He talked a while longer; then he rose, said good-bye, and never returned to that house again. He went back to the room which overlooked the river; for fifteen years he had lived therein. He sat by the window and muttered to himself:
“They that wasted us required of us mirth; saying: Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”
It was the hour between light and darkness; the river was clear silvery greyish blue, and the light struck down into it like daggers of quivering pallid fire; the bridge showed threadlike arches of vague darkness through the blue mist; little busy tugs sped up the water-way, dragging long, thin, black barges; a big waggon piled high with gleaming yellow straw creaked along the bank, coming townwards from the country. There was the half-light that brings out a thousand shifting tints; lights began to dot the shore and the boats lying at anchor.
On a sudden the scent of wild thyme smote through the room; there was a hill near his old home that was carpeted with it in summer time; and behold the Glamour-Land he had not seen for twenty years lay below him, in the very heart of the city. It was perhaps the shadowy silver-blue that opened the way; faint vague blue, unlike the gentian glow of the sea-lake, yet reminiscent of it. The room was palpably full of the perfume of wild thyme. The man rose. For ten years he had hungered for the beauty of his old home, and there had been no money to take him there, nor welcome for him had he journeyed thither. For ten years the money had been there and a temperate welcome to boot, but the desire lay, half-dead, numbed with over-long thwarting, weariness, and pain. Now he suddenly realised he could go back if he would. The next day he asked for and obtained a holiday and started northwards.
It was evening when he arrived; he went to a little inn, and after dinner he walked to the jetty and stood upon it looking at the water leaping on the bar, and the glowing line of the sun-bathed hills. He looked and he looked and he looked, and behold! there was nothing there which he desired. The hunger of twenty years was for something which this beauty recalled to him—nothing more. The Glamour-Land was not here. The purple of the darkening sea, the tossing of the water, foaming ghost-white on the great bar, the clear golden light of the hills, woke in him only a great hunger for that of which they made him think; for which they caused him to long; and of what he thought, for what he longed he did not know. It eluded him; it fled before him like a flickering elf-flame, never to be grasped or known.
“How can we sing the Lord’s Song in a strange land?”
He said the words aloud; as a stranger in that country in which he had been born and reared. The next day he went back to London to the room that overlooked the river. He sat alone; he was alone in the house; the offices below were closed; the place was quiet; the roar of London sounded distant, it was like the far-off breaking of the waves on the bar; the river water was lapping against the walls that pent it in. As he walked homewards he had crossed the bridge, and stopped to buy watercress of an old man. This old man was one who, through the ignorance which is the heritage of every man, had, in an hour of that madness which we call sin, become outcast from the rank wherein he was born; now, ill, old, and very poor, he sold watercress, groundsel, and pencils on the bridge by day and slept in a common lodging-house by night. This man was the one soul on earth to whom he who once told the tales of Glamour-Land ever spoke of the longing that consumed him. This old man also had a hopeless longing of his own; he desired one hour back of the seventy years that lay behind him; one hour to fashion as he chose, one hour which had darkened and made a hell of forty years. The man from the north stopped and bought cress of him. As he took the cress he spoke. “I used to think I longed for my old home,” he said. “I went back there yesterday after twenty years.”
“What did you find?”
“The country I seek is not there,” answered the other; his voice sounded tired, as though with much journeying of soul and body.
“Ah! you’d better not have gone. It is better to believe there is something which would make you content if you had it.”