The Pilgrim's Progress

by John Bunyan

  We were looking into a green cup of the hills, and it was all a garden. A little place, bounded by slopes that defined its graciousness with no hint of barrier, so that a dweller there, though his view was but half a mile on any side, would yet have the sense of dwelling on uplands and commanding the world. Round the top edge ran an old wall of stones, beyond which the October bracken flamed to the skyline. Inside were folds of ancient pasture, with here and there a thorn-bush, falling to rose gardens and, on one side, to the smooth sward of a terrace above a tiny lake.

  At the heart of it stood the house like a jewel well-set. It was a miniature, but by the hand of a master. The style was late seventeenth century, when an agreeable classic convention had opened up to sunlight and comfort the dark magnificence of the Tudor fashion. The place had the spacious air of a great mansion, and was furnished in every detail with a fine scrupulousness. Only when the eye measured its proportions with the woods and the hillside did the mind perceive that it was a small dwelling.

  The stone of Cotswold takes curiously the colour of the weather. Under thunderclouds it will be as dark as basalt; on a grey day it will be grey like lava but in sunshine it absorbs the sun. At the moment the little house was pale gold, like honey.

  Leithen swung a long leg across the stile.

  ‘Pretty good, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s pure, authentic Sir Christopher Wren. The name is worthy of it, too. It is called Fullcircle.’

  He told me its story. It had been built after the Restoration by the Carteron family, whose wide domains ran into these hills. The Lord Carteron of the day was a friend of the Merry Monarch; but it was not as a sanctuary for orgies that he built the house. Perhaps he was tired of the gloomy splendour of Minster Carteron, and wanted a home of his own and not of his ancestors’ choosing. He had an elegant taste in letters, as we can learn from his neat imitations of Martial, his pretty Bucolics and the more than respectable Latin hexameters of his Ars Vivendi. Being a great nobleman, he had the best skill of the day to construct his hermitage, and thither he would retire for months at a time, with like-minded friends, to a world of books and gardens. He seems to have had no ill-wishers; contemporary memoirs speak of him charitably and Dryden spared him four lines of encomium. ‘A selfish old dog,’ Leithen called him. ‘He had the good sense to eschew politics and enjoy life. His soul is in that little house. He only did one rash thing in his career – he anticipated the King, his master, by some years in turning Papist.’

  I asked about its later history.

  ‘After his death it passed to a younger branch of the Carterons. It left them in the eighteenth century, and the Applebys got it. They were a jovial lot of hunting squires and let the library go to the dogs. Old Colonel Appleby was still alive when I came to Borrowby. Something went wrong in his inside when he was nearly seventy, and the doctors knocked him off liquor. Not that he drank too much, though he did himself well. That finished the poor old boy. He told me that it revealed to him the amazing truth that during a long and, as he hoped, publicly useful life he had never been quite sober. He was a good fellow and I missed him when he died. The place went to a remote cousin called Giffen.’

  Leithen’s eyes as they scanned the prospect, seemed amused.

  ‘Julian and Ursula Giffen – I dare say you know the names. They always hunt in couples, and write books about sociology and advanced ethics and psychics – books called either “The New This or That” or “The Truth about Something or Other”. You know the sort of thing. They’re deep in all the pseudo-sciences. They’re decent souls, but you can guess the type. I came across them in a case I had at the Old Bailey – defending a ruffian who was charged with murder. I hadn’t a doubt he deserved hanging on twenty counts, but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him on this one. Dodderidge was at his worst – it was just before they induced him to retire – and his handling of the jury was a masterpiece of misdirection. Of course, there was a shindy. The thing was a scandal, and it stirred up all the humanitarians till the murderer was almost forgotten in the iniquities of old Dodderidge. You must remember the case. It filled the papers for weeks. Well, it was in that connection that I fell in with the Giffens. I got rather to like them, and I’ve been to see them at their house in Hamp-stead. Golly, what a place! Not a chair fit to sit down on, and colours that made you want to howl. I never met people whose heads were so full of feathers.’

