Up and Down

Quite suddenly I became aware that some huge subtle change had taken place. It was not that my dinner and the fire had warmed and comforted me, but it came from outside. Something was happening there, though it never occurred to me to guess what it was. But I pushed back my chair from the imitation of summer that sparkled on the hearth, drew back the curtain from the window that opened on to the terrace, and stepped out. And then I knew what it was, for spring had come.

The rain had ceased, the clouds that had blanketed the sky two hours before had been pushed and packed away into a low bank in the West, and a crescent moon was swung high in the mid-heaven. And whether it was that by miraculous dispensation my cold, which for days had inhibited the powers of sense and taste, stood away from me for a moment, or whether certain smells are perceived, not by the clumsy superficial apparatus of material sense, but by some inward recognition, I drank in that odour which is among the most significant things that can be conveyed to the mortal sense, the smell of the damp fruitful earth touched once again with the eternal spell of life. You can often smell damp earth on summer mornings or after summer rain, when it is coupled with the odour of green leaves or flowers, or on an autumn morning, when there is infused into it the stale sharp scent of decaying foliage, but only once or twice in the year, and that when the first feather from the breast of spring falls to the ground, can you experience that thrill of promise that speaks not of what is, but of what is coming. It is just damp earth, but earth which holds in suspense that which makes the sap stream out to the uttermost finger-tips of the trees, and burst in squibs of green. Not growth itself, but the potentiality of growth is there. The earth says, "Behold, I make all things new!" and the germs of life, the seeds and the bulbs, and all that is waiting for spring, strain upwards and put forth the green spears that pierce the soil. But earth, young everlasting Mother Earth, must first issue her invitation; says she, "I am ready," and lies open to the renewal of life…

I hope that however long I happen to inhabit this delightful planet, I shall never outlive that secret call of spring. When you are young it calls to you more physically, and you go out into the moonlit night, or out into the dark, while the rain drips on you, and somehow you make yourself one with it, digging with your fingers into the earth, or clinging to a wet tree-bough in some blind yearning for communion with the life that tingles through the world. But when you are older, you do not, I hope, become in the least wiser, if by wisdom is implied the loss of that exquisite knowledge of the call of spring. You have learned that: it is yours, it has grown into your bones, and it is impossible to experience as new what you already possess. You act the play no longer; it is for you to sit and watch it, and the test of your freedom from fatigued senility, your certificate to that effect, will lie in the fact that you will observe with no less rapture than you once enjoyed. You stand a little apart, you must watch it now, not take active part in it. But you will have learned the lesson of spring and the lesson of life very badly if you turn your back on it. For the moment you turn your back on it, or yawn in your stall when that entrancing drama of unconscious youth is played in front of you, whether the actors are the moon and the dripping shrubs and the smell of damp earth, or a boy and a girl making love in a flowery lane or in a backyard, you declare yourself old. If the upspringing of life, the tremulous time, evokes no thrill in you, the best place (and probably the most comfortable) for you is the grave. On the other side of the grave there may be a faint possibility of your becoming young again (which, after all, is the only thing it is worth while being), but on this side of the grave you don't seem able to manage it. God forbid that on this side of the grave you should become a grizzly kitten, and continue dancing about and playing with the blind-cord long after you ought to have learned better, but playing with the blind-cord is one of the least important methods of manifesting youth…

I was recalled from the terrace by decorous clinkings within, and went indoors to find the butler depositing a further tray of syphons and spirits on the table, and wishing to know at what time I wished to be called. On which, taking this as a hint that before I was called, I certainly had to go to bed (else how could I be called?), I went upstairs, and letting the night of spring pour into my room, put off into clear shallow tides of sleep, grounding sometimes, and once more being conscious of the night wind stirring about my room, and sliding off again into calm and sunlit waters. Often sleep and consciousness were mixed up together; I was aware of the window curtains swaying in the draught while I lay in a back-water of calm, and then simultaneously, so it seemed, it was not this mature and middle-aged I who lay there, but myself twenty-five years ago, eager and expectant and flushed with the authentic call of spring. By some dim dream-like double-consciousness I could observe the young man who lay in my place; I knew how the young fool felt, and envied him a little, and then utterly ceased to envy him, just because I had been that, and had sucked the honey out of what he felt, and had digested it and made it mine. It was part of me: where was the profit in asking for or wanting what I had got?

