BELLOC-On Nothing & kindred subjets - OF AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY
A woman whose presence in English letters will continue to increase
wrote of a cause to which she had dedicated her life that it was
like that Faery Castle of which men became aware when they wandered
upon a certain moor. In that deserted place (the picture was taken
from the writings of Sir Walter Scott) the lonely traveller heard
above him a noise of bugles in the air, and thus a Faery Castle was
revealed; but again, when the traveller would reach it, a doom comes
upon him, and in the act of its attainment it vanishes away.
We are northern, full of dreams in the darkness; this Castle is
caught in glimpses, a misty thing. It is seen a moment--then it
mixes once again with the mist of our northern air, and when that
mist has lifted from the heath there is nothing before the watcher
but a bare upland open to the wind and roofed only by hurrying
cloud. Yet in the moment of revelation most certainly the traveller
perceived it, and the call of its bugle-guard was very clear. He
continues his way perceiving only the things he knows--trees bent by
the gale, rude heather, the gravel of the path, and mountains all
around. In that landscape he has no companion; yet he cannot but be
haunted, as he goes, by towers upon which he surely looked, and by
the sharp memory of bugle-notes that still seem to startle his
hearing.
In our legends of Western Europe this Castle perpetually returns. It
has been seen not only on the highlands of Ireland, of Wales, of
Brittany, of the Asturias, of Normandy, and of Auvergne, but in the
plains also, and on those river meadows where wealth comes so fast
that even simple men early forget the visions of the hills. The
imagination, or rather the speech, of our race has created or
recognised throughout our territory this stronghold which was not
altogether of the world.
Queen Iseult, as she sat with Tristan in a Castle Garden, towards
the end of a summer night, whispered to him: "Tristan, they say that
this Castle is Faëry; it is revealed at the sound of a Trumpet, but
presently it vanishes away," and as she said it the bugles rang
dawn.
Raymond of Saragossa saw this Castle, also, as he came down from the
wooded hills after he had found the water of life and was bearing it
towards the plain. He saw the towers quite clearly and also thought
he heard the call upon that downward road at whose end he was to
meet with Bramimonde. But he saw it thence only, in the exaltation
of the summits as he looked over the falling forest to the plain and
the Sierra miles beyond. He saw it thence only. Never after upon
either bank of Ebro could he come upon it, nor could any man assure
him of the way.
In the Story of Val-es-Dunes, Hugh the Fortinbras out of the
Cotentin had a castle of this kind. For when, after the battle, they
count the dead, the Priest finds in the sea-grass among other bodies
that of this old Lord....
... and Hugh that trusted in his glass,
But rode not home the day;
Whose title was the Fortinbras
With the Lords of his Array.
This was that old Hugh the Fortinbras who had been Lord to the
Priest's father, so that when the battle was engaged the Priest
watched him from the opposing rank, and saw him fall, far off, just
as the line broke and before the men of the Caux country had room to
charge. It was easy to see him, for he rode a high horse and was
taller than other Normans, and when his horse was wounded....
... The girth severed and the saddle swung
And he went down;
He never more sang winter songs
In his High Town.
In his High Town that Faery is
And stands on Harcourt Lea;
To summon him up his arrier-ban
His writ beyond the mountain ran.
My father was his serving-man;
Although the farm was free.
Before the angry wars began
He was a friend to me!
In his High Town that Faery is
And stands on Harcourt bay;
The Fisher driving through the night
Makes harbour by that castle height
And moors him till the day:
But with the broadening of the light
It vanishes away.
So the Faery Castle comes in by an illusion in the Ballad of the
Battle of Val-es-Dunes.
* * * * *
What is this vision which our race has so symbolised or so seen and
to which are thus attached its oldest memories? It is the miraculous
moment of intense emotion in which whether we are duped or
transfigured we are in touch with a reality firmer than the reality
of this world. The Faery Castle is the counterpart and the example
of those glimpses which every man has enjoyed, especially in youth,
and which no man even in the dust of middle age can quite forget. In
these were found a complete harmony and satisfaction which were not
negative nor dependent upon the absence of discord--such completion
as criticism may conceive--but as positive as colour or as music,
and clothed as it were in a living body of joy.
