The Garden of Survival

  VII

  IT was some little time after my arrival, as I shall presently relate,that the experience I call the thrill came to me in England--and,like all its predecessors, came through Nature. It came, that is,through the only apparatus I possessed as yet that could respond.

  The point, I think, is of special interest; I note it now, on lookingback upon the series as a whole, though at the time I did not noteit.

  For, compared with yourself at any rate, the aesthetic side of me issomewhat raw; of pictures, sculpture, music I am untaught andignorant; with other Philistines, I "know what I like," but nothingmore. It is the honest but uncultured point of view. I am thatprimitive thing, the mere male animal. It was my love of Nature,therefore, that showed me beauty, since this was the only apparatusin my temperament able to respond. Natural, simple things, as before,were the channel through which beauty appealed to that latent storeof love and wisdom in me which, it almost seemed, were being slowlyeducated.

  The talks and intimacies with our mother, then, were largely over; there-knitting of an interrupted relationship was fairly accomplished;she had asked her questions, and listened to my answers. All thedropped threads had been picked up again, so that a pattern, similarto the one laid aside, now lay spread more or less comfortably beforeus. Outwardly, things seemed much as they were when I left home somany years ago. One might have thought the interval had been one ofmonths, since her attitude refused to recognize all change, andchange, and growth, was abhorrent to her type. For whereas I hadaltered, she had remained unmoved.

  So unsatisfying was this state of things to me, however, that I feltunable to confide my deepest, as now I can do easily to you--so thatduring these few days of intercourse renewed, we had said, it seemed,all that was to be said with regard to the past. My health was mostlovingly discussed, and then my immediate and remoter future. I wasaware of this point of view--that I was, of course, her own dear son,but that I was also England's son. She was intensely patriotic in theinsular sense; my soul, I mean, belonged to the British Empire ratherthan to humanity and the world at large. Doubtless, a very right andnatural way to look at things.... She expressed a real desire to "seeyour photographs, my boy, of those outlandish places where they sentyou"; then, having asked certain questions about the few women(officers' wives and so forth) who appeared in some of them, sheleaned back in her chair, and gave me her very definite hopes about"my value to the country," my "duty to the family traditions," evento the point, finally, of suggesting Parliament, in what she termedwith a certain touch of pride and dignity, "the true Conservativeinterest."

  "Men like yourself, Richard, are sorely needed now," she added,looking at me with a restrained admiration; "I am sure the Partywould nominate you for this Constituency that your father and yourgrandfather both represented before you. At any rate, they shall notput you on the shelf!"

  And before I went to bed--it was my second or third night, Ithink--she had let me see plainly another hope that was equally dearto her: that I should marry again. There was an ominous reference tomy "ample means," a hint of regret that, since you were unavailable,and Eva dead, our branch of the family could not continue to improvethe eastern counties and the world. At the back of her mind, indeed, Ithink there hovered definite names, for a garden party in my honourwas suggested for the following week, to which the Chairman of theLocal Conservatives would come, and where various desirableneighbours would be only too proud to make my acquaintance and pressmy colonial and distinguished fingers.

  In the interval between my arrival and the "experience" I shallpresently describe, I had meanwhile renewed my acquaintance with thecountryside. The emotions, however, I anticipated, had even cherishedand eagerly looked forward to, had not materialized. There was achill of disappointment over me. For the beauty I had longed forseemed here so thickly veiled; and more than once I surprised in myheart a certain regret that I had come home at all. I caught myselfthinking of that immense and trackless country I had left; I evencraved it sometimes, both physically and mentally, as though, for allits luscious grossness, it held something that nourished andstimulated, something large, free and untamed that was lacking in thisorderly land, so neatly fenced and parcelled out at home.

  The imagined richness of my return, at any rate, was unfulfilled; thetie with our mother, though deep, was uninspiring; while that othermore subtle and intangible link I had fondly dreamed might bestrengthened, if not wholly proved, was met with a flat denial thatseemed to classify it as nonexistent. Hope, in this particularconnection, returned upon me, blank and unrewarded.... The familiarscenes woke no hint of pain, much less of questing sweetness. Theglamour of association did not operate. No personal link wasstrengthened.

  And, when I visited the garden we had known together, the shady pathbeneath the larches; saw, indeed, the very chairs that she and I hadused, the framed portrait in the morning-room, the harp itself, nowset with its limp and broken strings in my own chamber--I was unawareof any ghostly thrill; least of all could I feel that "somebody waspleased."

  Excursion farther afield deepened the disenchantment. The gorse wasout upon the Common, that Common where we played as boys, thinking itvast and wonderful with the promise of high adventure behind everyprickly clump. The vastness, of course, was gone, but the power ofsuggestion had gone likewise. It was merely a Common that deservedits name. For though this was but the close of May, I found it worninto threadbare patches, with edges unravelled like those of some oldcarpet in a seaside lodging-house. The lanes that fed it were alreadythick with dust as in thirsty August, and instead of eglantine,wild-roses, and the rest, a smell of petrol hung upon hedges thatwere quite lustreless. On the crest of the hill, whence we oncethought the view included heaven, I stood by those beaten pines wenamed The Fort, counting jagged bits of glass and scraps of fadednewspaper that marred the bright green of the sprouting bracken.

  This glorious spot, once sacred to our dreams, was like a greatbackyard--the Backyard of the County--while the view we loved as thebirthplace of all possible adventure, seemed to me now withoutspaciousness or distinction. The trees and hedges cramped the littlefields and broke their rhythm. No great winds ever swept them clean.The landscape was confused: there was no adventure in it, suggestionleast of all. Everything had already happened there.

  And on my way home, resentful perhaps yet eager still, I did adreadful thing. Possibly I hoped still for that divine sensationwhich refused to come. I visited the very field, the very poplar ...I found the scene quite unchanged, but found it also--lifeless. Theglamour of association did not operate. I knew no poignancy, desirelay inert. The thrill held stubbornly aloof. No link wasstrengthened.... I came home slowly, thinking instead of my mother'splans and wishes for me, and of the clear intention to incorporate mein the stolid and conventional formulas of what appeared to me asuninspired English dullness. My disappointment crystallized intosomething like revolt. A faint hostility even rose in me as we sattogether, talking of politics, of the London news just come to hand,of the neighbours, of the weather too. I was conscious of oppositionto her stereotyped plans, and of resentment towards the lack ofunderstanding in her. I would shake free and follow beauty. Theyearning, for want of sympathy, and the hunger, for lack ofsustenance, grew very strong and urgent in me.

  I longed passionately just then for beauty--and for that revelation ofit which included somewhere the personal emotion of a strangely eagerlove.