detail is reduced to one vast blur. I have a friendly knoll upon which I sometimes take my stand towards sunset hour, and from which I have of late conjured up Biggars-bergs, inaccessible and kopje-covered as heart could desire. It is true that the enemy holding them is absolutely invisible, but then so he probably would be in any case. Evening has moreover in my experience an odd power of loosening the tie of the actual. The mind seems to be less fixed to its shell than in the earlier, and more garish hours of the day. As the shadows lengthen stronger and stronger becomes the impression that the world is after all but a small place, and that the scenes that one is thinking of are nearly, if not quite, as close as those that one is actually looking at. Thought flits over the wave-crests between this and South Africa more lightly than one of Mother Carey’s chickens, and alights dry-shod upon the veldt. One is amongst them. One is standing in the midst of them. One can see, literally all but see, that tattered, sunburnt, rather dilapidated-looking host—friends, cousins, kinsfolk; countrymen and fellow-subjects at all events. How odd you all look, dear friends, and yet how familiar! Big English frames, shrewd Scotch faces, tender, devil-may-care Irish hearts. Surely one knows you? Surely you are very near to us, disguise yourselves as you may? The setting may be new, the remoteness considerable, but neither setting nor remoteness can hinder one from feeling at home in the midst of you!
January 6, 1900
“BULLETS—The air was a sieve of them.—They beat upon the boulders like a million hammers. They tore the turf like a harrow!”