“He lifted me like a flying bird through space and set me upon his shoulder. I shall never forget the sight of his huge bare features growing larger as I came nearer to them; the sun shining on them as they smiled and smiled; a sight to give one dreams.”

  The young man paused again. I seemed to feel the whole sane universe of custom and experience slipping from me, and with an effort like a drowning man’s I cried out desperately. “But it was a man — it was your father.”

  He raised his eyebrows, as at a coincidence. “So they said,” he observed. “Do you know what it means?”

  I found myself broken and breathless, as Job might have been, battered with the earthquake question of Omniscience.

  He went on, smoking slowly.

  “With the giant was a woman. When I saw her something stirred within me like the memory of a previous existence. And after I had lived some little while with them, I began to have an idea of what the truth must be. Instead of killing me, the giant and giantess fed and tended me like servants. I began to understand that in that lost epic of adventures which led up to the greatest event of my life, I must have done some great service for these good people. What it was, I had, by a quaint irony, myself forgotten. But I loved to see it shining with inscrutable affection in the woman’s eyes like the secret of the stars. There are few things more beautiful than gratitude.

  “One day, as I stood beside her knee, she spoke to me; but I was speechless. A new and dreadful fancy had me by the throat. The woman was smaller than before. The house was smaller: the ceiling was nearer. Heaven and earth, even to the remotest star, were closing in to crush me.

  “The next moment I had realised the truth, fled from the house, and plunged into the thickets like a thing possessed. A disease of transformation too monstrous for nightmare had quickened within me. I was growing larger and larger whether I would or no.

  “I rolled in the gravel, revolving wild guesses as to whether I should grow to fill the sky, a giant with my head in heaven, bewildered among the golden plumage of Cherubim. This, as a matter of fact, I never did.

  “It will always fill me with awe to think that no sign or premonition gave me warning of what I saw next. I merely raised my eyes — and saw it.

  “Within a few feet of me was kneeling one of my own size, a little girl with big blue eyes and hair black as crows.

  “The landscape behind her was the same in every hedge and tree that I had left; yet I felt sure I had come into a new world.

  “I had got to my feet and made her a kind of bow, looking a fantastic figure enough; but a red star came into her cheek.

  “‘Why, you are quite nice,’ she said.

  “I looked at her enquiringly.

  “‘They say you are the mad boy,’ she said, ‘who stares at everything. But I think I like them mad.’

  “I said nothing. I only stood up straight, and thanked God for every turn of my rambling path through that elvish topsey-turveydom, which had led at length to this. Although I had not asked for a miracle in answer, two or three drops of clear water fell out of the open sky.

  “‘There will be a storm,’ cried the girl hastily.

  “She seemed quite frightened of the dark that had come over the wood, and the shocks of sound that shook the sky now and again. This fear surprised me, for she had not seemed afraid of the grass.

  “She seemed so broken with the noise and dark and driving rain that I put my arm round her. As I did so, something new came over me: a feeling less alien, and disturbed, more responsible and strangely strong; as if I had inherited a trust and privilege. For the first time I felt a kinship with the monstrous landscape; I knew that I had been sent to the right place.

  “‘You are very brave,’ she said, as the deafening skies seemed bowed about us and shouting in our ears; ‘Do you not hear it?’

  “‘I hear the daisies growing,’ I said.

  “Her answer was lost in the thunder.

  “We were miles further on before she said, ‘but are you not mad?’

  “I spoke; but it seemed as if another spoke in my ear.

  “‘I am the first that ever saw in the world. Prophets and sages there have been, out of whose great hearts came schools and churches. But I am the first that ever saw a dandelion as it is.’

  “Wind and dark rain swept round, swathing in a cloud the place of that awful proclamation.”

  The young man paused once more. Some one near me moved his chair against mine. I remember with what a start I realised that I was in a crowded room; not in a desert with an insane hermit.

  “But you have not told me,” I said, “of the great moment: when you seemed to have discovered all.”

  “It is soon told,” he said. “Ten years afterwards the girl and I stood in one room together: we were man and wife. Other men and women went in and out, all of my own stature. There were no more giants; it was as though I had dreamed of them. I seemed to have come back among my own people.

  “Just then my wife, who was bending over a kind of couch, lifted a coverlet, and I saw that for which, haply, I have been sent to this fantastic borderland of things.

  “It was a little human creature hardly bigger than a bird. And when I saw it, I — knew everything. I knew what was the greatest event of my life: the event I had forgotten.”

  I said “Being born” in a low voice.

  I did not dare to look at his face.

  The next consciousness I had was that he had risen to his feet, and was putting on his gloves very carefully.

  I sprang erect also and spoke quickly.

  “What does it mean? Are you a man? What thing are you? Are you a savage, or a spirit, or a child? You wear the dress and speak the language of a cultivated pupil of this over-cultivated time: yet you see everything as if you saw it for the first time. What does it mean?”

  After a silence he spoke in his quiet way.

