Beside Still Waters by Arthur Christopher Benson (sites to read books for free TXT) 📖

spirits, which had peopled the remembered flowers and trees of his first home, had flitted with them, and had taken up their abode in this other garden. The flowers seemed to smile at him with the same shy mystery, the trees to surround the house like a troop of loyal sentinels. The absence of the constant social interruptions that had been characteristic of the Rectory was an added charm; his mother and sister, too, though heavily overshadowed by grief, found the place peaceful and congenial; and the best joy of all was the sweet and fragrant relation that sprung up among the three. They were like the survivors of a wreck, whose former familiarity had been converted suddenly into a deep and emotional loyalty, by the sad experiences through which they had passed together. The relations had before been affectionate, but in some ways superficial. Hugh to his surprise found himself daily making discoveries about his mother and sister, through the close relationship into which they were brought. Unsuspected tastes and feelings revealed themselves, and he began to be aware of a whole host of new interests that sprang up between them. Sometimes, when a hedgerow is rooted up, one may notice how a whole crop of unknown flowers, whose seeds had been buried deep in the soil, suddenly emerge to conceal the bare scarred ditch. Hugh thought to himself that the experiences through which they had passed had had this effect of enlarging and extending sympathies which were there all the time, and which had never had an opportunity of revealing themselves. And thus, out of sorrow and wretchedness, there sprang to light a whole range of new forces, a vision of new possibilities. It seemed to Hugh that he was like a man who had passed by night through an unfamiliar country, by unknown roads; that as the darkness had begun to glimmer to dawn, the shapeless shadows of things about him had gradually taken shape, and revealed themselves at last to be but the quiet trees with their gentle tapestry of leaves, leaning over his way; and what had been but a formless horror, became revealed as a company of friendly living things that beckoned comfortably to his spirit, and grew into purer colour as the dawn began to break from underground.


XIX

Women--The Feminine View--Society--Frank Relations--Coldness--Sensitiveness

Hugh had always felt that he had very little comprehension of the feminine temperament; he realised to the full how much more generous, unselfish, high-minded, and sympathetic women were than men, their perceptions of personalities more subtle, their intuitions more delicate; in a difficult matter, a crisis involving the relations of people, when it was hard to know how to act, and when, in dealing with the situation, tact and judgment were required, he found it a good rule to consult a woman about what had happened, and a man about what would happen. Women had as a rule a finer instinct about characters and motives, but their advice about how to act was generally too vehement and rash; a woman could often divine the complexities of a situation better, a man could advise one better how to proceed. But what he could seldom follow was the intellectual processes of women; they intermingled too much of emotion with their logic; they made birdlike, darting movements from point to point, instead of following the track; they tended to be partisans. They forgave nothing in those they disliked; they condoned anything in those they loved. Hugh lived so much himself in the intellectual region, and desired so constantly a certain equable and direct quality in his relations with others, that he seldom felt at ease in his relations with women, except with those who could give him the sort of sisterly camaraderie that he desired. Women seemed to him to have, as a rule, a curious desire for influence, for personal power; they translated everything into personal values; they desired to dominate situations, to have their own way in superficial matters, to have secret understandings. They acted, he thought, as a rule, from personal and emotional motives; and thus Hugh, who above all things desired to live by instinct rather than by impulse, found himself fretted and entangled in a fine network of shadowy loyalties, exacting chivalries, subtle diplomacies, delicate jealousies, unaccountable irritabilities, if he endeavoured to form a friendship with a woman. A normal man took a friendship just as it came, exacted neither attendance nor communication, welcomed opportunities of intercourse, but did not scheme for them, was not hurt by apparent neglect, demanded no effusiveness, and disliked sentiment. Hugh, as he grew older, did not desire very close relationships with people; he valued frankness above intimacy, and candour above sympathy. He found as a rule that women gave too much sympathy, and the result was that he felt himself encouraged to be egotistical. He used to think that when he spoke frankly to women, they tended to express admiration for the way he had acted or thought; and if he met that by saying that he neither deserved or wanted praise, he received further admiration for disinterestedness, when all that he desired was to take the matter out of the region of credit altogether. He believed indeed that women valued the pleasure of making an impression, of exercising influence, too highly, and that in this point their perception seemed to fail; they did not understand that a man acts very often from impersonal motives, and is interested in the doing of the thing itself, whatever it may happen to be, rather than in the effect that his action may have upon other people. It was part of the high-mindedness of women that they could not understand that a man should be so absorbed in the practical execution of a matter. They looked upon men's ambitions, their desire to do or make something--a book, a picture, a poem--as a sort of game in which they could not believe that any one could be seriously interested. Hugh indeed seemed to divine the curious fact that, generally speaking, men and women looked upon the preoccupations and employments of the opposite sex as rather childish; a man would be immersed in practical activities, in business, in organisation, in education, in communicating definite knowledge, in writing books, in attending meetings--this he thought to be the serious and real business of the world; and he was inclined to look upon relationships with other people, sentiment, tender affections, wistful thoughts of others, as a sort of fireside amusement and recreation.

