There are certain moods into which minds, very much tired or very much concentrated, occasionally fall, in which the most trifling things take on them an appearance of great significance. A man in great anxiety, for example, will regard as omens or warnings such things as the ringing of a bell or the flight of a bird. I have heard this process deliberately defended by people who should know better. I have heard it said that those moods of intense concentration are, as a matter of fact states of soul in which the intuitive or mystical faculties work with great facility, and that at such times connections and correlations are perceived which at other times pass unnoticed. The events of the world then are, by such people, regarded as forming links in a chain of purpose—events even which are obviously to the practical man merely the effects of chance and accident. It is utterly impossible, says the practical man, that the ringing of a bell, or the grouping of tea-leaves, or the particular moment at which a picture falls from a wall, can be anything but fortuitous: and it is the sign of a weak and superstitious mind to regard them as anything else. There can be no purpose or sequence except in matters where we can perceive purpose or sequence.
Of course the practical man must be right; we imply that he is right, since we call him practical, and I have to deplore, therefore, the fact that Frank on several occasions fell into a superstitious way of looking at things. The proof is only too plain from his own diary—not that he interprets the little events which he records, but that he takes such extreme pains to write them down—events, too, that are, to all sensibly-minded people, almost glaringly unimportant and insignificant.
I have two such incidents to record between the the travelers' leaving the Benedictine monastery and their arriving in London in December. The Major and Gertie have probably long since forgotten the one which they themselves witnessed, and, indeed, there is no particular reason why they should remember it. Of the other Frank seems to have said nothing to his friends. Both of them, however, are perfectly insignificant—they concern, respectively, only a few invisible singers and a couple of quite ordinary human beings. They are described with a wholly unnecessary wealth of detail in Frank's diary, though without comment, and I write them down here for that reason, and that reason only.
The first was as follows:
They were approaching a certain cathedral town, not a hundred miles from London, and as the evening was clear and dry, though frosty, and money was low, they determined to pass the night in a convenient brick-yard about half a mile out of the town.
There was a handy shed where various implements were kept; the Major, by the help of a little twisted wire, easily unfastened the door. They supped, cooking a little porridge over a small fire which they were able to make without risk, and lay down to sleep after a pipe or two.
Tramps go to sleep early when they mean business, and it could not have been more than about eleven o'clock at night when Frank awoke with the sense that he had slept long and deeply. He seems to have lain there, content and quiet enough, watching the last ember dying in the brazier where they had made their fire.... There was presently a stir from the further corner of the shed, a match was struck, and Frank, from his improvised pillow, beheld the Major's face suddenly illuminated by the light with which he was kindling his pipe once more. He watched the face with a sort of artistic interest for a few seconds—the drooping shadows, the apparently cavernous eyes, the deep-shaded bar of the mustache across the face. In the wavering light cast from below it resembled the face of a vindictive beast. Then the Major whispered, between his puffs:
"Frankie?"
"Yes."