“I was never a man who thought life simple; I had not a five-hundred word vocabulary wherewith I explained the primitive emotions of birth, hunger, adolescence, love, and death; no, life was always difficult and involved to me, but now in the evening of my own existence, serene and ordered as that evening turns out to be, it appears as a labyrinth beyond conception, with not one, but a thousand centres into which we successively stray. Difficult, difficult and heavy to shift are the blocks of which our mansion is built. Nor am I now speaking of social-political creeds which are to govern the world; I am speaking only of poor, elementary human beings, for, not having mastered the individual, I don’t attempt to discuss the system under which he lives. Big and little things alike go to our building; and if it was the war which first put the grace of humility into me, it is the sequel to a tale of plain people which has kept it there.
“Oh, the humility of me! I cross my arms over my eyes and bow myself down to the ground like a Mussulman at prayer. There’s nothing like life for teaching humility to a man, nothing like life for shouting ‘Fool! fool! fool!’ at him till he puts his hands over his ears. It buzzes round our heads like a mosquito inside mosquito-curtains. Humility isn’t the gift of youth—thank God—for it takes a deal of buffeting to drive it into us. The war should have taught us a lesson in humility; a wider lesson, I mean, than the accident of defeat or victory, efficiency or non-efficiency. Let us ignore those superficial aspects of the war. What we are concerned with, is the underlying forces, the courage, the endurance, the loyalty, the development of a great heart by little mean men; all this, abstract but undeniable, unrivalled, the broadest river of human excellence that ever flowed. What then? Mistaken, by God! wrongheaded! an immense sacrifice on the altar of Truth which was all the time the altar of Untruth. Doesn’t it make you weep? All the gold of the human heart poured out, like the gold of the common coffers, in a mistaken cause. It’s barbaric; it’s more than barbaric, it’s pre-historic; it’s going back to the Stone Age. We can’t say these things now; not yet; not from lack of courage, but from a sense of tact: we’re living in the wrong century. It’s an outrage on tact to say to your century what will be self-evident to the next; therefore we continue to hate our enemy and love our country; mistaken ideals both.
“There, my dear fellow, I profoundly apologise; if I oughtn’t to say these things to my century I oughtn’t to say them to you either, not that you are narrow enough to condemn me, but because I shall bore you. I promised you, too, that my letter was to deal with our little corner of Kent, and on that understanding I have induced you to read thus far. I reflect, moreover, that I have no right to speak thus and thus to a man who has lost much of his activity in his country’s service. Mrs. Pennistan has drawn me a touching picture of you, though she hasn’t much descriptive talent, has she? A motherly soul, pathetically out of place among that untamed brood. Like the majority of people, she lives a life of externals, with sentimentality as a mild substitute for the more heroic things, and it has been her misfortune for her lot to fall among people who, in the critical moments of their lives, allow themselves to be guided by internal powers of which Mrs. Pennistan knows nothing. I said, nothing. Yet is such true placidity possible? When you see a person, a body, marvellous casket and mask of secrets, what do you think? I think, there stands a figure labelled with a name, but he, or she, has lived a certain number of years; that is to say, has suffered, rejoiced, loved, been afraid, known pain; owns secrets, some dirty, some natural, some shameful, some merely pathetic; and the older the figure, the greater my wonderment and my admiration. Mrs. Pennistan, dull, commonplace woman, once gave herself to Amos; was then that not an immortal moment? But if she remembers at all, she remembers without imagination; she can’t touch her recollection into life.
“And she dwells among hot, smouldering natures to whom the life of the spirit is real. She doesn’t understand them, and when her daughter, who is apparently living in externals likewise, breaks out into the unexpected, she is perplexed, dismayed, aggrieved. She doesn’t travel on parallel lines with the workings of such a mind as her daughter’s and consequently has to catch up with a sudden leap forward which disturbs her comfortable amble. She had to take such a leap when her daughter eloped, and another similar leap when her daughter tried to shoot her son-in-law. Humorous, isn’t it? and rather sad. I feel less for Amos, whose instinct is more in tune with Ruth’s, and is able to follow quickly by instinct if not by reason.
