My third happy memory is of a brief and idyllic attachment, very fervent, very romantic, entirely my own, and as I remember it, now, entirely beautiful. Nothing remains but the fragrance of it, and its dream-like quality, the sense I have of straying with the beloved through a fair country. Such things assure me that I was not wholly dead during those crushing years of servitude.
But those are, as I say, gleams out of the dark. They comfort me with the thought that the better part of me was not dead, but buried here with the worse. They point also to the truth, as I take it to be, that the lack of privacy is one of the most serious detriments of public-school life. I don't say that privacy is good for all boys, or that it is good for any unless they are provided with a pursuit. It is true that many boys seek to be private that they may be vicious, and that the having the opportunity for privacy leads to vice. But that is nearly always the fault of the masters. Vice is due to the need for mental or material excitement; it is a crude substitute for romance. If a boy is debarred from good romance, because he doesn't feel it or hasn't been taught to feel it, he will take to bad. It is nothing else at all: he is bored. And remembering that a boy can only think of one thing at a time, the single aim of the master should be to give every boy in his charge some sane interest which he can pursue to the death, as a terrier chases a smell, in and out, up and down, every nerve bent and quivering. There is a problem of the teaching art which the College at Spring Grove made no attempt to solve while I was there. You either played football and cricket or you were negligible. I was bad at both, was negligible, and neglected.
I suspect that my experiences are very much those of other people, and that is why I have taken the trouble to articulate them, and perhaps to make them out more coherent than they were. We don't feel in images or think in words. The images are about us, the words may be at hand; but it may well be that we are better without them. This world is a tight fit, and life in it, as the Duke said of one day of his own life, is "a devilish close-run thing." If the blessed Gods and the legions of the half-gods in their habit as they live, were to be as clear to us as our neighbour Tom or our chief at the office, what might be the lot of Tom's wife, or what the security of our high stool at the desk? As things are, our blank misgivings are put down to nerves, our yearning for wings to original sin. The policeman at the street corner sees to it, for our good, that we put out of sight these things, and so we grow rich and make a good appearance. It is only when we are well on in years that we can afford to be precise and, looking back, to remember the celestial light, the glory and the freshness of the dream in which we walked and bathed ourselves.
THE SOUL AT THE WINDOW
When I had been in London a year or two, and the place with its hordes was become less strange and less formidable to me, I began to discover it for myself. Gradually the towering cliffs resolved themselves into houses, and the houses into shrouded holds, each with character and each hiding a mystery. They now stood solitary which had before been an agglutinated mass. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.... I knew one from the other by sight, and had for each a specific sensation of attraction or repulsion, of affection or terror. I read through the shut doors, I saw through the blank windows; not a house upon my daily road but held a drama or promised a tragedy. I had no sense for comedy in those days; life to me, waking life, was always a dreadful thing. And sometimes my bodily eyes had glimpses which confirmed my fancy—unexpected, sudden and vivid flashes behind curtained windows. I once saw two men fighting, shadowed black upon a white blind. I once looked out of a window at the Army and Navy Stores into a mean bedroom across the way. There was a maidservant in there, making beds, emptying slops, tidying this and that. Quite suddenly she threw her head up with a real despair, and next moment she was on her knees by the bed. Praying! I never saw prayer like that in this country. The soul went streaming from her mouth like blown smoke. And again, one night, very late, I was going to bed, and leaned out of my window for air. Before me, across back yards, leafless trees, and a litter of packing-cases and straw, rose up a dark rampart of houses, in the midst of it a lit window. I saw a poorly furnished sitting-room—a table with a sewing machine, a paraffin lamp, a chair with an antimacassar. A man in his shirt sleeves sat there by the table, smoking a pipe. Then the door opened and a tall, slim woman came in, all in white, with loose dark hair floating about her shoulders. She stood between door and table and rested her hand upon the edge of the table. The man, after a while of continuing to read, quite suddenly looked up and saw her. They looked at each other motionless. He cast down his paper, sprang up and went to her. He fell to his knees before her and clasped hers. She looked across, gravely considering, then laid her hand upon his head. That was all. I saw no more. Husband and wife? Mother and son? Sinner and Saviour? What do I know?
As with the houses, homes of mystery, so with the men and women one passed; homes, they too, of things hidden yet more deep. The noise of the streets, at first paralysing, died down to a familiar rumble, and the ear began to distinguish voices in the tide. Sounds of crying, calls for help, hailings, laughter, tears, separated themselves and appealed. You heard them, like the cries of the drowning, drifting by you upon a dark tide-way. You could do nothing; a word would have broken the spell. The mask which is always over the face would have covered the tongue or throttled the larynx. You could do nothing but hear.
Finally, the passing faces became sometimes penetrable, betrayed by some chance gleam of the eyes, some flicker of the lips, a secret to be shared, or conveyed by a hint some stabbing message out of the deep into the deep. That is what I mean by the soul at the window. Every one of us lives in a guarded house; door shut, windows curtained. Now and then, however, you look up above the street level and catch a glimpse of the scared prisoner inside. He may be a satyr, a fairy, an ape or an angel; he's a prisoner anyhow, who sometimes comes to the window and looks strangely out. You may see him there by chance, saying to himself like Chaucer's Creseyde in the temple, "Ascaunces, What! May I not stonden here?" And I found out for myself that there is scarcely a man or woman alive who does not hold such a tenant more or less deeply within his house.
Sometimes the walls of the house are transparent, like a frog's foot, and you see the prisoner throbbing and quivering inside. This is rare. Shelley's house must have been a filmy tenement of the kind. With children—if you catch them young enough—it is more common. I remember one whom I used to see nearly every day, the child of poor parents, who kept a green-grocer's shop in Judd Street, Saint Pancras, a still little creature moving about in worlds not recognised. She was slim and small, fair-haired, honey-coloured, her eyes wells of blue. I used to see her standing at the door of the shop, amid baskets of green stuff, crimsoned rhubarb, pyramided dates, and what not. I never saw her dirty or untidy, nor heard her speak, nor saw her laugh. She stood or leaned at the lintel, watching I know not what, but certainly not anything really there, as we say. She appeared to be looking through objects rather than at them. I can describe it no otherwise than that I, or another, crossed her field of vision and was conscious that her eyes met mine and yet did not see me. To me she was instantly remarkable, not for this and not for any beauty she had—for she was not at all extraordinary in that quality—but for this, that she was not of our kind. Surrounded by other children, playing gaily, circling about her, she was sui generis. She carried her own atmosphere, whereby in the company of others she seemed unaccountable, by herself only, normal. Nature she fitted perfectly, but us she did not fit. Now, it is a curious thing, accepted by all visionaries, that a supernatural being, a spirit, fairy, not-human creature, if you see it among animals, beasts and birds, on hills or in the folds of hills, among trees, by waters, in fields of flowers, looks at home and evidently is so. The beasts are conscious of it, know it and have no fear of it; the hills and valleys are its familiar places in a way which they will never be to the likes of us. But put a man beside it and it becomes at once supernatural. I have seen spirits, beings, whatever they may be, in empty space, and have observed them as part of the landscape, no more extraordinary than grazing cattle or wheeling plover. Again I have seen a place thick with them, as thick as a London square in a snow-storm, and a man walk clean through them unaware of their existence, and make them, by that act, a mockery of the senses. So precisely it was with this strange child, unreal to me when she was real to everybody else.