The vision may be unreal or real, in either case it is valid: if it
is unreal it is a symbol of the world behind the world. But it is no
less a symbol; even if it is unreal it is a sudden seeing of the
place to which our faces are set during this unbroken marching of
years.
Once on the Sacramento River a little before sunrise I looked
eastward from a boat and saw along the dawn the black edge of the
Sierras. The peaks were as sharp as are the Malvern from the
Cotswold, though they were days and days away. They made a broad
jagged band intensely black against the glow of the sky. I drew them
so. A tiny corner of the sun appeared between two central peaks:--at
once the whole range was suffused with glory. The sun was wholly
risen and the mountains had completely disappeared,--in the place
where they had been was the sky of the horizon.
At another time, also in a boat, I saw beyond a spit of the Tunisian
coast, as it seemed a flat island. Through the heat, with which the
air trembled, was a low gleam of sand, a palm or two, and, less
certainly, the flats and domes of a white native village. Our
course, which was to round the point, went straight for this island,
and, as we approached, it became first doubtful, then flickering,
then a play of light upon the waves. It was a mirage, and it had
melted into the air.
* * * * *
There is a part of us, as all the world knows, which is immixed with
change and by change only can live. There is another part which lies
behind motion and time, and that part is ourselves. This diviner
part has surely a stronghold which is also an inheritance. It has a
home which perhaps it remembers and which certainly it conceives at
rare moments during our path over the moor.
This is that Faëry Castle. It is revealed at the sound of a trumpet;
we turn our eyes, we glance and we perceive it; we strain to reach
it--in the very effort of our going the doom of human labour falls
upon us and it vanishes away.
It is real or unreal. It is unreal like that island which I thought
to see some miles from Africa, but which was not truly there: for
the ship when it came to the place that island had occupied sailed
easily over an empty sea. It is real, like those high Sierras which
I drew from the Sacramento River at the turn of the night and which
were suddenly obliterated by the rising sun.
Where the vision is but mirage, even there it is a symbol of our
goal; where it stands fast and true, for however brief a moment, it
can illumine, and should determine the whole of our lives. For such
sights are the manifestation of that glory which lies permanent
beyond the changing of the world. Of such a sort are the young
passionate intentions to relieve the burden of mankind, first love,
the mood created by certain strains of music, and--as I am willing
to believe--the Walls of Heaven.
The ship had sailed northward in an even manner and under a sky that
was full of stars, when the dawn broke and the full day quickly
broadened over the Mediterranean. With the advent of the light the
salt of the sea seemed stronger, and there certainly arose a new
freshness in the following air; but as yet no land appeared. Until
at last, seated as I was alone in the fore part of the vessel, I
clearly saw a small unchanging shape far off before me, peaked upon
the horizon and grey like a cloud. This I watched, wondering what
its name might be, who lived upon it, or what its fame was; for it
was certainly land.
I watched in this manner for some hours--perhaps for two--when the
island, now grown higher, was so near that I could see trees upon
it; but they were set sparsely, as trees are on a dry land, and most
of them seemed to be thorn trees.
It was at this moment that a man who had been singing to himself in
a low tone aft came up to me and told me that this island was called
the Island of Goats and that there were no men upon it to his
knowledge, that it was a lonely place and worth little. But by this
time there had risen beyond the Island of Goats another and much
larger land.
It lay all along the north in a mountainous belt of blue, and any
man coming to it for the first time or unacquainted with maps would
have said to himself: "I have found a considerable place." And,
indeed, the name of the island indicates this, for it is called
Majorca, "The Larger Land." Towards this, past the Island of Goats,
and past the Strait, we continued to sail with a light breeze for
hours, until at last we could see on this shore also sparse trees;
but most of them were olive trees, and they were relieved with the
green of cultivation up the high mountain sides and with the white
houses of men.