There we lay, he and I, while the night wheeled round the earth, which was not sleeping, but was alert and awake. Some barrier that the past years thought they had set up between us was utterly battered down by those stirrings of spring, and all night I lay side by side with the boy that I had been. He whispered to me his surmises and his desires, as he conceived them in the wonder of spring nights, when he lay awake for the sheer excitement of being alive and of having the world in front of him. He wound himself more and more closely to me, nudging me with his elbow to drive into me the urgency of his schemes and dreams, and I recognized the reality of them. How closely he clung! How insistent was his demand that I should see with his eyes, and listen with his ears, and write with his hand. And, fool though he was, and little as I respected him, I could not help having a sort of tenderness for him and his youth and his eagerness and his ignorance.

"I want so awfully," he repeated. "Surely if I want a thing enough I shall get it. Isn't that so?"

"Yes; that is usually the case," said I.

"Well, I want as much as I can want," he said. "And yet, if you are what I shall be (and I feel that is so), you haven't got it yet. Why is that?"

"Perhaps you aren't wanting enough," said I. "To get it, would you give up everything else, would you live, if necessary, in squalor and friendlessness? Would you put up with complete failure, as the world counts failure?"

He drew a little away from me; his tense arm got slack and heavy.

"But there's no question of failure," he said. "If I get it, that means success."

"But it's a question of whether you will eagerly suffer anything that can happen sooner than relinquish your idea. Can you cling to your idea, whatever happens?"

He was silent a moment.

"I don't know," he said.

"That means you aren't wanting enough," said I. "And you don't take trouble enough. You never do."

"I wonder! Is that why you haven't got all I want?"

"Probably. One of the reasons, at any rate. Another is that we are meant to fail. That's what we are here for. Just to go on failing, and go on trying again."

"Oh, how awfully sad! But I don't believe it."

"It's true. But it's also true that you have to go on acting as if you didn't believe it. You will get nothing done, if you believe it when you're young."

"And do you believe it now?" he asked.

"Rather not. But it's true."

He left me and moved away to the window.

"It's the first night of spring," he said. "I must go and run through the night. Why don't you come too?"

"Because you can do it for me."

"Good-night then," he said, and jumped out of the window.

All the next morning spring vibrated in the air; the bulbs in the garden-beds felt the advent of the tremulous time, and pushed up little erect horns of vigorous close-packed leaf, and the great downs beyond the garden were already flushed with the vivid green of new growth, that embroidered itself among the grey faded autumn grass. A blackbird fluted in the thicket, a thrush ran twinkle-footed on to the lawn, and round the house-eaves in the ivy sparrows pulled about straws and dead leaves, practising for nesting-time; and the scent, oh, the scent of the moist earth! In these few hours the whole aspect of the world was changed, the stagnation of winter was gone, and though cold and frost might come back again, life was on the move; the great tide had begun to flow, that should presently flood the earth with blossom and bird-song. Never, even in the days when first the wand of spring was waved before my enchanted eyes, have I known its spell so rapturously working, nor felt a sweeter compulsion in its touch, which makes old men dream dreams and middle-aged men see visions so that all for an hour or two open the leaves of the rose-scented manuscript again, and hear once more the intoxicating music, and read with renewed eyes the rhapsody that is recited at the opening of the high mass of youth. The years may be dropping their snowflakes onto our heads, and the plough of time making long furrows on our faces, but never perhaps till the day when the silver bowl is broken, and the spirit goes to God Who gave it, must we fail to feel the thrill and immortal youth of the first hours of spring-time. And who knows whether all that this divine moment wakes in us here may not be but the faint echo, heard by half-awakened ears, the dim reflection, seen in a glass darkly of the everlasting spring which shall dawn on us then?

