On Nothing and Kindred Subjects (21 page)

I told him then that there were many such men, especially in the
town of Geneva. This, he said, he could well believe, though he had
never travelled there, and had hardly heard the name of the place.
But he knew it for some foreign town. He told me, also, that there
were men about in his own part of the world who pretended that since
Death was an accident like any other, and, moreover, one as certain
as hunger or as sleep, it was not to be considered. These, he said,
were the worst debaters upon his favourite subject.

Now as he talked in this fashion I confess that I was very bored. I
had desired to go on to Angouléme upon my bicycle, and I was at that
age when all human beings think themselves immortal. I had desired
to get off the main high road into the hills upon the left, to the
east of it, and I was at an age when the cessation of mundane
experience is not a conceivable thing. Moreover, this innkeeper had
been pointed out to me as a man who could give very useful
information upon the nature of the roads I had to travel, and it had
never occurred to me that he would switch me off after dinner upon a
hobby of his own. To-day, after a wider travel, I know well that all
innkeepers have hobbies, and that an abstract or mystical hobby of
this sort is amongst the best with which to pass an evening. But no
matter, I am talking of then and not now. He kept me, therefore,
uninterested as I was, and continued:

"People who put Death away from them, who do not neglect or despise
it but who stop thinking about it, annoy me very much. We have in
this village a chemist of such a kind. He will have it that, five
minutes afterwards, a man thinks no more about it." Having gone so
far, the innkeeper, clenching his hands and fixing me with a
brilliant glance from his old eyes, said:

"With such men I will have nothing to do!"

Indeed, that his chief subject should be treated in such a fashion
was odious to him, and rightly, for of the half-dozen things worth
strict consideration, there is no doubt that his hobby was the
chief, and to have one's hobby vulgarly despised is intolerable.

The innkeeper then went on to tell me that so far as he could make
out it was a man's business to consider this subject of Death
continually, to wonder upon it, and, if he could, to extract its
meaning. Of the men I had met so far in life, only the Scotch and
certain of the Western French went on in this metaphysical manner:
thus a Breton, a Basque, and a man in Ecclefechan (I hope I spell it
right) and another in Jedburgh had already each of them sent me to
my bed confused upon the matter of free will. So this Western
innkeeper refused to leave his thesis. It was incredible to him that
a Sentient Being who perpetually accumulated experience, who grew
riper and riper, more and more full of such knowledge as was native
to himself and complementary to his nature, should at the very
crisis of his success in all things intellectual and emotional,
cease suddenly. It was further an object to him of vast curiosity
why such a being, since a future was essential to it, should find
that future veiled.

He presented to me a picture of men perpetually passing through a
field of vision out of the dark and into the dark. He showed me
these men, not growing and falling as fruits do (so the modern
vulgar conception goes) but alive throughout their transit: pouring
like an unbroken river from one sharp limit of the horizon whence
they entered into life to that other sharp limit where they poured
out from life, not through decay, but through a sudden catastrophe.

"I," said he, "shall die, I do suppose, with a full consciousness of
my being and with a great fear in my eyes. And though many die
decrepit and senile, that is not the normal death of men, for men
have in them something of a self-creative power, which pushes them
on to the further realisation of themselves, right up to the edge of
their doom."

I put his words in English after a great many years, but they were
something of this kind, for he was a metaphysical sort of man.

It was now near midnight, and I could bear with such discussions no
longer; my fatigue was great and the hour at which I had to rise
next day was early. It was, therefore, in but a drowsy state that I
heard him continue his discourse. He told me a long story of how he
had seen one day a company of young men of the New Army, the
conscripts, go marching past his house along the river through a
driving snow. He said that first he heard them singing long before
he saw them, that then they came out like ghosts for a moment
through the drift, that then in the half light of the winter dawn
they clearly appeared, all in step for once, swinging forward,
muffled in their dark blue coats, and still singing to the lift of
their feet; that then on their way to the seaport, they passed again
into the blinding scurry of the snow, that they seemed like ghosts
again for a moment behind the veil of it, and that long after they
had disappeared their singing could still be heard.

By this time I was most confused as to what lesson he would convey,
and sleep had nearly overcome me, but I remember his telling me that
such a sight stood to him at the moment and did still stand for the
passage of the French Armies perpetually on into the dark, century
after century, destroyed for the most part upon fields of battle. He
told me that he felt like one who had seen the retreat from Moscow,
and he would, I am sure, had I not determined to leave him and to
take at least some little sleep, have asked me what fate there was
for those single private soldiers, each real, each existent, while
the Army which they made up and of whose "destruction" men spoke,
was but a number, a notion, a name. He would have pestered me, if my
mind had still been active, as to what their secret destinies were
who lay, each man alone, twisted round the guns after the failure to
hold the Bridge of the Beresina. He might have gone deeper, but I
was too tired to listen to him any more.

This human debate of ours (and very one-sided it was!) is now
resolved, for in the interval since it was engaged the innkeeper
himself has died.

Of all the simple actions in the world! Of all the simple actions in
the world!

One would think it could be done with less effort than the heaving
of a sigh…. Well—then, one would be wrong.

There is no case of Coming to an End but has about it something of
an effort and a jerk, as though Nature abhorred it, and though it be
true that some achieve a quiet and a perfect end to one thing or
another (as, for instance, to Life), yet this achievement is not
arrived at save through the utmost toil, and consequent upon the
most persevering and exquisite art.

Now you can say that this may be true of sentient things but not of
things inanimate. It is true even of things inanimate.

