The Upton Letters - Arthur Christopher Benson (learn to read books TXT) 📗

the day. It is only fifteen miles from here, so that I had two or three hours to spend there. You know I was born at Woodcote and lived there till I was ten years old. I don't know the present owner of the Lodge, where we lived; but if I had written and asked to go and see the house, they would have invited me to luncheon, and all my sense of freedom would have gone.

It is thirty years since we left, and I have not been there, near as it is, for twenty years. I did not know how deeply rooted the whole scene was in my heart and memory, but the first sight of the familiar places gave me a very curious thrill, a sort of delicious pain, a yearning for the old days--I can't describe it or analyse it. It seemed somehow as if the old life must be going on there behind the pine-woods if I could only find it; as if I could have peeped over the palings and seen myself going gravely about some childish business in the shrubberies. I find that my memory is curiously accurate in some respects, and curiously at fault in others. The scale is all wrong. What appears to me in memory to be an immense distance, from Woodcote to Dewhurst, for instance, is now reduced to almost nothing; and places which I can see quite accurately in my mind's eye are now so different that I can hardly believe that they were ever like what I recollect of them. Of course the trees have grown immensely; young plantations have become woods, and woods have disappeared. I spent my time in wandering about, retracing the childish walks we used to take, looking at the church, the old houses, the village green, and the mill-pool. One thing came home to me very much. When I was born my father had only been settled at Woodcote for two years; but, as I grew up, it seemed to me we must have lived there for all eternity; now I see that he was only one in a long procession of human visitants who have inhabited and loved the place. Another thing that has gone is the mystery of it all. Then, every road was a little ribbon of familiar ground stretching out to the unknown; all the fields and woods which lay between the roads and paths were wonderful secret places, not to be visited. I find I had no idea of the lie of the ground, and, what is more remarkable, I don't seem ever to have seen the views of the distance with which the place now abounds. I suppose that when one is a small creature, palings and hedges are lofty obstacles; and I suppose also that the little busy eyes are always searching the nearer scene for things to FIND, and do not concern themselves with what is far. The sight of the Lodge itself, with its long white front among the shrubberies and across the pastures was almost too much for me; the years seemed all obliterated in a flash, and I felt as if it was all there unchanged.

I suppose I had a very happy childhood; but I certainly was not in the least conscious of it at the time. I was a very quiet, busy child, with all sorts of small secret pursuits of my own to attend to, to which lessons and social engagements were sad interruptions; but now it seems to me like a golden, unruffled time full of nothing but pleasure. Curiously enough, I can't remember anything but the summer days there; I have no remembrance of rain or cold or winter or leafless trees--except days of snow when the ponds were frozen and there was the wild excitement of skating. My recollections are all of flowers, and roses, and trees in leaf, and hours spent in the garden. In the very hot summer weather my father and mother used to dine out in the garden, and it seems now to me as if they must have done so all the year round; I can remember going to bed, with my window open on to the lawn, and hearing the talk, and the silence, and then the soft clink of the things being removed as I sank into sleep. It is a great mystery, that faculty of the mind for forgetting all the shadows and remembering nothing but the sunlight; it is so deeply rooted in humanity that it is hard not to believe that it means something; one dares to hope that if our individual life continues after death, this instinct--if memory remains--will triumph over the past, even in the case of lives of sordid misery and hopeless pain.

Then, too, one wonders what the strong instinct of permanence means, in creatures that inhabit the world for so short and troubled a space; why instinct should so contradict experience; why human beings have not acquired in the course of centuries a sense of the fleetingness of things. All our instincts seem to speak of permanence; all our experience points to swift and ceaseless change. I cannot fathom it.

As I wandered about Woodcote my thoughts took a sombre tinge, and the lacrimae rerum, the happy days gone, the pleasant groups broken up to meet no more, the old faces departed, the voices that are silent--all these thoughts began to weigh on my mind with a sad bewilderment. One feels so independent, so much the master of one's fate; and yet when one returns to an old home one begins to wonder whether one has any power of choice at all. There is this strange fence of self and identity drawn for me round one tiny body; all that is outside of it has no existence for me apart from consciousness. These are fruitless thoughts, but one cannot always resist them; and why one is here, what these vivid feelings mean, what one's heart-hunger for the sweet world and for beloved people means--all this is dark and secret; and the strong tide bears us on, out of the little harbour of childhood into unknown seas.