MARCH, 1917

Never has there been a March so compounded of squalls and snows and unseasonable inclemencies. Verily I believe that my Lobgesang of that spring day in February was maliciously transmitted to the powers of the air, and, so far from being pleased with my distinguished approval, they merely said: "Very well; we will see what else we can do, if you like our arrangements so much." Indeed, it looks like that, for we all know how the powers of Nature (the unpleasant variety of them) seem to concentrate themselves on the fact of some harmless individual giving a picnic, or other outdoor festivity, for which sun and fine weather is the indispensable basis. But now in a few days I shall defy them, for I do not believe that their jurisdiction extends to Italy.

Italy: yes, I said Italy, for at last an opportunity and a cause have presented themselves, and I am going out there "at the end of this month, D.V." (as the clergyman said), "or early in April, anyhow." Rome is the first objective, and then (or I am much mistaken) there will be an interval of Alatri, and then Rome again and Alatri again: a sumptuous sandwich. How I have longed for something of the sort in these two years and a half of insular northern existence I cannot hope to convey. Perhaps at last I have reached that point of wanting which ensures fulfilment, but though I am interested in fantastic psychology, I don't really care how the fulfilment came now that it has come.

I have had no word from Francis since his letter last month from the Italian front, announcing his departure for Rome. He mentioned that he hoped to go to Alatri, and since he did not give me his address in Rome, I telegraphed to the island, announcing my advent at the end of March or early in April. Rather to my surprise I got the following answer from Alatri:

"Was meaning to write. Come out end of March if possible. Shall be here."

For no very clear reason this somewhat perturbed me. There was no cause for perturbation, if one examined the grounds of disquietude, for if he was ill he would surely have told me so before. Far the more probable interpretation was that he had already forgotten about his discomforts and his very depressed letter, and was snatching a few rapturous days now and then from Rome, and spending them on the island. He might foresee that he could do this again at the end of the month, and wanted me to come then, because he would be back at the front in April. That all held water, whereas the conjecture that he was ill did not. But though I told myself this a good many times, I did not completely trust my rendering, and his silence both before and after this telegram was rather inexplicable. My reasonable self told me that there was no shadow of cause for anxiety, but something inside me that observed from a more intimate spy-hole than that of reason was not quite satisfied. However, as the days of March went by and the time for my departure got really within focus, this instinctive and unreasonable questioning grew less insistent, and finally, as if it had been a canary that annoyed me by its chatter, I put, so to speak, the green baize of reason quite over it and silenced it. Soon I shall be sitting on the pergola, where the shadows of the vine-leaves dance on the paving-stones, telling Francis how yet another of my famous presentiments had been added the list of failures.

And, indeed, there were plenty of other things to think about. Bellona, goddess of war, has come out of her winter reverie, where, with her mantle round her mouth, she has lain with steadfast eyes unclosed, waiting her time. All these last months she has but moved a drowsy hand, just sparring, but now she has sprung up and cast her mantle from her mouth, and yelled to her attendant spirits "Wake! for winter is gone and spring is here!" And, day by day, fresh news has come of larger movements and the stir of greater forces. In Mesopotamia an advance began late in February, and gathering volume, like an avalanche rushing down a snow-clad cliff, it thundered on with ever-increasing velocity till one morning we heard that the Baghdad city was reached and fell into the hands of the British expedition. And still it rolls on with its broad path swept clean behind it…

Simultaneously the advance on the French front has continued, though without anything approaching a battle, as battles are reckoned nowadays. The Germans have been unable to hold their line, and retreating (I am sorry to say) in a masterly manner, have given us hundreds of square miles of territory. The ridge of Bapaume, which held out against the Somme offensive of last summer, has fallen into our hands; so, too, has Peronne. True to the highest and noblest precepts of Kultur, the enemy in their retreat have poisoned wells, have smashed up all houses and cottages with their contents, down to mirrors and chairs; have slashed to pieces the plants and trees in gardens, in vineyards and orchards; have destroyed by fire and bomb all that was destructible, and have, of course, taken with them women and girls. The movement has been on a very large scale, and the strategists who stay at home have been very busy over telling us what it all means, and the "best authority" has been very plentifully invoked. The optimist has been informed that the enemy have literally been blown out of their trenches, and tells us that a headlong retreat that will not stop till it reaches the Rhine has begun, while the pessimist sees in the movement only a strategical retreat which will shorten the German line, and enable the enemy both to send reinforcements to other fronts, and establish himself with ever greater security on what is known as the "Hindenburg Line." The retreat, in fact, according to the pessimist (and in this the published German accounts agree with him) is a great German success, which has rendered ineffective all the Allies' preparations for a spring offensive. According to the optimist, we have taken, the French and we, some three hundred square miles of territory, some strongly fortified German positions, at a minimum of cost. Out of all this welter of conflicting opinion two incontestable facts emerge, the one that the enemy was unable to hold their line, the other that their retreat has cost them very little in men, and nothing at all in guns.

