CHARACTERISTICS


But whatever may have been Father Payne's effect upon us individually or
collectively, or however the result may have been achieved, there was no
question of one thing, and that was the ardent and beautiful happiness of
the place. Joy deliberately schemed for and planned is apt to evaporate.
But we were not hunting for happiness as men dig for gold. We were looking
for something quite different. We were all doing work for which we cared,
with kind and yet incisive criticism to help us; and then the simplicity
and regularity of the life, the total absence of all indulgence, the
exercise, the companionship, the discipline, all generated a kind of high
spirits that I have known in no other place and at no other time. I used to
awake in the morning fresh and alert, free from all anxiety, all sense of
tiresome engagements, all possibility of boredom. All staleness, weariness,
all complications and conventional duties, all jealousies and envyings,
were absent. We were not competing with each other, we were not bent on
asserting ourselves, we had just each our own bit of work to do; moreover
our spaces of travel had an invigorating effect, and sent us back to Aveley
with the zest of returning to a beloved home. Of course there were little
bickerings at times, little complexities of friendship; but these never
came to anything in Father Payne's kindly present. Sometimes a man would
get fretful or worried over his work; if so, he was generally despatched on
a brief holiday, with an injunction to do no work at all; and I am sure
that the prospect of even temporary banishment was the strongest of all
motives for the suppression of strife. I remember spring mornings, when the
birds began to sing in the shrubberies, and the beds were full of rising
flower-blades, when one's whole mind and heart used to expand in an ecstasy
of hope and delight; I remember long rambles or bicycle rides far into the
quiet pastoral country, in the summer heat, alone or with a single