[adapted]

by
E. M. Forster

My step counter told me that I was at twenty-five; and, though it is a bad thing to stop walking, I was so tired that I sat down on a stone that showed the miles to rest. People passed me, making fun of me as they did so, but I was too tired to feel angry, and even when Miss Eliza Dimbleby, the great teacher, went past quickly, telling me to keep going, I only smiled and lifted my hat.

At first I thought I was going to be like my brother, who I had to leave by the road-side a year or two ago, round the corner. He had wasted his breath on singing, and his strength on helping others. But I had travelled more carefully, and now it was only the sameness of the highway that made me feel tired — dust under my feet and brown, dry hedges on either side, for as long as I could remember.

And I had already dropped several things — in fact, the road behind was covered with the things we all had dropped; and the white dust was falling on them, so that already they looked just like stones. My muscles were so tired that I could not even stand the weight of those things I still carried. I slid off the stone marker into the road, and lay there flat, with my face to the great very dry hedge, praying that I could give up.

A little puff of air made me feel better. It seemed to come from the hedge; and, when I opened my eyes, there was a little flash of light through the tangle of branches and dead leaves. The hedge could not be as thick as usual. In my weak, sad state, I wanted to push my way in very much, and see what was on the other side. No one was in sight, or I would not have been brave enough to try. For we people of the road do not say when we talk that there is another side at all.

I gave in to the urge, saying to myself that I would come back in a minute. The thorns scratched my face, and I had to use my arms like a shield, using only my feet to push me forward.

Halfway through I wanted to go back, because in the passage all the things I was carrying were knocked off me, and my clothes were torn. But I was stuck so tightly that I could not go back, and I had to crawl forward without seeing, expecting at any moment that I would lose my strength, and that I would die in the bushes.

Suddenly cold water went around my head, and I felt I was sinking forever. I had fallen out of the hedge into a deep pool. I came up to the surface at last, shouting for help, and I heard someone on the other side laugh and say: “Another!” And then I was pulled out and put, breathing hard, on the dry ground.

Even when the water was out of my eyes, I was still confused, for I had never been in such a big place, or seen so much grass and sunshine. The blue sky was no longer a thin line, and below it the land had risen beautifully into hills — clean, bare slopes, with beech trees in their valleys, and fields and clear pools at their bottoms.

But the hills were not high, and there was in the land a feeling that people lived there — so that you could have called it a park, or garden, if the words did not mean a kind of smallness and limits.

As soon as I could breathe again, I turned to the man who saved me and said: “Where does this place go to?” “Nowhere, thank God!” he said, and laughed. He was a man of fifty or sixty — just the kind of age we do not trust on the road — but he did not seem worried, and his voice sounded like that of a boy of eighteen.

“But it must lead somewhere!” I shouted, so surprised at his answer that I did not thank him for saving my life. “He wants to know where it leads!” he shouted to some men on the hillside, and they laughed back, and waved their hats.

I saw then that the pool that I had fallen into was really a deep ditch full of water that turned to the left and to the right, and that the hedge went along it all the way. The hedge was green on this side — its roots showed through the clear water, and fish swam around in them — and it was covered with dog-roses and Traveller’s Joy.

But it was a wall, and in a moment I lost all joy in the grass, the sky, the trees, the happy men and women, and understood that the place was only a prison, even with its beauty and size.

We moved away from the edge, and then followed a path almost along it, across the fields. I found it hard to walk, because I was always trying to get ahead of the person with me, and there was no point in doing this if the place went nowhere. I had never walked in step with anyone since I left my brother.

I made him smile by stopping suddenly and saying sadly, “This is really terrible. One cannot go forward: one cannot make progress. Now we on the road — ” “Yes. I know.” “I was going to say, we go forward all the time.” “I know.”

“We are always learning, growing, changing. Well, even in my short life I have seen a lot of progress — the Transvaal War, the Tax Question, Christian Science, Radium. Here for example — ”

I took out my step counter, but it still showed twenty-five, not a bit more. “Oh, it’s stopped! I meant to show you. It should have counted all the time I was walking with you. But it shows only twenty-five.”

“Many things don’t work in here,” he said, “One day a man brought in a Lee-Metford, and that wouldn’t work.” “The laws of science are the same everywhere. It must be the water in the moat that has damaged the machines. In normal times everything works. Science and the spirit of trying to be like others — those are the things that have made us what we are.”

I had to stop and answer the friendly greetings of people we passed. Some of them were singing, some talking, some doing gardening, hay-making, or other simple kinds of work. They all seemed happy; and I could have been happy too, if I could have forgotten that the place went nowhere.

I was surprised by a young man who came running very fast across our path, jumped over a little fence easily, and ran very fast over a ploughed field until he jumped into a lake, and began to swim across it. This was real energy, and I shouted: “A cross-country race! Where are the others?”

