something of the primeval savage blood still beats in us, we must suppose, else why is it that we, effete inhabitants of london, who love the closeness and proximity of our fellow-men so much, feel no less keenly the rapture of being miles and miles away from railways and the folk who travel on them? how quick, too, is the transition from one mood to another, so that while a week or two ago we rushed insanely, it may be, but with extraordinary pleasure, from party to party, jabbering with childlike delight to myriad acquaintances, face to face on a blocked staircase, or in the drawing-room unwillingly silent while somebody sang, we now take the same childlike pleasure in long days of solitude. but we may take our solitude in pairs, in company with a friend who for the time being is no friend at all, but a bitter (and, it is to be hoped, disappointed) golfer, or we{64} may lie out all day in the heather with a silent stalker, or, as has been my fortunate lot for the last ten days, may spend long hours, with a sandwich and a fishing-rod and a gillie, in angling over coffee-coloured streams or windswept lochs.
the oldest inhabitants never remember anything like this summer, but they are bad evidence, because their memories are probably very defective owing to their age; but, what is more convincing, younger people, whose memories are less impaired, never remember anything like it. so there has been little of the coffee-coloured streams for me personally, but, instead, long quiet days by this wonderful loch, supposed to hold trout of fabulous dimensions, which, as far as i can make out, nobody has ever caught, though every one agrees that they are there. then came a wonderful day, with more than trout-wonder in it.
i came up here to this remote lodge alone, for the trio of us usually go our own ways in holiday time. legs, in any case, had to go to germany to learn that classic and guttural tongue, and helen and i always make visiting{65} arrangements independently of each other, unless we are both bidden to a house to which we both want to go. but it stands to reason, so it seemed to us, that husband and wife probably do not have the same friends, and it is as absurd for her to stay at a house because the host is a great friend of mine as it is for me to stay at a house because the hostess is a great friend of hers. coincidences sometimes happen, in which we both go together. otherwise we make our own arrangements. i cannot bear some of her friends; she finds it almost impossible to tolerate some of mine. and with shouts of laughter we agree to differ. then in september or october the trio will come together again, and will all talk at once, describing simultaneously, while nobody listens, our delightful adventures.
i started from the lodge that morning after an early breakfast, the gillie having already gone on with lunch, and what we hoped would be the apparatus of death; for, the first time during this last week, it was a soft and cloudy morning, with a warm wind from the south-west, sufficient even in this cup of the hills,{66} where the lodge stands, to set the trees tossing their branches, and to strip the red ripe rowanberries from their stalks. upon the unsheltered tops, then, where lay the dark-coloured loch with its fabled inhabitants, there should be ripple enough for fishing purposes. i walked unencumbered but for the field-glasses i always carry; for nothing, during periods of waiting or in the half-hour that follows the sandwich, is so fascinating as to spy out the busy animal life on these empty moors, or find some three or four miles away two or three little human specks moving very gently up the hillside after the deer, or sitting there patiently till some untoward affair, suspicious hinds, or a foul wind are lulled into inactivity.
but first i had a mile of pine-wood to climb, up steep, slippery, needle-strewn paths, with bracken already yellowing on each side, making a sea of russet and green, while from overhead, in the thick arching boughs, there came, as it were, the noise of an aerial sea, the hiss of ripples on a sandy shore as the wind whistled through the stiff springy foliage. now and then a rabbit scuttled through the ferns, and{67} once i saw quite close at hand a roe-deer with flicking ears and startled eyes, that, as it caught sight of me, gave me one shy look of the woodland, and then galloped off, cutting its way through the tall bracken. the path sometimes led by the side of the stream that came out of the loch to which i was bound, but the dryness of the summer had hushed its voice, and it but trickled down the ways it was wont to prance along in spring. here and there a tree of the tamer woodland, a beech, or stripling elm, grew among the primeval firs, but it looked as if it had wandered here by mistake, had strayed, a member of some later civilization, into a settlement peopled by those of the older world.
