My dear Hugh,
I have just come back to read your letter from one of those super-days of which even the happiest life can contain, I imagine, no more than a handful. Of merely good days I can remember many enough—a sufficient number, at any rate, to absorb very happily the memory of their less favoured brethren. And several of them remain distinct by virtue of some outstanding incident or emotion that they contained or inspired. But most, I think, have become blended into a general peaceable impression of past contentment. To use a popular Americanism, they were good times, and usually real good times at that.
But of these super-days, these Olympians among mundane experiences, no man can expect very many, and I have been, I suspect, as fortunate as most—in any case so fortunate as to be more than grateful, notwithstanding the tiny, struggling sense in me (a legacy of superstition, I suppose, from some far-back ancestors) that so exquisite an enjoyment must surely prelude some equivalent disaster. They are not, as a rule, I think, critical days, at any rate in the ordinarily accepted sense of the term, though I can remember perhaps a couple that in a small fashion might answer this description.
The first of them was in my fifteenth year, and was the last day (at the end of six weeks' strict training) of the House Races at school. Our four had started bottom of the river, and day by day had crept up until, in the evening of this particular one, we were to row the favourites, School House, for the cup. When I call them the favourites, they were this merely in a sporting sense. Because, I think, the succession of good fights put up by our own insignificant little house, added to a certain reputation for conceit that most School Houses would seem to possess, had won pretty nearly the whole of the rest of the school to our support. As a very junior and inferior oarsman (and I was more than conscious of this at the time, I remember) I can claim no particular share, other than an accidental one, in this series of victories. I had been one of two candidates for the post of bow, and being a few pounds heavier than my opponent, had managed to secure the thwart. But my mere undeservedness did not lessen—in fact, I think, it enhanced—the almost miraculous sweetness of those wonderful twelve hours. To be gazed at surreptitiously by yet smaller boys in a patently envious admiration; to be patted on the back by older ones who had never hitherto noticed my existence; to be let out of school half an hour earlier by the form-master, with a jocose phrase about privileged heroes—all these things wove a magic round my way that no anxiety about the coming race was strong enough to mar, and that has survived a good many years. Of the race itself I can remember, curiously, nothing but the peculiar hollow echo of our oars as we came through the Town Bridge, and the bare fact that we succeeded in winning, to the supposed vast humiliation of our superior enemies. But what I do remember most distinctly is being invited to tea with the captain, a big man and a monitor. It was a splendid, god-like meal, in which the six weeks' abstention (mistaken, no doubt, but none the less heroic) from sweets and pastries was utterly forgotten. And there stands out to me the doughnut that dismissed them to oblivion, a doughnut of so succulent a clamminess that it is unlikely, I think, ever to have had its peer—a very Lycidas among doughnuts.
The second day that occurs to me is that in which, playing through, for the first time in many years, to the Finals, the Hospital XV was defeated after a gruelling ninety minutes by the team that represented Guy's. This must have been some eight or nine years later, and its essence is contained in my memory by five perfect minutes, gloriously relaxed, tired but hard, in a hot bath at Richmond.
Now looking back, I know these to have been super-days, and they were, as I have explained, in a very minor sense critical perhaps. But they were exceptions, I think, to the general rule. For though the critical day, the long-looked-forward-to, the apparently, and indeed, chronologically speaking, the really important day may be a good one, and contain great things, yet in later life, at any rate, there is an inseparable anxiety about it of which the super-day knows nothing. The day one qualified, for example, and became by one scratch of the pen licensed to sign death-certificates, exempt from serving on fire brigades, and worth (on paper) from three to five guineas a week as a locum tenens, was, no doubt, a notable one. The day one proposed oneself in a kind of stammering paralysis as a possible husband to the only possible girl—and was unbelievably accepted; the marriage day; the day when one was appointed to the hospital staff; the day when, in a cool and blinded room, one stooped to kiss the tired but joyful eyes of the first baby's mother—these are the dates over which, most probably, the outside historian would choose to pour the vials of his fancy. But I doubt if in any life these are ever the super-days. They are days to remember; but at the same time they are days that one is glad to have seen closed. They have beheld Destiny too visibly hanging on so desperately fine a balance.