  “Have you ever said some simple word over and over till it became unmeaning, a scrap of an unknown tongue, till you seem to be opening and shutting your mouth with a cry like an animal’s? So it is with the great world in which we live: it begins familiar: it ends unfamiliar. When first men began to think and talk and theorise and work the world over and over with phrases and associations, then it was involved and fated, as a psychological necessity, that some day a creature should be produced, corresponding to the twentieth pronunciation of the word, a new animal with eyes to see and ears to hear; with an intellect capable of performing a new function never before conceived truly; thanking God for his creation. I tell you religion is in its infancy; dervish and anchorite, Crusader and Ironside, were not fanatical enough, or frantic enough, in their adoration. A new type has arrived. You have seen it.”

  He moved towards the door. Then I noticed he had come to a standstill again, and was gazing at the floor apparently in deep thought.

  “I have never understood them,” he said. “Those two creatures I see everywhere, stumping along the ground, first one and then the other. I have never been content with the current explanation that they were my feet.”

  And he passed out, still carefully buttoning his gloves.

  I went back to the table and sat down. About four minutes after he was gone I felt a kind of mental shock, like something resuming its place in my brain.

  It occurred to me that the man was mad. I am almost ashamed to admit with what suddenness it came. For so long as I was in his presence, I had believed him and his whole attitude to be sane, normal, complete, and that it was the rest, the whole human race, that were half-witted, since the making of the world.

  Homesick At Home

  One, seeming to be a traveller, came to me and said, “What is the shortest journey from one place to the same place?”

  The sun was behind his head, so that his face was illegible.

  “Surely,” I said, “to stand still.”

  “That is no journey at all,” he replied. “The shortest journey from one place to the same place is round the world.” And he was gone.

  White Wynd had been born, brought up, married and made the father of a family in the White Farmhouse by the river. The river enclosed it on three sides like a castle: on the fourth side there were stables and beyond that a kitchen-garden and beyond that an orchard and beyond that a low wall and beyond that a road and beyond that a pinewood and beyond that a cornfield and beyond that slopes meeting the sky, and beyond that — but we must not catalogue the whole earth, though it is a great temptation. White Wynd had known no other home but this. Its walls were the world to him and its roof the sky.

  This is what makes his action so strange.

  In his later years he hardly ever went outside the door. And as he grew lazy he grew restless: angry with himself and everyone. He found himself in some strange way weary of every moment and hungry for the next.

  His heart had grown stale and bitter towards the wife and children whom he saw every day, though they were five of the good faces of the earth. He remembered, in glimpses, the days of his toil and strife for bread, when, as he came home in the evening, the thatch of his home burned with gold as though angels were standing there. But he remembered it as one remembers a dream.

  Now he seemed to be able to see other homes, but not his own. That was merely a house. Prose had got hold of him: the sealing of the eyes and the closing of the ears.

  At last something occurred in his heart: a volcano; an earthquake; an eclipse; a daybreak; a deluge; an apocalypse. We might pile up colossal words, but we should never reach it.

  Eight hundred times the white daylight had broken across the bare kitchen as the little family sat at breakfast. And the eight hundred and first time the father paused with the cup he was passing in his hand.

  “That green cornfield through the window,” he said dreamily, “shining in the sun. Somehow, somehow it reminds me of a field outside my own home.”

  “Your own home?” cried his wife. “This is your home.”

  White Wynd rose to his feet, seeming to fill the room. He stretched forth his hand and took a staff. He stretched it forth again and took a hat. The dust came in clouds from both of them.

  “Father,” cried one child. “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” he replied.

  “What can you mean? This is your home. What home are you going to?”

  “To the White Farmhouse by the river.”

  “This is it.”

  He was looking at them very tranquilly when his eldest daughter caught sight of his face.

  “Oh, he is mad!” she screamed, and buried her face in her hands.

  He spoke calmly. “You are a little like my eldest daughter,” he said. “But you haven’t got the look, no, not the look which is a welcome after work.”

  “Madam,” he said, turning to his thunderstruck wife with a stately courtesy. “I thank you for your hospitality, but indeed I fear I have trespassed on it too long. And my home—”

  “Father, father, answer me! Is not this your home?”

  The old man waved his stick.

  “The rafters are cobwebbed, the walls are rain-stained. The doors bind me, the rafters crush me. There are littlenesses and bickerings and heartburnings here behind the dusty lattices where I have dozed too long. But the fire roars and the door stands open. There is bread and raiment, fire and water and all the crafts and mysteries of love. There is rest for heavy feet on the matted floor, and for starved heart in the pure faces, far away at the end of the world, in the house where I was born.”

  “Where, where?”

  “In the White Farmhouse by the river.”

  And he passed out of the front door, the sun shining on his face.

  And the other inhabitants of the White Farmhouse stood staring at each other.

  White Wynd was standing on the timber bridge across the river, with the world at his feet.

