Back from the dark sea, across a grassy space, is his row of houses with lighted windows; and behind it, stretching inland, a thousand more, huddled, closer and closer, round the lighted railway shed, where, like spider’s threads, the rails run in from the expanse of sleeping fields and marshes and dim hills; of dark trees and moon-pale water fringed with reeds. All over the land these rails have run, chaining his houses into one great web so that he need never be alone.
For nothing is so dreadful to this man as solitude. In solitude he hears the voice of Her he cannot understand: “Ah! the baby that you are, my baby man!” And he sees Her smile, the ironic smile of evening over land and sea. In solitude he feels so small, so very small; for solitude is silence and silence irony, and irony he cannot bear, not even that of Her who gave him birth.
And so he is neither careful of his beauty nor of his strength; not careful to be clean or to be fine; his only care is not to be alone. To all his young, from the first day, he teaches the same lesson: Dread Her! Avoid Her! Look not on Her! Towns! more towns! There you can talk and listen to your fellows’ talk! Crowd into the towns; the eyes in your whitened faces need never see Her there! Fill every cranny of your houses so that no moment of silence or of solitude can come to any one of you. And if, by unhappy chance, in their parks you find yourself alone, lie neither on your back, for then you will see the quiet sunlight on the leaves, the quiet clouds, and birds with solitude within their wings; nor on your face, or you will catch the savour of the earth, and a faint hum, and for a minute live the life of tiny things that straddle in the trodden grasses. Fly from such sights and scents and sounds, for fear lest terror for your fate should visit you; fly to the streets; fly to your neighbours’ houses; talk, and be brave! Or if, and such times will come, your feet and brain and tongue are tired, then sleep! For, next to the drug of fellowship is the anodyne of slumber! And when it is your holiday, and time is all your own, be warned! The lot of those few left among you who are forced to live alone—on the sea, with the sheep of the green hills, guarding the trim wildness of your woods, turning the lonely soil—may for a moment seem desirable. Be sure it is not; the thought has come to you from books! Go to a spot where, though the nights are clear and the sun burns hot, the sea wind smells of salt, and the land wind smells of hay, you can avoid Her, huddled in your throngs! Dread Her! Fly from Her! Hide from Her smile, that seems to say: “Once, when you lived with me, you were a little gentleman. You looked in my eyes and learned a measure of repose, learned not to whimper at the dark, giggle, and jeer, and chatter through your nose, learned to hold yourself up, to think your own thoughts, and be content. And now you have gone from me to be a little cockney man. But for all your airs of courage and your fear of me—I shall get you back!” Dread Her! Avoid Her! Towns, more towns!
Such is the lesson man teaches, from the very birth, to every child of his unstinted breeding. And well he teaches it. Of all his thousands here to-night, drawn from his crowded, evil-smelling towns, not one has gone apart on this black beach to spend a single minute with his shadow and the wind and stars. His laughter fills the air, his ceaseless chatter, songs, and fiddling, the clapping of his hands; so will it be throughout his holiday.
And who so foolish as to say it is not good that man should talk and laugh and clap his hands; who so blind as not to see that these are antidotes to evils that his one great fear has brought to him? This ring of him with vacant faces and staring eyes round that anæmic singer with the worn-out voice, or the stout singer with the voice of brass, is but an instance of Her irony: “This, then, is the medicine you have mixed, my little man, to cure the pain of your fevered souls. Well done! But if you had not left me you would have had no fever! There is none in the wind and the stars and the rhythm of the sea; there is none in green growth or fallen leaves; in my million courses it is not found. Fever is fear—to you alone, my restless mannikin, has fever come, and this is why, even in your holiday, you stand in your sick crowds gulping down your little homœopathic draughts!”
The show is over. The pipes of noise are still, the lights fall dark, and man is left by the black beach with nothing to look on but the sky, or hear but the beat of wave-wings flighting on the sea. And suddenly in threes and fours he scurries home, lest for one second he should see Her face whose smile he cannot bear.
FACTS
XI
Facts
Each morning a noise of poured-out water revived him from that state in which his thoughts were occasionally irregular. Raising his face, with its regular nose above a regular moustache just going grey, he asked the time. Each morning he received the same answer, and would greet it with a yawn. Without this opening to his day he would not have known for certain that it had begun. Assured of the fact, he would leap from his bed into his bath, and sponge himself with cold, clear water. “Straight out of bed—never lose heat!” Such was his saying; and he would maintain it against every other theory of the morning tub. It was his own discovery—a fact on which, as on all facts, he set much store; and every morning he kept his mind fixed on its value. Then, in that underclothing, of which he said, “Never wear any other—lets the skin act!” he would take his stand in a chosen light before a glass, dipping in boiling water a razor on which was written the day’s name, and without vanity inspect his face to see that it preserved its shade of faintly mottled red against the encroachments of the town. Then, with a slanting edge—“Always shave slanting”—he would remove such hairs as seemed to him unnecessary. If he caught himself thinking, he would go to a bottle on the washstand and pour out a little bitter water, which he would drink; then, seizing a pair of Indian clubs, he would wave them. “I believe in Indian clubs!” he often said. Tying his tie at the angle he had tied it for nearly thirty years, and placing lavender water—the only scent he ever used—about his handkerchief, he would open his wife’s door, and say, “How are you, my dear?” Without waiting for an answer he would shut it, and go down.