VII. THE PLACE WE KNOW BEST
It is an ancient notion that the earth never forgets any of our thoughts and acts. When we leave home not to return, it bears us in mind. Man has long entertained this strange and disturbing thought. The old metaphysicians, who could always come to any conclusion they desired, hinted the same opinion, that we leave an impress on the air; or something as substantial as that. And why should we deny it? It would be unreasonable to expect a seal upon the invisible to be discernible, and just as unreasonable to deny its existence because it could not be seen. We cannot declare our record is not there; but it will never be apprehended by insensitive souls, we may safely assume, any more than the Absolute, or the other unseen abstractions which seem to shrink from the coarse contact of our senses. We may not expect a memory haunting a place to reveal itself even when our mood is right, and the hour. It may not be sought, we are told. Like Truth, it cannot be proved. It comes when we are not looking for it. It is never more precise than a sudden doubt, a wonder apparently unprovoked, a surmise which abruptly checks our well-ordered activities.
Well, it is a novel kind of ghost story, and perhaps it has as much in it as most ghost stories, for it was a sceptic who declared sadly that the trouble with a ghost is that there is no ghost. We know there are many people who do not rejoice in the thought that we leave no lasting impression on our circumstances. They do not consider the greater responsibility a certainty of this memory of earth for its children would put upon us. How we should have to sublimate even our emotions, if we would give an admirable impression! The nascent terror at the bare suggestion of it reminds us that the experience is not uncommon, on entering a strange room, or looking at an empty landscape, to feel there the shadow of an abiding but inexplicable remembering. We never know why. Mr. de la Mare, in his poem The Listeners, has given this sense of the memory of an old and abandoned house; and it would be as wrong to smile at the delicate intuitions of a poet because they are too subtle as to deny the revolutionary reasoning of Einstein because his argument moves on a plane beyond our attainment. It is unfortunately natural for us to limit the possibilities of the universe, the depth of its mystery, to what we are able to make of it; for the things we do not know can exist for us only when we do know them and so may admit they are there. When we declare we see clearly all there is to be seen it seldom occurs to us that, even then, we may be but confessing to a partial blindness.
It is true that the real mystery of the ghosts is not that they startle us but that they do not. Not worth the trouble? Perhaps they are aware we will maintain a vague belief in their presence only so long as they do not show themselves. I myself find it easy to accept Mr. de la Mare’s Listeners, but not the pair of evil souls who appear in Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. I have always felt that we ought not to have been allowed to see those maleficent spirits, and that it was a defect in the story, a concession to our crudity, that they were ever produced by their author as substance for his case. For we may suppose that anything so imponderable as a memory the impassive earth retains of the past will suggest itself only to the lucky, who may make of their luck what they will. Most probably they will give their good fortune a false interpretation. But what opportunities the notion offers! What entertaining history could be made of it, if there were anyone to write it! What poetry, if we were poets!
There is my own London suburb. After a walk round it, which would take too much time, and would be very wearying, we might estimate that, counting even its invisible shadows, it is not more than fifty years old. The taxpayers there have some right to suppose that they know the best and worst of it. It is an uproar of trams and motor-traffic in the midst of hotels, restaurants, and ornate drapers’ shops. An alien might suppose we devoted our whole lives to the buttoning and unbuttoning of clothes and getting something to eat, until he saw the gilded stucco in an Oriental style of architecture, the minarets and domes, of our many picture palaces; for, after all, we have our intellectual excitements, and the newsboys at the street-corners are anxious that we should never grow listless.
It would be foolish to deny it. Our suburb seems raw and loud. Yet in recent years it acquired an area where a shower of bombs fell from an airship. History at last? No, we have some history which is earlier than the airship, though less remarkable. We have some scholarly local insistence on Clive, who went to school near, and on Ruskin, whose grandmother kept a public-house near the High Street. We have a Fellmongers’ Yard, and a Coldharbour Lane, a tavern which can claim a Tudor reference, and a building, mainly of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and known to us as the Old Palace. Naturally, Queen Elizabeth slept there. She did in most places. Here, however, she really did sleep, and her most unqueenly ingratitude to her anxious host, expressed when she departed, is on record. We delight in the irregular mass of the Old Palace, with its little colony of rooks in the trees beside it; yet our delight in it comes, I think, because its memories of Tudor archbishops are associated, as we pass it, with the singing and the play of our neighbours’ children, for the Palace to-day is a school of theirs. We think more fondly of the children than of the old ecclesiasts. They give us something more beautiful to think about. Yet—the doubt is insistent—though we know well enough our libraries are full of the solemn nonsense which historians have made of their illusions and prejudices, is there a phantom more misleading than the visible Fata Morgana of our own day, our own illusion, which men of affairs call Things as They Are? For what are they? Dare we say we know more about them than we know of the Pyramids, the Cretans, and the wanderings of the Polynesians? Is the last comment on it all the laughter of children?
Our suburb seems so raw. It has been reduced to figures on a chart, which the Town Hall will supply. But I have long had a suspicion that it has secrets which it is not sharing with such latecomers as we are. This feeling has come over me, with chilling irrelevance, when I have been passing our parish church late at night. Nobody knows when a church first stood here, but it had a priest in 986. Late at night, our own suburb suggests oddly that it is not ours, that its real existence is in a dimension unknown to its sleeping citizens. I have wondered then whether it was possible to write the history of any place, of any time. Can we ever do more than make a few suggestive speculations? Perhaps the most important happenings are always omitted; the words with which we record an air-raid may not touch them. I know that the history of my own little street, during the few years of the war, could never be written, and if it were written it would be unbelievable. For no man could so translate my street of those years for all to see its significance, unless his imagination were like a morning sun which rose to reveal the earth that night had obscured. Our street doors are closed forever upon what happened behind them in those years. Unless their history is written on the invisible air, then it is lost.
For this unreasonable certainty I can offer no evidence more substantial than the last train home, and moonlight on the trees and battlements of the church, and the silence, and a gargoyle leering down at me from a porch. He might have been caught in the act of sardonic comment on what was passing below, out of a fuller knowledge, and a longer life. I can bring myself to believe that the gargoyle does not grin at me at night without reason. He knows something. He always did. But what is it? Why should he make me wonder whether I really know my own street? One comes home at midnight, with the mind revolving round London’s latest crisis; and for a wonder my suburb does not share the excitement of the city. It is sunk in an immemorial quiet. The church and the Old Palace might be the apparition of what was beyond us and above the anxieties which make our time spin so fast. It is not their time. Our contemporary bricks and mortar have assumed a startling look of venerable and meditative dignity. Our familiar place is free to compose itself in solitude, for we have withdrawn from it, noisy children who have gone to bed. It looks superior to me, when I surprise it at such a time, but it does not betray its knowledge. It spares no more than the ironic comment of the gargoyle.
I think I can guess a little of what is behind that imp’s grimace. Opposite to my house is a wall. It has no history. It is but a matured wall, and its top is hoary with lichens and moss. This year’s leaves are now littering the ground below. But I have seen our young men assemble there, and march off for the Yser. This year’s leaves are damp and sere on the path by the wall where the young men shuffled off in the ominous quiet of that forgotten winter dawn. But what do the new people in our street see when they gaze across to that old red brickwork on a bright autumn morning? There the dead leaves are. What is history? One may guess why the ancient imp by the church porch has that grin when chance wayfarers late at night look up, and find he is watching them pass. Does he know where they are going, and why, and is he grinning over his secret?