第25章 THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER(1)

We have read of some celebrated philosopher who was so absent-minded that he paid a call at his own house.My own absent-mindedness is extreme,and my philosophy,of course,is the marvel of men and angels.But Inever quite managed to be so absent-minded as that.Some yards at least from my own door,something vaguely familiar has always caught my eye;and thus the joke has been spoiled.Of course I have quite constantly walked into another man's house,thinking it was my own house;my visits became almost monotonous.But walking into my own house and thinking it was another man's house is a flight of poetic detachment still beyond me.

Something of the sensations that such an absent-minded man must feel Ireally felt the other day;and very pleasant sensations they were.The best parts of every proper romance are the first chapter and the last chapter;and to knock at a strange door and find a nice wife would be to concentrate the beginning and end of all romance.

Mine was a milder and slighter experience,but its thrill was of the same kind.For I strolled through a place I had imagined quite virgin and unvisited (as far as I was concerned),and I suddenly found I was treading in my own footprints,and the footprints were nearly twenty years old.

It was one of those stretches of country which always suggests an almost unnatural decay;thickets and heaths that have grown out of what were once great gardens.Garden flowers still grow there as wild flowers,as it says in some good poetic couplet which I forget;and there is something singularly romantic and disastrous about seeing things that were so long a human property and care fighting for their own hand in the thicket.One almost expects to find a decayed dog-kennel;with the dog evolved into a wolf.

This desolate garden-land had been even in my youth scrappily planned out for building.The half-built or empty houses had appeared quite threateningly on the edge of this heath even when I walked over it years ago and almost as a boy.I was astonished that the building had gone no farther;I suppose somebody went bankrupt and somebody else disliked building.But I remember,especially along one side of this tangle or coppice,that there had once been a row of half-built houses.The brick of which they were built was a sort of plain pink;everything else was a blinding white;the houses smoked with white dust and white sawdust;and on many of the windows were rubbed those round rough disks of white which always delighted me as a child.They looked like the white eyes of some blind giant.

I could see the crude,parched pink-and-white villas still;though I had not thought at all of them for a quarter of my life;and had not thought much of them even when I saw them.Then I was an idle,but eager youth walking out from London;now I was a most reluctantly busy middle-aged person,coming in from the country.Youth,I think,seems farther off than childhood,for it made itself more of a secret.Like a prenatal picture,distant,tiny,and quite distinct,I saw this heath on which Istood;and I looked around for the string of bright,half-baked villas.

They still stood there;but they were quite russet and weather-stained,as if they had stood for centuries.