The deck was now crowded with people, most of whom were coming back
to their own country after an exile in Africa among un-Christian and
dangerous things. The little children who had not yet known Europe,
having been born beyond the sea, were full of wonder; but their
parents, who knew the shortness of human life and its trouble, were
happy because they had come back at last and saw before them the
known jetties and the familiar hills of home. As I was surrounded by
so much happiness, I myself felt as though I had come to the end of
a long journey and was reaching my own place, though I was, in
reality, bound for Barcelona, and after that up northward through
the Cerdagne, and after that to Perigord, and after that to the
Channel, and so to Sussex, where all journeys end.
The harbour had about it that Mediterranean-go-as-you-please which
everywhere in the Mediterranean distinguishes harbours. It was as
though the men of that sea had said: "It never blows for long: let
us build ourselves a rough refuge and to-morrow sail away." We
neared this harbour, but we flew no flag and made no signal. Beneath
us the water was so clear that all one need have done to have
brought the vessel in if one had not known the channel would have
been to lean over the side and to keep the boy at the helm off the
very evident shallows and the crusted rocks by gestures of one's
hands, for the fairway was like a trench, deep and blue. So we slid
into Palma haven, and as we rounded the pier the light wind took us
first abeam and then forward; then we let go and she swung up and
was still. They lowered the sails.
The people who were returning were so full of activity and joy that
it was like a hive of bees; but I no longer felt this as I had felt
their earlier and more subdued emotion, for the place was no longer
distant or mysterious as it had been when first its sons and
daughters had come up on deck to welcome it and had given me part of
their delight. It was now an evident and noisy town; hot, violent,
and strong. The houses had about them a certain splendour, the
citizens upon the quays a satisfied and prosperous look. Its
streets, where they ran down towards the sea, were charmingly clean
and cared for, and the architecture of its wealthier mansions seemed
to me at once unusual and beautiful, for I had not yet seen Spain.
Each house, so far as I could make out from the water, was entered
by a fine sculptured porch which gave into a cool courtyard with
arcades under it, and most of the larger houses had escutcheons
carved in stone upon their walls.
But what most pleased me and also seemed most strange was to see
against the East a vast cathedral quite Northern in outline, except
for a severity and discipline of which the North is incapable save
when it has steeped itself in the terseness of the classics.
This monument was far larger than anything in the town. It stood out
separate from the town and dominated it upon its seaward side,
somewhat as might an isolated hill, a shore fortress of rock. It was
almost bare of ornament; its stones were very carefully worked and
closely fitted, and little waves broke ceaselessly along the base of
its rampart. Landwards, a mass of low houses which seemed to touch
the body of the building did but emphasise its height. When I had
landed I made at once for this cathedral, and with every step it
grew greater.
We who are of the North are accustomed to the enormous; we have
unearthly sunsets and the clouds magnify our hills. The Southern men
see nothing but misproportion in what is enormous. They love to have
things in order, and violence in art is odious to them. This high
and dreadful roof had not been raised under the influences of the
island; it had surely been designed just after the re-conquest from
the Mohammedans, when a turbulent army, not only of Gascons and
Catalans, but of Normans also and of Frisians, and of Rhenish men,
had poured across the water and had stormed the sea-walls. On this
account the cathedral had about it in its sky-line and in its
immensity, and in the Gothic point of its windows, a Northern air.
But in its austerity and in its magnificence it was Spaniard.
As I passed the little porch of entry in the side wall I saw a man.
He was standing silent and alone; he was not blind and perhaps not
poor, and as I passed he begged the charity not of money but of
prayers. When I had entered the cool and darkness of the nave, his
figure still remained in my mind, and I could not forget it. I
remembered the straw hat upon his head and the suit of blue canvas
which he wore, and the rough staff of wood in his hand. I was
especially haunted by his expression, which was patient and masqued
as though he were enduring a pain and chose to hide it.
The nave was empty. It was a great hollow that echoed and re-echoed;
there were no shrines and no lamps, and no men or women praying, and
therefore the figure at the door filled my mind more and more, until
I went out and asked him if he was in need of money, of which at
that moment I had none. He answered that his need was not for money
but only for prayers.
