I think there is no misery so great as that of youth surrounded by all opportunities for wholesome fellowship, endowed with natural faculties for enjoyment, yet repressed and thwarted at every turn by invincible self-consciousness and mistrust: surely no lost opportunities of manhood leave such aching voids as these. In the spring-time of life to feel day by day the slow erosion of the power of joy is of all pains most poignant; out of it grow anxieties, premature despairs, incongruous with fresh cheeks and a mind not yet mature. This misery was mine for those four years which to most men are the happiest of a whole career, but to me at every retrospect seem so beset with gloomy shadows that could I live my life again, I would not traverse them once more for all the gold of Ophir.
At first I writhed and strained in my bonds, and sometimes would make timid advances to the generous young hearts around me. But the tension always proved too sore; I never maintained the ground I had won, and with a perilous fatalism more and more readily accepted what I deemed inevitable failure. There were among them, I doubt it not now, Samaritans who would have tended my bruised limbs; but then they all seemed to be gliding over the black ice, too happy to stay and lift up the fallen. And bruised though I was, I still rose time and again and moved painfully among them, so that theirs was no culpable or merciless neglect.
Yet the end for me was illimitable dreariness; and like Archie in Weir of Hermiston, I seemed abroad in a world from which every hope of intimacy was banished. And as with every month the hopelessness of resistance was made plainer and plainer, there came upon me the recklessness of the condemned man who jests or blasphemes to hide his ruth. Overwrought continually by forebodings of coming pain, unstrung by strange revulsions, I would pass from burning wrath to cold despair, a most petulant and undisciplined sufferer. Uniting in one person the physical exuberance of youth and the melancholy of disillusioned manhood, I was deprived of the balanced energy proper to either age, and kept up a braggart courage with the headiest wine of literature. I could not bear the bland homilies of the preachers, but ranged myself with the apostles of rebellion who blew imperious trumpet blasts before the walls of ordered life.
Verily the violence of the blasts was sometimes such that the ramparts should have fallen down; and often in my exaltation I already saw them totter, as I strode along reciting the dithyrambs of men who like myself could find scarce a responsive heart-beat in all this throbbing world. Above all I gloried in the declamations of Queen Mab, which sanctioned by high poetic authority the waste of my affections and my moody defiance of life's most salutary law. With these upon my lips I roamed, an absurd pathetic figure, amid the haunts of the Scholar Gipsy, and the wayward upland breezes conspired with my truant moods. And while I sat by my lamp late into the night, I turned the pages of pessimists and cynics, for no principles are dearer to a man than those which allow him to profess contempt for the benefits which he cannot enjoy.
Yet by seeking amid such simples a balm for wounded pride, I did not really deceive myself, but lived as a sophist rather than a philosopher. And all the while I was digging graves for my better instincts, until my sexton's mood, confining me within churchyard walls, gave me over almost entirely to the company of mental bats and owls. The danger of it all was that though I was yet youthful, and should have been still pliant as a sapling, I was fostering the growth of those habits which, like rings in the grain, are the signature of unyielding years. Naturalists say that a bullfinch fed only on hempseed gradually loses his fair plumage and becomes black as a raven: so my soul, nourished on thoughts of rebellion, put off its bright and diverse enthusiasms and was clothed in the dark garment of despair.
When the long-desired hour of release came, and I was free to turn my back upon the spires of my prison city, I had already plumbed an abyss of misery. The very thought of life in the conflict of the world was abhorrent; and if I had been of the Roman Church I should have become a Benedictine and sought a lettered and cloistered peace. I despaired of finding anywhere upon earth the profound quietude, the absolute detachment, when a chance occasion seemed to crown my desire, and blind to all warnings of disillusion, I suddenly set sail for what I then thought might be a permanent sojourn in the East.
Within two months' time the whole environment of my life was changed, and I was established on a lonely plantation set high upon a range of hills whose slopes were clothed with primeval forests verging to a tropical sea. My home, a white-walled, red-roofed bungalow with a great columned verandah like a temple's peristyle, lay in the issue of an upper valley threaded by a clear stream, whence you may look far down over rolling plains to an horizon lost in the shimmering heat of noon. Immediately to the east rose the cone of a great solitary hill, always outlined against the sky with a majestic isolation that lent it an almost personal existence, and at the birth of every day bearing the orb of the rising sun upon its wooded shoulder. Round about, in scattered villages of thatched and mud-walled huts, dwelled brown men of ancient pagan ways, men who neither knew progress nor set any price upon time.
There I entered upon a wholly new existence as remote from all the social trials which beset shyness as if it were passed in some island of the uttermost sea. I had escaped from a harrying pursuit; I was free; and to the bliss of this recovered liberty I abandoned myself, without attempting to justify my flight to conscience or forming any scheme for future years. Like a deer which has eluded the hounds, I yearned only for rest and long oblivion of the chase; I wanted to live woodland days until, all the strain and panic of the past forgotten, I might rise refreshed and see a new way clear before me.
And this first abandonment was a time of ecstasy. The long tranquil days were crowned by nights of peace yet more desired. I lay beneath the verandah and watched the stars in their splendour, not the pin-points of cold light that pierce our misty western heavens, but bright orbs in innumerable companies hovering upon the tranced earth. Night after night I saw the incomparable vision; month after month the moon rose slowly over the high wall of the jungle, first a great globe imminent upon the trees, next soaring remote through the upper heavens, waning at last to a sphere of pale unquickening light. I would lie thus for hours motionless, with lulled mind, until the breeze forerunning the dawn, or the quavering wail of the jackal, recalled the startled thought to the prison bonds of self.
With the gentle lapse of months all these impersonal influences took dominion over me and gave me a quiet happiness never known before. The nights brought the greater light; but the days too had their glories. I would climb the rugged sides of the mountain, and emerging into a colder world sit beneath an overhanging rock and see the hot air quivering over leagues of plain; while in the nearer distance, far down beneath my feet, the rice-fields shone like emerald and the palm-fringed pools like shields of silver. Or I would stretch myself at early afternoon on the close-cropped grass on the jungle-edge, and watch the opposite sky take on an ever-deeper blue against the setting sun behind me. Often at such times I would hear a rushing in the highest branches, and turning very silently, see the outposts of a troop of monkeys peering down through the gleaming foliage. Then, if I moved, neither head nor limb, others would come, and yet others, leaping from branch to branch and plunging down from higher to lower levels like divers cleaving a deep green sea; until at last some slightest involuntary movement of mine would put the whole host to flight, and greybeards, young warriors, camp followers and mothers with their children on their backs would spring precipitate from tree to tree, screaming and gibbering like Homer's sapless dead. Then, when the stars rushed out and the darkness came on apace, it was sweet to wander home along those paths so dear to primitive men in all countries, narrow paths and sinuous, smoothed by the footfalls of centuries, winding patiently round every obstacle and never breaking through after the brutal manner of civilization. The fire-flies gleamed in the brushwood on either hand, and from every side rose that all-pervading hum of busy insects through which the tropic forest is never still.