The sun beats down, and still your carriage does not move; and this delay is getting on your nerves. You cannot imagine what is blocking-up your way! Do you ever imagine anything? If all those goodly coverings that contain you could be taken off, what should we find within the last and inmost shell—a little soul that has lost its power of speculation. A soul that was born in you a bird and has become a creeping thing; wings gone, eyes gone, groping, and clawing with its tentacles what is given it.
You stand up, speaking to your coachman! And you are charming, standing there, to us who, like your footman, cannot see the label “Blind.” The cut of your gown is perfect, the dressing of your hair the latest, the trimming of your hat is later still; your trick of speech the very thing; you droop your eyelids to the life; you have not too much powder; it is a lesson in grace to see you hold your parasol. The doll of Nature! So, since you were born; so, until you die! And, with his turned, clean-shaven face, your footman seems to say: “Madam, how you have come to be it is not my province to inquire. You are! I am myself dependent on you!” You are the heroine of the farce, but no one smiles at you, for you are tragic, the most tragic figure in the world. No fault of yours that ears and eyes and heart and voice are atrophied so that you have no longer spirit of your own!
Fashion brought you forth, and she has seen to it that you are the image of your mother, knowing that if she made you by a hair’s-breadth different, you would see what she is like and judge her. You are Fashion, Fashion herself, blind, fear-full Fashion! You do what you do because others do it; think what you think because others think it; feel what you feel because others feel it. You are the Figure without eyes.
And no one can reach you, no one can alter you, poor little bundle of others’ thoughts; for there is nothing left to reach.
In your seven hundred carriages, you pass; and the road is bright with you. Above that road, below it, and on either hand, are the million things and beings that you cannot see; all that is organic in the world, all that is living and creating, all that is striving to be free. You pass, glittering, on your round, the sightless captive of your own triumph; and the eyes of the hollow-chested work-girls on the pavement fix on you a thousand eager looks, for you are strange to them. Many of their hearts are sore with envy; they do not know that you are as dead as snow around a crater; they cannot tell you for the nothing that you are—Fashion! The Figure without eyes!
SPORT
VII
Sport
Often in the ride of some Scotch wood I used to stand, clutching my gun, with eyes moving from right to left, from left to right. Every nerve and fibre of my body would receive and answer to the slightest movements, the smallest noises, the faintest scents. The acrid sweetness of the spruce-trees in the mist, the bite of innumerable midges, the feel of the deep, wet, mossy heather underfoot, the brown-grey twilight of the wood, the stillness—these were poignant as they never will be again. And slowly, back of that stillness, the noises of the beaters would begin. Gentle and regular, at first—like the ending of a symphony rather than its birth—they would swell, then drop and fade away completely. In that unexpected silence a squirrel scurried out along a branch, sat a moment looking, and scurried back; or, with its soft, blunt flight, an owl would fly across.
Then, with a shrill, far “Mar-r-rk!” the beaters’ chorus would rise again, drowned for an instant by the crack of the keepers’ guns; louder and louder it came, rhythmically, inexorably nearer. In the ride little shivers of wind shook the drops of warm mist off the needles of the spruce, and a half-veiled sun faintly warmed and coloured everything. Stealing through heather and fern would come a rabbit, confiding in the space before him and the ride where he was wont to sun himself. At a shot he flung his mortal somersault, or disappeared into a burrow, reached too soon. To see him lie there dead in the brown-grey twilight of the trees would give one a strange pleasure—a feeling such as some casual love affair will give a man, the pleasure of a primitive virility expressed—but to watch him disappear into the earth would irritate, for he had got his death, and, dead within the earth, he would not do one any sort of credit. Nor was it nice to think that he was dying slowly, so one forbore to think.