and as i walked something of the same feeling of strangeness, of having gone back to the earlier ages of the world, came over me also. like the lost beech, there were none of my kind here, and i felt, though in an immeasurably greater degree, what one feels when one stands in the valley of the tombs of the egyptian kings. but all round me here were things far more ancient than they. ?ons before pharaoh oppressed the children of promise there stood{68} here on this hillside the ancestors in direct line of this woodland. the knowledge of the dawn of the world, when it was still but a little time since god had bidden the green things to live upon the earth, had been transmitted to these citizens of the hillside, and to them time had been but a little thing, and a thousand ages were but as yesterday.
as i ascended farther and more remotely into the heart of the wood, a sort of eager tremor, a desire to see that which i knew was there, and which must be so overpowering in its immensity, began to grow on me. wild silent life bubbled and hummed round me; eyes watched me from beneath the fern, and looked down on me from the over-arching fans of the pines; ears were pricked at my footstep; strange wild smiles broadened into a laugh at the intruder, at this child of immeasurably later ages. sometimes it seemed to me as if this ancient consciousness of the woods was scornful and contemptuous, so that i quickened my pace and longed to get out of this dark room; at other moments, and truer ones, i knew better, knowing that i, too, was of{69} it all, a manifestation of life, a piece of the pine-woods and brother of the bracken.
there is no myth that grew so close to the heart of things as the story of pan, for it implies the central fact of all, the one fact that is so indisputably true, that all the perverted ingenuity of man has been unable to split into various creeds about it. for pan is all, and to see pan or to hear him playing on his pipes means to have the whole truth of the world and the stars, and him who, as if by a twisting thumb and finger, set them endlessly spinning through infinite space, suddenly made manifest. flesh and blood, as the saying is, could not stand that, and there must be a bursting of the mortal envelope. yet that, indisputably also, is but the cracking of the chrysalis. how we shall stand, weak-eyed still and quivering, when transported from the dusk in which we have lived this little life, into the full radiance of the eternal day! how shall our eyes gain strength and our wings expansion and completeness, when the sun of which we have seen but the reflection and image is revealed! that is to see pan. it killed the mortal body of{70} psyche—the soul—when she saw him on the hill-top by the river, and heard the notes of his reed float down to her; but she and every soul who has burst the flimsy barrier of death into life joins in his music, and every day makes it the more compelling. drop by drop the ocean of life, made up of the lives that have been, rises in the bowl in which god dips his hands. he touches every drop.
the wood in front had grown thin, and i was nearly out on the open heather of the hills. just here the path crossed the stream bed; a great grey cliff of rock was above me, in which a pattern of lichens had found crevices for their roots; the pine-trees waved solemnly overhead; the miracle of running water, perhaps the greatest miracle of all, chuckled and eddied as it slid into the brown pool. and quite seriously i waited to see pan. the ferns would be pushed aside, and the merry face would smile at me (for pan, though he kills you, is kind), and he would put his pipes to his lips, and the world, as i had hitherto seen it, would swim away from me. and just before he puts{71} his pipes to his mouth, i hope i shall say: ‘yes, begin; i am ready!’ or shall i stop my ears, and shut my eyes to him? i hope not. but the fern waved only, and the water ran, and ... and i was going a-fishing.
i suppose i had not gone more than a hundred yards after this pause when execrable events occurred. it seemed as if some dreadful celestial housemaid suddenly woke up, and went on with her work. she shut the window (that is to say, the wind dropped), and began to dust. she dusted all the clouds away, and in ten minutes there was not one left. from horizon to horizon there was a sky positively egyptian, and an abominable sun shone with hooligan ferocity. and i was going a-fishing! i said what i should not say with such extraordinary distinctness and emphasis that i rapidly took out my field-glass, and swept the untenanted fields of heather to see that there was no one within a mile or two. but i expect the roe-deer heard.
sandy was waiting for me at the near end of the loch, when i arrived there a quarter of{72} an hour afterwards. scotchmen are never cynical, but i should otherwise have suspected him of cynicism when i saw that he had been at pains to set up my rod, and was soaking a length of gut. the brilliance of the sun from the polished and untarnished field of water was a thing to make the eyes dazzle. so i was cynical in turn, and, from pure cynicism and nothing else at all, i put on (for the sake of the curious) an astonishing fly, with a green body bound with silver, and a zulu. it was a shade too cynical to go out in the boat, for i think sandy would have seen through that, as it was impossible that any fish should rise at anything in this state of affairs, and i fished from the shore. fishing at all was an idiotic proceeding, and so the incredible happened. i wish to call attention to the incredibility of it, since it happens to be true.