"Why," said I, "do you need prayers?"
He said it was because his fate was upon him.
I think he spoke the truth. He was standing erect and with dignity,
his eyes were not disturbed, and he repeatedly refused the alms of
passers-by.
"No one" said I, "should yield to these moods."
He answered nothing, but looked pensive like a man gazing at a
landscape and remembering his life.
But it was now the hour when the ship was to be sailing again, and I
could not linger, though I wished very much to talk more with him. I
begged him to name a shrine where a gift might be of especial value
to him. He said that he was attached to no one shrine more than to
any other, and then I went away regretfully, remembering how
earnestly he had asked for prayers.
This was in Palma of Majorca not two years ago. There are many such
men, but few who speak so humbly.
When I had got aboard again the ship sailed out and rounded a
lighthouse point and then made north to Barcelona. The night fell,
and next morning there rose before us the winged figures that crown
the Custom House of that port and are an introduction to the glories
of Spain.
A Young Man of my acquaintance having passed his twenty-eighth
birthday, and wrongly imagining this date to represent the Grand
Climacteric, went by night in some perturbation to an Older Man and
spoke to him as follows:
"Sir! I have intruded upon your leisure in order to ask your advice
upon certain matters."
The Older Man, whose thoughts were at that moment intently set upon
money, looked up in a startled way and attempted to excuse himself,
suffering as he did from the delusion that the Young Man was after a
loan. But the Young Man, whose mind was miles away from all such
trifling things, continued to press him anxiously without so much as
noticing that he had perturbed his Senior.
"I have come, Sir," said he, "to ask your opinion, advice,
experience, and guidance upon something very serious which has
entered into my life, which is, briefly, that I feel myself to be
growing old."
Upon hearing this so comforting and so reasonable a statement the
Older Man heaved a profound sigh of relief and turning to him a
mature and smiling visage (as also turning towards him his person
and in so doing turning his Polished American Hickory Wood Office
Chair), answered with a peculiar refinement, but not without
sadness, "I shall be happy to be of any use I can"; from which order
and choice of words the reader might imagine that the Older Man was
himself a Colonial, like his chair. In this imagination the reader,
should he entertain it, would be deceived.
The Younger Man then proceeded, knotting his forehead and putting
into his eyes that troubled look which is proper to virtue and to
youth:
"Oh, Sir! I cannot tell you how things seem to be slipping from me!
I smell less keenly and taste less keenly, I enjoy less keenly and
suffer less keenly than I did. Of many things which I certainly
desired I can only say that I now desire them in a more confused
manner. Of certain propositions in which I intensely believed I can
only say that I now see them interfered with and criticised
perpetually, not, as was formerly the case, by my enemies, but by
the plain observance of life, and what is worse, I find growing in
me a habit of reflection for reflection's sake, leading nowhere--and
a sort of sedentary attitude in which I watch but neither judge nor
support nor attack any portion of mankind."
The Older Man, hearing this speech, congratulated his visitor upon
his terse and accurate methods of expression, detailed to him the
careers in which such habits of terminology are valuable, and also
those in which they are a fatal fault.
"Having heard you," he said, "it is my advice to you, drawn from a
long experience of men, to enter the legal profession, and, having
entered it, to supplement your income with writing occasional
articles for the more dignified organs of the Press. But if this
prospect does not attract you (and, indeed, there are many whom it
has repelled) I would offer you as an alternative that you should
produce slowly, at about the rate of one in every two years, short
books compact of irony, yet having running through them like a
twisted thread up and down, emerging, hidden, and re-emerging in the
stuff of your writing, a memory of those early certitudes and even
of passion for those earlier revelations."
When the Older Man had said this he sat silent for a few moments and
then added gravely, "But I must warn you that for such a career you
need an accumulated capital of at least 30,000."
The Young Man was not comforted by advice of this sort, and was
determined to make a kind of war upon the doctrine which seemed to
underlie it. He said in effect that if he could not be restored to
the pristine condition which he felt to be slipping from him he
would as lief stop living.
On hearing this second statement the Older Man became extremely
grave.