In the midst of the excitement in the West has come a prodigious happening from Russia. For several days there had been rumours of riots and risings in Petrograd, but no authentic news came through till one morning we woke to find that a revolution had taken place, that the Tzar had abdicated for himself and the Tzarevitch, and that already a National Government had been established, which was speedily recognized by the Ambassadors of the various Powers. At one blow all the pro-German party in Russia, which had for its centre the ministers and intriguers surrounding the Imperial Family, had been turned out by the revolutionists, and the work that began with the murder of Rasputin at the end of December had been carried to completion. The Army and the Navy had declared for the new National Government, and the work of the National Government after the extirpation of German influence was to be the united effort of the Russian people to bring the war to a victorious close. The thing was done before we in the West knew any more than muttered rumours told us; it came to birth full-grown, as Athene was born from the head of Zeus. There are a thousand difficulties and dangers ahead, for the entire government of a huge people, involving the downfall of autocracy, cannot be changed as you change a suit of clothes, but the great thing has been accomplished, and at the head of affairs in Russia to-day are not the Imperial marionettes bobbing and gesticulating on their German wires, but those who represent the people. A thousand obscure issues are involved in the movement: we do not know for certain yet whether the Grand Duke Michael is Tzar of all the Russias, or the Grand Duke Nicholas the head of the Russian armies, or whether the whole family of Romanoffs have peeled off and thrown aside like an apple-paring; what is certain is that some form of national government has taken the place of a Germanized autocracy. How stable that will prove itself, and whether it will be able to set the derelict steam-roller at work again and start it on its way remains to be seen. For myself, I shout with the optimists, but certainly, if the crisis is over and there actually is now in power a firm and national Government, capable of directing the destinies of the country, it will have been the most wonderful revolution that ever happened.

And then, even earlier than I had dared to hope, for I had not expected to get away before the last week in March, came that blessed moment, when one night at Waterloo Station the guard's whistle sounded, and we slid off down the steel ribands to Southampton. In itself, to any who has the least touch of the travelling or gipsy mind, to start on a long journey, to cross the sea, to go out of one country and into another where men think different thoughts and speak a different language, is one of the most real and essential refreshments of life, even when he leaves behind him peace and entertainment and content. For two years and a half, if you except those little niggardly journeys that are scarce worth while getting into the train for, I had lived without once properly moving, and, oh, the rapture of knowing that when I got out of this train, it was to get on to a boat, and when I got out of the boat (barring the exit entailed by a mine or a submarine), it would be to get into another train, and yet another train, and at the Italian frontier another train yet, all moving southwards. Then once more there would be a boat, and after that the garden at Alatri, and the stone-pine and Francis. Even had I been credibly informed by the angel Gabriel or some such unimpeachable authority that the chances were two to one that the Southampton boat would be torpedoed, I really believe I should have gone, and taken the other chance in the hope of getting safely across and, for the present, leaving England (which I love) and all the friends whom I love also, firmly and irrevocably behind. I wanted (as the doctors say) a change, not of climate only, but of everything else that makes up life, people and things and moral atmosphere and occupations. I was aware that there were some thousands of people then in London who wanted the same thing and could not get it, and I am afraid that that added a certain edge to ecstasy. To get away from the people I knew and from the nation to which I belonged was the very pith of this remission. A few hours ago, too, I had been hunting the columns of newspapers and watching the ticking tape to get the very last possible pieces of information about all the events of which I have just given the summary, and now part and parcel of my delight was to think that for many hours to come I should not see a tape or a newspaper. The war had been levelled at me, at point-blank range; for two years and a half I had never been certain that the very next moment some new report would not be fired at me (and, indeed, I intentionally drew such fire upon myself); but now I had got out of that London newspaper office, and was flying through the dark night southwards. Here in England everything was soaked in the associations of war (though the most we had seen of it was two or three futile Zeppelins), but in Alatri, which I had never known except in conditions of peace and serenity, its detonation and the smoke of its burning would surely be but a drowsy peal of thunder, a mist on the horizon, instead of that all-encompassing fog out of which leaped the flash of explosions. I wanted desperately, selfishly, unpatriotically, to get out of it all for a bit, and Alatri, in intervals of Rome, beckoned like the promised land. I am aware that a Latin poet tells us that a change of climate obtained by a sea-voyage does not alter a man's mind, but I felt convinced he was mistaken.

