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The Upton Letters, a non-fiction book by Arthur C. Benson |
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Upton, Aug. 4, 1904 |
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_ MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have just been over to Woodcote; I have had a few days here alone at the end of the half, and was feeling so stupid and lazy this morning that I put a few sandwiches in my pocket and went off on a bicycle for 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.
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