Losing One's Train

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Title:     Losing One's Train
Author: Vernon Lee [More Titles by Lee]

The clocks up at the villa must have been all wrong, or else my watch did not go with them, or else I had not looked often enough at it while rambling about the town on my way to the station. Certain it is that when I got there, at the gallop of my cab-horse, the express was gone. There is something hatefully inexorable about expresses: it is useless to run after them, even in Italy. The next train took an hour and a quarter instead of forty minutes to cover the nineteen miles between Pistoia and Florence. Moreover, that next train was not till eight in the evening, and it was now half-past five.

I felt all it was proper to feel on the occasion, and said, if anything, rather more. Missing a train is a terrible business, even if you miss nothing else in consequence; and the inner disarray, the blow and wrench to thoughts and feelings, is most often far worse than any mere upsetting of arrangements. A chasm suddenly gapes between present and future, and the river of life flows backwards, if but for a second. It is most fit and natural to lose one's temper; but the throwing out of so much moral ballast does not help one to overtake that train. I mention this, lest I should pass for heartless; and now proceed to say that, after a few minutes given to wrath and lamentation, I called the cab back and went in search of a certain very ancient church, containing a very ancient pulpit, which I had never succeeded in seeing before. Exactly as on previous occasions, when I got to the farm where the key of that church was kept, the key had gone to town in the pocket of the peasant. He would be back, no doubt, at nightfall. But I had not very much expected the church to be open, so I felt perfectly indifferent at not seeing the pulpit--nay, if anything, a little relieved, as one does sometimes when friends prove _not at home_.

I walked up a long steep track to the little battered, black, fast-locked church, which stands all alone under some oak trees. The track was through thin hillside woods. Such divine woods! young oak and acacia, and an undergrowth of grass and ferns, of full-blown roses thrown across the grass; and here and there, dark in that pale young green, a cypress. The freshness of evening came all of a sudden, and with it a scent of every kind of leaf and herb and fern, and the sweetness of the ripening corn all round. And when I got to the ridge, slippery with dry cut grass, what should I see in front of me, over the olive-yards and the wooded slopes, but the walls and towers of Serravalle, which have beckoned to my fancy almost ever since my childhood. I sat there a long while in the June sunset and very nearly missed the second train, which it had seemed intolerable to wait for.

This is an allegory, and I commend its application to the wise and gentle reader. There are more of such symbolical trains lost than real ones, even by the most travelled mortals, Odysseus or a bag-man. And such losing of trains is not inevitably a blessing. I have often written about life with optimistic heartlessness, because life, on the whole, has been uncommonly kind to me, and because one is nearer the truth when cheerful than when depressed. But this is the place for a brief interlude of pessimism. For it is all very well to make the best of losing trains when we have time, cabs, and a fine view at hand; and when in losing the train we lose nothing else, except our temper. But surely 'tis no ingratitude towards life's great mercies and blessings to discriminate them from life's buffets and bruisings. And methinks that the teaching of courage or resignation might fitly begin by the recognition of the many cases where only courage or resignation avails, because they are thoroughly bad. There is something stupid and underbred at times in the attitude of saints and stoics--at least in their books. When Rachel weepeth for her children, we have no business to come round hawking our consolation; we should stand aside, unless we can cradle her to sleep in our arms. And if we refuse to weep, 'tis not because there is not matter enough for weeping, but because we require our strength and serenity to carry her through her trouble. Pain, dear cheerful friends, is pain; and grief, grief; and if our own complete human efficiency requires the acquaintance thereof, 'tis because the knowledge of their violence and of their wiles is needed for our own protection and the helping of other folk. Evil comes from the gods, no doubt; but so do all things; and to extract good from it--the great Prometheus-feat of man--is not to evil's credit, but to the credit of good. The contrary doctrine is a poison to the spirit, though a poison of medicinal use in moments of anguish, a bromide or an opiate.

I am speaking, therefore, only of such contingencies as will bear comparison, without silly stoicism, to the missing of a train. Much of the good such disappointments may contain is of the nature of education, and most of it a matter of mere novelty. Without suspecting it, we are all suffering from lack of new departures; and life would no doubt be better if we tried a few more things, and gave the hidden, neglected possibilities a greater chance. Change as such is often fruitful of improvement, exposing to renovating air and rains the hard, exhausted soil of our souls, turning up new layers and helping on life's chemistry. The thwarting of our cherished plans is beneficial, because our plans are often mere routine, born not of wisdom, but of inertness. In our endless treadmill of activity, in our ceaseless rumination, we are, as a fact, neither acting nor thinking; and life, secretly at a standstill, ceases to produce any good. There was no reason for taking that express and getting back two or three hours sooner to my house: no one required me, nothing needed doing. Yet, unless I had lost that train I should not have dreamed of taking that walk, of making that little journey of discovery, in a delightful unknown place.

There is another source of good hidden in disappointment. For it is disappointment rather than age (age getting the credit for what it merely witnesses) which teaches us to work into life's scheme certain facts, frequently difficult of acceptance; trying to make them, as all reality should be, causes of strength rather than of weakness. Painful facts? Or rather, perhaps, only painful contradictions to certain pleasant delusions, founded on nothing save their pleasantness, and taken for granted--who knows how long?--without proof and without questioning. Facts concerning not merely success, love, personal contact, but also one's own powers and possibilities for good, what the world is able to receive at one's hands, as much as of what the world can give to one.

But the knowledge which disappointment gives, to those wishing to learn from it, has a higher usefulness than practical application. It constitutes a view of life, a certain contemplative attitude which, in its active resignation, in its domination of reality by intelligent acquiescence, gives continuity, peace, and dignity. And here my allegory finds its completion. For what compensated me after my lost train and all my worry and vexation of spirit? Nothing to put in my pocket or swell my luggage, not even a kingdom, such as made up for the loss of poor Saul's asses; but an impression of sunset freshness and sweetness among ripening corn and delicate leaves, and a view, unexpected, solemn, and charming, with those long-forgotten distant walls and towers which I shall never reach, and which have beckoned to me from my childhood.

Such is the allegory, or morality, of the Lost Train.

[The end]
Vernon Lee's essay: Losing One's Train

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