“At present Mrs. Pennistan’s mind must be in chaos, but it is happy chaos, and so she accepts it without disproportionate bewilderment. Besides, she has come by now to a fortunate state of resignation, in which she is determined to be surprised at nothing. I have questioned her on the subject. She is so profoundly unanalytical that I had some difficulty in getting her to understand at all what I was driving at, let alone getting her to answer my questions; still, what she told me was, in substance, this:—
“‘Ruth was my own girl, and a quiet girl at that, but Rawdon isn’t my boy, and we all knew that Rawdon was queer (this is the adjective she invariably applies, I find, to anything a little bit beyond her), so we got into the way of not being surprised when Rawdon did queer things. Though, I must say, this beats all. After ten years!... And he no coward either, I’ll say that for him. He was always a reckless boy, and if you’d seen the things he did you’d wonder, like I do, that he ever lived to grow up.’
“That, of course, is where her lack of imagination leaves her so much at fault. She has seen Rawdon climb into the tops of spindly trees after jackdaws’ nests, and has trembled lest he should fall and break his head, and has marvelled at his daring; but she cannot imagine, because she cannot with her physical eyes behold the torments he endured of late because his moral imaginative cowardice was so much greater than his physical courage. She cannot understand that the force of his imagination was such as to drive him away from all that he most desired. She cannot understand this, and I will admit that for us, who are phlegmatic English folk, it is difficult to understand also. We must dismiss our own standards first, and approach the situation with an unbiased eye. We must, in fact, pull prejudice down from his throne and set up imagination in his place. We must forget our training and our national conventions, if we wish to understand something alien to ourselves, something alien, but not thereby impossible or, believe me, uninteresting.
“I look back over what I have already written, and am bound to confess that I have set down hitherto the incoherent thoughts that came into my head, simply because I have been afraid of tackling my settled duty. To deal with ten years—for it is now ten years since the period of our correspondence ceased with the ceasing of the war—is a very alarming task for any man to undertake. I could, of course, acquaint you in a dozen lines with the salient happenings of those years. But it amuses me to cast them into the form of a narrative, and you will forgive me if I should slip into elaborating scenes in which I played no part.
“At the end of the war, I must tell you, I came back to England with no very fixed ideas as to my future. I had been a wanderer, and, I say it with shame, a dilettante all my life, and I felt that my restlessness had not yet spent itself. I had hated, oh, how I had hated, the discipline of the army! I had no joy in war; my theories—I can’t call them principles, for they were things too fluid for so imposing a name—my theories were in complete disaccord with war, and moreover my freedom, for the love of which I had sacrificed a possible home and children, was now taken from me, and, in its place, fetters both physical and moral were clamped upon me. As my feet had to move left! right! left! right! so my poor rebellious tongue had to move left! right! also. And yet, there were fine moments in that war; one learnt lessons, and one watched great splendid fountains leaping upwards out of that sea of humanity.... Then the end came when I was free, and could make a bonfire of my uniform. I wondered what I should do next, and as I wondered I became aware of two things pulling at me; one thing pulled me towards the Weald of Kent, and the other pulled me towards the Channel, where all the world would lie open to my wandering. I decided that the two were, in order, compatible.
“What a free man I was! I enjoyed paying the full fare for my ticket, and no longer travelling by warrant. You and I both know that journey to Penshurst, but you don’t know the freedom that was mine in those fields; I shouted, I ran, I jumped the brooks, I was like a lamb in May, forgetful of my middle-age. And then I was suddenly lonely, wanting, for the first time in my life, a companion to share my light-heartedness. I wished that you were with me, for I couldn’t think of anybody else. Home from the war; free indeed, but no welcome anywhere. Not even a dog. And as for a woman!...