Beside Still Waters - Arthur Christopher Benson (top 10 novels of all time .txt) 📗

To-day he sate for a long time in the little churchyard, the bees humming about the limes with a soft musical note, that rose and fell with a lazy cadence, while doves hidden somewhere in the elms lent as it were a voice to the trees. That soft note seemed to brim over from a spring of measureless content; it seemed like the calling of the spirit of summer, brooding in indolent joy and innocent satisfaction over the long sweet hours of sunshine, while the day stood still to listen. Hugh resigned himself luxuriously to the soft influences of the place, and felt that for a short space he need neither look backwards nor forwards, but simply float with the golden hour.

At last he bestirred himself, realising that he had yet far to go. It was now cool and fresh, and the shadows of the trees lay long across the grass. Hugh struck down on to the fen and walked for a long time in the solitary fields, by a dyke, passing a big ancient farm that lay very peacefully among its wide pastures.

The thought of the happy, quiet-minded people that might be living there, leading their simple lives, so little affected by the current of the world, brought much peace into Hugh's mind. It seemed to him a very beautiful thing, with something ancient and tranquil about it. It was all utterly remote from ambition and adventure, and even from intellectual efficiency; and here Hugh felt himself in a dilemma. His faith did not permit him to doubt that the civilisation and development of the world were in accordance with the purpose of God on the one hand, and yet, on the other hand, that expansion brought with it social conditions and problems that appeared to him of an essentially ugly kind, as the herding of human beings into cities, the din and dirt of factories, the millions of lives that were lived under almost servile conditions; and so much of that sad labour was directed to wrong ends, to aggrandisement, to personal luxury, to increasing the comfort of oligarchies. The simple life of the countryside seemed a better ideal, and yet the lot of the rustic day-labourer was both dull and hard. It looked sweet enough on a day of high summer, such as this, when a man need ask for nothing to better than to be taken and kept out of doors; but the thought of the farm-hand rising in a cheerless wintry dawn, putting on his foul and stiffened habiliments, setting out in a chilly drizzle to uproot a turnip-field, row by row, with no one to talk to and nothing to look forward to but an evening in a tiny cottage-kitchen, full of noisy children--no one could say that this was an ideal life, and he did not wonder that the young men flocked to the towns, where there was at all events some stir, some amusement. That was the dark side of popular education, of easy communications, of newspapers, that it made men discontented with quiet life, without supplying them with intellectual resources.

Yet with all its disadvantages and discomforts, Hugh could not help feeling that the life of the country was more wholesome and natural for the majority of men, and he wished that the education given in country districts could be directed more to awakening an interest in country things, in trees and birds and flowers, and more, too, to increasing the resources of boys and girls, so that they could find amusing occupation for the long evenings of enforced leisure. The present system of education was directed, Hugh felt, more to training a generation of clerks, than to implanting an aptitude for innocent recreation and sensible amusement. People talked a good deal about tempting men back to the land, but did they not perceive that, to do that, it was necessary to make the agricultural life more attractive? It was a mistake that ran through the whole of modern education, that the system was invented by intellectual theorists and not by practical philosophers. The only real aim ought to be to teach people how to enjoy their work, by making them efficient, and to enjoy their leisure, by arousing the imagination.