“There are no others,” the person with me said; and, later, when we passed some long grass where we heard the voice of a girl singing very beautifully to herself, he said again: “There are no others.” I was very confused by the waste in making things, and said quietly to myself, “What does it all mean?” He said: “It only means itself” — and he said the words again slowly, as if I were a child.

“I understand,” I said quietly, “but I do not agree. Every success is useless unless it is part of progress. And I must not use your kindness any longer. I must get back somehow to the road, and have my pedometer fixed.” “First, you must see the gates,” he replied, “because we have gates, though we never use them.”

I gave way politely, and before long we reached the deep ditch of water again, at a point where a bridge crossed it. Over the bridge was a big gate, very white, which was set in a gap in the hedge that marked the edge. The gate opened outwards, and I cried out in surprise, for a road ran from it — just like the road I had left — dusty underfoot, with brown dry hedges on each side as far as I could see.

“That’s my road!” I shouted. He shut the gate and said: “But not your part of the road. It is through this gate that people went out a very long time ago, when they first wanted to walk.”

I said this was not true, saying that the part of the road I myself had left was less than two miles away.

But with the stubbornness of his age he repeated: “It is the same road. This is the beginning, and although it seems to go straight away from us, it turns back so often, that it is never far from our border and sometimes touches it.””

He bent down by the ditch full of water, and drew on its wet edge a silly shape like a maze.

As we walked back through the fields, I tried to tell him he was wrong. “The road sometimes turns back, of course, but that is part of our training. Who can doubt that it mostly goes forward? We do not know what goal it has — it may be to some mountain where we will touch the sky, it may be over cliffs into the sea.

But that it goes forward — who can doubt that? It is the thought of that that makes us try hard to be the best, each in his own way, and gives us a push which you do not have. Now that man who passed us — it’s true that he ran well, and jumped well, and swam well; but we have men who can run better, and men who can jump better, and who can swim better. Focusing on one skill has produced results that would surprise you. In the same way, that girl — ”

Here I stopped myself to shout: “Oh my! I was sure it was Miss Eliza Dimbleby over there, with her feet in the fountain!” He thought it was.

“Impossible! I left her on the road, and she is going to give a talk this evening at Tunbridge Wells. Why, her train leaves Cannon Street in — of course my watch has stopped like everything else. She is the last person to be here.”

“People always are surprised at meeting each other. All kinds come through the hedge, and come at all times — when they are getting ahead in the race, when they are falling behind, when they are left as if dead. I often stand near the edge listening to the sounds of the road — you know what they are — and wonder if anyone will turn off. It is my great joy to help someone out of the deep ditch, as I helped you. For our country fills up slowly, though it was meant for all people.”

“People have other goals,” I said gently, because I thought he meant well; “and I must join them.” I said good evening to him, because the sun was going down, and I wanted to be on the road by dark.

To my surprise, he grabbed me, shouting: “You must not go yet!” I tried to pull away from him, because we had nothing in common, and his politeness was becoming annoying to me. But even though I struggled, the annoying old man would not let go; and, because I am not good at wrestling, I had to follow him.

It was true that I could never find by myself the place where I came in, and I hoped that, when I had seen the other sights he was worrying about, he would take me back to it. But I decided not to sleep in the country, because I did not trust it, and the people too, even though they were friendly. Though I was hungry, I would not join them in their evening meals of milk and fruit, and, when they gave me flowers, I threw them away as soon as I could do it without being seen.

Already they were lying down for the night like cows — some out on the empty hillside, others in groups under the beech trees. In the light of an orange sunset I hurried on with my unwanted guide, very tired, weak from lack of food, but murmuring without giving up: “Give me life, with its struggles and victories, with its failures and hate, with its deep moral meaning and its unknown goal!”

At last we came to a place where the round moat was crossed by another bridge, and where another gate broke the line of the hedge at the edge. It was different from the first gate; for it was half see-through, like horn, and opened inward. But through it, in the fading light, I saw again just the same kind of road as I had left — boring, dusty, with brown crackling hedges on each side, as far as I could see.

I was strangely worried at the sight, which seemed to take away all control of myself. A man was passing us, going back for the night to the hills, with a long grass-cutting tool over his shoulder and a can of some drink in his hand. I forgot the future of our people. I forgot the road that was before my eyes, and I jumped at him, pulled the can out of his hand, and began to drink.

It was nothing stronger than beer, but because I was very tired it was too much for me in a moment. As in a dream, I saw the old man shut the gate, and heard him say: “This is where your road ends, and through this gate people — all that is left of them — will come in to us.”

Even though my senses were fading into nothing, they seemed to grow before they reached it. They noticed the magic song of nightingales, and the smell of unseen hay, and stars shining through the fading sky. The man whose beer I had taken lowered me down gently to sleep until I felt better from it, and, as he did so, I saw that he was my brother.