Throughout that delightful journey my expectations mounted. First came the windy quay at Southampton, the stealing out into the night with shuttered portholes, and in the early morning the arrival at Havre. Then for a moment I almost thought that some ghastly practical joke had been played on us passengers, and that we had put back again into a British port, so Anglicized and khakied did the town appear. But no such unseemly jest had been played, and that night I slept in Paris, and woke to find a chilly fog over that lucent city, which again sent qualms of apprehension through me, for fear that by some cantrip trick this might be London again, and my fancied journey but a dream. But the dream every hour proved itself real, for again I was in the train that started from the Gare de Lyon, and not from my bedroom or the top of the Eiffel Tower, as would have been the wont of dreams, and in due time there was Aix-les-Bains with its white poplars and silvery lake, and the long pull upwards to Modane, and the great hill-side through which the tunnel went, with wreaths of snow still large on its northern slopes, and when we came out of the darkness again, we had passed into the "land of lands." The mountain valleys were still grey with winter, but it was Italy; and presently, as we sped clanking downwards, the chestnut trees were in leaf, and the petroleum tins stood on the rails of wooden balconies with carnations already in bud, and on the train was a risotto for lunch and a dry and abominable piece of veal, which, insignificant in themselves, were like some signal that indicated Italy. The dry veal and the risotto and the budding chestnut trees and the unwearied beneficence of the sun were all signals of the Beloved: tokens of the presence that, after so long, I was beginning to realize again. And then the great hopeless station of Turin happened, where nobody can ever find the place he wants, and trains steal out from the platform where he has left them, and hide themselves again, guarded by imperious officials in cocked hats at subtly-concealed side tracks, escaping the notice, like prudent burglars, of intending travellers. There were shrill altercations and immediate reconcilements, and polite salutings, and finally the knowledge that all was well, and I found my hat and my coat precisely where I had left them, as in some conjuring trick, in the identical compartment (though it and the train had moved elsewhere), and again we slid southwards. There were olive-trees now, green in a calm air, and grey when the wind struck them, and little ruined castles stuck on the tops of inaccessible hills, and houses painted pink, and stone-walled vineyards, and dust that came in through the windows, but it was the beloved Italian dust. Then came the sea again on the right-hand side of the train (only here was the magic of the Mediterranean), and the stifle of innumerable tunnels, punctuated with glimpses of Portofino, swimming in its hump-backed way out into the tideless sea, and the huddle of roofs at Rapallo, and the bridge at Zoagli, and the empty sands at Sestri, and the blue-jackets crowding the platform at Spezzia. All this was real; a dream, though the reality was as ecstatic as a dream, could not have produced those memories in their exact order and their accurate sequence, and when, next morning, I awoke somewhere near Rome, I thought that the years of war-time were the nightmare, and this golden morning which shone on fragments of ancient aqueducts and knuckled fig-trees was but the resumption of what had been before the unquiet night possessed and held me. Here again, as three years ago, was the serene wash of sun and southern air, untroubled and real and permanent. I could open my mouth and draw in my breath. Dimly I remembered the fogs of the north, and almost as dimly the fact that Italy was at war too, striving to put her foot on that damnable centipede that had emerged from Central Europe to bite and to sting and to claw all that resented its wrigglings and prevented its poisoning of the world.