I stood aware of
power, wisdom, love; and more, this power, wisdom, love were mine to
draw upon and use, not in some future heaven, but here and now. VI

I RETURNED to England with an expectant hunger born of this love of
beauty that was now ingrained in me. I came home with the belief that
my yearning would be satisfied in a deeper measure; and more--that,
somehow, it would be justified and explained. I may put it plainly,
if only to show how difficult this confession would have been to any
one but yourself; it sounds so visionary from a mere soldier and man
of action such as I am. For my belief included a singular dream that,
in the familiar scenes I now revisited, some link, already half
established, would be strengthened, and might probably be realized,
even proved. In Africa, as you know, I had been set upon the clue at home in
England. Among the places and conditions where this link had been
first established in the flesh, must surely come a fuller revelation. Beauty, the channel of my inspiration, but this time the old sweet
English beauty, so intimate, so woven through with the fresh wonder
of earliest childhood days, would reveal the cause of my first
failure to respond, and so, perhaps, the intention of those final
pathetic sentences that still haunted me with their freight of
undelivered meaning. In England, T believed, my "thrill" must bring
authentic revelation. I came back, that precarious entity, a successful man. I was to be
that thing we used to laugh about together in your Cambridge days, a
distinguished personality; I should belong to the breed of little
lions. Yet, during the long, tedious voyage, I realized that this
held no meaning for me; I did not feel myself a little lion, the idea
only proved that the boy in me was not yet dead. My one desire,
though inarticulate until this moment of confessing it, was to renew
the thrills, and so to gather from an intenser, sweeter beauty some
measure of greater understanding they seemed to promise. It was a
personal hope, a personal desire; and, deep at the heart of it,
Memory, passionate though elusive, flashed her strange signal of a
personal love. In this dream that mocked at time, this yearning that
forgot the intervening years, I nursed the impossible illusion that,
somehow or other, I should become aware of Marion. Now, I have treated you in this letter as though you were a woman who
reads a novel, for in my first pages I have let you turn to the end
and see that the climax is a happy one, lest you should faint by the
way and close my story with a yawn. You need not do that, however,
since you already know this in advance. You will bear with me, too,
when I tell you that my return to England was in the nature of a
failure that, at first, involved sharpest disappointment. I was
unaware, as a whole, of the thrills I had anticipated with such
longing. The sweet picture of English loveliness I had cherished with
sentimental passion during my long exile hardly materialized. That I was not a lion, but an insignificant quasi-colonial adventurer
among many others, may have sprinkled acid upon my daily diet of
sensation, but you will do me the justice to believe that this
wounded vanity was the smallest item in my disenchantment. Ten years,
especially in primitive, godforsaken Africa, is a considerable
interval; I found the relationship between myself and my beloved
home-land changed, and in an unexpected way. I was not missed for one thing, I had been forgotten. Except from our
mother and yourself, I had no welcome. But, apart from this immediate
circle, and apart from the deep, comfortable glow experienced at the
first sight of the "old country," I found England and the English
dull, conventional, and uninspired. There was no poignancy. The
habits and the outlook stood precisely where I had left them. The
English had not moved. They played golf as of yore, they went to the
races at the appointed time and in the appointed garb, they gave
heavy dinner-parties, they wrote letters to the Times, and ignored an
outside world beyond their island. Their estimate of themselves and
of foreigners remained unaltered, their estimate of rich or
influential neighbours was what it always had been, there were many
more motor-cars and a few more peers, it was more difficult than
formerly to get into a good club; but otherwise, God bless them, they
were worthier than ever. The "dear old country," that which "out
there" we had loved and venerated, worked and fought for, was stolid
and unshaken; the stream of advancing life that elsewhere rushed, had
left England complaisantly unmoved and unresponsive. You have no idea how vividly--and in what curious minor details--the
general note of England strikes a traveller returning after an
interval of years. Later, of course, the single impression is
modified and obscured by other feelings. I give it, therefore, before
it was forgotten. England had not budged. Had it been winter instead
of early spring, I might sum up for you what I mean in one short
sentence: I travelled to London in a third-class railway carriage
that had no heating apparatus. But to all this, and with a touch of something akin to pride in me, I
speedily adjusted myself. I had been exiled, I had come home. As our
old nurse, aged and withered, but otherwise unaltered, said to me
quietly by way of greeting: "Well, they didn't kill you, Master
Richard!" I was, therefore, alive. It was for me, the unimportant
atom, to recover my place in the parent mass. I did so. I was
English. I recovered proportion. I wore the accustomed mask; I hid
both my person and my new emotions, as was obviously expected of me. Having reported my insignificance to the Foreign Office.... I came
down to the Manor House. Yet, having changed, and knowing that I had changed, I was aware of a
cleft between me and my native stock. Something un-English was alive
in me and eager to assert itself. Another essence in my blood had
quickened, a secret yearning that I dared not mention to my kind, a
new hunger in my heart that clamoured to be satisfied, yet remained,
speaking generally, un-nourished. Looking for beauty among my
surroundings and among my kith and kin, I found it not; there was no
great Thrill from England or from home. The slowness, the absence of
colour, imagination, rhythm, baffled me, while the ugliness of common
things and common usages afflicted my new sensitiveness. Not that I
am peculiarly alert to beauty, nor claim superior perception--I am no
artist, either by virtue of vision or power of expression--but that a
certain stagnant obtuseness, a kind of sordid and conservative
veneration of the ugly that the English favour, distressed and even
tortured me in a way I had never realized formerly. They were so
proud to live without perception. An artist was a curiosity, not a
leader, far less a prophet. There was no imagination. In little things, as I said, a change was manifest, however.