world, the sorrows, the
bereavements, the sufferings, the dark possibilities, that lay like the
shadows of trees across a sunlit road--death itself, that grim horizon
that closed the view whichever way one looked--the mistake lay in
attempting to reckon with them beforehand, to anticipate them, to
discount them. They were all part of the plan, and one could not alter
them. Better to let them come, to husband strength and joy to meet
them, rather than to dissipate one's courage by dwelling upon them.
Indeed all Hugh's experience showed him that troubles, even the
deepest, wore a very different aspect when one was inside them.

The very storm itself was a parable. Those zigzag ribbons of purple
fire, the fierce shouting of the thunderclap that followed! In all the
wide forest-tracts over which the tempest hung, all that grim artillery
did but rend and split some one tough tree. Rather it turned again to
gladden the earth, and the tears of heaven, that fell so steeply, only
laid the dust of the hot road, and filled the pasture and the lane with
the fragrance of the cleansed earth and the comforted brake.

XXIII

The Club--Homewards--The Garden of God

As Hugh became more and more enamoured of his work, and of the sweet
peace of the countryside, he became more and more averse to visiting
London. But he was forced to do this at intervals. One hot summer day
he went thus reluctantly to town; the rattle of the train, the heated
crowd of passengers, the warm mephitic air that blew into the carriage
from the stifling, smoke-grimed tunnel--all these seemed to him
insupportably disgusting. But the sight, the sound, the very smell of
London itself, was like a dreadful obsession; he wondered how he could
ever have endured to live there. The streets lay in the steady sun,
filled with fatigued, hurrying persons. The air was full of a sombre
and oppressive murmur; the smell of the roadways, the hot vapour of
cookshops, the din and whizz of vehicles, the ceaseless motion of
faces: all this filled him with a deep pity for those who had to live
their lives under such conditions. Was it to this that our boasted
civilisation had brought us? and yet it seemed that the normal taste of
ordinary people turned by preference to this humming and buzzing life,
rather than to the quiet and lonely life in the green spaces of the
country; Hugh had little doubt that the vast majority of those he saw,
even the pale, patient workp