The Garden of Survival by Algernon Blackwood

Author:Algernon Blackwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620131022
Publisher: Duke Classics

VII

*

IT was some little time after my arrival, as I shall presently relate, that the experience I call the thrill came to me in England—and, like all its predecessors, came through Nature. It came, that is, through the only apparatus I possessed as yet that could respond.

The point, I think, is of special interest; I note it now, on looking back upon the series as a whole, though at the time I did not note it.

For, compared with yourself at any rate, the aesthetic side of me is somewhat raw; of pictures, sculpture, music I am untaught and ignorant; with other Philistines, I "know what I like," but nothing more. It is the honest but uncultured point of view. I am that primitive thing, the mere male animal. It was my love of Nature, therefore, that showed me beauty, since this was the only apparatus in my temperament able to respond. Natural, simple things, as before, were the channel through which beauty appealed to that latent store of love and wisdom in me which, it almost seemed, were being slowly educated.

The talks and intimacies with our mother, then, were largely over; the re-knitting of an interrupted relationship was fairly accomplished; she had asked her questions, and listened to my answers. All the dropped threads had been picked up again, so that a pattern, similar to the one laid aside, now lay spread more or less comfortably before us. Outwardly, things seemed much as they were when I left home so many years ago. One might have thought the interval had been one of months, since her attitude refused to recognize all change, and change, and growth, was abhorrent to her type. For whereas I had altered, she had remained unmoved.

So unsatisfying was this state of things to me, however, that I felt unable to confide my deepest, as now I can do easily to you—so that during these few days of intercourse renewed, we had said, it seemed, all that was to be said with regard to the past. My health was most lovingly discussed, and then my immediate and remoter future. I was aware of this point of view—that I was, of course, her own dear son, but that I was also England's son. She was intensely patriotic in the insular sense; my soul, I mean, belonged to the British Empire rather than to humanity and the world at large. Doubtless, a very right and natural way to look at things.... She expressed a real desire to "see your photographs, my boy, of those outlandish places where they sent you"; then, having asked certain questions about the few women (officers' wives and so forth) who appeared in some of them, she leaned back in her chair, and gave me her very definite hopes about "my value to the country," my "duty to the family traditions," even to the point, finally, of suggesting Parliament, in what she termed with a certain touch of pride and dignity, "the true Conservative interest."

"Men

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