Within call of my voice, still studying by lamplight now the symbols
of her well-established strength, burning, moreover, with the steady
faith which does not easily break across restraint, and loving the
man as she had loved the little boy, sat one, not wondering perhaps
at my unspoken misunderstanding, yet hoping, patiently and in
silence, for its removal in due time. In the house of our boyhood, of
our earliest play and quarrels, unchanged and unchangeable, knowing
simply that I had "come home again to her," our mother waited.... I need not elaborate this for you, you for whom England and our mother
win almost a single, undivided love. I had misjudged, but the cause
of my misjudgment was thus suddenly removed. A subtler understanding
insight, a sympathy born of deeper love, something of greater wisdom,
in a word, awoke in me. The thrill had worked its magic as of old,
but this time in its slower English fashion, deep, and
characteristically sure. To my country (that is, to my first
experience of impersonal love) and to my mother (that is, to my
earliest acquaintance with personal love) I had been ready, in my
impatience, to credit an injustice. Unknown to me, thus, there had
been need of guidance, of assistance. Beauty, having cleared the way,
had worked upon me its amazing alchemy. There, in fewest possible words, is what had happened. I remember that for a long time, then, I waited in the hush of my
childhood's garden, listening, as it were, with every pore, and
conscious that some one who was pleased interpreted the beauty to my
soul. It seemed, as I said, a message of a personal kind. It was
regenerative, moveover, in so far that life was enlarged and lifted
upon a nobler scale; new sources of power were open to me; I saw a
better way. Irresistibly it came to me again that beauty, far from
being wasted, was purposive, that this purpose was of a redeeming
kind, and that some one who was pleased co-operated with it for my
personal benefit. No figure, thank God, was visible, no voice was
audible, but a presence there indubitably was, and, whether I
responded or otherwise, would be always there. And the power was such that I felt as though the desire of the planet
itself yearned through it for expression. X

I WATCHED the little bird against the paling sky, and my thoughts,
following the happy singing, went slowly backwards into the
half-forgotten past.... They led me again through the maze of
gorgeous and mysterious hopes, un-remembered now so many years, that
had marked my childhood. Few of these, if any, it seemed, had known
fulfilment.... I stole back with them, past the long exile in great
Africa, into the region of my youth and early boyhood....

And, as though a hand uncovered it deliberately, I recalled an
earliest dream--strangest, perhaps, of all the mysterious dreams of
that far time. It had, I thought, remained unrealized, as, certainly,
till this moment, it had lain forgotten--a boyish dream that behind
the veils of the Future some one waited for me with the patience of a
perfect love that was my due. The dream reached forward towards some one who must one day appear,
and whose coming would make life sweet and wonderful, fulfilling,
even explaining, the purpose of my being. This dream which I had
thought peculiarly my own, belongs, I learned later, to many, if not
to the race in general, and, with a smile at my own incurable vanity
(and probably a grimace at being neatly duped), I had laid it on one
side. At any rate, I forgot it, for nothing happened to keep it
active, much less revive it. Now, however, looking backwards, and listening to the singing in the
sky, I recalled what almost seemed to have been its attempt at
realization. Having recovered its earliest appearance, my thought
next leaped forward to the moment that might possibly have been its
reappearance. For memory bore me off without an effort on my part,
and set me abruptly within a room of the house I had come home to,
where Marion sat beside me, singing to the harp she loved. The scene
rose up before me as of yesterday...  the emotions themselves
reconstituted. I recalled the deep, half-sad desire to be worthy of
her, to persuade myself I loved as she did, even the curious impulse
to acknowledge an emotion that came and went before it could be
wholly realized--the feeling, namely, that I ought to love her
because--no more, no less is the truth--because she needed it: and
then the blank dismay that followed my failure, as with a kind of
shameful horror before a great purpose that my emptiness left
unfulfilled. The very song came back that moved me more than any else she
sang--her favourite it was as well. I heard the twanging of the
strings her fingers plucked. I heard the words:

   "About the little chambers of my heart
    Friends have been coming--going--many a year. The doors stand open there. Some, lightly stepping, enter; some depart. Freely they come and go, at will. The walls give back their laughter; all day long
    They fill the house with song. One door alone is shut, one chamber still." With each repetition of the song, I remembered, how at that time my
boyhood's dream came back to me, as though its fulfilment were at
last at hand; as though, somehow, that "door" must open, that "still
chamber" welcome the sweetness and the loveliness of her who sang. For I could not listen to the music, nor watch her fingers moving
down the strings, her slender wrist and rounded arm, her foot upon the
pedal as she held the instrument so close--without this poignant
yearning that proved ever vain, or this shame of unshed tears my
heart mysteriously acknowledged. To the end, as you know, that door
remained unopened, that chamber still. It was the singing of this sweet English bird, making articulate for
me the beauty I could not utter, that brought back to memory the
scene, the music, and the words.... I looked round me; I looked up. As I did so, the little creature, with
one last burst of passionate happiness, flew away into the darkness. And silence followed, so deep that I could hear the murmur of my
blood...  an exquisite joy ran through me, making me quiver with
expectancy from head to foot....

And it was then suddenly I became aware that the long-closed door at
last was open, the still chamber occupied. Some one who was pleased,
stretching a hand across the silence and the beauty, drew me within
that chamber of the heart, so that I passed behind the door that was
now a veil, and now a mist, and now a shining blaze of light...
passed into a remote and inner stillness where that direct communion
which is wordless can alone take place. It was, I verily believe, a stillness of the spirit. At the centre of
the tempest, of the whirlpool, of the heart's commotion, there is
peace. I stood close against that source of our life which lies hid
with beauty very far away, and yet so near that it is enclosed in
every hope, in every yearning, and in every tear.