Her room looked
out upon the courtyard, and she must have seen the books come crashing
down, and also have heard her master leave the house a few minutes
later.
“And what’s this rubbish the brutes have left?” he cried, taking up
two slabs of worn gray stone, on the writing-table. “Bath brick, or
something, I do declare.”
He looked very sharply again at the confused and troubled
housekeeper.
“Throw them on the dust heap, Mrs. Fewings, and—and let me know if
anything is missing in the house, and I will notify the police this
evening.”
When she left the room he went into the laboratory and took his
watch off the skeleton’s fingers. His face wore a troubled expression,
but after a moment’s thought it cleared again. His memory was a
complete blank.
“I suppose I left it on the writing-table when I went out to take
the air,” he said. And there was no one present to contradict him.
He crossed to the window and blew carelessly some ashes of burned
paper from the sill, and stood watching them as they floated away
lazily over the tops of the trees.
I
Hibbert, always conscious of two worlds, was in this mountain
village conscious of three. It lay on the slopes of the Valais Alps,
and he had taken a room in the little post office, where he could be at
peace to write his book, yet at the same time enjoy the winter sports
and find companionship in the hotels when he wanted it.
The three worlds that met and mingled here seemed to his imaginative
temperament very obvious, though it is doubtful if another mind less
intuitively equipped would have seen them so well-defined. There was
the world of tourist English, civilised, quasi-educated, to which he
belonged by birth, at any rate; there was the world of peasants to
which he felt himself drawn by sympathy—for he loved and admired their
toiling, simple life; and there was this other—which he could only
call the world of Nature. To this last, however, in virtue of a
vehement poetic imagination, and a tumultuous pagan instinct fed by his
very blood, he felt that most of him belonged. The others borrowed from
it, as it were, for visits. Here, with the soul of Nature, hid his
central life.
Between all three was conflict—potential conflict. On the
skating-rink each Sunday the tourists regarded the natives as
intruders; in the church the peasants plainly questioned: “Why do you
come? We are here to worship; you to stare and whisper!” For neither of
these two worlds accepted the other. And neither did Nature accept the
tourists, for it took advantage of their least mistakes, and indeed,
even of the peasant-world “accepted” only those who were strong and
bold enough to invade her savage domain with sufficient skill to
protect themselves from several forms of—death.
Now Hibbert was keenly aware of this potential conflict and want of
harmony; he felt outside, yet caught by it—torn in the three
directions because he was partly of each world, but wholly in only one.
There grew in him a constant, subtle effort—or, at least, desire—to
unify them and decide positively to which he should belong and live in.
The attempt, of course, was largely subconscious. It was the natural
instinct of a richly imaginative nature seeking the point of
equilibrium, so that the mind could feel at peace and his brain be free
to do good work.
Among the guests no one especially claimed his interest. The men
were nice but undistinguished—athletic schoolmasters, doctors
snatching a holiday, good fellows all; the women, equally various—the
clever, the would-be-fast, the dare-to-be-dull, the women “who
understood,” and the usual pack of jolly dancing girls and “flappers.”
And Hibbert, with his forty odd years of thick experience behind him,
got on well with the lot; he understood them all; they belonged to
definite, predigested types that are the same the world over, and that
he had met the world over long ago.
But to none of them did he belong. His nature was too “multiple” to
subscribe to the set of shibboleths of any one class. And, since all
liked him, and felt that somehow he seemed outside of them—spectator,
looker-on—all sought to claim him.
In a sense, therefore, the three worlds fought for him: natives,
tourists, Nature….
It was thus began the singular conflict for the soul of Hibbert.
In his own soul, however, it took place. Neither the peasants nor
the tourists were conscious that they fought for anything. And Nature,
they say, is merely blind and automatic.
The assault upon him of the peasants may be left out of account, for
it is obvious that they stood no chance of success. The tourist world,
however, made a gallant effort to subdue him to themselves. But the
evenings in the hotel, when dancing was not in order, were—English.
The provincial imagination was set upon a throne and worshipped heavily
through incense of the stupidest conventions possible. Hibbert used to
go back early to his room in the post office to work.
“It is a mistake on my part to have realised that there is
any conflict at all,” he thought, as he crunched home over the snow at
midnight after one of the dances. “It would have been better to have
kept outside it all and done my work. Better,” he added, looking back
down the silent village street to the church tower, “and—safer.”
The adjective slipped from his mind before he was aware of it. He
turned with an involuntary start and looked about him. He knew
perfectly well what it meant—this thought that had thrust its head up
from the instinctive region. He understood, without being able to
express it fully, the meaning that betrayed itself in the choice of the
adjective. For if he had ignored the existence of this conflict he
would at the same time, have remained outside the arena. Whereas now he
had entered the lists. Now this battle for his soul must have issue.
And he knew that the spell of Nature was greater for him than all other
spells in the world combined—greater than love, revelry, pleasure,
greater even than study.
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