"Young Man," said he, "Young Man, consider well what you are saying!
The poet Shakespeare in his most remarkable effort, which, I need
hardly tell you, is the tragedy of Hamlet, or the Prince of
Denmark, has remarked that the thousand doors of death stand
open. I may be misquoting the words, and if I am I do so boldly and
without fear, for any fool with a book at his elbow can get the
words right and yet not understand their meaning. Let me assure you
that the doors of death are not so simply hinged, and that any
determination to force them involves the destruction of much more
than these light though divine memories of which you speak; they
involve, indeed, the destruction of the very soul which conceives
them. And let me assure you, not upon my own experience, but upon
that of those who have drowned themselves imperfectly, who have
enlisted in really dangerous wars, or who have fired revolvers at
themselves in a twisted fashion with their right hands, that, quite
apart from that evil to the soul of which I speak, the evil to the
mere body in such experiments is so considerable that a man would
rather go to the dentist than experience them.... You will forgive
me," he added earnestly, "for speaking in this gay manner upon an
important philosophical subject, but long hours of work at the
earning of my living force me to some relaxation towards the end of
the day, and I cannot restrain a frivolous spirit even in the
discussion of such fundamental things.... No, do not, as you put it,
'stop living.' It hurts, and no one has the least conception of
whether it is a remedy. What is more, the life in front of you will
prove, after a few years, as entertaining as the life which you are
rapidly leaving."
The Young Man caught on to this last phrase, and said, "What do you
mean by 'entertaining'?"
"I intend," said the Older Man, "to keep my advice to you in the
note to which I think such advice should be set. I will not burden
it with anything awful, nor weight an imperfect diction with
absolute verities in which I do indeed believe, but which would be
altogether out of place at this hour of the evening. I will not deny
that from eleven till one, and especially if one be delivering an
historical, or, better still, a theological lecture, one can without
loss of dignity allude to the permanent truth, the permanent beauty,
and the permanent security without which human life wreathes up like
mist and is at the best futile, at the worst tortured. But you must
remember that you have come to me suddenly with a most important
question, after dinner, that I have but just completed an essay upon
the economic effect of the development of the Manchurian coalfields,
and that (what is more important) all this talk began in a certain
key, and that to change one's key is among the most difficult of
creative actions.... No, Young Man, I shall not venture upon the
true reply to your question."
On hearing this answer the Young Man began to curse and to swear and
to say that he had looked everywhere for help and had never found
it; that he was minded to live his own life and to see what would
come of it; that he thought the Older Man knew nothing of what he
was talking about, but was wrapping it all up in words; that he had
clearly recognised in the Older Man's intolerable prolixity several
clichés or ready-made phrases; that he hoped on reaching the Older
Man's age he would not have been so utterly winnowed of all
substance as to talk so aimlessly; and finally that he prayed God
for a personal development more full of justice, of life, and of
stuff than that which the Older Man appeared to have suffered or
enjoyed.
On hearing these words the Older Man leapt to his feet (which was
not an easy thing for him to do) and as one overjoyed grasped the
Younger Man by the hand, though the latter very much resented such
antics on the part of Age.
"That is it! That is it!" cried the Older Man, looking now far too
old for his years. "If I have summoned up in you that spirit I have
not done ill! Get you forward in that mood and when you come to my
time of life you will be as rotund and hopeful a fellow as I am
myself."
But having heard these words the Young Man left him in disgust.
The Older Man, considering all these things as he looked into the
fire when he was alone, earnestly desired that he could have told
the Young Man the exact truth, have printed it, and have produced a
proper Gospel. But considering the mountains of impossibility that
lay in the way of such public action, he sighed deeply and took to
the more indirect method. He turned to his work and continued to
perform his own duty before God and for the help of mankind. This,
on that evening, was for him a review upon the interpretation of the
word haga in the Domesday Inquest. This kept him up till a
quarter past one, and as he had to take a train to Newcastle at
eight next morning it is probable that much will be forgiven him
when things are cleared.
C'est ma Jeunesse qui s'en va.