here was i, then, on a still and windless morning, with a blazing sun overhead, and a looking-glass loch in which were supposed to be monstrous fish, whose shyness apparently increased in ratio to their weight, for nobody{73} had ever seen them before, but had only heard about them second-hand, like ghost-stories. half a dozen casts carried out a convenient length of line, which fell, so it appeared to me, on the glassy surface of the water like the cane of an angry schoolmaster, resonant and cruel. then at the end of the cane, where the zulu was, there came a boil just underneath the looking-glass; my rod bent, and the reel screamed. for one moment i knew, so i thought (for the boil came just as i was preparing to cast again), that i had hooked some stalwart weed, or perhaps a snag of tree-trunk. then i knew i had hooked a fish. he was clearly insane to have taken a fly at all, but what mattered was that he was a large lunatic. i thought i knew also that this was but the first act of what would turn out to be a tragedy. but the tragedy was not for me.
again, for the sake of the curious, i will give his weight. he turned the scale at five pounds some six hours later. so i imagine he was about five and a half when he came out of the water with the zulu in his mouth.{74} he was mad; he turned a fierce bedlamite eye on me.
i dare say i am more impatient than the true fisherman, but when i have cast my fly upon the waters for three hours without a hint of a rise, i sit down, and do not feel it incumbent on me to rise again unless conditions change. so when, at about two o’clock, nothing further had broken the surface of the loch except the cane of the schoolmaster, i felt, after eating my sandwich, that i was not unlikely, without incurring the contempt of sandy, to prolong the interval. i wanted also, after my mis-tryst with pan that morning, vaguely also, after that day of bovine observance of nature which i had spent a week or two ago in the garden at home, to ‘sit up and take notice.’ instead of nirvanic contemplation, i wanted to focus all that surrounded me, not to see a stag-beetle advance ten yards, and then go back to the place he advanced from, but to see the activity of it all, to be alert and to collect, not to be lazy and to soak.
yes; it was a wonderful day. almost{75} immediately i spied two little human figures on the adjoining forest creeping, creeping up a steep brae. a mile below i saw their ponies. they moved so slowly that it was only possible to see they moved at all, because they passed out of the field of my glass; the deer i could not find.
then, after watching them for ten minutes more, i saw they stopped. stealthy movements went on. then came the sharp crack of a rifle, but before the report reached me they had both jumped up, and ran into a hollow of the hills, where i lost them. it was like being at sea, and having news twitched out from the receiver of a marconi apparatus.
but hardly had that drama been played to its curtain when another started. the call of a startled grouse, ‘come back, come back, come back!’ sounded close at hand, and it was followed by another and yet another. sandy had remained by the edge of the loch when i climbed this hillock for my lunch, and since then i had been very quiet, so i could not imagine what had caused this commotion on the hill, as the stalkers were not on this beat{76} at all to-day. i could account, in fact, for the movements of any human being that could have disturbed grouse for a mile or two. then i looked up to the enormous sky, and saw.
above me, but close, so that i could see the outspread feathers of the wing, was a golden eagle. as i watched i saw he was not vaguely circling, looking out for prey, but employed in his stalk, even as on the other side of the valley ten minutes ago i had watched another stalk. he was sweeping wide circles of the moor, and driving up towards a gully of the hills behind the fowls of the mountain, flying in low and ever narrowing semicircles, so that it must seem to the terrified grouse and black game that huge-winged danger threatened from every quarter but that. yet still i could not guess what his plan was when he had driven them there.
and then i saw. straight down from the grey crag of cliff that rose on the west of this gully, into which he had driven the birds, there dropped his mate, savage and hungry, seeking her meat from god. aha, you grand mistress eagle; it is dinner-time!{77}
merrily and well has the old cock-grouse lived in the heather, lying warm in the sun, and filling himself with the good things of the moorland, but to-day pan sends him to your table, and in the swift hissing down-rush of your wings he hears his pipes. pan will play them for you, too, some day, and the grey film will cover over your fierce yellow eye that was wont undazzled to behold the sun in his strength, and the strong hooked beak which gasped for one breath more of the aromatic moorland air will close, and be hungry no more, and the crooked, horny talon will relax, and next year, maybe, i shall find whitened bones on the hillside, and perhaps, crumpled up under them, a feather, an eagle’s feather. but i shall not be so foolish as to say i have found you, for do i imagine that that is all there is of you, that your life, your spirit, has been blown out like a candle? i know better than that.