  I said something about that being an odd milieu for him.

  ‘Oh, I like human beings, all kinds. It’s my profession to study them, for without that the practice of the law would be a dismal affair. There are hordes of people like the Giffens – only not so good, for they really have hearts of gold. They are the rootless stuff in the world today. In revolt against everything and everybody with any ancestry. A kind of innocent self-righteousness – wanting to be the people with whom wisdom begins and ends. They are mostly sensitive and tender-hearted, but they wear themselves out in an eternal dissidence. Can’t build, you know, for they object to all tools, but very ready to crab. They scorn any form of Christianity, but they’ll walk miles to patronise some wretched sect that has the merit of being brand new. “Pioneers” they call themselves – funny little unclad people adventuring into the cold desert with no maps. Giffen once described himself and his friends to me as “forward-looking”, but that, of course, is just what they are not. To tackle the future you must have a firm grip of the past, and for them, the past is only a pathological curiosity. They’re up to their necks in the mud of the present – but good, after a fashion; and innocent – sordidly innocent. Fate was in an ironical mood when she saddled them with that wicked little house.’

  ‘Wicked’ did not seem to me to be a fair word. It sat honey-coloured among its gardens with the meekness of a dove.

  The sound of a bicycle on the road behind made us turn round, and Leithen advanced to meet a dismounting rider.

  He was a tallish fellow, some forty years old, perhaps, with one of those fluffy blond beards that have never been shaved. Short-sighted, of course, and wore glasses. Biscuit-coloured knickerbockers and stockings clad his lean limbs.

  Leithen introduced me. ‘We are walking to Borrowby and stopped to admire your house. Could we have just a glimpse inside? I want Jardine to see the staircase.’

  Mr Giffen was very willing. ‘I’ve been over to Clyston to send a telegram. We have some friends for the weekend who might interest you. Won’t you stay to tea?’

  He had a gentle, formal courtesy about him, and his voice had the facile intonations of one who loves to talk. He led us through a little gate, and along a shorn green walk among the bracken, to a postern which gave entrance to the garden. Here, though it was October, there was still a bright show of roses, and the jet of water from the leaden Cupid dripped noiselessly among fallen petals. And then we stood before the doorway above which the old Carteron had inscribed a line of Horace.

  I have never seen anything quite like the little hall. There were two, indeed, separated by a staircase of a wood that looked like olive. Both were paved with black-and-white marble, and the inner was oval in shape, with a gallery supported on slender walnut pillars. It was all in miniature, but it had a spaciousness which no mere size could give. Also it seemed to be permeated by the quintessence of sunlight. Its air was of long-descended, confident, equable happiness.

  There were voices on the terrace beyond the hall. Giffen led us into a little room on the left. ‘You remember the house in Colonel Appleby’s time, Leithen. This was the chapel. It had always been the chapel. You see the change we have made – I beg your pardon, Mr Jardine. You’re not by any chance a Roman Catholic?’

  The room had a white panelling and, on two sides, deep windows. At one end was a fine Italian shrine of marble, and the floor was mosaic, blue and white, in a quaint Byzantine pattern. There was the same air of sunny cheerfulness as in the rest of the house. No mystery could find a lodgement here. It might have been a chapel for three centuries, but the place was p
agan. The Giffens’ changes were no sort of desecration. A green baize table filled most of the floor, surrounded by chairs like a committee room. On new raw-wood shelves were files of papers and stacks of blue-books and those desiccated works into which reformers of society torture the English tongue. Two typewriters stood on a side table.

  ‘It is our workroom,’ Giffen explained. ‘We hold our Sunday moots here. Ursula thinks that a weekend is wasted unless it produces some piece of real work. Often a quite valuable committee has its beginning here. We try to make our home a refuge for busy workers, where they need not idle but can work under happy conditions.’

  ‘“A college situate in a clearer air,”’ Leithen quoted.

  But Giffen did not respond except with a smile; he had probably never heard of Lord Falkland.

