That was the end of it. I had rather have died than tell him. Perhaps I was afraid of his mockery, perhaps I dared not risk his unbelief, perhaps I felt ashamed that I had been prying, perhaps I grudged him the sight of her moulded beauty and keen wild face. "What am I staring at? Why, nothing," I said. I got up and put the strap of my school satchel over my head. I never looked for her again before I walked away. Whether she left when I left, whether she was really there or a projection of my mind, whether my inner self, my prisoner, had seen her, or my schoolboy self through his agency, whether it was a trick of the senses, a dream, or the like I can't tell you. I only know that I have now recalled exactly what I seemed to see, and that I have seen her since—her or her co-mate—once or twice.
I can account for her now easily enough. I can assure myself that she was really there, that she, or the like of her, pervades, haunts, indwells all such places; but it seems that there must be a right relation between the seer and the object before the unseen can become the seen. Put it like this, that form is a necessary convention of our being, a mode of consciousness just as space is, just as time, just as rhythm are; then it is clear enough that the spirits of natural fact must take on form and sensible body before we can apprehend them. They take on such form for us or such body through our means; that is what I mean by a right relation between them and ourselves. Now some persons have the faculty of discerning spirits, that is, of clothing them in bodily form, and others have not; but of those who have it all do not discern them in the same form, or clothe them in the same body. The form will be rhythmical to some, to other some audible, to others yet again odorous, "aromatic pain," or bliss. These modes are no matter, they are accidents of our state. They cause the form to be relative, just as the conception of God is; but the substance is constant. I have seen innumerable spirits, but always in bodily form. I have never perceived them by means of any other sense, such as hearing, though sight has occasionally been assisted by hearing. If during an orchestral symphony you look steadily enough at one musician or another you can always hear his instrument above the rest and follow his part in the symphony. In the same way when I look at fairy throngs I can hear them sing. If I single out one of them for observation I hear him or her sing—not words, never words; they have none. I saw once, like a driven cloud, the spirits of the North-west wind sweep down the sky over the bare ridge of a chalk down, winged and shrouded, eager creatures, embattled like a host. They were grey and dun-coloured, pale in the face. Their hair swept forward, not back; for it seemed as if the wind in gusts went faster than themselves, and was driving them faster than they could go. Another might well have heard these beings like a terrible, rushing music, as cries of havoc or desolation, wild peals of laughter, fury and exultation. But to me they were inaudible. I heard the volleying of the wind, but them I saw. So in the still ecstasy of that Dryad bathing in light I saw, beyond doubt, what the Greeks called by that name, what some of them saw; and I saw it in their mode, although at the time of seeing I knew nothing of them or their modes, because it happened to be also my mode. But so far I did not more than see her, for though I haunted the place where she had been she never came there again, nor never showed herself. It became to me sacred ground, where with awed breath I could say, "Here indeed she stood and bathed herself. Here I really saw her, and she me;" and I encompassed it with a fantastic cult of my own invention. It may have been very comic, or very foolish, but I don't myself think it was either, because it was so sincere, and because the impulse to do it came so naturally. I used to bare my head; I made a point of saving some of my luncheon (which I took with me to school) that I might leave it there. It was real sacrifice that, because I had a fine appetite, and it was pure worship. In my solitary hours, which were many, I walked with her of course, talked and played with her. But that was another thing, imagination, or fancy, and I don't remember anything of what we said or did. It needs to be carefully distinguished from the first apparition with which imagination, having nothing whatever to proceed upon, had nothing whatever to do. One thing, however, I do remember, that our relations were entirely sexless; and, as I write, another comes into mind. I saw no affinity between her and the creature of my first discovery. It never occurred to me to connect the two either positively, as being inhabitants of a world of their own, or negatively, as not being of my world. I was not a reflective boy, but my mind proceeded upon flashes, by leaps of intuition. When I was moved I could conceive anything, everything; when I was unmoved I was as dull as a clod. It was idle to tell me to think. I could only think when I was moved from within to think. That made me the despair of my father and the vessel of my schoolmaster's wrath. So here I saw no relationship whatsoever between the two appearances. Now, of course, I do. I see now that both were fairies, informed spirits of certain times or places. For time has a spirit as well as space. But more of this in due season. I am not synthesising now but recording. One had been merely curious, the other for a time enthralled me. The first had been made when I was too young to be interested. The second found me more prepared, and seeded in my brain for many a day. Gradually, however, it too faded as fancy began to develop within me. I took to writing, I began to fall in love; and at fifteen I went to a boarding-school. Farewell, then, to rewards and fairies!