Adieu! la tres gente compagne--
Oncques ne suis moins gai pour ça
(C'est ma Jeunesse qui s'en va)
Et lon-lon-laire, et lon-lon-là
Peut-etre perd's; peut-etre gagne.
C'est ma Jeunesse qui s'en va.
(From the Author's MSS. In the library of the Abbey of Theleme.)
Host: Well, Youth, I see you are about to leave me, and since it is
in the terms of your service by no means to exceed a certain period
in my house, I must make up my mind to bid you farewell.
Youth: Indeed, I would stay if I could; but the matter lies as you
know in other hands, and I may not stay.
Host: I trust, dear Youth, that you have found all comfortable while
you were my guest, that the air has suited you and the company?
Youth: I thank you, I have never enjoyed a visit more; you may say
that I have been most unusually happy.
Host: Then let me ring for the servant who shall bring down your
things.
Youth: I thank you civilly! I have brought them down already--see,
they are here. I have but two, one very large bag and this other
small one.
Host: Why, you have not locked the small one! See it gapes!
Youth (somewhat embarrassed): My dear Host ... to tell the
truth ... I usually put it off till the end of my visits ... but the
truth ... to tell the truth, my luggage is of two kinds.
Host: I do not see why that need so greatly confuse you.
Youth (still more embarrassed): But you see--the fact is--I
stay with people so long that--well, that very often they forget
which things are mine and which belong to the house ... And--well,
the truth is that I have to take away with me a number of things
which ... which, in a word, you may possibly have thought your own.
Host (coldly): Oh!
Youth (eagerly): Pray do not think the worse of me--you know
how strict are my orders.
Host (sadly): Yes, I know; you will plead that Master of
yours, and no doubt you are right.... But tell me, Youth, what are
those things?
Youth: They fill this big bag. But I am not so ungracious as you
think. See, in this little bag, which I have purposely left open,
are a number of things properly mine, yet of which I am allowed to
make gifts to those with whom I lingered--you shall choose among
them, or if you will, you shall have them all.
Host: Well, first tell me what you have packed in the big bag and
mean to take away.
Youth: I will open it and let you see. (He unlocks it and pulls
the things out.) I fear they are familiar to you.
Host: Oh! Youth! Youth! Must you take away all of these? Why, you
are taking away, as it were, my very self! Here is the love of
women, as deep and changeable as an opal; and here is carelessness
that looks like a shower of pearls. And here I see--Oh! Youth, for
shame!--you are taking away that silken stuff which used to wrap up
the whole and which you once told me had no name, but which lent to
everything it held plenitude and satisfaction. Without it surely
pleasures are not all themselves. Leave me that at least.
Youth: No, I must take it, for it is not yours, though from courtesy
I forbore to tell you so till now. These also go: Facility, the
ointment; Sleep, the drug; Full Laughter, that tolerated all
follies. It was the only musical thing in the house. And I must
take--yes, I fear I must take Verse.
HOST: Then there is nothing left!
YOUTH: Oh! yes! See this little open bag which you may choose from!
Feel it!
HOST (lifting it): Certainly it is very heavy, but it rattles
and is uncertain.
YOUTH: That is because it is made up of divers things having no
similarity; and you may take all or leave all, or choose as you
will. Here (holding up a clout) is Ambition: Will you have
that?...
HOST (doubtfully): I cannot tell.... It has been mine and yet
... without those other things....
YOUTH (cheerfully): Very well, I will leave it. You shall
decide on it a few years hence. Then, here is the perfume Pride.
Will you have that?
HOST: No; I will have none of it. It is false and corrupt, and only
yesterday I was for throwing it out of window to sweeten the air in
my room.
YOUTH: So far you have chosen well; now pray choose more.
HOST: I will have this--and this--and this. I will take Health
(takes it out of the bag), not that it is of much use to me
without those other things, but I have grown used to it. Then I will
take this (takes out a plain steel purse and chain), which is
the tradition of my family, and which I desire to leave to my son. I
must have it cleaned. Then I will take this (pulls out a trinket),
which is the Sense of Form and Colour. I am told it is of less value
later on, but it is a pleasant ornament ... And so, Youth, goodbye.