Look down some straight railway line for a vanishing point to the
perspective: you will never find it. Or try to mark the moment when
a small target becomes invisible. There is no gradation; a moment it
was there, and you missed it—possibly because the Authorities were
not going in for journalism that day, and had not chosen a dead calm
with the light full on the canvas. A moment it was there and then,
as you steamed on, it was gone. The same is true of a lark in the
air. You see it and then you do not see it, you only hear its song.
And the same is true of that song: you hear it and then suddenly you
do not hear it. It is true of a human voice, which is familiar in
your ear, living and inhabiting the rooms of your house. There comes
a day when it ceases altogether—and how positive, how definite and
hard is that Coming to an End.

It does not leave an echo behind it, but a sharp edge of emptiness,
and very often as one sits beside the fire the memory of that voice
suddenly returning gives to the silence about one a personal force,
as it were, of obsession and of control. So much happens when even
one of all our million voices Comes to an End.

It is necessary, it is august and it is reasonable that the great
story of our lives also should be accomplished and should reach a
term: and yet there is something in that hidden duality of ours
which makes the prospect of so natural a conclusion terrible, and it
is the better judgment of mankind and the mature conclusion of
civilisations in their age that there is not only a conclusion here
but something of an adventure also. It may be so.

Those who solace mankind and are the principal benefactors of it, I
mean the poets and the musicians, have attempted always to ease the
prospect of Coming to an End, whether it were the Coming to an End
of the things we love or of that daily habit and conversation which
is our life and is the atmosphere wherein we loved them. Indeed this
is a clear test whereby you may distinguish the great artists from
the mean hucksters and charlatans, that the first approach and
reveal what is dreadful with calm and, as it were, with a purpose to
use it for good while the vulgar catchpenny fellows must liven up
their bad dishes as with a cheap sauce of the horrible, caring
nothing, so that their shrieks sell, whether we are the better for
them or no.

The great poets, I say, bring us easily or grandly to the gate: as
in that
Ode to a Nightingale
where it is thought good (in an
immortal phrase) to pass painlessly at midnight, or, in the glorious
line which Ronsard uses, like a salute with the sword, hailing "la
profitable mort."

The noblest or the most perfect of English elegies leaves, as a sort
of savour after the reading of it, no terror at all nor even too
much regret, but the landscape of England at evening, when the smoke
of the cottages mixes with autumn vapours among the elms; and even
that gloomy modern
Ode to the West Wind
, unfinished and
touched with despair, though it will speak of—

  … that outer place forlorn
  Which, like an infinite grey sea, surrounds
  With everlasting calm the land of human sounds;

yet also returns to the sacramental earth of one's childhood where
it says:

  For now the Night completed tells her tale
  Of rest and dissolution: gathering round
  Her mist in such persuasion that the ground
  Of Home consents to falter and grow pale.
  And the stars are put out and the trees fail.
  Nor anything remains but that which drones
  Enormous through the dark….

And again, in another place, where it prays that one may at the last
be fed with beauty—-

  … as the flowers are fed
  That fill their falling-time with generous breath:
  Let me attain a natural end of death,
  And on the mighty breast, as on a bed,
  Lay decently at last a drowsy head,
  Content to lapse in somnolence and fade
  In dreaming once again the dream of all things made.

The most careful philosophy, the most heavenly music, the best
choice of poetic or prosaic phrase prepare men properly for man's
perpetual loss of this and of that, and introduce us proudly to the
similar and greater business of departure from them all, from
whatever of them all remains at the close.

To be introduced, to be prepared, to be armoured, all these are
excellent things, but there is a question no foresight can answer
nor any comprehension resolve. It is right to gather upon that
question the varied affections or perceptions of varying men.

I knew a man once in the Tourdenoise, a gloomy man, but very rich,
who cared little for the things he knew. This man took no pleasure
in his fruitful orchards and his carefully ploughed fields and his
harvests. He took pleasure in pine trees; he was a man of groves and
of the dark. For him that things should come to an end was but part
of an universal rhythm; a part pleasing to the general harmony, and
making in the music of the world about him a solemn and, oh, a
conclusive chord. This man would study the sky at night and take
from it a larger and a larger draught of infinitude, finding in this
exercise not a mere satisfaction, but an object and goal for the
mind; when he had so wandered for a while under the night he seemed,
for the moment, to have reached the object of his being.

And I knew another man in the Weald who worked with his hands, and
was always kind, and knew his trade well; he smiled when he talked
of scythes, and he could thatch. He could fish also, and he knew
about grafting, and about the seasons of plants, and birds, and the
way of seed. He had a face full of weather, he fatigued his body, he
watched his land. He would not talk much of mysteries, he would
rather hum songs. He loved new friends and old. He had lived with
one wife for fifty years, and he had five children, who were a
policeman, a schoolmistress, a son at home, and two who were
sailors. This man said that what a man did and the life in which he
did it was like the farmwork upon a summer's day. He said one works
a little and rests, and works a little again, and one drinks, and
there is a perpetual talk with those about one. Then (he would say)
the shadows lengthen at evening, the wind falls, the birds get back
home. And as for ourselves, we are sleepy before it is dark.

Then also I knew a third man who lived in a town and was clerical
and did no work, for he had money of his own. This man said that all
we do and the time in which we do it is rather a night than a day.
He said that when we came to an end we vanished, we and our works,
but that we vanished into a broadening light.

Which of these three knew best the nature of man and of his works,
and which knew best of what nature was the end?

* * * * *

Why so glum, my Lad, or my Lass (as the case may be), why so heavy
at heart? Did you not know that you also must Come to an End?

Why, that woman of Etaples who sold such Southern wine for the
dissipation of the Picardian Mist, her time is over and gone and the
wine has been drunk long ago and the singers in her house have
departed, and the wind of the sea moans in and fills their hall. The
Lords who died in Roncesvalles have been dead these thousand years
and more, and the loud song about them grew very faint and dwindled
and is silent now: there is nothing at all remains.