Dear Woodcote, dear remembered days, beloved faces and voices of the past, old trees and fields! I cannot tell what you mean and what you are; but I can hardly believe that, if I have a life beyond, it will not somehow comprise you all; for indeed you are my own for ever; you are myself, whatever that self may be.--Ever yours,

T. B.

P.S.--By the way, I want you to do something for me; I want a MAP of your house and of the sitting-rooms. I want to see where you usually sit, to read or write. And more than that, I want a map of the roads and paths round about, with your ordinary walks and strolls marked in red. I don't feel I quite realise the details enough.


SENNICOTTS, HONEY HILL, EAST GRINSTEAD, Aug. 9, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I am making holiday, with the voice of praise and thanksgiving, like the people in the Psalm, and working, oh! how gratefully, at one of my eternal books. Depend upon it, for simple pleasure, there is nothing like writing. I am staying with Bradby, who has taken a cottage in Sussex. He has had his holiday, so that he goes up to town every day; it does not sound very friendly to say that this arrangement exactly suits me, but so it is. I work and write in the morning, walk or bicycle in the afternoon, and then we dine together, and spend peaceful evenings, reading or talking.

But this is not the point. I came in yesterday to tea, saw an unfamiliar hat in the hall, and found to my surprise James Cooper, whom you remember at Eton as a boy. I knew him a little there, and saw a good deal of him at Cambridge; and we have kept up a very fitful correspondence at long intervals ever since.

I am ashamed to confess that I was bored, though I trust to Heaven I did not show it; I had come back from my ride brimming over with ideas, and was in the condition of a person who is holding his breath, dying to blow it all out. Cooper said that he had heard that I was in the neighbourhood, and he had accordingly come over, a considerable distance, to see me. He is in business, and appears to be prospering. We had tea, and there was a good deal to talk about; but Cooper showed no signs of moving, and said at last that he thought he would stay and see Bradby--perhaps dine with us. So we walked about the garden, and I gradually became aware, with regret and misery, that I was in the presence of a bore. Yes, James Cooper is a bore! He had a great deal to say, mostly on subjects with which I was not acquainted. He has become a botanist, and seemed full to the brim of uninteresting information. He stayed till Bradby came, he dined, he talked. At last he decided he must go; but he talked in the hall, he talked in the porch. He pressed us to come over and see him, and it was evidently a great pleasure to him to meet us again. Since his visit I have been pondering deeply. What is one's duty in these matters? How far ought loyalty to old friends to go? I confess that I am somewhat vexed and dissatisfied with myself for not being more simply pleased to see an old comrade--actae non alio rege puertiae, and all that. But what if the old comrade is a bore? What are the claims of friendship on busy men? I have a good many old friends in all parts of England--ought I to use my holidays in touring about to see them? I am inclined to think that I am not bound to do so. But suppose that Cooper goes away, and says to another friend that I am a man who forgets old ties; that he took some trouble to see me, and found me absorbed, and not particularly glad to see him? I hope, indeed, that this was not his impression; but boredom is a subtle thing, and it is difficult to keep it out of one's manner, however religiously one tries to be cheerful. Well, if he DOES feel thus, is he right and am I wrong? His whole life lies on different lines to my own, and though we had much in common in the old pleasant days, we have not much in common now. It is quite possible that he thinks I am a bore; and it is even possible that he is right there too. But, que faire? que penser? I can honestly say that if Cooper wanted my help, my advice, my sympathy, I would give it him without grudging. But is it a part of loyalty that I must desire to see him, and even to be bored by him? I am inclined to think that if I had a simpler, more affectionate nature, I should probably NOT be bored, but that in my gladness at the sight of an old friend and the reviving of old memories, the idea of criticism would die a natural death.

What I have suffered from all my life is making friends too easily. It is so painful to me being with a person who seems to be dull, that I have always instinctively tried to be interested in, and to interest my companion. The result has been--I am making a very barefaced confession--that I have been often supposed to be more friendly than