Youth (with a mysterious smile): Wait--I have something else
for you (he feels in his ticket pocket); no less a thing
(he feels again in his watch pocket) than (he looks a trifle anxious
and feels in his waistcoat pockets) a promise from my Master, signed
and sealed, to give you back all I take and more in Immortality! (He
feels in his handkerchief pocket.)
Host: Oh! Youth!
Youth (still feeling): Do not thank me! It is my Master you
should thank. (Frowns.) Dear me! I hope I have not lost it!
(Feels in his trousers pockets.)
Host (loudly): Lost it?
Youth (pettishly): I did not say I had lost it! I said I
hoped I had not ... (feels in his great-coat pocket, and pulls
out an envelope). Ah! Here it is! (His face clouds over.)
No, that is the message to Mrs. George, telling her the time has
come to get a wig ... (Hopelessly): Do you know I am afraid I
have lost it! I am really very sorry--I cannot wait. (He goes
off.)
I knew a man once who made a great case of Death, saying that he
esteemed a country according to its regard for the conception of
Death, and according to the respect which it paid to that
conception. He also said that he considered individuals by much the
same standard, but that he did not judge them so strictly in the
matter, because (said he) great masses of men are more permanently
concerned with great issues; whereas private citizens are disturbed
by little particular things which interfere with their little
particular lives, and so distract them from the general end.
This was upon a river called Boutonne, in Vendée, and at the time I
did not understand what he meant because as yet I had had no
experience of these things. But this man to whom I spoke had had
three kinds of experience; first, he had himself been very probably
the occasion of Death in others, for he had been a soldier in a war
of conquest where the Europeans were few and the Barbarians many!
secondly, he had been himself very often wounded, and more than once
all but killed; thirdly, he was at the time he told me this thing an
old man who must in any case soon come to that experience or
catastrophe of which he spoke.
He was an innkeeper, the father of two daughters, and his inn was by
the side of the river, but the road ran between. His face was more
anxiously earnest than is commonly the face of a French peasant, as
though he had suffered more than do ordinarily that very prosperous,
very virile, and very self-governing race of men. He had also about
him what many men show who have come sharply against the great
realities, that is, a sort of diffidence in talking of ordinary
things. I could see that in the matters of his household he allowed
himself to be led by women. Meanwhile he continued to talk to me
over the table upon this business of Death, and as he talked he
showed that desire to persuade which is in itself the strongest
motive of interest in any human discourse.
He said to me that those who affected to despise the consideration
of Death knew nothing of it; that they had never seen it close and
might be compared to men who spoke of battles when they had only
read books about battles, or who spoke of sea-sickness though they
had never seen the sea. This last metaphor he used with some pride,
for he had crossed the Mediterranean from Provence to Africa some
five or six times, and had upon each occasion suffered horribly;
for, of course, his garrison had been upon the edge of the desert,
and he had been a soldier beyond the Atlas. He told me that those
who affected to neglect or to despise Death were worse than children
talking of grown-up things, and were more like prigs talking of
physical things of which they knew nothing.
I told him then that there were many such men, especially in the
town of Geneva. This, he said, he could well believe, though he had
never travelled there, and had hardly heard the name of the place.
But he knew it for some foreign town. He told me, also, that there
were men about in his own part of the world who pretended that since
Death was an accident like any other, and, moreover, one as certain
as hunger or as sleep, it was not to be considered. These, he said,
were the worst debaters upon his favourite subject.