  A woman entered the room, a woman who might have been pretty if she had taken a little pains. Her reddish hair was drawn tightly back and dressed in a hard knot, and her clothes were horribly incongruous in a remote manor-house. She had bright eager eyes, like a bird, and hands that fluttered nervously. She greeted Leithen with warmth.

  ‘We have settled down marvellously,’ she told him. ‘Julian and I feel as if we had always lived here, and our life has arranged itself so perfectly. My mothers’ cottages in the village will soon be ready, and the Club is to be opened next week. Julian and I will carry on the classes ourselves for the first winter. Next year we hope to have a really fine programme. And then it is so pleasant to be able to entertain one’s friends. Won’t you stay to tea? Dr Swope is here, and Mary Elliston, and Mr Percy Blaker – you know, the Member of Parliament. Must you hurry off? I’m so sorry. What do you think of our workroom? It was utterly terrible when we first came here – a sort of decayed chapel, like a withered tuberose. We have let the air of heaven into it.’

  I observed that I had never seen a house so full of space and light.

  ‘Ah, you notice that? It is a curiously happy place to live in. Sometimes I’m almost afraid to feel so light-hearted. But we look on ourselves as only trustees. It is a trust we have to administer for the common good. You know, it’s a house on which you can lay your own impress. I can imagine places which dominate the dwellers, but Fullcircle is plastic, and we can make it our own as much as if we had planned and built it. That’s our chief piece of good fortune.’

  We took our leave, for we had no desire for the company of Dr Swope and Mr Percy Blaker. When we reached the highway we halted and looked back on the little jewel. Shafts of the westering sun now caught the stone and turned the honey to ripe gold. Thin spires of amethyst smoke rose into the still air. I thought of the well-meaning, restless couple inside its walls, and somehow they seemed out of the picture. They simply did not matter. The house was the thing, for I had never met in inanimate stone such an air of gentle masterfulness. It had a personality of its own, clean-cut and secure, like a high-born old dame among the females of profiteers. And Mrs Giffen claimed to have given it her impress!

  That night, in the library at Borrowby, Leithen discoursed of the Restoration. Borrowby, of which, by the expenditure of much care and a good deal of money, he had made a civilised dwelling, is a Tudor manor of the Cotswold type, with its high-pitched narrow roofs and tall stone chimneys, rising sheer from the meadows with something of the massiveness of a Border keep.

  He nodded toward the linen-fold panelling and the great carved chimney-piece.

  ‘In this kind of house you have the mystery of the elder England. What was Raleigh’s phrase? “High thoughts and divine contemplations.” The people who built this sort of thing lived close to another world, and thought bravely of death. It doesn’t matter who they were – Crusaders or Elizabethans or Puritans – they all had poetry in them and the heroic and a great unworldliness. They had marvellous spirits, and plenty of joys and triumphs; but they had also their hours of black gloom. Their lives were like our weather – storm and sun. One thing they never feared-death. He walked too near them all their days to be a bogey.

  ‘But the Restoration was a sharp break. It brought paganism into England; paganism and the art of life. No people have ever known better the secret of bland happiness. Look at Fullcircle. There are no dark corners there. The man that built it knew all there was to be known about how to live. The trouble was that they did not know how to die. That was the one shadow on the glass. So they provided for it in a pagan way. They tried magic. They never became true Catholics – they were always pagan to the end, but they smuggled a priest into their lives. He was a kind of insurance premium against unwelcome mystery.’

  It was not till nearly two years later that I saw the Giffens again. The May-fly season was about at its close, and I had snatched a day on a certain limpid Cotswold river. There was another man on the same beat, fishing from the opposite bank, and I watched him with some anxiety, for a duffer would have spoiled my day. To my relief I recognised Gif-fen. With him it was easy to come to terms, and presently the water was parcelled out between us.