for, indeed, there is no other explanation possible of the incessant war, the death, the murder, the butchery in which nature’s fair hands are steeped and stained, except by this{78} one supposition that the spirit of bird and beast escapes at the moment of death from the splendid sunlit prison of this beautiful world, which has the bright-eyed hours for its bars. otherwise the world becomes a mere intolerable shambles, viler than chicago. i at any rate cannot believe otherwise, but should any sceptical reader at this point ask me to sketch out for him the subsequent movements of the wasp he has just squashed in the tongs, or the trout i have just landed, i hasten to assure him that i have not the slightest idea about them. but that does not invalidate the explanation, nor in the least disturb my complete belief in it. i do not know what the weather will be this day year. but i make no manner of doubt that there will be weather of some kind. i only insist that he with his tongs, and i with my zulu-fly, cannot destroy life. one cannot even destroy matter; how much less, then, the lord and master of matter!
i think i have never been in a house where absurd gaiety—the gaiety of friends, of health, of outdoor spirits—was so rampant as here;{79} and she whose house it was, and who was leader of the ludicrous, was she, as you may have guessed, who in june had asked me to come here for the last time. that evening when i got home i found her sitting out in the garden enjoying the last half-hour of sunset, and she beckoned to me across the lawn.
‘it’s true,’ i said. ‘i have caught the original trout. he had gone mad from old age and riotous living, and came to the fly when the sun was brightest and the winds were dead.’
‘i wish you wouldn’t use such beautiful language,’ she said. ‘how much does he weigh?’
‘about a ton. he has gone to be weighed now.’
‘and anything else?’
‘not a fin. no more bites, as somebody said last night. i chattered with rage.’
‘you did; and what have you been thinking about?’ she asked.
‘pan chiefly. no, to be honest, i think i have thought about the fish most. but pan next!’
she turned rather slowly on her long {80}wicker-couch, the tired aching body for the moment usurping the use of her eyes.
‘ah, don’t let us talk,’ i said; ‘you are tired and suffering.’
at that she laughed.
‘all the more reason for thinking about something less inferior than one’s own health,’ she said. ‘what cowards we are nowadays! why, our forebears in elizabeth’s time used to go smiling to the rack for the sake of some small difference of dogma, and we snivel when we have the opportunity of showing, by our contempt for pain, the truth of things that matter much more. if bravery in the abstract and cheerfulness are not worth being brave and cheerful for, i don’t know what is. in any case, what conclusion did you come to about pan? oddly enough, i have been thinking of him, too. let’s compare notes, and see if we mean the same person.’
i told her more or less what i have already written down on the subject, and at the end she nodded at me with the quick eager gesture that was so characteristic of her.{81}
‘hurrah!’ she said. ‘i have guessed the same. so perhaps our guesses are right. but i put it to myself rather more personally, and, though it sounds conceited, so much more vividly than you. that is only natural, you know; pan concerns me much more immediately than he concerns you, we hope. and another image of him suggested itself to me, which appeals to me more than your figure of the ferns being pushed aside, and the hand with the pipes in it being raised to the smiling lips. listen!’
the sun had dropped behind the big trees to the west of the lawn, leaving us in shadow, though it still shone on the hills to the east of the house. but evening was coming without any chill or whisper of autumn in it, and in this northern latitude nights were short in august. it was as if she already saw dawn.
‘jim and i and our children,’ she said, ‘and you and all my friends are shipwrecked, or so it would seem to anyone who did not understand, on a little rock surrounded by infinite sea. every one alive in the world is there, too, as a matter of fact, but our friends somehow are so{82} big to us, and strangers and acquaintances so small in comparison, that all that really is seen by us is our own immediate circle. huge thumping seas surround our rock, and, for some occult reason, we all have to sit exactly where we are, while the waves rush up, and every moment sweep somebody away. we can’t move our places, and go higher up on the rock, and we have to sit and look at the big waves, we poor shipwrecked people (so a man who does not understand would say), and know that this wave or the next will wash us off. that is the ignorant view of the situation, and the most pessimistic, so we will answer it at once.
