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Being so treated I should have shamed England among races who think well of her, if I had allowed a mere knock on the head to dwell too much upon my mind. Strogue came to look at me, and spoke with his usual lofty confidence.
"My son, you have done well and wisely. I fell among a tribe on the borders of Thibet, who make a point of taking out a piece about the size of half a crown from the skull of every strong male infant. The folly of the earth goes out, and the wisdom of the air comes in, according to their traditions. But I was not allowed to verify their views, and I found more vigour than wisdom there, for they kicked me over their border. But you may hope the best. Who knows? You may begin to say something good at last, and we shall know how you got it."
This was all very well for him, who had not received a single scratch, and was living now in clover. Let good friends try things for themselves, and comfort us with their own distress. "Optimism" is a lovely gift, and comes direct from Heaven, chiefly when the sun shines on ourselves. But Strogue never listened to argument. "You are the luckiest fellow," he proceeded, "that I have ever come across. Here you have had your sister crying over you for days and days, putting her husband on the shelf, although he is made of money; and then the best doctor in the world, the only one that ever did any good; and now you have the loveliest girl ever seen waiting upon you hand and foot; and more than all without a bit of pain, without even knowing it, you are made a wise man for the rest of your life, at the age of six-and-twenty. Stop out here, my boy, stop out here. Your father will have heaps of money now, from your brother's grand discovery. Sûr Imar has made up his mind to keep 'Farmer George' for the coffee-growing; you can shoot all sorts of mountain game, and people the Terek and the Kur with salmon, and winter at Tiflis or Patigorsk."
As yet I was not in a clear condition to care where I was, or even to enquire at all about it, so long as the one my whole heart looked for came for it to dwell with every day. But gradually (I know not how, and probably none can tell me) a power, almost as strong as love of the finest and sweetest of our kind, began to grow in my heavy nature. Everything is now explained, even when a man knocks his brother on the head, as a piece of hereditary tendency. To enter that plea appears to me to cast an ungraceful reproach upon those who have gone before us and done their best according to their lights which we disparage, and without receiving any credit for the wonderful goodness we derive from them. Let me blame no one but myself for that unreasonable pining and hankering for my native land.
"Look at the glory of the sky, look at the mountains and the woods," several people said to me, who never looked twice at them when they could smell their dinner; "look at the grand peaks robed with snow! Can you see anything like that in England?"
"No. But I can feel the things I see there," I used to answer meekly; "there may be little grandeur in them, but I love the things I know."
Moreover it came into my jarred and worried mind, that the gentle satisfaction—the only solid form ever taken by human happiness—is seldom or perhaps never to be found, when nature is too great around us. We see perpetual change of form and colour, and a fleeting majesty, and possibly our puny selves are incited to hopeless rivalry. Or even if there be nought in that, the sense of danger and wild elements and powers altogether beyond our control is at enmity with placid thought and the quiet course of duties; so that it is a sweeter thing, at any rate for an Englishman, to watch the plough on a gentle slope, or the cows in a meadow with their hind legs spread ready for the milking-pail, or the harvest-waggon coming to the rick, than to gaze at all the rugged grandeur of the Alps or Caucasus.
"My dear friend," Sûr Imar said, when I tried to make him see it so, "you were not born here, but I was; and that makes all the difference. I see no more of majesty, or menace, or sublime oppression, when I look at a peak growing up against the sky, than you find in a tall poplar-tree. And behold how calm is your Captain Strogue, a man of the world, who takes nothing amiss."