Algernon Blackwood by The Garden Of Survival

Author:The Garden Of Survival [Survival, The Garden Of]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-11-15T13:25:18+00:00

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.

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