september 20, 1894.
i had to-day a strange little instance of the patient, immutable habit of nature. some years ago there was a particular walk of which i was fond; it led through pastures, by shady wood-ends, and came out eventually on a bridge that spanned the line. here i often went to see a certain express pass; there was something thrilling in the silent cutting, the beckoning, ghostly arm of the high signal, the faint far-off murmur, and then the roar of the great train forging past. it was a breath from the world.
the red spider
on the parapet of the bridge, grey with close-grained lichen, there lived a numerous colony of little crimson spiders. what they did i never could discern; they wandered aimlessly about hither and thither, in a sort of feeble, blind haste; if they ever encountered each other on their rambles, they stopped, twiddled horns, and fled in a sudden horror; they never seemed to eat or sleep, and even continued[195] their endless peregrinations in the middle of heavy showers, which flicked them quivering to death.
i used to amuse myself with thinking how one had but to alter the scale, so to speak, and what appalling, intolerable monsters these would become. think of it! huge crimson shapeless masses, with strong wiry legs, and waving mandibles, tramping silently over the grey veldt, and perhaps preying on minute luckless insects, which would flee before them in vain.
one day i walked on ahead, leaving a companion to follow. he did follow, and joined me on the bridge—bringing heavy tidings which had just arrived after i left home.
the place grew to me so inseparably connected with the horror of the news that i instinctively abandoned it; but to-day, finding myself close to the place—nearly ten years had passed without my visiting it—i turned aside, musing on the old sadness, with something in my heart of the soft regret that a sorrow wears when seen through the haze of years.
there was the place, just the same; i bent to see a passing train and (i had forgotten[196] all about them) there were my red spiders still pursuing their aimless perambulations. but who can tell the dynasties, the genealogies that had bridged the interval?
the red spider has no great use in the world, as far as i know. but he has every right to be there, and to enjoy the sun falling so warm on the stone. i wonder what he thinks about it all? for me, he has become the type of the patient, pretty fancies of nature, so persistently pursued, so void of moral, so deliciously fantastic and useless—but after all, what am i to talk of usefulness?
spider and man, man and spider—and to the pitying, tender mind of god, the brisk spider on his ledge, and the dull, wistful, middle-aged man who loiters looking about him, wondering and waiting, are much the same. he has a careful thought of each, i know:—
to both alike the darkness and the day,
the sunshine and the flowers,
we draw sad comfort, thinking we obey
a deeper will than ours.