THE GODS IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE
Who am I to treat of the private affairs of my betters, to evoke your fragrant names, Félicité, Perpetua, loves of my tender youth? Shall I forget thee, Emilia, thy slow smile and peering brown eyes of mischief or appeal? Rosy Lauretta, or thee, whom I wooed desperately from afar, lured by thy buxom wellbeing, thy meek and schooled replies? And if I forget you not, how shall I explore you as maladies, trace out the stages of your conquest as if you were spores? Never, never. Worship went up from me to you, and worship is religion, and religion is sacred. So, my dears, were you, each of you in your turn, sacred in your shrines. Before each of you in turn I fell down, suddenly, "Come corpo morto cadde." And to each of you in turn I devoted those waking hours which fancy had hitherto claimed of me. Yet this I do feel free to say, by leave of you ladies, that calf-love has not the educative value of the genuine passion. It is blind worship by instinct; it is a sign of awakening sense, but it is not its awakener. It is a lovely thing as all quick or burning growth is, but it has little relation to the soul, and our Northern state is the more gracious that consummation of it is not feasible. Apart from the very obvious drawbacks there is one not quite so obvious: I mean the early exhaustion of imaginative sympathy. Love, indeed, is an affair of maturity. I don't believe that a man, in this country, can love before forty or a woman before thirty-five. They may marry before that and have children; and they will love their children, but very rarely each other. I am thinking now of love at its highest rating, as that passion which is able to lift a man to the highest flight of which the soul is capable here on earth—a flight, mind you, which it may take without love, as the poet's takes it, or the musician's, but which the ordinary man's can only take by means of love. Calf-love is wholly a sex matter, perfectly natural, mostly harmless, and nearly always a beautiful thing, to be treated tenderly by the wise parent.
In my own case my mother treated it so, with a tact and a reverential handling which only good women know, and I had it as I had mumps and measles, badly, with a high temperature and some delirium but with no aggravation from outside. It ran its course or its courses and left me sane. One of its effects upon me was that it diverted the mind of my forensic self from the proceedings or aptitudes of my recondite. I neither knew nor cared what my wayward tenant might be doing; indeed, so much was my natural force concerned in the heart-affair of the moment that the other wretch within me lay as it were bound in a dungeon. He never saw the light. The sun to him was dark and silent was the moon. There, in fact, he remained for some five or six years, while sex pricked its way into me intent upon the making of a man. He, maybe, was to have something to say to that, something to do with it—but not yet.
So much for calf-love; but now for a more important matter. I left the Grammar School at S——, at the age when boys usually go to their Harrow and Winchester, as well equipped, I daresay, as most boys of my years; for with the rudiments I had been fairly diligent, and with some of them even had become expert. I was well grounded in Latin and French grammar, and in English literature was far ahead of boys much older than myself. Looking back now upon the drilling I had at S——, I consider it was well done; but I have to set against the benefits I got from the system the fact that I had much privacy and all the chance which that gives a boy to educate himself withal. My school hours limited my intercourse with the school world. Before and after them I could develop at my own pace and in my own way—and I did. I believe that when I went to my great school I had the makings of an interesting lad in me; but I declare upon my conscience that it was that place only which checked the promise for ten years or more, and might have withered it altogether.
My father was an idealist of 1851; he showed the enthusiasm and nursed in his bosom the hopes and beliefs of the promoters of the International Exhibition of that year. There was a plentiful planting of foreign stock in England after that, and one of its weedy saplings was an International Education Company, which out of a magniloquent prospectus and some too-confident shareholders bore one fruit, the London International College at Spring Grove. It never came to maturity, and is now dropped and returned to the ground of all such schemes. I suppose it had been on the stalk some fifteen years when I went to feed of it.
The scheme, in fact, sprang out of enthusiasm and had no bottom in experience. It may be true that all men are brothers, but it is not logical to infer from that that all brothers are the better for each other's society. The raw Brazilians, Chilians, Nicaraguans and what not who were drawn from their native forests and plunged into the company of blockish Yorkshire lads, or sharp-faced London boys, were only scared into rebellion and to demonstration after their manner. They used the knife sometimes; they hardly ever assimilated; and they taught us nothing that we were the better of knowing. Quite the contrary. We taught them football, I think, and I remember a negro from Bermuda, a giant of a fellow who raged over the ground like a goaded bull when that game was being played, to the consternation of his opponents. He had a younger brother with inordinately long arms, like a great lax ape, a cheerful, grinning, harmless creature as I remember him. He was a football player too; his hug was that of an octopus which swallowed you all. As for the English, in return for their football lore they received the gift of tobacco. I learned to smoke at fifteen from a Chilian called Perez, a wizened, preternaturally wise, old youth. Nobody in the world could have been wise as he looked, and nobody else in the school as dull as he really was. Over this motley assembly was set as house-master a ferocious Scotchman of great parts, but no discretion; and there were assistants, too, of scholarship and refinement, who, if they had had the genius for education, without which these things are nothing, might have put humanity into some of us. When it was past the time I discovered this, and one of them became my friend and helper. I then discovered the tragedy of our system from the other side. For the pain is a two-edged sword, and imbrues the breast of the pedagogue even while it bleeds the pupil to inanition. That poor man, scholar, gentleman, humourist, poet, as he was, held boys in terror. He misdoubted them; they made him self-conscious, betrayed him into strange hidden acts of violence, rendered him incapable of instruction except of the most conventional kind. All his finer nature, his humanism, was paralysed. We thought him a poor fool, and got a crude entertainment out of his antics. Actually he was tormenting in a flame; and we thought his contortions ridiculous. God help us all, how are we to get at each other, caged creatures as we are! But this is indeed a tragic business, and I don't want you to tear your hair.