But from this moment my mind began to run upon the picture of Fenella Stanley, surrounded by those Snowdonian spirits which her music was supposed to have evoked from the mountain air of the morning.
XIII
THE MAGIC OF SNOWDON
I
In a few days I left London and went to North Wales.
Opposite to me in the railway carriage sat an elderly lady, into whose face I occasionally felt myself to be staring in an unconscious way. But I was merely communing with myself: I was saying to myself, 'My love of North Wales, and especially of Snowdon, is certainly very strong; but it is easily accounted for—it is a matter of temperament. Even had Wales not been associated with Winnie, I still must have dearly loved it. Much has been said about the effect of scenery upon the minds and temperaments of those who are native to it. But temperament is a matter of ancestral conditions: the place of one's birth is an accident. As some, like my cousin Percy, for instance are born with a passion for the sea, and some with a passion for forests, some with a passion for mountains, and some with a passion for rolling plains. The landscape amid which I was born had, no doubt, a charm for me, and could bring to me that nature-ecstacy which I inherited from Fenella Stanley. But with Wales I actually fell in love the moment I set foot in the country. This is why I am hurrying there now.'
And I laughed at myself, and evidently frightened the old lady very much. She did not know that underneath the soul's direst struggle—the struggle of personality with the tyranny of the ancestral blood—there is an awful sense of humour—a laughter (unconquerable, and yet intolerable) at the deepest of all incongruities, the incongruity of Fate's game with man. I apologised to her, and told her that I had been absorbed in reading a droll story, in which a man believed that the Angel of Memory had refashioned for him his dead wife out of his own sorrow and unquenchable fountain of tears.
'What an extraordinary idea!' said the old lady, in the conciliatory tone she would have adopted towards a madman whom she found alone with her in a railway carriage. 'I mean he was very eccentric, wasn't he?'
'Who shall say, madam? "Bold is the donkey-driver and bold the ka'dee who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve, not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah, not knowing in any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer."'
At the next station the old lady left the carriage and entered another, and I was left alone.