Now as he talked in this fashion I confess that I was very bored. I
had desired to go on to Angouléme upon my bicycle, and I was at that
age when all human beings think themselves immortal. I had desired
to get off the main high road into the hills upon the left, to the
east of it, and I was at an age when the cessation of mundane
experience is not a conceivable thing. Moreover, this innkeeper had
been pointed out to me as a man who could give very useful
information upon the nature of the roads I had to travel, and it had
never occurred to me that he would switch me off after dinner upon a
hobby of his own. To-day, after a wider travel, I know well that all
innkeepers have hobbies, and that an abstract or mystical hobby of
this sort is amongst the best with which to pass an evening. But no
matter, I am talking of then and not now. He kept me, therefore,
uninterested as I was, and continued:
"People who put Death away from them, who do not neglect or despise
it but who stop thinking about it, annoy me very much. We have in
this village a chemist of such a kind. He will have it that, five
minutes afterwards, a man thinks no more about it." Having gone so
far, the innkeeper, clenching his hands and fixing me with a
brilliant glance from his old eyes, said:
"With such men I will have nothing to do!"
Indeed, that his chief subject should be treated in such a fashion
was odious to him, and rightly, for of the half-dozen things worth
strict consideration, there is no doubt that his hobby was the
chief, and to have one's hobby vulgarly despised is intolerable.
The innkeeper then went on to tell me that so far as he could make
out it was a man's business to consider this subject of Death
continually, to wonder upon it, and, if he could, to extract its
meaning. Of the men I had met so far in life, only the Scotch and
certain of the Western French went on in this metaphysical manner:
thus a Breton, a Basque, and a man in Ecclefechan (I hope I spell it
right) and another in Jedburgh had already each of them sent me to
my bed confused upon the matter of free will. So this Western
innkeeper refused to leave his thesis. It was incredible to him that
a Sentient Being who perpetually accumulated experience, who grew
riper and riper, more and more full of such knowledge as was native
to himself and complementary to his nature, should at the very
crisis of his success in all things intellectual and emotional,
cease suddenly. It was further an object to him of vast curiosity
why such a being, since a future was essential to it, should find
that future veiled.
He presented to me a picture of men perpetually passing through a
field of vision out of the dark and into the dark. He showed me
these men, not growing and falling as fruits do (so the modern
vulgar conception goes) but alive throughout their transit: pouring
like an unbroken river from one sharp limit of the horizon whence
they entered into life to that other sharp limit where they poured
out from life, not through decay, but through a sudden catastrophe.
"I," said he, "shall die, I do suppose, with a full consciousness of
my being and with a great fear in my eyes. And though many die
decrepit and senile, that is not the normal death of men, for men
have in them something of a self-creative power, which pushes them
on to the further realisation of themselves, right up to the edge of
their doom."
I put his words in English after a great many years, but they were
something of this kind, for he was a metaphysical sort of man.
It was now near midnight, and I could bear with such discussions no
longer; my fatigue was great and the hour at which I had to rise
next day was early. It was, therefore, in but a drowsy state that I
heard him continue his discourse. He told me a long story of how he
had seen one day a company of young men of the New Army, the
conscripts, go marching past his house along the river through a
driving snow. He said that first he heard them singing long before
he saw them, that then they came out like ghosts for a moment
through the drift, that then in the half light of the winter dawn
they clearly appeared, all in step for once, swinging forward,
muffled in their dark blue coats, and still singing to the lift of
their feet; that then on their way to the seaport, they passed again
into the blinding scurry of the snow, that they seemed like ghosts
again for a moment behind the veil of it, and that long after they
had disappeared their singing could still be heard.
By this time I was most confused as to what lesson he would convey,
and sleep had nearly overcome me, but I remember his telling me that
such a sight stood to him at the moment and did still stand for the
passage of the French Armies perpetually on into the dark, century
after century, destroyed for the most part upon fields of battle. He
told me that he felt like one who had seen the retreat from Moscow,
and he would, I am sure, had I not determined to leave him and to
take at least some little sleep, have asked me what fate there was
for those single private soldiers, each real, each existent, while
the Army which they made up and of whose "destruction" men spoke,
was but a number, a notion, a name. He would have pestered me, if my
mind had still been active, as to what their secret destinies were
who lay, each man alone, twisted round the guns after the failure to
hold the Bridge of the Beresina. He might have gone deeper, but I
was too tired to listen to him any more.
This human debate of ours (and very one-sided it was!) is now
resolved, for in the interval since it was engaged the innkeeper
himself has died.
BELLOC-On Nothing & kindred subjets - OF AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY