sighed across the sea of wailing branches, echoing down
the dark abyss below. "God give you rest at last!" For he saw a princely, nay, an imperial Being, homeless for ever,
and for ever wandering, hunted as by keen remorseless winds about a
universe that held no corner for his feet, his majesty unworshipped,
his reign a mockery, his Court unfurnished, and his courtiers mere
shadows of deep space....

And a thin, grey dawn, stealing up behind clearing summits in the
east, crept then against the windows of the mountain hut. It brought
with it a treacherous, sharp air that made the sleeper draw another
blanket near to shelter him from the sudden cold. For the fire had died
out, and an icy draught sucked steadily beneath the doorway. XII

A BIT OF WOOD


He found himself in Meran with some cousins who had various slight
ailments, but, being rich and imaginative, had gone to a sanatorium
to be cured. But for its sanatoria, Meran might be a cheerful place;
their ubiquity reminds a healthy man too often that the air is really
good. Being well enough himself, except for a few mental worries,
he went to a Gasthaus in the neighbourhood. In the sanatorium his
cousins complained bitterly of the food, the ignorant "sisters," the
inattentive doctors, and the idiotic regulations generally--which
proves that people should not go to a sanatorium unless they are really
ill. However, they paid heavily for being there, so felt that something
was being accomplished, and were annoyed when he called each day for
tea, and told them cheerfully how much better they looked--which
proved, again, that their ailments were slight and quite curable by the
local doctor at home. With one of the ailing cousins, a rich and pretty
girl, he believed himself in love. It was a three weeks' business, and he spent his mornings walking in
the surrounding hills, his mind reflective, analytical, and ambitious,
as with a man in love. He thought of thousands of things. He mooned. Once, for instance, he paused beside a rivulet to watch the buttercups
dip, and asked himself, "Will she be like this when we're married--so
anxious to be well that she thinks fearfully all the time of getting
ill?" For if so, he felt he would be bored. He knew himself accurately
enough to realise that he never could stand _that_. Yet money was
a wonderful thing to have, and he, already thirty-five, had little
enough! "Am I influenced by her money, then?" he asked himself ... and
so went on to ask and wonder about many things besides, for he was of
a reflective temperament and his father had been a minor poet. And
Doubt crept in. He felt a chill. He was not much of a man, perhaps,
thin-blooded and unsuccessful, rather a dreamer, too, into the bargain. He had £100 a year of his own and a position in a Philanthropic
Institution (due to influence) with a nominal salary attached. He meant
to keep the latter after marriage. He would work just the same. Nobody
should ever say _that_ of him----! And as he sat on the fallen tree beside the rivulet, idly knocking
stones into the rushing water with his stick, he reflected upon those
banal truisms that epitomise two-thirds of life. The way little
unimportant things can change a person's whole existence was the one
his thought just now had fastened on. His cousin's chill and headache,
for instance, caught at a gloomy picnic on the Campagna three weeks
before, had led to her going into a sanatorium and being advised that
her heart was weak, that she had a tendency to asthma, that gout was in
her system, and that a treatment of X-rays, radium, sun-baths and light
baths, violet rays, no meat, complete rest, with big daily fees to
experts with European reputations, were imperative. "From that chill,
sitting a moment too long in the shadow of a forgotten Patrician's
tomb," he reflected, "has come all this"--"all this" including his
doubt as to whether it was herself or her money that he loved, whether
he could stand living with her always, whether he need _really_ keep
his work on after marriage, in a word, his entire life and future, and
her own as well--"all from that tiny chill three weeks ago!" And he
knocked with his stick a little piece of sawn-off board that lay beside
the rushing water. Upon that bit of wood his mind, his mood, then fastened itself. It was
triangular, a piece of sawn-off wood, brown with age and ragged. Once
it had been part of a triumphant, hopeful sapling on the mountains;
then, when thirty years of age, the men had cut it down; the rest
of it stood somewhere now, at this very moment, in the walls of the
house. This extra bit was cast away as useless; it served no purpose
anywhere; it was slowly rotting in the sun. But each tap of the stick,
he noticed, turned it sideways without sending it over the edge into
the rushing water. It was obstinate. "It doesn't want to go in," he
laughed, his father's little talent cropping out in him, "but, by Jove,
it shall!" And he pushed it with his foot. But again it stopped, stuck
end-ways against a stone. He then stooped, picked it up, and threw it
in. It plopped and splashed, and went scurrying away downhill with
the bubbling water. "Even that scrap of useless wood," he reflected,
rising to continue his aimless walk, and still idly dreaming, "even
that bit of rubbish may have a purpose, and may change the life of
someone--somewhere!" --and then went strolling through the fragrant
pine woods, crossing a dozen similar streams, and hitting scores of
stones and scraps and fir cones as he went--till he finally reached his
Gasthaus an hour later, and found a note from _her_: "We shall expect
you about three o'clock. We thought of going for a drive. The others
feel so much better." It was a revealing touch--the way she put it on "the others." He made
his mind up then and there--thus tiny things divide the course of
life--that he could never be happy with such an "affected creature." He went for that drive, sat next to her consuming beauty, proposed to
her passionately on the way back, was accepted before he could change
his mind, and is now the father of several healthy children--and just
as much afraid of getting ill, or of _their_ getting ill, as she was
fifteen years before. The female, of course, matures long, long before
the male, he reflected, thinking the matter over in his study once....

And that scrap of wood he idly set in motion out of impulse also went
its destined way upon the hurrying water that never dared to stop. Proud of its new-found motion, it bobbed down merrily, spinning and
turning for a mile or so, dancing gaily over sunny meadows, brushing
the dipping buttercups as it passed, through vineyards, woods, and
under dusty roads in neat, cool gutters, and tumbling headlong over
little waterfalls, until it neared the plain. And so, finally, it
came to a wooden trough that led off some of the precious water to a
sawmill where bare-armed men did practical and necessary things.