Perhaps I Succeeded In Saving Two Or Three
Threatened Lives In The Lanes And Secret Green Places By The
Stream; Perhaps I Didn't; But In Any Case It Was Some
Satisfaction To Have Made The Attempt.
Now all this made me a somewhat impatient listener to the
village tales - the old unhappy things, for they were mostly
old and always unhappy; yet in the end I had to listen.
It
was her eyes that did it. At times they had an intensity in
their gaze which made them almost uncanny, something like the
luminous eyes of an animal hungrily fixed on its prey. They
held me, though not because they glittered: I could have gone
away if I had thought proper, and remained to listen only
because the meaning of that singular look in her grey-green
eyes, which came into them whenever I grew restive, had dawned
on my careless mind.
She was an old woman with snow-white hair, which contrasted
rather strangely with her hard red colour; but her skin was
smooth, her face well shaped, with fine acquiline features.
No doubt it had been a very handsome face though never
beautiful, I imagine; it was too strong and firm and resolute;
too like the face of some man we see, which, though we have
but a momentary sight of it in a passing crowd, affects us
like a sudden puff of icy-cold air - the revelation of a
singular and powerful personality. Yet she was only a poor
old broken-down woman in a Wiltshire village, held fast in her
chair by a hopeless infirmity. With her legs paralysed she
was like that prince in the Eastern tale on whom an evil spell
had been cast, turning the lower half of his body into marble.
But she did not, like the prince, shed incessant tears and
lament her miserable destiny with a loud voice. She was
patient and cheerful always, resigned to the will of Heaven,
and - a strange thing this to record of an old woman in a
village! - she would never speak of her ailments. But though
powerless in body her mind was vigorous and active teeming
with memories of all the vicissitudes of her exceedingly
eventful, busy life, from the time when she left her village
as a young girl to fight her way in the great world to her
return to end her life in it, old and broken, her fight over,
her children and grandchildren dead or grown up and scattered
about the earth.
Chance having now put me in her way, she concluded after a few
preliminary or tentative talks that she had got hold of an
ideal listener; but she feared to lose me - she wanted me to go
on listening for ever. That was the reason of that painfully
intense hungry look in her eyes; it was because she discovered
certain signs of lassitude or impatience in me, a desire to
get up and go away and refresh myself in the sun and wind.
Poor old woman, she could not spring upon and hold me fast
when I attempted to move off, or pluck me back with her claws;
she could only gaze with fiercely pleading eyes and say
nothing; and so, without being fascinated, I very often sat on
listening still when I would gladly have been out-of-doors.
She was a good fluent talker; moreover, she studied her
listener, and finding that my interest in her own interminable
story was becoming exhausted she sought for other subjects,
chiefly the strange events in the lives of men and women who
had lived in the village and who had long been turned to dust.
They were all more or less tragical in character, and it
astonished me to think that I had stayed in a dozen or twenty,
perhaps forty, villages in Wiltshire, and had heard stories
equally strange and moving in pretty well every one of them.
If each of these small centres possessed a scribe of genius,
or at any rate one with a capacity for taking pains, who would
collect and print in proper form these remembered events,
every village would in time have its own little library of
local history, the volumes labelled respectively, "A Village
Tragedy", "The Fields of Dulditch", "Life's Little Ironies",
"Children's Children", and various others whose titles every
reader will be able to supply.
The effect of a long spell of listening to these unwritten
tragedies was sometimes strong enough to cloud my reason, for
on going directly forth into the bright sunshine and listening
to the glad sounds which filled the air, it would seem that
this earth was a paradise and that all creation rejoiced in
everlasting happiness excepting man alone who - mysterious
being! - was born to trouble and disaster as the sparks fly
upwards. A pure delusion, due to our universal and
ineradicable passion for romance and tragedy. Tell a man of a
hundred humdrum lives which run their quiet contented course
in this village, and the monotonous unmoving story, or hundred
stories, will go in at one ear and out at the other. Therefore
such stories are not told and not remembered. But that which
stirs our pity and terror - the frustrate life, the glorious
promise which was not fulfilled, the broken hearts and broken
fortunes, and passion, crime, remorse, retribution - all this
prints itself on the mind, and every such life is remembered
for ever and passed on from generation to generation. But it
would really form only one brief chapter in the long, long
history of the village life with its thousand chapters.
The truth is, if we live in fairly natural healthy condition,
we are just as happy as the lower animals. Some philosopher
has said that the chief pleasure in a man's life, as in that
of a cow, consists in the processes of mastication,
deglutition, and digestion, and I am very much inclined to
agree with him. The thought of death troubles us very little
- we do not believe in it.
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