Hugh's musings led him on to wonder how it was possible to cultivate a sense of happiness in people; that was the darkest problem of all. Children had the secret of it; they could amuse themselves under the most unpropitious circumstances, and invent games of most surpassing interest out of the most grotesque materials. Then came the age when the sexual relations brought in a fierce and intenser joy; but the romance of courtship and the early days of marriage once over, it seemed that most people settled down on very dull lines, and made such comfort as they could get the only object of their existence. What was it that thus tended to empty life of joy? Was it the presence of anxiety, the failure of vitality, the dull conditions of monotonous labour undertaken for others' gain and not for oneself? Looking back at his own life, Hugh could not discern that his routine work had ever deprived him of zest and interest. It was rather indeed the other way. The suspension of other interests that his life had involved, had sent him back with renewed delight to the occupations and interests of leisure; he had been, he thought, perhaps unusually fortunate in receiving his liberty from mechanical work at a time when his interests were active and his zest undimmed. But how was one to guard the quality of joy, how could it be stimulated and increased, if it began in the course of nature to flag? It was clear that life could not have for every one, nor at all times for any one, that quality of eager and active delight, that uplifting of the heart and mind alike, which sometimes surprised one, when one felt an intensity of gladness and gratitude at being simply oneself, and at standing just at that point in life, surrounded and enriched by exactly the very things one most loved and desired--the feeling that must have darted into Sinbad's mind when he saw that the very sand of the valley in which he lay consisted of precious gems. Probably most people had some moments, oftenest perhaps in youth, of this full-flushed, conscious happiness. And then again most people had considerable tracts of quiet contentment, times when their work prospered and their recreations amused. But how was one to meet the hours when one was neither happy nor contented; when the mind flapped wearily like a loosened sail in a calm, when there was no savour in the banquet, when one went heavily? It was of no use then to summon joy to one's assistance, to call spirits from the vast deep, if they did not obey one's call. There ought, Hugh thought, to be a reserve of sober piety and hopefulness on which one could draw in those dark days. There were no doubt many equable and phlegmatic people who, as the old poet said,


"Perfacile angustis tolerabant finibus aevom,"
(In narrow bounds an easy life endured).


But for those whose perceptions were keen, who lived upon joy, from the very constitution of their nature, how were such natures--and he knew that he was of the number--to avoid sinking into the mire of the Slough of Despond, how were they to rejoice in the valley of humiliation? What was to be their well in the vale of misery? How were the pools to be filled with water?

The answer seemed to be that it could only be achieved by work, by effort, by prayer. If one had definite work in hand, it carried one over these languid intervals. How often had the idea of setting to work in these listless moods seemed intolerable; yet how soon one forgot oneself in the exercise of congenial labour! Here came in the worth of effort, that one could force oneself to the task, commit oneself to the punctual discharge of an unwelcome duty. And if even that failed, then one could cast oneself into an inner region, in the spirit of the Psalmist, when he said, "Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it." One could fling one's prayer into the dark void, as the sailors from a sinking ship shoot a rocket with a rope attached to the land, and then, as they haul it in, feel with joy the rope strain tight, and know that it has found a hold.

Hugh felt that such experience as this, experience, that is, in the vital force of prayer, might be called a subjective experience, and could not be put to a scientific test. But for all that, there was nothing which of late years had so grown upon him as the consciousness of the effectiveness of a certain kind of prayer. This was not a mechanical repetition of verbal forms, but a strong and secret uplifting of the heart to the Father of all. There were moments when one seemed baffled and powerless, when one's own strength seemed utterly unequal to the burden; prayer on such occasions did not necessarily bring a perfect serenity and joy, though there were times when it brought even that; but it brought sufficient strength; it made the difficult, the dreaded thing possible. Hugh had proved this a hundred times over, and the marvel to him was that he did not use it more; but the listless mind sometimes could not brace itself to the effort; and then it seemed to Hugh that he was as one who lay thirsting, with water in reach of his nerveless hand. Still there were few things of which he was so absolutely certain as he was of the abounding strength of prayer; it seemed to reveal a dim form moving behind the veil of things, which in the moment of entreaty seemed to suspend its progress, to stop, to draw near, to smile. Why the gifts from that wise hand were often such difficult things, stones for bread, serpents for fish, Hugh could not divine. But he tended less and less to ask for precise things, but to pray in the spirit of the old Dorian prayer that what was good might be given him, even if he did not perceive it to be good, and that what was evil might be withheld, even if he desired it.

While he thus mused, walking swiftly, the day darkened about him, drawing the colour out of field and tree. The tides of the sky thickened, and set to a deep enamelled green, and a star came out above the tree-tops. Now and then he passed through currents of cool air that streamed out of the low wooded valleys, rich with the fragrance of copse and dingle. An owl fluted sweetly in a little holt, and was answered by another far up the hill. He heard in the breeze, now loud, now low, the far-off motions of the wheels of some cart rumbling blithely homewards. All else was still. At last he came out on the top of the wolds; the road stretched before him, a pale ribbon among dusky fields; and the lights of the distant village pierced through the darker gloom of sheltering trees. Hugh seemed that night to walk with his unknown friend close beside him, answering his hopes, stilling his vague discontents, with a pure and tender faithfulness that left him nothing to desire, but that the