IX
PRIEST AND DOCTOR
There are hours in every man’s day when the main current of his destiny, rising up from some hidden channel, becomes a recognizable and palpable element in his consciousness. Such hours, if a man’s profoundest life is—so to speak—in harmony with the greater gods, are hours of indescribable and tremulous happiness.
It was nothing less than an experience of this kind which flowed deliciously, like a wave of divine ether, over the consciousness of Hamish Traherne on the day following the one when Sorio and Philippa walked so far.
As he crossed his garden in the early morning and entered the church, the warm sun and clear-cut shadows filled him with that sense of indestructible joy to which one of the ancient thinkers has given the beautiful name of μονοχρονος ἡδονὴ—the Pleasure of the Ideal Now.
From the eastern window, flooding the floor of the little chancel, there poured into the cool, sweet-smelling place a stream of quivering light. He had opened wide the doors under the tower and left them open and he heard, as he sank on his knees, the sharp clear twittering of swallows outside and the chatter of a flock of starlings. Through every pulse and fibre of his being, as he knelt, vibrated an unutterable current of happiness, of happiness so great that the words of his prayer melted and dissolved and all definite thought melted with them into that rare mood where prayer becomes ecstasy and ecstasy becomes eternal.
Returning to his house without spilling one golden drop of what was being allowed him of the wine of the Immortals, he brought his breakfast out into the garden and ate it, lingeringly and dreamily, by the side of his first roses. These were of the kind known as “the seven sisters”—small and white-petaled with a faint rose-flush—and the penetrating odour of them as he bent a spray down towards his face was itself suggestive of old rich wine, “cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth.”
From the marshes below the parapet came exquisite scents of water-mint and flowering-rush and, along with these, the subtle fragrance, pungent and aromatic, of miles and miles of sun-heated fens.
The grass of his own lawn and the leaves of the trees that overshadowed it breathed the peculiar sweetness—a sweetness unlike anything else in the world—of the first hot days of the year in certain old East Anglian gardens. Whether it is the presence of the sea which endows these places with so rare a quality or the mere existence of reserve and austere withholding in the ways of the seasons there, it were hard to say, but the fact remains that there are gardens in Norfolk and Suffolk—and to Hamish Traherne’s flower-beds in spite of the modesty of their appeal, may well be conceded something of this charm—which surpass all others in the British Isles in the evocation of wistful and penetrating beauty.