WINDOWS.
13EIVATE It—, lying in the shell-shock ward of a. hospital,
would tell you that he knew men who had not been able to stand the war. For himself, he was glad to say that it had not troubled his nerves. if you asked him what he did lying there, ho would say that he did not do much. He did not care to read, and though sometimes people would offer to read to him, he found it difficult to listen. The sentences were too long. He was very well, he would add, but he felt tired. The war was rather a tiring job. He liked best to lie and do nothing, and look at the white wall opposite. It was then that he was moved to the window " Give a man like that nothing but a wall to look at and he'll see things on it," said the doctor : " he'll see all the things that he ought to forget." But by the window he still lay and looked at nothing, or at whatever else it was that his mind saw. He was content with nothing. That was his disease. " If a man does not want to get well," the doctor said, " no treatment can cure him."
He had been by the window a week or more when chance brought to that ward a great parcel of old magazines, gathered from the tops of bookshelves and forgotten cupboards. They were only ten or twenty years old, but they seemed more ancient than the Flood, and the patients looked curiously, as into another world, at pictures of the South African War, at the ascending ages of celebrities whom no one now remembered, at cartoons of forgotten controversies. Private R.— turned them over without interest. He looked at the pictures with a dull eye. He was too tired to puzzle out the jokes. He gave up the attempt. And then, as he pushed them away, ho found, -between a Punch and a Strand Magazine, a book of coloured pictures called Mediaeval Masters. They were queer, but they did not trouble him like the queerness of the fashions and the jokes of many years ago. For there was something very clear and firm about them. It was at their brilliant colours that he looked-first, and then he saw with satisfaction that he knew at once what each thing was. He had never seen such chairs and cups, strangely shaped and carved, but he knew that they were chairs and cups. Nor had he ever seen such woqien, with their long white fingers and wonderful dresses. He looked through that book, and not until it was finished did. he remember to be tired. Two days later he sur- prised his nurse by tieing angry because another patient had the book when he wanted it. He had not troubled before to be angry. He was content at first to look at the brightness of the colours, and at those•women who were, in some strange way, both beautiful and comic. Then he began to look into the pictures,.at the carving of furniture and the embroidery of dresses. In one an open book lay on a cushion. He could see the drawings in the book. He began to go round those pictures like a child examining a new room. It was then that he noticed a picture which seemed to him very odd. It was called " Madonna Enthroned with Angels," but the throne was not such as he had ever imagined, and, most clarions of all, is
it was a window. He looked through the window and saw trees, very tall trees as delicate as feathers ; he saw a shore, where a man
was running down towards the quaintest of little ships ; and far away on an island was a shadowy blue city, a city that looked as if it had risen straight from the sea.
He turned through the book again, and found what he had not noticed before, that in nearly every one of the pictures was a window.
Even those that were not rooms yet had their windows, and none of the windows was empty. Through one he looked up a winding valley to hills as blue as the sea, and through another at a little town. Instead of looking into those pictures, he began now to look out of them. It was the window with the little town that pleased him most. For it was a window in a real room, a room with a tiled
• floor, and a three.cornered chair, and a carved wooden bench where the mother sat feeding her child. The window itself was very small, with a heavy iron-studded frame folded back from it, but through it you saw the whole town—houses, and people walking in the square and a tall church tower, and behind it a road that crossed the hills, It was all extraordinarily small, and far away, but as clear as a summer's day. He wished that be could have put. his head out of that window and seen a little more, but it was wonderful how much one could see. He had long since lost the feeling that in those pictures was anything odd. The women remained beautiful, but they no longer seemed comic. It was right that in gardens and in thrones you should find windows looking out on other worlds. Then one day he suddenly realized that he had a window of his own and had never looked through it ; and when he came to look through it he found, what was still more strange, that it was not very unlike the little town through the window of the picture. He looked down a slope of chimneys and roofs, and across them to another slope where houses stood, and he could see a tall brick tower with a clock. He could see also one bend of a road, where trams passed. They were very small, but as vivid a red as the wonderful dress of the woman in the picture. It was not as good.. to look at as the little town. At first he disliked it because it was never for two days the same, and that troubled him. But the more he looked at it the more his interest in it grew. Sometimes in the sunlight it was almost as clear as the town in the picture, but even when the rains drew their grey brush across it, he could see the tower with its clock, and the- bend of the road. At last he began to feel a pleasure in its changes, and to watch for them, for the coming of the sun and
the shadows and the rain, that were always making it look different though they left it always the same. However much he looked he would never see more of the little town, in its perpetual clearness, nor find where the road led, that crossed the hills. But here was a road below him, and one day when he was well he would take the tram along it and find where it went.
The doctor's notes on his case (which were published in a medical journal and were read with interest by other doctors) described the various treatments which led to his recovery. Perhaps they did k than justice to the book of Mediaeval Masters. Indeed, they did not mention it, unless it was included in the phrase " a judicious com•
bination of psychotherapy and occupation." Nor did they sad that through the quaint windows of those pictures he had learnt to look out again on his own world, with desire.
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