It is always the gentle things of life that conquer us. ‘The moving waters’—to quote Keats’ beautiful phrase—
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores’
wear down the towering cliffs along the coast. It is Aesop’s fable of the North Wind and the sun over again. The North Wind, with its violence and bluster, only makes the traveller button his [43] coat the tighter. It is the genial warmth of the sun that makes him take it off. It is always by gentleness that the adamantine world is mastered. That is one of life’s most lovely secrets. We are not ruled as much as we think by parliaments and commandments and enactments. The proportion of our lives that is governed by such things is very small. But the proportion that is dominated by gentler and more winsome forces is very great. The voices that sway us with a regal authority are soft and tender voices, the voices of those whose genial goodness compels us to love them. The imperial tones to which we capitulate unconditionally are very rarely stern official tones. Who does not remember how, in The Rosary, the Hon. Jane Champion asks Garth Dalmain why he does not marry? And Garth tells her of old Margery, his childhood’s friend and nurse, now his housekeeper and general mender and tender—old Margery, with her black satin apron, lawn kerchief, and lavender ribbons. ‘No doubt, Miss Champion, it will seem absurd to you that I should sit here on the duchess’s lawn and confess that I have been held back from proposing marriage to the women I most admired because of what would have been my old nurse’s opinion of them.’ Yet so it invariably is. Our servants are often our masters. Life’s loftiest authorities never derive their sanctions [44] from rank, office, or station. The soul has enthronements and coronations of its own. A little child often leads it. A Carpenter becomes its king. Out of Nazareth comes the Conqueror of the World. The pure and cleansing waters wear down the giant crags at the last.
But with purity and gentleness must go patience. The lapping waters do not reduce the rocky strata at a blow. It is always by means of patience that the finest conquests are won. Who that has read Jack London’s Call of the Wild will ever forget the great fight at the end of the book between Buck, the dog hero, and the huge bull-moose? ‘Three hundredweight more than half a ton he weighed, the old bull; he had lived a long, strong life, full of fight and struggle, and at the end he faced death at the teeth of a creature whose head did not reach beyond his great knuckled knees!’ How was it done? ‘There is a patience in the wild,’ Jack London says, ‘a patience dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself’; and it was by means of this patience that Buck brought down his stately antlered prey. ‘Night and day, Buck never left him, never gave him a moment’s rest, never permitted him to browse on the leaves of the trees or the shoots of the young birch or willow. Nor did he give the old bull one single opportunity to slake his burning thirst in the slender, trickling streams they crossed.’ For four [45] days Buck hung pitilessly at the huge beast’s heels, and at the end of the fourth day he pulled the bull-moose down. Buck looked so little, but he wore the monarch out. The waters seem so feeble, but they beat the rocks to powder. It is thus that the foolish things of this world always confound the wise; the weak things conquer the mighty; and the things that are not bring to naught the things that are.
[46]
IV
LINOLEUM
True love is never utilitarian. I am well aware that, in novels and in plays, the fair heroine considerately falls in love with the brave man who, at a critical moment, saves her from a watery grave or from the lurid horrors of a burning building. It is very good of the lady in the novel. I admire the gratitude which prompts her romantic affection, and, nine times out of ten, my judgement cordially approves her taste. I know, too, that, in fiction, the sick or wounded hero invariably falls desperately in love with the devoted nurse whose patient and untiring attention ensures his recovery. It is very good of the hero. Again I say, I admire his gratitude and almost invariably endorse his choice. But it must be distinctly understood that this sort of thing is strictly confined to novels and theatricals. In real life, men and women do not fall in love out of gratitude. As a matter of fact, I am much more likely to fall in love with somebody for whom I have done something than with somebody who has done something for me.
[47]
I was talking the other day with a nurse in a children’s hospital. It is a heartbreaking business, she told me. ‘You get into the way of nursing them, and comforting them, and playing with them, and mothering them, until you feel that they belong to you. And then, just as you have come to love the little thing as though he were your own, out he goes. And he always goes out with his father or his mother, clapping his hands for very joy at the excitement of going home, and you are left with a big lump in your throat, and perhaps a tear in your eye, at the thought that you will never see him again!’ Clearly, therefore, we do not fall in love as a matter of gratitude. The people who cling to us and depend upon us are much more likely to win our hearts than the people who have placed us under an obligation to them. If, instead of telling us that the heroine fell in love with the man who had saved her from drowning, the novelist had told us that the man who risked his life by plunging into the river fell in love with the white and upturned face as he laid it gently on the bank; or if, instead of telling us that the patient fell in love with the nurse, he had told us that the nurse fell in love with the patient upon whom she had lavished such beautiful devotion, he would have been much more true to nature and to real life. It is indisputable, of course, that, the rescuer having [48] fallen in love with the rescued, she may soon discover his secret, and, since love begets love, reciprocate his affection. It is equally true that, the nurse having conceived so tender a passion for her patient, he may soon read the meaning of the light in her eye and of the tone in her voice, and feel towards her as she first felt towards him. But that is quite another matter, and is beside our point at present. Just now, I am only concerned with challenging the novelist’s unwarrantable assumption that we fall in love out of gratitude. We do nothing of the kind. Love, I repeat, is never utilitarian. We may fall hopelessly in love with a thing that is of very little use to us; and we may feel no sentimental attractions at all towards a thing that is almost indispensable. If any man dares to dispute these conclusions, I shall simply produce a roll of linoleum in support of my arguments, and he will be promptly crushed beneath the weight of argument that the linoleum will furnish.
The linoleum is the most conspicuous feature of the domestic establishment. It is impertinent, self-assertive, and loud. If you visit a house in which there is a linoleum, the thing rushes at you, and you see it even before the front door has been opened. Every minister who spends his afternoons in knocking at people’s doors knows exactly what I mean. The very sound of the knock tells you a good deal. Such [49] sounds are of three kinds. There is the echoing and reverberating knock that tells you of bare boards; there is the dead and sombre thud that tells of linoleum on the floor; and there is the softened and muffled tap that tells of a hall well carpeted. And so I say that the linoleum—if there be one—rushes at you, and you seem to see it even before the door has been opened. Perhaps it is this immodesty on its part that prevents your liking it. It is always with the coy, shy, modest things that we fall in love most readily.