AUGUST 31, 1918. I make the same mistake whenever the chance of a holiday broadens and brightens. A small library, reduced by a process of natural selection, helps to make weighty the bag. But I do not at once close the bag; a doubt keeps it open; I take out the books again and consider them. When the problem of carrying those volumes about faces me, it is a relief to discover how many of them lose their vital importance. Yet a depraved sense of duty, perhaps the residue of what such writers as Marcus Aurelius have done for me, refuses to allow every volume to be jettisoned. It imposes, as a hair shirt, several new and serious books which there has been no time to examine. They are books that require a close focus, a long and steady concentration, a silent immobility hardly distinguishable from sleep. This year for instance I notice Jung’s Analytical Psychology confidently expecting to go for a holiday with me. I feel I ought to take some such stern reminder of mortality, and, in addition, out of a And that is why I find them at the journey’s end. But why did I bring them? For now they seem to be exactly what I would avoid—they look like toil. And work, as these years have taught the observant, is but for slaves and the conscripted. It is never admired, except with a distant and haughty sententiousness, by the best people. Nor is it easy, by this west-country quay, to profit by a conscience which is willing to allow some shameless idleness. I began talking, before the books were even unpacked, with some old acquaintances by the water-side. Most disquieting souls! But I cannot blame them. They have been obliged to add gunnery to their knowledge of seamanship and navigation. They were silent, they shook their heads, following some thoughtless enquiries of mine after the wellbeing of other men I used to meet here. Worse than all, I was forced to listen to the quiet recitals of stranded cripples, once good craftsmen in the place, and these dimmed the blessed sun even where in other years it was unusually bright. So how can I stay by the quay all the golden day long? I have not come here prepared to endure the sudden Arctic shadows which fall, even in summer, from such clouds. The society of our fellows was never so uncertain, so likely to be stormy, as in these days. And the opinions of none of our fellow-men can be so disturbing as those of the rebel from the trenches, who appears, It is not easy, and perhaps this summer it would not be right, to find the exact mood for a holiday. In the frame of mind which is more usual with us, I put Ecclesiastes—forsaken by a previous visitor, and used to lengthen a short leg of the dressing-table—in my pocket, and leave the quay to its harsh new thoughts, and to the devices by which it gets a bare sustenance out of the tides, the seasons, and the winds, complicated now with high explosives in cunning ambush; and go out to the headland, where wild goats among the rocks which litter the steep are the only life to blatter critical comment to high heaven. I left that holiday quay and its folk, and took with me a prayer which might go far The dust of official lorries in a hurry no longer made the wayside hedges appear aged. The wind was newly arrived from mid-ocean. I met it coming ashore. It knew nothing about us, so far. In the distance, the village with its shipping was a faint blur, already a faded impress on earth, as though more than half forgotten in spite of its important problems. It was hardly more than a discoloration, and suggested nothing of consequence. The sun on the grey rocks was giving a hint that, should ever it be required, “Vanity of vanities...” I looked up again. There was a voice above |