No, they come, these gift-days from the gods, even as they list; and they refuse to be classified. The most constant feature about them, I think, is that they rather generally appear during a holiday. And this, I believe, is because they depend so much on a certain purely bodily fitness. I hesitate a little to be very dogmatic about this, because the older one grows the more spiritual, and consequently deeper, becomes their joy. And yet, for the majority of us, at any rate, I am certain that the temple must be at least in passable order if the spirit within is to look abroad with an unworried heart, and thoroughly spring-cleaned before its householder, free from domestic cares, can roam joyously at will to find those rarer flowers that he's so seldom free enough to seek. And there lies my stock argument for all misguided religious workers who won't take holidays, and incidentally the real damnation of all systems of monastic self-mortification. A sound body not only means a sound mind, but an untrammelled spirit. For a spirit that has constantly to be down on its knees stopping up some leak in the basement cannot possibly find much time for walking in the garden with God. And if it's a self-made or self-permitted leak, it hasn't even the excuse of being engaged in some equally necessary occupation.
Yet apart from this, there isn't a doubt, I think, that these super-days stand out in memory, and gain their constructive force less by reason of their muscular exaltation than by virtue of their spiritual vision. For even in the days of the doughnut and the hot bath this last wasn't altogether absent. The doughnut marked the closing of an epoch and the dawn of its successor. It meant the passage—and to a certain extent the conscious passage, too—of an irresponsible childhood into a region of honourable reputation. It was a doughnut that had been bestowed by the hands of a captain. While the hot bath, careless of defeat, merely whispered how great had been the game. And in their successors of later years this spiritual factor has tended to emphasise itself in an ever-growing proportion. Wordsworth might almost have selected the theme, I think, for an Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in Middle Age. I can remember one such day on Butser Hill, during a snatched week-end in Hampshire, and another that is summed up for me in a bend of heather-bordered road, turning, at a hot day's end, towards Stronachlacher and a green lawn above Loch Katrine.
And now, with an equal unexpectedness, there has come the latest of them all.
You know how it goes on a holiday—the holiday, that is, of a man to whom holidays are rare and very blessed. For the first day your mind has not yet freed itself from town and toil and the hundred other interests for which they stand. Nor has your body quite overcome the lassitude inspired by pavements, and encouraged by taxi-cabs and broughams. Your host, too, wants to learn the latest tidings from the great metropolis; what So-and-so thinks of the political situation; the prevailing opinion on stocks and shares; the last pronouncements on art and music; the newest good thing in plays. And perhaps even, if you chance to be of the same profession, you fall to talking shop. Not even the magic of plunging streams and deep, rock-shaded pools is quite sufficient, for the moment, to dispel the urban atmosphere that still clings about you. Your unused muscles remind you of the reason for their flabbiness. Your eye, too long engaged upon other sights, is not yet quick enough to mark the swift rise among those ripples at the tail of the pool. And you return from your first day's fishing a little annoyed with yourself, aching as regards the wrist and thigh, and more often than not with a light or empty bag. Yet even so, mark the change in your after-dinner talk! Smoking there round the hall fire, surrounded by rods and guns and cases of fish and game, you no longer deliver yourself of opinions on the rubber market or the precise value of the latest vaccine. You discuss instead the reason why you missed that pounder under Applebrook Bridge. And you sit for long minutes staring through a blue tobacco haze into the wood-fire's heart, presumably thinking, but in reality doing nothing of the kind. For though the gates of your brain are open, it is to speed rather than receive impressions. And by to-morrow the overcrowded hostel of your mind will be standing with doors ajar for its lustier moorland visitors.