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180 30 I Went Today to Dorking. AUGUST 16 I learned long ago what to do when the world begins to look dun-colored, and my own part in it seems of no account. I take to the hills! It was hot and muggy in London and I was discouraged. I seemed, after six months, to have accomplished nothing whatever; work swept into the void by the whirlwind of the war. What use? What use? What could any one man do to temper this madness with reason or understanding? So I took the first train I found in the station. It took me to Dorking.152 Looking out on the fields after I started I was sorry I had come. The long roads leading up from the valley looked tiresome and the little villages dull. “Why,” I asked, “did I leave London?” And when I arrived, how lonesome Dorking seemed, how unattractive the people. I hated Dorking, and yet I knew deep down that it was not Dorking that was wrong, but myself. It was hot and I was tired. I walked aimlessly out along a road toward the west and through a swinging gate into the fields. “What a fool I am,” I said, “dragging myself out here. What a fool, what a fool! If I were a wise man, I should be doing better things than this. What a poor stick I am anyway.” Presently, for sheer weariness, I lay down in the grass on the field-side, my coat under me. At Dorking I had bought a little book and map of the countryside , and now looked off across the valley and said: “There is Leith Hill and the tower—and there below is the close of Denbies —and what do I care for Leith Hill, and what had Denbies close to do with me?” 152. Dorking is twenty-five miles south of London. I Went Today to Dorking | 181 So I lay there utterly miserable, and weary, and lonely—and wished I were anywhere save in Dorking, wished I were home in America, wished I had a true friend. So I lay on the hillside, looking at Leith Hill, looking at the sky, looking at the sheep feeding in the fields, a long time. “Ah well,” I said, “I must go on”—and so, coat on arm, I dragged myself up the hill—and it seemed to me as if two natures were struggling within me. And one said, “What a fool you are; why do you do this?” And the other urged me onward. So I came presently to a little copse and a watering place for the sheep. And I pumped hard there and drank, and took my hat and coat and collar off and pumped on my head so that the water ran down around my throat, pumped until I gasped and stood up dripping—and looked across the wide valley toward Leith Hill. I took a long breath and said, “I feel better,” and so dried myself, and coat on arm walked more briskly up the hill. At this unwanted exertion, how I perspired ! From head to foot I was all aglow, like a furnace there on that blazing hillside and yet would not stop nor give over. “I will have it out of me,” I said, “I will not live with myself in such misery.” I came thus, when I was too breathless to bear longer the heavy exertion, to a wonderful rolling valley, with grassy slopes, and fine great beach and oak trees upon it, and in the distance a view of Box Hill and the town of Reigate. And so I sat down there in a shady spot and a little friendly breeze came to me quietly, and as I looked off toward Reigate and the misty blue hills beyond, a curious something, like little harmonious bells, began to ring somewhere within me. I looked again all about me, at the grass, at the trees, and up at the calm blue of the sky. “I am glad I am here,” I said. “It is beautiful.” So I sat for some time, hardly feeling anything, just quietly glad that I was there, and that I was alive, even in Dorking. Presently I walked on again, not so furiously, more content to look about me, and came through lodge gates to the top of the world—wide spaces of bracken and purple blooming heather upon Ranmore Common. To the left was...

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