Papers from Lilliput

by J. B. Priestley

A ROAD AND SOME MOODS

I HAVE been living lately near a fine highway, which cuts across the blurred edge of a town and makes straight for the open country. By this road a man may quickly escape from the town and start upon almost any journey. The road will take him some part of the way to Edinburgh, or Moscow, or Bagdad, or the mountains of the moon. Or he may use it, as I do, for a saunter in the morning sunshine.

The road rises as it leaves the town, and a little way beyond my windows it climbs to a summit, so that, walking forward, one sees nothing in front but the sharp, slightly curved edge of the road against the sky. Though I have travelled this way so often, each time that I set eyes on the clean cut of the road and the great emptiness beyond, something in me is thrilled, faintly yet perceptibly, like taut wires troubled by a gust of wind. I know well, none better, what lies at the other side of the hill, the easy stretch of highway descending into a pleasant green valley; yet the sight of the little summit still holds for me some vague promise. But every hill in the world is brother to that ‘peak in Darien.’ One day, maybe, I shall stand on the crest of this tiny hill, and find that all beyond is changed. I shall look down, maybe, upon a sea covered with strange ships, or into the thronged streets of a magical city.

The other morning I left the house for the first time for several days, and walked slowly up the road. There was a touch of autumn abroad. In the mellow sunlight the trees were putting on their last splendid livery. The air was still, and had in it a faint odour of burning leaves.

In such a season, golden, spacious, but already whispering of the end, there will often come to a man a certain solemn mood, a vein of not unpleasing melancholy, and for a little while he will see all life moving to a grave measure, an adagio for strings. But the mood that encompassed me that morning was very different, and much less welcome. As I walked forward I seemed to sink into depression:

And fears and fancies thick upon me came;
Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name.

In a fair state of health and unassailed by bad fortune, I walked in that genial sunshine—as a man will—the victim of self-torment or inexplicable misery, the Old Man of the Sea heavy on my shoulders.

Now when I came to the summit of the road and looked down the other side, my whole mood was changed in a flash. And for no other reason than this: an inn stands there, a little way back from the road, and its walls had been newly done a creamy white, so that they showed dazzlingly against the foliage near by. That is all.

But the moment that my eyes fell upon these gleaming white walls my mood was changed, and I saw another vision of life. At that moment, as when a loved person enters a room, it seemed to me as if the footlights of the world were suddenly turned up, and I could hear the strings and flutes of the great orchestra of life. I saw the road before me dancing away to the hills, and the hills themselves standing in silent jubilation. It was one of those rare moments when the passion, the wonder, the mystery of life smite through a man’s flesh and bone, and set his spirit towering above good and evil fortune, fearless, exultant, eager for the best and worst of human existence. Such moments come to us on a sudden wave of exultation, and then leave us to be carried gently forward by the customary easy flow of thoughts and emotions. What marks their passage in a man’s life, what heroic promptings they bring, what valorous decisions are born of their passing cannot be told, least of all by the man himself. I know that I stayed for a few seconds on the crest of the hill, and then continued my walk. The rare moment had come and gone, sweeping away my former dull mood and leaving me in a pleasant reverie. I walked along, thinking, maybe, of inns and the part they have played in Romance, or of whitened walls and the time when even London was a city of white buildings; or I thought about myself (as you do), and what a fine fellow I should be if I were not a fool. It is no great matter what I thought.