‘even if it was right, what then? supposing we were shipwrecked, and all round us was the howling sea of death, would it not be much better, until the wave swept us off, to make the best of it, to talk, and laugh, and be pleasant with our friends, instead of looking with terror-stricken eyes at the hungry sea? how much nicer even for ourselves to be amused and talk a little while, instead of being frightened, and how much nicer for our friends when we are swept off, as we all certainly shall be, to know that{83} before we were swept off we were moderately cheerful, and picked up bits of seaweed, and played with shells! i say nothing of the moral aspect of it all, because if you once bring that in there is no question any more about the matter, since in one case we are brave, and in the other merely cowardly. but given that we are shipwrecked, that the sea of hungry death surrounds us, and will soon pick us off, how much better, on the lowest possible view of the affair, to play about, to be kind and gentle, even if to-morrow there will be an end of us, utterly and for ever!
‘yes, i am using beautiful language too. but i am talking of beautiful things.
‘well, that view is the silliest and most incomprehensible possible. how did we get on this absurd rock, if only death surrounds us? did we come from death into life? that is impossible, since scientifically you can’t produce life out of dead things. or did some ship founder on the sea of death, and did we swim to shore, where we shall live until a wave sweeps us off again? that is possible; but, then, what was that ship on which we once were passengers,{84} that for a time anyhow, until it foundered, if it did founder, rode over these waves? that is a serious question, but there is only one answer to it. the ship must have been life in some form. but the image does not seem convincing, does it?
‘what is left, then? only this, that the sea which surrounds us on our little rock is not death at all, but life. just as some day without doubt a wave will sweep us off our rock again, so there is no doubt that once a wave of that sea put us on the rock where you and i now are. if there is a wreck at all, it is a land-wreck, a wreck that puts us on shore. from the great sea of life we have been washed up for a little moment on to our little rock. soon we shall be received back into life again!
‘in the interval, though in a new sense we are wrecked, how interesting is our rock, and how full of dear people, and pink shells, and divine things of the sea that life, not death, casts up round us, and nourishes by the spent water of its waves! how utterly idiotic it would be not to collect them eagerly, these little bits, for when we go back into life we shall see{85} the forests from which they come, the sapphire caves in which they really dwell. a little bit of life, that grouse that the eagles ate, was cast up close to you to-day. i shall particularly ask, when the wave takes me off again, where it came from. and i shall go and see the place. and certainly i shall see mistress eagle come back.’
courage, huge, natural courage like this, absolutely unassumed, absolutely instinctive, may have one of two effects on the beholder of it. it may make him weep for the admiration of it, or it may make him laugh out of joyousness of heart for the same admiration. at least i laughed.
‘oh, be sure to show me the place when i come,’ i said. ‘i am certain that mistress eagle will have a nice house.’
‘they all have,’ she said. ‘there are many mansions.’
she looked at me in silence a moment.
‘but i was not so certain of all these things when first i knew that i was so soon to see them all,’ she said. ‘at first, though i was never exactly frightened, i was dazed and{86} stunned. i saw nothing clearly. i must use another image for that, and say that days passed as one sees the landscape pass through a railway-carriage window which is blurred by rain. i could see nothing clearly; it was all dim and rain-streaked. but then, without any conscious effort on my part, except perhaps a little exercise of patience, we passed—the train and i—out of the scud again, and soon the glass cleared, and i saw the green valleys and the sunny hillside just as they had always been.’
again she paused.
‘i have not told you anything of importance yet,’ she said; ‘all i have said is really quite obvious. but this now——
‘you think of pan as the smiling face that peeps from the fern, the presence that assures all suffering things that he is kind when he pipes to them, even though the sound means death. but surely that is no more than a sort of pagan mythical aspect of him. i always think that he suffers too, that every pain which he seems to inflict is only the reflection of the pain in his own universal heart, although he still smiles. it is from the cross that he smiles at us all.{87}’
