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I WATCHED the little bird against the paling sky, and my thoughts,following the happy singing, went slowly backwards into thehalf-forgotten past.... They led me again through the maze ofgorgeous and mysterious hopes, un-remembered now so many years, thathad marked my childhood. Few of these, if any, it seemed, had knownfulfilment.... I stole back with them, past the long exile in greatAfrica, into the region of my youth and early boyhood....
And, as though a hand uncovered it deliberately, I recalled anearliest dream--strangest, perhaps, of all the mysterious dreams ofthat far time. It had, I thought, remained unrealized, as, certainly,till this moment, it had lain forgotten--a boyish dream that behindthe veils of the Future some one waited for me with the patience of aperfect love that was my due.
The dream reached forward towards some one who must one day appear,and whose coming would make life sweet and wonderful, fulfilling,even explaining, the purpose of my being. This dream which I hadthought peculiarly my own, belongs, I learned later, to many, if notto the race in general, and, with a smile at my own incurable vanity(and probably a grimace at being neatly duped), I had laid it on oneside. At any rate, I forgot it, for nothing happened to keep itactive, much less revive it.
Now, however, looking backwards, and listening to the singing in thesky, I recalled what almost seemed to have been its attempt atrealization. Having recovered its earliest appearance, my thoughtnext leaped forward to the moment that might possibly have been itsreappearance. For memory bore me off without an effort on my part,and set me abruptly within a room of the house I had come home to,where Marion sat beside me, singing to the harp she loved. The scenerose up before me as of yesterday... the emotions themselvesreconstituted. I recalled the deep, half-sad desire to be worthy ofher, to persuade myself I loved as she did, even the curious impulseto acknowledge an emotion that came and went before it could bewholly realized--the feeling, namely, that I ought to love herbecause--no more, no less is the truth--because she needed it: andthen the blank dismay that followed my failure, as with a kind ofshameful horror before a great purpose that my emptiness leftunfulfilled.
The very song came back that moved me more than any else shesang--her favourite it was as well. I heard the twanging of thestrings her fingers plucked. I heard the words:
"About the little chambers of my heart Friends have been coming--going--many a year. The doors stand open there. Some, lightly stepping, enter; some depart. Freely they come and go, at will. The walls give back their laughter; all day long They fill the house with song. One door alone is shut, one chamber still."
With each repetition of the song, I remembered, how at that time myboyhood's dream came back to me, as though its fulfilment were atlast at hand; as though, somehow, that "door" must open, that "stillchamber" welcome the sweetness and the loveliness of her who sang.For I could not listen to the music, nor watch her fingers movingdown the strings, her slender wrist and rounded arm, her foot upon thepedal as she held the instrument so close--without this poignantyearning that proved ever vain, or this shame of unshed tears myheart mysteriously acknowledged. To the end, as you know, that doorremained unopened, that chamber still.
It was the singing of this sweet English bird, making articulate forme the beauty I could not utter, that brought back to memory thescene, the music, and the words....
I looked round me; I looked up. As I did so, the little creature, withone last burst of passionate happiness, flew away into the darkness.And silence followed, so deep that I could hear the murmur of myblood... an exquisite joy ran through me, making me quiver withexpectancy from head to foot....
And it was then suddenly I became aware that the long-closed door atlast was open, the still chamber occupied. Some one who was pleased,stretching a hand across the silence and the beauty, drew me withinthat chamber of the heart, so that I passed behind the door that wasnow a veil, and now a mist, and now a shining blaze of light...passed into a remote and inner stillness where that direct communionwhich is wordless can alone take place.
It was, I verily believe, a stillness of the spirit. At the centre ofthe tempest, of the whirlpool, of the heart's commotion, there ispeace. I stood close against that source of our life which lies hidwith beauty very far away, and yet so near that it is enclosed inevery hope, in every yearning, and in every tear. For the whisper cameto me, beyond all telling sure.
Beauty had touched me, Wisdom come to birth; and Love, whisperingthrough the silence those marvellous words that sum up all spiritualexperience, proved it to me:
"Be still--and know...."
I found myself moving slowly across the lawn again towards the house. Ipresently heard the wind mousing softly in the limes. The air was freshand cool. The first stars were out. I saw the laburnum drooping, asthough thick clusters of these very stars had drifted earthwards amongthe branches; I saw the gleam of the lilac; across the dim tangle of theearly roses shone the familiar windows, cosy now with the glow oflighted lamps... and I became suddenly, in a very intimate sense,"aware" of the garden. The Presence that walked beside me moved abruptlycloser. This Presence and the garden seemed, as in some divinemysterious way, inseparable.
There was a stirring of the dimmest and most primitive associationspossible. Memory plunged back among ancestral, even racial, shadows. Irecalled the sweet and tender legend of the beginnings of the world,when something divine, it was whispered, was intimate with man, andcompanioning his earliest innocence, walked with him in that happierstate those childlike poets called--a garden. That childhood of theworld seemed very near.
I found again the conditions of innocence and pristine wonder--ofsimplicity. There was a garden in my heart, and some one walked with metherein. For Life in its simplest form--of breathing leaves and growingflowers, of trees and plants and shrubs--glowed all about me in thedarkness. The blades of grass, the blossoms hanging in the air, strongstems and hidden roots, fulfilled themselves with patience upon everyside, brimming with beauty and stillness did not seek to advertise. Andof this simplest form of life--the vegetable kingdom--I became vividlyaware, prodigal, mysterious, yet purposive. The outer garden merged withthe inner, and the Presence walked in both of them....
I was led backwards, far down into my own being. I reached the earliest,simplest functions by which I myself had come to be, the state where thefrontier lies between that which is dead and that which is alive.Somewhere between the mineral and vegetable worlds, I knew, thatfrontier lay. For the vegetable kingdom alone possesses the power ofconverting the mineral or the chemical into the living organism byabsorption; and here, among the leaves and roots and flowers, that powerwas sweetly, irresistibly, at work.
It seemed I reached that frontier, and I passed it. Beauty came throughthe most primitive aspect of my being.
And so I would tell you, you alone of all the world, that the Presencewalking beside me in the scented darkness came suddenly so close that Iwas aware of it in what seemed my earliest and most innocent state ofsoul.
Beside me, in that old-world garden, walked the Cause of all things. TheBeauty that in you was truth, in Marion tenderness, was harvested: andsomebody was pleased.
The Garden of Survival Page 10