  We foregathered for luncheon, and I stood watching while he neatly stalked, rose and landed a trout. I confessed to some surprise – first that Giffen should be a fisherman at all, for it was not in keeping with my old notion of him; and second, that he should cast such a workmanlike line. As we lunched together, I observed several changes. He had shaved his fluffy beard, and his face was notably less lean, and had the clear even sunburn of the countryman. His clothes, too, were different. They also were workmanlike, and looked as if they belonged to him – he no longer wore the uneasy knickerbockers of the Sunday golfer.

  ‘I’m desperately keen,’ he told me. ‘You see it’s only my second May-fly season, and last year I was no better than a beginner. I wish I had known long ago what good fun fishing was. Isn’t this a blessed place?’ And he looked up through the canopy of flowering chestnuts to the June sky.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve taken to sport,’ I said, ‘even if you only come here for the weekends. Sport lets you into the secrets of the countryside.’

  ‘Oh, we don’t go much to London now,’ was his answer. ‘We sold our Hampstead house a year ago. I can’t think how I ever could stick that place. Ursula takes the same view. I wouldn’t leave Oxfordshire just now for a thousand pounds. Do you smell the hawthorn? Last week this meadow was scented like Paradise. D’you know, Leithen’s a queer fellow?’

  I asked why.

  ‘He once told me that this countryside in June made him sad. He said it was too perfect a thing for fallen humanity. I call that morbid. Do you see any sense in it?’

  I knew what Leithen meant, but it would have taken too long to explain.

  ‘I feel warm and good and happy here,’ he went on. ‘I used to talk about living close to nature. Rot! I didn’t know what nature meant. Now—’ He broke off. ‘By Jove, there’s a kingfisher. That is only the second I’ve seen this year. They’re getting uncommon with us.’

  ‘With us.’ I liked the phrase. He was becoming a true countryman.

  We had a good day – not extravagantly successful, but satisfactory – and he persuaded me to come home with him to Fullcircle for the night, explaining that I could catch an early train next morning at the junction. So we extricated a little two-seater from the midst of a clump of lilacs, and drove through four miles of sweet-scented dusk, with nightingales shouting in every thicket.

  I changed into a suit of his flannels in a room looking out on the little lake where trout were rising, and I remember that I whistled from pure light-heartedness. In that adorable house one seemed to be still breathing the air of the spring meadows.

  Dinner was my first big surprise. It was admirable – plain, but perfectly cooked, and with that excellence of basic material which is the glory of a well-appointed country house. There was wine, too, which I am certain was a new thing. Giffen gave me a bottle of sound claret, and afterwards some more than decent port. My second surprise was my hostess. Her clothes, like her husband’s, must have changed, for I did not notice what s
he was wearing, and I had noticed it only too clearly the last time we met. More remarkable still was the difference in her face. For the first time I realised that she was a pretty woman. The contours had softened and rounded, and there was a charming well-being in her eyes, very different from the old restlessness. She looked content, infinitely content.

  I asked about her mothers’ cottages. She laughed cheerfully.

  ‘I gave them up after the first year. They didn’t mix well with the village people. I’m quite ready to admit my mistake, and it was the wrong kind of charity. The Londoners didn’t like it – felt lonesome and sighed for the fried-fish shop; and the village women were shy of them – afraid of infectious complaints, you know. Julian and I have decided that our business is to look after our own people.’

  It may have been malicious, but I said something about the wonderful scheme of village education.

  ‘Another relic of Cockneyism,’ laughed the lady, but Giffen looked a trifle shy.

  ‘I gave it up because it didn’t seem worth while. What is the use of spoiling a perfectly wholesome scheme of life by introducing unnecessary complications? Medicine is no good unless a man is sick, and these people are not sick. Education is the only cure for certain diseases the modern world has engendered, but if you don’t find the disease, the remedy is superfluous. The fact is, I hadn’t the face to go on with the thing. I wanted to be taught rather than to teach. There’s a whole world round me of which I know very little, and my first business is to get to understand it. Any village poacher can teach me more of the things that matter than I have to tell him.’

  ‘Besides, we have so much to do,’ his wife added. ‘There’s the house and the garden and the home farm and the property. It isn’t large, but it takes a lot of looking after.’