The moonless night has a touch of frost, and is steely-clear. High and
dominant amidst the Populations of the Sky, the restless and the
steadfast alike, hangs the great Plough, lit with a hard radiance as
of the polished and shining share. And yonder, low on the horizon, but
half resurgent as yet, crouches the magnificent hunter: watchful,
seemingly, and expectant: with some hint of menace in his port.
Yet should his game be up, you would think by now. Many a century has
passed since the plough first sped a conqueror east and west, clearing
forest and draining fen; policing the valleys with barbed-wires and
Sunday schools, with the chains that are forged of peace, the irking
fetters of plenty: driving also the whole lot of us, these to sweat at
its tail, those to plod with the patient team, but all to march in a
great chain-gang, the convicts of peace and order and law: while the
happy nomad, with his woodlands, his wild cattle, his pleasing
nuptialities, has long since disappeared, dropping only in his flight
some store of flint-heads, a legacy of confusion. Truly, we Children
of the Plough, but for yon tremendous Monitor in the sky, were in
right case to forget that the Hunter is still a quantity to reckon
withal. Where, then, does he hide, the Shaker of the Spear? Why, here,
my brother, and here; deep in the breasts of each and all of us! And
for this drop of primal quicksilver in the blood what poppy or
mandragora shall purge it hence away?
Of pulpiteers and parents it is called Original Sin: a term wherewith
they brand whatever frisks and butts with rude goatish horns against
accepted maxims and trim theories of education. In the abstract, of
course, this fitful stirring of the old yeast is no more sin than a
natural craving for a seat on a high stool, for the inscription -- now
horizontal, and now vertical -- of figures, is sin. But the deskmen
command a temporary majority: for the short while they shall hold the
cards they have the right to call the game. And so -- since we must
bow to the storm -- let the one thing be labelled Sin, and the other
Salvation -- for a season: ourselves forgetting never that it is all a
matter of nomenclature. What we have now first to note is that this
original Waft from the Garden asserts itself most vigorously in the
Child. This it is that thrusts the small boy out under the naked
heavens, to enact a sorry and shivering Crusoe on an islet in the
duck-pond. This it is that sends the little girl footing it after the
gipsy's van, oblivious of lessons, puddings, the embrace maternal, the
paternal smack; hearing naught save the faint, far bugle-summons to
the pre-historic little savage that thrills and answers in the
tingling blood of her; seeing only a troop of dusky, dull-eyed guides
along that shining highway to the dim land east o' the sun and west o'
the moon: where freedom is, and you can wander and breathe, and at
night tame street lamps there are none -- only the hunter's fires, and
the eyes of lions, and the mysterious stars. In later years it is
stifled and gagged -- buried deep, a green turf at the head of it, and
on its heart a stone; but it lives, it breathes, it lurks, it will up
and out when 'tis looked for least. That stockbroker, some brief
summers gone, who was missed from his wonted place one settling-day! a
goodly portly man, i' faith: and had a villa and a steam launch at
Surbiton: and was versed in the esoteric humours of the House. Who
could have thought that the Hunter lay hid in him? Yet, after many
weeks, they found him in a wild nook of Hampshire. Ragged, sun-burnt,
the nocturnal haystack calling aloud from his frayed and
weather-stained duds, his trousers tucked, he was tickling trout with
godless native urchins; and when they would have won him to himself
with honied whispers of American Rails, he answered but with babble of
green fields. He is back in his wonted corner now: quite cured,
apparently, and tractable. And yet -- let the sun shine too wantonly
in Throgmorton Street, let an errant zephyr, quick with the warm
South, fan but his cheek too wooingly on his way to the station; and
will he not once more snap his chain and away? Ay, truly: and next
time he will not be caught.
Deans have danced to the same wild piping, though their chapters have
hushed the matter up. Even Duchesses (they say) have ``come tripping
doon the stair,'' rapt by the climbing passion from their
strawberry-leaved surroundings into starlit spaces. Nay, ourselves,
too -- the douce, respectable mediocrities that we are -- which of us
but might recall some fearful outbreak whose details are mercifully
unknown to the household that calls us breadwinner and chief? What
marvel that up yonder the Hunter smiles? When he knows that every one
in his ken, the tinker with the statesman, has caught his bugle blast
and gone forth on its irresistible appeal!
Not that they are so easily followed as of yore, those flying echoes
of the horn! Joints are stiffer, maybe; certainly the desolate suburbs
creep ever farther into the retreating fields; and when you reach the
windy moorland, lo! it is all staked out into building-lots. Mud is
muddier now than heretofore; and ruts are ruttier. And what friendless
old beast comes limping down the dreary lane? He seems sorely shrunk
and shoulder-shotten; but by the something of divinity in his look,
still more than by the wings despondent along his mighty sides, 'tis
ever the old Pegasus -- not yet the knacker's own. ``Hard times I've
been having,'' he murmurs, as you rub his nose. ``These fellows have
really no seat except for a park hack. As for this laurel, we were
wont to await it trembling: and in taking it we were afraid. Your
English way of hunting it down with yelpings and hallooings -- well, I
may be out of date, but we wouldn't have stood that sort of thing on
Helicon.'' So he hobbles down the road. Good night, old fellow! Out of
date? Well, it may be so. And alas! the blame is ours.
But for the Hunter -- there he rises -- couchant no more. Nay, flung
full stretch on the blue, he blazes, he dominates, he appals! Will his
turn, then, really come at last? After some Armageddon of cataclysmal
ruin, all levelling, whelming the County Councillor with the
Music-hall artiste, obliterating the very furrows of the Plough, shall
the skin-clad nomad string his bow once more, and once more loose the
whistling shaft? Wildly incredible it seems. And yet -- look up! Look
up and behold him confident, erect, majestic -- there on the threshold
of the sky!
