2 a.m. 5th July.
It is at this moment deep in the long still night, and all along
the north and west, the embers of the day are glowing. Everyone sleeps, and I
feel like a mother walking in the garden when all her children are in bed. On
the eglantine, the deep red roses are fixed. It seems they have been produced by
enchantment. In my secret garden there is such a rose-tree blowing, and each
rose is mysterious. It is a strange symmetric tree of seven round roses. Each
rose glows as with fire, and exhales enchantment.
Ever mysterious for me is the breath that I take from the world
and then again return to it, the element that has been perfectly wrought for my
being. Now at this moment it seems stilled, as if
resting with Nature, and as I came home from the river just now it was as if I
walked through high and gentle flowers, waving them
to right and to left to make a passage for myself.
How all the herbage grows in such a night as this, rankly, swiftly.
The oats and the rye, the grass and
the weeds seem to get richer and longer before the eyes. All things that live on
light are glutted. Till midnight a girl has been
sitting on the cliffs over the Dwina, singing by
herself. I listened to it from far away — it was full
of sadness, and came again and again upon my ears like a complaint.
The windmills have grown gigantic since sundown, and I, too, am
a veritable giant, getting white on my head from a scraping of the sky as I
walk. Heaven affords no stars. Flit, flit, flit, a white moth has come from the
rose on mysterious business. The moth suggests that the night is sultry — 1 should
like to see its glowing eyes.
A feeling of sadness and loneliness came over me, a wave of
home-sickness of a kind. But for what home?
The wanderer is everywhere at home, and yet never at home, not even in the
land where he was born. He is a seeker.
The world is a strange accidental
place. Do they in other realms take note of what is
happening in this garden where they have abandoned us? Is it not kindred in
other worlds that we seek — spiritual fathers and mothers?
The long summer day of life crawls on, and we wait
like lost children for someone to come and fetch us. And we are weary!
To-day Kalmeek sat astride upon the
roof of his house in the sunshine, singing his favourite songs. He was still
without hat, and clad in his dirty crimson shirt,
and he struck the roof lustily with a heavy mallet.
His wife had bidden him climb up and mend a hole in the roof, for the rain had
been coming through. He did not once stop singing, and seemed as happy as man
could be, but he is asleep now and all the village is asleep. The painter
sleeps, the revolutionaries, all. Only my watchful soul is looking out
attentively through my eyes, and trying as it were, to remember something, to
see something in the night that shall remind me. It seems that once I forgot.
On my spiritual body is a strange royal seal, but the
significance of the seal I cannot understand. And has not every man that seal?
If so, most of them have forgotten. It is my
fanaticism or misfortune always to remember, to remain for ever
irreconcilable.
In England one is familiar with every sight and sound;
the English world grew up with us and became part and
parcel of ourselves. But when one arrives on new original ground like this of
Archangel Province, one is suddenly struck with the foreignness of the world
itself. One is forced to say every now and then "How the devil came I here?"
"Whatever have all these dark forests got to do with me?" "What's there to do in a place like this?"
"Where is there any real scope for my faculties?" "Are we not all Napoleons upon a St.Helena?"
In England they are "progressing" — but to what end? Are not
the English, like everybody else, children lost in a garden, and waiting for
someone to come and fetch them?" Progress "is a game and
a gamble just to kill the time, to while it away till someone comes. But
gamblers lose their heads and forget the serious things of life, they forget.
And we tramps and tree-climbers and watchers
remember…
...
And now the sun is rising again. New light is pouring into the
old. The babushka has come out and is calling her
cows — "pooky, pooky, pooky," and it
is morning. I must go to bed — one gets into ad habits when there is no darkness
to bid the restless spirit sleep. One is wakeful at night and sleepy in the
morning, like night birds and moths. To-morrow or
next day I must be leaving Liavlia, for the yearning
is upon me to go further and see new places. Perhaps I shall find something upon
my new wanderings, come upon some old homeland, or find the priceless pearl. Or
I may find that I have the pearl all the time, and
that such moods as that of tonight are the glory of our ordinary
lives.
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