MARGINAL COMMENTS
By E. L. WOODWARD We took the cliff path past Dancing Ledge to St.
Aldhelm's Head, whence you can sec Portland as a great table set for.a giant's party in the sea. Then we turned inland until we reached the footpath to Swyre Head. All day long we walked in full sunlight. I do not think we passed a dozen people, except in Kingston village. In the forenoon we skirted a farm, and came within speaking distance of a man ploughing with two horses. The field behind his plough was white with seagulls ; when the plough was turned at the furrow's end these birds flew up as though the pieces on a chessboard had come suddenly to life.
The sight of this man ploughing, the two horses, the plough itself, filled my mind until I watched the sun go down into the sea. The pleasure of it all would have been unmixed, if one had not thought of England beyond the Isle of Purbeck. There may come a time when England will be homogeneous again, and every con- trivance of ours will have the shapeliness of the plough, a thing fit to be mirrored in the constellations. There may come a time when England will be neither Birm- ingham nor Bournemouth, neither aimless getting nor aimless spending, when the ebb and flow of commercial demand will not be the ebb and flow of human happiness. If this time should come, those who live in it will not easily understand why there should ever have been sadness, beyond the ordained sadness of things mortal, in watching coulter and share cut through the soil.
After dark, still thinking of the future of England, I read Lenin's letters to his family. They are curious reading ; as letters, there is not much interest in them, but they show the man's intense preoccupation, a mind acrid, devouring, proud, a vast engine of power. Lenin studied philosophy as though it were military geography ; he read Spinoza as Napoleon read books on artillery, and his life seemed predestined as the life of Napoleon. There was, indeed, one grotesque chance that the course of modern history might have been different. Lenin, on a bicycle, was run down by a French vicontle in a motor-car ; a French vicomte,. of all people. The bicycle was wrecked, but Lenin, of course, went on to his destiny, and the French noblesse had no more effect upon 1917 in Russia than upon 1789 in France. .
What was this destiny ? Turn from Lenin to the hills and to the furrowed earth, and you will know the folly of judging the destiny of Lenin by the intentions of Lenin. I said that, today, we saw no one on Swyre Head ; yet, as I was looking across the quiet fields, I heard the tap-tap-tap-tap of machine guns. The camp at Wool was some miles away, and out of view, but there was no mistaking this sharp, steady beat which broke into the sunlight. Was I hearing the ultimate destiny of the work of Lenin ?
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