Women, on the other hand, found their real life in these things, desired to please, to win and retain affection, to admire and to be admired, to love and be loved; and they tended to look upon material things--comfort, wealth, business, work, art--as essentially secondary things, which had of course a certain value, but which were not to be weighed in the scale with emotional things. There were naturally many exceptions to this; there were hard, business-like, practical women; there were emotional, tender-hearted, sensitive men; but the general principle held good. And thus it was that men and women regarded the supreme emotion of love from such different points of view, and failed so often to comprehend the way in which the opposite sex regarded it; to women it was but the natural climax, the raising and heightening of their habitual mood into one great momentous passion; it was the flower of life slowly matured into bloom; to men it was more a surprising and tremendous experience, an amazing episode, cutting across life and interrupting its habitual current, contradicting rather than confirming their previous experience.

Hugh was himself rather on the feminine side: though he had a strong practical turn, and could carry through a matter effectively enough, yet he valued delicate and sincere emotions, disinterestedness, simplicity, and loyalty, above practical activity and organisation; the result of this, he supposed, was that he tended, from a sense of the refreshment of contrast, to make his friends rather among men than among women, and this was, he believed, the reason why he had never fallen frankly in love, because he could to a great extent supply out of his own nature the elements which as a rule men sought among women; and because the complexity and sensitiveness of his own temperament took refuge rather in tranquillity and straight-forward commonsense. As he grew older, as he became absorbed more and more in literary work, he tended, he thought, to draw more and more away from human relationships; the energy, the interest, that had formerly gone into making new relationships now began to run in a narrower channel. Whether it was prudent to yield to this impulse he did not stop to inquire. It seemed to him that many of his friends wasted a great deal of force and activity from semi-prudential motives. As his life became more solitary, an old friend once took him to task on this point. He said that it was all very well for a time, but that Hugh would find his interest in his work flag, and that there would be nothing to fill the gap. He advised him, at the cost of some inconvenience, to cultivate relations with a wider circle, to go to social gatherings, to make acquaintances. He knew, he said, that Hugh would possibly find it rather tiresome, but it was of the nature of an investment which might some day prove of value.

Hugh replied that he thought that this was living life too much on the principle of the White Knight in _Through the Looking-Glass_. The White Knight kept a mouse-trap slung to his saddle; when it was objected that he would not be likely to find mice on the back of his horse, he replied that perhaps it was not likely, but that if they were there, he did not choose to have them running about. Hugh confessed that he did find ordinary society tiresome; but to persist in frequenting it, on the chance that some day it would turn out to be a method of filling up vacant hours, seemed to him to be providing against an unlikely contingency, and indeed an ugly and commercial business. He did not think it probable that he would lose interest in his work, and he thought it better to devote himself to it while it interested him. If the time ever came when he needed a new set of relationships, he thought he could trust himself to form them; and if he did not desire to form them, well, to be bored was bad enough, but it was better on the whole to be passively rather than to be actively bored.

But Hugh's theory in reality went deeper than that. He had a strong belief, which grew in intensity with age, that the only chance of realising one's true life was to do something that interested one with all one's might. He did not believe that what was done purely from a sense of duty, unless it pleased and satisfied some part of one's nature, was ever effective or even useful. It was not well done, and it was neglected on any excuse. His pilgrimage through the world presented itself to Hugh in the light of a journey through hilly country. The ridge that rose in front of one concealed a definite type of scenery; that scenery was there; there were indeed a hundred possibilities about it, and the imagination might amuse itself by forecasting what it was to be like. But it seemed to Hugh that one wasted time in these forecasts; and that it was better to wait and see what