  And a great wind came flying from the opposite edge of the sky (a land of marvellous pale golds) and met him. Some may know what that first wind outside the door is to a man. To this man it seemed that God had bent back his head by the hair and kissed him on the forehead.

  He had been weary with resting, without knowing that the whole remedy lay in sun and wind and his own body. Now he half believed that he wore the seven-leagued boots.

  He was going home. The White Farmhouse was behind every wood and beyond every mountain wall. He looked for it as we all look for fairyland, at every turn of the road. Only in one direction he never looked for it, and that was where, only a thousand yards behind him, the White Farmhouse stood up, gleaming with thatch and whitewash against the gutsy blue of morning.

  He looked at the dandelions and crickets and realised that he was gigantic. We are too fond of reckoning always by mountains. Every object is infinitely vast as well as infinitely small.

  He stretched himself like one crucified in an uncontainable greatness.

  “Oh God, who hast made me and all things, hear four songs of praise. One for my feet that Thou hast made strong and light upon Thy daisies. One for my head, which Thou hast lifted and crowned above the four corners of Thy heaven. One for my heart, which Thou hast made a heaven of angels singing Thy glory. And one for that pearl-tinted cloudlet far away above the stone pines on the hill.”

  He felt like Adam newly created. He had suddenly inherited all things, even the suns and stars.

  Have you ever been out for a walk?

  The story of the journey of White Wynd would be an epic. He was swallowed up in huge cities and forgotten: yet he came out on the other side. He worked in quarries, and in docks in country after country. Like a transmigrating soul, he lived a series of existences: a knot of vagabonds, a colony of workmen, a crew of sailors, a group of fishermen, each counted him a final fact in their lives, the great spare man with eyes like two stars, the stars of an ancient purpose.

  But he never diverged from the line that girdles the globe.

  On a mellow summer evening, however, he came upon the strangest thing in all his travels. He was plodding up a great dim down, that hid everything, like the dome of the earth itself.

  Suddenly a strange feeling came over him. He glanced back at the waste of turf to see if there were any trace of boundary, for he felt like one who has just crossed the border of elfland. With his head a belfry of new passions, assailed with confounding memories, he toiled on the brow of the slope.

  The setting sun was raying out a universal glory. Between him and it, lying low on the fields, there was what seemed to his swimming eyes a white cloud. No, it was a marble palace. No, it was the White Farmhouse by the river.

  He had come to the end of the world. Every spot on earth is either the beginning or the end, according to the heart of man. That is the advantage of living on an oblate spheroid.

  It was evening. The whole swell of turf on which he stood was turned to gold. He seemed standing in fire instead of grass. He stood so still that the birds settled on his staff.

  All the earth and the glory of it seemed to rejoice round the madman’s homecoming. The birds on their way to their nests knew him, Nature herself was in his secret, the man who had gone from one place to the same place.

  But he leaned wearily on his staff. Then he raised his voice once more.

  “O God, who hast made me and all things, hear four songs of praise. One for my feet, because they are sore and slow, now that they draw near the door. One for my head, because it is bowed and hoary, now that Thou crownest it with the sun. One for my heart, because Thou hast taught it in sorrow and hope deferred that it is the road that makes the home. And one for that daisy at my feet.”

  He came down over the hillside and into the pinewood. Through the trees he could see the red and gold sunset settling down among the white farm-buildings and the green apple-branches. It was his home now. But it could not be his home till he had gone out from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son.

  He came out of the pinewood and across the road. He surmounted the low wall and tramped through the orchard, through the kitchen garden, past the cattle-sheds. And in the stony courtyard he saw his wife drawing water.

  Culture And The Light

  The Traveller had the third-class railway carriage to himself all the way from London into the wilds of Yorkshire; dusk was already turning to dark upon the high wilderness of the moors; he had just taken out his cigar case to beguile the tedium with smoking, when the train slowed down at a wayside halt and the Stranger got into the carriage. The Stranger was grey of hair and garb, with certain oddities and even contradictions in his appearance: his shoulders were stooping, but his step light and springy, and his face was of the long sort called cadaverous, and associated with melancholy; yet he could often be seen to be secretly smiling. A few moments after the train had started again he leaned across and said politely, “Could you oblige me with a light?”

  The Traveller immediately produced his match-box, and then hesitated a little, for his companion remained in the same polite posture, and showed no signs of producing anything to smoke.

  “Excuse me,” said the Traveller, “have you any tobacco? Or may I offer you a cigar?”

  “Thank you,” replied the other. “But I did not ask for a cigar; I only asked for a light.”

  Even as he spoke, the other had automatically struck a match and lit his own cigar. He was just about to toss away the match, when the Stranger made a sudden gesture as if seizing his wrist.

  “For heaven’s sake,” he cried, “do not put it out yet! Why, it is not a third burnt through!”

  The Traveller stared at the man, and began, for the first time, to be creepily conscious of the solitude and the stormy twilight. The flame of the match was in truth the only light in that world of shadow; and it lit the haggard face before him with an expression that was something more than fanatical. The man was still speaking.